Posts by Buzzword

Full HD

Kudos to HP for having possibly the first Full HD laptop at just £329. Everything else at that price is horrible x768. Ok so it doesn't run Windows, but that won't matter for a great many people.

There are more important places to cover first!

I'd like to see decent coverage on the railway network first, before worrying about national parks. If I could surf the web and comment on Reg articles on the train, then I wouldn't need to do it at work, and my productivity would increase. It's good for the economy, apparently.

Mobile security? Hah. Getting them to take more than a passing interest in regular security would be a good start.

And when they grow up?

How much do adult coders get paid in Silicon Valley then? $7,000 a month works out to £50,000 a year in the UK, which is well above-average in most places (possibly except London).

News flash: Vatican found to employ too many Catholics, not enough members of other religions.

Which crypto?

Do we know which encryption algorithm(s) and which software he was using? Inquiring citizens might like to know which systems can't be broken by the police.

"signed off"?

What exactly does "signed off" mean here? If nothing has been signed off, the project shouldn't have started in the first place. So clearly something has been signed to get it started, and to get the millions spent so far. We're missing a large part of the story.

No worse than Las Vegas, surely?

Isn't this just a clone of Las Vegas? There the hotels have light blue sky-ceilings instead of glass, but otherwise it's the same concept. Vegas has miles of shops, huge hotels, ample parking, a barely-used monorail, and no culture. Granted Dubai's version seems a little more controlled, but it's the same principle.

Disappointingly expensive

It's more expensive than I expected. A brand new Google Nexus 5 starts from $349 contract-free. It gives you the same vendor lock-in you'd enjoy with Amazon, plus access to a bigger App Store. Sure, the phones are technically different; but tech specs were never going to be the USP of an Amazon phone.

The Kindle Fire tablets were competitively priced. This thing isn't.

Sowing confusion

In WWII, the Brits had radar and the Germans didn't. Allegedly the Brits told the Germans that they had better eyesight because they are lots of carrots.

This story is similar smoke & mirrors. It draws your attention away from the real vector of infection, which as other commenters state was most likely plain old USB sticks and a brown envelope stuffed with banknotes to gain access.

I can just about cope with the absence of a Start menu on a touchscreen laptop. But on a server?

You can take my Windows Server 2008 R2 when you pry it out of my cold dead hands!

Humans > robots?

What can a human do on Mars that a robot can't? It's safer and far cheaper to send robots, as we have been doing. The only reason to send humans is for PR.

And the clients?

So you've successfully encrypted your server; but what happens when you access your files or emails from your compromised Windows or Android client? Or does your small business run exclusively on Linux?

Apple

iOS seems to cope fine without any kind of file manager. In fact that's almost it's unique selling proposition: not having to worry about where your files are.

Not up to scratch

Come on Reg, you can do better than this! The pliers and the cat 5 cables were brilliant. This is just some kid's first lame attempt at a listicle.

Also, on the mobile site the pictures come out squashed (at least on iPhone).

Given that a Chromecast dongle costs just £30, the price of a YouView box is hard to justify.

(Yes it's hidden in the contract cost, but it's still a cost.)

Back to the Future?

Virtualisation, containerisation - isn't it just multitasking? How is this different from what my 386 DX could do nearly 30 years ago?

Just not big enough

It does seem strange to put a low-rise building on such a valuable prime central location. Presumably their new plans will be taller.

This is evolution 101.

This always happens as technology advances. When the first cars where being made, there were tens of thousands of companies in Britain alone making cars, engines, gearboxes, seats, bodies, custom paint jobs, and the rest. Today we're reduced to a handful of global giants. The same happened in pharma, it happened a bit in banking post-2008, and now it's happening in mobiles. I daresay Chromecast is eating all the competing TV dongles too.

They're already here

Since our IT department consists 80% of foreign nationals, I think we're already wide open.

This seems to be the norm, at least in London and the southeast.

Work on a train requires local copy

If you want your users to be able to work on a train, they need a local copy of the data. That's a fundamental constraint. Thin-client solutions like Citrix simply aren't usable over 3G/4G networks while moving through tunnels and railway cuttings; even Outlook Web Access can be torture.

This means documents on the client device must be stored in encrypted form. BitLocker is suitable on Windows, but I'm not aware of any equivalent on Android or iOS.

"How do you prevent an army of users with data on their own phones and tablets from strolling off with your intellectual property? The answer is mobile device management (MDM)."

MDM is a solution looking for a problem. Anyone with half a brain who plans to leave the company will already have a USB drive full of all the important documents and emails they need, regardless of whether it's against company policy. Remotely deleting their email app is merely closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Congestion

On the down side, congestion will get far worse once self-driving cars go mainstream. I wouldn't put up with a 90-minute stressful commute by car; but I would be much happier with 90 minutes sitting in the back seat, doing some work, writing emails, etc. If everyone else has the same reasoning, traffic volumes will increase dramatically.

Bring the App Store to Windows 7!

As a developer, I want to target as many potential customers as possible. If the app store were available on Windows 7, and had been from the start, then we'd have seen a much greater uptake.

Meeting room display

In our offices we have a number of meeting rooms with either very large monitors or DLP projectors. They're currently powered by left-over Dell Windows XP boxen which were considered too cruddy even for secretaries to use. Their main uses are PowerPoint presentations, light web browsing, and Remote Desktop to a more powerful computer. A cheap Android dongle seems like the ideal way to replace these XP machines; but clearly this Dell/Wyse device isn't up to scratch.

(Yes, the meeting rooms are also equipped with videoconferencing kit, but I've never seen anyone actually make use of it.)

This seems to be straying a long way from Microsoft's core competencies. One day a future Microsoft CEO - possibly after an aggressive takeover or shareholder revolt - will look at all these curious parts of the business and spin them off.

Another +1 for squeezing in two references to that awe-inspiring movie, Idiocracy!

NetFlix vs Music

Going off on a tangent, why are all-you-can-eat film services priced at ~£6 per month whereas the corresponding music services are £10 a month? Audio+video should be more expensive than audio-only, shouldn't it?

Correction

Voice memos is a stock app, it's been there for years.

Poe's law

I can't tell whether this is parody or just copied & pasted from the BBC News website.

Oz still doesn't get any money

One thing is clear though: it's the US government which loses out here, not the Australian one. Apple in Australia acts merely as an importer, and importers have thin margins (and thus low profits). It's no different than Kogan: they import at $550, sell at $600, deduct expenses, leaving very little profit. Corp tax is charged as a percentage of profit, and x% of a small profit is an even smaller tax bill.

The real profits are made by Apple in the USA. They buy $190 of components, hire FoxConn to package them in a shiny case, and sell them on for $550 a piece. That's a whopping profit and should incur a tax liability in California, but the US govt explicitly exempts them.