Posts by AMBxx

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

Struggling to understand this

Why would I want a keyboard as bad as the one on a laptop?

Mines the one with the Cherry Brown switches.

Doomed UK smartphone maker Bullitt Group finally liquidated

At least PWC were paid!

What's the bet those 'costs incurred' were a nice earner for PWC. Why appoint such a huge, expensive consultancy for such a small liquidation?

Sad to see them go. I'm still using my Motorola Defy 1. Dented and bashed but as good as the day it was bought.

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Similar problems with the little shutter on the camera for video calls. Needs to be VERY bright orange!

Ease the seat back and watch some video in your car with next Apple CarPlay

I've not use CarPlay, but on the Android equivalent, only certain applications are available. I'm not sure what determines that. I can see TomTom and Spotify but not email.

It looks horrible and is dreadful to use (small icons), so I didn't investigate further.

Re: A good example of when new is not better

Our 2 cars are extreme opposites. Mine, a LR Defender (old model) can be driven wearing ski gloves and wellies. Everything is totally manual (3 pedals, 2 gear sticks etc).

Recenly bought an LR Discovery Sport as my wife's car. Total opposite, auto gears and everything touch screen. I was totally against the touch screen but very hard to avoid these day.

Despite my misgivings, the LR 'piviPro' is very well designed. All the major stuff is visible on the front screen including air-con and music. All you need to click further for is the stuff you'd never want while driving.

I'd still prefer dials for temperature and volume, but it's been done well by Land Rover.

UK bets big (and small) on nuclear as datacenter demand expected to climb

Re: You know it's a load of horsehit

1 downvote for each of us!

The last person in the whole UK who believes anything Starmer/Reeves say is also a Register reader! What are the odds of that?

Re: You know it's a load of horsehit

"Energy too cheap to meter"

Worked well last time!

Just waiting for Reeves to talk about white hot....

Then we'll have "the pound in your pocket"

Would be fun to have "He would say that" again.

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

Re: So a bit like Vista then?

Looks remarkably like Windows Vista. Perhaps the beginning of Apple's decline?

AMD puts Intel in rear view mirror with Threadripper Pro 9000 high-end desktop chips

350W!!

Not sure I want to be in the same room as the cooling fans for that. Need a BIG upgrade for my UPS too.

Bosses weren’t being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start own biz

Re: No surprise

Came here to say the same but less eloquently.

My last employer, nearly 20 years go, went bust. I was the only person who worked remotely. I jumped ship before they went bust and have since been self-employed. My office based colleagues all went to safe public sector jobs. Something I can't ever imagine doing.

OpenAI wants to build a subscription for something like an AI OS, with SDKs and APIs and 'surfaces'

Good AI article in The Times today.

Fun article from James Marriott in The Times today.

Comparing how the introduction of junk food and office work made it easier to be fat vs the introduction of AI making easier to be thick.

Mars may have vast underground oceans and enough H₂O to make it a water world

Just cheese

It's just the cheese layer. For our moon, the outer layer has worn away leaving just cheese. Difference is that Mars is Red Leicester rather than Wensleydale.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

For those that do need a numeric keypad (myself included), just use a RollerMouse Pro. Sits in front of the keyboard. Just takes a while to get used to using a rolling tube instead of a regular mouse.

Mines the Filco with Brown Cherry switches. Blue is too hardcore for me and red is for softies :)

Surely, you just stick the Pi to the back of the monitor and plug a proper keyboard into the Pi?

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Free Viewer

They provided a free viewer.

HMRC's Making Tax Digital scheme also made tax more expensive – by £300M

Re: Small business VAT

Not forgetting that your old accounts software was a perpetual licence. Now it seems to be impossible not to get tied into a monthly fee.

BTW Windows Subsystem for Linux officially uses Arch now

Just too much bother?

I use Windows for 90% of my work. I needed WSL to run Docker. It was all just too much bother. In the end, I just installed Ubuntu on a VM and installed Docker on that.

30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Re: Only 30%?

No, it was definitely Lotus 123. I remember a young trainee being sent on a training course for Lotus. When she returned, she insisted on using Lotus as a word processor.

It was DOS though.

Re: Only 30%?

Microsoft 123.

Lotus had WYSIWYG text in their spreadsheet and tried to present it as a word processor before they had Amipro (I forget the details).

Look how well it worked for them!

Asia reaches 50 percent IPv6 capability and leads the world in user numbers

Re: Inflection point?

I've changed all mine to use just 2.5 GHz. Better range is more important to me that better speed.

Helps that I have no near neighbours, so no problem with congestion.

FreeDOS 1.4: Still DOS, still FOSS, more modern than ever

If you don't know where you came from, how can you know where you're going.

It would be great if we were all forced to program using limited hardware (especially RAM) now and again. Modern code would become a lot more efficient.

Ubuntu 25.04 beta takes flight – but this Plucky Puffin is still molting

Penguins are much better at swimming though.

Introducing Windows on arm. And by arm, we mean wrist

Re: Windows on Arm has been around since the Surface RT

They wanted to run the same OS on all form factors from PC to phone to Band. Obviously wasn't possible so end of the lot.

Specsavers takes off the Oracle glasses, sees better ERP options

>> I'm also intrigued, if Specsavers are using an associate/partner/franchise type model, seems there's not going to be a universal one vendor solution to these myriad options.

Everything is centrally mandated.

Specsavers patient records are all electronic (still unusual in Optics). Vile system to work on.

When Mrs AMBxx, the Optician, did a day at Specsavers, she was told that many of their locums just walk out at lunch to never return. She managed the whole day but would rather earn nothing than return.

Although it is a partnership model, it is very centrally controlled. Much more like a franchise with all those lovely fees heading tax-free to the channel islands.

UK finance watchdog spends millions 'enhancing' Workday software rolled out 4 years ago

What am I missing?

They're changing the software to meet new requirments in a changing environment. What's the alternative?

SAP legacy ERP customers still in no rush to adopt latest platform

Re: "You have to have AI"

Without AI hallucinations, how will all the public sector bodies be able to show their improved efficiency following a cloud migration?

'Dead simple' hijacking hole in Apache Tomcat 'now actively exploited in the wild'

Re: Poisoned Fruits of Serialization

It's up there with all the Log4J stuff from a couple of years ago.

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Re: Yet weirdly

That's only half the job - has to manage the collections too.

Re: Yet weirdly

Have you checked how many residents are in arrears?

Depending upon source £165, - £195m

Microsoft SQL Server 2019 shuffles out of mainstream support

Re: Cue an uptick in articles on how to migrate to Postgres

SQL to Postgres isn't for the faint hearted. Big differences in the SQL syntax and every SP would need to be rewritten from scratch. Then there's the case sensitivity...

I'd expect most to just carry on with their old database, others will just upgrade. Anyone who's that worried about DB version is likely to have some sort of licence deal.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

You want to go back to those wonderfully efficient days when the government controlled them all? 2 months for a phone line?

Asbestos

There's a lot of old asbestos concrete water pipes still underground. Fine if left alone but best you don't start cutting them.

30-year-old NHS supply chain system hit by 35 major alerts in 11 months

Re: What is Rhesus?

I recently attended a hospital appointment where the consultant had to remote desktop to a PC. The PC was running Windows XP. He needed to use an old version of Internet Explorer so that the Java plugin was available.

Of course, he had no idea of the implications of any of this which is why it will continue for some time.

Murena kicks Google out of the Pixel Tablet

Re: No SIM

Thanks, I stand corrected.

Re: No SIM

Even if you do manage to find this, you'll probably have problems due to the absence of Google Services.

I had one of the early Amazon Fires that didn't have Google App Store. There was a lot that couldn't even be sideloaded as the apps all need Google Services. Back to Square 1.

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Re: Goodbye Windows 11

Not at all. Most home users have already 'migrated' to Android tablets or iPads.

Re: Goodbye Windows 11

80-90% of home users could get by on a machine that just booted into a browser.

Avaya hangs up on users with fewer than 200 SaaSy contact center seats

Time for Broadcom?

Sounds like an excellent candidate for a takeover by Broadcom. Minimum 200, treble the price, give 7 days notice.

Bank of England Oracle Cloud bill balloons – but when you print money, who's counting?

Re: As a British tax payer ...

IR35 put an end to that. Independently minded consultants don't want to be government employees. Now we're all retiring.

Users await the fine print on SAP Business Suite reboot

Re: Real customer focus there at SAP

Is there a possibility that SAP are becoming a little more pragmatic? I'm only involved with the BI side (Business)bjects & Crystal stuff). This was all supposed to be having the final release about now. Instead, there's a release in stone for 2027 and another for probably 2029 (that one's in pencil as it may shift a year).

They do love all that maintenance revenue!

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

I've worked with hundreds of companies over the last 20+ years (more if you go back further). I've never seen anything other than MS Office running on a client PC. I do a lot of work with Open Source, so that's not the issue.

Maybe if I moved in with my parents and lived in their basement, I could have a pure life and use LibreOffice. Until then, I'll keep earning a living with the software I need to do my job.

Re: All you need

Except for Outlook, Teams, OneDrive. I use and need all three to be able to work with my clients.

Maybe when I retire?

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

Physics A Level

With articles like this, my A grade at Physics A Level is woefully inadequate. It was nearly 40 years ago. We didn't even get to Einstein's work. All Newton et al.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Re: As long as they don't remove the workaround

Does Rufus still work?

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

All that matters to MS now is Office 365 subscriptions and Azure. The rest is just historical baggage.

Amazon's Kuiper secures license to take on Starlink in the UK

Re: Pathetically slow and overpriced

On the other hand, they charge 3x what my ISP charges for 5x the bandwidth. Looking pretty good to me.

Perhaps you're not part of the target market?

Rural is what it's aimed at.

I get 20Mb broadband and very sketchy 4G. All our mobile calls have to go over WiFi.

5 years ago, 20Mb was great. Now, more and more websites are assuming you have more and are becoming slow. I also struggle with the dreadful 1Mb upload speed.

Broadband contract is up in 11 months. I'm seriously considering switching to a satelite service.

Robots in schools, care homes next? This UK biz hopes to make that happen

Re: Elderly care facilities are actually understaffed

There's some interesting work being done with Alexa-like devices. Monitoring temperature and movement etc, useful for emergency alerts. Some even do chat stuff to give the illusion of not being alone. That's all great when it's done in addition to having a human carer. Never instead of.

The thing that concerns me is when this is done to replace human care rather than to augment. Bit like a personal visit to your elderly parents being replaced by a weekly phone call, then a weekly email/facebook post.

FWIW, I do a lot of work in analytics with home care providers. Not much with care homes, so different environment.

Brit competition watchdog takes aim at Google, Apple's mobile ecosystems

How Open Source is Open Source?

Most apps need 'Google Services'. That bit's not open which limits the options for other vendors.

Look at the mess of the app store on Amazon's Kindle Fire.