Sign in / up

* Posts by Ku...

67 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2010

Page:

HTC Sensation dual core Android smartphone

Ku...
Happy

performance is part of the deal but not the whole deal

As has been mentioned by a couple of people, its about the user experience.

I've played with other Android phones but what I like is not so much Android as Sense. So if I want an Android phone I want a HTC.

It would be good if HTC allow you to turn off some of the graphic effects (like you can turn off Aero in Windows) if you want to reduce some of the overhead.

Its not so much a Ferrari in a cast iron body but a full spec luxury car. HTC are trying to produce a smartphone which has *everything" loaded in there.

I moved from HTC to iPhone 4 because I needed IOS for business. I am considering the Sensation as my actual phone and use the iPhone 4 simply for running the IOS apps

For me the usability and "experience" of Sense is what makes a great phone. HTC have all the boxes ticked there for me.

1 0

Yahoo! boo-hoo over Alibaba boo-boo

Ku...

Alibaba is a respectable brand

Out East, where I have family, Alibaba is a reputable source of B2B sales. It has networks across most of Asia. Sure there have been some dishonest sellers who have been acted on and execs sacked as a result of this going down on their watch, but when people have been sold stolen, misdescribed or fake goods through Amazon or eBay who was fired? Exactly.

It is almost entirely unlike eBay as its not an auction site and is not open to the general public in the same way.

If anything its like an online version of a wholesaler like Makro

0 0

UK tax system takes a little break from the interwebs

Ku...
Thumb Down

this is a PITA

Tax year change over period is the quietest part of the year, yeah right. Especially when the tax credit system is affected and guess when they want you to register your change of circumstances after the 1st April. 1st working day after the 1st April I phone in and am told (via a recorded message) that they are closed due to a planned upgrade.

Seriously.

0 0

Mobile operators ditch Tube plans

Ku...

Once again we prove we are no longer a top tier nation

Its getting embarrassing how far behind we are getting compared to the competitive nations across the globe. And once again we (or at least Reg readers) seem pleased of the fact. "Britain is open for business" they say, its just getting harder to do business here and when foreign guests or clients come over more embarrassing.

1 0

Mozilla debuts Firefox 4 for Android

Ku...

If I can'rt see it in the App Store

I presume that means its a no-go on my device?

0 0

Government needs to bring IT skills in-house

Ku...

As has been said...

And as per my comments on Bury doing their outsourcing...

You need to be able to control your suppliers. You need to be able to set targets, achieve targets, that sort of basic management. Whether you do it in house or use a subby to do it what you need is a clear goal and a plan to get there. This is what is lacking in Government IT programmes much of the time.

Too much consultation too. A racehorse designed by committee and all that.

1 0

Bury council considers mass outsourcing

Ku...

This is all fine, but...

Much as local authorities are known as organisations who are expensive at the direct delivery of services they are not known as effective and efficient commisioners of services either. I hope Bury are going to buck the trend but a lot of local authority outsourcing is good only for the contract holder and bad for the service user and the tax payer...

0 0

Google Docs morphs into once and future 'GDrive'

Ku...

Google - potentially useful services, but...

1. Google is Evil in more ways than I can be bothered to outline again here.

2. Google's interface looks like it was designed by people who hate users. Or have shares in the manufacture of Asprin.

I'm all for this cloud stuff. I find Dropbox to be the most useful thing I have discovered in years. Being an Android phone user and a Gmail user (hey, I must like evil then, right?) I find the G-whatever products easy to get sucked into. I just wish they were less crappy.

I'm not giving all my docs to Google for sure.

2 2

Computacenter joins cloud club

Ku...

UK Cloud changes "everything"

A UK based cloud is not subject to US interferance as is an American company based cloud. Your data will be stored in a UK data centre and as such you have not moved data cross jurisditcion which is important in compliance for some types of data/organisation. The geographic guarantee which Amazon, Google, Microsoft et al cannot give you suddenly is not the obstacle it was before. Could be a winning angle for Computacenter

0 0

What you think about SaaS

Ku...
Reply Icon

How much scalability do you need?

We aren't all the CEOs of General Motors or Coca Cola here. The arguments about scalability disappear if you have a SME looking at bang for buck. I predict thats who is using this stuff and who will be moving to this. There are some big corporates who have "gone Google" so obviously it scales a fair size organisation. SMEs looking at the often disproportionate costs in on-premise systems are going to be well tempted if they aren't already.

0 0

Onkyo CS-545 combo mini hi-fi

Ku...
Happy

I still buy CDs

Its is often notably cheaper to buy a CD from Play/Amazon/etc than it is to download it. It gives you complete flexibility on how you encode it for playing on your personal player of choice. if you change player or you want to re-encode then you can do. It gives you proper cover art and something tangible for your money. As said, its lossless. I only buy downloads for things where its an impulse buy, novelty item or I only want one or two tracks off the album (the Plan B album for example, I only like one track off there).

I still have vinyl too! I'll keep my "record" collection until it is really utterly not viable to take up that much space in our house with it LOL.

1 0

Whose data is it anyway?

Ku...
IT Angle

I've seen both sides of this

The business doesn't like IT involvement because they insist on contracts and compliance and all that boring stuff. JFDI. Then 9 months and hundred thousand pounds later the relationship the business has with their 3rd party is as bad as their relationship with IT. Calls in IT to help. Unfortunately all the documentation is held by 3rd party and is "confidential", no agreements, no SLA, no penalty clauses, nothing. The project then mires and attempts to take it in house or move to another third party are blockaded by the IP rights of the existing 3rd party. Trap! I've even seen whole developments writen off and the project kicked off again from fist principals with another third party because of this.

This only occurs when you have some seriously bad management taking place in your business.

But I've seen IT impose such restrictions on how business can take place on a daily basis you have to wonder why those "at the top table" allow it. IT, and specifically those parts of IT tasked with security and compliance can be seen as "the business prevention department".

As has been said up above by other folks quicker to keyboard than I, the point is to read the contract, understand what is in it, what are your legal responsibilities, etc. and act in the best interests of your business. If you don't understand the contract or the regulatory requirements then pay for someone who does to explain it to you.

0 0

National Identity Card holding chumps have buyer's remorse

Ku...

£30 is nothing

There are people who have lost a lot more than £30 over this fiasco. Huge job culls at the Passport Office for example to make back the money HM Govt. can't get back on contracts but had budgeted for anyway (cancellation clauses including huge financial penalties). When people who have nothing to do with the introduction and cancelation of ID Cards and all that get made redundant to pay for government policy whims then £30 seems like nothing.

1 0

School caretaker harassed after Islamists hack EDL

Ku...

Perhaps

Perhaps Evil Auditor is one of our American cousins? In that (red) neck of the woods they enjoy a lot less legal protection in their employment. You can pretty much be sacked because your employer just doesn't like you and they don't have to go through the same level of process we do in this country to remove someone from post.

I remember being TUPE'd into an American company and they sent us copies of thier standard contract of employment and my legal advice was it didn't matter if I signed it or not because about 60% of it was illegal under UK law anyway.

0 0

Ofcom proposes UK phone numbers prefix re-org

Ku...
Headmaster

call charges are insignificant?

To these folks who have "saved a fortune" how much time do you spend on the phone to 0845 and 0870 numbers?

I get the 08... itemised on my mobile bill because they are annoyingly excluded from my free minutes but seriously, this adds up to a quid or two a month, tops. For that its not worth my time trying to find the actual geographic number for these folks.

I agree 08... numbers should be included in your free minutes whether you are on a mobile or a pre-package deal land line, but really, I can't be arsed with the ire people seem to find about these things.

We ran 0845 numbers here because it allowed us to route calls effeciently. For some reason our customers were unable to pick the right number from either public listings (yellow pages et al) or off our website. We got compalaints we were "ripping people off" or "making money" out of it when in fact it actually cost us money to provide 0845 numbers. Customer doesn't like it, so we withdrew them, now customer complains they have to ring several numbers to get right department, some of which are "long distance" numbers. Well, duh, look the right frikkin number up then.

So we invest in an expensive phone system linking all our offices via VoIP and now our customers can call any number they like and a receptionist will route their call correctly.

However - this costs us money to do and guess who pays for that? The customer. Companies can't just magic money out of thin air (our shareholders would love it of we can). Increase our operating costs and you'll just pay more somewhere else to cover it.

Welcome to consumer economics.

These things should be as transparrent as possible but at the end of the day you don't get anything for free.

0 0

Facebook trains self to recognize your face

Ku...

You have to be in it to win it

Quit freaking out. If you are not on Facebook you can't be tagged.

re: young people. read the stats, largest group of Facebook users is the over 35 demographics. Fastest growing is 45+ We use Facebook for advertising so we get all this demographic stuff off them.

Older people often fail horrifically at online stuff. Younger people don't seem to care. Thats how Facebook works.

0 0
Ku...
WTF?

"always default to the most secure"

Facebook will never offer this.

Remember on facebook you are not the customer you are the product.

Facebook makes its money by sharing your data with whoever wants to pay to have it and by using your data to improve the targetting of adverising to you.

If you care about the privacy of anything, don't put it on Facebook. Simples.

0 0

Apple iPhone 4 vs... the rest

Ku...
IT Angle

N95

I also had an N95. The point is not that the N95 could do all that an iPhone can, nor all that a HTC Desire or Galaxy S can, the point is that the N95 was an ergonomic nightmare to use. yes, it could do loads of things, but it was such a palaver to do any of them that I was pleased to upgrade it to a phone which was actually pleasant to use (HTC Hero) .

IMO this is where a lot of the phone manufacturers are going wrong. They are all about tick lists of features and not about make the phone a delight to use. Apple has a very good handle on this. HTC has a very good handle on this. I am due an upgrade so I'm looking at the market and so many of the phones out there still have ugly, confused, unintuitive UIs and there is absolutely no excuse fort that these days.

I want my phone to USE not to bark on about its got this app or that feature or this CPU or some nebulous reason its "the best". The best phone for me is the one which makes it easiest and quickest and "funnest" to achieve what I want to do, which is basically send texts, check emails, check web, listen to music, make a phone call, etc.

I don't care about the brand and I'm not even committed to an OS. I like HTC because I've had great backup and great customer service from them as a consumer and also we use their phones at work. Pro/Anti Apple/Microsoft is just plain sad. Who cares? What does it do for me, thats what matters.

3 0

Scareware cold-callers target 1 in 4

Ku...

TPS won't help you here

TPS only prevents legitimate businesses within the UK from cold calling you. My parents are plagued with boiler room scammers calling from various overseas locations, on the occasions my parents have mentioned that they are TPS registered they have either been laughed at or just given a load of verbal abuse. And called back later.

I say "plagued", on a good day they get 2 or 3 calls. They may go a few days with no calls. Its a moderate annoyance.

1 0
Ku...

two thoughts...

Firstly, we have been "poo-poo"ing scares and fake warnings about online crime for so long now that when there is a *real* threat people are just zoned out. First time I heard about this I assumed it was another one of those fake bogey man stories.

I'm also unsure about the figure of 1 in 4 internet users have been called by these people. 1 in 4? Really? Straw poll in my office suggests otherwise. 25% of all internet users in the UK is a lot of people.

See point 1.

Over-egging a threat which is real but low incidence makes people less likely to believe you next time around.

3 0

Gov report urges total consumer contract law overhaul

Ku...

makes sense but...

...why does it make me nervous as well...?

0 0

Global warming is actually good for rainforests, say boffins

Ku...

A sample of 1 is not statistically reliable

Remember science is based on the evidence of a body of research. One paper does not mean universal truth. However, there is a definite trend in published research which says that the cataclysmic predictions of earlier researchers were overstating the case.

This is one more block in that body of evidence.

Interesting.

But not a final answer all on its own.

So while I welcome reporting on the continual research into climate change I hope we aren't falling into the tabloid trap of thinking that one published report changes everything.

1 0

Google search rolls out 'instant' site previews

Ku...

I'm with Andy

Ilike the idea of not ending up on pay-to-click sites and the various other crap which seems to be prevalent in a lot of the searches I do. I actually use Bing as my primary search engine these day FWIW.

0 0

Steelie Neelie calls for 'every vehicle digital'

Ku...
Reply Icon
Happy

Not all classics are hard to drive or maintain

You can get classic cars with power steering, servo discs, automatic transmissions, decent fuel economy, etc.

You can make some allowances for fuel economy when you aren't losing a couple of grand a year in depreciation. Or convert to LPG, which is usually cheap and easy to do on older carburettor or single point injection engines.

Recently a water pump for my wife's modern car was £400 +VAT for the parts alone. It took 8 hours at the garage to fit it. I had to do one on one of my classics recently and it cost me £43 +VAT and arrived next day from the supplier. Fitted it myself in an hour and a half. Even if you pay a mechanic thats 2 hours, £80 plus your parts, not a big bill.

If you buy some obscure 1940s Panhard or something then don't expect it to be easy but there are plenty of options with great parts supply, low parts prices, decent reliability and great fun drivability that some anonymous modern derv will never come close to!

0 0
Ku...
Pirate

I do like a bit of tech...

...I don't think I'd be here otherwise.

But i think the only WiFi I want in my car is streaming my MP3s from my cloud based music collection.

And I can live without that really.

I daily drive a Ford Mustang which is old enough not to even have electronic ignition...

0 0

Old PCs: When it's time to die

Ku...
IT Angle

Some bad assumptions in this article.

We are running an estate of HP DC7600 and other HP PCs many of which are "significantly" old. We are not losing thousands in productivity. We are not running risks with security. We are not running out of date OS. Just because some of these shipped with Windows 2000 or XP doesn't mean we are still running that. We have Windows 7 and Windows Vista (I would prefer all W7 but we can't do the licencing). Why Vista you ask? Because some WS2008 functions require a fellow "Longhorn family" OS in order to run and we had a business case for those functions.

We have very few hardware failures. Our aging PCs run at an acceptable pace for the work which they are asked to do. Most of our serious/business critical apps are web published not client server so as long as they can run a browser they can run. Shaving 30 seconds or even 2 minutes off the boot up time on a Monday morning won't save a lot. We run modern monitors, mostly. I have seen some people offering some really over cooked arguments about power saving but all of the ones we checked the maths on they didn't add up at all. People make bad assumptions then publish online and other people believe what they read and make more bad assumptions on those bad figures. Using Vista and W7 gives you a bit better control over power management but its still not "right", and thats the case on old and new PCs (oddly enough the PC on my desk is a brand new one, who'd have thought that?)

We have our patching sorted, we have our general updating sorted, we have our monitoring sorted, a tried and tested set of group policies. We have very few problems of OS reliability or application failure, even when running Vista on 4 and 5 year old PCs.

If you run a business where everyone needs to run heavy duty applications on their PC then you won't get by using this approach. But as we are looking to the cloud more and more (public or private) the hardware on the desk of Mr or Mrs Averageuser is less a critical factor. So long as you spec it right, keep it patched, keep the crapware off it, etc.

Look at the cost of HW refresh? Blimey.

This article reads like the argument a chap I worked with made. He swapped his 5 year old Astra for a new Focus and was crowing about how he'd save £50 a month with the better fuel consumption, ignoring the £175 a month extra it was costing him in finance to buy the blessed thing...

I'll ditch hardware when it breaks and can't be fixed economically or when it is no longer supported by or capable of running the SW/OS I need to run on it. If you have Vista or W7 deployed then multiple HW generations or even vendors is no big deal, you can still have unified build images and keep your estate easy to manage.

You don't have to rip and replace.

0 0

Public sector tech jobs still plummeting

Ku...
Coffee/keyboard

Advertised jobs are not always real jobs

For example I saw one post being advertised which was really VERY specific and was obviously the same one job not only being advertised by about 3 or 4 agencies but also was advertised fairly continually for about 4 months. I know finding the right person is tricky but I suspect that job got filled well before the adverts finished. Also it got advertised as being at several different cities, all in the same region, so on the face of it maybe 20 different adverts appeared for that one job. What does that do for the "plenty of vacancies being advertised" stats? Another job I see being advertised by a number of agencies from a company I know does not use agencies to recruit... They were advertising that position maybe 2 months ago. Now thier name and branding is stripped from the ads and several agencies I never heard of have the role advertised...

Recruitment agencies always say the market is strong in the same way estate agents always tell you house prices are going up and up...

1 0

Toshiba AC100 Android smartbook

Ku...

Seems like a sad fail

I've been looking forward to just this very combo, an ultralight netbook with Android or similar running on it. It seems to fail as a consumer and as a business device. This is a real shame. Hopefully someone gets some fixes out there for this.

0 0

Spending cuts force police IT merger

Ku...

short term savings

Even if the savings are not in the short term savings are savings. One of the problems we have is a lack of strategic thinking, not looking to the mid or long term. Maybe a forces consolidation won't save money in 2011/12 and certainly won't in 2010/11 but if there is real saving in 2012+ then thats a saving for future tax years. Lordy only knows what the situation for public spending will be by then. Just because we need to save now doesn't mean we should discount savings for tomorrow. This is why we still have all these lumbering 20th century structures - there is no short term gain in changing them and everybody is all about the short term. If this had been done 2 - 3 years ago we'd be saving the money now. Lets not be in 2 -3 years time in the same situation wondering where the money is goign to come from to run this stuff.

0 0

DfT to install new motorway tech

Ku...
Unhappy

Something needs to be done.

This is a horrific stretch of motorway. Not just because it leads to Sheffield either.... ;-)

Something needs to be done with most of the M1 through the Midlands and North it starts feckin up about J21 and doesn't get right again until somewhere about J29. Leicester to Chesterfield seems to be the absolute worst.

The A roads linking many of the big cities to the M1 are also dreadful, the A52 into Derby is bad but the A610 and A453 into Nottingham are an absolute joke.

I've seen stuff from various places suggesting ATM can help, case studies of various cities abroad and the like. I'm not sure if we are passed the limit for that though.

Dare I suggest telecommuting...

0 0

Equality Act causes logistics nightmare

Ku...
Thumb Down

Working in the public sector...

I'm afraid this is all too familiar. There is an element of "welcome to my world" about this whole thing. Government hasn't decided what its goig to ask you to do but it knows you have to be doing it by this date...

3 0

Cameron promises boost for tech companies

Ku...

So a high proportion of new hires come from start ups...

...misses the coresponding stats for the number of businesses which fail in the first five years of operation. Which is very high. I don't have the numbers to hand, I'd look a lot smarter if I did, but I know that there used to be a lot of tax incentives to invest capital in startup companies bt you had to leave your investment in place for the first 5 year "danger period". it was an effective tax write off.

I suppose if you maintain the churn, enough new startups keep coming to fill the gaps by those who fail then you keep some kind of equilibrium.

I applaud anything which helps business startups, whether they are tech companies or plumbing services. I hope that the same rigor will be applied to business plans of all sectors though not just letting the funding agencies get blinded by the glitz of it being "all techy"

0 0

Motorola Backflip Android smartphone

Ku...

Android 1.5?

Sorry Moto, I have loved your phones in the past but snafus like rolling with Andorid 1.5 mean I'm still on track for another HTC when my upgrade comes in.

0 0

Sony hits stop on Walkman tape players

Ku...

"Emerging" or "other" markets

I had assumed by "emerging markets" they were talking about Africa and some East Asian and Subcontinental martkets where there isn't anywhere handy to hook up an MP3 player or get downloads where there isn't even and landline phones. Cassette tape may be a horrible medium in so many ways but its cheap and pretty robust where even "indestructable" CDs will end up scratched and otherwise damaged. Remember when CDs were sold to us as being "indestructable" LOL?

1 0

NHS: Big tech might be OK for patient power

Ku...
Reply Icon

@h4rm0ny

Not benevolent dictatorship - electoral democracy.

You elect a party who claim they will do "X". They should then do "X" because that is what they have an electoral mandate to do. What they should not do is be elected bereft of any ideas of what to do and spend the whole term of their elected office piddling about asking us what we want when that is actually the whole point of a general election, not to find out which party is lead by the guy with the nicest smile.

We seem to have forgotten how to run a democracy in this country.

Everybody is too scared of upsetting some element of public opinion or some newspaper editior that they have nothing of significant substance to offer.

I work in the public sector and I agree entirely with the sentiment that it is "awash with intiatives and no prioritisation" and this has to stop. It wastes my money as a tax payer and wastes my time as an employee. I don't work in health but I have friends who do. Its very demoralising for them.

If Party X says "elect us and we'll have the whole NHS online" and you want that - vote for them, if you don't then vote for someone else. Thats the way its supposed to work. It involves politicians putting together firm manifestos and the general public reading them and then bothering to vote.

With our electoral turnout people are in a poor position to complain about not being represented, or rather, about 40% of us are...

0 0
Ku...

The people who know least about the health service...

...are often the people who use it.

Look at any big private company. How do they achieve success? By continual consultation, focus groups, navel gazing, risk assessment and so forth? Or by putting strong, dynamic, capable leadership in place and bulldozing ahead regardless of the comentards and nay-sayers.

Its not "democratic" to run a public service that way you say?

What part of "democracy" requires you to mire everything in so much red tape that the cost to the tax payer of dispensing an asprin becomes £500 a go?

If you ask me: you will find I want access to all my NHS services online, yes, I'd love to be able to email my GP, make appointments online, renew prescriptions on a phone app, etc. if he's running late a SMS to tell me so would be great.

If you ask my parents: all of the above is the work of satan. My parents don't even believe in direct debit.

You can't please everyone because everyone has so many divergent views and experiances depending on their age, expectation and how they need to access the service.

Get a vision, enact. Get voted back in or out on the basis of how it pans out. Lets have some results here and less screwing over hard working and much put upon health service professionals who have to bend and twist with every public policy review....

2 1

HP whips out iPad challenger Windows 7 fondle-slab

Ku...

Just because its not suitable for your job

doesn't mean that its unsuitable for any job. I have no need for a bar code reader in my job, but you gotta bet theres thousands of warehouse staff, logistic managers, team leaders, truck drivers, docking staff and so forth who find them very useful and would be equally scoreful of a desktop PC if they approached life in the same blinkered way as many comentards in this topic do...

The question is not if the new tablet format units CAN be put to productive use, the question is WILL they [and where is the ROI?]

0 0
Ku...

They do have an obvious use

but I'm not sure if thats how they will generally be used...

I used to work for a large network provider, they provided all the techs with laptops. There were maybe 200 of these guys in high vis vests and white vans. They had to stand in the street logging in using a 3G (GPRS then I guess) signal to access the fault management system, then they could update and close the jobs in real time. They all complained how big and bulky the latops were. Maybe you could get the job done with a smartphone these days. I doubt you'd get a good "user experiance" though. A netbook or tablet would be ideal for this.

Another example is those Gallup poll people who come knock on your door, they have tablet type devices.

Another example is insurance assessors, building inspectors and other such professionals who have to make notes and enter details on site.

Outreach workers, social workers generally carry laptops which just cry out "steal me" so many of them don't bother and leave them in the office meaning they arn't updating records and having access to the info they need... a smaller lighter easier to hide device would work for them.

However I suspect most are destined to be executive toys.

2 0

Phone 7: Another Vista or another XP?

Ku...
Unhappy

May have a place...

We may deploy Windows Phone 7 for our corporate users. The guys who don't get a choice of what phone they get. It its easy to manage, secure, remote wipe and all that then I can see the attraction as a fancy business phone. However I can see a lot being put off by the prominence of Facebook in there for this purpose...

I've been keenly looking forward to seeing what MS can turn out for this as I know how much they have invested in it. I have to say I'm not feeling interested as a potential user. I'll stick with Android thanks.

I'm not too fussed about removable storage, especially if there is a nice slick cloud available but inability to mount as a USB drive is just a big fat PHAIL and possibly the big deal breaker on there for me.

1 0

Gov depts to cut back office, IT spending

Ku...

Oh, and on centralised purchasing...

I don't know what planet the people who negotiate OGC contracts are on, but I have been approached several times with offers to buy on OGC negotiated supply contracts for desktops, servers, network infrastructure, etc. and on every single occasion I have managed to get a significantly better price through direct negotiation on my own part. On Hewlett Packard desktops the difference between me buying though Insight.com and me buying through OGC procurement contract was £80 a unit! EIGHTY QUID PER BOX.

OK, centralised procurement SHOULD work but needs someone to oversee it and needs someone to the challenging it. But the Audit Commission is being wound up to save cost so who does this?

4 0
Ku...

Only cheaper if you do less...

All this talk of cutting back office functions, IT, all that... Plays well to the peanut gallery but unless you cut the processes out which those back office functions do then all that happens is that your front line staff get tied up doing the admin, often in less efficient processes than you had before...

A hell of a lot of effort is expended tracking, monitoring, reporting locally to then feed back to local, regional and central government offices. If you cut the amount of this admin work *then* you can start to cut the back office. I don't hear much about real streamlining. This is how we deliver better services cheaper.

2 0

Microsoft gets in a spin, announces Office 365

Ku...
Thumb Up

The point...

There is a good application here for mobile workers. Its effectively giving you access to your full corporate set up from home or where ever you land without having to licence those individual PCs. If you have users who use an office suite but not email, or who use a shared mailbox, it means you can save a couple of licences here if you can arrange it like a concurrent licence (something Microsoft has not offered in so long I can't even remember if they ever did)

It also saves you from having to install, maintain, patch and upgrade all those copies of Office. If the cost is more important to you than the user experiance then this will be very attractive. The more you put in the cloud the less tech staff you need to support each office on your estate.

As we are moving our business model away from staff based in offices we are looking more at this kind of application and don't want to "go Google". I'm sure there will be others for whom a MS cloud applicaton answers a lot of questions about how we move away from on premise based IT

1 0

Want to do a desktop refresh? How would you like to pay?

Ku...

Leasing and finance purchase are an option

Not a great option for some. Understand the cost model being put in front of you and thrash itout with people in your finance team who are probably better skilled to see a vendors attempt to pull the wool over your eyes than you are....

If you are deploying W7 then its a lot easier as the images are "hardware agnostic" so you can deploy to mixed hardware easily. Legacy kit is not the pain it was with Windows XP.

The problem is, as always, making the business case. How will a desktop refresh improve the bottom line? For some reason big IT projects are finding it harder to get finance approval at the moment. Wonder why that could be?

0 0

Quango bonfire torches websites

Ku...

How many times is Becta going to be killed?

That thing has some serious resiliance man. Becta has been announced as killed off a half dozen times now.

1 0

Windows Phone 7: 'Different, delightful'... and unfinished

Ku...

Windows "crashing"

Are people still making that jibe? c'mon, get with the 21st century, Windows since 2000 has been relatively stable, each sucessive release being generally better than the last. I manage a large WinTel estate and we don't have Windows "crashing". I guess its the "give a dog a bad name" thing. I suspect that will haunt Windows phone efforts as some previous efforts have been a bit horrible. Not so much that they were bad attempts for their era, but that MS has been lacking development in this area and what it has been offering has been sorely out of date. Like walking into a Ford dealer and finding they are sill selling the Escort... Not great when new but not actually bad. But compared with a modern design, sub-par! I'm prepared to give MS a shot with this, I'm even prepared to wait until Phone 7 v1.1 but Ballmer beware I am rapidly becoming an Android Fanboi as are just about everyone I know who doesn't Fangrl thier iPhone...

1 1

Android rebellion: How to tame your stupid smartphone

Ku...
WTF?

this is not my Android experience

I have an Android phone (HTC Hero), my friends mostly have HTC Hero or Desire. This is not their experience. I manage a team who are responsible for the company fleet of smartphones. For various reasons many of these are HTC Android. We do not have these issues.

I set my Hero up with an old Googlemail account, been no problem. Exchange works peachy too. When I first set the Hero up it just worked.

Any issues or queries I have had with the phone have been handled by HTC (dunno why you'd expect Google to fix it?) and I rate their support very highly.

Only nag I have is the hanging download problem which hit me maybe twice in the last 14 months or so I have been using the phone.

In 2 years or maybe slightly more of exposure to Android on handsets I don't recognise this article as being anywhere near right.

I'm getting the HTC Desire HD when it releases. I am a happy happy HTC customer.

4 0

Much of recent global warming actually caused by Sun

Ku...

I actually used to work in this field of research

20 years ago we were mapping global temperatures against solar activity. There is a period called the Maunder Minimum which was the lowest solar activity recorded. The Thames froze every year during this period.

Now that said, increased solar activity means additional heat input into the system, but "greenhouse" gasses can cause more of that heat to be retained which amplifies the effect of the additional heat from the sun.

If we had a period of very low solar activity we may welcome the greenhouse effect! However there is a real risk of damage to ecosystems in the mean time due to high temperature effects.

Remember that solar activity is cyclical.

Climate science is hard and there are no easy answers to explain all the effects away in one go. Also too much politics in it.

8 0

Blighty's carriers to field Windows Phone 7

Ku...

The proof will be how well they work. Or not

We have a large estate of Windows PCs, Windows servers, MS Exchange, SharePoint here. If Windows Phone 7 works better with that lot than Android then we will buy the Windows product.

Not all phones are bought on how pretty they are or by social networking addicts.

7 1

Viewsonic intros £350 7in Android tablet

Ku...

Its not an eBook reader

I assume that as I bothered to read the article, its a phone and it runs Andorid 2.2, which makes it a different beast to a boggo eBook reader. I hope this answers your question....

Viewsonic stuff is usually OK. We used their monitors at work quite a bit. I'd see one running in the flesh before dismissing it.

You get what you pay for, you want a "real" iPad, stump up the money for one (and you won't even get a phone on it... )

0 0

CTOs warned to prepare for Windows 7 budget squeeze

Ku...

The sky isn't falling in...

Reading some of the articles and listening in on other IT pros taling you'd think the world was ending, not XP support.... C'mon, lets get this in perspective: If you have a 3 year hardware refresh cycle then you will have all the HW and OS licencing in a 3 year rolling programme anyway. If you buy MVL OS then please tell me you staged purchase of these to include W7 licence or at least if your hand was forced to buy early you took software assurance?

We have a large proportion of our W7 licencing (OEM and MVL, we have a mix) covered already.

Also we already did the upgrade to Vista (we use Bitlocker, and a couple of other features in Vista it was way cheaper to go Vista than implement another solution) plus we part funded our W7 upgrade this way, especially as the move to W7 from Vista is simple.

TBH XP to Vista was OK. And, believe it or not, Donkey Vista is waaaay more reliable in operation than XP ever was. OS related support calls are way down.

I saw Gartner or Forester saying it would cost companies who didn't go to Vista way more to do W7 than those of us who did. I'm never sure that the figures they quote aren't just a little over cooked though.

Suffice to say, when we decide to go to W7 it won't be the end of the world. What is hurting companies out there is the lack of forsight to invest in the upgrades as you go along. You then have to pay to catch up and either risk getting further behind or ramping up the cost in a short window.

If you are going to go Microsoft you need to be keeping up with the game. If you are not prepapred to do that, then maybe its time to talk to the opersource guys.

2 0

Page: