Posts by Tim 11

Microsoft Store adds ‘private audience’ apps to its Store

Microsoft store

Is that even a thing anymore?

Hate to add to the wanky jargon – but your digital transformation is actually a bolt-on

Survivorship bias

Even though it may seem that some companies are struggling with digital transformation (or any kind of business transformation for that matter) and maybe even questioning whether it's worthwhile bothering, don't forget that most of the time you are only comparing them with other companies that still exist.

Even if your stock price or market share has gone down while you were undergoing transformation, that doesn't mean it would be better if you hadn't done it; in today's world, companies have to run just to stay still.

Airbus ditches Microsoft, flies off to Google

Desktop Apps?

I'm sure google would like you to think this means that everyone in airbus will be doing their word processing and spreadsheet work using google's JavaScript office apps, but anyone who's tried this for real knows it's just not realistic.

I suspect what this means in reality is that although they'll be using the web version of gmail, they'll still be using word and excel but just storing their documents in google's cloud. Even if that's not their plan, I'd wager that's where they'll be in 5 years time.

Huawei guns for Apple with Mac-alike Matebook X

MacOs

There's 2 huge reasons a lot of non-technical people are prepared to buy apple kit regardless of the cost/performance: (a) the apple logo and (b) the simplicity of the interface. This can't touch either of those.

For sure there are reg readers (like me) who have bought apple for other reasons, and might be tempted by kit like this in the future, but we are in the tiny minority of mac users.

That terrifying 'unfixable' Microsoft Skype security flaw: THE TRUTH

Re: I'll quickly check my Skype version

Hmm, I'm on version 7.40 (the proper windows version, not the UWP version). if I click "check for updates" it says I have the latest version. I have no wish to "upgrade" to the UWP version so I guess I'm sticking with V7 for the moment

Oracle: We've stuffed automation in 'pretty much' all our services

Re: Yeah, real soon now...

They also use the old Microsoft technique of just self-referentially redefining the latest buzzword - e.g. last year "we're now a cloud company, so the definition of cloud is everything we do, so everything we do is cloud" without actually changing anything.

From July, Chrome will name and shame insecure HTTP websites

Re: yet more encouragement ...

"...SSL certificates are free and take little effort to install, add virtually no load or problems for your website"

This is exactly the problem. Google are training naive users into thinking that just because the site is HTTPS, somehow it's bona fide. When any old idiot can get a cert for free, that's a very dangerous assumption.

Home taping revisited: A mic in each hand, pointing at speakers

LR14 !?!?

I presume you mean HP2s or HP11s - nobody in the 80's had heard of things like D size or LR14

It took us less than 30 seconds to find banned 'deepfake' AI smut on the internet

Re: Could mark the end of the celebrity/political sex tape

TBH I don't really make a distinction between fake and real politician/celeb any more. They're all just bodies for hire to promote a product, and whether they're the "real thing", a human impersonator or a digital avatar doesn't make much difference.

Skype for Biz users: Go watch nature vids. Microsoft wants you to get good at migration

Good Riddance to bad rubbish

We're a long way from Teams being good enough to replace proper skype, but there are some areas where it works well. SfB on the other hand has never been usable or stable enough to be a viable product.

Microsoft Surface Book 2: Electric Boogaloo. Bigger, badder, better

1TB flash

"The three-grand asking price of this particular Book 2 is because it carries a 1TB flash SSD"

No it's not. I have 1TB flash SSD on my dell latitude. It cost about 200 quid from what I remember, and I got to keep the HDD I took out of it

PHWOAR, those noughty inks: '0.1%' named Stat of The Year

Re: 7.7 billion: the number of active phone connections in the world

it's not very clear but I would assume it's the number of land-lines + active sim cards (i.e. either on a contract or with credit balance). if you include business, most people in the UK probably have between 2-3

@Aaiieeee I believe a lot of people who don't have access to mains electricity live can charge mobile phones through solar panels or wind-up

Why is Wikipedia man Jimbo Wales keynoting a fake news conference?

better than nothing?

Of course Wikipedia isn't perfect, nothing's perfect. Everywhere you look in the world there is injustice, and journalists make a living from being outraged by it, as if we (humanity) had a choice between doing things right and doing them wrong, and we chose to do them wrong.

But that's not the way the world works. We invent things at random all the time, some are good, some are bad, we usually don't know which is which when we invent them, and on the whole the ones that don't work fall into disuse. Could anyone really claim that the world as a whole would be a better place without Wikipedia in it?

Coventry: Once a 'Ghost Town', soon to be UK City of Culture

What is this award supposed to indicate?

Is it intended to revive the culture of a city which is ailing, or celebrate one which is thriving?

The name would imply the latter, but assuming it comes with a slab of cash to promote cultural events, giving that cash to the city with the worst culture would make more sense.

Microsoft adds nothing to new Semi-Annual Windows Server preview

worth installing

I assume the new release contains fixes for bugs that are more scary than the ones they are prepared to tell you they left in.

User dialled his PC into a permanent state of 'Brown Alert'

Re: USB mice are fun...

back in the 90's you used to have sockets on the back of the PC to piggy-back power to the monitor.

When a colleague was away I put a novell netware server under his desk, connected it to his keyboard and screen, and piggy-backed the power to the server off his PC. Then primed a colleague to mention that we'd had to install netware on his PC due to a customer emergency. At first he laughed it off but when he powered on the PC and saw netware booting up it definitely had him believing it.

User asked help desk to debug a Post-it Note that survived a reboot

Re: CONTEXT PLEASE!

GF has a habit of telling me about a dream she's had but without actually mentioning it was a dream, leaving me rather confused most of the time.

The other day she said "I had a weird dream last night" and then proceeded to tell me about something that had happened the previous day - apparently it was supposed to be two unrelated sentences.

Fresh bit o' Linux to spruce up that ancient Windows Vista box? Why not, we say...

"Windows Vista"

I still get that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I see that phrase.

What’s the real point of being a dev? It's saving management from themselves

Component Reuse

I think the author is conflating object orientation with component reuse. Whilst neither has been a panacea for all software development problems (and I don't think anyone serious ever claimed they would be), both have been successful and improved developers lives.

OO (or at least the central concept of encapsulation) is pretty much universal in proper languages, and so is reuse of standard (often FOSS) code - even if it's not necessarily objects, it's JavaScript functions and microservices.

Try going back to VB3 or plain K&R C and see how long it takes to build an application from scratch (like almost all apps were in the 80's and 90's) compared to what you can achieve with modern tools.

Windows Fall Creators Update is here: What do you want first – bad news or good news?

Re: Have they fixed the decades old bug in File Explorer ?

hardly - you can't even create a file called aux.txt because of some legacy MS-DOS limitation from 1985

Facebook, Google, Twitter are the shady bouncers of the web. They should be fired

Re: Society

I'd agree education in critical thinking has to be a key part of any solution. The only other way is state controlled media, and we all know where that ends up.

Compsci degrees aren't returning on investment for coders – research

Re: Still seems worth it

Also, it may be that grads are more likely than non-grads to get higher up the food chain rather than staying as a coder all their life, but the survey doesn't investigate that.

WordPress has adverse reaction to Facebook's React.js licence

"...the popular content management system"

I would prefer the word "widespread"; "popular" implies people actually like it

Connect at mine free Wi-Fi! I would knew what I is do! I is cafe boss!

Re: This is the reality of life

But it's a really interesting observation that a lot of people (e.g. Athenian cafe owners and presumably a significant proportion of their customers) aren't concerned about cyber security at all and just see the internet as somewhere to gawp at porn and pictures of other people's dinners.

Are they all ignorant/deluded about the dangers, or are they living a lifestyle that doesn't really depend on the internet in the way ours does?

Microsoft's fix for web graphics going AWOL? Disable your antivirus

Re: Is IE still a thing?

more than use edge, I'd guess?

US watchdog alert: Don't fall victim to crapto crypto-coin cons, people

Re: Wait, What?

I strongly believe that in 20 years people will be looking back and saying fiat currencies were one big scam

At last, a kosher cryptocurrency: BitCoen

It all depends whether you trust banks and the governments they're in league with. At the moment, most people do (at least in the west) but as the realization of the global finance racket becomes apparent, I think people will be increasingly likely to look for something that's doesn't require you to trust any institution.

I'm calling april fool (please...??)

Microsoft: Get in, IT nerds, you're now using Insider builds and twice-annual Windows rollouts

Re: Has my browser broken?

If you weren't using an ad blocker, you'd probably find that the narrow column of text is all that's left after the rest of the screen is full of adverts (I don't know for sure though, and there's no way I'm turning my ad blocker off to find out)

Volterman 'super wallet': The worst crowdsource video pitch of all time?

why not just have 2 phones?

they're basically selling a dual-redundant passive standby phone configuration but one of the phones is in a leather case and probably costs $1000

Two-factor FAIL: Chap gets pwned after 'AT&T falls for hacker tricks'

Re: Any other luddites about?

you might only use your phone for calls, but the person who calls up and pretends to be you can then use it to order phone upgrades and tablets on your phone account (as I discovered to my cost).

Fortunately it looks like AT&T are slightly more on-the-ball than EE, because the latter don't seem to have any security precautions at all - they let the hacker repeatedly access my account and order stuff (10 times in a month) despite not knowing any security details except my name and address.

One-third of Brit IT projects on track to fail

Re: Definition of fail

Also it's very dependent on the definition of project. Small projects amending existing systems are much more likely to succeed than big greenfield ones so the percentage of failures depends very much on where you draw the line at what constitutes a project for inclusion in this list.

Look who's joined the anti-encryption posse: Germany, come on down

Re: "Any terrorist with even a modicum of competence"

Yes this is exactly the point.

There are arguments for and against of enforcing backdoors for use in extreme circumstances, just like there are for other government security powers, but with encryption it's too late to do it because the horse has already bolted - strong encryption has been invented and is in the public domain. Any debate about banning encryption is pointless because criminals already have it and we can never take it away from them.

The internet may well be the root cause of today's problems… but not in the way you think

Re: Christian Berger: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

Repeat after me "Government finances are not the same as Personal Finances"

and whatever you do, just keep repeating it, don't ever stop to think about it

Giffgaff 'roam like at home' package means £1/min calls in Jersey

This will benefit far more people than it harms, so they can probably afford for a few people to leave

Bot you see is what you get: The cold reality of Microsoft's chat 'AI'

Re: And they want to make sure their customers aren't calling them over the phone.

What nobody seems to be able to grasp is that if you make your product or service inherently usable and reliable, and fix problems reported by customers rather than just fobbing them off quickly to keep your "tickets closed" numbers up, people won't need to keep calling customer service, and that's what really slashes helpdesk costs.

Crooks can nick Brits' identities just by picking up the phone and lying

I think it's a bit naïve to think that just paying existing staff more would change their behavior. Even though it would probably attract some better candidates for future positions, you'd still need to improve the hiring process to make sure you're not just wasting your money by paying more for the same level of skills.

Don't stop me! Why Microsoft's inevitable browser irrelevance isn't

Active Desktop anyone?

A lot of the things described in this article already happened 15 years ago in IE4 with Active desktop. It bombed. Are things different now?

What a To-Do! Microsoft snuffs out Wunderlist

"the only task management app built on an enterprise cloud..."

There is some truth in that, at least if you only consider Microsoft apps. If there's one thing Exchange/Outlook definitely ain't, "built for cloud" would be a fair description

The gospel according to Blockchain, or is it the other way round?

As they say in wikipedia...

This article contains content that is written like an advertisement

Google, Microsoft bump bug bounties

Re: Oh, so fixing normal bugs is no longer a priority?

unfortunately this is only about security bugs, otherwise we'd all be millionaires

Google's Project Zero reveals another Microsoft flaw

ground-up rewrite?

I thought edge was supposed to be an all-new browser, finally throwing off the shackles of legacy IE code. Is it just coincidence the two have the exact same bug, or is Edge just a skin on top of a load of old IE code?

Hold the phone! Crap customer service cost telcos £2.9 BEEEELLION in 2016

as the old addage says...

"We don't care; we don't have to. We're the phone company"

just as true today as it was in the 60's

Everything you need to know about HP's three-in-one x3 deals

What's the point?

I'm mystified by this constant desire to consolidate all our devices into one all-encompassing hopeless compromise.

I own a big Dell laptop for work, a MacBook air for casual computing, a Nokia 105 for calls and text, a smartphone for those (rare) occasions when I need the internet on the move, and a Kindle for reading books. Each of these is better than any of the others for the thing I use it for (and I don't need a tablet because there's nothing they are good at).

Sure, it means I'm occasionally carrying 2 devices with me, but 90% of the time the only one I'm carrying weighs 70g and only needs to be charged once a fortnight.

Is Google using YouTube to put one over on Samsung?

Re: ...put "blocks" in inverted commas

I think should be "\"blocks\"" (or maybe ""blocks"" depending on context)

Cisco president: One 'hiccup' and 'boom' – AWS is 'gone'

Re: I take that as a rather good sign, overall

I think the issue is that if Amazon went tits up, a lot of people would get scared of cloud as a concept, even though Google or MS are much less likely to collapse.

GDS shouting matches so severe team takes to talking by hand signals

I can certainly see the value in this - it allows everyone to quickly express their opinions at the same time without interrupting the flow of the conversation. Based on my experience, even with only 4 or 5 people in the meeting it's quite possible for 2 to dominate (usually I'm one of them) leaving the others struggling to get a word in edgeways. hand signals would also help to subtlely shame those people who are dominating and get them to yield for a bit

Dutch bicycle company pretends to be television company

Re: Doesn’t always work

since we're having a pop at courier companies, my company recently had a parcel which was returned to the sender because they had tried to deliver it to us 3 times and nobody was in

on checking the details it transpired all 3 delivery attempts were within 5 minutes of each other

Robot cars probably won't happen, sniffs US transport chief

Re: I'm not so pessimistic

@AMBxx - that's a really interesting point. I don't specifically enjoy driving, but like most people I think I'm a better driver than average. So a computer would have to be a lot better than average to convince me it was better than me :-)

I'm not so pessimistic

I'm generally a pretty cynical person but I reckon once autonomous cars are shown to be substantially safer than a human driver (which won't be long, if it hasn't happened already), insurance companies will be happy to insure them and governments will come under increasing pressure to allow them.