* Posts by GeezaGaz

73 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2012

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Europe says Adobe's $20B buy of Figma will kill competition

GeezaGaz

So 0.03% of customers go from free to paying...

...and with those metrics surely they gotta ask how good their own product is?

As someone who has to use it, dire! A mammoth Javascript application that runs like a dog in a browser, quick and easy (the whole point of UX prototyping) it aint.

Carmack quits Meta, brands it inefficient and unprepared for competition

GeezaGaz

ah meta/oculus/vr...that age old solution...to a non existent problem.

It will be like 3d TV waiting for a killer app...that never arrived.

Give it up, go home, people arent interested.

Log4j doesn't just blow a hole in your servers, it's reopening that can of worms: Is Big Biz exploiting open source?

GeezaGaz

But, but, but, but... Java is secure right?

Bean-counting outfit Sage appoints bean-counter as new CEO

GeezaGaz

800lb Gorilla

As others have said its simply a lack of innovation/progress.

Line 50 has changed very little in the last 20 years, its been a great cash cow for Sage. In fact ever since the 90s when their greatest success was 'accountants in practice' promotion ensured all accountants got a nice little 25% for every referral. What do you do when you start a buisiness? Go to an accountant ask what 'What do I need?'

That took Sage from just an accounting software vendor to massive scale, I was working at Pegasus in the early 90s and they were pretty equal up to this point but Sage left them in the dust. Not a better product just better marketing.

I actually wrote software that migrated data from Line 50 other formats for SaaS providers to eat some of Sage's lunch (Kashflow being most notable) but hey being the incumbent with huge market share still hasn't really threatened their dominance. Even doing an appaling job with Sage One didn't hurt them that much,

Don't even talk about Line 500, the original Tetra CS/3 product from 80s where all the database table names are still 8 characters long because of the old DOS naming restriction when the data was stored using Btrieve!

HMS Windows XP: Britain's newest warship running Swiss Cheese OS

GeezaGaz

Newer != Better

Xp is a robust system and as others have said if it goes nowhere near the Internet and isn't fed USB dongles and dodgy CDROMs whats the issue?

XP is probably the only OS that I couldn't manage to BSOD (Even NT wasn't that hard to screw up if you had a dodgy device driver)

Adding more code (and probably more bugs and holes) and making an OS look 'flat' or 'modern' doesn't always equate to better.

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

GeezaGaz

Re: Microsoft Office

Here here!

It is of course purely a commercial exercise to keep trotting out ever increasing bloatware but software companies forget that more features does not always equal better! Code bases get larger, more potential bugs and lets not forget; rendering completely usable hardware obsolete.

As mentioned constant UI revisions are simply bizarre:

Take the 3d effect UI and lets make the UI look flat

Nah don't like that lets make it 3d effect

Lets make top level menu items all Uppercase

No don't like that lets make it lowercase

and repeat Ad infinitum

Insert coin: Atari retro console is coming back

GeezaGaz

speculation

"That means it is almost certainly working on a retro console that can play original Atari games".

That is pure speculation you don't *know* what they are working on so why assume?

And this line:

"You know, the ones that triggered the 1980s video games crash."

don't you mean the original games that triggered the 1970s video game boom?

Read up on the history of Atari, its all there.

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

GeezaGaz

website bombshell

Totally pointless poll posted on (supposedly) interesting IT website

Anyway what if your 'tab indent' is actually putting in spaces????

Thats what Delphi always did/does

Forgetful ZX Spectrum reboot firm loses control of its web domains

GeezaGaz

“We do not currently have control of these domains and an unauthorised third party has taken over these accounts. We are working to recover our property from this person or persons whom we have identified and reported to Action Fraud and the Metropolitan Police,”

Its not an *unauthorised* third party. They let the domains lapse and someone bought them, simple as.

Complete and utter bollocks.

Imagine a ChromeOS-style Windows 10 ... oh wait, there it is and it's called Windows Cloud

GeezaGaz

usr 33 teletype circa 1975 anyone?

Devs reverse-engineer 16,000 Android apps, find secrets and keys to AWS accounts

GeezaGaz

Surely...

>>It's 2017 and developers are still doing really dumb things

Surely not as dumb as some massive Internet company foisting a massively insecure OS onto beelions of devices????

Drone company fails to take off, tells pre-orderers: You can have your $34m back

GeezaGaz

3 years in the normal world

Is like 10 years in the tech/Internet

Took too long dilly dallying

old hat now

Apple sued by parents of girl killed by driver 'distracted by FaceTime'

GeezaGaz

Re: Sad

Agreed.

Apple should be sued for raising endless patents that exist purely to provide a potential legal battle to stop anyone else doing anything.

Sad case but I think its a stretch too far for the family.

Violin Memory axes staff just before Christmas, gives CFO $150k bonus

GeezaGaz

Reminds of classic David Brent

Bad News: Some of you are going to lose your jobs

Good News: I've got a promotion

Meet the Loughborough 'emo' boffins who predicted Trump's victory

GeezaGaz

Why didn't they...

...put their money where there mouth is?

Can't have that much faith in their system.

I mean if I developed something that was super whizz bang and could predict stuff I would have shoved some cash on it!

Complete B.S.IMHO

Emulating x86: Microsoft builds granny flat into Windows 10

GeezaGaz

Re: Baby... Bathwater?

"Now ask yourself why a quick Google for "Java algo trading" returns 173,000 results."

Actually thats falling foul of the 'say a search terms has x 1000 results when in fact it doesn't'

I get 138,0000 results but if I click the 10 at the bottom of the 1st page and go to page 10 and then click 14 to go to page 14, what happens?

You get the "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 139 already displayed.If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

In your case I'm guessing page 17 or thereabouts will show the same message. So there aren't 178 *thousand* at all

Just sayin'

Elon Musk wants to launch 4,000 satellites and smother globe with net connectivity

GeezaGaz

haters gonna hate

Do I detect some bad feeling towards musk? The article couldn't get more biased

KCL staff offered emotional support, clergy chat to help get over data loss

GeezaGaz

counselling for data loss????

you couldn't make this shit up...

..or maybe you did?

Tailored Swift – coming soon to a cloud near you

GeezaGaz

Performance

>Is there enough data yet to make language choices based on performance?

Based on what was written in this article hardly. I mean Twitter didn't realise they had a problem with Rails until there were generating gazillions of messages every second.

Its not battle tested (yet) with a massive throughput site so it remains to be seen if its a *better* option.

Google knifes Eclipse Android Developer Tools

GeezaGaz

Re: Android Studio

So much market share, so little profit share.

Brexit judgment could be hit for six by those crazy Supreme Court judges, says barrister

GeezaGaz

Well at least...

...the government didn't waste...errrr I mean spend £9M of taxpayers money printing and posting leaflets about a referendum and how we should stay in Europe

O hang on a minute....

Microsoft's IFTTT competitor goes live for suits & sysadmins alike

GeezaGaz

Re: Microsoft is just another me too company.

There is *no* innovation, anywhere.

What will iphone 27 and samsung galaxy s22 have what the current models don't?

Longer battery

thinner

bigger screen

faster processor

thats not innovation thats just evolutionary progress.

Innovation stopped around 1986

Apple’s macOS Sierra update really puts the fan into 'fanboi'

GeezaGaz

Re: 'less' is sometimes 'more' - unless you're in OS design...

Couldn't agree more.

I find it ironic that Apple (once the doyen of UI design) would seem it appropriate to put functionality suited for a mobile device (where typing is a pain) onto a desktop OS. On desktop you have a keyboard and its quicker to type rather than wait for (dumb) Siri to roundtrip to some remote server to try and understand your request! Its so damn obvious its bewildering, and yes M$ adding Cortana to windows, why???

Sadly the typical approach these days is to simply 'add more shit' thinking (blindly) that it adds more value. All it adds are pointless features, silly constant UI revisions, code bloat and complexity. I keep banging my head against the wall telling people, more features *does not* mean better!

I guess it does achieve the ultimate aim for these companies though; making perfectly adequate slightly older hardware completely unusable.

Apple to automatically cram macOS Sierra into Macs – 'cos that worked well for Windows 10

GeezaGaz

Re: Good.

Agreed.

I was quite happy with mavericks and my workflow for dragging photos straight out of iphoto into screenflow. One upgrade to EC later and I have the joyous piece of shit now named 'Photos' just to keep it in line with iOS (like anyone cares). Now my workflow is drag from photos into finder and then drag from finder to screenflow.

Photos only allows drag/drop with approved 3rd party apps (and finder), I can pay (again) for a major screenflow update for this feature.

I like (well did) Apple but their constant OS revisions are just like M$ now; completely pointless rehashes of the UI, keep changing/removing useful features while adding more bulk to the OS and features that nobody even asked for!

In other words dev teams working on these systems have completely lost their fucking minds.

Sage advice: Avoid the Windows 10 Anniversary Update – it knackers our accounting app

GeezaGaz

Small Businesses....and old people

>Essentially, users who have updated to the latest version of Windows 10 are knocked back with weird password errors when trying to log into *Saga* 50, a financial management package aimed at small businesses.

Saga 50? So you are saying this only affects the older generation of business owners??? :)

Ex-Apple gurus' elusive Android phone coming to UK next month

GeezaGaz

Re: Screen size?

No need for science, just type the phone name into Google, it gives you the obi site, go to said site and read specs!

Yes it has a 5" screen :)

I was about to bemoan the fact it has no sd card support (because el reg didn't mention it) but boom it does!!! right there in the specs.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Richard Branson will lead Sage's 'sexy accounting' shtick

GeezaGaz

Sounds like they are trying to make the unbelievably dull and boring topic of accounting software just faintly interesting....

Fancy £200m? Tell HMRC you'll help them sort their IT out

GeezaGaz

> However, MPs have warned that represents a high risk move.

Risky? Or perhaps smaller firms won't be handing out brown envelopes to said politicians....

How Remix's Android will eat the world

GeezaGaz

Re: VirtualBox?

A well hung android robot no less :)

Oracle v Google: Big Red wants $9.3bn in Java copyright damages

GeezaGaz

Re: Re:correct Corporate tax

O I'm sure they paid the correct amount of corp. tax...

The problem is that 'correct' amount would be small, very very small

Microsoft SQL Server for Linux is a brilliant and logical idea

GeezaGaz

Historically changing for software on Linux has never worked well.

I was a big Delphi user and I remember Borland asking did anyone want Delphi for Linux, cue rapturous applause and shouts of joy so they went and gave the world Kylix.

Except no-one actually bought it!

Brit geeks craft bijou Pi Zero gaming controller

GeezaGaz

Quite neat but too small as a joystick.

Nearly all cloud ERP projects will 'fail' by 2018, reckons Gartner

GeezaGaz

Re: ERP failure

Agreed, its down to organisations starting with a massive functional requirements list that means an off the shelf solution needs installing/configuring/maintaining all in a big bang approach and takes 2 years before everyone realises it isn't going to deliver what was needed in the first place.

Then of course there's the migration of existing data from the current system. I think every ERP upgrade/downgrade project I have been on has been 18 months minimum, big old job you ain't gonna do in a few weeks.

Oh TechNation. Britain's got tech talent. Just not like this

GeezaGaz

Re: Bournemouth...

Yes Bournemouth, full of blue rinse and stinks of piss

Feds look left and right for support – and see everyone backing Apple

GeezaGaz

Re: Optional

What the fuck?

Tell it to the families and loved ones of the 14 dead....

I can see it now, sales of idevices to terrorists goes through the roof. They can buy one safe in the knowledge that having blown-up/shot innocent people their deepest darkest secrets will remain hidden forever.

Couldn't make this shit up.

Hello, Kotlin: Another programming language for JVM and JavaScript

GeezaGaz

Re: Not the first and quite late to the party ...

Probably because its not open source.

As a long time Delphi dev I've known about RemObjects for many years. Their technology is 'cool' but not really had widespread adoption.

I have you now! Star Wars stocking fillers from another age

GeezaGaz

Re: Star Wars (Atari arcade) 1983

It was an incredible experience. Although without that same heavy duty controller you could yank forward and bash forward when in the trench to avoid obstacles, playing it on a keyboard with MAME I guess just wouldn't be the same.

Barracuda kills CudaDrive and Copy cloud storage services

GeezaGaz

no more freeloaders

you want online storage...you gotta pay

them servers aren't free to buy or run

These companies need to scrap free plans to have a sustainable business.

Can't upgrade, won't upgrade: Windows Mobile's user problem

GeezaGaz

So they've learnt nothing then...

"It was Windows Phone’s smooth performance on budget hardware that finally gave the platform a toe hold on the market in 2013, as Nokia launched an impressive range of low cost models."

Still its going to affect what 40-50 people worldwide who actually *have* a winpho.

Oracle laying off its Java evangelists? Er, no comment, says Oracle

GeezaGaz

Re: The world is not Java, nor even the JVM.

Errr quite.

What is it with all these fucking lame;

what about erlang?

what about haskell?

what about rust?

Because no-one can earn a living with them! I know.... I can say I know some esoteric language...before going to sign on for JSA/dole or whatever it's called these days.

The designer of the IBM ThinkPad has died

GeezaGaz

truly great machines

I owned a thinkpad back in the mid 90s and what a joy it was.

Sadly everything else IBM produce (hardware and especially software) is complete and utter shite.

Continuous Lifecycle London – Early Bird Tickets Available Now

GeezaGaz

sounds like....

...the most boring conference ever invented

...and pointless too

Java 9 delayed until Thursday March 23rd, 2017, just after tea-time

GeezaGaz

Whats the hurry?

We've just had V. 8 and now 9 is already on the horizon?

Why?

O of course its just the way it is with software these days, regardless of platform or function. All the big firms go, 'I know lets just keep rolling out new versions with new features nobody wants or asked for, increase the codebase, introduce more bugs and slow everything down!'.

Yep you couldn't make it up.

I miss the days of long upgrade cycles, I started way back with BASIC. Then moved onto dbase/clipper/ Clipper 87->Clipper 5 that'll be 3 years. Foxpro 2.0->2.6 that'll be three years.

Its one of the joys I find in using SQL, I'm happy to work to an ANSI 92 standard, I don't need change every frickin' 6 months!

'Dear Daddy...' Max Zuckerberg’s Letter back to her Father

GeezaGaz

The most pointless article on el reg....

....Ever

Microsoft whips out PowerApps – now your Pointy Haired Boss can write software, too!

GeezaGaz

Re: Back in the day we called it 4GLs

Just what I was going to mention, actually it was:

70s: CASE Tools - going to make programmers redundant any day soon.... (where is IEF or coolgen as it later became these days?)

80s: 4GLs dBase/Foxpro et al so 'power users' can build apps - which sort of worked

90s: RAD tools, anyone (and I mean anyone) could walk into PC world, buy a copy of VB3 and label themselves a 'programmer' and then hash up fucking nightmare apps

00s: code generators and 'scaffolding' gets you somewhere as long as that somewhere looks and acts the same way

Its bad enough seeing most businesses run off a million and one excel spreadsheets which have become 'apps', still it means instead of steaming piles of crap all over the place its all going to be in 'the cloud'

Most developers have never seen a successful project

GeezaGaz

Shiny new object/methodology syndrome

As @kmac499 says its all about building something to a rigid fixed set of requirements.

I've seen software development in 30 years go from waterfall, to DSDM/RAD (iterative prototyping) to now Agile (make it up as you go along).

The bottom line is these methodologies lean more to the user than the developer, i.e. more and more freedom to start from a 'I've not a frickin clue what I want this system to do' standpoint which makes a nice easy life for the user and a pain in the arse for the developer.

You start off with a sales person who says yes to everything (because they don't have the balls to tell the customer otherwise).

To a project manager who says yes to everything (because they don't have the balls to tell the customer otherwise).

To the devs who have to wear the shit and fit more in within the same time frame.

Coding with dad on the Dragon 32

GeezaGaz

Any colour you like as long as its green....

I didn't have a D32, my friend did and he became quite adept at 6809 assembler on it. Even going as far as writing a Rally X clone. My one overriding memory is how everything was green! Quite a limited colour palette.

I had a vic20 which yes whilst had 8 colours had a paltry 3.5k, unless you slammed in a 4/8/16K cartridge. I went for a switchable one as bizarrely games written for one memory expansion didn't always work on another.

Herbie Goes Under Investigation: German prosecutors probe ex-VW CEO Winterkorn

GeezaGaz

Just keep denying it...and walk away...

Seems to be par for the course.

Resign.

Keep denying any knowledge ad infinitum

Avoid any criminal charges

Always seem to work for the privileged few who have had their noses in the trough.

Lessig to NZ court: Dotcom charges would fail in the US

GeezaGaz

Hey fatty bum bum

Doesn't look like his diet has gone too well....

'A word processor so simple my PA could use it': Joyce turns 30

GeezaGaz

Re: The story goes..

It was Chris Currie, and it was in Cambridge, not Camberley.

Search for 'Micro Men' a BBC4 Drama about the whole Sinclair vs Acorn battle.

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