Posts by Stuclark

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

TSB are doing the same thing. Only difference is they're a year ahead in the "hire CIO > transform to *new and better* > fire decent staff > break everything > fire CIO > panic" cycle

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Been using it for years

I love Haiku (actually that's a lie, I still don't like the name). But I absolutely love using the OS.

I do a lot of testing of things like corporate access to Azure resources - Haiku is immensely useful there and yes, all the Azure admin portal sites work in Haiku!

It's maybe never going to be mainstream, but those who know... know ;)

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: "Progress, eh?"

Run Win11 installation *without* a network connection - it gets you round the need to have an MS account as well. Simples!

Hardly news

Didn't everyone kind of know this since... 1995???

MediaTek enters the 4th Dimensity with 3nm octa-core 9400 smartphone brains

Genuinely challenging Qualcom

The 9400 is being touted as a genuine competitor, performance-wise, for the Snapdraggon 8 gen 4 (or whatever it will be called)

Both Oppo and Vivo (both BBK Electronics sub-brands) are launching 2025 flagship phone series featuring the 9400 around 14th October 2024 and both are already teasing improved performance *and* improved battery life.

... let's wait and see ...

NHS drops another billion on tech in the hope of finally going digital

At least it's not a FAX

It wasn't so long ago (less than 10 years) that the NHS still insisted on FAXING results / records from one trust to the next. Their excuse? ..."email isn't secure"

My wife, who's a nurse, whilst working in one of the richer London NHS trusts got told by an IT tech "no, Windows 10 doesn't work on computers, it is only for tablets" ... this was during their Trust-wide upgrade from WinXP to Win7... in 2016!

Tesla asks shareholders to reinstate Musk's voided $56B pay package

Re: Fuck that!

"Whilst I would rather the Elongated Muskrat be paid 56 billion pineapples so that he can shove them up his backside"

Hahaha - that made me laugh out loud!

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

You know it's bad when even Crapita withdraw

Lets face it, Crapita runs a significant number of schools IT in the UK, especially the schools' information management system (SIMS).

Putting it politely, SIMS hasn't got the best reputation in the world - especially when it comes to the routine update process (it breaks literally every time).

If even Crapita withdraw from a tender, you know there's something very fishy with that tender!

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Re: Fushitesu

If you're going to do that, you need to cancel all the contracts of Crapita, Crapgemini, Infoshit, Sercrap and all the others too!

Then there'd be no-one left to do any of the work...

UK Department for Education to schools: Maybe delay signing that 3-year licensing deal for MIS with Education Software Solutions

Re: This cannot be right

As a school, you *HAVE* to have a MIS - it is a regulatory requirement.

Moving form one MIS to another is not the action of a moment - it typically takes a year of planning and months to implement.

SIMS is, and always has been, a complete mess of software, but because most schools still use it, Capita (and now ParentPay) merely sit on their hands and watch the cash flowing in

NHS COVID-19 app is trying to tell Android users something but buggy notification appears stuck on 'Loading...' screen

Not a new notification

It used to pop up this loading... crap at about midnight every night on my OnePlus device.

... that is, it kept doing it until I uninstalled the app!

Train-knackering software design blunder discovered after lightning sparked Thameslink megadelay

Re: Progress

"old locomotives ... tended to wear down the rail head more rapidly ..."

Guess which BR research project finally solved excess real head wear?

... Oh yeah, that will have been the APT project!

Re: and basically impossible to test for.

I know exactly who you were talking to, and yes, he has said that (and proven it) on record.

The lie though is that APT tech was sold to Fiat - it wasn't, which is probably why the Pendolino your system isn't as good as APT tilt was (and is - you can still experience it on a real APT in Crewe)

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

Somebody say NO

Andrew was one of the reasons I started (kept) reading elReg - I remember well(ish) those days and evenings at the variously titled Symbian... / Nokia.. / "OMG, Apple just launched a bloody phone" expos and shindigs - the AAS story (which I believe I quoted you in) about which vendor gave away the best mints - the endless WTF related to Sendo & Microsoft - then your brilliant writing in the ensuing years.

I've always tended to pay more attention to a Reg article if it had Mr. Orlowski's or the late and sorely missed Mr. Haines' names under the headline - what am I going to do now... read everything???? *Geez*!

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

Andrew; could you please tell me which networks you used the phone on; as I want to check whether the lack of VoLTE and VoWiFi I'm seeing is network dependent?

LG seem to leave vital settings out of the UK firmwares for VoLTE & VoWiFi; and the phone isn't on the officially supported list from O2 for either of those functions. (and as EE, Voda etc. don't sell the phone as a branded handset, neither officially support it either)

This was the same with the LG V30 before hand; and is proved to be a handset issue as my SIM allows both VoLTE and VoWiFi when used in a different handset.

Any chance of a screenshot of the About Phone > Software page, as I can't make my G7 (UK model) pick up *any* VoLTE or VoWiFi settings; and hacking the firmware seems currently un-doable

The Splunk that got sunk: Log-lover ends support for mobile apps

Splunk is (simply put) a self or cloud hosted web-based application which slurps data from your A / B / C / X / Y / Z on-prem or cloudy application / log producer / disk space abuser and allows you to form "simple" queries against that data.

The more data you ingest into Splunk, the more they charge you for the priviledge; but you can get it to show you some pretty charts and drop emails etc. based on pretty much any alert; such as when your receptionist starts looking up "BDSM for CEOs"

Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today

The days of OSR releases...

I was working for a MS disti back in the day when 98 was released and remember it well!

I'd spent the previous month debugging their OEM Pre-Install Routine, otherwise known as the OPK installer; as the MS instructions simply didn't work! For every 5 copies of 98 we sold, we sent out my hand typed *extra* instructions, and never, ever, had an OEM system builder phone up asking how to get it working (unlike our competitors).

((I might have made a bit of fuss about this on MS's OEM forums on their fairly new website, and might have had an email from a certain S.Ballmer basically telling me to STFU))

Win95 had 15 seperate CD releases; the best of which was the penultimate OSR2.1 (OSR2.5 introduced USB support and was as stable as a chocolate teapot). Win98 had 3 releases from memory; the best (for overall stability in our labs) being the initial OSR1; 98SE was OSR2 and was a piece of crap; OSR2.1 was much, much better and was what should have been released to the public (but as was MS's way then, never was!)

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

Let's not forget that if they actually managed to sell you a "blank" laptop, they, and the laptop's manufacturer, would be in breach of their licence agreement with Microsoft!