Posts by EddieD 1117 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
I have a Mate 20 Pro (great phone btw) which has the Google stuff on, and I know I'm a light user, but it goes 3 days before dropping to 30% charge, in normal mode.
Huawei seem to have got the knack for switching things off and on in the background.
What do you count as a reliable service? I have VirginMedia (and no, I don't work for them or anything else) and in the last decade you can count the number of noticeable outages I've had in the last decade on the fingers of one hand - I'd call that pretty damn reliable.
Chris Addison on Mock the Week summed it up (this is a slight paraphrase) "We have the total knowledge of the Universe at our fingertips which is utterly amazing, but let it go down for five minutes and we're all 'AM I LIVING IN A THIRD WOLD COUNTRY THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS OH MY GOD THE HUMANITY'"
He has a point. We should all know that things can happen to IT systems that you can't plan against - what is most important - and here I will accept the criticism of VM - is communicating with the customers. Having a recorded message on your helpline that tells you to consult a webpage when your internet is out is pretty awful.
>Workmates have 2017 Dell corporate laptops. And they do lose an hour out of their morning or afternoon when Windows 10 decides to update, often unexpectedly.
If they're running a corporate version of Win10, the corporation should have taken charge of updates, that's one of the advantages of a corporate version of Windows.
Here, our corporate versions of Win10 update when instructed, and give users a 24 hour notice period, and schedule all installations to start not before 6pm (local) and not after 6am (local). I've never had one problem.
Similarly, at home, I have set my work hours, and I get notified when the machine has updates to install, I've never had the machine just announce a reboot. All the folk who have control suddenly taken off them need to RTFM .
"Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the water just metres downstream would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer at most" "
For an article by the BBC about a technology company that's not Apple, it's remarkably positive. Obviously, if it had been Apple, it would have been on the front page for at least a month, and you'd have needed kleenex to see the images.
Just having a mobile with us takes away privacy, the base stations, wifi, whatever track us, and that data alone can reveal more than we realise.
I don't do social media, other than a few sites like El Reg, and I try and keep details of me on the web to a minimum, but like it or loathe it human data is probably the fastest growing, and given the market caps, most profitable, commodity on the planet.
I'm waiting till the Googles and Facebooks try and market the intrusion as motivational and supportive "here at global spycorp we're interested in _you_ and we'll keep an eye out for you all the time", but hopefully as more folk learn just what is being done with the story of their lives, they'll realise it has value and guard it more safely.
Back in the day I used to help researchers design experiments in eye-tracking. When you watch a film of the person reading, paying attention to the eyes, you see no movement of the eye - but the Tobii software captures minute saccades and fixations - it's incredible to watch.
My introduction to it was designing an experiment that randomly put a distractor dot half the intra foveal angle from a target stimulus, to measure the time to recover from a distraction. As a lapsed biologist that was absolutely crap at Maths trying to work out how to move a dot, viewed from 25cm, an angle of 0.7 degrees was a wakeup call to go revise trig.
Boring but true - if you look at the Forth Bridge, underneath the middle span, you'll see an identical pillar to the ones from the fateful Tay Bridge - they were about to build a bridge to the exact same design across the Forth when the Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay went kersplat.
Many years ago I went to the small server room we had (this is the late 90s), and there was a KVM that connected to all the machines.
I pressed the relevant button for the NT server I administered, and, as I always did, hit <ctrl><alt><del> to give me a login prompt, as the monitor was waking up. Unfortunately, the KVM had been "rationalised" by my boss, who hadn't updated the switch labels, and I'd just connected to a Linux server console session, which immediately shut down.
The team that were using it for data analysis were a tad miffed.
All this material and not one double entendre? No-one though that the bill faced stiff opposition? That the thrust of politics was making boobs out of everyone? And that, when it comes down to it, folk who oppose net neutrality are a bunch of c***ts who have just fucked us all?
Locusts are delicious. I've been lucky enough to eat them a couple of occasions - just stir fried whole, with a little soy.
A colleague of my father described them as "pork scratchings (rinds) with legs" - I'd go slightly more to bacon, but whatever, delicious!
Insects like the locust are just land bound arthropods similar to prawns etc., so why not eat them here in the affluent west? They're delicious, nutritious - scrumptious. Also, they require very little in the way of care, easy to cook, low "greenhouse gas" (compared to the methane production from meat production).
Munch those bugs folks - it's the future food.
I agree - I really like the WinPhone system, the machines themselves have been solid (although my 950XL is not as nice to hold as my old 800...), the interface is good, and it's stable. I don't use many Apps, so the state of the Store is
There are, now, alas, bugs which I don't think will be ever fixed (e.g. Edge streaming music behind the lockscreen - techsupport says do a factory reset, which works...until the phone updates...), so I think when this machine gives up the ghost, I'll be cast out into the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth, i.e. I'll get an Android, and be one of the crowd...
In the offseason, it can be used for Australian rules football - which makes American rules football look entirely sane..
And besides, being british, I think a cricket pitch is always a good idea, and I'm vaguely pleased with the idea that the open spaces on the campus are as important as the buildings.
And there isn't a UFO in sight/on site.
A lesson from Dave Allen about the perils of automating your house...
Much as I love the magic of GPS and associated technology, you'll have my 1:50000 Landranger and 1:25000 Explorer maps and my venerable Silva compass when you prise them from my cold dead hands - probably at the bottom of the Cuillin ridge when I've walked over the edge because a sudden gust of wind blew the map over my face...
The Ordnance maps are incredible creations - I was taught to read them at school, and I have seen no other maps that allow you to visualise the landscape in your mind quite like they do. One of the best perks of my current job is access to the complete Edina library of OS maps, down to 1:5000 scale (and historic...and geologic...and maritime...)
I'm glad to see that the OS are moving with the times.
I had a contract with O2 and they didn't tell me about the end of my contract, and being an inherently lazy bastard, I didn't do anthing.
Then, I lost my contract phone and bought a replacement on Amazon and thought "bugger this for a game of soldiers" and stalked down to O2 prepared to wax greatly wroth upon them, but they meekly, okay, willingly, gave me a new sim-only contract - half the price and far better terms.
Now, here's the thing. Up until then, when I'd been meekly paying for a phone I'd paid off well over 18 months earlier, I'd never heard a dicky bird from O2. Immediately after I switched to a much better deal for me, I started getting rung about 3 times a week with "incredible offers on new hardware" which I ended up having to block with Truecaller.
Odd that.
Edinburgh doesn't have a tram network, it has a tram line.
A very, very expensive tram line.
That was took nearly half a decade longer to complete than advertised.
That was badly laid and had to be dug up and repaired before it could be used.
That was so badly thought out that in spite of advice from many parties was laid in such a way that it crosses cycling lines in a very awkward fashion which has necessitated some odd road markings. If you want to see the fun that the council had trying different things out, use the history settings.
And it possibly won't work. The BBC website website says that it could be ruled as "trade circumvention", and therefore not be allowed.
Can you have a favourite dystopia?
All far too different, and I'd have trouble choosing one. I liked the first robocop as it touched on matters of identity and memory, I enjoyed Blade runner as it touched on the idea of memory and identity, but from a completely different angle.
I think I prefer both of the above over e.g. Star Trek, as they are set, in the words of "Max Headroom" "20 minutes into the future" and address issues in a society not far removed from our own.
They're all good fun though.
"Edge on Windows 10 Mobile is the biggest piece of shit around. Nothing fucking works properly. The text rendering with its bullshit random font size generator is garbage."
Quoted for truth - I always have to start Edge twice, because the first time I start it, everything is rendered in a font you need a microscope to read...
Not only that, but it's inability to stream audio under the lock screen in its recent incarnations is infuriating... I need my fix of Radio4...
"MARKETING GIRL:
When you have been in marketing as long as I have, you’ll know that before any new product can be developed, it has to be properly researched. I mean yes, yes we’ve got to find out what people want from fire, I mean how do they relate to it, the image -
FORD:
Oh, stick it up your nose.
MARKETING GIRL:
Yes which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know, I mean do people want fire that can be fitted nasally. "
Earlier this year they bricked a whole bunch of laptops with an update, they already bricked Proliants in 2014 with an update, marvellous QC there chaps...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
