* Posts by Downside

97 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2010

Page:

Atlassian to offensively price itself through the post-pandemic patch

Downside

Not surprised - they have a mature product which is admittedly a bit ropey in quite a few places but it stands up for us and scales well enough. We've developed great plugins for Confluence which tie in nicely with Comala workflows and delivers a robust document management solution. Cannot see us moving anywhere else anytime soon.

And yes, I've run and admin'd a ton of these systems over what is now decades, so IMHO these are still great. REST api is a bit hit and miss, but if you wish to tool rond these apps, you can. Cloud is defintly where it's all going - who wants on prem anymore?

Stop, collaborate, and listen: Microsoft Teams gets an Atlassian glisten

Downside

Whats MS Teams like on Linux?

Anyone? Linux?

Remember when Apple's FaceTime stopped working years ago? Yeah, that was deliberate

Downside

Who's her lawyer, Saul Goodman?

Can't fault apple redesigning Face Time to avoid stepping on someones tech.

If the complainant wins, I hope she gets awarded an iPhone 5c rather than a gazillion bucks for her discomfort, upset and ruined life. What a waste of time and effort to even resort to litigation - someone needs their priorities realigning.

IMHO, natch

Trump pulls trigger in US-China tit-for-tat tariff tiff: 10% slapped on $200bn of imported kit

Downside
Facepalm

Tariff recursion

So you tax goods the US mfr base uses to make it's things like cars, boats and planes, making them more expensive.

The tariffs push up prices on US steel and aloominum because of demand increases, meaning US mfr's already using home produced materials have their material costs go up 30%.

Those US mfr's start losing orders and laying off staff.. just before the mid-terms.

This trade war idiocy just doens't stack up

Meltdown, Spectre bug patch slowdown gets real – and what you can do about it

Downside

Re: Don't buy a new Intel based system for a while?

No need to reverse engineer - speculative execution is not a secret, it's just hardware engineers don't have an appreciation of software and/or couldn't be bothered to clear down the registers on execution failure.

For once you can't "fix it in software" - which, if you've ever worked for a co that designs hardware, is a big fat chicken coming home to roost.

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

Downside
WTF?

Re: Good BBC prog

Good? Amazing show. Never realised how central a role was played by Carl Sagan, for example in getting it to take a shot of earth as it flew out to interstellar space.

My take away from the show was that Voyager will be still flying onwards long after our sun expands and wipes us off the map. We will be outlived by a machine we made back in the 70s.

Prosecute driverless car devs for software snafus, say Brit cyclists

Downside

Go Dutch

The Netherlands have a simple rule - any RTA involving a cyclist, it's the non-cyclists fault.

Simple.

Effective.

Sure, I've got skin in the game as a cyclist and driver, but I'd be happy with that law here. Cyclists everywhere are up against it., It normally being bumpers, wing mirrors and lorries. For all your whining about Lycra and berserk cyclists - it's the motorist who's the carefree killer here.

Rejecting Sonos' private data slurp basically bricks bloke's boombox

Downside
Pint

Soooo up tight

You lot happily use google, whatsapp, mobile phones but THIS grinds your gears? Oh, cue the replies with folsk who still dig out their 1994 yellow Pages instead of Google, only use their original Nokia 3210 and still send postcards.

So Sonos updated the firmware, the user didnt and now the mobile app has got out of sync? I thought the perp in the piece was technically savvy? Just click yes-yes-yes and update all the software. Do you read every page of the updated T&C's for Sky, Virgin, EE, Apple's itunes, Googles play store etc?

Yup, I'm a happy Sonos user and could not give a tinkers cuss about the T&Cs, so long as it works. Just wish it also had BT streaming, but aside from that, I'm really happy with them. Life's got plenty to get up tight about, without getting all salty about Sonos.

Why Uber isn't the poster child for capitalism you wanted

Downside

Re: Uberbnb

Locally, ten years ago, the transition of an inner city residential rental / owner area to student tenancy's was greeted with similar dismay - late night partying disturbing the people who lived there - and triggered a rapid exodus of tenants, and owners moved out, renting their houses to students. Sounds pretty similar to those airbnb gripes to me. The real problem is a lack of housing in the first place.

Places have always had areas where people could rent, get gentrified and have to move out. That's the difference between owning and renting.

Full disclosure: I've rented a few places off airbnb. It has pretty solid payment protection for both parties and a world wide brand.

'OK, everyone. Stop typing, this software is DONE,' said no one ever

Downside

Definition of Done

When my SW was etched into Silicon, it was Very Much Done 3 months before it popped out the foundry. There was no hope of "fixing" anything without

a) Scrapping a million or more devices

b) Making new expensive mask sets

c) Waiting another 3 months

But when the cost is "download new version form the web", software quickly becomes evolutionary.

It's all down to your Definition of Done. i.e.. do you have one?

Non-doms pay 10 times more in income tax than average taxpayer group

Downside

Re: They won't leave

You Danish? 50% tax there, cars are OMG taxed and... its one of the happiest places on Earth.

Pains us to run an Apple article without the words 'fined', 'guilty' or 'on fire' in it, but here we are

Downside

Cool kids are all Bluetooth

I know you old hands all love your 350 quid analog headphones but all the young students at work wander round with Bluetooth headphones on. Bloody antisocial, how do you talk to a young geek when they're wearing headphones?

Anyway, toilet proof iPhone plus that does bokeh? Take my money now.

Patent trolls, innovation and Brexit: What the FT won't tell you

Downside

Good luck with marketing your great idea outside of brexit blighty

No matter what you do, the American lawyers will come and sit (expensively) on your lawn if there is even a hint of your product going on sale in the US and some patent troll looks at you funny.

Putting blightly in a snowglobe on the worlds mantlepiece is not the answer.

Russian boffins want to nuke asteroids

Downside

MAC on he Moon

Surely this is an opportunity for a moon-based mass accelerator? When it's not throwing slugs at asteroids, it could be firing spacecraft off on trips to other worlds?

Chuck an inflatable moon base up there and a self-assembling accelerator.

Maybe SpaceX or Prof Hawking are already on the case..

Oh, sugar! Sysadmin accidently deletes production database while fixing a fault

Downside

it's so easy

..to type DELETE * FROM TABLE everything and forget to add WHERE index_id=nnn

It's taking a bit longer to restore because they've just discovered the backups have been broken for the last year.

{cough} checks backups on own system {cough}

Hand in glove: Google and the US State Dept

Downside
Big Brother

Forget Google, what about John Lewis?

I was in John Lewis at the weekend, looking at bean-to-cup espresso machines.

Later that night, I get an email about... bean-to-cup espresso machines.

Deriving that from my browsing habits is one thing, getting that from my idle wander around a physical store is quite the other.

The guy on the moon with the Telescope was clearly someone trying to blow the whistle on this.

Hey Windows 10, weren't you supposed to help PC sales?

Downside

AMAZING VALUE

Picked up a Tosh 15" laptop for £125 from Staples, perfect for acting as a presentation workhorse. Windows 10 runs lovely on it and it's only a few quid more than a Hudl !!.

Well chuffed. Cheap as.

Sure, not going to be playing the latest game on it or run Handbrake anytime soon, but as bread-and-butter iron to replace an aging laptop, it fits the bill nicely. Sure, only has 15Gb spare after dumping Office on it, but a fat stick or sd card and/or cloud storage and I'm laughing.

Still can't quite understand that price point... it's bonkers.

Wikimedia’s executive director quits after less than 2 years in post

Downside

Wiki needs a great search tool

Look at Atlassians confluence, it's got an amazing search.

But 150 s/w engineers? You could do A LOT with that. Don't see the fruits of my donations yet...

Na na na na na na na na bionic-BATMAN! Boffins build bat-like electro-stimulated drone wings

Downside

I'd give that a rinse

I hope they rinsed it off before putting it back in the car.There's a sewage plant about half a mile upstream from there.

FTDI boss hits out at 'Chinese criminal gang' pumping knock-off chips

Downside

Best solution is...

a) Dectect fake

b) Inform user "Counterfeit parts detected, return to vendor for replacement"

c) Degrade performance

e) Brick device

Probably give them a couple of weeks to send the unit back for a refund/replacement.

But I'd definitely brick it if I was them.

Silent Nork satellite tumbling in orbit

Downside

Aside from the concentration camps, deaths of innocents and human resources strategy based on Game Of Thrones, the norks are pantomime baddies.

Nato sabre rattling? As opposed to Russia actual-rattling, Crimea black-ops takeover, shooting down passenger jets? They do have form on that, as Deutschland 83 reminded us this week.

Funnily enough,I don't think anyone is really keen on going to war, even if your day job is tooling about in a tank, sub or plane.

Ofcom's head is dead against Three and O2's merger

Downside

Three versus the charity that is BT?

The thought of Three bringing some sanity to O2's offers, whilst bringing wider 4G availability to my phone was quite exciting, so thanks for raining all over that prospect, Ofcom.

Happily used my phone in Denmark, Eire and the US of A without worrying because of the unrivaled roaming prices offered by Three, and she thinks bringing this to more subscribers is a bad thing?

In the US, cost of phoning a US number, 19p a minute on Three. I think the best I found was £1.49 on other networks.

Lincolnshire council IT ransomware flingers asked for ... £350

Downside
Windows

zero-day email

^^^^ her bit fat yorkshire thing ^^^

Bet it was a simple forged email link posing as LinkedIn or Facebook. Seen it happen in even the most paranoid of companies, one thoughtless click and suddenly a Russian ferret is alive in the network encrypting your MSql servers.

Turn it all off, restore from backups, virus check all the laptops, ta-da, back to normal.

GCHQ spies quashed this phone encryption because it was too good against snoopers

Downside
WTF?

Yep, you keep telling yourself that all those old laptops and 386's that clutter up your house and garage will soon be worth a fortune.

Downside

You watched The Imitagion Game, right?

Encryption is as old as the hills - everyone tries to crack or peddle their encryption and all have an agenda. There are no noble answers to it.. anyone who comes up with a decent method will have the Isrealis, Brits, Yanks, Ruskies, Germans, French, Chinese trying to crack it.

The best Ive ever seen was the stuff used for CHAPS. That was done by THALES, paid a bundle by the banks to come up with a proper secure end-to-end solution. Proper money at risk there, not like just your email password or Tinder profile. I'm sure if you paid them enough, they'd do the same for you too.

Twitter goes titsup

Downside

as expected

Twitter is back up so everyone's back on it rather than posting here. Thanksfully the Three data network has been tunred-off-then-on-again too, yay, much rejoicing in my iDevice.

Big Brother is born. And we find out 15 years too late to stop him

Downside

If you want to keep a secret

Top Tip - If you want to keep a secret - don't tell anyone.

I want access to my PRESTON phone records, because there are people I've lost contact with in the last fifteen years. If I post here, can GCHQ find out the numbers for Anna, Sue and Fraser? Steve and Andy? They live in Weymouth if it helps?

All this info I've bloody paid for and it's no use to me. How annoying.

(PS great article - I've read it open mouthed, don't know why, you've been banging on about it for 30 years. Keep up the good work)

So, what should Atlassian spend its post-IPO riches on?

Downside

First step will be to buy (if they don't already) Gliffy and then Who ever produces Komala workflows for Confluence.

For us, we do our planning in Agile, defect tracking in Jira, knowledge base in Confluence, sign offs in Confluence+Komala.. so we just need a decent test management suite to round it off.

Git management and CI? Not sure why that needs to be wrapped up in yet-another-increasingly-expensive bundle with the others.

That's my main gripe with the tools.. sure, it's cheap for a defect tracker, but if you add all the other toys in, you're knocking on IBM prices.

More flexibility would be good.. Jira for 500 people but maybe 100 seats of Agile and 50 for that tool, rather than the 500 seats of one thing? 500 for everything model they currently have.

Having said all that, it's the only enterprise tool I've ever dealt with that had PM's and teams coming and begging for a log-in. Not only that, but they HAPPILY tutored each other in how to configure it and set it up. Talk about easy.

Downside

Re: Love Atlassian products

Feel for you there.. each on of our steps has been painful BUT try buying that tech from anyone else. Yes, you could wish they brought in a floating-seat model just like everyone else but that's a ball-ache too. Just give everyone a log in and you never have the "got no seats available" problem.

I appreciate that you might have 100 seats an just 20 users but that's part of their "unique" (aka very profitable) business model.

ISIS operates a crypto help desk – report

Downside

OpSec fail

Handy having a help desk that's only contacted by your operational units. Makes that quite the honey pot to keep an eye on.

It's the white heat of the tech revolution, again!

Downside

Hmm government funded research

So the many millions we give THALES and BAE to spin up brit designed robo ships and drones, which they then sell to the rest of the world ... surely we tax-payers deserve a slice of that?

Truth is we already spend a fortune of funding the private sector to inefficiently and expensively do jobs for us.

I'd invest in University and colleges developing rapid-cycle (aka agile) teams that could bid for work offered out by private co's. Colleges would get interesting projects to work on, learn how to apply their knowledge to commercial ends, turn out useful employable students - companies would get (effectively) cheap consultancy, govt would fund it and take a slice of the profits from patents.

Let's all binge on Blake’s 7 and help save the BBC ... from itself

Downside

World/perception conflict alert

you are not just getting <insert your favourite BBC show here> for your license fee. You also get a lot of services you aren't interested in. Radio three,5 Live , BBC parliament, tennis coverage, golf, Songs of Praise...

It's the same principle that means we have nuclear submarines and schools full of children, when I'm not in the mood to nuke anyone, they wouldn't give me a free ride in a sub if I turned up ('even though I've paid for it'), nor do I have any use for schools full of children - I don't have any.

The biggest rip off of all is paying north of ten quid a month for line rental. More than my license fee and for what, exactly? I mean, EXACTLY?

Great, we all want 5G mobile broadband. Now just how are we gonna wire it all up?

Downside

4G is great!

Don't get where you 4G deniers are at - there is a world of difference between the two IMHO. Video streaming sucks on 3G, my downloads suck on 3G, all are pretty much seamless on 4G. At home, my 4G is as good-as or better-than by fibre-fed 5K WiFi.

I agree it's ridiculous that phone coverage is so poor in London and in the desolate rural wastelands of Surrey and Hampshire it's as if Marconi never existed, but I've found 4G coverage in Manchester and Southampton more than acceptable. (Small sample set, I know - I should get out more)

Barclaycard axes bonking payments bracelet

Downside

Re: whats so good about bonking?

You clearly have never waited an age in the pub to pay for a couple of pints by pin pad, or in a football stadium at half time where the world+dog tries to get two cups of coffee and a super-heated pie.

Waving a card is so much easier and quicker. If I was worried about security, I'd get the folding out. Sure, you can't buy a sofa by bonk, but for tiddly transactions, it's ace.

(A friend suggests that it makes it much easier to buy a (small) round if your visually challenged too, or having "finger trouble" at the end of an evening)

I love my contact-less cards. Great idea.

Periscope smeared by streaming security SNAFU

Downside

The Bong! Crowd?

WTF is the Bong! Crowd? (Tip : Don't google at work unless you want to do some explaining to IT)

Authy 2FA app popped by simple, secret, code

Downside

confused about Authy

The article could do with more words for the hard of thinking like me.

I just don't understand it.

The screen grab in the article looked like the bit on a web login to gmail or you tube where it asks for the 2FA code.. not the Authy app on the phone.

So what's broke? The implementation of 2FA used by all of these services, or the Authy app or what?

Eye laser surgery campaigner burned by Facebook takedown

Downside

Damn that european competition

@RegGuy1

Euro competition? What, someone does your job better or cheaper than you? Shocking. Where is it okay for that competition to come from? A local student from down the road? She might be the next one to try and under-cut you. Or is it the prospect of competition full stop that you're against?

Its just that in my humble experience, if you're decent, you can get a job. For sure maybe that easy-street job from ten years ago isn't so plentiful, but be patient - a time of plenty will soon be here again.

2015: The year of MAD TV science, but who can keep up?

Downside

4k netflix et al soon to follow

Sony will give you a big HD full of 4K movies and you can sort yourself out with Netflix that is releasing some of it's IP in 4K (eg House of Cards - worth a watch).

I've got a 50" TV which IMHO is the biggest 1080p can go.. bigger really demands a 4K screen.

1080p can look gobsmacking - the BBC "pets" show has some great slo-mo vivid shots of cats'n'dogs doing their thing, truly impressive. 4K on a bigger screen would be gorgeous too.

A lot of the picture quality is down to the cinematography and post-production - how much data they squeeze out the picture before sending it to your house. A great example was a recent live footy match on the beeb. It looked so crisp and clear compared to watching a live match on Sky's HD Sports channel. I'll take a guess that it's the same OB tech but Sky squeezes a lot of the quality out by compression because it's got 500 channels of rubbish to fit into its pipe.

Of course you might not care a jot about telly image - lucky you. Your local car-boot probably has a fantastic set that's just up your street for about a tenner.

Sony-blasting Lizard Squad suspects quizzed by UK and Finnish cops

Downside

Lizard dox

http://lizardsquad.info

Is the dox for the members, or so it suggests

Dotcom 'saved' Xmas for Xbox – but no one can save Sony's titsup PlayStation Network

Downside

Really?

He claims it but did he really? What was lizardsquad.info all about?

Dragon Age, Inquisition: Our chief weapons are...

Downside

tightwads

£50 for all that content and game time? All those artistes creating those textures and environments? it costs a fortune to employ hundreds of people for a year or two, you think it should be £10 in a steam sale?

Anyway, thought most PC players just downloaded the hacked copy?

Man buys iPHONE 6 and DROPS IT to SMASH on PURPOSE

Downside
WTF?

Your gravity may vary

..but the gravity round me seems to be more benevolent to my iPhone. Sure, it's lept like a salmon from my grasp/coat/trousers onto hard wooden floor/concrete/tarmac and has loads of dings in in'ts "cheap grade aluminium" housing but the glass front and back is completely unmarked.

Everywhere I go I see people with crazy-paved screens on their phones, what on earth do you lot do to them?

Toshiba plans chippery with mere 0.5V power slurp by 2017

Downside
Alert

Quantum mechanics?

Really? Finally? Some spooky science in a chip for the every-day?

Truly amazing bonkers news though, that's so bloomin' low - useful electronics really properly run off solar, for example. Standby power drains on stuff left on becoming less significant, battery tech advances less important, as the existing tech gets to make things last longer...

I remember the last "breakthrough" I read about on newgroups (back in the 90's) being blue LED's/lasers which lead us to the hi-tech future we live in today, with hidef films on blu-rays and..er.. blue Christmas lights. Judging by that, I'd say it's going to take 15 years for this tech to be ubiquitous, just in time for my retirement. Boo. Boo to getting old and long-product cycle times.

The agony and ecstasy of SteamOS: WHERE ARE MY GAMES?

Downside

platform independant hahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha

SteamOS is not platform independent - just the opposite! It's the Intel PC architecture.

If all you want to play is a Limb-o-like indie, then some little 200 quid fag-packet linux box (not including 512GB SSD) will be just gggreat. If you are wanting to play Dragon Age 5 or WoW with any decent framerate, you're going to be disappointed.

The reason the existing consoles work is that they provide a stable fixed target to aim at for devs. A continually evolving hardware bundle like the steam boxes will be will just not work.

Are you going to throw away last years SteamBox because this years version from Alienware has much better gfx? If you're a PC centric gamer, of course you are...that new game doesn't run well on the last years model you've got.

That's what you do all the time with your PC. New gfx card this year, oh a new PSU because the last one wasn't meaty enough, oh more memory, oh new CPU is out so new mobo and...

Valve don't really care - they are coining it in from you all right now ! You already have PC's and why would you no just connect up your pc to your TV? You probably already do. If they cared about games, they'd get around to writing some rather than milking you all just as much as Sony, Microsoft and Apple do.

Dolby Atmos is coming home and it sounds amazing

Downside
Thumb Up

Re: I've seen a couple of films with Atmos

Piracy is rampant because the world of full of ppl who will happily grab stuff for free if they can, even if it means watching a movie with the same quality as an inflight TV system

Atom however, looks interesting. My Onkyo must be ooo 4 years old now, it wouldn't break me to replace it. But here's a thing.. the speakers I use are well over (and I mean WELL over) 20 years old. Missons and Solids. Who needs to replace speakers when you're happy with them? Adding a couple of Atmos speakers is only 130 quid..plus a bit of wire. Bargain

Bring on the movies and bring on the XBOX games supporting it.

iPhone 6 FEELS your heat, wetness... and it'll TELL Apple – report

Downside

weather

GPS location is okay but it's very poor at telling you your altitude.Barometric pressure handy here.

Humidty? Weather?

Temperature.. weather?

Aside from the fact that some sports fans like having those sort of sensors for instrumenting thier runs/rides

We see ya, Ouya, you tasty Android games console gear

Downside

Android fail

I don't wish to denigrate the excellent hard work that people have put in to make a titchy box of electronics with software and bring it to market - it's not an easy task; But this product is a technical achievement with hardly any potential customers, bit like the Wii-U.

It's bad enough taking conventional controller-centric games and putting them on a touch device.

Then you come up with the genius idea of taking those (poor) games and putting them on a platform based round a controller.

"Who's going to buy it?" Should have been the first question.

"No, really, WHO is going to buy it?" Should have been the second.

NSA: It's TRUE, we grab 200 MILLION of your text messages A DAY globally

Downside

You're entitled to compensation

All this snooping would be a lot cheaper if they didn't have to slurp the

"Your entitled to compensation for that accident" and "You're legally entitled to not pay back your debts" spam I keep getting. I'd like to see the slide that shows how much of that rubbish gets sent every day..

Anyone that hoped their data was private has quite clearly never worked with technology, or even been paying attention over the last decade or two. Or three. Or four.

It never will be private, never. It's just data.

Snowden to warn Brits on Xmas telly: Your children will NEVER have privacy

Downside

Kids DON'T WANT privacy

I don't know if he's seen Facebook or used snapchat recently, but keeping things private seems the last thing the youth of today want.

But as for mass survelliance, a quick check of the crime clear up rate would suggest that criminality is still, on balance of probability, something you can get away with. That would tell me that for all the "woo, scary" big brother bullsh*t, it mainly doesn't work. So good luck to the NSA etc monotoring every communication, they will never crack every case and have a working pre-crime unit.

For the tin-foil hat brigade, someone once said to me "if you want to keep something a secret, don't tell anyone", Good rule of thumb, that.

Page: