Posts by TechnicianJack

I certainly hope they lose the contract. I can't see how anyone thought that having a 3rd party handle recruitment and information for the armed forces is a good idea. (Well, other than the people being passed the brown envelopes). It will be a good kick to Capita to show they're not invincible, or even better, accelerate their death spiral.

So basically thousands of elderly people might finally have to migrate their old POP3 accounts in Outlook Express to something more modern.

I think that the price of phones now is partially to blame. With the average decent handset now costing £500+ and more if you want anything from Apple, people are no longer changing their phones every year, rather running them until they're worn out. That and a combination of online shopping. Once you know what you want, you can easily go and find the cheapest price for the product online.

Brexit/political uncertainty seems to be the excuse for everything at the moment. I would like to see what these sales are relating to, either business or personal sales. I would expect the business sales are probably staying reasonably constant, while the personal sales are declining as people buy phones/tablets instead. (Of course, there may be some companies moving overseas, but it's not like companies are leaving in droves).

Another thing which may contribute is SSDs. Where I used to work, the company used Lenovo equipment. Over the last couple of years, SSDs have become standard in the laptops we had from them, and we upgraded the older slow machines with SSDs in place of their conventional hard drives, and they became as fast of the new machines. The SSD machines don't seem to suffer from slow performance over time, so there was no need to replace them as frequently.

As the SSDs make a substantial difference to the device performance, companies may simply be choosing to keep their laptops (and some desktops) longer before they need replacing.

In 1942, a 22 year old was sent to another country to capture enemy equipment under enemy fire knowing he would be shot by his bodyguard if he was captured, managed to work out how the system roughly worked by looking at it and thought outside the box to alter its operation so it could be detected and successfully analysed remotely.

22 year olds today seem to cry and hide in a safe space if you don't identify them with their correct made up gender pronoun. What a world we live in.

Rugged Android Equipment

Hopefully they will choose the Android route instead of Apple or Windows Phone. The reason being that there is already Android based rugged equipment designed for law enforcement, construction, military etc, which is designed to survive drops, rain and general abuse. There is also appropriate accessories for those, such as vehicle mounts and other related hardware that already exist, rather than having to be procured later. It is also likely that these would have replaceable batteries, which would prevent the devices having to be left on desks/in the police car to charge, rather than being where it's needed.

The arguments about the competitors are that Apple products are generally fragile, expensive and have no replaceable/repairable parts. Yes, you could put an armoured case on an iPad, but underneath, it's still a fragile device that will likely get damaged at some point. They're also not waterproof, so would likely need a case that would fully enclose it. This would potentially make the touch screen difficult to operate. Also, when the device inevitably gets damaged, it would be an expensive replacement/repair that would have to be returned to Apple, rather than the Police's IT department. Finally, if any accessories were required, they would have to be procured by a likely expensive process to custom build what was required. All of this ancillary equipment would likely then have to be scrapped due to Apple changing the shape/size of the device or the shape/location of the connectors. (And knowing the amount of time it takes to procure this equipment, the design would change half way through the process, causing loads of money to be wasted redesigning and reissuing replacement kit).

The same argument goes for Windows Phone, in that it's still a fragile device in a rugged case, although there are a couple of rugged phones available with this OS. There's also the potential that it will be discontinued if its market share stays low or decreases due to lack of demand or competitors, leaving the police to risk using unsupported equipment or having to pay for another procurement process.

Overall, the Android equipment is probably the most suitable for this sort of work. There is a possibility that this will have the highest cost due to the heavy duty requirements of the devices. However, it will probably outweigh the other devices, as there is a potential that Apple and Windows devices would be expensive to procure and adapt for their intended use, and they may spend more time being returned for repair or replacement due to them not being designed for rugged use. The Android equipment would likely also be supported by the manufacturer, being able to supply new devices, accessories and spare parts for the duration of their use. This would be the be the best option to spend taxpayer's money on.

Hardly surprising

After working in a school and experiencing RM's Community Connect software managing a network, I'm hardly surprised that they're losing money. At the time, I worked in two schools, both part time around my university. One had a 'vanilla' Windows environment and the other had RM CC4. The RM system was incredibly unreliable and often failed to perform basic tasks. Endless hours were spent on the phone to support, who would spend ages remoting into the servers to fix problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. By the end of my employment there, the school had taken on my recommendation to invest in a fresh vanilla Windows network to replace RM, and were impressed with how much better it was. Not to mention that they saved loads of money, as RM's services are surprisingly expensive.

I'm surprised people still use WhatsApp, especially as you have to pay for it. I remember it being really popular 2-3 years ago, but it seems most people have moved over to the Facebook Messenger app now, and very few people I know still use it. (Especially after the redesign for both the Facebook app and the Messenger app). I personally like the Google Hangouts messenger app. One thing I do like about Facebook messenger is you can make a big snake of your friends faces by dragging the conversation bubbles around the screen.

Manual Settings

Why does it need to identify the frame rate? Can't it just have a setting to manually tell it to use 50Hz?

While it seems a good idea on paper, having an SD card NFC system is a problem. Some phones do not have an SD slot, and phones that do often have a small internal memory as they expect you to put your media and apps on removable storage. People would then have to choose between NFC with their bank details or their media. Seeing as lots of phones have SD cards mounted behind batteries etc, swapping between them would be inconvenient and seeing as some credit/debit cards have NFC built into them, a SD card is almost redundant. (Most people will carry their phone and wallet with their cards in).

Ideally, the phone should have two SD card slots, so users don't have to choose.

The usual then.

'It won't happen again'

Until it happens again.