Posts by Jim McDonald

Lester Haines: RIP

So young...

:(

Dragon capsule bids adios to ISS

re: Mice

Wrong!

The Mice, hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings that they are, have been running a series of complex experiments on the humans.

ISS to host space truck rally

Someone will be along wearing a Hi-Vis to slap tickets over them "hey! you can't park there you know..."

Microsoft to make Xamarin tools and code free and open source

Well done MS. Excellent news (if not entirely new)!

Apple coughs up $350m – 2.3 days of annual profit – to make Italy's taxmen go away

Phase 1: Sell Consumer Products

Phase 2: ?????

Phase 3: Profit!

Now we know that Phase 2 is... Pay no CT for 5 years (some estimates put this at €880m) and when they catch up with you, offer €318m in full and final settlement.

Cisco forgot to install two LEDs in routers

LED free solder?

VDI comes to the Raspberry Pi

Do Citrix still have the free for 10 users XenDesktop Express edition going?

I know it's not available at the latest 7.1 (?) release level but is 5.x or 6.x still downloadable? (I'd check but can't recall my Citrix login details!)

Still, for rPi2 users who are thinking of VDI it may still be possible to do the server side for free (if the above holds water)

SpaceX starts nine-day countdown to first flight of the new Falcon

Fingers & toes crossed!

Microsoft Lumia 950 and 950XL: Clear thoughts of Continuum with a snazzy camera

Good review.

TL;DR... mostly great hardware, now need the software to catch up.

IBM bets POWER8 processor farm on hardware acceleration

I'm looking forward to seeing the real world impact upon AIX & "System i" in the next year or two.

A bubble? No way, we're in a bust, says rich VC living in alternate reality

"...no more than Shetland Ponies with plastic horns held on by elastic..."

goes to show they are, first and foremost, very successful PR, Sales & Marketing people.

We can't all live by taking in each others' washing

Missing you already!

http://www.timworstall.com/ bookmarked!

WordPress blogger patch foot-drag nag: You're tempting hackers

I prefer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fCgPMMH4vA (Bruno Ganz is superb)

Entertaining prospect: Amazon Fire TV Stick

Thumbs up from me.

Got mine for £19, so worth a punt. They had a special on a week or two ago dropping it from £35 to £25 but that only lasted a day or so. However they may repeat it so keep an eye out.

I second the reviewer about a strong WiFi signal, buffering can occur in weak signal areas. It does have b/g/n 2x2 MIMO so worth putting it on the 5GHz rather than 2.4GHz if, like me, you're airwaves are swamped by the neighbours ISP issued vanilla Routers.

I've side loaded Kodi for DLNA streaming, and use the Miracast feature too from my phone. Took it to France & Spain recently, very useful indeed!

Well worth the money (assuming you don't put it in a poor WiFi spot on 2.4GHz).

HP is giving away FREE* STORAGE to lucky server customers

small, but useful

'valid for 1095 days' in addition to being limited to 1TB.

Might come in handy for Dev/Testing work though.

SAVE THE EARTH... give all your iThings back to us, begs Apple

It would be highly amusing if the solar panels featured in the Apple ad were actually manufactured by Samsung!

Quite possible given they manufacture some of the most efficient (subject to certain types/usage) http://www.samsung.com/us/business/solarmodules/introductiontosamsungsolarenergy.html

You like iPads, you like things called 'Air'. You will LOVE this puppy

Credit where credit is due, it is the benchmark device for its class.

No mention of battery life, assuming it's no worse than iPad4 then the only think to dislike is the price.

Microsoft: Everyone stop running so the fat kid Win RT can catch up

Re: Glacial?

Indeed, very frustrating and arguably inexcusable.

Re: Glacial?

Agreed, sales not market share... my bad.

I would have thought the average might have moved from the 24 month point now though. Contracts are/can be shorter (12 or 18) but on the other hand the days of very large steps forward in power/usability are behind us for the most part. They'll always be people who buy the latest and greatest but the unsung majority are likely to hang on to a smartphone bought in the last year or two longer if it continues to meet all their needs I suspect. Perhaps those two factors keep the average around the 24 month point. Still Unlocked/SIM free is much more popular now (indeed mine is an Unlocked/SIM free Lumia 920. I also have an Unlocked/SIM free Sony Xperia) and I plan on hanging on to both (probably) for a total of 36 months IE two more years as things currently stand.

Thinking ahead then, given that WP8 is only just over 12 months old now it's market share is being depressed by the large volume of older phones yet to be replaced. If the sales share each quarter remains strong and growing then in another 10-12 months time that will convert to market share of the current user base in a much more dramatic way. IE market share is a trailing indicator.

Glacial?

It's true that many of these features are catch up, 'rotation lock' can't arrive soon enough for example. Yet there is a killer feature too 'driving mode'. So, we ought to praise MS when opportunity arises and slag them off terribly otherwise (as is the fine tradition).

What I do think is completely misleading is the pace of development. OK, lets forget about previous incarnations of WP (different architecture altogether). WP8 was shipped in August 2012 (iirc), GDR 1 in December 2012, GDR 2 in July 2013 and now GDR 3 in Oct/Nov 2013 with 8.1 expected in Q1 2014 (subject to slippage of course). Hardly glacial. Of course they have needed to, to catch up with the others but they are the 'new kid on the block' (again, ignoring previous architectures).

Look back on less than 18 months and recall the almost universal predictions that WP8 is a waste of time, it would crash and burn and 'why bother' as it has such small market share. Now it is about 10% of the UK market and still growing (ok still 5% of worldwide, but growing there too).

So yes, MS have some ways to go... WP8.1/Blue in 3-6 months time will be most welcome but when it comes I think it stands a chance of being an overall leader/setter of features rather than a follower.

Boffins FREEZE PHONES to crack Android on-device crypto

cool!

*groan*

DropBox seeks to woo IT admins with team data controls

Dropbox is great, but at those 'team' prices it doesn't look so attractive... the price would soon stack up.

Open Source alternatives, such as ownCloud, look attractive now they have caught up in the feature/stability department.

She's a beauty! Super WATER-RICH Mars rock FOUND

Re: How do we know that it came from Mars?

The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one... but still they come!

Samba 4 arrives with full Active Directory support

I for one welcome our Penguin overlords!

10 Gigabit Ethernet still too expensive on servers

+1 for having 4-8 10GbE ports whether on their own or as upgraded ports on a larger switch.

Until the price comes down we're stuck with link aggregation.

HP warns consumers: Don't downgrade Win8 PCs to Win7

I was under the impression that MS discounts OEM licences to such as HP in return for undertaking the support.

Whilst I can understand HP not doing any drivers etc they may not actually have a choice but to "support" the end-user with a valid HP OEM licence... otherwise they could end up in doo-doo.

Analyst slams Apple innovation FAIL

Didn't Mr Jobs also go on the record about mobile and tablet screen sizes?

To paraphrase... "mobile screen sizes over 3.5" don't work, we've tested it and we're sure we're right" AND "the perfect size for a tablet is 10" nothing smaller is usable, we've tested that and we're sure we're right."

Apple do get a lot of things right, but this insistence that "we're always right, everyone else is wrong" just sets them up for fall after fall. Still, with their revenue and profit numbers other tech firms would love to "fail" in a similar fashion.

Premature balloon burst thwarts US paper spaceplane attempt

Confirm/Deny: Lester seen lurking around the rivals launch site with a large pin just before launch?

Windows 8 pricing details announced as preorders begin

For those wanting to upgrade from XP Pro -> 7 Pro there now seems to be two choices:

1. Pay for 7 Upgrade... this costs about £110 iirc.

2. Pay for 8 Upgrade... this costs £49.99 (as per the article, max), and exercise the downgrade rights to... Win 7 Pro.

What a hard choice!

P.S. What annoys me about Win 7 editions is that Pro doesn't have Bitlocker (Enterprise & Ultimate does), fortunately Win 8 Pro at last has all the features you need in business (Bitlocker, join domain, etc).

VMware brings out new madly complicated enterprise buyer plan

Re: The other lot...

If you talking about VDI then I take your point, but surely it's not a fault of VMWare/Citrix et al if you have to jump through MS hoops to do MS desktops.

VMWare make the Citrix XenServer pricing model look even better, given they price per server (regardless of sockets, cores, threads, memory etc)... and a very reasonable price too.

Tim Cook: 'So sorry for Apple's crap maps app - try Bing or Nokia'

Re: if I were Larry Page

That is a plan as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University!

DARPA demos cyborg binoculars to spot the enemy

Clockwork Orange springs to mind when the eyelids are held back to allow uninterrupted images to be played to the victim... err I mean operator

Nokia tears wraps off new Windows Phone Lumias on steroids

The 920 looks very good indeed. Still, many weeks to go before they ship and no doubt many "hands on" reviews to be read between now and then. It's at the top of my xmas list at the moment so will keep an eye on it for sure

Elon Musk says he's planning a 'supersonic, electric hover jetplane'

"It is more important to the world that we do a more affordable electric car. Hopefully, we will get to a [new] electric supercar in 4 to 5 years," Musk said.

Super! An "electric supercar" and "more affordable" in the same quotation!

Why Java would still stink even if it weren't security swiss cheese

Java = Write Once, Debug Everywhere

I do take Trevor's point that Java has the reputation of "write once, run everywhere" but in practice they don't run everywhere without extra care and attention... and Trevor's point is that the extra care and attention isn't done in the majority of cases.

Windows 8 Storage Spaces: Can you trust it with your delicates?

And this is labelled as a "Release Candidate"?

Sounds more like an Alpha or early Beta to me, perhaps we ought to blame developers such as Google for labelling things incorrectly (Google do tend to leave the label of Beta on things for many years after release).

Drilling into Amazon's tape-killing Glacier cloud archive

For SME's with "modest" amounts of data that is a great price-point (I'm thinking of those companies with 25-250 users and perhaps 5-10 servers... so on the smaller end of the scale).

At $0.01/GB/Month then they can use a service like this as a redundant off-site backup to complement what they do in-house. In that scenario any issues about retrieval/backup speed isn't so much of a concern.

IEEE admits its MS-DOS history revisionist is in Microsoft's pay

Bob Zeidman (the author of the article) should be thrown out of the IEEE (IE his membership revoked) for bringing the IEEE into disrepute and not upholding the standards required of the membership.

Tegile adds dash of disk to flash, hopes to taste cash

Entry level storage array coverage?

Don't get me wrong, I do like to read coverage of mainstream storage arrays such as Tegile's, however lets face it they aren't cheap.

There are many small business that could do with storage arrays that are "fast enough" but don't have the cash to spend on these high performance devices.

So, El Reg... how about covering the bottom end of the storage market too?

AuthenTec sells out to Apple to the sound of 1,000 lawsuits

The article seems quite clear that Apple are *very* keen to incorporate AuthenTec's IP into upcoming products.

Given the animosity between Apple & Samsung (aka "Thermonuclear war") I would say if Samsung coughed up the $10.95M cancellation fee and then slapped a better offer on the table it could have a massive disruptive effect on Apple and their plans, whatever those are.

Microsoft tightens grip on OEM Windows 8 licensing

Regardless of whether you like MS or not (or their products) this is a very smart business move for them if true.

Blame crap mobe apps for swap-by-bonk hacks, say NFC bods

Re: NFC Forum must take responsibility

+1 to Graham's idea.

Given that Contactless Payment/NFC/"Wallets" seems to be on the verge of really taking off this seems like a really sensible thing to pursue.

Gabe Newell: Windows 8 is a 'catastrophe' for PC biz

shock news: Store owner (Gabe Newell @ Steam) is upset that MS will be building in a Store feature

Several commentators have correctly pointed out that Gabe's real beef is that MS will feature a built-in Win8 store which will potentially hit 3rd party stores like Steam (yes I know Steam is also a delivery service, but it is a defacto Store as well).

You can't really blame him for showing self-interest and trying to sow FUD so MS back down on this aspect but don't mistake his self-interest and concern for his own companies bottom line for it being any concern for us, the users/public.

As an aside I wonder what percentage Steam charges it's external clients given Apple are at 30% and MS will be at 30/20% (depending on volume).

Early verdict on Intel Ultrabook™ push: FAIL

As the title says "early". To be fair, there aren't that many *new* Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks out yet - although in the last several weeks refreshes of Sandy Bridge versions have started to come online.

Remember that Intel only launched the i7 Mobile Ivy Bridge and the i5 Mobile IB is just weeks old. So, the *really good stuff* (at the right price points) either hasn't been shipping very long or is yet to ship. Many have been announced/launched but some don't even have their prices confirmed.

Case in point - I'm waiting for the Asus Transformer Book which they seem to be holding back for Win8 (IE October). I'd be happy with Win7 and buy one right now if I had the option (assuming the reviews are favourable, otherwise a Samsung Series 9 looks good too).

However I wish Intel would spend their £250 of their £300M marketing fund on reducing the price they charge the manufacturers so they can hit decent price points! Ultrabooks are supposed to be circa $1,000 in theory yet Intel charge $250 of that.

Numbers don't lie: Apple's ascent eviscerates Microsoft

Apples with Apples?

I see pains are made to point out that the Apple numbers include all iOS devices (IE iPods + iPad's + iMac's etc).

Therefore I wonder do the Windows numbers include all Windows mobiles (admittedly this is currently not that many, 2-3% currently as a market share isn't it?) but also - and this is a shit load of devices - all those embedded/industrial devices (cash registers, cash machines, various machines in factories etc that all have a UI that are usually running Windows CE)?

I've bought/used many industrial devices over the years that use some sort of PLC within them, but the user controls are exposed as a touchscreen UI... most have been Windows CE based.