Posts by Joe Harrison

I don't see the business case for selling software tokens. Google or Verisign Labs will give you one for free.

I'll use it but not really sure why

You can store all your data "in the cloud" somewhere. Maybe (or maybe not) you will be able to access it again later depending on availability of your internet connection. And you don't know who else is messing with your stuff unknown to you.

Or you can carry everything with you on a tiny cheap flash memory and have guaranteed high-speed private access to it whenever you like.

Not that it matters since Google Drive does not seem to work behind a corporate proxy requiring authentication, which I imagine is the case for most of us.

Tomi Ahonen

"Nokia has just set a world record in suicidal self-destruction" - a fairly typical comment from Tomi, an ex-Nokia executive turned telecoms industry analyst. If you are interested in the smartphone landscape then Tomi is a must-read.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/

dodgy?

I tried to install this from the bar code and instantly got an SSL certificate failure "The site name does not match the site name in the certificate." The app is supposed to be downloaded from play.google.com but in fact according to the certificate (which has only been valid for a few days) is coming from googleusercontent.com

Is this legit?

I am global head of tech support for...

a large enterprise of friends, family, and people I met once at a party. Our bread-and-butter business of rolling back Windows PCs to their last restore point before malware installation is holding up well. So far however we are seeing zero levels of tickets raised on tablets thanks to our education program to "turn them off then on again." I for one welcome our new tablet overlords.

Those checkouts are awful

The reason being that they break the model which everyone has spent years learning of how checkouts are supposed to work. Conveyor belt, scan your things, another conveyor belt, put in bags, pay. Having to put your stuff in a specific place after scanning is not at all intuitive especially when the weight sensor is carefully disguised as the empty bags dispenser. Pay by cash and you will be baffled again as your incomplete change rattles into the little tray - who would think of looking separately down around their knee level to get any paper money.

We're saved

Startup the lab, genetically-engineer a few bizarro versions of barely-understood nano creatures, then cross fingers and release into environment. What could possibly go wrong!

Maybe I'm just old :(

Read the review to see if it was a suitable game for my kids but utterly failed to understand it.

"The class system will be recognisable conforming to the Ranged, Tank, Healer and overpowered force lighting broker. Alas, no dual spec either."

Is this supposed to mean something?

Burn your own recovery media?

The Asus laptop I bought last year nagged me endlessly to burn my own copies of the recovery media. On a machine with no optical drive! Did not fancy buying USB DVD writer so merely imaged the existing partitions.

Is it just me

I don't want "post-click marketing engagement." Last month my MOT was due and I needed a new lightbulb but didn't fancy a trip to Halfords through the xmas shopping crowds. I ordered a bulb online price £1.50 and got it all sorted out.

Then I had an e-mail asking me to fill in a feedback survey. How was my bulb experience? Then two follow-ups after I ignored the first. Maybe yes if I bought a TV but it doesn't work for trivial purchases.

I wouldn't exactly call NetWare "stable"

It was OK-ish provided you used it for its built-in services and didn't fiddle with it too much. From my point of view though trying to develop third-party applications for it was not the easiest thing in the world thanks to the flat unprotected memory model - a userland fault could and regularly did abend the entire server. Oh and having to download updates for CLIB.NLM twice a day didn't help either.

That is really what finished NetWare, the fact that NT4 gave you file and print AND somewhere to run your applications. Novell brought Linux in too late.

But I still can't watch my telly after all these years

I bought a 20-inch Samsung HD-Ready television in 2004 for six hundred quid. It is now 2011 and I still can't watch things in HD. This is because DRM (HDCP) was added into the HD standard as an afterthought and my TV can't do it. If there were no DRM I could be watching stuff in HD. Anyone who wants to convince me that DRM is a good and necessary thing can please go somewhere else.

I think Steve has it right

"We are pleased to announce orbital insertion of our spy satel... OH sorry I mean (takes out onion) the sad failure of our heroic Mars mission"

Tired of bluetooth

If you just want to use a car kit or mono headset then OK usually no problem.

Anything more ambitious forget it you end up in driver version hell. I have a nice bluetooth stereo headset that works flawlessly on Windows 7 box A but refuses to play on Windows 7 box B. Even when the same dongle is moved from the working to non-working machine! You end up desperately scouring the internet forums for someone who allegedly got it working with a dodgy zip file from a Chinese web site.

Bluetooth is just not worth the effort.

No SD-card slot

Just 16GB or 32GB take it or leave it. And let me guess.... you can't replace the battery? I think I heard this before somewhere.

You can get a Kindle 3 for 80 quid

Amazon are selling the old Kindle 3 (aka Kindle Keyboard) for 79.99 "refurbished". The one I bought yesterday was brand new and boxed although with only a USB lead no mains charger. Warranty only 3 months. Still a bargain if you feel like having the keyboard and the headphone port.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B002Y27P46/ref=dp_olp_refurbished?ie=UTF8&condition=refurbished

Paragon Free Edition

Paragon Backup & Recovery 2011 Free Edition works great for me.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

Tutorial?

Many people say Windows 7 search is not half bad but I suspect I am not giving it a fair go. Anyone recommend a tutorial?

I want the functionality to remain as near as possible to what I have now with Google Desktop on XP... type in "horcrux" and it will find any mention of horcrux either on local filestore or Outlook mail.

Time Travel

You know how you get up every day and go to work as normal... It won't be like that forever. Imagine one day when your body is too old to let you do that any more. You are sitting there going omfg now I'm stuffed where am I going to get money now.

What if you could use time travel (which will be invented by then obviously) to send your 40-year-younger self a message. "Start a pension and then there will be some money coming in after I pack in working." You contrive to get this message onto an interwebs message board 40 years ago where your younger self will see it. Fantastic, it seems to have worked.

Srsly there is currently only one way to solve this problem and that is via the magic of compound interest over a long period of time.

Just too dear

Apple deservedly own the tablet market by getting themselves into a position where they can keep the manufacturing cost low enough and the desirability factor high. Kudos to them but they can't be unique in that forever.

I don't own any Apple products but my kids love their MP3 players. Recently cost me 96 pounds and a lot of messing to get a broken headphone port fixed. Next stop is 56 pounds for a replacement battery. When it's time for me to buy a tablet I am going to remember this!

Can we also get rid of the stupid ads based on search terms

The ones like "Buy cheap javascript DOM methods and save!"

Hitler learns HP is abandoning WebOS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaeOXyA7wo0

Believe it or not

@DRendar: Six months ago I was hit from behind by a Porsche doing more than twice my speed on a deserted, dry, straight motorway. Thank you Mercedes for construction safety and I was barely scratched. I am lucky to be alive; please don't encourage these crazy people who are convinced they are outstanding drivers.

If you can't buy it you can't buy it

I occasionally listen to mainstream music but most of what I like comes from half a dozen really obscure sub-genres. Mostly it is literally not for sale. If they have in fact done a CD then I buy it from the specialists such as cdbaby.com but usually I can't. Word of mouth download direct from the artist its the way of the future.

Sergey Brin of all people

Russians have complicated patronymic names that can sometimes get quite long. Most of the ones I know invent a shorter version that they think English speakers will feel more comfortable with.

I remember years ago trying to support an X.400 system that crashed every time on names containing an apostrophe, ah good times.

Can we keep this real please

OK so feelings were running high during the actual riots last week but it's time to stop frothing about it now. You cannot turn "posting crap on facebook" into a four-year crime or we will have to pave over the entire country into new jails.

Octone FTW

Try these - Octone IEM Pro In-Ear Monitor Earphones - Deep Bass Edition Professional

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Octone-IEM--Ear-Monitor-Earphones/dp/B0055QAH7A/

Price goes up and down like a yo-yo (I got a pair for 5 yes five pounds recently) so just keep your eye on them until the price is right.

Sadville

Why are there so many Bitcoin stories in my face all the time? Reminds me of the flood of Second Life articles a while ago where the actual story didn't seem to matter so long as people kept hearing about the product.

So what value does "cloud" add?

Satellite phone technology is well-established although still quite expensive. The "GAP" product sounds like a terrestrial gateway to route satphone texts into Twitter. Surely this could be done easily with a traditional hosted server?

Skype is great for travellers

The only time I use Skype is when I am in a hotel room in a foreign country. Nearly-free calls back to the UK via free wireless and Skype Out easily beat arm-and-leg mobile rates. It does work absolutely great for this with zero setup problems.

Yes I am a SIP user the rest of the time but while travelling I really hate being behind an unknown NAT fiddling with the stun settings in the hope of getting my call working.

Free tip from a security professional

Whenever I want to keep something confidential I always find "not announcing to a big crowd of people" works well.

Pointless

Pointless trying to have logical arguments about speeding. People like and enjoy driving fast and in my experience are capable of unlimited justification for why the speed limit may safely be disregarded by advanced drivers (i.e. themselves.)

What never fails to astound me however is how quickly the very same people can switch to telling you how "nutters come down our road far too fast don't they know our kids play out there?"

Never thought it would happen

Two years ago if someone had said to me "no-one within your social circle will own a Nokia phone" I would have laughed at them. Now it's literally true as far as I know.

I do have quite a few gamer friends so maybe the x-box connection will bring it back full circle to Nokia in two more years. Although considering how obsessed they all are currently with their I-phones and Android I wouldn't hold my breath.

Android/Outlook sync not bad via google calendar

Over the years I too had got used to Nokia PC Suite and bluetooth for Outlook sync. I never synced my mail though only calendar. With Android you still can if you don't mind syncing Outlook with Google Calendar then Google Calendar with Android. Does actually work quite well, with the bonus that even if you are not near your PC things still happen.

And if you don't buy the Kingston...

The Kingston drive comes with software to migrate your stuff off your old disk. But if you decide on one of the others you won't get that so how about "Partition Manager 11 Free Edition"

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/pm-express/download.html

Free is free

Do people really "find it hard to move music around to different devices" ? Nobody on the train this morning seemed to have any difficulty solving that one. To be honest I would much rather have my 5GB of music on my local SD card than out there on the internet somewhere. But free storage is free storage I'm sure I can think of a use for this.

Those 3 cents could get expensive

I would very much like to do this kind of experimentation on their free cloud but it's exactly these considerations that put me off. If you can spend 3 cents just doing Hello World then any real work could get expensive very fast! Or what if 4chan takes a dislike to me and sends me a few gig per second for a day or two.

Where does Facebook get all that money?

OK they run those measly ads about six-pack abs and allegedly sell user demographic data. I just find it hard to believe the proceeds from that (and more) doesn't get burnt up providing a worldwide network of fast servers for gigs of cat pictures.

"Saccharin problem"

What is the "Saccharin problem"?

Spot the non-parents

I never found any reason to re-install my last XP system over the three or four years I had it. Didn't seem to have any virus problems and I only got rid of it to upgrade to 7.

My kids' computers were another story entirely. Every day they grew five new toolbars and some new thing had pwned them generating popups about casinos whatever. Several times I had to re-install after it would have been just too time-consuming to defeat the malware du jour. And yes I did try making them login as non-administrators but many games are very poorly written and I got endless complaints of "But Dad, Lucy's Little Horsebox 3 says Access Denied".

I don't even want to think about superphones in the family!

What have teh herbal scientists ever done for us?

Go on then what ? Apart from researching which tree barks produce aspirin. But apart from that? And which flowers produce heart drugs? Apart from that though? And identifying the thousands of other phytological items in today's pharmacopoeia? Apart from that WTF have they ever done for us?

But it's illegal

Changing your phone's MAC address is an offence under the Mobile Telephones (Re-programming) Act 2002 and section 62 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006.

Should really be a win-win

Everyone's different, some want to pack it all in asap whereas someone else might fancy carrying on for a bit. If I were an employer I would want a mix of young people (energetic and easy to take advantage of) and old folks (more relaxed, battle scars taught them to avoid simple mistakes grads might sleepwalk right into.)

@Chris W - remember "raising of pension age" is completely different from "raising of retirement age"!!!

App store?

Can someone explain why we need an Android app store? It's not like there is a Windows app store or a Linux app store. What's wrong with you're a developer and you put your app on your website so people can download it?