Rant over?
Seemed to cover all current whinges there.
Posts by AMBxx
2718 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jan 2014
Page:
Queue baa, Libra: People will buy what Facebook's selling. They shouldn't, but they will
Don't panic: Dixons Carphone's share price crashes 30% after statutory losses hit £329m
Akamai CEO: Playing games from the cloud? Seems too expensive to be viable right now
Thursday 13th June 2019 12:07 GMT 
Re: Economics
There are two gaming markets:
1) Casual gamers (like me). Have plenty of free games that play on mid-spec PCs and often just a phone.
2) Hard core gamers who will spend ££££s, but are concerned about every millisecond of lag.
I don't see how streaming games appeals to either of these unless it's free or nearly free.
UK taxman spent six times more with AWS last year than cloud firm paid in corporation tax
Like using the latest version of Microsoft Office? Love Offline Files? Not for long!
Friday 7th June 2019 15:57 GMT
Did anybody find offline files reliable?
I always found that stuff wouldn't update as expected. Gave up long ago.
Onedrive is much easier, especially now you can have automatic cleaning up etc.
If you want it all local, that's possible too.
Still no good for a company with shared folders though. You have to use Sharepoint for that (sorry!)
Alexa Conversations: Amazon's AI assistant is about to get a whole lot more like Clippy
Labs are for nerds, it's simply Kaspersky now – just hold still while we cyber-immunise you
I'll just clear down the database before break. What's the worst that could happen? It's a trial
Monday 3rd June 2019 10:24 GMT 
SQL Express 10GB limit
I had a new customer who had implemented a DW in SQL Express. They had hit the 10GB limit, but fortunately they didn't need transactions older than a few months.
I cleared them up nicely, then got more ambitious and wrote some SQL to delete all transactions from all tables that were more than 3 months old.
Oops - there go the dimension tables.
Fortunately, the reload from source 'only' took a weekend.
Firmware update borks Bose boxes: Owners report crackles on Lex-i of the soundbar world
It's 2019 and a WhatsApp call can hack a phone: Zero-day exploit infects mobes with spyware
Panic as panic alarms meant to keep granny and little Timmy safe prove a privacy fiasco
Monday 13th May 2019 08:05 GMT
Re: who exactly is going to bother
Not difficult to predict how this could be used.
Reset a bunch.
Remotely turn on the GPS.
Find out where person lives from the GPS.
Wait until they're out and break in.
Yes, the wearer is likely to be far from the hacker, but I'm sure there's a ready market for this level of information.
Portal to 'HELL' cracks open in street – oh sorry, it's just another pothole
Blockchain is a lot like teen sex: Everybody talks about it, no one has a clue how to do it
Meet Microsoft's new Visual Studio Online... not the same as the old Visual Studio Online
We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth
Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for 'defective' cyber-revamp
Sophos antivirus tools. Working Windows box. Latest Patch Tuesday fixes. Pick two: 'Puters knackered by bad combo
Thursday 25th April 2019 11:43 GMT
I have Mint running quite happily on one laptop. Setting up was crap - first a warning that Chrome was out of date, but the link to update took me to something that Mint wouldn't installed. Went for Firefox, but the OS wasn't detected, so just had to guess.
As a server OS, Linux is great. For clients, still years away.
Cheapskate Brits appear to love their Poundland MVNOs as UK's big four snubbed in survey again
Tuesday 23rd April 2019 13:05 GMT
Re: PlusNet is BT
Plusnet say my next bill is due in 2037. This follows their botched migration to a new accounts system last year. I know I'm not alone in this, but no idea how many others there are.
Every month they open the ticket and send me an update telling me that there is no update.
I've read somewhere that they won't bill me for more than 90 days service - keeping my fingers crossed.
Their service is great until something goes wrong. Then it's awful.
Tuesday 23rd April 2019 13:03 GMT
There's an element of expectations in all these surveys. If you have a cheap car/phone/whatever, you're expectations of its performance are likely to be lower. Same goes for mobile sims.
I have a giff-gaff sim in my car's tracker. Works fine and I've only spent £10 in 5 years. I'd give them 5/5, but no way to measure how I'd feel about them if I needed it for daily use.
Conversely, I've signed up with a reseller to handle our mobile contract. I was promised great service. Took 3 months to transfer the account and only way I've been able to make them return my calls is by leaving bad reviews on Trustpilot. Their service may be just as giff-gaff, but as I need them for daily use, I rate them at 0/5,
Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips
Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript
Hey criminals, need a getaway vehicle? There's an app for that... Car share tool halts ops amid crime wave, arrests
.EU wot m8? Brexit smacks fresh registrations of bloc's top-level domain
Astronomer slams sexists trying to tear down black hole researcher's rep
Patch blues-day: Microsoft yanks code after some PCs are rendered super secure (and unbootable) following update
Thursday 11th April 2019 14:35 GMT
t's best to try them on a test machine before allowing them anywhere near production
Useless advice - are we now supposed to keep parallel, identical computers running? What about non-standard software that's been installed?
I don't know if we should blame MS or the AV vendors, but either way you can't have umpteen test PCs.
When is a phone not a phone? When it's an Android security key
Facebook acknowledges asking you to invite your dead pals to parties is 'painful', plans to fix it
RIP: Microsoft finally pulls plug on last XP survivor... POSReady 2009
As the UK updates its .eu Brexit advice yet again, an alternative hovers into view
Lend me your ears and AI will play with your brain: Machine voice imitators outsmart us
Thursday 4th April 2019 09:50 GMT
Re: Need more knowledge how the black box works
I did some work as a trial on recruitment data to work out which candidates would leave within the first 6 months.
Using a neural network, I was able to predict 50% of early leavers if I tweaked for no false positives. Much higher if I allowed a few false positives. This would lead to a massive reduction in recruitment costs for companies with high staff turnover (ignoring the legalities of the data!).
Ran a slightly different model using more formal Regression - could find no pattern at all.
As you say, I had no idea what was going on in the black box. Nor do I know if I could trust it.
Google plonks right-wing think tanker and defence drone mogul on AI ethics advisory board
6 days to go, no sweat, just more than a million UK firms still to sign up to Making Tax Digital
Tuesday 26th March 2019 14:48 GMT
Still a non-story
My VAT quarter ends 31st March. I'd be a fool to sign up to MTD before I absolutley have to. One this Q is filed, I'll register then get one of the free spreadsheet integrations that are kicking around ready for June.
I'm damned if I'm going to start paying £30 per month just to file my VAT return.
Public disgrace: 82% of EU govt websites stalked by Google adtech cookies – report
Apple's revamped iPad beams a workhorse in from Planet Ludicrous
From MySpace to MyFreeDiskSpace: 12 years of music – 50m songs – blackholed amid mystery server move
Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator
Take Note: Schneider's teeny-tiny Galaxy VS li-ion UPS set to explode onto data centre scene
They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7
Small Brit firms beg for 'light touch' as only half are ready for digital tax reforms due next month
Tuesday 12th March 2019 07:00 GMT
Not quite. It's your VAT quarter after 1st April. I have until mid-June to be compliant.
I can't register until after the deadline as registering stops you using the old method.
Real reason is that HMRC are trying to force everyone to use cloud accounts software so they can have unlimited access to your records.
No guns or lockpicks needed to nick modern cars if they're fitted with hackable 'smart' alarms
Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster
IR35 contractor tax reforms crawl closer to UK private sector with second consultation
Wednesday 6th March 2019 08:16 GMT
Re: Tax loss for HMRC
You need to remove the VAT from your figures unless you're selling to individuals. To your VAT registered customers it's just a cashflow thing.
The tax take goes up if everyone just went permie. The more likely scenario is that the work goes overseas. We need a flexible workforce. Only people in the UK that gain from this are the big consultancy firms and they just send the work overseas.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
