Posts by tin 2 542 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2010
Nope. And only for the fact that it was a clear brazen attempt to dominate market share. And its not like we hadn't seen that before from MS.
So what did we do? we let them, and later paid the price many times over (as lamented above).
So it was never ever a good browser. It could make cups of tea and file your tax return for you and it STILL wouldn't have been a good browser, solely for that reason.
There's a digital sign at my local gym that shows the start bar from time to time, right across the middle of the screen for some reason.
I bet it won't detect that's an issue and the screen will keep bleating that windows is underneath... as windows has always done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x9Vado0S7M
(but also, is the reason I imagine in later releases they made it reboot and start again anyway, which is a whole lot more acceptable than anything stuck at some kind of error prompt).
A contract is a contract. The idea is that the customer locks in for a deal, and the provider locks in a price. This bollox that they can change the prices in the middle of it is not what a contract is supposed to be!
Perhaps for much longer terms and b2b you might say that price rises are inevitable and they need pricing in, but not for a 1yr or 2yr phone contract. If forecast rises need factoring in, then make the initial price accordingly higher.
And again - it's a contract. So if the provider wants to change the price mid-contract - they can't. None of this customer can cancel then BS. End of discussion. Cos it's a FUCKING CONTRACT!!!
THAT should be what ofcom is enforcing, not this faffing around the periphery nonsense.
...but I find particularly since covid that with 99% of meetings done over some form of VC, a decent camera, mic and speakers is critical.
I'm neither Wintel nor Mac (they're both awful in their own unique ways) but if I get a Mac, I'll guarantee I can unfold it in any situation, generally bark at it, and the other end will have a relatively easy experience seeing/hearing me (and not hearing themselves as an echo, or seeing a blurred smudge on the screen blending into the background, or hearing my audio as if I was in a 1970s phonebox or whatever).
Unfortunately with Wintel this is not guaranteed. It seems like it's pot luck, and it seems no manufacturer has figured this out and marketed on it. I was handed a updated but otherwise supposedly the same model of Dell that I'd previous good success with, and it was atrocious. They'd changed the quality of everything, while presumably maintaining the price and trading on a reputation. Cue a year+ of being completely ineffective in meetings cos people could not be arsed with the mental workout of keeping up with what I was trying to convey in shite audio. I've recently bought two admittedly aged but near top-of-the-range-in-their-day corp laptops and the quality for the other end on a video call is woeful. One is completely unusable for this. Buy the same aged MacBook Pro and the quality will be immense.
On the same theme I worked in a place that bought a fleet of 1000s of laptops without a second of integration testing. Not even if the Wi-fi chipset wasn't pure crap. Cue a massive worldwide workforce wading through some amount of treacle every day to execute.
My point? Bad choices result in bazillions of hours of less effective employees, for the sake of saving what? £1k maybe over a laptop's lifetime? Same problem with IT departments obsessively demanding their workforce bend to a particular model choice made in all circumstances pretty subjectively, then complaining about diva users. Madness, and the utterly wrong focus.
The laptop - and the phone - is definitively the employee's window on the entire world, all day every day. Why on earth would you not make that as good as you possibly could?
Indeed. I think history has agreed Commodore was a horribly mismanaged company by then!
And, further, possibly if ESCOM had not also shot themselves in the foot.
I remember reading that selling an Amiga pulled in a hell of a lot more profit than their PCs but there was so much snobbishness (and ofc the Amiga was a several years old design by then) that PCs were sold, they didn't make enough money, and boom.
My local ESCOM had a couple of Amigas that were either off, or showing the insert disk screen. Whack a decent demo disk in it back then and everything else in the shop would have looked quite silly.
Got caught up long ago in between the twin fiascos of OCZ vertex SSDs and ebuyer's rejecting refunds policy (https://www.theregister.com/2013/12/24/ebuyer_rates_staff_on_returns_rejected/).
Have bought nothing from them, and dissuaded many to do likewise since. I do feel sorry for those who just happen to have jobs there but glad to see karma does sometimes come around.
It sounds doom-y but I have to agree.
My experience is of course limited, but I've seen precisely 0% accuracy/usefulness come out of everything I've chucked at this supposed "AI". All it's actually achieving is wasting time and god-knows-how-much energy seeing if it can be of any use, and finding that it's not.
That can't be good, and chimes not-at-all with any kind of efficiency, be that sacking dudes or supposedly complimenting them, and critically to every single organisation considering deploying it en-masse: customer satisfaction.
That's why said Chief Executive needs to grab any and all of the councilors that will be in any way so grabbed, and go for several beers/coffees with them, to educate, persuade and cajole. That's part of their job surely?
... that "how its systems interact with the Vodafone platform" means precisely nothing, and
... supplier (presumably) to the baggage handler straight under the bus, when it's the direct responsibility of the airline involved to handle the bags. It's as if we've all started accepting that outsourcing stuff means the provider of the actual service to the customer is perfectly allowed to immediately absolve themselves of responsibility.
100%. The operation for safety here is to roll along behind the obstructions. Not least because it didn't appreciably overtake anything.
The more concern for me is it just moved into and back out of another lane without any indication of it's intention to do so. That's unnecessarily dangerous regardless of any of the other factors, and leads to the question if that's missing out of it's software, what else is?
"At this point, readers might wonder if, in that context, HPE's planned acquisition of Juniper Networks is such a good idea."
Truth, and not just for the reasons discussed in the article. Problem is, and I mean this with all goodwill to Neri, that he literally can't say anything else. The doublespeak in the call (networking is soft/buying jnpr will fix it) means nothing and we still have to draw our own conclusions.
I'm bemused by this quote. I think it's pretty clear that browser market share is just market distortion.
Whatever comes pre-installed (historically IE, now Edge, Chrome, Safari) gets used the most. Whatever gets advertised as the thing you should definitely use instead (Chrome, and to a lesser extent Edge) often replaces the pre-installed thing.
There's no competition here based on what people want.
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