Posts by Dwarf

Breaking news - there's a world outside of 'Merica. For the rest of us we don't care where the devices are made - since there is a global economy. If 'Mercian stuff is really the best, then it would be the most popular and people would buy it from there anyhow.

The fact that other countries can make things more cost effectively and we can pay less for its and have more money for other stuff can only be a good thing for everyone - this includes the developing countries and our own pockets.

Competition is good, it keeps people on their toes.

Bit of an odd decision - not that that in its self is unusual from Microsoft these days

As Office uses VBA which is presumably sharing a lot of that code, could that mean the end to VBA / poisoned documents and spreadsheets ?

What about MS Access - doesn't that use the same framework too. Do they even still do Access ?

VB kind of has a place, but its also the cause of a lot of departmentally generated "headache applications" that bypass any form of proper development control / testing / inclusion in any DR plans but also become business critical.

A step in the right direction

Its a step in the right direction as long as they change their approach to the services they provide as well.

1. Value is very different thing to a low price

2. The throughput and reliability of the Internet connection matters.

3. Security matters

4. Security matters. I mention it twice as its important and in case you didn't get it the first time.

5. Customer service matters

6. Don't take customers for granted - for example what you do with their personal data.

Anyone want to send her a "not sorry you're leaving" card.

The only cloud is the "Cloud cuckoo land" that the marketing people live in.

I will have my stuff here, among the rest of the things I own - note the words own and here in that sentence.

Luckily, I got out of the Microsoft dream world and never looked back.

00 BORED

Printer programming - nothing new there. Its kind of what its there for - programming a page layout etc. Agree with the other posters that taking a printer off the network, when the diagram shows the connection is via the PC and PC's need to be connected to printers to print to them isn't logical. Most companies would not pass the "business value" test of moving printers to a different subnet even though larger companies are mainly using print servers. Surely most attacks these days would focus on the e-mail enabled scanning features that they all have built in. Amazing where badly trained users will send documents at the press of a button.

The story made me laugh though as I got a date via a printer once. Back in the old Laserjet 4 days, I changed the 00 READY message to 00 BORED and got a support ticket in, it took a long time to fix as the PA was both interested and hot ! Amazing what you can do with PCL command codes :-), I recall that she was definitely 00 READY !

Nooooo..

If only he had managed to get a couple more dots and some cherries for that next extra life

Anyone got a spare £1 to give him another go ?

If they don't get discharged, then she is in for some hard time in chokey.

For some reason this old Unix one-liner springs to mind

she sh csh on the cshore.

Perhaps if they would stop inventing problems and realise what people want, then people will buy their stuff again.

iWatch -nope, got a nice one from a jewellers, it will still be working and probably fashionable in 20 years time, unlike the iGadget.

Wireless earbuds - then an application to locate them for when you loose them - nope. Give me a 3.5mm plug and I'll just buy a new pair like I've been doing for years.

They can also take a look at the stupid pricing. Drop a couple of hundred pounds off a phone and a lot more from the laptops and I might talk to you again. A good place to start is by looking at how much FLASH memory costs, its not £60 for a +32gb increase. Take a look on Amazon, a stick costs about £15 and that's after profits, shipping, the plastic package, PCB and driver chip - all of which you've already got on the lower model.

Then - stop crippling the previous generation as soon as a new one comes out a vain hope that it will force people to the latest version with its nice little price premium.

I must have been asleep at the point when contractors stopped being accountable for the correct running of their companies in line with the legislation that affects all companies. I can't think of any other case where someone else makes binding decisions on behalf of someone else's company.

Obviously agencies have a vested interest in this since they have to do nothing other than :

1. Decide that their own contract that they force is bad from an IR3 perspective

2. Watch the contractor hike the prices by 25% or so

3. Watch their own profits go up due to the increased contractor rate.

So would any agency actually want you outside of IR35 since it would adversely affect their own profits

Not sure IoT is a good analogy for tractors, given that most farms I know have no Internet connectivity due to the fact that they are by definition rural places. Surely to qualify as IoT, it must actually be on the Internet.

Perhaps describing a tractor as an interconnected subsystem (much like a car) is a more appropriate acronym, but I guess we have to let the marketing people have their take on things too - if only so we can ridicule them later.

Irrelevant

There are plenty of skilled people out there who understand Win 7.

After all, it's hardly like the COBOL skills gap problem and the world went through that one too.

I smell marketing BS

I expect this is a report from a company specialising in handling unstructured data. Of course, any data without metadata is effectively lost, so I'd argue that there isn't a compliance issue as nobody knows that the data is held. Do you really know, or have the ability to read those old DLT-1 tapes, DAT, QIC or other tapes, DVD's or similar from yesterday.

Secondly, 100Tb isn't a lot of data given that we can freely go into any on-line store and buy 10Tb disks for next to no money and stuff it onto our PC's for our cat pics, data backups, porn stash, DVD library, music library, family photos, VM's or whatever else we want.

I expect that most of the old data will be old backups, which they will need next time they get hit by a cryptolocker variant, at which point another consultancy company will release a report saying that governments don't take enough care in protecting their data.

A couple of side effects

Slightly tongue in cheek, but here goes ..

1. Mobile devices will get heavier, thicker

2. Devices will require their annual servicing to test the extinguisher.

3. Don't fire extingiushers need to be replaced after a number of years - so built in obsolescence - on safety grounds of course ..

4. If you phone goes off, then the person sitting next to you will think you are setting off some form of chemical device, so you'll get punched, shot or worse !

5. Can you really carry pressurised canisters in hand luggage on planes ?

Trust us, we're experts

Each region will consist of three high-bandwidth, low-latency sites, named Availability Domains, which will be based within several miles of each other and operate fault-independently. It's unclear whether Oracle will build or lease the facilites required to float the UK portion of its cloud.

Is anyone else worried by the lack of insight of the part in bold.

What with the speed of light being as it is and fibre being plentiful, there is no reason why they can't increase "several miles" to something more aligned with recognised best practice on designing resilient infrastructure.

Understanding the market should be fairly high up if you want to compete with the big boys in the market.

If only there was a sensible Microsoft alternative then I'm sure companies would have it on their roadmap.

One thing is sure though, it's not going to be Windows 10 with all the spyware and forced updates and adverts. You do realise that we've got a business to run and all this IT spend is an overhead ?

Why do you think that there are still lots of places runnning 2003 and 2008 based OS's

Hopefully this is a good kick for the manufacturers of such kit to up their game for improved security and maintainability. Perhaps the devices should should go and fetch the latest firmware and auto-update say once a month / on each reboot. Obviously the devices would need double the flash storage to allow there to be two OS installs - one good install and one to roll forwards onto - like many other devices already do. This is not difficult to engineer in.

It sounds like there is a market today for local IT people to offer a service to improve people's home network security given that most just plug in kit and turn it on like any other device they buy on the high street Internet. This could be simple upgrades, change the passwords or more involved such as the use of open source firmware alternatives such as dd-wrt, OpenWrt or LEDE as a way of improving functionality and security at the same time.

End of the TV Licence

If they are publishing to the world, then the only possible outcome is to dump the UK only TV Licence.

Too little, too late the damage to trust is already done and they already have most of the data from the Win10 user base.

I can't see the embedded remote control capabilities and listening in on voice being compatible with basic confidentiality, security and regulatory requirements as it's not possible to guarantee who has access to the data processed on client pc's

About bloody time too.

Eurocrats - please learn from this and understand how much its been ridiculed and ignored.

Why not learn how the technologies work next time before you come up with any more crazy ideas for people to "make work"

LIDAR /RADAR swamping

So, what happens when there are a pile of electric cars all spamming out LIDAR and bouncing it off everything around and other cars receive their signals, won't that lead to incorrect sensing of the real world - presumably with bad consequences for everyone ?

How do they ensure that each vehicle is immune to other vehicles signals, except the ones that want to share between vehicles. Also, is there a market for after market modifiers that report the car to be longer / wider than it is so that there is a larger buffer around your car to all the rest of them ..

Is it really that difficult to sign up for a DDoS protection service. (*)

Yes, it costs a bit of money, but it will cost less than being on the front page of the press every week when your services are unavailable

(*) if you already did, then its time to change to one that works.

static

Given that brushing hair causes a lot of static electricity and that same electricity is the foe of anything electronic, I wonder how they deal with that.

Or did I miss the hidden "feature" of this device that its self charging from all the stray static

Also wonder how it copes with being given a rinse out under a tap to wash off all the gel.

What a completely pointless product.

bug free software

Is the manufacturer claiming only they can produce bug free software that ensures safety etc ?

If so, then they should teach the rest of the world their tricks, since nobody else has managed that yet.

Urgent requirement

The "Urgent requirement" Implies that someone didn't know that Christmas falls on the same day every year and they have 364 days to plan for the next one.

As they say : A failure to plan is a plan to fail

Add in the fantastic day rate and extended hours and short term nature of things - Looks like we know which way this one is going.

Would you like to run malware.exe ?

Whats the user going to do when they see the pop-up instead of their favourite web site ?

Answers on a post card please ..

Another cloud bursts

Heavy rain forecast for (ex) customers for several weeks.

On the positive side though, you'll get the contractual 90 days to move all your cloudy stuff to someone else, but don't forget, you are saving loads of money compared to having your own data centre.

You will of course have all your technical people sitting there idle and ready for just such an event and nobody will blink on the delivery of the programme you actually want now that this new task that popped up.

I wonder if "cloudburst" is on anyone's risk register ??