Posts by chainman

Back to the Future: the internet of things as imagined in 1985

It's Not the Boxes

It's the internet of "Big Data". It seems that interaction with many of these gadgets is mediated by some central service. I'm not that clever, but I assume that there are lots of marketing types salivating over the details of millions users interactions with their "personal" environments. Just knowing what people of watching on the TV/Stream is apparently valuable data, or so I've heard.

Everything your users ever need to know about BYOD

Really excellent summary

Covered the bases with just enough to give the nitties something to nit on.

Never mind the jetpack, where's my 21st-century Psion?

HP100LX was Heaven

I could type on the keyboard with thumbs when holding it while walking and with two fingers if I set it on a desk. Seem to remember that it ran a rather long time on a pair of alkaline AAs.

Did sort of lust after a Psion II just out of curiosity.

Breaking with your back-up supplier is a sticky business

Backup V. Archive

Or has that distinction vanished into the wind?

IT distributors: The only people adding value to the world economy

Wrong Industry but Some Outdated IT Experience

Years (well decades) ago I did some programming on an order processing system for a hardware (as in hardware store) distributor. The key element seems to be that they were a stocking distributor for a fairly large number of manufacturers. The salesman would call on a retail outlet and on a custom order form arranged in the order of the displays enter the quantities to be ordered. In many cases, the store manager would simply sign the order trusting the salesman to specify the appropriate quantities.

The salesman would drop the order forms at the warehouse where they were keyed into the system (runnning on a minicomputer btw) and pick lists would be generated, the order picked and loaded into company trucks for delivery.

The whole system from sales call to delivery was designed to offer delivery within 24 to 48 hours within an approximately 100 mile radius.

While I was working for them, they added a capability to maintain retail price data and apply price tags during the order picking process.

Ok, terribly out of date and wrong industry.

Even so I would think that even today being able to order items from a number of manufacturers and have them arrive quickly, in the same shipment and possibly even packaged into appropriate kits might be of some value.

Royal Navy running-jump method confirmed for F-35B

Top Down (up?) Sports Fighter

When I saw the picture at the head of the article, I thought something like "These guys are pretty sporty driving with the canopy up."

Forgot about the fan door.

Some days being stupid isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

Windows 7 Backup gets users' backs up

Push to Cloud?

Could this be part of a strategy to push users to "The Cloud" esp. the MS version?

"Don't worry. We'll back you up automagically!"

This does however point out the difficulty of having the extremely large partitions which 1TB+ drives make possible. Recently I've found myself leaning toward smaller primary partitions and placing very large datasets on separate volumes. Might note that I'm an Acronis user.