Posts by SVV

Amazing piece of research

I womder hiow long these academics spent on this groundbreaking study to reach the conclusion that "being taught" and "doing work" in class result in better academic results than "playing videogames" and "doing Facebook"?

Certainly my best teachers were the ones who actually stood in front of the class teaching - especially the maths teacher who could spend 40 minutes of the lesson on hilarious stories and sarcastic putting the world to rights before a lucid explanation of some difficult new topic for the last 20 minutes, knowing he had gained the full undivided attention of the whole class : everyone in that class got a Grade A at O Level. The worst ones were the ones who just pointed us at a chapter in a textbook and then more or less left us to work through it before doing the written exercises at the end. Those were the most "spend time staring out of the window" type classes. I suspect that a lot of the latter still goes on rather than the former, and no amount of rebranding as free schools and academies is going to make the slightest bit of difference when the kids are having to plough through "Key Stage 4, Module 17B" in order to get the marks that get the school its' ranking in those risible "league tables".

$40 for a phone charger?

I thought these products were designed and priced to make you look "affluent and cool" : this just screams "more money than sense".

Hilarious

I'm assuming that every time someone goes to Youtube to experience this clunky, illiterate infantile whining he gets paid for it?

But it's just not enough, waaaaaah, waaaaaaaah......

This guy sounds like those senior bankers whose banks had to be bailed out with billions of public money to prevent them from going bust and then started whining that they had to be paid millions otherwise they'd have to leave the country and take their enormous talents elsewhere.

How very "street".

Add me to the confused list....

In common with most of the posts so far, I'm wondering..... why? and what for?

This seems so typical of what you have to put up with when MS rush products to market without finishing them properly: Massively convuluted installation procedure with a "cobbled together at the last minute" feel about it? Limited subset of features guaranteed to trip you up the moment you need to use something you assume is there, but then find out is missing? Can only connect to the server using esoteric proprietary Windows tools from a Windows PC that has them installed?

And using 1Gb of memory for an install doesn't exactly sound like "nano" to me - I've run proper Windows server installations successfully on half of that in the past. All in all this sounds like something that will have the Linux people chuckling away at it, whilst some poor sod at Microsoft Press has to churn out yet another breeze block sized textbook that makes it usable, but spends half its' length going on and on about how brilliant the product is.

These are music experts?

"the Rolling Stones – burst onto the US charts with a rocky sound that swept away popular music's jazz and blues chords."

Yeh, the Rolling Stones were really well known for their dislike of blues, and sure swept away its' chord structures with their avant-garde atonal serialism......

'The second greet stylistic revolution came in 1983 when electronic bands using new instruments (synthesisers, samplers and drum machines) burst on the scene.'

Is that "new as in just invented" or "new as in just bought it from the shops"? Anyone who thinks that these things were invented in the early eighties has no clue whatsoever.

'The most recent upheaval (and for the analysts at least, the greatest) came in 1991 when rap and hip-hop (which make little use of harmony, emphasising speech sounds and rhythm instead) hit the mainstream.'

So Grandmaster Flash, etc, didn't have worldwide hit records in the early 80s?

What's the conclusion to their research? That a new type of electronic dance music called "house music" is about to become popular?

You can already do this with emulators

run iOS apps on Winedows :

http://techraze.com/best-ios-iphone-ipad-emulator-for-pc-download-windows-mac

run Android apps on Windows:

http://techapple.net/2014/12/top-7-free-android-emulators-windows-788-110-pccomputer-run-android-appsgames-windows-78-110/

And no sodding redirection to MS me-too crap like "Bing Maps" to irritate the hell out of you.

cloudobile?

Cloud O' Bile : def : what Nadella's horrific jargonistic mangling of the English language results in when you hear it.

"like a rock star on speed from start to finish".

Having misbehaved backstage at several large festivals in my 20s, and having too many blurred memories of post-gig excess,I can assure you that comparing a presentation from the CEO of a large multinational IT company with the sort of shenanigans that I have wiitnessed / taken part in is akin to comparing the awful political campaign we are currently being subjected to to Keith Moon driving a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool.

You are a manufacturer of commodity products competimg on the basis of lowest price. You are about as rock'n'roll as James Blunt.

I have played in bands and had a brilliant and irresponsible time. I have also worked in IT for 20 years and had a brilliant and very responsible time. That means the band things were "cool", and the IT things weren't. But I could never have done the former without the latter.

Moral : don't try and be "cool" when tallking about IT stuff.

Government as a Platform?

That's just so 2013 for a mission statement, get up to date guys and start bullshitting about Government as a Service instead.

"GDS has become an in-house big consultancy firm itself, building everything bespoke, making it "special", unjoined up and delivering late."

In other words it's like the IT department at every big company I've ever worked for.

So, after trying to put a phone UI on the desktop.....

They're now putting a desktop UI on a phone?

And who on earth is going to do any serious work in Word or Excel on a phone? Dsktop OS for PCs, touchscreen OS for tablets and phones is the only way for me personally. And many other people too I expect.

This will be useless for me

After 20 years working in IT sat in front of a keyboard and monitor, I can sometimes barely read my own handwriting anymore if I leaf back through my jotter pad further than a month or so ago, so the chances of an app being able to do so are very liow indeed.

Shame, as I really hate using the on screen keyboard on my tablet.

First law of robotics

is in fact : Whenever you hear someone going on about how robots are going to become a part of our daily lives much more , they are talking nonsense.

Sure, they are good for repetetive tasks in manufacturing, and various rail based transport applications. They can even mow the lawn if you're prepared to deal with something that's not 100% infallible and you're too lazy to do do that yourself. But "talking to each other" and "making decisions around my house in order to do all my chores"? Yeh, I remember reading that sort of stuff in the school library back in the 1970s.

And the reason why? You need humans to create interfaces and define strictly how stuff talks to other stuff if you want interoperability, and that takes serious work (e.g. how you manage sudden unavailabilty of the stuff you were trying to talk to)

Given the way Windows has evolved over the last 15 years, Bill's not really the go-to person for this advice. Unless floundering around from partial-but-bloated success to misguided failure really is technological Nirvana..

Top Marks

Great article that neatly explains why this is so ridiculous.

And references to Frank Sidebottom and an obscure pun based on a track from the first Fall album too - nice to know this comes from from a writer who also has tastes beyond the ever diminishing pool of "global superstars" (Also liked the Daft Punk putdown too - weren't they briefly top ten material about 15 years or so ago?)

Please, please market it this way MS

Introducing new Windows Apps, not to be confused with Windows Desktop Apps, although you can run Windows Apps on the Windows Desktop if you want to - you just can't run Windows Desktop Apps on Windows devices that only run Windows Apps.

And to all you software developers who invested time and money building stuff for Windows 8, errrm sorry about all that, hope you didn't lose too much, please support our new world of confusion and non compatability, thank you.

In this week's lecture....

We learn that airheaded golddiggers are attracted by expensive shiny shiny. Who knew!

However extensive field research by me and my friends has come to the amazing discovery that you can also get laid if you're a normal decent human being with a sense of fun and humour however much money you have or don't have.

Is this another example of "read all the theory, little practical experience", or one of the more feeble attempts to crowbar free maket theory into any subject, no matter how relevant? Whatever the case, using these articles as the basis for any conversation on a date, or even idly mentioning them within a relationship will surely lead to a great implementation of the Singleton pattern (sorry, for that gag, have a bit of a design patterns related bet on at the moment...)

My own experience

I filled in the online form in about 2 minutes, which was surprisingly clear and well designed for a government website. A week later a letter arrived from the local council telling me my application had been successful.

Having previously lived in a shared house and missed out on being registered when someone filled in the form with their own details and sent it back without telling anyone else, I think the new individual registration system is better.We got a leaflet through the door explaining the new system, and there are posters up everywhere explaining what to do to register (and have been for months now). And for those without home internet access there's always the local library, etc.

Just to set the record straight, my previous experience of government IT was getting a few stages through the recruitment process for a Whitehall job at a department whose expensive failures are regularly reported on this site. The analysis of the work I submitted seemed to have been written by someone not long out of Oxbridge who'd read all the theory books, but had no idea about currently efficient tools and frameworks due to having no commercial experience. Unsurprisingly, that department's website is a turkey that's not so much half baked as barely defrosted.

Another cloud evaporates.....

Putting aside the part of "cloud" which is really just another name for external hosting, this is another classic example of why it's far too risky to actually RELY on this sort of service for anything serious. At the most I would only consider using something like this as a temporarily convnenient way of sharing things or accessing them remotely from time to time, and keep the "master" copies of content strictly under my own control.

Then again, everyone should know by now that it's pointless moaning when Google shuts down yet another service that isn't making them the money they thought it might possibly do if it reached critical mass.

I stil miss iGoogle : my email inbox, weather radar, real time train info, news headlines from 6 different sources and some other fun stuff all on my home page - the sort of thing that makes loads of individual full screen apps on a tablet still look primitive, and this was 5 years or so ago now.

Sounds like Windows Phone 3.11

"suffered freezes at unpredictable intervals, ranging from every few days to several times a day"

Oh how I reminisce about the glory days when saving a Word document caused a complete reboot. Maybe spending more a bit more time and money on quality control and a little less on CEO driven marketing bullshit could be a good idea?

My ultra stable Win 7 machine has been retired from the internet and any type of upgrade for a couple of years now, joining the ancient but still great for music making Win 98 machine that's been reliable for 15 years. Alutomatic updates also disabled for all Android apps too after the last update turned the nice media player stuff into a horrible Google Play marketing tool and I had to turn to a third party app to restore my sanity.

I guess I've learned the hard way over the years to say "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

Copying Java 15 years too late

That's what this announcement says to me.

However, this has led to a huge delay in the development of truly cross patform code libraries and dev tools, many of which are free and open source, and have years of proven service and reliability.

Being so late to the party, and with no corresponding offer of free development tools is gong to impress nobody in the corporate world of Enterprise Java that has a massive amount of skilled, experienced people that have worked out the best solutions to most of the common development issues over the last decade and a half.

I look forward to watching the look on the Linux sysadmin's face when told to install version 1.0 of this on the comapny's mission crtical production servers.

Poverty Porn?

Did you go over to the Guardian and enjoy the story of the guy with mental health problems who starved to death because his benefits had been sanctioned?

Well, the UKIP association at least now makes a bit of sense, go and check out the story today of their candidate for Basildon who's been recorded making racist comments and jokes about "shooting peasants".

Aaaah, outsourcing......

Oh, we need this extra validation check....

Me working in-house : Sure, I'll just add it in now, then run the build and tests.

Outsourced contractor : That's not in the agreed specification, it'll cost you £xxx and I'll deliver it in the next 14 days when I have some spare time from my other customers' projects.

Been there, seen it, know that pure free market theory and real life don't ever seem to coincide on software projects.

Seen the "Microsoft Cloud" adverts on the telly yet?

They are playing them fairly frequently, and seem to show lots of grinning bearded hip young folk looking at screens containing code scrolling upwards at speeds far too fast to read.....

Rather than IT managers receiving angry phone calls from senior executives informing them that if all their systems go down for hours again, losing their company a fortune, they'll be sacked immediately.

Microsoft Cloud : it never rains, it's poor

The acronym should really be BYEHWYW

Buy your employer's hardware with your wages.

Great Idea

Do they also give away a free t shirt that says "Check out the size of my pockets! I'm carrying the latest expensive iPhone in them! So don't bother mugging me."

Momentous News

As the streets fill with cheering crowds, delerious with excitement at the release of a new version of Internet Explorer, the web enters a state of spooky silence as nothing is being posted anywhere across the globe. Even the Windows Phones (tm) that everyone is carrying are left unfondled as the sheer unbridled joy of being present at the dawn of this new era has tapped in to the primal urge to congregate and celebrate that is innate in humankind.

"The fox is on fire, the chrome is badly tarnished, and only rich gits can afford to go on safari" says the youth rushing out of the gigantic Microsoft Store (tm) that you can find on every high street into the camera of the BBC's "Click Online".

And I woke up and it was only a dream.

Meanwhile, back in the real world.....

"How's the user tracking module going", says the project leader at the daily scrum meeting.

"Sorry, can't implement it because it's a dark pattern" says the developer.

"Clear your desk and hand in all company property before leaving, good luck in your next job"

Sack Moffat.... Please!

I'm sick of his incomprehensible "plots" : how about good stories with nice plot twists and some sort of logic to them instead of it being all about this "ooh, what's happening with this weird woman at the end of the episode" sort of crap after another 45 minutes of well acted and produced letdowns.

Get someone in who understands that it should be about adventure, suspense and underlying reflection of moral issues, not about creating dull "series arcs" which always turn out to be rubbish anyway - I want it to go back to being mass entertainment rather than something for fanboys to have idiotic debates about on the web as to what all this "mysterious nonsense" actually could mean.

Office 358

And counting down........

Who would have predicted that something like this would have happened given their long track record of proven expertise in the online hosting world...Erm, apart from me that is?

At least Excel users will have had a few days away from the horror of spreadsheets.

He was like a little child....

"He was a like a little child. He was so excited, so happy. We sort of connected. I felt he would be good for the team"

Not half as much as you felt he would be good for your bank balance I guess.

$2000 million dollars. For a BASKETBALL TEAM! Go ask Bill G if he thinks that's a good thing to spaff your wealth on......... Truly you are a man of great taste and sophistication which was reflected by the quality of your company's products when you were in charge.

Two thousand mill for a boy's netball team! Jeez, These people are really not like us are they? Next time your Windows computer crashes, just imagine this goon grinning like an imbecile as he watches some blokes bouncing a ball up and down thinking "I OWN THIS! IT'S ALL MINE! HA HA HA!" Losing all faith in the sanity and decency of human beings is an optional extra option.

Eggscruciatingly bad

But ommeletting you have some time to make this actually entertaining before I get too fried and scrambled. If she got poached by a competitor we could get back to the usual hard boiled cynicism we like so much here at El Reg.

Oh to be an "industry analyst"

"It does appear, from most sources, that Microsoft will not abandon ARM, but that it may drop the attempt to create a unified experience across both architectures."

So big fail, didn't work, oh look Apple have OSX for desktop and iOS for phones and tablets, let's do the same. Wonder how many meetings of highly paid executives it took for that insight to develop?

We couldn't be happier with how we've done...

I bet you could.

For instance if you'd sold twice as many you would almost certainly be happier. Ad infinitum for higher multiples of sales. But for tv, radio, and the other sundry useful little apps, toys and fun stuff I mostly use my tablet for, the replacement point will probably be either when it dies or when something amazingly better comes out. And that should not be taken as a suggestion to make your devices conk out quicker than they currently do by the way.

Sorry, waste of money, already been tried.....

Universal Description Discovery and Integration :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Description_Discovery_and_Integration

OK, it was for SOAP webservices rather than REST webservices but that's the only difference. By the way it failed horrendously, because although the idea of writing code to parse the service descriptions and automatically be able to start using them was very seductive and got lots of people excited back in 2000, the reality soon dawned that this was so difficult in practice that it would be impractical.

OK, I know that REST is currently quite popular, and SOAP is considered a bit verbose and difficult ( which it is, but not massively so, and it has way better security and robustness), but why are our government spaffing millions on this because they think that there's 200 billion to be made from wi-fi equipped lightbulbs and toasters? Does the UK still manufacture this sort of stuff? And weill countries who do make this stuff not be able to create something easily themselves if by some miracle it was found to be practicable and useful?

Unfortunately, I just watched the videos....

Horrendous, just flabbergasting. $18 billion dollars.......

Don't let the chair hit you on the way out.

Another day.....

Another failure.......

" the outage spans "Cloud Services, Virtual Machines, Websites, Automation, Service Bus, Backup, Site …". I think describing this list as "various features" is somewhat kind to them, somewhat along the lines of a car lacking various features such as an engine, wheels, doors, seats.....

Amyway, I would expect a cloud service not to require any downtime at all - if it had been designed properly they could have moved the VM image to anothe server in seconds before shutting down the machine to fit a new network card : which also sould not take anything like 45 minutes. Has anyone seen a service level agreement for this rubbish? Presumably you have one when relying on third parties for essential IT services?

Just bought a new mouse from Maplin

Optical thingy with 2 buttons and a scroll wheel, 8 quid, ergonomic shape and nice to use

I doubt that the price of this Apple nonsense will be anywhere near as low, and given Apple's stupidly long resistance to concepts like a mouse with more than one button, the iMouse should fail badly but probably won't because generic USB devices are for sad losers who don't even have a beard, Right?

"After about an hour of investigating the issue"

Naughty, naughty, no contingency planning or failover or proper acceptance testing again.......

Quiz question : How soon should you be able to roll back changes to your cloudy service if they break ?

a) almost immediately, as you have servers on standby to do just that at a moment's notice.

b) about an hour

This seems to be happening with MS cloud stuff on an almost daily basis right now, giving ample opportunity for posting the same sort of comments about the increasing evidence of managerial ineptitude that must take the blame for it, but I'm sure their army of downvoters will be onto this post even quicker than their service came back online.

Has this article slipped through a wormhole from 25 years ago?

I mean, the photo of the hammer and sickle and whole premise of the piece scaring us about the concept of state run car manufacturers is really topical, seeing as pretty much nobody is advocating these things anywhere or has been in the last two decades or so.

However the deification of Friedrich Hayek, who Margaret Thatcher so admired gave the game away somewhat....... perhaps the author can explain why our major utilities such as electricity and railways are more efficient than our continental neighbours who own and run their own and are far cheaper. I reaaly would love to know why the IT industry which is full of such intelligent people is so susceptible to libertarian / thatcherite nonsense rather than social conscience.