Posts by moonpunk

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

Re: "Whatever x86 apps I threw at it just ran. Swiftly."

I bet SQL Server wouldn't run - I tried it on a Parallels VM on Apple Silicon running Windows 11 ARM and it wouldn't get pas the install stage

Any x86 Application???

Try running Microsoft SQL Server x86 - i bet that doesn't run ;-)

UnitedHealth's 'egregious negligence' led to Change Healthcare ransomware infection

Paying Ransoms...

I know of a Police Authority in the UK who seriously contemplated paying a ransom after finding their data partially encrypted (they managed to stop the rest of the data being encrypted) - they had no network segmentation, and found their backup systems (which were not offline - were only online and connected to their live production network) were also affected! I know this because I was a consultant working on site and helping to manage the fallout. In one meeting the then Head of IT had said he spoke with senior management about the very real possibility of paying the ransom in order to get the keys!! Fortunately their bacon was saved when one of the more junior member so fhte team announced they had a lot of the data in an offline data warehouse he had been working on!

Competition is decreasing in enterprise IT – and you’ll be poorer and dumber for it

It's rare that a VC would invest in an established business - not unheard of, but invariably quite rare. They want to invest in startups, get in on the ground where the opportunity to maximise return on their investment is at its highest. At this point they're interested in costs - and making a big capital investment on infrastructure would undoubtedly be frowned upon, they'd much rather see initial costs start low and ramp up on a PAYG basis.

Market Disruption Hasn't Happened As Expected?

Surpise surprise - the sharp practices of companies such as CISCO to initially allow license transfer/extension/discount for SDN appliances in the cloud have ensured they retain their customer and future-proof their cash-cow (very similar to what Microsoft are being investigated for with their License Portability for Windows Server and SQL Server).

I guess it takes a brave organisation to 'throw the baby out with the bathwater' and break their reliance on the likes of CISCO, and for every one of those 'brave' organisations, there are thousands of others not quite so brave!

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Who Was The Oracle Partner?

I’d question the Oracle Partner here just as much as I would be questioning Oracle!

EU monopoly cops probe complaints about Microsoft Azure

Microsoft License Mobility

This is a practice where Microsoft are very long in the tooth. It's not that they offer "discounts" for those with on-premise licenses to simply port them over to Azure (I'm thinking SQL Server, Windows Server, etc.), it's that they don't offer the same mobility/pricing to other cloud vendors such as GCP and AWS - thereby ensuring the success of Azure.

Microsoft makes Windows Server 2022 licenses a little less cynical

Re: it wasn't just Ballmer

Commercial organisation focusses on providing choice to their existing and potential new customers in order to maintain or increase their revenue - shock horror!

Eufy security cams 'ignore cloud opt-out, store unique IDs' of anyone who walks by

Exactly! I'm a Eufy doorbell user and if I'm honest I don't really have an issue with them using cloud in order to provide the functionality that I require to enable me to get a notification that someone has rang my doorbell, and in fact one of the reasons I chose Eufy (over Ring for example) is the fact that I can store locally and don't have to pay a monthly cloud subscription (again unlike Ring). But for those people that chose on ethical grounds that their data would NOT be sent to the Cloud were lied to - that's what Eufy need to address!

You could - but that would remove one of the major pieces of functionality which is to recevie a notification on your mobile device that someone is at your door having rang your doorbell and giving you the option to interact with them.

Where in the world is Jack Ma? Alibaba tycoon not seen since October after slamming Chinese government

Re: And we still do business with China ?

Couldn't agree with you more - to think that Amazon would enter a market with little research is naive to say the least. This certainly isn't their first time at the Rodeo!

Unsecured Azure blob exposed 500,000+ highly confidential docs from UK firm's CRM customers

The problem is that company's like Probase have most likely always written shoddy software like this, without even so much as a nod to 'secure by design' principles. But the difference is they've got away with it in the past (albeit by the skin of their teeth) because they've hosted it in their own (or co-located) datacentres and on their own managed tin, and the only bit of security that's been saving their bacon has been some Firewall at the edge.

Now, in the cloud they continue to write shoddy software with no regard to security and it' all laid bare. This is the problem when companies go looking for SaaS line of business applications, they often seem only interested in whether the application meets their functionality requirements, and only demand auditable security once they've had their pants pulled down like this!

Microsoft sides with Epic over Apple developer ban, supports motion for temporary restraining order

Re: Cynical

Wow! Thanks for mansplaining Apple's T&C's - it's not like anyone would have understood the issue (in its entirety) from the main article!

Jeeez - what on earth possesses people to post a response like this. You add literally *nothing* to the debate!

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Re: Bit harsh

Couldn't agree more - like you say there would have been a time that the community would have been grateful and would have jumped on this to get it included.

Happy days!!

Wow, Microsoft's Windows 10 always runs Edge on startup? What could cause that? So strange, tut-tuts Microsoft

IE??? Really??

Do you mean IE (Internet Explorer) or do you actually mean Edge?

Apple is a filthy AWS, Azure, Google reseller, gripe punters: iPhone giant accused of hiding iCloud's real backend

Re: A contract is a contract

I actually don't think the point the plaintiffs make is valid at all. Apple would argue (in my view successfully) that they're not simply reselling other cloud providers storage, not least because of the 'value add' that Apple are providing by enabling the seamless functionality of providing backup and storage through their iOS operating system - hence the price premium compared to natively choosing AWS, Google, or Azure storage. Furthermore (as others have pointed out) the fact that Apple has chosen to outsource *some* elements of their iCloud solution is in no way a breach of their contractual obligations to their users, they certainly do not state that they are providing the entire solution themselves (hardware, servers, OS, electricity, datacenter, etc.). Basic common sense will undoubtedly see this lawsuit fail.

Microsoft to make Ubuntu a first-class guest under Hyper-V

Re: Poring cold water on it....

"...Microsoft overtook AWS in IAAS in early 2017"

Factually incorrect - there you go!

Even with their SaaS and PaaS offerings, Microsoft only just tip the balance on quarterly revenue. AWS is bigger by customer numbers AND revenue when it comes to IaaS - no question!

You made it up - your statistics are wrong and you are FACTUALLY INCORRECT!

Re: Poring cold water on it....

What on earth are you talking about? The only reason Microsoft overtook Amazon for Cloud Revenue was because they started including O365 (and now Dynamics 365) revenues in their collective revenue figures - it's a point that is constantly on everyone's lips on the Microsoft quarterly revenue calls, but gets shut down every time (a bit like Apple never actually declaring how well (or not) their Apple Watch sales are - they just don't separate it out).

Last quarter Microsoft had 500m active Azure subscriptions, AWS had almost 1.7bn!

Don't get me wrong I like Azure, and O365 (they have over 100m business O365 subscribers and 57m personal O365 subscribers). But if you're going to quote statistics and "facts" at least check them first before just arbitrarily making them up - you could have just used Google after all (or maybe even Bing)!

UK watchdog Ofcom tells broadband firms: '30 days to sort your speeds'

And that's the point that SO many people miss! I love it when they tell me their ISP gives them a 200Mbps internet connection, and I tell them - no they don't! They give you 200Mbps connection to their network, that's not the same as a 200Mbps connection to the Internet!

Re: But there is no legal imperative for these companies to comply with the code

Agreed! A real Malcolm Tucker type!

Re: But there is no legal imperative for these companies to comply with the code

What is the point of having a "REGULATOR" who merely puts forward a code of practice. They need some teeth!

Heaps of Windows 10 internal builds, private source code leak online

Am I the only one...

...that actually likes Windows 10?

Works great for me. As does Office 365 (Teams, OneDrive, Skype 4 Business, and all of the usual Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook applications).

I accept that you pay your money and make your choice, and it wouldn't do if we were all the same, but it all works fine for me!

Beeb hands £560m IT deal to Atos. Again

Spot on! Which is why you can be sure that after the 5 years of this contract they will most definitely exercise the 3 year extension clause - means as long as the licence fee keeps rolling in then they won't have to worry about running a procurement until 2025!

What an absolute disgraceful use of public funds!

Chap 'fixes' Microsoft's Windows 7 and 8 update block on new CPUs

Re: Microsoft does not care

I’m not sure I understand the point you’re trying to make (other than the usual “Microsoft are evil and we all hate them <blah> <blah> <blah>…”

You say “Microsoft does not care about the non corporate user base” but this move absolutely does harm to the corporate user base - almost exclusively.

A consumer buying a new PC today with the latest Intel Kaby Lake chipset will likely buy the PC complete with an OS. It is highly probable that the OS bundled with that PC will be Windows - and the vendor will install Windows 10 (not least because the drivers to support the Kaby Lake chipset on Windows is only for Windows 10). There won’t be many consumers that will be buying a new PC to run a previous version of Windows on - that’s for sure.

However, there will be many corporates who will! They will do a deal with the vendor to bulk buy PC hardware and (if bought in sufficient numbers) to buy without an OS. They will want to run a previous version of Windows (8.1 or 7) - just some of the reasons for this will be: -

- They have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement which already provides them with a Windows licence

- They don’t have Software Assurance with that EA agreement and therefore don’t have access to Windows 10 (thereby needing to run a previous version)

- They have specific Line of Business applications which are incompatible or not supported on Windows 10

- They have a corporate build of a previous version of Windows and now is not a good time for them to invest in creating a new one

Microsoft are absolutely not caring about the corporate user base here - the complete opposite of what you’re whinging about!

Hyperloop One settles hangman lawsuit

He was a bit more than an employee though wasn't he?

I thought he was a co-founder? It's not like they interviewed him and overlooked his total "w4nker'ness", it looks like they went into business with him then realised he's a total w4nker!

Cisco gives cable industry tech for 10Gbps uploads on DOCSIS 3.1

Re: Virgin Media should be beaten over their asymmetric mess

Great response!

Supposedly during the Thatcher government in the 80's BT proposed a project to lay Fibre Optic cable to every premise in the UK at an exceptionally high cost (several billion pounds). The government canned the project deeming it too expensive and distracting from their goal to take BT public (IPO share offering) - and hence a great opportunity was scuppered.

Just imagine if they had gone ahead with that project!!!

Shared services centres supposed to save £128m saved £0... and cost £4m

I'm all for shared services...

The principle is absolutely sound - why on earth would you have multiple departments buying the same functional solutions from multiple vendors? The problem of course (as we all know) is the absolutely fantastic level of incompetence shown by those in charge of both setting up and running the Shared Service, along with those local departments that insist on the "I want to be in control and run things myself" attitude.

Acer silences Thunderbolt

Re: Intel have crippled themselves!

Good question - I understood that a single TB port on an iMac supported up to 2 TB displays. So following your logic the new (and very sexy) Mac Pro with 12 TB ports should support 24 TB displays??

Now wouldn't that be something?!

Intel have crippled themselves!

The reason why so many OEM's are not supporting Intel's Thunderbolt is because there is a mandatory requirement to deliver Video through it!

I firmly believe that if Intel relaxed this requirement, and under the terms of it's license allowed manufacturers to deliver everything but Video, then there would be a wider adoption of the technology.

Because OEM's are not delivering Thunderbolt, then Thunderbolt devices are few and far between - it's a real catch-22.

Until Intel relax this mandatory requirement then USB 3.0 will continue to win through. Thunderbolt is a great technology - but Intel have crippled it with stupid rules!