Posts by airbrush

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress

If only they could notify you about something useful

Spent weeks trying to get to the bottom of a new pc build that often blue screened on startup. The cause, a requirement by the Windows 24H2 update for the drive to report the size of the cache, which certain Western digital drivers misreport. Microsoft knew about the issue so didn't deploy the update unless the firmware was updated unless it's a sodding fresh install where it deployed the current version including the issue. I've no problem with that but please let the users know, even if it's just an entry in the event logs. Stuff like the above is the kind of polish thats missing, just some dev with imagination and empathy. It's something I come across all the time when encountering issues in Azure too when scripts start failing for some unknown reason. I do like the steady replacement of the old control panel though, even if it's taking 20 years to complete they're actually quite usable.

UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act

Whats the big deal??

I mean it can't be privacy as you're easily tracked by every ad tracker out there with or without anonymous browser sessions etc, sure its an inconvenience but thats life

Microsoft pulls plug on generous Azure credit program for startups

They're quite good at tweaking their offering so that your visual studio credits don't quite fit your monthly spend while the bean counters would rather die than top up your credits even though it's a fraction of the cost to host via the corporate account.

UK government's cloud strategy: Pay more, get less, blame vendor lock-in?

Re: Not just "digital" skills

Not in cloud procurement, we're not alone in this

Arm gives up on killing off Qualcomm's vital chip license

Re: There's a gun in my hand and it's pointing at your head.

Guess the two licenses were different enough, seems trivial to us but it's their whole income model.

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Re: A bit later than that...

My first pc was an amstrad 286 with a total of 1MB of ram and monochrome monitor for £500 I think, a 386 was a couple of hundred more in 1991.

UK authority struggles to RISE with SAP, throws another £9M at project

Re: How bloody much?

These systems are pretty huge, you'd be waiting a very very long time to do it from scratch. Totally agree they should standardise but it'll never happen, they can't even get a couple of police areas to merge and various governments have tried over the past 20 years. Local democracy needs a reboot.

Local councils struggle with ill-fitting software despite spending billions with suppliers

Re: Go back to the future.

Theres a 100k more civil servants than pre Brexit, at least 3 billion quids worth put year for people we didn't need before, that should give an indication of the the huge amount of new red tape that needs administering..

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

They use council systems to deliver the service I expect, to integrate yet another software process would add considerably to the cost presumably.

UK govt office admits ability to negotiate billions in cloud spending curbed by vendor lock-in

Re: shocked

The public sector has never been allowed to bid on a level playing field by our government.

Microsoft sends OneDrive URL upload feature to the cloud graveyard

One drive locks up computers when you run out of storage, you can't easily opt out of it backing up pictures or whatever. I just uninstall it as soon as possible.

Tesco techies and Azure jockeys hit the floor during weekend of outages

Their acr service was degraded yesterday so had build timeouts all day, it's not surprising these instances occur but sure that's not what they say when selling it. Using Azure DevOps can be even more expensive when factoring in downtime and time consuming processes so you have to be very very careful

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Great job!

Famously the barber the conservative chancellor left a similar note in 73, more a case of recycling a joke

Re: went cap in hand to the IMF

Not the first time a labour chancellor was mislead, in 70 they were given poor figures around the election which were subsequently upgraded to a huge surplus. Of course the conservatives then created a huge trade deficit; over heating economy from tax cuts, the oil crisis, striking miners and the scene was set for the remainder of the 70's from the resultant inflation.

Keir Starmer's techno-fix for the NHS: Déjà vu disaster or brave new blunder?

Re: "years of arguable underfunding2

The NHS budget is substantially less than our peers in France and Germany, if you include private spending ie NHS surgeons working overtime it's still substantially less. If you want to see how privatised systems work in this country take a look at social care, the NHS was pretty good a decade ago but we've not really had a government since then and either they don't care or are incapable but still the problems pile up!

Microsoft pushes users to the Edge in Outlook, Teams

Re: It's how they turn you into the product..

Yeah I prefer it but every time I authenticate using ms company portal thing it needs Chrome to import the certificate etc, wouldn't mind if it was monthly

It's how they turn you into the product..

Try and use a browser other than Chrome and edge on your phone that have a business model of tracking your every move and it is much harder, some things like authentication for your company portal only work with chrome. On the desktop some office links already won't open in Firefox although not common enough to deter. Needs more regulation.

Qualcomm faces fresh competition in world of Arm-based Windows PCs

Re: Windows on x86 is the new mainframe.

Microsoft sell a small arm development box which is pretty good, a long way off M1 performance and not particularly cheap but will happily run x86 apps.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Anti virus, anti malware etc

Not sure if anyone else has experienced developing on a pc fully loaded with AV products, it's awful. Random lock ups, accessing the browser is scanned so that's a nightmare too. This is on a 2.5k laptop, sometimes I wonder if they want us to do any work.

Intel's €80bn European chip plant investment plan not bound for UK because Brexit

Re: What a surprise

They did offer that, the government was happy unfortunately parliament voted down Mays proposals and we're left with the current dogs breakfast.

Biden is doing the same thing, it's common practice in the US and pretty much everywhere else.

Azure anywhere: Arc adds App Service, Function apps, Event Grid and more to on-premises Kubernetes

developers

I'll be happy if it means I can run the services on my laptop, the costs of running so many instances to support development teams is out of proportion to it's benefits currently.

Dominic Cummings: Health secretary's 'stupid' targets delayed building UK test and trace system to combat COVID

Under oath

If he exaggerated its going to be by omission, his testimony just confirmed that the current idiots in charge were a particularly nasty bunch of dysfunctional idiots. You'd be lying if you don't acknowledge that it explains the poor communication, uturns and crazy decisions over the past year. The problem is that despite all the proof he provided this will just be brushed under the carpet by their mates in the media.

European Commission redacts AstraZeneca vaccine contract – but forgets to wipe the bookmarks tab

Re: And the EU still can't understand why the UK left.

The Chinese sequenced the virus in record time enabling all the vaccines, we can hardly take all the credit!

And now for something completely different: A lightweight, fast browser that won't slurp your data

Re: Not Free

It uses Mozilla's JavaScript engine

Microsoft to rethink crash-prone Visual Studio extension model, shift towards cloud

Resharper

Things improved with Vs when much of the code analysis moving out of process so I rarely get out of memory errors these days however a move to 64bit is long overdue. Been waiting for resharper to move out of process for years, to be honest take away one or two features that improve the unit test experience no end and they're dead in the water, it's a bit scandalous that vs has such obvious gaps while costing so much.

Need next-gen connectivity but don't want to break the bank? Samsung's Galaxy A42 5G is a bin-raking £349

updates

The problem is that with the slow to non existent updates you may as well get the equivalent or better xiaomi 10 lite with better chip and more memory for two thirds the price or even cheaper Poco x3. Two day battery in each too along with 5G.

Xiaomi and Samsung go head to head with new phones in bargain-basement 5G battle

Norfolking way

Seems North Norfolk has good 5G coverage, guess they know where the early adopters have holiday homes!

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

It's ok

My first experience of it is that it's quicker than the previous version, the bar at the bottom makes more sense. Every time familiar stuff changes people moan, personally I find it quite refreshing to see. Chrome is more bloated, like every redesign there's good, bad and stuff you'll get used to.

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..