Posts by ntevanza

Run away.

You heard it here first.

I can't read that graph

I think I'm cerise-russet colour blind.

Will switching to Windows fix this?

Garter love triangle

In a magic quadrant of industry analysts, where would Gartner be?

L'enfer

Can you nominate other people?

Abused puppy capitalism

'most public tech companies right now have shareholder bases that do not want them to do new things. And instead want them to give back cash.'

As a tech shareholder I'm personally pretty tired of tech firms giving back cash. On the risk aversion scale, the managers of public companies are down there with nematodes and abused puppies. Unfortunately, at the other end of this scale you have wolves and parasitic worms.

Capitalism is great, until it works.

Although

'Sonos speakers can have internet radio stations streamed to them, as well as play music stored on your smartphone, tablet, notebook or PC.'

Beware - Sonos cannot hook into PC audio directly, other than by <gasp> cables. You have to emulate an internet radio station by serving PC sound over http, which is relatively tedious. This is no good for video, or presumably for gaming - the audio stream arrives too late.

It will read local files, or SMB shares over the LAN, which is why it can claim to play PC sound.

Go Black.

There's no reason to buy the other ones. 5 year warranty, which you won't need.

Show me you care

This unified thing would ring true if MSFT were selling a credible business phone. With the disclaimer that I haven't seen W10 or the new 900 yet, the list of basic business requirements set by Blackberry five or more years ago is still not met by any other manufacturer.

3 day battery life, in use

local public private key encryption

programmable notification LED

auto end of day power off

power on alarm

charge while off

Exchange integration that works, particularly for calendars

no bloody beeping in meetings

<add your favourite BB feature here>

plus

app signing

remote power off

update control

Presence

+1 to Mr Dell for not being an alphahole, and for doing the rounds at his own show. You don't have presence if you're not there.

On presence: To meet Eddie Merckx is to know what goes through the mind of prey seconds before death. In one second I knew he was an unblinking, unsentimental killing machine. In retrospect I'm glad he had a bicycle to play with and not a country.

It's in the eyes.

Computery science

I'd be interested in a view from a grown-up computer scientist. What I have read about engine management system development is so interesting that it helps explain how VW (and its competitors) could be unaware of what code is running on board its cars. Unfortunately we have to discount the interestingness to account for illiteracy and speculation, until we get a grown-up to look at it.

To wit, we have been told that there are millions of lines of code running in an EMS, and that it is not coded by humans. It sounds prima facie like a machine learning approach. I'm not sure I believe it. First, that sounds too hard for Bosch or VW when IBM and MIT have only just managed it. Second, it would be harder to certify for safety than human readable code. Remember, this thing has its virtual foot on your accelerator (all VWs fly by wire) and brakes (all VWs have ESC).

If it's not machine learning, then it sounds like an inefficient mess. I don't know which is worse.

So long

Dell and EMC employees and customers have my sympathy, for the first time, and for a limited period only.

Summary of this article for the busy reader

Nothing happened.

RAID 1

Every time I hear one of these 'officials raided VW HQ' stories I have to pinch myself. It's 2015. What do they expect to find? Files? Microfilm? Typewriters, so they can trace the source of the incriminating memo? WTF?

Gartnerballs

Half of consumers intend to buy a PC (not a tablet) in the next year? I checked their press release to see whether this astonishing prediction was qualified in any way (left handed consumers, or consumers who hate pie). It is not.

Bless 'em.

Run away

Most deals like this fail. They are driven by bankers on commission and private equity houses looking to turn someone's equity into someone's debt. Viewed in that light, this makes perfect sense.

All is forgiven, Carly

Sell all your shares and buy popcorn, in that order.

Here's the rub

For home use Win 10 is okay. There have been no complaints, with start button replacements installed. The interface isn't quite finished, but from what I can tell, there have been no detectable changes under the hood/bonnet in consumer versions other than hacking the internal version to 10. None whatsoever.

And the rub is, unlike 6, 7 and 8, that makes it an easy technical transition, but also rather pointless. For example, 8 had better security than 7. 10 has nothing.

I can understand privacy concerns, because the data governance cock-up probability function approaches 1 asymptotically.

Gooey

This is a convenient distraction from some other problems that are harder for users or admins to solve.

My observation after a few weeks is that the UI is a step backwards, and the underlying OS is really just Windows 6.3.

Silly little annoyances that should have been fixed haven't. For example, every time Explorer starts up it declares it can't connect my network drives, which subsequently work fine, with little red crosses next to them. This is a startup sequence bug straight out of 2009.

New infuriators have been invented. For example, white title bars don't work, and you can't change them. If you superimpose windows, particularly in a remote scenario, you can't see what the hell you're doing.

There is a new Explorer bug where folders full of thumbnails will spontaneously jump to the parent when the thumbnails are updated.

New annoyances have been imported from other shells - for example the skinny Xfce-style window resize areas. They extend beyond the window to allow for less precise mouse movement, but this doesn't work over RDP because the mouse pointer doesn't switch properly, and there is no visual feedback.

Edge is horrible to use and has coarse enough control over cache, security and privacy settings that I don't know what it's doing.

One my boxes, installed clean, steadfastly refuses to find executables in the search box, with or without indexing. Instead it says it's getting search ready for me.

All this is superficial, but there's enough of it to add up to a slight loss of productivity. In all, ignoring the start menu (you can just install the one you want), the Win10 UI is a more disruptive change than Win 8's.

Recovery partitions have gone away. That's good.

I can find nothing new in the OS itself. All the same settings are where they were. All the same drivers work. There is some incompatibility with hypervisors, which seems to be the result of stricter or broader application EMET-style vulnerability mitigations, maybe. Many of these were already baked into Win 8.

The obverse the lack of change is that backward compatibility is excellent. That that is the most I can say is a sign of maturity, but also of stasis.

Accuracy v precision

A measurement can only be accurate with respect to a precision. If your GDP figures keep changing, but within a known and acceptable precision, then they're accurate.

This distinction is easiest to grasp in geographic applications. No-one complains that their road is 100m too far to the left on a map of the whole country.

+1 for universal welfare payments. Less (albeit non-zero) room for cock-ups and fraud, and meaningful for those who need them. Insert here a well crafted point about governments' ability to target benefits precisely.

A pox on both your subnets

We do exactly this. BYO devices get to connect to a bad network that is treated as public by the good network. Bad devices are free to infect each other in an bacchanalian orgy of licentious filth, as is their wont. However, unfortunately, those bad devices accumulate (securely transmitted) sensitive data. Maybe it's encrypted, maybe it isn't. We can wipe them remotely, unless we can't. Seemed like a terrible idea at the time, and still does.

It's not about the hardware.

It's not about the hardware.

It's not about the hardware.

It's not about the hardware.

The shell is not the OS

Among MS's many misfortunes in the whole Win8 fiasco is that the tech press has failed the public in helping to distinguish the OS from the shell. Everyone hates the shell, and dissing it is an easy way to get eyeballs. It kind of misses the point of what an OS is, particularly for a technical audience.

Personally I don't give a fuck about the shell. I care that Win8 was a more secure OS than Win7, with some new features (storage spaces or whatever they're called) and quirks (e.g. something happened to volume shadow copy).

This unfortunate development is repeating itself for Win 10.0. What we need is some hard info on whether Win10, the OS, improves on Win 6.3, the OS, and indeed 6.1. For end users, power users, and sysadmins.

Jernilisim v clickbait

Jernilisim would be finding out and reporting how many people had been affected by this issue, if it is real. On the forum link provided it looks like between 3 and 54 people. For added value, compare to the failure rate for past updates, or for competitors' updates.

Without numbers or other facts, you have not earned the right to the schadenfreude we all know and love.

The Second Law of the Internet states that he who relies on clickbait will eventually be eaten by Ariana Huffington. Think about that for a few seconds. Then write this article again.

Having used Edge,

I'm sticking with Firefox.

You can switch Cortana off. It's a good effort, but like any of these tools, its value is in integration, for example with your mail and calendar. It's not that useful for anyone who doesn't buy into the whole bundle. Techies therefore aren't the audience. For the rest, it is a credible ploy to grab market share for Bing and Edge, and to target ads. That is smart.

However, given past form, and the antitrust reaction, MS are sailing fucking close to the wind by changing the default browser on upgrade. Now that Firefox has demonstrated that it's possible, they will also attract attention for failing to offer an alternative search engine behind Cortana. That is dumb.

If I'm bored with Google

imagine how poor Larry and Sergey must feel.

You ain't seen me.

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Dog bites man.

Kidz

Let's have a discussion about what happens when you employ kids at random in customer service roles. Ever been to a phone shop? This is a wider problem. Sorry, opportunity.

Das Vaterland

What, Austria? Their trains are nice, but they only have three.

Solar climate denial

Another solar minimum is just going to make us more blasé about solar maxima. These are especially nasty for the long bits of metal on which all readers, and indeed writers, of this site rely for their livelihoods.

https://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk%20reports/solar%20storm%20risk%20to%20the%20north%20american%20electric%20grid.pdf

Bidding war

I think you meant boasting war.

I buy AMD

because I don't want to sleep with the friendly gorilla.

AMD has demonstrated breathtaking foot marksmanship over the years, but their tech is mainly good, always reliable, and in parts excellent.

What are *you* doing?

Economics are everywhere

If the missing storage hardware investment is going into solid state storage, this will bring forward the point at which the marginal cost of flash approaches that of the Winchester disk.

However, we know there isn't enough flash foundry capacity to cater for storage growth, even if total Winchester disk capacity continues to increase. This puts a brake on Winchester -> flash substitution.

If the marginal price of storage rises or stops dropping, there will be an incentive to raise investment. That investment is likely to go to solid state tech. But building a foundry is like building a ship or an office building - a colossal bet on future prices. The dynamics are exactly like those of shipping or commercial property, which lurch from periods of echoing overcapacity to periods of frantic building. Half the projects in those businesses go bust, and no-one knows which half until it's too late.

In semiconductors, the flat panel debacle still haunts manufacturers. Building flat panel factories to cater for seemingly insatiable demand turned former industrial giants into shells. LG, Samsung, Sharp and Sony were all humbled by flat screen bets. Between 2004 and 2010 the industry lost $13 billion, according to the Economist (2012). That is chicken feed in comparison to what awaits poorly judged solid state storage investments.

Will we have a Mexican stand-off of non-building? Or there will have to be consolidation or co-operation on semiconductor fab mega-projects that don't lead to overcapacity because they are cartels?

If manufacturers compete on megaprojects, some of them will be fatally injured, which leads to de facto concentration, and more manufacturer pricing power.

Long term price falls are still possible, with current dynamics, but not in the most likely scenarios.