Posts by AMBxx

2009 IBM: Teleworking will save the WORLD! 2017 IBM: Get back to the office or else

Re: It's Like The Tide...

Step 7 is to complain about skills shortages

Step 8 outsource to a cheaper country

Oracle refuses to let Java copyright battle die – another appeal filed in war against Google

Re: Its like watching

Would be nice if they could both lose.

Samsung's Chromebook Pro: Overpriced vanilla PC with a stylus. 'Wow'

There's no shortage of mid-range laptops capable of Windows or Linux. Why bother with one that's got a crappy keyboard?

Brexit could further harm woeful rural payments system

Why do you think reducing the amount of trade agreements

Because we get to buy and sell from anyone we please rather than every trade agreement being limited by the interests of inefficient french farmers.

Food imports which may see a 20% import duty after Brexit

Do what? You really think if we're short on food we'll tax the imports to make it more expensive?

Re: Scrap it

Most farmers I speak to would love to see subsidies scrapped. You can't build a business on subsidies that may change at any time.

Cardiff researchers get £250k to monitor Brexit hate crime on Twitter

Re: Who defines what Brexit Related Hate Crime is?

It's much simpler than that - white, heterosexual men are always guilty.

J'Accuse

I think the fact you have to ask the question shows that your guilty.

Might take me a little while to work out what you're guilty of, but your guilt is not in doubt.

Baseline?

Ignoring for one moment whether this research is necessary, why are they only starting analysing data from 23rd June? Needs a baseline of 'some time period' before that to make any useful conclusions.

Windows 10: What is it good for? Microsoft pitches to devs ahead of Creators Update

Re: The use case for W10 is now very small...

I need to get me some of this penguin stuff. It would obviously make me an expert in all things, even those I claim not to use or need.

Getting bored of Linux bores clogging up MS discussions.

SQL Server on Linux? HELL YES! Linux on Windows 10? Meh

Who cares what the OS is!

Logical progression is SQL on Azure. At that point, you really don't know what the underlying OS is. all that matters is the database tools and the authentication.

Announcement feels like something that just won't matter soon enough.

Android's February fix-fest flings 58 patches

Blackberry

I'm currently using a MS Lumia 950XL. Love the phone, but have to admit MS are going nowhere fast with mobile. When I'm finally forced to go kicking and screaming to Android, it will have to be a Blackberry.

IBM's Marissa Mayer moment: Staff ordered to work in one of 6 main offices – or face the axe

It's only marketing

Not sure I'd want marketing to telecommute. Hard enough to see what they do as it is.

Can we now have an IBM marketing campaign on IBM facilitating remote working for their customers?

AMD's daring new money-making strategy: Sue everyone! Mwahaha

Re: Then there will be one

I think ARM would disagree. Intel might become the only option for Intel architecture, but there's plenty of choice of chip manufacturers for the ARM stuff.

Looks like MS are taking ARM seriously. Most mobile stuff is there anyway. Be interesting to see if Apple ever reverse their decision to go Intel for their 'proper' computers.

Streetmap loses appeal against Google Maps dominance judgement

Re: @AC Just say no to Google

I wonder what proportion of Register readers block Google Analytics? At what point is it worth writing your own that's less likely to be blocked?

Re: Just say no to Google

Sadly, streetmap.co.uk can't even do that properly - they use Google Analytics!

Cloud price wars resume as Microsoft cuts by up to 51 per cent

You could say that on-prem you don't know how much electicity you're going to use or how long the server will work without replacement parts.

As an industry, we're all still working out what's suitable for cloud and what should be on-prem. Just need to ignore anyone that says 'everything should be cloud' or 'nothing should be cloud'

Re: Classic Microsoft

No greed involved as far as I can see - they've just mucked up their pricing policy by making a large increase followed by an even larger decrease. They could have had some good publicity, but they blew it (again).

Classic Microsoft

Don't they discuss this stuff internally? Instead of annoying everyone last month, they could have just hung on and announce a 'despite Brexit' price cut.

Another open goal missed.

Google gets smooth early Android releases. OEMs are struggling

Re: Awww.... come on !

Is Samsung are complaining now, just wait until Google decide to stop releasing updates outside of their own phones leaving their OEMs stranded on 7.0

UK uni KCL spunks IT budget on 'reputation management' after IT disaster headlines

It's bizarre that there's no off-site backup or anything beyond a single RAID-5 array! Can't be right - need an insider to tell us if there's just been a problem with backup that was ignored.

Sophos update borks systems at London NHS trust

Most of which were playing Quake 3

Even the games they play in the NHS are out of date!

Re: Poor NHS

I did a project for them not so long ago. The internal NHS IT project staff were great, but working within the dreadful bureaucracy. Only went wrong when it was handed to the operational team of NHS lifers. Never heard from them again and it looks like it was never rolled out properly.

Poor NHS

I don't normally have much sympathy for the NHS as so much is self-inflicted, but feeling sorry for anyone working in IT in the NHS after the last few weeks.

Is it the beginning of the end for Visual Basic? Microsoft to focus on 'core scenarios'

Re: VB was the first MS language I learnt...

There's so much autocomplete these days that volume of typing is unimportant. Ease of reading and understanding the code is far more important.

Re: Fickle Microsoft

Stuff changes, get over it. Bit like DOS developers complaining when they had to learn this new Windows stuff.

I moved from QBasic to VB5 to VB.Net with a sprinkling of other bits along the way. Once .Net 2,0 was released, it became obvious that there were no advantages to staying with VB. Switch to C# was relatively painless as I'd done som Java along the way. OO had been learnt through Smalltalk.

None of use should be dependent upon a single language.

Amazon's cloudy desktops now tiptoe across hot sand

Still don't get it

Given the option of Cheap PC, Citrix, VM desktop thingie, little PC stick thing or AWS, I can't see any good reason to pick AWS.

Still looks like a solution looking for a problem.

Millions of Brits stick with current broadband provider rather than risk no Netflix

Re: Quality of Service is probably more important to me

Maybe the ££££££ figure relates to how much we could all save if we switched to Talk Talk?

All these arguments for switching price the consumers time at £0 per hour and ignore individual requirements.

Sony takes $1bn writedown: Streaming has killed the DVD star

Re: No so much...

Just bought my first DVD that comes with an Ultraviolet streaming/download option. Initial thought - great. Turns out to be SD only rather than the excellent HD I normally get from Amazon.

Got worse - to stream you need Flash installed on a PC.

Another stillborn format dreamt up by an industry that failing to see that everything will be streamed in a few years.

God save the Queen... from Donald Trump. So say 1 million Britons

Sadly

Given all the people she's had to meet in the past, I doubt Trump even makes her top 10 of repulsiveness.

Microsoft is cooking virtual storage in Azure

How is this different so existing offerings such as Cloudberry Drive? Hopefully, the performance would be better than Cloudberry, but not sure what else is being offered beyond a Network share to Azure Storage.

Devonians try to drive Dartmoor whisky plan onto rocks

Whisky vs Whiskey

It's a legal distinction Whisky is for Scotch. Whiskey if for everything else

Huawei could rescue Amazon's Alexa from the smart home

Is it just because I'm over 40?

I have voice control on all sorts of stuff, but stopped using it within a few days as there seemed to be no advantage to keyboard/mouse/buttons. People I speak to seem to have reached the same conclusion - novelty wears off very quickly.

Is it just my age?

Unite: CSC UK set for 'jobs massacre' as 1,101 heads put on chopping block

It happens already, but the old cliche of 'Get big, get niche or get out' still applies. I freelance. On larger or more complex projects I work with other consultants. Also means I can offer wider services than would otherwise be the case.

Biggest problem is being let down when someone decides they like the security of 5 days a week on site. Whether we like to admit it or not, many contractors like the secure income of longish term contracts without all the BS that goes with being employed by a large company.

Re: Perhaps?

No, we need to nationalise EVERYTHING because as we all know the public sector is so efficient.

UK.gov tells freelance techies to slap 20 per cent on fees as IR35 tax hike looms

The old tool for self-employment had some crazy questions. One of the highest valued options to prove you were self-employed was to have bad debts amounting to 10% of turnover per year.

Not many businesses survive that!

It's classic government thinking - they assume that changes to the tax system won't change any behaviour!

The new 7.5% dividend tax is another example. I'm just living on savings and paying directly into my pension instead. Tax bill has dropped by nearly £20k. I didn't mind paying CT before, just unhappy at the sudden hike. They should think more along the lines of boiling a frog.

Plump Trump dumps TPP trade pump

Portugal's our oldest ally.

Yes, your enemy's enemy is generally a good friend.

Let's not forget that in 1968 Portugal was still a fascist dictatorship.

Re: Good for the average man on the street.

It's the difference between improving the average income and improving the income of the average man.

If you double the income of the richest, the average income increases regardless of its impact on those lower down.

All other things being equal, free trade is good. However, you can't improve your own workers' conditions then send all the work overseas to areas with fewer rights.

What links macOS, iOS, Safari, tvOS, watchOS? They all need patching

Six operating systems?

Not an Apple user, but how much do they have in common? Seems like a lot to keep on top of.

Stallman's Free Software Foundation says we need a free phone OS

Re: Sadly yes

Given Microsoft's market share in phone, perhaps they should give the OS away (minus the data slurping). With the forthcoming stuff to run x86 binaries, they might even succeed.

Re: Basically their wish list is "copy what's hot today"

Can anyone out there list this guy's previous successes?

UK.gov still drowning in legacy tech because no one's boarding Blighty's £700m data centre Ark

Re: Legacy stuff isn't the problem.

I think you'll find that under the current York Minster are the remains of 2 previous churches plus a roman building.

You'd also struggle to extend it much further as the foundations are barely good enough and there are other nearby buildings preventing it being enlarged.

Re: Legacy stuff isn't the problem.

'flaky after a lot of use' is a bit confusing (confused?). Any government system, by definition, will have changing requirements. That means the software has to change. Chances are that this introduces more dependencies within the code and lots of bits that are probably unused but left alone 'just in case'.

You can only extend a house so far. Eventually, you have to knock it down and start again with new foundations. Same goes for software.

Fujitsu strikes are OFF – it's not the 1970s after all

dispute over pay centred on the gender gap that exists in the organisation

Genuine question - is the dispute over not enough women being employed or about women being paid less?

The rise, fall, and rise (again) of Microsoft's killer People feature

Re: Talking to people at the computer

Some people (like me) have jobs at a computer that involve interacting with people too!

I like this CRM-lite approach to contacts.

Now can I just have InfoCentral back?

Avaya files for bankruptcy

Silver Lake

Anybody else out there ever told to refer to Silver Lake as 'Golden Pond' for during a takeover?

UK.gov departments are each clinging on to 100 terabytes of legacy data

Um

That's an awful lot of buzzwords to explain the retention of cat videos.

Doctor AI: Good news, I'm better at predicting when you'll die of a heart attack. Bad news is...

Still not AI

Why is everything being called AI? Linear Regression has been around for a long time and credit goes to the wonder of statistics, not intelligent computers. I was studying this 30 years ago at Uni. Not sure when it was first mooted, but have a feeling it was well before then.

Auto emissions 'cheatware' scandal sparks war of words between Italy, Germany

public evaluation of how well US built cars

Are there the same pressures to hit arbitrary emissions levels? In the UK, the annual car tax is based upon CO2 emissions. Big selling point if you can get your emissions down one notch.

I've no idea how it works on the other side of the Atlantic.