Posts by Dr_Cynic

No surprise

From my many years of experience with University central IT much the same criticism could be directed at most of their projects, policies and implementations (though possibly not with such large financial costs).

The workers at the bottom are generally fine , but the top managers try to implement one size fits all policies, that whilst possibly pefectlty reasonable in a big financial institurion make no sense when dealing with research, academics or students.

When implementing new IT systems , whikst they have consultation meetings the design decisions are often based onlyb on satisfying the simplest requirements of small departments whilst telling the larger departments with more complex requirements that they won't implement something because 'nobody else has an issue' (which is uusally not true).

Changing my nameservers from the default university ones to use google's temporarily makes most sites accessible. though there are still a few which don't seem to be working.

I suspect all the car manufacturers are to some extent 'cheating' on the tests.

It certainly wasn't news to me that they have special modes for testing, I think I picked that up from some car forums a few years ago, though it is possible it might have been via some of my drinking mates who have dealings with the car industry.

Past Peak demand?

Couldn't possibly also be to do with the fact that most people who want a smartphone already have them, and for many there is no great incentive to upgrade as the previous models already had sufficient features and specifications for the form factor.

More cores/faster processors may look good on paper, but in practice what is more important in a mobile device is battery life.

Cameras have reached the limit of resolution that makes sense due to the limitations of the compact lenses (yes I know you could use all that excess processor power to compensate in software for the limitations of the lens if it is well characterised, but wouldn't you do better just to have a proper lens on a real camera).

Most users want something that fits easily in their pocket and are only using them to browse the web, check emails and play the odd game, for which they are fine.

Personally I'm still using an S2, and the only reason I am considering replacing it is because the usb port is a bit loose so the charger keeps poping out if you aren't careful, otherwise I would just buy a new battery and probably keep it for another 3 years.

theoretical non-event

Theoretically this might be weakness but there's 2 things stop it being a major problem.

1) the long lamented fact that manufacturers tend not to bother pushing out more than 1 os update if any to old devivces.

2) on the rare occasions that Updates to android have been available for my phone, all apps have had to be reinstalled anyway.

So in effect the only real risk is the standard one that the average user just accepts the permissions requested witout reading/understanding the implications.

Was messing up my laptop, windows event viewer was showing various dlls as having invalid hashs and was trying to do a chkdisk on every boot(but finding no problems. Kaspersky refused to start claiming corrupt database which an update fixed.

Checking another machine this morning , which also now keeps wanting to run chkdsk, but in this case kaspersky keeps claiming it's not activated, point it at the key file it is happy till next reboot at which point it has forgotten again. Looks like I will have to remove the update from that machine on Monday.

Flaw in their logic

Unless , in addition to detecting the processor type, the researchers also ran benchmarking tests on the different instances their conclusions are based on probably flawed assumptions.

It is unlikely generally that any individual instance has exclusive access to a cpu, the total demand on the service will be spread around, higher specified systems will have more individual instances than the older lower spec kit.

There may be a slight advantage to being on the 'better' systems but I doubt it justifies the cost of actively searching them out , you are probably better just picking the geographically closest centre.

The main problem I see is the lousy download speed which at best is less than 1/4 what I typically achieve from elsewhere, which is increasingly a problem with the ever larger offerings.