Posts by tin 2

Amazon Leo constellation nears 400 satellites as broadband launch looms

"Whether Amazon will be able to compete against Starlink, which has a significant head start, depends on a number of factors"

I was gonna say Bezos or Musk... But Bezos or Musk.. What a choice.

Notion kills its Gmail client after AI agents keep humans from troubling inbox

A week?!

bellends. That is all.

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

Re: National Humiliation Service

"it is conceding that the people employed to design and run those processes have not managed to. Administrative dysfunction is being procured around rather than fixed."

For me that's the stand out key point.

Some £, time and decent people invested in some competant systems that (a) eliminate admin (b) do some of the admin or (c) help make the admin much quicker will produce a much greater ROI in time and £ than is being talked about here

But that's boring, not at all sexy, and those in charge often are unable to see the wood for the trees.

Time for some extremely strong leadership in the real of boring admin!

Salesforce waves bye-bye to UI in 'headless' embrace

I wonder...

... how many of these are people migrating off SFDC as fast as possible

IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power

Re: Status pages are crap.

Yea they've just mutated into essentially a lie.

Flip side of things, if your vendor is that badly out of touch with when things are actually wrong, do they deserve your business?

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Speaking of information boards that say nothing

Every element of this is very much IIRC. Merseyrail put some information boards in on (at least) the underground part of the service in Liverpool sort of around the late 90s. They were the funky 38 segment LCD things. They never ever managed to get them to say anything about any actual trains coming (or not) - or at least did not manage to do so for many years - and at some point were replaced with presumably something that worked.

Vodafone dials up full control of joint venture with Three in £4.3B deal

Re: And then there were(n't) Three

ahh no worries, the MVNOs will be gone soon too. Then we pay a lot more.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: They probably 'reach out' all the time as well

I just sing the refrain from the Four Tops classic. As inspired by the flowchart published by the Poke a long time ago.

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

Re: Nobody cares

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.

Mall display crashes the vibe with Windows activation nag

Re: “Windows For Digital Signage”

to be fair that's the list of reasons that implementors should never use windows for digital signage. Has been the rule for like 30 years, and yet nobody listens or learns.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Had that! And several BT engineers, until the decent one spotted the rust streak down the wall and replaced it.

Microsoft blanks out BSODs on public displays with new ‘Digital Signage mode’

Re: a Windows Update nagscreen. Will they blank that out too?

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.

There is but only one computer error acceptable for public display.

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).

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: I went to Downdetector to find out what was happening...

also most enjoyed the error message when doing so, which had sod all to do with what was actually going wrong.

Started at 11:20 UTC?

So 30 mins to update their own status page, long after socials and downdetector had enough weight behind it to know.

Retro Games opens pre-orders for THEA1200, a full-size working Amiga replica

Re: Want

So the only question is did the rest arrive with CPUs too?

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

Pretty simple isn't it?

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.

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Re: Cloud based - forget it

Logi's discontinuance of squeezebox appears utterly knuckleheaded, considering it's still going strong (relatively speaking for something with no new hardware since 2012) and smart speakers etc are all the rage.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

it ofc depends on what your job is...

...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?

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Even after years I'm still utterly bemused...

...that with stuff like AmigaOS around at the time, that either of these objectively shit OSs ever took off.

Collapsing your interface with the whole computer down to one button, for Patent's sake? Absolute madness.

Tech troubles create aviation chaos on both sides of the Atlantic

Re: Russians?

Upvote for layered fuckery.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

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.

Re: Great Memories

Love this story!!

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

Re: Extra option?

Seen it happen first hand in private companies too (and resigned once directly because of it). The extra $$$s that acutally costs the business doesn't come home to roost until at least a year.

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

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.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Seeing the same

BT chief says AI could deliver more job cuts, hints at Openreach sell-off

Re: BT

Here's the appropriate comment. They could fix it by just sticking in some systems that work and doing some training. No need for (maybe great, maybe snake oil) AI.

Workday talks up AI agents platform that will reap rewards of staff cuts

They have something like 20,000 people looking after a website which is fundamentally a load of text boxes wrapped in web 2.0 nonsense? Wow.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

I know we've been saying it for years but WHY is anyone at all trusting MS with all their shit when they can't help but act like a dodgy sharp-practice startup?

Workday erases 8.5% of workforce because of ... AI

Workday. Wrapping text boxes in a web UI and charging business for the pleasure, since 2005.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Literally building the infinite monkey nonsense generating machine.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

I'm still frequently accidentally spamming the keyboard shortcut that gives me a very helpful interrupting popup to tell me Cortana is depricated.

Vodafone and Three permitted to tie the knot – if they promise to behave

Not sure why the downvote, this is exactly my experience!

Musk and Trump to fall out in 2025, predicts analyst

Oh no? Really?

Who are these amazing analysts? Trump falls out with literally everybody. It's nailed on to happen.

Mystery Palo Alto Networks hijack-my-firewall zero-day now officially under exploit

Lots of people, unfortunately. I guess at some level you think "it's a firewall, there's no way that will have a weakness"

Also I'm not entirely sure "lock it off from the outside, cos you trust everything on the inside, right?" is an awful lot better.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: I can't disagree more about CSD

I especially like not being able to grab hold of anything to actually move the fucking window somewhere, so I for one welcome our titlebar eliminating overlords.

Cisco combines Meraki and Catalyst into single wireless brand

It's great to see Cisco catching up to Aruba after like 10 years....

French govt finance panel mulls nationalizing Atos

Remind me again about the insurmountable inefficiencies of Government running stuff in-house?

Broadcom juices VeloCloud SD-WAN for AI networking

Not being tied to VMware is a good thing when they're still tied to Broadcom?

Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing

Re: At least...

I'm willing to bet that if Bing suddenly became the bastion of not tracking and slurping, it would attract more people than it does currently.

Floppy discs still run a U.S. metro? Japan steps in with 'project kill floppy'

I don't get it.

If it's working. Leave it. Just cos it's old doesn't mean it's shit.

Sounds like there's several other problems that need attention first.

Microsoft says its Copilot AI agents set to tackle employee tasks in November

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.

Critical hardcoded SolarWinds credential now exploited in the wild

They rushed out and performed a comprehensive code review in response to the last couple of exploits then. Lovely job.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Re: "The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully"

....and your system does a test run, and punts any anomalies to a meatbag for resolution.... once you do that THEN you migrate the data... Right?

This is pretty much the same business and world over. Amazes me that the overlords get so out of touch.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Re: Interesting that there is an allegation of hiding the badness from the elected members.

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?

Capgemini wins deal with UK tax collector worth up to £574M

Our government departments need to stop spending such a ridiculous amount of money on shite IT. There it is, that's the take.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Is nobody going to comment...

... 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.

Wanna curb datacenter outages? Try combating burnout with shorter shifts

Can not understand how this got a downvote, it's succinct and spot on.

Tech is GREAT if and when it does something appreciably better for appreciably cheaper. If those things are not met, continue employing, paying and looking after enough meatbags. It's astonishingly simple.

Blue screen of death or Eurovision's Windows95man performance – what's less annoying?

Re: The english clearly still have the language of prurience cornered. :)

a million upvotes for Fascinating Aida!