Posts by John Munyard

Less than 11 weeks to test and implement a complex, integrated system like this will inevitably be is ridiculous. And unachievable.

I was annoyed to find this wonderful "update" disabled some of the apps on my Windows10 PC, including the one which includes all the utilities for my motherboard... so now I can't adjust the fan profiles...

Thank you Microsoft. I knew you'd look after me, you bastards.

And what happens when a Government decides to oppress dissent by flagging the posts of everything it disagrees with ?

The sound of scores being settled.

One hopes this action hasn't been spurred by numerous recent pronouncements from the Trump administration and heads of various US Government agencies.

Because it smells a bit like the US Intelligence community settling a score for Kaspersky Labs' pivotal role in uncovering the Stuxnet virus 12 years ago and ascribing it's origin to the US and Israeli Governments.

Sod them

Been with them for 11 years. Closed my account last night and told them why in thier feedback.

If they don't want the clicks and advertising then there are plenty of others who do.

As an owner of the disappointing and now almost completely unsupported Surface 1 (only 3 years old remember) there is no way I would buy another Microsoft tablet. The thing will be obsolete in less than two years.

Given that Windows 10 now routinely feeds all sorts of usage and application data backto the Microsoft mothership whether you want it to or not this does seem a rather arrogant move.

All your base are belong to them I guess, as Apple aren't any better.

The problem with issuing these kind of ultimatums is that often it is the most innovative, creative and valuable staff who simply just quit, because they are the ones who know they can just go and get another job.

Since Facebook are so bloody smart, perhaps they could take the trouble to create "preferences" that actually stop unwanted posts when you do actually elect not to see them.

Hmm

That result is really a shame, because it shows overwhelmingly that a strategy based around public apathy has succeeded in putting around 98% of clients into pot who will have their data shared,

And I fully expect that shortly it will be announced that since 98% of the people do not object, that there is no longer any reason to exclude records from commercial data sharing since most people "agree" and thus the inconvenient gap will be arbitrarily closed anyway.

As the man said : "all your base are belong to us..."

Typical politics

This is nothing more than a piece of track covering by the EU, to distract everyone's attention from the fact that they knew all about these men, knew they had been arrested and extradited to Turkey before returning back ot Belgium.

They knew all about these people! What bloody good is more data sharing going to do FFS!

Frankly the level of competence demonstrated by the Police in it's management of this fairly simple issue raises serious concerns about their suitability to uphold the laws of our country. Whether they be unbelieveably incompetent or smugly arrogant the problem is the same.

According to reports on Radio 4 this afternoon this wasn't even a particularly complex attack, comprising of a DDOS attack with an SQL injection... something that 90% of amateur script-kiddies know how to do.

Now cyber security is a big issue, but as a Talk-Talk customer myself you really have to question the basic competence of what is one of the UK's major ISPs that they have not only managed to have thier pants pulled down around thier ankles so easily, but also how that came to happen successfully after two previous similar attacks during the past year.

What a bunch of f**king clowns. The woman CEO of Talk Talk should be incarcerated for presiding over such interstellar levels of corporate incompetence.

Customer Service

Yeah shame about all those Surface 1 & 2 users who were mislead by MS about thier tablet's inability to run legacy windows apps (even Microsoft ones).

And now they are abandoned with a piece of kit (in my case less than two years old), hardly supported, with a app store full of juvenile, poor apps. We just have to get on with it.

Microsoft may have screwed up with Windows RT, but this is NOT a great experience for those who bought early Surface tablets.

You know occasionally you read an article in the press that really makes you question the intelligence of people who really should know better.

This is one of those events. Reading other articles in ElReg regarding Lenovo's current financial worries in what is clearly a very difficult financial climate for PC and Laptop sales, you would think that ruining the trust of your brand by going to such lengths to install covert and un-removable adware as this would be inconceivable and yet here we are.

Any self respecting intelligent person reading this is just never ever going to buy Lenovo product again(if they ever did!). The company has put a gun to it's temple and pulled the trigger. Goodbye Lenovo.

If Microsoft invested as much in it's software as it does in it's lawyers they would have a better product.

It's clear to me that the biggest tit in this story is David Cameron. There he goes again promising to ban everything and threatening an entire industry when he clearly hasn't got a scooby-doobie-doo how anyone will be able to achieve it.

Clearly he's a believer in just shouting at people and the magic will happen. His Daily Mail fuelled initiative to get ISPs to block all porn sites without an opt-in has already f**king failed miserably, and yet here he goes all over again.

What a complete knob.

I guess it depends how you see it...

"Finally a new e-government plan will force different national systems to work together so that businesses and citizens only have to give their data to a public administration once."

Which could be ready another way as "regardless of whether you agree, and regardless of whether there is a need, the EU is going to grab all your UK Government data for it's own, undisclosed, purposes"

Nice. I guess it depends on how you read it....

Thats a smart move by Microsoft - to globalise on a single platform what is basically a crap app store (if the Surface/RT app store is any guide)

"All shall have crap" that is the mantra!

Ballmer the nut

Perhaps instead of cretious "bans" Ballmer should be asking himself - and the players - why they prefer Apple stuff to Microsoft stuff? You know Steve - a but of customer research intstead of the corporate arrogance for which Microsoft is so famous?

I have no idea why the media get so excited when Stephen Fry says something about any Apple product.

Aside from probably being in breach of advertising rules, because Fry is of course now utterly sponsored by Apple so it's less opinion and more "paid celebrity endorsement" the guy doesn't know squat about technology, as is proven by his almost autistic focus on everything which is good about Apple whilst conveniently ignoring what a repulsive, greedy, exploititive company it is.

Arrogance will get them nowhere

You would have thought with 30% of the world's PC's still on XP, and with IE continually losing market share, that Microsoft would have looked at new ways to keep thier client base content.

But instead all we get is more arrogance, more enforced attempts to get people to upgrade thier OS. People really won't bother - they'll just switch to apps like Firefox is even greater numbers.

Redmond still hasn't learned about Customer Service has it...

Perhaps they should have tried switching it off and then switching it on again.

If that fails log a ticket and it will be put into the Bangalore Support Team's Kanban backlog for sprint assessment.

I'm sure the xBox One is amazing, but if Forza 5 is anything to go by they won't be getting a purchase from me anytime soon.

£55 buys you a game with about 60% of the tracks and 20% of the cars available in Forza 4. You can then buy all the stuff they've taken out as DLC. And remember most of this content was already in Forza 4. Strangly I still have my 360 with all that DLC content still on it, not that Mocrosoft has also apparently made the decision to drop all interest in that platform already - another mistake which Sony have not made.

You would have to be some kind of cretin to accept that lot as an upgrade. Microsoft may think the money is in the games, but if nobody buys the things because they are sh*t value MS will not get any money at all.

Once again Microsoft manages to kill it's Golden Goose because of nothing more than pure greed. < GOLF CLAP >

No more tech deals over £100m... unless GCHQ want some new tech to spy on us with...

Apple may have thier swagger & bully tactics in full effect, but when you see how sales of Android phones are now going against iPhones it cannot possibly go on like this. We cannot be far from a time when the operators will just tell Apple to get stuffed.

Ryanair

Of course it makes total sense for Ryanair to madate a passport when travelling with them.

Because with Ryanair that ticket which you thought would take you to "Belfast East" will more likely instead drop you in some out-in-the-sticks airport outside Dublin with a 80 mile bus trip to get you where you thought you were going.

Hence passport.

Why people don't move on

I would suggest that many people, both home users and businesses don't upgrade from XP for what are fairly basic reasons:

1) There is little functionality of real value within either Vista or Windows8 which is not supported by XP. Most home users do browsing, email and maybe some media storage. Most businesses can use completely decent (if old) versions of Office on XP without upgrading.

2) For many people a move on from XP will also necessitate upgrading hardware and existing software packages as well. Why spend money and mess with stuff that works perfectly well? Who wants to chance that your router, printer or NAS drivers are supported in Windows 8?

The underlying problem for Microsoft is that most people (except boffins and excitable journalists) have everything they need and don't give a toss about cloud-enabled functionality or other such junk. There is basically no justification for spending the money and supporting Microsoft's bloated business model.

Rather than tring to scare the world into upgrading from XP, perhaps Microsoft could massively discount Vista instead and continue to sell that. Without a very low cost option, people and companies will (if forced) undoubtedly look for other cheaper platforms which won't pull support all over again in another 3 years time.

No one should be surprised the take up isn't improving as they haven't fixed the underlying objections many consumers have to DAB, which are:

1) Even the cheapest DAB radios are the best part of £30

2) The quality of DAB is inferior to FM and everyone knows it

3) We already have lots of FM radios which work perfectly well, thank you

I mean... durrrrh!

I think Google should think a bit more about thier actions. It was crap tricks like this that put developers off the Microsoft platform.

For all you guys who are scratching thier heads over whether it's better or not, what alternatives are better, and what uninstalls properly, I suspect there are hundreds of us out here watching with bemusement and feeling completely vindicated that thier decision not to move on from Win7 or even XP was absolutely the right one.

Can someone remind me again why Win8 is supposed to be so worthwhile? Does it make Outlook, Excel or Firefox run better? Or is it just "the newest thing you just don't need"?

Dumb

You know Google have just confirmed my suspicions about the value of cloud computing as a concept.

For a few years now all these industry thinking wonks have promoted the cloud as the future of computing. In a single dumb stroke Google have just given us all a cast iron reason to abandon it.

I suspect that Google's own cloud and mail services will take a drop now (or they bloody well should) but unfortunately so will a number of other companies who've invested heavily in this technology. I bet they are getting thier voodoo dolls out for Google right now.

Corporate greed just kills off everything worth having in the end doesn't it?

When you think for a moment what laptop you could buy instead for $899 the whole premise of Microsoft's offering just becomes absurd.

Oh dear, no Tetris = discredited article

Yah-boo!

Seriously does anyone even use Yahoo! anymore? You'd think with them racking up massive losses finding new ways to nark users would be low on thier list of stuff to do.

No surprises, except if you're Microsoft

The slow adoption of users and in particular businesses to Windows 8 should be no surprise to anyone. I find it strange that Microsoft continue to be (at least in public) flummoxed by the obvious.

To be fair Microsoft are caught in somewhat of a trap. They need to keep updating thier products & maintain revenue, but there are few new real ideas out there which really add to business productivity and there havn't been since WinXP.

Large businesses depend on thier workstations being reliable and thier staff using them effectively. Whenever Microsoft decide to piss about significantly with the interface, they create massive training impacts for large companies. That's why so many people reacted badly to the Ribbon.

Microsoft fail to comprehend that software is so central to a business operation that a company is taking a significant risk by updating it. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!!". Upgrading to Windows introduces incompatability, both with other software and with peripherals. In house applications which integrate with Windows may suddenly stop working. We should also not ignore the impact of a OS change on a company's IT pros to fully support it.

I work for an international bank and we're not even on Windows 7 yet. The list of incompatible software which requires re-write was in the hundreds and is still a significant issue. Many of our internal browser delivered apps are on IE8 and yet Windows 8 foists a new and potentially incompatible browser without the option to retain the old one. Fucking great that is.

The business community don't want an OS that looks like a big keyless iPad. The business community don't want to have to shell out for an entire generation of new PCs, or the costs of training, or the costs of redeveloping thier software landscape and testing it, they are nowhere as interested in public clouds or publishing stuff on the web from a toolbar (Sharepoint is fucking bad enough!), and they certainly aren't enticed by Microsoft's veiled threats to remove support from Windows XP or thier unrealistic volume licence pricing schedules.

The only thing that keeps Microsoft in business is that Apple and the other open source alternatives are even worse in many of these regards.

The Daily Mail

No shortage of irony that Ranzten published her opinion piece in the Daily Mail, who's online edition is at least 50% tits and arse stories these days...

Yeah... right....

Despite what Ballmer says I can't see most corporates agreeing to put thier data in some poxy ananymous, potentially insecure and uncontrolled "cloud".

Instead of focussing on pointless crap like that, perhaps Microsoft would add some more charts to Excel, or (God forbid) put styles back in the proper way instead of ruining the feature like they did.

Get the facts guys

Sorry to sound like a party pooper but before you link the poor fix time for this problem to the redundancies in 2010, have you established whether any of the job losses were in the division which runs the retail banking systems?

Suck

So that's an Olympic Gold for suck then.

It's nice to know we still dominate the world in certain fields.

Micro$oft

They really are a bunch of cheap schmucks. I really can see the day when corporates finally cry enough and go open source.

They think we muppets

I just love the way these people want to install this technology with all these amazing capabilities and then say "trust us, we've put in safeguards to stop ourselves using it fully"

I mean, seriously... do you really think I'm that stupid?

The only "safeguard" which is truly effective is not to put the tech in in the first place. That said, where can I get the software crack that allows you to rig your own readings?

As a bit of great value priced media it's great, but as a exhibit of blue-ray quality it is a long way from where it needs to be in my opinion.

The comment about the early films being grainy may be true, but what is unacceptable is that these movies have clearly been stuffed through some processing to sharpen and brighten the contrast (no doubt so on first viewing you coo "isn't that bright & bluray") but it also introduces a lot of noticeable picture noise. It's especially bad on Aliens and Alien Resurrection.

£12 is great value, but frankly that's about all the product is worth for what is supposed to be premium quality media.

Hmm, I'm calling "bollocks" on this one.

If Office 2007 is anything to go by, productivity will DROP dramatically because Microsoft messed with a well established GUI and refused to offer a way for those that wanted to switch back to the older version - you know, the productive non "ribbon" version where you knew where everything was, the hotkeys worked and the whole thing made sense.

And don't even get me started on the complete clusterf**k that Microsoft has turned MS Word styles into. It used to be a genuine productivity tool, and now it's a useless mess, clearly screwed up by endless feedback clinics with morons who never understood how styles worked in the first place.

Message to Microsoft : a GUI which is primarily directed at tablets isn't going to get all those companies still running WinXP to upgrade. In fact with so much kit due for replacement you may just be pushing them towards other alternatives.

Poor exploitation

The least Sony could have done would be to have dug up a few crappy extra tracks that never made it first time around and added them to the CD.

I mean that's what they did with Amy Winehouse and everyone wowed about that....

The Police investgate!

So Police are carrying out a thorough investigation to find the perpetrators eh?

So presumably that means everyone in Strathclyde nick is now looking at online porn all day eh?

Anonymous

How grateful and justified I now feel in not completing most of the census form. I wasn't the only person concerned about the processing of this data by Lockheed Martin and how it might be used.

The Government bleated on batting aside all the concerns as if they were irrelevant. Who's right now? Bunch of incompetent tossers. Hacked by a bloody 19 year old....

Only minor hipocisy

I find Schmidt's comments a bit funny really. So it's "bad" to roll out CCTV with facial recognition software, but at the same time it's ok to photograph people's properties without thier consent and post it on the internet, and it's ok to obtain and post high quality satellite pictures of people's houses and gardens on the internet without thier consent too?

Is that right? Hmm.