Posts by 0laf 1980 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Nov 2009
I liked Winho (typo but I like it) 8.1 a lot. It worked for me and I found it very easy to use.
I've since had an Apple (over rated but it does indeed "just work") and now an Android (mostly works, great hardware but generally a fucking mess).
I still use the old WinHo 8.1 as a sat nav in an old car. Lovely solid little thing that Nokia 920 was.
I honestly thought I'd hate it (P20pro), and I still think it's ugly but really within a few hours I hardly noticed it. A few days more and I really don't notice it at all now.
So yeah it's an ugly artifact of phones for now but shouldn't be a deciding factor for any of them.
Phone jack, yeah I'll give you that I do miss it. Huawei supply an adapter but it's stil a PITA for a car so you can't connect the phone to power and the aux at the same time. And that car doesn't do bluetooth
I used to have a box of pentium 2 processors and some compatible motherboards.
The cable clear out has happened although I've still got 3 palm pilots, a few Win 6 phones, a P1 with a Voodoo 1 coprocessing card and fuck know what else junk kicking around. My only regrets are not holding onto more of it.
Well tbh, you know the value of your assets. You know who is coming after it and you know they are capable and well resourced.
Now you need to protect your assets appropriately.
It sounds like many companies have been paying lip service to the security around their IP and if they want to continue to do business in the world today they will have to up their game.
If your business was gold storage you wouldn't cut corners on the physical security around that asset. You wouldn't leave your locked windows to rot until they fell out of their frames leaving gaping holes in the walls. But many buinesses think it's fine to let their IT installations of Windows rot without updates or patches. Then they wonder why the electric burglars were able to climb through the holes in their walls.
It's taking a long long time to get the idea across that nothing has changed, people still want to steal your valuables it's just the form of the valuables that has changed.
I remember seeing some sci-fi show where they had devices that rolled rather than folded. So they pulled the device out of a tube.
I wonder if that would be less stressful on the screen than a fixed hinge.
I think the magic in the show was that the 'rolled screen' went rigid when it was extended.
But this is interesting, it would be one of the first really novel innovations in mobile tech for a while.
Hmm if a parliamentary committee called you in. And you knew with some degree of certainty they were going to take the opportinutiy to pass the blame for every internet wrong onto you including their own legislative failures and misconceptions, whilst all the time trying to outdo each other to look like they were giving you a roasting and trying to publically humiliate you personally and the company you built....if you had the opportunity to avoid that lose-lose situation would you not take it?
I've no time for MZ or his data slurping behemoth but if I was in his shoes would I buggary be turning up to that committee meeting.
CAPITA isn't really one company it's more like a bag of marbles. Shitty marbles. Shitty marbles stripped of all talent, skill and hope then sold to a market with few choices manged by people with big egos and small brains.
This allows CAPITA to sell fuckin shitty products, with fuckin awful support for a fuckin lot of money.
I had an SE thought it was expensive but appreciated the fact that it just worked with everything but I found the screen keyboard too small for my sausage fingers.
I would have preferred to stick with Apple for the 'it just works' element but the premium on new Apple device is just too high. I picked up a P20 Pro for just over £500, a near equivalent iPhone would be £1k now.
I'm not brand loyal, most of my acounts are still MS from my Winpho days and even with the worry about Google sniffing, the Chinese sniffing and every app sniffing it was still too much to stick with Apple. I don't trust any phone really so don't shop or bank on them anyway.
They do exactly that. It's part of international agreements with space thingies. When they're done switch 'em off to prevent interference.
Kepler is too far away to be de-orbited but it's also too far away to present much of a problem with regard to Kessler Syndrome. That's a near earth orbit issue.
I think it's safe to say that the bods at NASA had very good reasons for chosing one form of propulsion over another.
Yet another mission sadly ends although having greatly exeeded its original targets. Some excellent boffinry has been and is being done in our era. Libations for those white coats and engineers who have and are working on such wonderful projects!
It's the MO of business these days, pass the liability and blame for everything onto the customer.
Luckily for them most customers are idiots and are happy to do this.
Scooters have two wheels, unlike 4 wheels vehicles if you fait to balance they will fall over. Hitting the ground (or immobile objects) at speed hurts. Hitting the ground (or immobile objects) at speed whilst not wering any protective equipment will very likely result in injury.
These basics seem beyond a lot of people brough up driving cars filled with airbags and electronic safety aids. Safey always being someone else's problem.
Switched recently from Plusnet to SSE.
Previously (2yr ago) I stayed with PN during a house move. They royally fucked it up and I was without service for 6 weeks. They offered vapourware refunds and refused to let me raise a complaint. I ran out of energy to continue the process since I was dealing with some other big personal issues at the time.
Shifted to SSE the other month who were offering (after cashback) 35Mb fibre and phone for £15 a month less than PN offered to keep me. They also switched me over on the day with less than 1hr of downtime and it's a one month rolling contract so if they are shit I can switch again without much delay.
GDS was full of overconfident sharp suited little boys that like to play with tablets.
I really enjoyed watching one shit himself when a world weary MoD manager took exception to being told to stop worry about storing his secrets in the cloud.
Yes, Gov did a kick in it's digital balls but it did not need it from children who were straight out of school with no experience of the real world, who implicitly believed eveything Google told them and who had no idea of how to use or protect high assurance systems.
It's been discussed here before and it's just not viable. It would cost so much to do a refuelling mission that you are actually better off just to go for a replacement. In the intervening timetech will have moved on so for your one space mission you can improved things a great deal by replacing the machine in orbit.
Maybe one day we could lauch a tanker which would float round refuelling sats but in reality that probably not very feasible either.
I think that's the thing that really sticks in people throats. If you can't make your software work on your own hardware then it reall does appear that you don't give a shit about what you put out.
Apple isn't immune from this but they don't do it with the monotonous regularity MS does. It is starting to appear that the Apple Tax is in fact a QA charge.
If you're going to pay less for shonky hardware and support you might as well pay a lot less and get some Chinese no name tablet. It'll do 90% of the functions for 30% of the cost of MS' premium Surface so when it breaks in the same way you'll at least have the comfort of some extra cash in your pocket to go with the same level of inconvienience.
Having tried to book flights with BA earlier in the year I can only guess that those customers who didn't have all their details sniffed got halfway so the process and were so frustrated byt the fucking appalling website that they gave up like I did.
In fairness however I found practially every airline's website to be a fucking nightmare designed to extract accidental extra payments before bombing out with some random java error or just failing to respond at some critical point.
Make a product and say it will be revolutionary then unveil it as basically the same thing everyone else sells but with worse support and higher costs.
Stand in front of investors aghast that the world hasn't snapped up your 95% identical-to-every-other-phone-but-costs-more product and then promise that the NEXT product will be truely revolutionary and can he have some more money?
Fool me once....
Smart phones are a utility/white goods item now. You don't get many truely revolutionary developments in white goods from startups, maybe once a generation. Dyson is probably the only company that has done it and a lot of their kudos is snake-oil and marketing. The shine is off Dyson from many of the former customers I've spoken to (also being a former customer).
I don't think anyone really has much innovation on the go. It's just incremental improvements in various areas and has been like this for quite a few years.
When these phones make the leap to a proper Continuum like switch being both mobile and desktop as and when needed that might (might) kick things up a gear.
Same with the flexible/rollable displays that are always just a little away.
But even if you look at scifi (The Expanse), even with hundreds of years of fantasy R&D the characters are still carrying little rectangular screens that process data, take pictures and process data. Maybe we're at the end point for mobile coms until they get imbedded into our heads.
Even with Cloud doing the heavy lift we'll still have little square screens to carry around for output.
Legacy apps will be an issue. Plenty of very large companies dislike keeping their shit current as long as they can pass the risk and cost onto their customers.
I dearly hope that one of them will cop a big GDPR fine for failing to do this sooner rather than later and they'll get the idea they they are actually responsible for maintaining their products and their customers shouldn't need to compromise their own networks to make their shit function.
I'm not surprised this is costing a fortune. Money was cut from most of the public sector and basic maintenance was an easy thing to stop. Since they'd never had a problem there was not problem. Patching just causes downtime doesn't it?
It'll have left them with a massive pile of catch-up actions and no staff to do it since they'd all been paid off
I wonder if the NHS be getting ongoing money to do maintenance on an ongoing basis or if we'll be back here in 5yr since they'll patch all the wannacry stuff then stop thinking the job is done?
I don't have a Surface I think they're overpriced plus sized tablets but I know lots of people with them that like them a lot.
We've bought into a lot of Surface devices for senior people and they, in general, are happy with what they are getting. I'm also increasingly seeing Surface devices being used by conference presenters etc. The sorts of people who like to have 'Influencer' somewhere in their CV or profile.
So on the surface (fnar fnar) the Surface appears to be a bit of a success for MS.
Which isn't to say they won't fuck it up totally soon or that Nedella won't just throw the entire product line in the skip at a moments notice because he woke up and decided that MS aren't a hardware company. This is MS after all.
I'd rather not carry multiple devices if I can help it. I think that's the case for most people which is why they often have one powerful phone type device which does 90% of their needs.
This is an expensive dumb phone with tethering which means I'd still have to carry multiple devices.
If I'm going to carry multiple devices anyway I would probably choose a sub $50 dumb phone and a $50 4G dongle or a device with built in LTE.
This seems a bit, well, wanky.
Anyone remember the Harry Enfield sketch where he runs a shop called "I saw you coming"?
the long read to day in the Gruniad is worth a read. Trump doesn't know what he's doing and really doesn't care. Seems doubtful the Russian's control him he's just too unstable, more likely they would seen to control those who influence him.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/27/this-guy-doesnt-know-anything-the-inside-story-of-trumps-shambolic-transition-team
Yep really isn't possible. Well it's possible but it's improbable. It would need a big feck off booster fitted to it and somehow the whole thing would need to be shored up to cope with the move. TBH it's pretty old, and like many things you're better starting a new with the lessons learned from previous versions.
But I agree with others it's a sad state when we're really not a long way from where we were 50yr ago.
I'd have liked to have seen moon obiting bases, larger earth orbiting habitats maybe as places to build Mars vehicles. I'm sure we could have done it ages ago had politics, wars and other top table nonsense not taken over again.
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