* Posts by hp

12 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2010

Smartwatches: I hate to say ‘I told you so’. But I told you so.

hp

"Give me a wearable that I didn't ever have to recharge, or only needed to recharge once a month, that cost under £20, and that gave reliable notifications of calls or messages received on my phone, and instantly gave me a zoomable map - and maybe then we're talking"

I'd be happy if I could have a smartphone that does this for £20.....

Does no one remember when the first iphone came out and how everyone laughed that anyone would buy a phone that couldn't even last a week on one charge and was so huge?

I think if you can have one that lasts 2.5 days between charges with reasonable use, lets you make calls/texts/check email, has GPS built in and the ability to run apps/make enough sound to act as a satnav, looks good and sells for <£200 it will sell well. It seems like everyone I know that runs/cycles/tri club thinks the 'right' price point has been reached for GPS sports watch type things at £80-300 and either has, or wants something like the tomtom runner2 music(UK£189), and if they can sell the tomtom without the apps facility/email/text/phone calls then an iwatch type thing with added sim card/gps (surely this will happen in the next 2 iterations) will really sell.

Volkswagen: 800,000 of our cars may have cheated in CO2 tests

hp

Re: I'd like to see a proper survey of all vehicles

Actually if you look at http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/realmpg you can see what mpg real people have posted for their cars. Obviously the disadvantage from a government point of view is that you can only get the figures after the car is on the road!

15,000 London coppers to receive new crime-fighting tool: an iPad

hp

Theft/loss: The 'find my ipad' can locate any ipad when its on and has internet connection. Since iOS 7 you can't 'factory reset' without the apple log in, so theft very unlikey (I help manage 30,000 ipads sent out to our sales guys worldwide, losses/cost of losses/breakages is dramatically less than when they had laptops). I would have though the police would get a few more breakages when chasing fufatives and the like. It is very likely that you will log in when you pick up your ipad and will be responsible for it so you make sure it is returned safely.

I would have thought that recording the witness statements would be a great app on the ipad - the current hand written then typed in ones are not necesarily exactly word for word, whereas with this you could include the audio files, photos/videos, and it will all be automaticall timestamped, and probably backed up via the cloud too. The device needs a battery life good enought to last a shift obviously.

Put down that iPad! Snoopware RECORDS your EVERY gesture, TAP on iOS, Android

hp

Nothing to see here - move along .....

So if you jailbreak it and install your own programs, they run. Big surprise!

Haswell micro: Intel’s Next Unit of Computing desktop PC

hp

Re: Power Usuage

For a comparison the current mac mini PSU is 85W peak and can drive 2 HDDs in the server model. It uses less than 11W at idle.

SLAPPING an iPhone out of a corporate drone's hand: You're not the only one who longs to do it

hp

My own opinion is that the app store/microsoft store etc are almost irrelevant on a business device. I don't want to manage peoples games/photos/social media/general data/running out of space/finding dodgy photos of themselves when the device is broken and they want it fixed….. - do that on your own device. For work, you get the apps we give you, locked down. If you need something else app wise for work purposes, request it and if it is good/useful it will be pushed to everyone. If you take this policy, you will find your integration woes are greatly reduced. For reference we have over 30,000 ipads and a similar number of iphones to manange worldwide (mostly used by our sales force and management grades, to replace notebooks, technical grades and everyone else get windows laptops and simple nokia phones still) We developed some in house apps for the ipad 2 towards the end of 2012 to cover our legacy software, before “going for it”, which were surprisingly easy to do and maintain from a technical point of view (you might not think so if you are trying to do the same thing for an organization of 50 people with 1 IT bod though. We have a couple of mac mini servers in a rack with raid backup, which for us was not significant cost, but again if you are a small business 4K may seem a lot extra). The main issue with legacy apps has been deciding what the actual aim of the app was, getting agreement on that, and producing an app that achieves that, rather than documenting what does it actually do now and trying to duplicate it. The maintenance of these is significantly less than the XP based laptops and applications we had before. By the way – turn on ‘track my iphone’ on all the devices – it’s definitely worth it.

Stand by for more big, windfarm-driven 'leccy price rises

hp

@sisk

I'm interested in renewables, so thought I'd look up Freiberg as you say it tells you 'all you need to know about renewables being viable'. I was hoping for some great examples that would help spread the fact that renewables work, but according to their web page 30% of their electricity comes from nuclear, 3.7% from local renewables and the rest from natural gas and woodchip being burnt, hardly the great example I was expecting. They have done some good stuff on energy saving though.

Hugh

Dozens of exploits released for popular SCADA programs

hp

Probelms securing control systems

Theres a good opportunity here for someone to earn a lot of money telling people how to secure their scada/control systems. We have been under pressure for years to connect out system to the intranet/internet and have only just caved in due to the decision being taken out of our hands. Why is it connected-? purely to service the need of 'visualisation' /business information, and this is the trend throughout all industry it seems. Don't listen to your technical guys on the control system who don't want to connect to the internet, listen to the IT guys who want to provide information to the manaement.

The main problem in securing the system is that you can't patch and reboot without stopping production. On out site we have a 4 hour window every other year to do anything we have to with hardware/system upgrades. The only other time we could patch the system is if the power and generators and UPS all fail

Microsoft's Windows 8 goals revealed

hp

fast boot/face recognition

My missus works for a magazine publisher and theyre think of developing for the iPad - they have a couple to play with and I had a couple of hours on it the other night. Boot time is between 1 and 2 seconds. This means (for example) you use it to immediately enter someone in the address book etc rather than writing it on a post it and typing it in later. I wouldnt have thought face recognition wasn't useful - as said you'll still need a password otherwise someone could just hold up your photo. Also if this is a wish list of features for a prooduct not yet developed by microsoft it'll be a couple of years before you see it in real life.

Regards

Hugh

Apple sells 2m iPads to hungry fanbois

hp

numbers sold

Just out of interest I had a look to see how many games consoles get sold - the biggest annual sales ever were 8 million for the Wii in 2008. I'll be interested to see if the iPad outsellls it (in 10 months from now - can we please have no more numbers sold articles on the register until then. thanks)

Two years later, Apple Safari still open to 'carpet-bombing'

hp

Prooving if you've looked at a file

@Crazy operations guy

If the police take you to court, the first thing they will do is a bitwise copy of your hard disk.

You can then call an 'expert' in your defence, to use the unix commands at the terminal

ls -l -u'(unix) or 'find -atime' (unix) or even the finder (explorer equivalent in osx) to show when or if the file has been accessed since it was downloaded. This should be enough to show that the files have never been accessed.

Also, you would expect an expert to know of this problem and (perhaps) to be able to show you had visited the infected site.

Regards

Hugh

hp

How to find out if a downloaded file has been looked at in unix/OSX

In a criminal case they make a bitwise copy of your disk first.

You can then prove that you haven't accesed (as opposed to changed) the file since it was downloaded - either using the terminal command 'ls -l -u' or 'find -atime ....' or use the finder and click 'get info'.

Regards

Hugh