Posts by Tony J Smith

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

There's an easy way for us not to bother HP with phone calls again. We can just not buy their products, and then we won't have to bother ringing them if something goes wrong. Brilliant idea HP, brilliant idea.

Apologetic Audacity rewrites privacy policy after 'significant lapse in communication'

Per their other recent headlines, let's hope that whoever made this mistake isn't a Chinese dissident that can be threatened with deportation back to China. One Mafia-esque threat a week is more than enough.

You'd think 1.8bn users a day would be enough for Zuck. But no. Oculus fans must sign up for Facebook

Re: That's in 3 years...

Actually, the PS4 based PSVR is compatible wit the PS5; even Sony themselves have said so. They're developing a newer version, but you can still use your current version with it. It's the Dualshock 4 controller that won't be fully compatible with the PS5; you can't use it with PS5 games, only if playing a PS4 game on the system.

Still, I very much agree with the rest of the post. Lots of new next gen headsets will be coming over the next couple of years. Any non-Oculus ones now look more attractive.

Cisco to sell everything-as-a-service – even core networking hardware – and cut costs by a billion bucks

Re: Cisco As a Service

Yes, that's what happens with their Meraki gear. It becomes a useless brick without a subscription. The only benefit to it is that they'll give you some free hardware samples if you watch their webinars, which you can later slap DD-WRT or OpenWrt on (if it's a supported model).

Microsoft: Yes, we agree that Irish email dispute is moot... now what's this new warrant about?

Microsoft made $90 bn in revenue last year. Ignoring potential issues with large parts of that being made by subsidiary companies, the maximum fine under the GDPR is 4% of global revenue, which would equate to a potential $3.6 bn (or €2.92 bn) fine, if using the figure for overall revenue. Ouch. I'd imagine there'd be sections of the EU bureaucracy quite happy to levy such a fine as a warning to all others about what happens when you fail to comply with the GDPR. It would make for a very effective message.

No, Windows 10 hasn’t beaten Windows 7’s market share. Not for sure, anyway

Re: What about next year

You actually have just under two years left for Windows 7 support; extended ends on January 14, 2020.

No more IP addresses for countries that shut down internet access

Re: Wouldn't this just create more North Koreas?

I'd argue it likely wouldn't for two reasons, the first is that the disruption to business would likely chip away at the support of, and hopefully bring down, the offending governments, before they ever got that far. Governments restricting and censoring the internet in this fashion would usually be well on their way to becoming authoritarian, if they were not already so. They still, however, need the support of broad sections of their populations to stay in power. Severely harming business interests could radically reduce their support in several key support bases, the business community most directly, the general population (by way of self-inflicted economic damage), and possibly the military, if the general situation deteriorated that much (i.e. increased disorder, and possibly fewer resources going to the military).

The second reason, related to the first, is that these countries would generally not have a Chinese "sugar daddy" to prop them up, as North Korea does now. North Korea is not a normal state; it exists as it does today only because China views them as a useful buffer/client state between themselves and capitalist South Korea, and it's thousands of US troops. The removal of Chinese support, and most importantly money, would collapse the North Korean regime quite quickly.

You might argue that these sorts of policies are unfair because they will harm the populations of any countries that might run afoul of these policies. The populations of these countries are, however, already being harmed by the policies of governments that policies such as these are designed to combat, both now, and in the long term. I'd argue that countermeasures such as this would only make it easier for all to see how widespread censorship and similar policies are ultimately self-harming, and the only people they serve are a handful of kleptocrats who want a slightly easier time of it in robbing their people.

Fox gives Minority Report the nod – precog goes primetime on tellybox

Re: Fox will cancel it mid-flow

Almost Human says hello. An excellent show, with a very similar premise and an impressive cast, cancelled by Fox less than thirteen months ago, after they failed to advertise it, and aired the episodes out of order.

Value of European outsourcing deals plummets

I wonder if the decline in outsourcing deals is at least in part a response to the quality of prior outsourced deals? Poor quality, outsourced customer support, for instance, is a fantastic way to lose repeat business, as anyone who has had the misfortune to deal with Dell can attest.

Windows 8: We kick the tyres on Redmond's new tablet wheels

A foolish decision by Microsoft to force metro upon all users, desktop as well as tablet. It's one which will likely backfire in spectacular fashion upon them. I can see the taglines and twitter posts now: "You can't spell METRO without ME".

Syrian secret police endorse male hair remover

My own favourite set of amazon reviews has to be for this product:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005MR3IVO/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=boingboing06-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B005MR3IVO

Sony may break up with Samsung

@ Anonymous Coward

Unfortunately Sony's efforts in FED were an early casualty of the credit crunch when 'Field Emission Technologies' (FET), the FED joint venture that Sony was a major shareholder in, was closed down due to an inability to raise capital. Sony sold all it's patents and other FED assets to AU Optronics early last year.

Gartner: Acer's glory days may be over

Bradley makes a good point about the problems of relying on anecdotal evidence about a brand. There was, however, a survey done a few years back that found Acer laptops to have a high failure compared with other brands. HP, unsurprisingly, came out worst.

The pdf came be found here:

http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf

Electronista article summarising and discussing the results:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/17/reliability.study.has.apple.4th.place/