The Grumpy IT Admin

I know a lot of people dont think Windows 10 phone is worth a punt because it doesn't have enough apps or err........ is there any other reason other than it isn't IOS? How many apps do you actually use? If we ignore all the apps that do the same thing how many would each platform actually have? Anyway I use a windows phone because it is relative simple at doing stuff and it generally works for me. I still haven't worked out how to remove all the Tesco apps that came pre-installed on my wife's Hudl tablet, Android just doesn't seem to work in any kind of logical way for me, I am sure if I spent some time (a year or so) with just Android I may grow to ......... work with it. As for Apple, I am really not keen on their closed shop Apple only business mentality. I am currently running 10586.71 on my trusty Nokia 925. Having gone through all the fast ring builds i have to say it is mostly very stable and slick. There are a few minor issues. Outlo...

Hi all you gaming developers out there. I like gaming (on my PC) I don't do consoles because my wife watches Eastenders (for you US folks that is a British soap) and we only have one TV in the house, I now it is sad but that is how the other 99% of the world live. I imagine gaming development is a high pressure job these days with the humungous film like budgets and all that you have to deal with, but there seems to be a be a disconnect between you and us. I accept you develop for consoles and then transfer to PC, if we are lucky, because apparently we in the PC zone like to pirate your games, well here's some news for you, everyone I know who owns a console has chipped it and there is a hard disk going round with 100's of games on so don't delude yourselves that there isn't as much pirating going on on consoles as there is on PCs. From a gameplay perspective, you need to focus on the end user. Yes, they come in many varieties and you need to cater for all of ...

I have been using Windows 10 on my Nokia 925 for two weeks now and for the most part there is a a lot to be thankful for. It is a development of the Windows 8.1 Phone, especially the not widely released one that spookily turns up on your phone just before Windows 10 if you decide to go down the Windows Insider path, I would like to spend a bit more time with that one. However, as with Windows 10 on the PC there are signs that Microsoft are struggling to to hit that one OS rules them all goal that they started with Windows 8. It is all beta still but as we are expecting an Autumn (fall) release, you would expect them to have nailed the basic design of the OS and supporting in house apps and just be fixing GUI and interface issues and any bugs. Unfortunately there are still, in my opinion some major issues with some functionality which I would have expected only from an immature company not one that built it’s empire around how the user interacted with its software and could mak...

Why oh why to MS shoot themselves in the foot? I am sure there is a practical reason for doing but for me it is unfathomable. Microsoft has seen fit to reverse the way the mouse wheel works in Modern UI apps. I never really noticed this odd behaviour as I the only Modern app I use is solitair. But I have been using the VMware Horizon app lately and couldn't work out why scrolling with the mouse wheel was backwards to what you get on the desktop. I then noticed that it was backwards in other apps I tried. this makes using the Horizon App awkward to use so I have had to revert to using the desktop client rather than the App, not a big thing but really Microsoft why did you make that decision?

My company recently merged with another company, doubling the size and doubling the IT requirement. This has meant that our existing VMware platform with iSCSI EqualLogic was not really up to the task as it was beginning to creak anyway and doubling it to support more than 500-750 servers was unlikely to expand. Time to look at some grown up storage again.   Usual suspects, EMC, NetApp, Dell and HP. Key features required were expandability, replication, off host backups at remote site. There were a number of other minor things like making copies of live SQL databases between live and dev systems and storage tiering. Dell Compellant, HP EVA/3Par, EMC VNX, NetApp were all in the frame. Hardware wise all came in around the same prices, software wise it was different story for the replication and backup piece, the dell offering went off down the NetBackup route which is stupidly expensive and cost more than the hardware so that was first to go. HP went before we starte...

It's quick it can allow you to have one cable to your monitor, it's quick and err that's about it. What's not good is that you can't get it on anything other than a Mac without paying out a good deal of money, even the cables are around c£30 (c$45), a recently acquired Drobo storage unit came with a TB and USB 3 ports but only a USB cable, surely this tells you something? There is no such thing as a TB expansion card that you put in to a computer. Intel seems to have missed the point. Proprietary standards always fail unless they offer something you can't get somewhere else and become ubiquitous before any competing standard can get a foot in, HDMI managed this trick but is slowly being replaced by Display Port, which is an open standard and has no licencing fees associated with it. USB took off simple because it was on every computer before it was even supported by the OS, every update has been backward compatible. Anyone in retail will tell that if you ...