Posts by Tim 11

BT internet outage was our fault, says Equinix

I was getting 10% packet loss pinging facebook. not sure how that works or if it was related but that's what I saw

Microsoft tweaks TCP stack in Windows Server and Windows 10

Re: Not holding my breath

Windows file copy is still completely f***ed up in one serious respect. drag a big file from one drive to another, then while it's copying, drag another file, then another. Windows attempts to copy all the files at the same time, interleaving the operations and causing disk contention and thrashing, when simply copying them in sequence would be (in my tests) up to 5 times quicker.

You can buy Windows 10 Enterprise E3 access for the price of a coffee

"...customers whose own IT support is thin on the ground"

Good luck to them - you don't know the meaning of the words "support is thin on the ground" until you've tried office 365 support.

If you want sympathy from fellow disgruntled users, you'll get plenty of that, but expect things to work properly and you're in for a shock.

Use Brexit to save smokers' lives and plug vaping, say peers

yeah - who on earth would possibly bother making a product aimed at a market of only 50 million people.

Gartner: Brexit cluster-fsck has ballsed up our spending forecast

Brexit

Wherever we end up (and let's face it, nobody really knows, no matter what they say) , I'm pretty sure it'll have been worth it just to see all our "authority figures" running round panicking and trying to blame everyone else for things that are just to go wrong.

Microsoft releases cross-platform .NET Core 1.0 at Linux event

Don't forget system.web.dll

In addition to not including web forms, I presume that .Net core it doesn't include system.web, which you almost certainly depend on unless you've been very careful to avoid it

Microsoft buys LinkedIn for the price of 36 Instagrams

Presumably the supposed "synergy" is harvesting personal data - to what end I'm not entirely sure but it seems to be the fashion nowadays. Still, considering MS's recent performance (technical and business), I can't imaging they will actually be able to achieve this.

The only real beneficiaries of this deal are LinkedIn shareholders though there will be some small benefit for those of us who find LinkedIn irritating, as it gradually declines and MS eventually declares it to have been "superceded" by something utterly unrelated like WCF or Surface.

Mars One puts 100 Red Planet corpses colonists through fresh tests

selection criteria

"knowledge, clarity of communication, and their ability to handle conflict" - Yup you've pretty much summed up the typical reality show contestant. This thing is sure to fly.

Don't go chasing waterfalls, please stick... Hang on. They're back

Re: cambam boards [sic]

Normally I would report a genuine typo using the "tips and corrections" link. Unfortunately this mistake would seem to indicate that the author of the article is just playing buzzword bingo and has no idea what he's talking about.

Smartphone sales falling

"halved its forecast for worldwide sales of smartphones"

not really - it sounds like it's halved its forecast for the *increase* in worldwide sales of smartphones, which is a very different thing

US 5th graders have a pop at paper plane record

"another 100 to 150 grams of helium"

hmm just try weighing that out on the kitchen scales ;-)

Dark net LinkedIn sale looks like the real deal

the link about salting is from 2006. presumably they have fixed this now in which case the hashed passwords are useless?

Learn a scripting language and play nicely: How to get a DevOps job

Re: Not asking much then?

" Isn't there some kind of axiom about "Jack of all trades"? "

yes there is but in my experience it's almost universally false in computing. Someone who can turn their hand to many different things is usually better at any one of them than someone who can only do that one thing.

Brexit would pinch UK tech spend but the EU wouldn't care – survey

Re: Oi!

What I find interesting is quite how un-political most of the debates are. There's strong arguments both for and against from people at both ends of the political spectrum and everywhere in between. I find it great to be able to openly discuss the pros and cons without having to worry about offending anyone's political sensibilities.

The people who are coming off worse IMHO are those who seem to think the answer is obvious and doesn't warrant any discussion (i.e. most of the political establishment)

Why we should learn to stop worrying and love legacy – Fujitsu's UK head

Heresy

How dare anyone imply that there's any value in legacy code, or that old systems worked as well as new ones. Everything should be written in javascript these days, should only work on tablets, and a new version should be released every 3 minutes.

As far as I'm concerned, any app that didn't get borked by the removal of left-pad from NPM last week has no place in the modern world.

Apple assumes you'll toss the Watch after three years

Immature product

I agree with the comments about OSX devices having a long service life, but those are basically mature and stable products.

The apple watch is basically a first generation very immature product and, if the whole smart watch concept is viable at all, developments need to be so rapid that the current product is a laughing stock within a 1-2 year time frame.

ESET blocks news sites

Re: Just reboot

I suspect the reboot was a red herring. I had the symptoms between about 11:45 and 12:00 today after which they went away, and my last signature update was showing as 9:45 throughout the whole period.

I assume that it's doing some check against a blacklist which is more "live" than the virus signature updates.

Legal right to 10Mbps broadband is 'not enough', thunders KCOM chief

10Mb would be a great start

Yes, more than 10Mb is lovely if you really want to watch several movies at once but for access to essential services, and even for casual streaming, 10Mb is mostly perfectly acceptable, and I predict that situation won't have changed significantly by 2020.

The big problem at the moment is that a small but significant percentage of the population does not have access to broadband that's good enough for accessing government services, banking, online shopping/price comparison etc. Bringing these people online is higher priority than striving to reduce the time it takes for the average connection to download a movie from 10 to 5 minutes.

Microsoft adds OneDrive to bug bounty program

Re: Pity it's only bugs

Damn shame - at $15k a time, I could retire on the bugs I've found in OneDrive (and probably afford to buy MS outright if you included the abortion known as OneDrive for Business)

Domino's trials trundling four-wheeled pizza delivery bot

Re: Not wanting to state the obvious...

I suspect the conversation went something like this:

"have you seen the amount of free publicity Amazon got from their pie-in-the-sky delivery drone videos.?"

"yeah let's get us some of that"

Remix OS: China's take on an Android operating system – but for PCs

another desktop linux

Woo hoo - finally someone's really committed to making a usable linux for the desktop aimed at non-techie users.

Now stick it in the pile with all the others and wake me up in 5 years if there's any more than a few techies using it ("0.2 probability" as Gartner would say)

The monitor didn't work but the problem was between the user's ears

Re: Office nasty

in the old days when the monitor power was daisy-chained out of the back of the PC, I connected a novell netware server to the output power socket on my colleague's PC, and connected his monitor power and VGA to the output of the netware box. when he turned the PC on, the monitor turned on and he saw netware booting up.

Facebook Messenger: All your numbers are belong to us

Re: Errrrrrmmmmmm...

Surely if there's any reluctance in user takeup, all they have to do is integrate messenger into the normal FB application (which in my experience can't be uninstalled on android), then users will have the simple option of either having messenger or not having a smartphone.

What did we learn today? Microsoft has patented the slider bar

Re: Performance...

For me, the performance difference is real because the startup time of Libre office is much longer than MS office.

Chat messages in Skype for Windows are bang out of order – so here's how to 'fix' it for now

Re: How?

The problem isn't quite as simple as that.

In Skype there is no central server through which all messages pass, so no authoritative source of "system time". Individual users' devices may vary in their current time setting by several minutes. Also the order in which messages are received is not necessarily the order in which they were sent because the network is slow and unreliable.

However, I'm not defending the fact that it used to get it "right" (or at least better than it does now) so there has undoubtedly been a regression of functionality.

Re: Skype sponsored content

agree - I think skype usability peaked around version 5 (in the golden days of windows 7 and server 2008, before everything MS did was shit)

Watch out, er, 'oven cleaners': ICO plans nuisance call crackdown in 2016

Re: Protip

Does this really work? sounds like a valuable tip we should know about

Bah humbug. It's Andrew's Phones of the Year

I'm not looking forward to my next phone and that's a great cause for optimism in my book. The fact that the phone market is maturing is a good thing. It means we'll get more reliable and stable platforms, better usability and fewer dead ends.

But most importantly, we can get on with our lives in the real world using the phone as a means-to-an-end rather than the phone itself being the object of our attention.

IT bloke: Crooks stole my bikes after cycling app blabbed my address

The good old days

When I go out for a walk or cycle, I'm pretty sure nobody gives a shit where I've been or how fast I was going, and I certainly don't want to be fiddling with gadgets all the way round. I thought the point was to get out and enjoy the countryside and have a rest from technology?

Microsoft mandates browser-extension defence to malvertising

Didn't understand a word of that

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I thought an advert was just an HTML element on a web page (possibly an iframe) which is served from a web server. It's no different technically from any other content. What has this got to do with browser extensions?

If it still works six months from now, count yourself lucky

I'm currently the proud owner of a 4 year old dell precision M6600 and a 5 year old macbook air 11. Both used very intensively and both are in just about perfect condition, though the macbook does have a small dent where I knocked it off a table onto the floor (this would probably have killed a plastic cased HDD laptop).

I agree with AD though - the construction on cheaper products is crap. there was a time when you knew your laptop would be outdated in a year so there was no need to bother buying something well built, but nowadays it's worth the money to get something that will last

have just bought an HP envy 13 which looks superficially as well built as a macbook but only cost £600. if I get 5 years out of that, it'll be a bargain.

Microsoft whips out PowerApps – now your Pointy Haired Boss can write software, too!

Re: Anyone remember Frontpage?

The apparent quote "aren't enough developers" isn't actually a quote from the story; the story actually says "aren't enough skilled developers".

In my experience there are plenty of insufficiently skilled developers (many of them "trained, experienced and idle" to quote yourself) but there is most definitely a skill shortage in the industry despite good pay rates. I have personally never met a truly talented IT person of the type I recruit (developer or otherwise) who left the IT field to do something else more profitable.

Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 years (and you're officially old)

Looking at those adverts...

...reminds me how glad I am that I don't live in the US

GPS, you've gone too far this time

Isn't this obvious?

Just turn on your GPS and leave it in the same place. Subsequent location readings will differ from each other by some error margin and thus it will think it has moved (i.e. that your speed is non zero)

Now imagine you're moving very slowly compared to the error margin and you can see that it will think you're moving much faster than you actually are.

Tim Cook: UK crypto backdoors would lead to 'dire consequences'

the bleedin' obvious

what's sad is that it's newsworthy when someone has to say this.

Oracle's Hurd mentality: We (and one other) will own all of cloud by 2025

The same strategy as microsoft.

step 1: redefine <<latest buzz word>> to be whatever we're already doing

step 2: claim we are 100% compatible with <<latest buzz word>>

I'd be interested to know what percentage of LOC has been changed to meet this "98% redone" claim. I'm guessing it's way less than 1%, and all the rest is creative accounting.

Oracle, SAP, IBM: They're rubbish and charge you billions for Excel, says man

exponential growth in one year?

I think you need more than two data points to claim exponential growth.

And with debt of £200k per employee or £2,000 per customer, I'd agree the jury is still out on the business model.

Outlook.com had classic security blunder in authentication engine

surely they knew already??

Anyone with friends that still use hotmail will regularly get spam coming from those people with links to dodgy web sites. This flaw has been very obvious and actively exploited for at least 10 years.

I only twigged it as a simple XSS attack last year when my gf clicked on one of the links and we noticed a load of spam messages appear in her sent items. If there was anyone inside MS with the remotest interest in hotmail security they could have found and fixed this flaw years ago and saved all of us a lot of grief.

Hey, Facebook – these are the new Like buttons you should have used

novel??

"While Facebook's response is a novel one"

err, a forum site allowing smileys to be used in posts - novel?? it's only been around since about 1986

'One Windows' crunch time: Microsoft tempts with glittery new devices

two problems

1. using the same ecosystem for such a broad range of devices will restrict developers to the "lowest common denominator" features (which should really be called highest common factor) i.e. developers can only access features common to all devices and will find it much more difficult to optimize for a specific class of devices.

2. using the same ecosystem for such a broad range of devices is probably not desirable. contrast the success of iPad and iPhone (iOS having a completely separate codebase from from the desktop OSX) with the failure of windows 8 (trying to shoehorn desktop and mobile into the same UX)

Asus ZenBook UX305: With Windows 10, it suddenly makes perfect sense

touchpad

This Asus might be different but so far I've never used a windows laptop which came within a mile of the macbook touchpad for usability (multi touch, swipes etc). Boot the macbook into Windows and all the magic goes away, so I guess this has as much to do with the OS as the hardware.

I'm not an apple fanboi at all; I don't own any other apple products and generally find Windows easier to use than OSX. But for me, this alone is worth the price premium and the hassle of not being able to run my windows apps.

Don't want to upgrade to Windows 10? You'll download it WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Re: "Personal" computer no more

I very much sympathise with your viewpoint, but let's not forget most computer users are not IT savvy people. IMHO the biggest problem faced by non-techie home users is there's too much scope for them to mess things up. One of the reasons tablets have been so successful with home users is that they are so much more difficult to screw up (though this is partly down to much lower levels of functionality available). Maybe Windows should have two separate modes, one for people who want control and one for those who just want to take the line of least resistance and do everything the recommended way?

Just WHO is hiring a 'Cloud Transformation Director' for £162,000? Actually YOU are

yeah that'll work

because if there's one thing the public sector is better at than outsourcing IT, it's running it's own IT.

The enterprise hardware market is growing. You read that right. Growing

This is heresy

How dare you print this heretical and blasphemous crap. Repeat after me, "cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud", and don't stop until you believe it.

Random numbers aren't, says infosec boffin

"Take my vehicle's radio"

I have noticed what seems to be a lack of randomness in car audio track selections, but on doing a bit of research I believe this is actually psychological - I'm sure even the most basic computing device easily has the capabilities to generate PRNs that appear random to a casual observer.

However, what you want most of the time is a shuffle, not a random!

At last we know for sure. Blighty's 'best mobile network' is ...

Don't forget virgin mobile

Anyone who has ever had to use EE customer service would never touch them with a barge pole, but if you're a virgin cable customer you can get to use EE's network and still have some semblance of customer service. YMMV IMHO etc.

Thanks for open sourcing .NET say Point of Sale villains

Let's ban anything that makes crims' lives easier

A lot of bank robbers seem to use cars as getaway vehicles - let's ban them

All kinds of criminals use mobile phones - they should be made illegal as well

Our oxygen-rich atmosphere makes it easy for criminals to breathe - destroy it!

etc. etc.

Everything I see is Windows 10, says Microsoft's SatNad

Windows 10 is just a name

If there's one pattern we've seen again and again from Microsoft it's this - pick a buzzword and re-brand all your product lines to that buzzword (Remember "live"?). The technology behind it is irrelevant.

BYOD anyone?

"The fact that ... some social networking app is not available is not much of an issue (in business scenarios)."

So it's goodbye BYOD and welcome to the world of having a separate phone (and presumably separate tablet) for work.

UK TV is getting worse as younglings shun the BBC et al, says Ofcom

32,000 hours??

"32,000 hours of original programming" ... "371 hours of new UK output were broadcast"

can anyone explain what these numbers mean and why there is nearly a factor of 100 difference between them?