Friday, June 10, 2011

Autoglass - Don't

Against my better judgement I recently got Autoglass to fix a small chip on the passenger side of my windscreen.

Nothing wrong with the service or the repair - in fact it was beyond reproach. What I couldn't work out is how this could be "free".

Now I know.

The adverts tell you it won't affect your no claim discount. What they don't tell you is that it counts as a claim on your insurance.

Mine went up by £200 as a result.

And I don't expect it will go down again any time soon.

So it is a scam.

Autoglass get x pounds from the Insurance company who then up your premium with no risk to themselves.

Don't do it.

By the way I have complained to the ASA, but I'm not holding my breath.

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

SMB2 or how to corrupt your data without really trying

I don't think Microsoft have ever really got the hang of the idea that people might use computers for applications that just might require data integrity.

Deep down they are just a desktop company, bit of Office, nothing serious, mostly works if you are lucky. Good job Dave Cutler came along. Clearly real world issues aren't high on the list probably because they're too busy counting the money and coming up with the next ill concieved way to screw something up.

SMB2 - Microsoft have previous on this whole area but as far as I can see SMB2 will corrupt just about every application that uses file sharing due to caching and metadata issues. Perhaps there should be a new 4 letter word at Microsoft called "TEST". "Think" might also be good. Or just stop "fixing" things that mostly work (or at least we have got used to and know how to workaround).

We are moving into ill considered areas now. What happens when your Cloud evaporates?

There is so much data recovery is almost impossible.

The same applies to large scale systems - the HMRC system is broken and I can't see how it will ever be fixed. It's a live system that we know is wrong that we are adding data to every day. So at best it will be an approximation of our affairs and it will be up to the end user to spot the more obvious errors whilst being told "the computer says no".

Meanwhile all our data is being hacked because even large companies (never mind the small ones) we hand over all bank details to have apparently never heard of the idea of encrypting passwords.

There seems to be a blind assumption by everybody that all this stuff actually works.

It doesn't.