Posts by DS 1

No expandable storage

What a bunch of morons. I have no words for this kind of continual clusterfuck.

If there was a device to have an SD card slot on it, this was one.

Nokia + Microsoft - epic conbinations of failure.

Old Problem - getting fat now

What you see if the explosion. Its happened before. This was how computing islands exploded, and how in fact things like Novell and MS AD came about - computing structures combined under single sign on. There are single sign on entities out there, onelogin for example. As Trevor cites however, never before has such a system inherently been so attackable, or breakable by state forces. In the modern world, I'll pointedly state that as much as Trevor cites the US gov, this by extension today also seems to mean anything the US can do - China and others like to play as well.

So much so, I think that much of this is very wrong. The attractiveness of the cloud is over-riding security to an extent each of us has to have a reality check. Are you willing to write off security in exchange for this? Maybe you are, maybe you are not. You can run tightly controlled closed internal networks. If you pride security, then each of us have choices to make.

The equipment available means your own closed private networks can be done. And they were no so cheap to do.

detest powershell.

I bow down to its power. But its a hopeless method for individual admin, and the answer go look up how to do this on google is a dire appalling place to end up. I think MS got this wrong. They clearly built it and its a powerful API and there is no doubt on that. But its power is in the create stage, not administration. MS and partners should rightly be building their tools and UIs on it. And many are.

I've found despite its power, its real world power is limited, and confined. And in most cases the unskilled or semi skilled are simply able to do more, better, and faster using older methods and older toolsets.

Real power comes from how applicable and usable something actually is.

And one final note. Hyper V has been junk level for an age. In 2008 R2, the real world method to actually make it usable was to go get tools from codeplex that IMHO should have been supplied, and the Hyper V team should have been hammered into the ground until they did so.

Trevor's article leads me to think they have learned nothing.

Heh... Backup Exec

After it ate our servers, and we were good about it, we worked hard with them. They torched us and tried to treat us like idiots. We did all that we did on a promise that the bug would be made public - as would the fix. The renaged on that.

Will_never_buy_recommend_or be nice about Simantec _ever again.

Come on El Reg

Don't install software that looks dodgy? What kind of useless advisory is that? Install some security software. Well, yes, Quite. However, most malware is walking straight past.

Android is a whole heap of fun, but its not a place to do business or put personal stuff aboard - but hey, everyone is doing it right!

Android aside, the security landscape is pretty horrible and growing worse. I think most people and orgs are in the state of 'overwhelmed' and its being taken advantage of all across the board. Not fun...

Hmmm

The problem is that we always assume equality. IE - people here may think that its obviously photoshopped and chopped and this erodes the propaganda. It does, but the audience of this garbage may not be nearly so well educated. They may well absorb it all as lore.

The question isn't really being answered by anyone. We know they are a stupid regime. Are we stupid enough to plan for them not_to smart things? I'm half expecting bad news any day anout NK doing something very very dumb. What then? Because history tends to show that appeasing such acts only leads to very much larger problems.

If they did attack okinawa - and wreck the Americans there, what then? More sabre rattling? Serious talks with the Chinese? Personally my own view here is its too late for friendly diplomacy. The chinese need to be told 'You sheltered and protected these nut jobs, - if they attack, you will be held accountable" and follow it with some nuke armed subs pointed in china's direction. And a back channel of 'they make one step and you are glass''.

You are right.. and wrong

Firstly, brave of you to actually outline your edge of network box and its somewhat out of date configs - thus making it a target - for this - 50 lashes :)

DNSSEC and DNS work require skills and training, things businesses of many a note cease to provide. They have reached a point where like everything else, they can't be bothered to do right.

And 50 lashes for you claiming guilt. You did not start this attack, nor did you ask for it. There are however people who are responsible, and they are not being dealt with. Put the blame where it really lies. Cyberbunker and its miscreants.

I detest 8

So what. The idiots at MS are going to bludeon me and everyone until we get it. Oddly, we aren't getting it (see 8 sales vs Vista..)

I noted the comment that 100 workstations means nothing. Thats true. If its just 100 workstations. But its not. That guy is saying something echoing across the windows world. And wether he says it or not isn;t changing the fact that our user base is moving to IOS and Android. (I'm a PC fan, and I have been for a very long time, but Windows 8 might be a very big nail in the coffin.) - and whatever anyone tells you, you can bank this. Where a user base goes, the business will (in some cases wether it likes it or not...) follow.

I can fit my own start menu, and in fact some engineering under the bonnet of WinH8 is quite good. But this isn't enough. Metro in fact has to die. The sooner MS simply accept this, the better. They can keep shipping it on ARM/RT - but on the PC it needs to be terminated like a vista wrong turn. In actual fact I think its too late. I think 8 has wrecked the landscape to an unfixable degree. Business and people are no longer working in old tired models, and MS no longer has the grip it once held. If I *want* or if I am told.. Most (not all, but give it time) of our userbase can live on IOS or Android - or Linux for that matter. And the more that do, the more it shatters whatever grip there was.

If MS ship a platform that can't be setup/controlled from AD and GPO - I need no real education in seeing that they have lost their way totally. And they have.

Good article

I love VMware - used it since Workstation 2, but in recent years the stack from VMware has become vast, enormous and beyond the pale. And they really broke things once they left techs behind at the ESXi level, and I've not been able to stay with it since. I still run an ESXi 4 box and did not load up 5 as the cpu lics simply were in your face. Now the VMware website is like one enormous minefield. Inpenetrable, difficult, hard to resolve.

And as you say - its not like the product is easy to install. You now need to become a recluse level tech and better be good at reading best practice notes, and deep tech detail.

For very large enterprise and business I can see it has good value. But I think anywhere else the ground is eroding under their feet. For me, its vastly easier to use free hypervisors (proxmox, Xen, KVM, hyper V, Vbox and fudge my management of them because no one at my level really has a willingness to pay money for virtualisation, or its at least very thin on the ground.

They are in serious need of a simplistic ESXi variant thatssomething like MS small business servers was- where you get all the menu in a limited size stack - with simplicity and ease of management at its core, and say upto 6 hardware boxes and x number of VMs.

No Money?

Perhaps your Journalist might like to repost'e the spokesperson. You've just fined MS 700 Million dollars. And you previously fined them so the total is in the billions. And yet you have no tech money, and no money in a kitty to do this. So - where did this money go? On the great EU gravy train?

The Register needs to bite back - and hard. These commisars are unelected scum bags, and they are involved in huge fines and the money disappears. And thir audits fail, and their accounts fail. And yet they sit their postulating and dictating to all around. Its disgusting.

Did you really just say

Ethernet (sadly not gigabit).

Reaaaallly?

See, this is the entire problem. These Ultrabooks repeatedly are not ultra. They tend to just be thin, compromised, horrible systems. I bet for £1200 you get... intergrated graphics.

So what you are offering me is a thin version of a business notebook from 7 years ago, with some decent proc and ram and mediocre HD space. Thanks. Oh, and its £1200 notes.

Intel and whoever at intel made these 'Ultra' bullcrap models and ideas need a serious kicking. Its little wonder that people are observing that instead of this they will buy a tablet for down to a tenth of the price.

Shipping any pc in 2013 that does not have decent GPU and other kit is unforgivable. And its serious time that this got drilled into the industry, reviewers, and the rest. Its pretty dire at the low end, but at the £1200 price mark its a complete joke.

All true

But the numbers are small. Sales in the quarter of 152M?

(iNTEL) Net income for the last three months of 2012 fell 27% to $2.47bn (£1.54bn), although the figure beat analysts' forecasts. Revenue fell 3% to $13.5bn.

See the difference? I'm all for ARM kicking ass - I would love a brit CPU and technology core to be world class in size and scale, but I am frequently surprised how small the ARM stuff is money wise.

Hmm

Maybe I am off here, but the problem with this - is its a bit of fantasy. Trevor seems to have access to a high level of funding that is beyond the norm. While it is fun to talk 10Gbps and 60K - the harsh reality is that this is all fantasy beyond reality for most of us. We are in the real world having to make and mend and build using very minimal costs. I suppose its nice to look in on this, but what fun is a project you can't actually do yourself, or partake in.

Also, I have to say, MS and Windows are in terrible trouble. The OS licensing when in many cases you can do it for free is a real world challenge. What future for AD when you can't even hook up surface to it and group policy? What are you paying all these huge costs on licensing? For joined up cross device defined design? What with in tune and azure?

Hmm

The capacity to deliver a viable aircraft is a good one. The Lightning had a cut off and drought in its development because the UK gov decided the future was unmanned aircraft and rockets. Some 50 years later and here we are.

The only people who can run drones are people who have complete air control. Using these toys against a real airforce will end badly. But in that context, its use against current enemies must be cheaper and possibly a better economy that more expensive manned flight. And if you lose one, its not as bad as handing the taliban a pilot.

The big hole in strategy here is the Pakistani's are not really our friends. And their F16 pilots are actually useful. On the day the decide enough is enough, the singular use of drones will close out. Stark choices will be made and it won't be drones in the answer.

Hmm

The only real reason any company buys into, uses, partakes and invests in open soure - is to increase market share. Once they realise it can work for them - they increasingly take to it. Forget the name. Either you are prepared to accept this idea, and then enxtend to MS or you don't. If you don't want people to partake, and invest, and you make the whole thing hostile, then people won't.

Are people complaining about 10 years ago and MS not joining and contributing, or are they complaining that they do and are. Sometimes you won't actually have a difference. Those people just hate MS..

MS can't win in that situation - at least in such people's eyes.

So what?

The RT platform doesn't really have much software, even in its primary 'store'. Getting stuff from elsewhere when its a trickle isn't worth much.

To be blunt, its as dead a platform as there is. No software, and pretty incomptible with previous windows systems. It was born dead. Good luck trying to revive it.

Good times ahead

PC gaming is on the up. The games are good, there are exciting things due for release - its again the platform to be on, with even midgrange gear able to oblitaerate what a console can do. And steam is largely great. However, this means that the high street is dead. Its abuse and hatred of the PC and selling its soul for the console means its time is up. If you walk into the histreet stores and talk PC they have eyes glazing over and either don't know or don't care; why should I give them my custom. Same with PCs. Who on the high street cares or offers a good deal? Almost no one. So people will buy their XPS boxes from Dell.

Its a shame that MS is such a mess with 8, otherwise things could be better. The PC will be the platform in 2013 - but it will be that DESPITE the vendors and the high street. The high street will suffer horribly. Which devs will want to be on 6 year old consoles in 13? No one worth their salt.

I love PC's

and have done for a long time. But its serious crunch time. PC's today are in general at the low medium and ultrabook ends - just rehashed, warmed up shit. Its little wonder that people have tired of buying the same rehashed, reheated garbage ever x years. Some people say a PC is enough, but brutally I personally have not found it to be thus. Today if you wish to work on or study on the enterprise software levels (example, 16GB for exchange) then you start to reach a point where you need fantastic monster machines. And who provides these - not many options, and very little in the medium range. So, people more and more find tablets equal to rdiculous ultrabooks. And who can blame them. And on the server side, given the vast cost and nightmarish levels required for working on serious server level stuff (Hi Microsoft, welcome server 2012, powershell, windows 8, and..) its little wonder there is a run taking place to move cloudwards. And not to azure either.

AMD could save itself. It could simply up the spec on its motherboards and oem's (LAPTOPS). Why not put 4 dimm/simm slots on every laptop chipset. Guess what, I'd like a machine I can put a lot of ram in without a nightmare price?? Oh look, you've just created a bioundary layer where a PC is again bigger, badder and better than tablets.

I'll say this to every single PC vendor out there. You are not going to out tablet the ARM platform at tablet level, and certainly not on rediculous over priced garbage ultrabooks. If I want a thin mobile device with mobility at its core, I am not going to pay your price. End of. However, I still want the PC of tommorow. Something powerful - capable beyond the tablet or cloud. And I'm willing to pay good money for it. But its graphics, and its cpu and its storage and its memory must not just be another reheated hash of the last gen over and over and over. Yes, I want a 1TB drive, yes I want 16GB, yes, I actually want a decent GPU not just rehashed junk intel gfx. And if you don't want to build that machine, thats ok, I don't have to buy the crap you're shipping today thats junk. And by the figures no one else wants that stuff either.

The PC isn't going to win the war in mobility. And its not going to survive in the areas like battery life, convenience or light usage that the tablets rightly dominate in. The bulk of its software library isn't even built for that paradigm. Built the powerful PCs of tommorow and start doing it today. You will in either case have lower sales figures, but the powerful PC will always hav e its place, and the junk models won't.

People are dropping the PC - because the last 2-4 machines they bought were junk and they are reaching a tipping point where they don't want to have that complexity + junk again when simnplistic tablet platforms answer more of their desires.

Lastly - ultrabook - a huge nail in the coffin of PCs. Intel lost the plot on this. Its taken its quite marvellous Ivy bridge and sandy bridge lines, and crippled them in the worst chassis. With limited connectivity (Its a PC - PC's soul is plugging things into it, not removing the connectors) and heat induced crippled perf - one can only marvel at this dirge. At huge price as well.

In the meantime, PC gaming is screaming for a vendor to step in and bring it. The games are at a surperior level to consoles or tables - assuming the right hardware is applied. And the window to catch it right is now.

This failure is going to result in the death of a very large part of the PC industry. Thats going to bite all affected. Would be much better to attack the issues in a unified way. That way is not the ultrabooks.

veiled.. in shadows

The sales figures are just that. There has been heavy discounting, including £14.95 offers. With the level of discounting taking place the figures can be very spurious. I don't think anyone who is sensible actually believes 8 is bigger/better/selling harder than 7 - its just not seen on the street and in the feedback. Only low percentages of people like 8, most hate it.

Really nice.

I gave it a test run - have to say Clement and his team actually 'get it' in terms of making something.

IMHO - Shuttleworth should go talk to them and should consider making that whole team his UI folks, and simply give them the full resources to make 'the linux desktop'.

Not the core problem

Several years ago, HP started the slaughter in their engineering departments and teams. They did this to save money. The innovation did not stop - it never does in technology companies, but a clear devastation hot home.And this is never immediate. You can see years leter, when most of their laptops end up being reknowned for overheating, and having poor reliability, their printing is no longer a class leader, and that in servers they make good solid stuff, but Dell will nominally match for 1/3 less cost, AND your support and how you run is old school, beurocratic, and hefty.

HP needs to seriously get back on a bleeding edge of tech, but also, it needs to get back to being very very good at its bread and butter stuff. I stopped getting HP gear outside of servers for no other reason than the gear just simply dropped below even average. Which isn't good enough for HP, and its not good enough for me. I am glad Ms Whitman turned round the direction - but thats not enough. Its got to get back to making kick ass gear - in every range, and be fanatical about doing so.

I don't mind that they want to do software and services, but if you churn out crummy printers and end uers gear, how are you impressing me that your services or software won't be the same fail.

Metro

Here is Metro.

http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/windowsexperience/archive/2012/03/08/getting-around-in-windows-8.aspx

And here are your keyboard shortcuts.

(It is sadly a point of contempt mixed with comedy and insanity that MS got so twisted into the idea that their new touch interface was so deficient to keyboard/mouse users in operation that the saving solution was to resort to keyboard shortcuts.)

Can you seriously imagine Android or Apple resorting to keyboard shortcuts as the prospective solution to a UI failure for IO / HID device operation? No.

Oh - I know, some people will take umbridge, having used keyboard shortcuts forever - and deem this wrong. But its not. Metro should not need KS for simplified design and operation - unless it was deeply flawed.

And by the way - the comms to sinofsky were meant to be patronising and contempt fueled - and its easy to understand why. Sinofsky actually believes in wrecking things, and was unreserved in how fuck you he was going to be in getting it done. Well, people told them - just as D did in multiple areas.

Ribbon in explorer in a touch env - reeaaaaallly?

And there are no sane reasons for not providing a sound viable working file manager (explorer) and to focus on making it better. Not worse. And there was no sanity in removing the reg change that allowed end users to put back 7's start menu - that was an outright act of vandalism.

Bah

The playbook was horrible on release. But the updates have made it much more well rounded. The thing does all the basics better than my android stuff does (pics, film, media, pdf, music) with a weakness in the appstore. But £129 for a baseline tablet that is high quality and 64GB... its worth a much higher score on value alone than the 70% given.

Dropped bollacks

Nokia's last chance in terms of Linux was a near miss. The N900 had some promise. But here is a list of the screw up - probably not alone - other people might add their own.

1. The device landed in market - and was largely not available.

2. Sales outlet behaved stupidity. Refusing to sell me one in the only store that had stock unless I did it on contract (example).

3. Poor touch screen. The touch screen was a mistep from a company that historically understood hardware. The poor screen pretty much foobared the phone from a user standpoint (part 1)

4. Software - most of the software was good, but it had large flaws that required some fixing. Given the 'enormous' teams of engineers and 'developers' floating around inside Nokia, Its hard to credit that they simply failed to respond and make things happen.

5. Had a fast follow up device come out - one that fixed the N900 flaws, it might well have done well.

Nokia was an old engineering company being annihilated by a faster moving world. The N900 needed to be some slow moving thing that had a 3 year life like the N800 before it. But the times had changed. If Linux and the N900 and later phones did not have an Android level of development and speed and some real pazazz, there was never any hope for it.

I frankly don't know what all these developers did at Nokia. To be blunt, the software on the N800 and later 900 was so old, tepid and slow in fixes coming - you wonder if any work happened on them at all.

LAN and WAN cross over is profuse

I'm sorry, but the LAN only thing does not fly with me. LAN's today are not simply limited closed pools we reside. Devices enter and leave the LAN, and the LAN intersects across WAN technology everywhere. And as everyone wants everything, security has been watered down to never watered down to this level before levels.

I looked at these vulns, and they were brutally ugly. End users who took a misstep were owned. The coverage viewing these vulns were ballpark correct at how effective they were, and its stupid and childish to think that if this thing surfaced on some other LAN that it would not spread. Its windows vulnerability attacks were effective.

Given its multiple vectors covering USB insertion vulns as well, thinking this think was boxed in is wrong headed.

UK Judge

That story needed to be read. I read the headline and was appalled. The problem was if you read the whole story, the criminal has made some steps the judge regarded as serious in terms of turning round their life/behaviour. I'm not a leftie, I hate it when this garbage happens, but in the case of this judge, its pretty clar to me that he was following the right track. The point of the criminal justice system has to be to get/help people turn their lives round. Society and the judiciary have to work on this premise. So, despite the headlines, the Judge had a point.

I don't want burglers to be treated with kid gloves. My gut feeling is throw the book at them - BUT, I'd rather see them stop doing it and doing something with their lives. This is much better than both sides of the coin suffering ongoing failure, repeat offending, repeat burglary, rinse - repeat. The public/tax payers end up paying over and over if thats the trodden path...

Sillymantec

A company that generally seems to move all its development off to third would countries, while having management still done by older shool middle and upper management. The result? Diabolically poor software releases. Get into the higher problem solvers, and you'll find the American guy has to talk to the Indian guy tommorow, as he is already finished for the day. The UK op is riddled with high paid sales idiots.

The engineering at symantec long ago perished in the ever deepeing race to the bottom. All the useless middle and upper management still rack in the dosh, which is where the money goes.

The last time I spent with them was when their backup products started eating our servers.

True comment from Backup Exec defect ********

This is Symantec’s confirmation and verification the issue you’re experiencing is a flaw within the CPS code. Specifically,

If CleanUpPushDeploy is called with an empty string, it will attempt to delete

everything on the root drive. The value in PushSource string value is what is

passed to CleanUpPushDeploy.

PushSource string value should be c:\<guid>

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\SOFTWARE\Symantec\Install Status\PushSource

So, in the event the above registry guid is non-existent, we’re defaulting to the root of the volume to do our clean-up; this is “unwise”.

End of defect info

The poorly written installer was not worth much, and the uninstaller was seriously bad for our health.

Yes, Deleting my whole C drive in your uninstall of a poorly working product was not well recieved at my end either. Unwise. Yes. I suspect that reserved, cautious use of english has a comic tone of indulgence unworthy in a senario where your un-installer just did a *.* delete on a client server.

I will say the team dealing with the issue were very good about it, but the rest of symantec were_absolutely not. We were promised a public advisory because we worked hard with them on the bug on the premise that we might at least warn others. In the end senior Symantec people made sure that never went out.

Ended up with some smoothies in suits talking down to use with their brycreemed hair and pin stripes, trying to diminish the scope of the issue and pretend it was not worthy of complaint. To be honest, bugs I can work with. Problems exist in this world. What I can't and won't is vendors who are patently bad, evil, indifferent. And the none publishing of a very embarrasing, but lethal problem for customers showed us they were not to be trusted. Ever. Other people deserved to know about it and get a chance not to suffer what hit us.

To be blunt, the issue I worked on should have had Symantec offering compensation to us, if nothing else for our diligent and friendly and full complete co-operation despite extremely stressful circumstances.

And at that point we ceased using Symantec products anywhere. Ever. And no, I'm never going back.

Blah

Sorry, but serious video means serious storage, and by that I mean no one in their right mind doing the work the reg whined about on spindle or local SSD storage.

Hmm

The private cloud comes in at a scale where its crossing over from SMB to Medium sized business. And you better have the teams in place to cope with the chunky workload the article glosses over. By the time you double checked all the whitelisting, costs, and nightmares, maybe your own old skool servers in a rack will seem in fact a better option.

Microsoft's focus is all on clouds and vast structure. It thinks everyone is like that. They are not.

However, they might evolve that so no one runs their own stuff. But when you reach that scale_you really won't run it yourself, so the last thing you'll want is SVCMM and a bucket load of techs. Why pay and run all that when MS or some other cloud bunch of lunatics already pays absolute bottom dollar to techs in some data centre to screw things up for you anyway. Its much more fun to blame them and not your own teams.

The race to the bottom is exciting.

Bleh

I have no idea who or why Ultrabooks even exist. They can't compete with lighttweight tablets. They are only viable as thin limited machinery - and their pricetags are lunacy at play.

If you take even midrange laptop kit - its better spec, better gear, and less limited. Yes, it weighs a bit more but I don't flippin care. When kit starts to be looks alone and half of its function is gone and the price is quadrupled - its a wankpad.

People are better off with a decent PC and a cheap tablet. I don't even know anyone who has even considered an Ultrabook.

The problem is

That although MS have worked through and bred a common working set of API's - these are not windows. They are a metro based structure, WinRT, and so on, and basically break with previous windows. Metro isn't windows. The new WinPhoMo isn't winpho mo - the software isn't even compatible in terms of legacy apps.

All the garbage being punted about Metro. Its a shitty garbage touch UI. Its being foisted on people because MS got into a funk and think they have to get on ARM. They also think they can just drag and force everyone over. This kind of stupid arrogance in multiples deserves failure.

And having had some conversations with Sinofsky - Its clear the guy doesn't give a fig about what was, only what he thinks will be, there is a tear taking place.

MS is full of stupid idiocy at present. But someone there is still smart. They extended the lifespan on windows 7 - if they are in fact smart in response to realising the harsh factors that are going to be Windows 8/Metro world.

I have no idea why people media wise like Metro. In my testing orf it - its a steaming, clunky, pile of garbage. Yes, it kind of drags a windows version onto ARM. Assuming you can do without legacy, support for management, win32 apps, and a shitload - then fine.

As for Nokia - to be clear, IMHO Nokia are slow. Clunky. Old school. When they make handsets - its bedevilled by lack of supply, hitches, and slow updates. In the face of the new platforms - where the updates and rate of change are rapid - its just way off the pace. The Linux N900 took ages to get into supply.

Their new model has arrived, but has a glitch. Frankly you can make nicely engineered phones all you want, if they are riddled with poor, unsupported, lacklustre software - you deserve failure.

And Elop's mad Winphomo idiocy deserves failure. Nokia should have been shipping as wide a range of Phone OSs as anyone, but plumped for Metro. Idiots.

Hmmm

People still don't get whats going on. The Metro shift isn't just a change of START button and UI. Its a shift into a different platform and thats inclusive of things like Kernel and power management. Its not jusdt apps looking different. Its a change of the actual platform, and a death of Win 32/x64 as it stands in the older desktop.

In desktop terms, its abysmal. Its taking high powered gear and lobotomising it. Who the hell would want a phone style single apping nature in such devices? And the jarring crash to desktop for legacy is just as abysmal, miserable and the removal of the start button is a lasting piece of vandelism to try and force users back to Metro.

Few people understand why tho. That enforcement of Metro has to happen to allow Metro on ARM. I'm not calling this garbage Windows on ARM, because its not. Its at best Metro on ARM.

I have nothing good to say on Windows 8. Its a vandelising job on what was Windows, seemingly to try and shoehorn an ARM build of windows in some foul cludge. 99% of applications remain legacy, win32/x64, and these applications today remain superior to Metro in every way.

What I am surprised is how much latitude the Metro nazi's have managed to get inside Redmond and from the press. They deserve none in either case.

Microsoft should make Windows 8 Metro optional on the desktop, and primary on tablet/ARM, and they should break this down now. There is no reason whatsoever to deciate Win32/x64 this way, and beyond that, I can see Win 8 being a complete train wreck outside of tablets/ARM.

Worse, without showstopping Metro applications, its coming in very late against IOS and Android, and it may be a train wreck there too.

Metro - garbage.

However, its harsh but simple. MS can't pull the whole MS structure onto smaller ARM devices. And somewhere in the great fat wallowing mass - They decided that they must get on ARM. The desktop, Start Button, and legacy, old apps, and multiple old MS technologues you find on X86/X64 can't get across.

So fundamentally its about trying to force a new start, hence all the abuse of previous, and the deletion of the Start menu. By doing this, they hope to force a new start and get everything on the new structure in as short a time as possible.

Some of which makes sense.

MS is currently moving at great pace. They are throwing out the baby with the bath water, and putting the cart before the horse. They've been on this trail bnow for a few years. Do you know what the future holds for dot net? silverlight? No? Nor do most others. What about previous technologies and investments? Azure and powershell, and a lot of core work has been done to make their stuff data centric in nature, to compete in the cloud layers. Screw what was before, its all azure, office 365, and now Win 8 (which if you test it links into all that crap.)

As a tech, and a user, and a customer - not one part of this helps me. Not one part of it uses my time and invetment wisely, and most of it will leave me worse off with poorer products, and more limited services. Sometimes simplification can be a good thing. But this is all about doing what MS wants, to help MS, and to sell new stuff.

If you carefully examine things, a lot of MS products in recent times have less feartures, for example, check MSN messenger, which had a lot of features moved from it into office 365. A lot of stripping is taking place. And if you want it back you're going to pay for it.

That is.... assuming all this goes to plan. I don't have to use any of that MS. And there may well come the time where I don't.

At least

She's put a stop to some seriously bad bleeding going on at HP. The way they were going was dead man walking. And yes, she has instilled a bit of swagger and self confidence in what HP is - about time

Dying.....

So its probably a pain induced Owwww Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww rather than this. But I digress. SJ - RIP, will miss your showmanship on the yearly 'one last thing'.

Fail

Someone needs to tell the design teams at all these companies making Laptops that can game - STOP making the goddamn cursor keys small. These keys need to be viably big and chunky on a gaming rig.

Bleh

So, everything pre Windows 8 gets presented back to the user in the worst way I have seen since forever. And Metro - which I have tested and tried out has little useful content, and is a diabolically poor interface on mouse and keyboard if rammed face first into the user. There is no bridge or cross over. Want to use a windows 7 app? Crash back to the now broken desktop.

I have no idea why people like 8. In my testing its not even good under touch, and frankly the moment you start applying it against needing to do real work - ie run the real windows environment, it gets much worse.

And the crazy part is that people are trying to make a bone to bone comparison of Android against Windows. Its really like comparing tanks to rifles. Neither works well in the other's space, and trying to make a jump to lightspeed to reach the other's ground is in fact stupid.

Transformers

I started at the beginning pondering how were they going to turn this cartoon into some viable movie.

The truth is, they did a belting job. I loved both movies, although as with much sci fi, you have to be in the mood to suspect your disbelief and just take the joy ride. Assuming you do this, both movies are a blast and I hope 3 is the same.

Anyone quibbling and making oddball statements about how a transformer movie doesn't come up to snuff in historical and philosophiocal movie terms seems to miss the point, and their basis for existing.

Probably has some wear and tear.. but

I recollect when google first arrived. Came from no where, but each such came back with solid precise answers. Today, searches on Google come back in millliseconds, and are the same precision.

Without being harsh about this, but its not broken, and at least in search seems not to need 'fixing'.

Other areas of the google empire may indeed bring or highlight weaknesses or lack of something, but not so much in their core business... search

Odd company

They basically know how to make great handsets. But always struck me as being slow, slow, and very slow in getting anything working software wise at all. I imagine internally that trying to drive through this change is probably like trying to move the ice age.

Anyway, the last time Nokia were interesting for me was the N900. Had they made a better phone with decent screen imput, and better (read, Linux that actually got worked on, improved, finished, updated, instead of broken and incomplete) that would have been nice. And they should have used Android too, but dread to think what their software update program would have panned out at. Probably still stuck on 1.6

I don't understand how you end up being that large, with those numbers and end up also being slower than treacle at _any_delivery_whatsoever.

Its not hard no matter how well engineered the handsets might be at how badly behind they ended up in a time where software change, speed, and progression has to be lightening, not molasses.

Its done, its cool?

Well, he may have been at Cononical - but he seems as deluded as many there seem to be regarding Unity. But he is right I guess, having made the desktop unusable, broken, and unpleasant, and unconfigurable, maybe its best to move of to do cloud based offerings.

Linux on the desktop until recent times seems to me to have made steady progress. But everything in recent times is utterly depressing, and enough to drive me off it as a desktop in totaility. Neither Gnome 3 or Unity are fit for desktop use, and they all seem to have gone tablet crazy, even though they are not on tablets, but being jammed onto desktops.

Hahahah

I like the idea checkpoint are talking to us as if they know a thing about reducing complexity. The last time I dealt with them, their licensing models and pain in the ass methods made MS licensing version 6 look like fun.

I like the Euro fighter

And I believe it has a very good basis for dogfighting. I don't believe in Lewis's idea that an Air superiority fighter is not required, indeed, I believe in future years, it will be badly needed. However, the plane itself is one thing. The comedy of Labout and the EU lovers and others involved is another ball game. A plane with no spares, a lack of flight time (Hint, Air Superiority depends on being the best pilots, because the plane can be a secondary factor to a variable degree) is a total fail within the ethos.

Britain's defense budgets and planning are currently destroyed, and a total shambles. Its going to take a great deal to fix it.