Posts by Buzzword

One word: Tizen

Samsung were in the same position as Huawei a few years ago. I don't expect to see Tizen dominate the market any time soon.

How about scrapping them?

Do we really need "notifications to manage food imports"?

Weak reception is a serious fault

It's not just a problem for those who "live in a region with weak mobile coverage"; it affects anyone who uses their phone indoors, on the train, or in the car. £749 for a phone that you can't even use half the time is criminal.

Mac OS X Server isn't what it used to be

As your colleague pointed out - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/29/farewell_to_macos_server/ - a few months ago, Mac OS X Server has been thoroughly gutted. Gone are the mail server, web server, VPN, and more. It's now just a tool for administering other Mac and iOS devices.

Of course you can still use a Mac Mini as a departmental server; but you'll need third party tools, and you can no longer expect Apple to support your efforts.

Microsoft had CodePlex

Microsoft already had a popular open source code repository, in the form of CodePlex. What happened? Benign neglect, until all the users shuffled over to GitHub.

Is it just regurgitating the training dataset?

"the generator ... creates images that are similar to the training dataset"

Can it generate original images, or just tweaks of the training dataset?

A/B testing

I propose two streams. In the A-stream, you create fancy new apps with all the latest bling. Calc.exe does blockchain, notepad.exe becomes notepad.js, Paint uses AI to predict what you want to draw, etc. In the B-stream, you leave everything exactly as it is. Randomly assign users to A/B, and after a few months see which is more popular.

Counter-argument

I was a contractor for a government body which, every week, had to record a short document into two different systems. I was asked to quote for a script which would link the two systems together, ensuring that whatever data was entered in one system would automatically be forwarded to the second.

I gave them a quote, but pointed out that the potential savings were meagre (15 minutes of clerical staff time each week) and unlikely to cover future support costs. The manager concurred and I never got the job.

Only 4GB of RAM ?

Even mobile phones have 6GB these days. For similar money I'd rather have a Samsung Galaxy S-whatever and a DeX dongle.

HTTPS doesn't solve much

"Since the infection, most hospital websites have moved from HTTP to the more secure HTTPS, according to Milosevic – a move that wouldn't have halted the virus's spread but is indicative of IT staff taking security more seriously."

Or, it's indicative of IT staff fixing the easy and most visible stuff, while leaving gaping holes open elsewhere.

Notepad to support *nix line endings

This is long, long, long overdue.

It’s either a case of too little, too late; or Microsoft finally listening to end users. Time will tell.

Since it obviously works for government contracts ...

Not so long ago, our great government promised to award more IT contracts to small businesses and/or startups. This implies that "If the startup failed to deliver, the scheme [i.e. the government] would pay the first customer [also the government] the contract value".

Since the government has roundly failed to award more contracts to smaller suppliers, perhaps the whole principle of providing government backing to startups isn't all that wise.

Besides, any businessperson knows that landing the first contract is easy; it's the second one which proves far more difficult.

“the IRS gets to decide what does and doesn't get an appeal hearing”

Rather defeats the purpose of an appeals hearing, if the opposing side gets to decide whether to let you fight.

Shoved down our throats

Dear Reg,

I get that you’re trying to be all grown-up by dropping the innuendos, but couldn’t you have slipped one in for us loyal readers? Perhaps ask Dabbsy to write next week’s piece if & when the spec is actually released.

Meanwhile in America ...

... someone stuck wifi on a doorbell and sold it for $1bn.

If I had a brainy idea, I'd be on the first flight to Silicon Valley to bring it to market.

Unspecified amount of money

I too have invested an unspecified amount of money in Magic Leap.

But since you ask, I’ll specify: zero.

99.995% is impossible

Even humans aren’t that accurate.

If you’re positively identifying terror videos at that rate, you must have a huge false-positive rate. So a movie like Mad Max Fury Road, featuring fighty young people with big guns on dusty desert roads, would probably be flagged as jihadi propaganda.

BusinessWaste.co.uk

Ahh, that cherished outfit. They really are quite thick. The blogger Tim Newman has eviscerated their press releases in the past:

http://www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/?p=4246

Migrating without adapting

: enabling on-premises NFS-using applications to move into Azure

Great, we're going to see on-premise apps loaded half-arsed into the cloud, without any accommodations for cloud-specific issues (latency, bandwidth, etc.). This is unlikely to end well.

Desired State Configuration, Puppet, etc.

I'd like a button to export the configuration from one server as a text file (like Puppet etc.), then import it into another server. Far better than our current approach of trying to play spot-the-difference between two servers, where one is behaving and the other is not.

I avoided VAT just last month

Bought a Samsung Galaxy S8 for the missus. Ordered through a 3rd party seller on Amazon UK. Paid roughly 17% less than the version sold by Amazon themselves. Ordered on Saturday, dispatched same day, received the following Wednesday. No mention of VAT on the receipt.

It is trivially easy to evade VAT in this manner; and it's obviously not illegal. The government does need to change the law to create a level playing field for both domestic and overseas sellers.

Streisand effect

And that's how you drum up business in Paris during the slow August holiday season.

Stability

I just wish we had some stability. Ever tried writing for the browser in 2017? The toolchain keeps changing. We had jQuery, then React, then Angular. Building it required Grunt, then Gulp, SystemJS then Webpack. Modules went from AMD to UMD to CommonJS to something else. Package management moved from Bower to NPM to Yarn and back to NPM again.

Examples and quickstart projects which compiled perfectly six months ago no longer work because somewhere a package was upgraded. Answers on StackOverflow are irrelevant because they applied to version 1.3.5, and you're using version 2.7.1 now. Bugs on Github are left open, with not even a WONTFIX comment from the developers.

Not so long ago I remember a world where major tools were upgraded every 2-3 years. Windows XP was standard for over a decade. VB6 even longer. We had years to learn the quirks of IE6's "quirks mode". Nowadays if your Github project isn't on a six-week release cycle, it's abandonware.

I'd take a sabbatical if I could, but my skills would be worthless by the time I return.

All of the above problems are magnified on a CI system, because half the tools don't log to stderr or set the error code correctly.

Edit: this guy nailed it: https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f

"regularly accessing 4chan"

Is that a known sign of a nonce?