Posts by Anthony Hegedus 192 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2008
Yes you've hit the nail on the head here. But I think that Android should go a several steps beyond what it's currently doing: how about you plug in an SD card and the OS works out which apps to move, informs the user and then actually moves them and their data (and their caches) over to the SD card?
Now someone is going to tell me that that's something that microsoft's thing does.
Actually I buy Kingston and sandisk, never cheap sd cards. And that's not the reason my s3 is cocking awful. It's just cocking awful. I could explain why if enough people really want to know.
But my point is that as it comes, you are limited in what you can actually store on SD cards in android. Yes, you can store torrented movies but why does google play insist on using main storage when it even has a setting to use the SD card? And why do games not let you store their huge data files on SD card? Why can't programs be stored on SD card?
I have android devices (as well as an iphone 6+) and yes, they have a microSD cards but they're not that useful:
- Google Play Music claims to store my tracks on the SD card but I regularly find it's been using 1GB or more of the main flash storage
- Apps can't be stored on the SD card
- Apps that download data after downloading the app don't always seem to ask where I'd like it stored.
Consequently, my Sony tablet for example keeps telling me my device memory (the 10GB or so left of the 16GB that Sony advertises) is more than 75% full and I should move items to the SD card. It offers a little app to do it for me, and it moves precisely nothing, because it can't.
My samsung phone is so cocking awful (Galaxy s3) that it always has free storage, mainly because I try to use the phone as little as possible anyway. I'm now on my third SD card, and I've given up as all of them are now "damaged or corrupted" and the stupid phone refuses to ever use them again, and plugging them into a PC confirms that they're now faulty.
So they all do it. Look at Windows (!). I installed Windows 8 on a 64GB SSD and it gradually filled up with temporary files, bits of service pack, bits of update and basically crap.
But yes, all manufacturers should say how much space their OS takes up. In the case of Windows, Microsoft should fess up and say it needs at the very least a 120GB SSD to work properly for more than a few months.
I have the 1020L model, which appears to be exactly the same as the 1820L but without the docking station. It only cost £60 as opposed to £170 and I'm very pleased with it. It's strong enough, has an easily switchable brush/solid end mode, and above all, its really tiny and very light.
I support some residential users (professionally) and it would seem that some my older customers are not always the ones who are scammed. They may not be so computer-savvy, but they've been around the block a few times and know a scam when they get one. Some of the people I know who have been successfully duped are middle-aged professionals (who really should know better).
And they don't just get you by phoning you, like some spiders, they wait for you. A couple of years ago a customer of mine once bought AVG Antivirus from PC World, took it home and had trouble installing it. He told me that he rang PC World (from the number on the receipt, he said), got through to an indian call centre and they told him the reason he had trouble installing it was that he probably had viruses already. So they persuaded him to do a remote control session using teamviewer, and showed him all the "viruses" (in reality what they did was get him to start a command prompt, type "dir c:\ /s" or similar, which causes a long listing of all the files in the computer, and they typed something like "system error - system infected with viruses" or something. My customer couldn't see that until the very end of the listing when the words appeared as if by magic. To him, the computer looked like it was doing something very technical and ended with a scary warning about viruses). Then it got interesting. The Indian guy told him it would cost £300 to fix the computer. My customer, realising that something was not quite right, politely declined. Then the indian guy did something to his PC that caused it to never boot properly again (I couldn't work out what) and hung up, rudely.
When my customer rang me about this, he was adamant he had rung the number on the receipt. But after a bit of probing, he remembered that that didn't work and he did an internet search. Unfortunately, his computer had already been "got" by Ask Jeeves, and the first page of results were fake computer support companies. So he typed "AVG Support" and he got back a site which had a freephone number for what he thought was AVG support. They were possibly the Guruaid company, a well know scammer.
So he was duped by an ad. In his head, he was convinced he was speaking to PC World or AVG and he was convinced at first that he had rung the number on the receipt. I've had other customers duped the same way, when they're desperate for a number for BT or AOL or whatever tinpot broadband company they use, and they just find the wrong thing.
Oddly, I just typed "AVG Support" into google, and they appeared as an ad. Shame on google!
The outbound scammers can be very aggressive by the way - in one case they told a child that their mother was irresponsible and that they are going to remotely destroy their laptop!
The office ribbon interface seems to have been based on very accurate user feedback and usage data, you can really tell. It's just that after gathering all this data, microsoft's elite team of crack programmers decided to use their amazing brains to make the interface as annoying as possible, with a "hide-the-useful-function" methodology that still haunts me today,
Does anyone actually use those stupid style things that take up half the bloody ribbon? Does anyone actually know how to make numbered paragraphs work?
Oh and exactly what usage data led to the decision to have the standard paragraph style with an extra several points of blank space "after" each paragraph, thus making it hard for the average user to work out how to actually type an address which doesn't look double spaced? I mean seriously.,.
Crappy atom processor? Check
Limited RAM? Check
Pre-installed OS that is crippled in some way? Check
Too small to be useful? Check
Yep, they're netbooks alright. Like a netbook in tablet clothing. A netbook without a keyboard actually, so even more crippled than it was in the first place. The only tablet which actually needs to run an antivirus for general day-to-day use. There are no useful apps for it. And despite its total crappiness it'll probably sell well, for a while, until people realise they're useless, just like netbooks. Once you've got 18 months of updates on it, and the usual windows slow-down, it'll run like an arthritic slug.
Every morning I prepare a shot of Nespresso (not genuine Nespresso toner, I use Cafe Pod), and then prepare a big cup on my tassimo machine and make the rest of my breakfast. By the time I've fumbled through that, The nespresso has cooled down to just the right temperature. I drink it first to ensure the caffeine enters my bloodstream quickly (to lower the amount of blood in my caffeine stream?) then have breakfast and enjoy a nice long cup of coffee.
I bought the Tassimo machine because I was having far too many shots of nespresso and I needed a way of making a reasonably strong long cup of coffee.
I've been reading The Register since I can't remember - 1998? - something like that. And it's my go-to source of information and news. During 9/11 when all the news websites couldn't cope, I ended up reading the latest on The Register. I go to the register before I go to the bbc news website every day. The reporting, if slightly eccentric at times, is brilliant - no bullshit, well written and just the right level of sarcasm. And now I get to read more of it. Well done!
And me... exactly what we see. The phones report a good signal but it's unusable for data. Our phones also sometimes do voice, and that's hit and miss. In my office, the signal goes from 0 bars and no signal to full strength and back all day. It means that I can be in the middle of a call and get cut off.
And it'll also fail because 2G isn't good enough for 11Kbps down AND up. 2G is good for nothing. It cannot deliver a consistent data rate, and with the number of push messages being sent to mobiles these days, it'll be a very broken-up experience. Now if only someone could crack the voice-over-2G problem, I'm sure people will pay more of a fairly solid reliable and good-ish quality call, that they don't need to install an app for. Perhaps this is a problem that doesn't need to be solved for some reason.
Maybe after they fail, this company will invent a type of copper tubing for water transmission. They could insert this into your home plumbing to run over your existing plumbing system. No need for a new water supply. Or they could invent a sort of rubber sock for car tyres. Or a luminous lampshade.
I do computer repairs and servicing, and my business partner and I visit customers' premises a lot. Screwdrivers are consumables to us, like toner, ink, pens, whatever. No matter how many we buy, I never have one in my van when I need one, or the workshop. They just seem to go missing. So every time we order a Draytek router for a customer, we order a half dozen of their promotional screwdrivers. They come with two flat blade sizes and two pozis and they're only a quid each.
Perhaps they're related to biroid life forms....
I seem to remember that happening with my BT Vision box a year or so ago. The reason the recordings got deleted was that they changed from a linux-based system to a WinCE based system. The new interface was ghastly, and unreliable. I shouted at BT until they gave me a Humax Youview box. The UI is slow and clunky and the BT part of it is ghastly and unreliable. Seriously, this box is far too slow at EVERYTHING!
So, some users of an ISP use badly designed insecure router eh? And that's the ISP's fault how exactly? The article seems to suggest that PlusNet were returning dodgy addresses, because of customers' routers. I don't get this at all. The routers surely didn't actually affect plusnet?
And yes, the routers most ISPs supply are complete bollocks. A friend of mine had his DNS repeatedly modified despite him disabling remote admin and changing his admin password. And that was a Thomson router supplied by TalkTalk!
"Luckily for any would-be space explorers, they won't be required to experience the erratic climes of Kepler 413b as it's too warm for life as we know it. It's also too close to its suns for liquid water to exist and it's a super Neptune - a giant gas planet - so there's no surface for anyone to stand on." - However, the local council has still managed to paint double yellow lines to prevent shoppers from parking, and there's still a starbucks on every corner
I had a QL and I seem to remember getting one of the JS ROM versions, which was the least buggy of the lot. Oddly, I never really had trouble with the microdrives, but I managed to purchase (out of my own money - I was just 16) a floppy drive. This was fantastic. For just £40 more I purchased 10 floppy disks and had a storage capacity of 10MB! This was amazing, it was like, the capacity of a WINCHESTER but for a fraction of the price, and only the slight inconvenience of having to change disks. Still, I managed to keep the thing going till I started university and I used it to do coursework in the first year or two. I had a Centronics GLP ("Great little printer") that could actually print on A4 sheets!
At one point I had purchased a multitasking programming language called QBasic or something - can't remember - but it did allow for inter-process communication. I also had a mouse, which was useless, as it only worked with one specific and rather bad "paint" program.
I also did various bits of coursework in Pascal using a compiler I'd bought and it overall a bloody useful tool. In those days we put up with buggy software, unfinished hardware and lies from manufacturers. It was just part of what you'd expect from home computers at the time. Especially sinclair. Compared to today, when software "just works", it was a different world...
Windows Mod sounds awful to me, like "modification". Or reminds me of Mods and Rockers of course (not that I have a clue what they are - not quite old enough!). Seriously they ought to come up with a better name. Metro was a good name, pity it can't be used. As a footnote I'd just like to say how much I hate MS office when you install it coming up with a video clip which speaks to you "welcome to your modern office"! Cringeworthy!
For all out customers with the appropriate linux servers, we've just blocked zip files in incoming emails. The minor inconvenience is outweighed by the safety aspect. For customers with windows servers and an antivirus on the server, we can usually block these attachments too. Most of our customers are perfectly happy with this arrangement.
It's just the same typical nonsense from Microsoft. They're pushing this tiled (TIKFAM) interface on us whether we like it or not. I think someone at Microsoft had been watching too much Star Trek TNG - everything there is touch based.
One of our customers upgraded from windows 8 to 8.1 and found that IE11 didn't work with her ancestry.co.uk website properly. In previous versions of IE, when a site didn't work, you could click the "compatibility view" button and often that would cause the website to be rendered correctly. In IE11, you have to go to a menu and add the site to the compatibility list, something way beyond what most users are capable of, let alone dream of doing.
But then MS have always done this. They make the most arcane, complex and buggy software on the planet and nothing about windows 8.1 is going to change my mind about that
Who cares? I meet hundreds of different people in my (IT) line of work and everybody without exception just searches for stuff. Half the time in google chrome, even if you type a domain name it goes and does a search anyway. Just as DNS makes the need for people to hunt for IP addresses superfluous, decent search engines make the need for domain names superfluous. Even Bing.
Today I had to correct three people during a conversation with them (together) lasting about five minutes because they kept referring to their computers as either a modem, a hard drive, a power pack and rather oddly, a "TCP Stack" . And the number of people I meet who tell me that their computer "crashed - what could that be?"
I never trust what my customers tell me.
Rule 1: Don't listen to the customer's description of the problem
Rule 2: Absolutely never listen to the customer's proposed "solution". Remember, if their "solution" had a cat's chance in hell of working, they'd have tried it and it would have worked, and they wouldn't have called me.
To rephrase the above, find out what the customers really need to do rather than what they want to do. They'll often be more pleased with the result. Case in point - a customer once asked me to bring a CD Writer for their computer.
1. They already had a CD writer
2. I asked her why they needed one. Shetold me that they wanted to save their pictures onto them.
3. I asked why she wanted to save their pictures onto CDs when she already did backups onto a portable drive. She told me so that she could transfer the pictures to their husband's computer.
4. I asked why she wanted to transfer the pictures onto her husband's computer. She told me that she sometimes wanted to sit at her husband's computer if he wasn't using it because it had a bigger screen to edit her photos with
5. So I suggested "how about a system where you can sync the photos on the two computers together so that if she edits a photo on one computer, the edits will show on the other, and all she needs to do is run a program to synchronise the two.
6. She said "AH!! That *just* what I wanted! I knew that's what it was but didn't know how to explain it....
So I asked "Why?" THREE times to determine what she really needed rather than what she said she wanted....
I've met someone like that. He told me he kept his important stuff in the deleted folder. I asked him if he kept important letters and documents in the bin under his desk. His reply was that he didn't know he could create folders and thought he had to keep them in the deleted items folder.
I meet several people who won't delete their deleted items folder "just in case"...
This will serve to lessen the appeal of Macs to die-hard Mac fans. Making the software free and including it with new Macs would appeal to a PC user who might be thinking of buying a Mac this time round, who generally would only use the word processor to write a letter to the bank or make a shopping list.
But I fear Apple's long-term strategy doesn't really include Macs at all. By dumbing them down and upping the ante on their now faster and faster ipads, there'll be little need for Macs at all.
This is a recurring problem I see.
"what internet program do you use to access the internet?"
"er... is it google?"
"who is your internet provider?"
"er... is it google?"
"who do you actually pay monthly for internet access?"
"er... is it vodafone?"
"do you use google chrome or internet explorer?"
"what's internet explorer?"
"it's the one with the 'e'"
"oh in that case I use BT"
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