Posts by gv

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

The parking brake on my car is a switch.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

"Which begs the quetion how much iron is created through sending ironic emails?"

Whatever the amount, it's a steel.

HMD Global pokes head out of quarantine to show off 3 new Nokia mobiles

Re: SD Card & Headphone Jack?

Absolutely this. Bought Nokias for the kids (one to the utter disdain of the Carphone Warehouse guy who had to fetch it from the stock room): solid, cruft-free phones with regular updates.

Hold up, ace. Before you strap into Firefox's latest Test Pilot, ask yourself...

Re: As usual, with open source applications, you should ask yourself "where do the money come from?"

I'm not sure I'd trust a coder who was up at 5 AM...

Don't panic! Don't panic! UK IT job ads plummet as Brexit uncertainty grabs UK tech sector by the short and curlies

Re: The search for good news is getting desperate

Sunlit uplands hitting in 2050.

Lenovo ThinkPad X390: A trusty workhorse that means business but it's not without a few flaws

Re: X220 forever

Apart from the battery, my T61 running Ubuntu Mate, still works remarkably well and that keyboard is superb.

What first attracted Ofcom boss Sharon White to the near-£1m salary offered by John Lewis Partnership?

Re: damp squib

The down voters need to get off their pedal stools.

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

Re: "Everyone loves a bit of REGEX torture"

I don't think your regex parses.

Terribly Sorry Bank reports 165% drop in profits to a pre-tax loss of £105.4m

Re: Who decided such massive change all at once?

Indeed, a controlled, phased migration of customers should have been the strategy here with copious amounts of usage and stress testing and a bullet-proof rollback strategy just in case. I would have thought it would be fairly straightforward to identify the senior director who gave the green light...

Dixons Carphone still counting cost of miserly mobile phone sales

Re: It's not Dixon's fault..

"Shush, thinner is not a plus!"

I'd quite like my headphone socket back so that I can actually be on a phone call and charge the phone at the same time.

Three quarters of US Facebook users unaware their online behavior gets tracked

"The IQ average will remain at 100, by definition, no?"

I wish I had more than 1 up vote.

Google now minus Google Plus: Social mini-network faces axe in data leak bug drama

Re: Google+ users

I trust them 110% with my cat photos.

WLinux brings a custom Windows Subsystem for Linux experience to the Microsoft Store

The Other Way Round

Running Linux as the base OS and Windows in a VM is much better.

Microsoft sharpens its claws to cut Outlook UI excess, snip Ribbon

Re: With no competition for miles ....

Funnily enough I find Outlook is buggy, lacks features and is very unreliable. Definitely not enterprise-grade (whatever that means).

Go Pester someone else: TSB ditches CEO over bank's IT meltdown

Re: New Chief Executive Puppet wanted

Isn't the new TSB banking platform implemented in .NET?

LG G7 ThinkQ: Ropey AI, but a feast for sore eyes and ears

Re: LG G7 ThinQ: Raising a StinQ.

Ay, there's the rub. If only LG provided software updates on a regular basis...

Meet the Frenchman masterminding a Google-free Android

Re: I'm uncertain...

'... but for "Mom & Pop" this will be just like asking them to run Linux instead of Windows on their laptop.'

Or maybe like asking them to run Linux on their phones. Oh wait...

Trump’s new ZTE tweets trump old ZTE tweets

Also, the smartest and the healthiest.

You've got pr0n: Yes, smut by email is latest workaround for UK's looming cock block

Re: What's next?

Time to re-invigorate Usenet and Gopher.

TSB's middleware nightmare: Execs grilled on Total Sh*tshow at Bank

PHB

"Can he not see that determining the expected load and planning for adequate resources to deal with that load are what his job is supposed to be?"

I'm guessing they employ the "brightest and best" IT people for this, just like everybody else.

Who will fix our Internal Banking Mess? TSB hires IBM amid online banking woes

Re: not a customer

On the contrary, customers should get very agitated. This is a core banking platform migration, so there should have been extensive contingency planning, testing and a fallback system in place.

"to help identify and resolve performance issues in the platform"

A good rule of thumb is to do this BEFORE going live.

Brit bank TSB TITSUP* after long-planned transfer of customer records from Lloyds

Contingency and rollback

Whoever put together their contingency and rollback plan in case the 'upgrade' failed should quite probably be tendering their resignation...

UK pub chain Wetherspoons' last call: ♫ Just a spoonful of Twitter – let's pull social media down ♫

Given the choice, I think most people would do likewise.

Huawei guns for Apple with Mac-alike Matebook X

Never buying anything with a Broadcom card ever again.

Arrrgh! Put down the crisps! 'Ultra-processed' foods linked to cancer!

Re: Usual media over-reporting highly interim and possibly invalid findings

Life is (ultimately) fatal.

France to lend Brexit Britain sore souvenir of Norman yoke – the Bayeux Tapestry

Talks

"months of talks between culture department officials in London and Paris"

Nice work if you can get it.

Hello, Dixons Carphone? Yep, we're ringing from a 2015 handset. Profits down 60%, eh?

Re: Are people still blaming Brexit for management stupidity

"The only interaction I have with normal shops is either to buy a drink or lunch but never tech"

Are they still selling £30 HDMI cables?

Spy-on-your-home Y-Cam cameras removes free cloud storage bit

Re: Boom. Gotcha.

"Now you have it, we'll now lock you in because that would be cheaper than you buying all new stuff"

To a certain extent, yes. But, as there is a hardware component almost always involved somewhere, when said component needs to be replaced, then it's goodbye and goodnight (probably for ever).

ATM fees shake-up may push Britain towards cashless society

Re: Cash just in case

My local fish and chips establishment being the most critically important example for cash only transactions.

The Google Home Mini: Great, right up until you want to smash it in fury

Re: Silly Valley

Until somebody builds the equivalent of Orac, I'm not parting with my money.

Ignite: Microsoft drops veil on Honolulu, releases SQL Server on Linux into the wild

Re: Lock-in

One way would be application functionality, i.e., your application has some whizzy things that your competitors do not, but you're always taking the risk that the customer will migrate anyway because of the cost, or security concerns, or the support experience, or any number of other factors.

Mozilla whips out Rusty new Firefox Quantum (and that's a good thing)

Re: First look

"Old school Firefox users will be pleased as punch to note the return of square tabs"

On Firefox 55 there are the Compact Light and Compact Dark themes.

My name is Bill Gates and I am an Android user

Re: Thriller

The irony is that they took Elop's Nokia down with them.

GNOME Foundation backs 'freedom-oriented' smartphone

Re: But

If it has a browser app and maybe a port of the f-droid repository, I think I would definitely spend my money on this.

What's your flava? Ooo, tell me what's your flava... of Ubuntu

Re: Does KDE work now?

Running vanilla KDE on Arch Linux and had absolutely no issues. I always turn the file indexing/searching stuff off though.

Move to QT

It's interesting that both LXDE and Budgie are moving to QT.

Ubuntu sends trash to its desktop's desktop

Window Managers

Fortunately, if you use a window manager, you are spared all this nonsense.

Not another Linux desktop! Robots cross the Uncanny Valley

Re: Carebots for the elderly?

I'll take a T-101 please.

Microsoft's Surface Pro 2017, unhinged: Luxury fondleslab that's good...

Re: UI must fully switch based on context.

I have a touchscreen laptop. Number of times I've used this capability? Once, just to try it out.

One-third of Brit IT projects on track to fail

Re: In other news

It's almost as if nobody bothered to read Mr. Brooks excellent book on this subject.

Ex-NASA bod on Gwyneth Paltrow site's 'healing' stickers: 'Wow. What a load of BS'

Re: High level spirit

I've not come across a wellness problem that can't be solved with a glass or two of a single malt.

Yeah, if you could just stop writing those Y2K compliance reports, that would be great

Famous last words when that critical banking COBOL batch program crashes in the year 10000.

Specsavers embraces Azure and AWS, recoils at Oracle's 'wow' factor

Interesting

"Pavitt – a former HMRC CIO and director general of change – is leaving Specsavers at the end of June, two years after joining."

Having punted the tech platform into the cloud, the exec is not sticking around to see the results/challenges...

DUP site crashes after UK general election

Interesting Times

Amazing dog's breakfast (or should that be dog's brexit?) served up by the party that won the 2015 election.

So despite all the cash ploughed into big data, no one knows how to make it profitable

Re: Big data profits?

It is reminiscent of the hype surrounding artificial intelligence in the 70s and 80s.

Distro watch for Ubuntu lovers: What's ahead in Linux land

Not sure about the USB opton, but I think it works fine, especially on older hardware. Using a modern DE does slow it down a bit, but maybe that was because I was running it on the older hardware.

IBM's ShinyHappy™ SAP Ariba deal papers over SaaS fail

Acquistion from six years ago

It's clear that the lifespan for enterprise cloud applications will get shorter. Customers may take their data and move to a rival in a matter of weeks. In their stampede to get customers to move to the cloud, I don't think the vendors have fully understood this interesting side effect.

Volvo is letting Android 'take over underlying car software' – report

Future updates/upgrades/patches/security

Is this the automotive equivalent of the "smart" TV?

Mozilla to Thunderbird: You can stay here and we may give you cash, but as a couple, it's over

Re: "The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies"

It's clear that Gecko has no long term future, so they'll need to use something still being actively developed.