Posts by airbrush

No surprise: Britain ditches central database model for virus contact-tracing apps in favour of Apple-Google API

Tories...

All these weird decisions and over centralised control do make you wonder if this epidemic is just a huge opportunity to reward the parties friends..

In Hancock's half-hour, Dido Harding offers hollow laughs: Cake distracts test-and-trace boss at UK COVID-19 briefing

Re: "......worst death toll in Europe"

And you trust what's written about Cummins, more fool you.

Brit council tosses Serco a £50m contract extension as coronavirus pandemic leaves in-sourcing plans in tatters

Re: Still in the Dark Ages

Bins, housing and libraries might not be the best examples of stuff that can be centralised! Take a look at the Worcestershire and Warwickshire police centralisation that was recently reversed by the vain prima donnas that want their own little fiefdoms. Local control is often more manageable than having someone up high trying to do everything as the recent coronovirus omnishambles has shown but yeah most councils have outsourced back office to the same old providers which is centralisation in a way.

You can get a mechanical keyboard for £45. But should you? We pulled an Aukey KM-G6 out of the bargain bin

Keyboard Layout Creator

Compact keyboards seem to have a fairly random idea of what keys to include, who needs a shortcut to your email program when it doesn't provide a forward slash for example! I only mention it as my cheap mechanical Zalman keyboard lacked quite a few useful keys, Microsoft provide a key mapper that actually creates a keyboard driver with the mappings you specify so far better than other solutions and is fairly easy to use, hopefully they'll continue to support it!

We could all do with a bit of empathy in our systems, says Mozilla as it ships Firefox 75 in the thick of global pandemic

Should be number one

Not sure why it's not more popular, I find it far less of a memory hog than Chrome and handles every site with aplomb as well as excellent privacy by default. Had one or two shopping sites with issues on my phone but nothing like the issues with Safari.

'Up to 300' UK heads to roll at Brit IT services firm Allvotec, with 200 jobs offshored to Bulgaria in cost-cutting drive

Probably best to take the chance to move to Bulgaria, especially if you can keep your UK salary

Our 'solution is killing us in a number of areas' IBM said about doomed £175m Co-Op Insurance project

Doh!

Seems stupid of the coop to migrate their whole business to a new system instead of doing it in chunks with the complexity of insurance. However IBM sound like they've completely mismanaged the process, this is a specialist area and best undertaken by a specialist software company. Recently had a similar experience where our companies system was due to be replaced by one written by oracle, three years and millions later they decided to stay with the existing one after all.

FTC kicks feet through ash pile that once was Cambridge Analytica with belated verdict

Re: Liability limited to shares with no value.

There could be circumstances where a companies liable such as seeing unrealistic targets that mean speeding is required.

Microsoft says .NET Framework porting project is finished: If your API's not on the list, it's not getting in

Re: Jettisoning .NET and all but accepting the mistake it was

I think he means from back in the day when .Net originally came out it was effectively Microsoft's Java Runtime replacement after the lawsuit over their version. He's just saying it could have been written as cross platform from the start avoiding the rewrite although maybe they were worried about stepping on Java's litigious toes?

Leaked EU doc plots €100bn fund to protect European firms against international tech giants

And half billion pound loans to JLR..

Just look at Q! Watch out Microsoft, the next Android has a proper desktop PC mode

Re: Nope!

Me too, a tad sluggish but great for playing videos and surfing the web. The lapdock could be used with a raspberry pi or any other device with a hdmi too but Motorola being Motorola didn't have any compatibility from one version to the next so it faded away.

Surface Studio 2: The Vulture rakes a talon over Microsoft's latest box of desktop delight

Wacom Cintiq

You should really be comparing this with it's main competitor, as far as I'm aware it doesn't compare so why would anyone buy it?

Flea market Xiaomi makes mad dash for growth

Re: Xiaomi The Money!

It was allocated by lottery apparently so only the lucky few got the phone.

So, about that Google tax on Android makers in the EU – report pegs it at up to $40 per phone

Time to ban Google outside of America?

If ever there was a company that's abused its position..

Stroppy Google runs rings round Brussels with Android remedy

what is with people??

If they can get to the situation where Google make a version of Android that doesn't slurp your data then it's all good. Some power for the consumer to say no would be good while having a phone with a few apps for pennies. Not much hope of that but hey it's worth a shot

What a hang up: US big box biz Best Buy kicks Huawei to the curb

Re: Chinese government

Mainly because he created a huge warchest to repulse any attempted takeover by 80's buy and breakup merchants. Weinstock was only there as he married the bosses daughter which counted as a qualification to run one of the largest companies in the Uk back then.

Did somebody say Brexit? Cambridge Analytica grilled: Brit MPs' Fake News probe

Repeating the lie enough times..

Trump was probably the least honest candidate in history, repeat a lie enough times to the right people and it becomes a 'fact'. Similar with brexit really so there are similarities.

Sacre bleu! Apple's high price, marginal gain iPhone strategy leaves it stuck in the mud

Re: Compare like with like

Sure but Apples whole ecosystem is built on open source, no open source and Apple would have gone bust years ago.

Motorola's modular Moto Z: A fine phone for a weekend away

Re: Futureproof?

Yeah that's the problem with Motorola, they innovate first but shoot themselves in the foot.

Futureproof?

I still have my Atrix lapdock and desk dock in a drawer somewhere, well made but ultimately too expensive for disposable extras (bought with a hefty discount). If they nail that they can lock in users for the next upgrade in the same way as apple.

Government to sling extra £4.7bn at R&D in bid to Brexit-proof Britain

Re: Is Harold Wilson back?

Well the 70's were a tough time to do business for everyone so drawing conclusions is tricky, government involvements worked pretty well for South Korea, China and Japan..

Barnet Council: Outsourcing deal with Capita has 'performance issues'

Re: saved???

Also the government gets 40% back in taxes.

So, was it really the Commies that caused the early 20th Century inequality collapse?

Re: So no economic growth from IT?

Nicely done. Next week, how big corp gave votes for women, universal healthcare, a safe workplace and fair pay for all.

Hmmm

Theres little evidence this is the case, capitalism works best when you have customers. Low wages and easy credit ultimately lead to most of the money and alk of the power in fewer and fewer peoples hands. Higher taxes ensure the money keeps circulating, keeping the system functioning. This is why inheritance taxes and inequality matters to everyone. You might find a few knowledgeable people on TED, even a billionaire believe it or not saying exactly that. The highest rate of tax in the USA was 80% in the 50's and they didn't turn into the Soviet union. Our wealth depends on customers too,if we run out of young people willing to pay for our houses then obviously that price will fall.

Why OH WHY is economics so bleedin' awful, then?

Trust

Id only trust the ones that value their reputation over the corporate coin : http://rabble.ca/columnists/2013/02/economists-conflicts-interest-and-plea-journalists.

iOS and Android apps on Windows 10: How is this supposed to work?

Piracy

Sounds like a great platform for running pirate apps.

Vodafone didn't have a £6bn tax bill. Sort yourselves out, Lefties

Petty politics

I can see where Worstead is coming from when the current government wastes billions on schools no one needs, ineffective reorganisation of the nhs, starts on austerity and ends up following the Labour plan, millions wasted on universal credit, policy made up on the back of a fat packet, Libya, Syria etc etc. Were this a left wing government they'd have been utterly ridiculed, I certainly don't trust them with my taxes. Journalism's always been partisan and lazy but is that good for democracy?

Hacker kicks one bit XP to 10 Windows scroll goal

Re: Impossible!

I think it was the kernal that was rewritten from the ground up which is what he might be referring to..

What time do you call this, BT? Late, state-funded broadband rollout plods on

State funded?

At least some small amount of the public service part of BT has survived privatisation, the always privatised businesses in the states delivering universal broadband have swallowed up billions of tax payers money and delivered far less.

Google's latest letdown: Simply not enough billions since October

Boring adverts

At least in print etc. they make an effort with the adverts, perhaps in the future adverts will all just consist of plain text + all in the same font..

The next big thing in medical science: POO TRANSPLANTS

Re: Gut ... er journalism?

You can listen to Jaspers story here, its fascinating : http://www.radiolab.org/story/91691-sculptors-of-monumental-narrative/

European Commission decides it won't have a science advisor after Greenpeace pressure

A bit one sided maybe?

If Greenpeace was the only lobbyist she annoyed then she wasnt doing her job, given the lack of background to the article I'm taking it with a hefty pinch of salt. Anyway here's a great article in the Guardian about the sterling work she was doing and hopes that she would carry on :

http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/jun/23/evidence-based-union-a-new-alliance-for-science-advice-in-europe

and then later an article about why the role is being questioned:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/aug/29/the-eu-needs-science-policy-but-does-that-mean-it-needs-a-chief-scientific-adviser

Seems like someones being cynical about the green lobby when its dwarfed by pretty much any other lobby group, the decisions made by the EU are pretty transparent at least compared to our Government that is. There's always going to be the scientific view about GM crops and the publics view, if a good proportion of the population don't want GM crops then politicians aren't going to alienate the voters without good reason (you'd hope).

AMD claims record with latest overclock-happy FX Series chips, again

Free market

I've never managed to replicate the benchmarks/overclocks so it does make you wonder, also my super fast i7 locks up all the time when the processor is far below 100%. My guess is theyre using unrealistic set ups and production motherboards etc perform far below what the average consumer buys.

Britain's housing crisis: What are we going to do about it?

This is not a solution

I'm afraid the free market only works with honest competition, that's about as likely as communism!

Piketty thinks the 1% should cough up 80%. Discuss

More class war from the register?

Yes because everyone on benefits gets a mansion in Mayfair while honest working people struggle to buy a shoebox. Read the daily mail by any chance?

EU: Let's cost financial traders $400m a day, because EVIL BANKERS. Right?

Re: Cost of markets

Thats not the point I'm making, the banks have been caught screwing the pension funds by buying and selling shares to institutions for a fast buck : http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/apr/06/michael-lewis-flash-boys-high-frequency-traders. That's naughty of them to say the least!

Cost of markets

Wasn't the problem that certain banks were taking advantage of the time differential between stock exchanges shifting the price up for pension funds?

Sorry London, Europe's top tech city is Munich

Re: @ Don Jefe

Well 40% of manufacturing in the early 80's, much of our knowledge based industry has been bought by French, American and German companies. The result of these sales is that the jobs and profits eventually go overseas, incidentally income inequality is now back at Edwardian levels. Great job. No ones being negative about Britain, what she allowed was a kind of unilateral disarmament of our industry. Remember when UK companies could make power stations??

Android engineer: We didn't copy Apple or follow Samsung's orders

Bad advice

I know quite a few people moving away from apple mainly because of battery life and screen size but I suspect that these court cases are seen as unjust. Buying apple might once have made people envious, now its disgust at their tax affairs and throwing their weight around.

SCRAP the TELLY TAX? Ancient BBC Time Lords mull Beeb's future

Seems good value to me

Sorry but I like things the way they are, no systems perfect. Most tinkering over the past 20 years have hardly improved stuff, the more they concentrate on making great programs the happier I'll be.

Googorola's Dennis Woodside shuffles over to Dropbox

Great Guy

Emailed him about my broken matrix screen, it had malfunctioned and within a week he sorted out a replacement razr hd. Pity Motorola couldn't be turned around because they gave it a good shot.

A BBC-by-subscription 'would be richer', MPs told

Oh dear

Hey let's just sell it all to the Germans. Or the French. I guess that's what Margaret Thatcher meant when she made Britain 'Great' again. Lions and donkeys comes to mind. Pretty soon there will be no nation, sorry not sure where that came from.

How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

Despite the evidence..

The UK has become a world leader in the arts in the past 20 years and this sector of the economy is pretty successful so can't have been all bad.

British support for fracking largely unmoved by knowledge of downsides

Its not all bad..

If we burn all the gas in the ground the City of London will be underwater within the next 50 years, so there are some positives,,

Google teases hush-hush Android event on July 24

with the death of symbian all the os choices are american and feeding data to prism, so which os exactly is a private person to use??

More than half of Windows 8 users just treat it like Windows 7

I Like the new settings but its a job half done..

Havent found a use for any metro apps. Configuring stuff in the metro interface is much clearerl but they've left many of the settings in the old windows 95/vista dialogs, probably because the ui doesnt work well in metro. Unfortunately this makes windows feel disjointed where you have to jump all over the place to set stuff up. I did look in the windows store once. I think ms started to go off the tracks when they tried to switch to 2 year releases so now we have an os with a muddle of windows 95, vista and now windows 8 design rather than a complete over-hall like with NT4/95.

You know how your energy bills are so much worse than they were?

Yeah ok

Probably lots of over simplifications etc. but some good points. It seems to me that the energy companies are proposing a pfi style nightmare with nuclear plants. Let the government finance and build it while they lease it from us. At least if the energy company turns out to be inept we can replace them in fact wasn't that the point of privatisation in the the first place not creating new monopolies.

Cameron's speech puts UK adoption of EU data directive in doubt

Why so vague?

Why doesn't he tell us what these laws are that make us 'uncompetitive'? Perhaps he could spell out what they are, how we voted at the time, if we voted against what changes we wanted and what evidence he can present to show that law is uncompetitive. Surely its not just hyperbole?

EU-wide mega-Leveson 'needed' to silence Press, bloggers

Re: Hungary votes to support proposal

Isn't that a body that can fine newspapers? Not sure our judiciary is exactly a neutral body, but then what organisation is?

Lolz

I love these stories about stuff that the EU might do, or voted against it brings out the paranoid in people. Go back to bed, luckily one or two countries arent in the pocket of multinational companies or the USA so democracy won. Wish we were one of those countries .. Zzzzz.