* Posts by scifidale

22 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2011

Which qualifications are worthwhile?

scifidale
IT Angle

Besides which qualifications to study, the main question surely should be can you "afford" to change careers at this stage of the game. Depends on were you live etc etc but helpdesk wages are very low and generally only good for those skipping out of school/college with no commitments etc. If you have wife/family/car/house any or all then you will need to look at the average salary for helpdesk and desktop support to see if you can survive the 2-3 years on average it takes to rattle through those positions.

Helpdesk positions generally do not require any certifications, only a certain mindset so dont go thinking that you need a certification before you start looking for helpdesk work if its feasible.

20 years of GSM digital mobile phones

scifidale

My first mobile phone was in 95 and was a (snappily titled) sony cw-h333. my favourite phone ever through taking into account the era and tech available at the time was the ericsson t28, flippy mouthpiece, voice recognition that worked and tetris. The worst was a nokia N80 a dreadful piece of tat that I quickly got rid of for something else.

Bargain! Desperate Comet SLASHES price of £4,400 iPod Nano

scifidale

Re: Kettles one fifth off ?!?? BRILLIANT...

Good luck with that one !! :)

Peeved bumpkins demand legally binding broadband promise from UK.gov

scifidale

Re: priorities

Mains drainage as gas would be a godsend to me, it would stop me having to spend a ton of money on heating oil and having to unblock the septic tank every couple of months, After that they can upgrade my broadband that is currently being carried by string with flakes of copper in it I think. I'm quite happy leaving iso's downloading overnight.

Doctor Who to hit small screen on 1 September

scifidale
Gimp

Pond-age, now theres a thought!!!

Microsoft 'yanked optical drive from Xbox 720'

scifidale

Cartridges were better but not indestructible, who remebers blowing wildly into the bottom of a cartridge to bring it back to life?

Downloadable content is a nightmare for me if MS do this my connection is ok considering I live in the country but its unreliable so if MS do do this they'll need to ensure they include a download manager by default. Someone down the road to me who has a young family get only get half a meg on their up to 8 meg line so they wont be able to download anything.

As long as cart's are the new medium or they stick with dvd/BD then I'll be quite happy, download only means I'll be playing my 360 for many years until fibre broadband makes an apperance in our area (I dont think I'll live that long).

SHOCK: RIM PlayBook outsells Apple iPad

scifidale

RIM have been unable/unwilling to keep up with consumerization within IT, if you think about blackberry UI and an android/apple/wp7 UI which one is going to get picked up by a user, plus RIM devices always carry a few quirks that catch staff out but are well known to helpdesks. I used to love blackberrys but the fact that the UI and featureset on a blackberry is practically identical to how they were 5 or more years ago and activesync does what most companies need makes puts them on very shakey ground indeed.

Report: Most council workers granted access to Facebook, Twitter

scifidale

I dont see a problem with allowing access to social media, by doing so it allows us to monitor it and providing someone isnt spending all day on FB and useage is moderate then whats the issue.

People are paid to do certain tasks and it doesn't mean they do it 8 hours a day 5 days a week, there may be lulls in workload so a bit of facebook or online shopping is of no interest to me if they do. If they spend too long on it though then I'm interested.

I've worked for both public and private sector and I'm quite interested to see how many of the posters who always say how little work public sector workers do have actually worked within the public sector, any seeming lack of activity in public sector that I have observed is generally spent following all the lawful red tape that goes with working within the public sector. Whereas in the private sector firms I have worked for if there is a delaying issue it has money chucked at it and the issue goes away.

Brit pair deported from US for 'destroy America' tweet

scifidale
Facepalm

{rolls eyes and snaps another rich tea biscuit}

Parasites spark swarm of zombie bees

scifidale

Sounds more like the behaviour is due to comfort and pain rather than zombiness!

Comet Lovejoy survives brush with fiery solar death

scifidale

I wonder if it bought any extinct animals back with it when it reappeared via a slingshot manouver?

Apple fanbois get app to summon store staff

scifidale

surely a simple COOOEEEE or Oi over 'ere bud, would be simple enough, or is actual social interaction and traditions a bit much for apple store goers!

Open source team creates apocalypse survival kit

scifidale
Mushroom

"In this brave new world, with a handful of men, we can start all over agaaaaiiinnn!

RIM stands, staggers, falls again

scifidale
Thumb Down

This is an awful cock up on their part and shows how relient BB users are on one infrastructure set. I would still say that even bes express provides more granular control of a business device than an android/iphone or windows phone can with exchange active sync. I support both and I dont have to worry much about BB's where I worry all the time about active sync connected phones and there app happy end users.

Unless RIM go horribly bust and everything dies I still dont see a more secure/controllable way of providing email/messaging to the business users.

45% of Android users to upgrade to rival phone OSes

scifidale
Happy

My only problem with my HTC desire is the small amount of onboard memory and the number of apps that still cannot ber entirely moved to SD, so yes I wont be moving away from android but I will be paying attention to how much onboard memory the phone has on my next upgrade.

Microsoft cloud evaporated by one busted file

scifidale
Mushroom

BOOM and theres the reason I wont host any company data in "the cloud". If theres downtime to be had I want to be the one instigating or fixing it!

GM OnStar cars will upload all data unless owners opt out

scifidale
Stop

Dont think it'll make much difference to those without insurance (and proberbly no driving licence, road tax MOT etc). all it means is some datacenter somewhere will know where a cars been.

I hope when they say receive updates to the latest and greatest I hope they dont actually mean the vehicles computer as well, I'd rather not get a (quite literally) BSOD on the motor way!

Hunt: We'll slightly inconvenience pirate sites

scifidale

So the 2 things mentioned in the item handily means the government dont have to do anything at all other than the receptionist typing out a dictated letter to google asking to demote pirate sites.

I've got an idea for the sticker though, rather than "intel inside" pirate sites could be labelled "free-stuff inside" yep that'll do it.

Dixons predicts Olympics will boost sales

scifidale
WTF?

Oh dear

I still dont get this 3d thing at all, I watched a bit recently in a sky booth (so assumidly the best of the best equipment), and yes it was tv but it still looked like one cardboard cutout moving in front of another, Meh! I'll wait until there is no choice but to buy a 3d telly.

Most Adobe Reader installs are out of date

scifidale
Thumb Down

bye bye adobe

Any network I have control over be-it corporate or home the first thing that goes is adobe reader, and in goes foxit. Users then whoop with joy that their pdfs actually open quickly instead of taking the same time that it takes to load crysis!! for the love of god adobe you know something is wrong when you take 200MB's or more to do what foxit can do in around 10MB and with alot less of the swiss cheese effect.

Dell's faulty PC legal woes worsen (again)

scifidale
Happy

the plate comes off

You can take the plate off, you need a nice small set of tough pliers and the push the cpu bracket pins out from the top side of the motherboard and take both the bracket and metal plate off!

scifidale
Mushroom

not just 270's and 280's

The 260's were bad too, put many a soldering iron to those over the years.