Showing 1 - 10 of 57
Covid computing
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/05/2020
» Things are quiet on the IT front. Well, that's not necessarily true, as many are trying to come to grips with the whole working-from-home existence. Many, including myself, are spending a lot of time in front of a screen. Instead of getting up and conferring with a colleague at their desk, it is a Skype chat. Instead of a walk to the meeting room, often on another floor, it is a Skype meeting or similar. Many do not have a video camera at home so it is voice only. There are new collaboration technologies like Microsoft Teams to get used to. Instead of handing a report to someone, it is uploaded into a shared area for all to browse. I find that I am sharing my screen more often to go over a document or diagram. On the plus side I recently had an upgrade to my Internet speed. This has helped with downloads but not much else, as a chat takes up very little bandwidth.
Someone, somewhere still uses IE
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/02/2020
» A Microsoft engineer, Eric Lawrence, who worked on moving the Edge browser to a Google-driven open source base code, has suggested that people need to stop using the more traditional version of Internet Explorer. His plea was a personal one on his own blog but Microsoft cybersecurity chief Chris Jackson expressed the same sentiment a year earlier. IE still has a couple of percent of people using it -- probably those who had it installed on their machines -- that have yet to be upgraded. The technology is old and full of security holes but a number of organisations demand that it still be used.
More data, more problems
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/01/2020
» It's time to make some predictions for 2020. A number were made by others a while back, most of which did not eventuate, like a Japanese base on the Moon, flying cars and a Beijing to London rail link. I'll try for a bit more realism.
You can forget HAL 9000
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/12/2018
» It has been over five years and it was time for a new PC. It took a while to pull together, required an eclectic set of carefully chosen components, and I paid someone to put it together for me, having done that myself too many times in the past.
Huawei still some way behind rivals
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/11/2018
» I've had some feedback expressing surprise that I invested in a smartwatch. Yes, I didn't think I'd see the day either, but it does function very well as a watch with changeable faces and at a price point that's far below some of the faces it can duplicate. The always-on test was a success in that I only turned the watch off when I wasn't using it on some evenings. It also does sleep tracking, which perhaps provides a sterner test, but it still provided a week's worth of use making it usable for many. On a longer trip you would need to take the charger along. Note that for both tests, I kept Bluetooth on the whole time.
Australia still trailing Thailand in broadband coverage
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/09/2018
» Wither now comms in Australia? With the National Broadband Network or NBN a certified failure, Australia seems to be working hard to ensure that to make the NBN look reasonable, any emerging 5G network must be made to hobble by banning technology companies like Huawei from providing the same kind of support it has been giving over the past 15 years to the local telcos. The given reason is a lack of trust in any Chinese company, keeping the spying eyes of China out of the country. To be fair, there is some justification for this, as China has not been the poster child of espionage abstinence across the globe. What earth-shattering useful secret info they might get from the Australians is debatable, but it looks like the Land Down Under will not be improving their communications any time soon. Thailand is still well ahead on that front.
Privacy an artefact of times past
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/07/2018
» If you have learned nothing else from my many years of writing, it should be that unless extraordinary steps are taken, personal data privacy doesn't exist, except perhaps in the deluded minds of government officials. The only thing privacy laws do these days is stop you from returning someone's lost phone. In just one day in the news, I read reports about Huawei infiltrating Facebook, another Spectre CPU problem, political data harvesting in the UK, insecure military servers in the UK, Chinese hackers interested in Cambodia (and the rest of the world) along with other items about lost or hacked data. Yahoo and Google collect far more than the whole of the US spy agencies combined, though at least the latter doesn't deliberately spread it around or sell it to marketers.
No new Vistas for us to view?
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/03/2017
» After Microsoft Bob and Windows ME, Vista would have to be the least-loved Windows operating system. It arrived in 2007 on Jan 30, and on April 11 will no longer be a supported OS. That means no more security updates, no hotfixes and no support options, paid or otherwise. Readers will not be surprised to learn that Microsoft is recommending that any remaining Vista users upgrade to Windows 10. You may be thinking that if you are a really large organisation and are willing to pay, Microsoft will provide support just like they still do for some XP customers. But the word on the street is they won't for Vista.
Your TV is watching you
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/03/2017
» Love them or hate them as I write this WikiLeaks has just dropped a large batch of new documents for all the world to see, this time CIA secret materials. The part that has caught most attention is the information on how to spy on people, using commonly found household items. Apple and Android devices, Samsung TV's (glad I recently changed to Sony), Macs and Windows devices can all be used to spy on people -- no one in the US of course -- and pass info back to the CIA. There are also different malware products that can be used to infect all manner of devices including a USB stick that can be used to jump that critical air-gap between your system and the outside world. For anyone living in the real world none of this will be of any surprise. All the leaks really do is confirm what everyone knows and every country does.
Money trumps morals in the online world
Life, James Hein, Published on 07/12/2016
» In a world where making everything smaller and lighter is the trend, a half-tonne CPU is certainly an anomaly. The 42,300 transistors, 10,548 LED CPU machine was built by hand from regular components and can be seen at the Centre for Computing History in Haverhill, England. The builder is James Newman, who wanted to learn about transistors and then got busy. The result is a CPU that shows how it is working in real time by following the flashing LEDS. At 15m² it roughly equates to the old 33m² Intel 8086. OK not quite that powerful as it only has 256 bytes of ROM and RAM and runs at an estimated 20kHz. I'm putting this in for the people with way too much time on their hands category. You can find out more here megaprocessor.com/programming.html.