Posts by xj25vm

Re: Never extrapolate a curve close to a turning point

While your point 1. does make sense, I'm afraid I can only partially agree with point 2. and point 3. And by partially, I actually mean "not agree much at all".

First, your example about employees not being able to create mobile apps? Well, I don't think that has much relevance in the long term. We are talking about a new and emerging technology, which has been around for much shorter period of time than the rest of the industry. You choose to extrapolate from that? Are you sure the mobile app development market will look the same in 5-10 years time - and it will be just as inaccessible as it is now to people with lesser technical skills? I'm not sure at all. Not if you look back at what the history of computing has to teach us.

Secondly - your point 3 about the increasing complexity of IT - in a sense, it would be nice if that was the case - if the complexity of IT would bring more of the work into the hands of specialists. While it is true that there are plenty of fields in IT where one has to truly know one's stuff to make it - you neglect to take into account the fact that while IT has increased in complexity nonetheless over the years - a lot of that complexity has been moved deeper and deeper into the bowels of the beast - away from users and power users. IT has been on a path to "democracy" so to speak pretty much since its inception. Where are the "specialists" in long coats reigning over the data room - as gods supreme? Do you still require an engineer (or a team of them) to install a printer or a scanner for you? No - and the reason is because a lot of this technology has been simplified at the interface level sufficiently for even average users to handle it themselves - even if they don't understand what is under the hood/bonnet. And things are continuing relentlessly in that direction.

As to your web design example - I'm not sure where you've been the last 5-10 years - but you've obviously never heard of WordPress, or any of the other frameworks/templates based tools. Yes - you could say that people who don't know proper web design will end up with insecure Wordpress installations, or that a template based website is not a substitute for a proper, professional version. And that just installing a Wordpress site doesn't make one a web designer. And you would be right. But did we have tools available in '99 for an average user to get an interactive, database driven, dynamic content website up and going without advanced knowledge? Ten years ago anybody would have been shocked if they were shown a Wordpress website from today (specially one with a tasteful theme) and be told that somebody with virtually no webdesign expertise has put it together.

For good or for worse - that's where the world is going. Not back to the good old days when technical experts were scarce and paid in gold. Yes - like in any industry - true experts will still be able to command wages above their peers and be in demand no matter where the industry is going - within reason. The rest is just daydreaming. And I am working in this industry, and I am and will be affected by it every day - but that's just the way it is.

Already done

As far as I know this has been the case in the Republic of Ireland for at least two years. A friend of mine use to be subscribed to a 4G LTE provider there - using a fixed router (supplied and fitted by the provider themselves). Unfortunately - at least at the time - the real-life speeds were pathetic and it kept on disconnecting and giving problems. So in theory, doable. In practice, without decent coverage and network capacity - not so much.

Re: Very good indeed

I agree. Overall the article does bring forward interesting information. However, from practical experience, far too many managers have an overly and unjustifiable positive bias - so I'm a bit weary of just taking the word of the guy who was in charge of it all and who wouldn't have an interest in making his efforts look crap - if there were any actual problems. So useful, but could have done with the contribution of some third party with less personal stake in the project, as well.

"Government and regulation is too big, expensive and crap until it is something that you feel passionately about then all of a sudden you want more involvement of said beast."

So, basically, government for the sake of government. Self serving and self perpetuating bureaucracy - the worst kind (the only kind?).

I say No - something is either needed, or not. Feel free to apply your passions to something else - the privilege of paying more of my money in taxes to support a bigger government than is absolutely necessary does not instigate any passions in me (at least not the positive kind).

Re: NAS

I like the HP Microservers in general - but one thing puzzles me: the power supply. Why install a 150W power supply in a server which can take up to 4 x 3.5" hdd's? Sure, to begin with, that is just about enough, but few years down the line, with capacitor aging - I'm not sure I would feel reassured if I'd be the owner of that server.

Re: One more reason...

"Both XP and W7 took a few attempts to install them cleanly on new hardware combinations."

Strange that. Can't work out why would anyone "attempt" to install XP or W7. There is no way I can recollect how many XP and W7 machines I've installed - but I certainly didn't have to "attempt" to - never mind few times.

Re: RFID?

Yeah - that will work wonders with smartphones nowadays having a battery life just a touch longer than an ant's attention span. Dead battery = truancy.

Re: @ AC 13:19 Merely getting old, maybe?

You certainly have a few interesting points to make - but some of us are actually talented at what we do. Dare we say, we have a vocation for our occupation. Maybe some people can just jump from one career to other, as finances require or entice, but others have much more of an emotional and intellectual affinity for what they do. If the only reason one goes to work is just to pay for a mortgage and holidays - sure, your line of thought is fully applicable.

Than again - I don't know if your Quality of Life is that much better as you spend 8 hours of your working day (is that most of your waking time?) doing something just for the money - when plenty of us spend 8 (or more hours) of our days doing something they actually like doing - with some lucky ones even working with people who's company they enjoy. Who has more quality time in their life then?

The equation is not that simple.

Re: Every user interface gets this way!

"Because of featurism. It's a great excuse for a developer to not work on what needs to be done or finish what he was doing before."

I agree. Prime example is Mozilla Thunderbird right now. The bugtrack is full of elusive, annoying and intermittent bugs experienced by users in the last 10 years. But these are difficult to work on - why bother. The back-end, including the address book and email storage engines need a serious rework to bring Thunderbird into the 21st century, including Maildir support (locally, not on the server), which would seriously improve performance and reliability - but that's like, well, hard work, and you can't exactly show off at the end - so let's forget about it and just move the icons around the screen for the next version, or hide them altogether so that we can all be hip and up there with the other fashionistas of the software industry. Urgh!

Re: meh

Got one of those as well. Very pleased with it - it might weigh a bit - but I used it on transatlantic flights, when working away from the office and generally away on holiday for my laptop and even camera (with USB charging).

I wish they would quote Wh figures in the article above though - mAh or Ah are useless with multivoltage devices - and even for s single one you have to sit down and do the maths - not easy to compare capacities quickly.

Re: Touchpad pressure/duration

"I'm sure they exist, but I've never knowingly used a laptop which allows you to set the pressure at which the touchpad responds, nor the duration (apart from double click speed)."

Actually it depends. If you use Linux on your laptop - pretty much any laptop will have those settings available. I had to play with those settings in Xorg.conf to get an overly sensitive touchpad to work properly. You could set the pressure threshold, and duration before a tap registered as a click. Really handy when you need them. Then again, on most laptops, the defaults seem to work just fine - so you don't normally have to fiddle with them.

On the other hand in Windows - yes, don't recall them being exposed by regular mouse or touchpad drivers. But there could be exceptions to this one.

Re: Typical Acer garbage.

Agree about the power button. Placing it on the outside - specially the front edge - is a recipe for the laptop turning on during transport. Bad idea.

Oh, and the rest - of course the spec on this machine is worse than average - it doesn't do anything particularly well. Don't know why The Reg fell for the "ultrabook" moniker anyway - as this machine is as far away from what an ultrabook is supposed to be anyway.

"Google is shilling a shit OS whose intent is to collect all my personal info."

Judging by how Mozilla seems to have been taken over by marketing droids in the last few years, how they stubbornly avoid dealing with core bugs in their products while they muck about with the interface all the time, and the fact that Thunderbird now bundles "offers" from various web "partners" when you install it and other annoying messages from the "headquarters" - all for your own "good" - I wouldn't be surprised if their new OS would be just as rapacious at gobbling up all your personal info and behaviour statistics. Mozilla are slowly morphing into a wolf in sheep's clothes - the good guys behaving just like any other greedy commercial entity out there. At least with Google I know where I stand by now.

Re: So true!

I'm afraid that is true. Windows XP without SP2 didn't have the firewall enabled by default. If the computer is connected to the Internet during the OS install using ethernet and a DSL/cable connection (without a router with firewall and/or NAT in between - just the cable modem with public IP) - malware would exploit the various open ports and vulnerabilities even before you manage to finish the installation. Been there - learned the lesson the hard way :-(

Re: Really?

"Actually, the problem with Socialism is it has been given a bad rep by those corrupt leaders who tried to impose it on their people."

Really? How else do you get Socialism but by imposing it on the people? What, do you want to be socialist on your own? How would you "redistribute" other people's money if it's only your money that you control?

And also, "corrupt leaders"? What other kind of leaders are there? When are people going to stop believing in cuckoo land and get it that utopian dreams are utopian (and dreams, actually)? At least capitalism (or free market or whatever other variation we seem to be having these days) accepts some (or plenty) people will be greedy and tries to work with it. Of course it's not perfect, but it is realistic at least. Oh, and it doesn't take away freedom in the name of some childish BS fantasy and "greater good" or whatever way you want to call it. If you don't like being an adult, dealing with reality, taking responsibility for your actions and choices and standing on your own two feet - you can always stay home with mummy and daddy - that's perfectly fine - but don't ram your life style choices down the rest of our throats.

Re: Why the negative headline and subhead?

Probably just part of the slew of attention grabbing headlines plaguing El Reg these days. Seriously, no news that can stand on their own left?

Re: Fix the cables with chewing gum

So a highly efficient, highly civilized dictatorship than. Hmm, I think I'll put up with the inconvenience of slower Internet, chewing gum on the pavement and quite a few other things in order to keep a bit more of my personal freedom. Everything has a cost, and I value my personal freedom much higher then walking on clean side walks - as appealing as that might sound. But I suppose everybody has their own priorities.

Re: Cost? Don't make me laugh

There will indeed be significant costs relating with retraining, assessment, writing plans, support, implementation of change etc. But these are mostly one offs. As they are saying in the article - once the foundations are laid, and if they stick with it - significant savings will be there in time - once the initial cost is amortized and they have to pay no more regular license fees.

Interesting move from Iceland. I guess, like with any other IT project - it will all be down to how well and smooth it is implemented.

Re: Impressive...

Well - Trevor does have a way of getting overly excited about stuff before actually delving deep enough into said product or feature. Just the fact that he keeps on repeating "the way it was explained to me" is quite telling. I'd rather prefer a review from somebody who sweated over a product for a good while longer before passing on a verdict - not just clicking few buttons and believing what's been told to them - so they can quickly move on to reviewing some other "greatest and latest". But maybe that's just me.

Re: Still waiting...

You are right. But this is not really a netbook. This is more like the sub-laptops which existed before netbooks - a small enough machine, but with enough performance, resolution and keyboard size to be used for much more serious work (and longer periods of time) then one of the initial, 7" screen Celeron processor netbooks. And the good thing is that this machine doesn't actually cost close to £1000 (or even over) - as the sub-laptops used to cost. So yes, it is more expensive then a "true" netbook - but it is a lot cheaper then a sub-laptop with similar functionality.

Bold? Not so sure. It's a cosmetic respray of their existing consumer netbook(s) - so it couldn't have taken much of an effort (or financial risk, for that matter). Not sure if the consumer version is available yet with the new Atoms - but everything else seems the same (except Windows version, of course).

It does seem insane they are pitching at business a machine which has a version of Windows for home users. Maybe on some levels it might make sense - as others pointed out - but the paradox is right in the spec. Somebody's got their wires crossed.

Although I agree that many of the "accessories" in the article are rather useless, I believe that the Canon printer reviewed here and the similar one from HP are indeed the smallest A4 printers you can get. I had the HP 460bwt printer for about 4 years now and it has been very useful to me. If printing for business purposes, A4 is pretty much a must - and the HP version has a battery and wifi or bluetooth as well (depending on which model you are buying).

Also, a universal laptop external battery would have been a useful addition. I have a 133W/h one I bought on Ebay (new) - and I find it brilliant - specially for long journeys. Plugged into a netbook gives about 12 hours of solid work, movie watching or listening to music - a bit less on my sublaptop. And those hours are in addition to the internal battery of the laptop. Yes - it is heavy, but well worth it. It comes with about 20 different plug adapters, and even has a usb connection to charge things that can use it.

I also agree with the comment about portable scanners. I have one of those feed-through, usb powered, "Toblerone" size scanners - and found it really useful on the go - if quite slow to operate.

Thank you for that. I will try Sogo out as soon as I can. I've installed and used the SyncKolab extension for Thunderbird/Lightning at a number of different clients for about 2 years now - but the number of bugs it contains is far too great. I keep on contributing bug reports, and some of them have been fixed. However, it is still corrupting data, duplicating data and making a general mash of things. I think I've just about given up on it.