* Posts by BeachBoy

49 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2007

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

BeachBoy

Re: I refuse to panic

Here in Spain I bought toilet roll on Saturday, not only were the shelves fully stocked, but it was on special offer!

Microsoft's cloud keeps printing cash, Surface not so much as Windows giant pockets $119m profit a day

BeachBoy

According to Forbes the Microsoft tax bill for 2017 was $3.3 Billion

I discovered the world's last video rental kiosk and it would make a great spaceship

BeachBoy

Re: ArtJl - old fires

Those bulbs look like the Edison style bulbs made from the mico LED's which are quite fashionable and easily available now.

March 2020: When you lucky, lucky Brits will have a legal right to a minimum of... 10Mbps

BeachBoy

Not just the Far East

Same money will get you a symmetrical 600Mbps fibre to the home connection in Spain from several providers including Telefonica. So its not just the Far East

The record shows I took the blows, and did it... Huawei: IT titan will start tackling GCHQ security gripes from June

BeachBoy

No Backdoor just an open front door

Looks like the problem is not that Huawei have actually installed back doors into their devices, its just that the security as implemented is so full of holes that it would be easy to "hack" a device at a later time and install something naughty. Which is probably what the Imperial Kingdom (and all other agencies with letters for names) have actually been up to.

Microsoft has developed its own Linux. Repeat. Microsoft has developed its own Linux

BeachBoy
Thumb Up

Tools for the Job

UNIX (of which Linux is really just a reverse engineered copy) was originally developed by AT&T (Bell Labs) as an OS to run telephone exchanges. So using it now to run network switch hardware is the logical choice.

Philae heads for comet, reports back to mothercraft Rosetta

BeachBoy

cool stuff

This is the cool sort of thing its worth paying your taxes for. Can't wait for the first on the ground pics

Belgian watchdog barks at Apple: Take care when you flog that warranty

BeachBoy

the worst for customer service

After spending 4, 500 euros on 4 imacs and the funny 3 year warranty the apple store (a premier apple store) wouldnt deliver them 5km to us without an extra payment and when we turned up to the store to get them they said they werent even there but somewhere else (another store)

Will never buy apple again despite what the over pampered creatives ask for

Apple granted patent for ebook page-turning

BeachBoy
FAIL

mega fail

errr. haven´t online (digital) versions of newspapers been doing this for years? I think it uses a piece of software from pagesuite.com to do it. I know of one local paper in Herts thats been using it for over 8 years.

Come on Apple try to enforce this one ......... haha

Cook's 'values' memo shows Apple has lost its soul

BeachBoy
FAIL

Re: iPhone was a big risk, iPad was a big risk.

No, people buy these Apple products because they are fashion accessories, and its cool to have a little apple logo on things. Not because they´re better. Is an Ipod really better than a generic MP3 player is the sound any better (hint they almost all use the same chips inside)?

It´s exactly the same with Nike sports wear, Rayban sunglasses, D&G handbags etc. etc. etc.

The sheep will always buy something that other sheep deem to be cool.

Basic instinct: how we used to code

BeachBoy
Thumb Up

Hooked because of StarTrek

That star trek game from the 70´s is probably the single biggest reason most of us got into IT. I remember being exposed to it aged 13 on an NCR mini in 1978. My first hands on Computer experience. Six months later I was self taught BASIC programmer trying to get it working on my (second hand) PET that my father bought me as a birthday present that christmas.

Ah those were the days.

After a career in IT I´m now involved teaching in schools, and it saddens me to see the soft fluffy rubbish that passes as ICT lessons. None of the nurturing the spark that we had. I hope the proposed syllabus changes brings that back. People sneer at the PEEK and POKE we had to use. But those two commands taught you more about the inner workings of a computer than you can possibly imagine.

AOL sells Microsoft 800+ patents for over $1bn

BeachBoy
Alert

I know everyone loves to hate micro$oft and correct me if i´m wrong, but in the current Patent wars our redmond friends have never aggressively gone after anyone. They seem to be soley using their patent collection as protection against the likes of the cupertino evangelical gangsters.

NASA confirms first Earth candidate in habitable zone

BeachBoy
Angel

Radio?

I wonder, out of curiosity, has anyone pointed a large wideband antena at these 2,000+ candidate planets?

LightSquared admits it will knock out 200,000 sat-navs

BeachBoy
Stop

Chapter 11

Having lived through the Telcoms bubble v1.0 I can smell v2.0 here, hang on in guys in about 18 months there will be a nice telcoms network going cheap in a chapter 11 sale and the opportunity to watch a redundant satelitte come to a firey end over the pacific.

Samsung countersues Apple on new ground

BeachBoy
FAIL

Really Stupid

Apple's Ego really has got the better of them this time. Fighting a patent war is one thing, but now taking on a component manufacturer, and not only that a component manufacturer that you rely on is whole new level of stupidity.

All it would take is Samsung to pull the supply of some key component and suddenly Saint Steve would have no Jesus Phones / Fondleslabs ,or what ever Samsung decided to hit, to sell.

UAE looks to block BlackBerry mail, again

BeachBoy
Coat

Why does only 3rd world countries complain?

Is it because their security services don't have the kit that the USA/UK et al have?

After all can you seriously see the over paraniod UK intellegence services allowing a commercial encrypted service that they can't listen in to?

Mines the one with the tin foil hat

Channel Five reborn as Channel Five

BeachBoy
Badgers

Fifth Channel?

There is a Channel five I thought everything after 4 belonged to sky. Never watched it my self.

If I want to see badgers in a state of undress Channel 4 is good enough.

WikiLeaks supporters milk Twitter API in DDoS attacks

BeachBoy
Pirate

Bigger issue

The bigger issue here is the US government has discovered a new tool to control the bits of the internet it doesn't approve of. Namely muscling the Mastercard and Visa boys.

It first did this to clamp down on the foreign online gambling sites, that were stealing all the lovely tax revenue from the vegas Mob, and now Wikileaks has pissed it off it's using the card people to try to cut off the funding there. This tactic is much less blatant than simply blocking sites which would immediately generate huge negative publicity and probably generate a few freedom of speech legal cases, but is just as effective

Who or what will be next?

Content producers should chip in for mobile internet costs

BeachBoy
FAIL

Flawed Business model

Another ISP moaning about their flawed "sell it cheaper than their competitors" business model. When will these guys realise that consumers will pay more to get more quality.

The supermarkets do this quite happily (Tesco's have a value range, the standard range and a premium range). People are happy to pay extra for extra services/quality

PARIS in 89,000 ft climax

BeachBoy
Thumb Up

Beautifully bonkers

I have followed the project from the start and am amazed at the release footage, truely awesome.

This is the sort of typically British on a shoestring, sticky tape and luck project that I thought had died out with John Noakes and a pair of Val's old knickers.

Guy's I will a raise a pint to you tonight, and the plucky little playmonaut, and hope in an alcoholic moment you scribble something down on the back of a fag packet that can become Vulture 2

Net TV to consign Net Neutrality debate to dustbin of history. Why?

BeachBoy
Badgers

The longest suicide note in history

EddieD: I think you´ll find if you look at the very very small print in the contracts, thats its a 50:1 contention ratio on consumer ADSL circuits. So its no suprise that the Networks started to creak when streaming services came along.

This snake oil aproach of selling the same bandwidth to 50 different people has been going on since the days of dial ups, (or in those days fit one modem for every xx customers).

ISP´s should start to sell on the quality of the service now and not on the lowest price. I am more than happy to pay extra for smoothly streamed video´s and quick torrent connections. But my granny who only read her emails only wants a reliable connection at a cheap price. One size does not fit all and the ISP´s have to accept that or go bust. The price of wholesale bandwidth can not fall much lower, most people who want a ADSL line have one, so the only way to churn customers now is lower your price (financial suicide) or be better than the competion.

Google Instant a potential bonanza for search scams

BeachBoy
FAIL

Couldn't delete fast enough

Experienced this for the first time this morning, it is very very annoying, fortunately google supply a link so you can turn the damn feature off.

Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash

BeachBoy
Troll

Spanair

Very scary, on the second anniversary of the accident a spanair plane going from Las palmas to Madrid (ie the same route in the opposite direction) had an engine explode in flight. Fortunately they managed to get to madrid on one engine.

Maintenance is obviously where a lot of cost cutting has gone on at Spanair, think I'll be paying a few extra euros to fly with someone else in future.

New 3D displays use falling water drops as 'voxels'

BeachBoy
Happy

Go to Disney

I saw jaw dropping 3D displays using water mist as a projection surface at Disneyland (LA) over 10 years ago.

Go see it, it is amazing

Top 500 supers – The Dawning of the GPUs

BeachBoy
Coat

... and not on the list

While there are a few machines on the list that have their use listed as "Classified" it seems to me this is a very small number.

I'm guessing there are quite a few boxes in the Virginia area of the USA and the Glocestershire area of the UK that aren't on this list but would certainly be top 20 or better contenders.

Mines the one with the paranioa medication in the pocket ......

DARPA trying to beat block lists, deep packet inspection

BeachBoy
Happy

.... or the real reason is ....

Someone high up in DARPA currently can't surf for smut online while at work.

Branson's SpaceShipTwo rocketplane gets off ground

BeachBoy
Happy

Fly the flag

Come on wave a flag for poor old Blighty, if we had a few more the Bearded one and Sur (lord) Alun, then we might not be in the hole that we are.

It could have been yanks funding this (Microsoft, Delta, Google ....) but no, it was a plucky Brit who had the vision, and the balls to put his money where his mouth is. The wright brothers may not have flown any great distance but everyone remembers them as being first. now the history books will remember the virgin VSS Enterprise.

Now all we have to do is get rid of the scotish numpty and his cronnies and return to climate where taking risks is cool .....

Loud sex ASBO woman back on the job

BeachBoy
WTF?

What noise?

You mean women are supposed to make a noise at these moments? I thought they just lay there looking at the ceiling (and apparently thinking of recipies).

BBC claims angry iPlayer plugin mob 'conflated' open source term

BeachBoy
Thumb Up

The usual noise

Let me start by saying I don´t work for the BBC (I don´t even live in the UK anymore - and wish iplayer was legally available to me)

The comments here are from a very small minority of users of the service, so if the BBC ignores you don´t blame them. They are doing the best they can to roll out a world beating service to the most number of users on as many platforms as is realistic given limited resources. MIllions of users are very happy with what they are doing. a few thousand are not. Sorry thats just life, You have alternatives to the XBMC ghetto you have decided to live in.

As pointed out by some posters the BBC is restricted by the copyright holders of the material not by their own rules (look to the radio version of iplayer to see the difference). Anyway if you think iplayer is a problem, have you tried to use ITV´s dismal offering recently?

As for the comment that soon all the BBC´s output will soon be available on Torrents, I have news for you 95% of it already is, youre just looking in the wrong place for it!

Adobe sounds off on iPad's Flash slap

BeachBoy
Coat

Oh my god ....

..... I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with Hitler!

Mines the one with the HP Slate advert in the pocket .......

PGP disk encrypt approved by MoD for military use

BeachBoy
Happy

To Crack PGP .....

My guess is about the size of one of the ones the boys in Cheltenham have

Brooke Shields pic exposes real/online rift

BeachBoy
WTF?

Sad reflection on society

I had never heard of this picture, and of course the first thing I did was google it to see what the fuss is about.

The picture itself shows nothing that virtually every under ten year old child in Europe doesn't display on a beach every summer (ie no genitals are visible)

Its a sad reflection on our society when we are now retrospectively censoring art. Where will this stop? Ruben's paintings in the national gallery getting little fig leaves added? Greek and roman statues being given pants to wear?

These people should go out and get a life, This is not a problem in the more liberated rest of Europe, where icidently they have lower levels of sex related crimes.

Apple sends iPhones into 'Coma Mode'

BeachBoy
Grenade

What do you expect.....

Strangely this is not a problem I have with my Nokia. By a phone from a company that understands phones, and a computer from one that understands those, and you'll have no problems.

Virgin hijacks empty pages

BeachBoy

Not a problem

Its a trivial matter to run your own DNS server and bypass your ISP's so this becomes a non-problem. Especially if your building/running applications that check domain availability doing this will be well within your abilities

Satellite to offer 10Mbit broadband to entire UK

BeachBoy
Stop

Been there, done that

I was a beta tester for Tiscali's attempt at doing this about 6 years ago. It too was a bi-directional via satellite service (no phone line required), and yes it did work after a fashion.

First issue was the 1.2m dish bolted to the side of my house - dont imagine for a minute you can get a sufficient strength uplink signal from a dinky sky sized dish.

Secondly just like Sky TV it was prone to the weather. Microwaves don't like going through water very much (ie cloud and rain, something we get a lot of). Yes on a normal overcast day things worked. But heavy rain did knock it side ways.

Finally (and I hope they don't make this mistake) at the groundstation they had a whopping great proxy/cache server inorder to minimise the backhaul requirements and to give an illusion of better performance (ie remove the additional cable based latency). Problem with this was two fold, sites that require constant refreshing ran like dogs because the cache had to be updated, and secondly sites that required a secure login got blocked by the proxy so were un-accessible.

iPlayer chief pushes tiered charging for ISPs

BeachBoy

Its the ISP's stupid

Lots of ranting about poor old Aunty Beeb, but all it is doing is providing a service that people want to use, no different from Google or Youtube or Bit torrent. The problem is still, as it always has been, with the ISP's.

For the last ten years or so the ISP's have been playing an economically stupid game of my service is better than yours and its also cheaper. An economically gravity defying trick they pulled off with old fashioned smoke and mirrors, that being ridiculously high contention ratios for the technical amongst us. An idea that was orignially cooked up in they days when you had to install modem banks for your customers to connect. (I was designing ISP and carrier networks way back then).

I don't deny contention ratios have a place in ISP economic planning, but now with streamed services the idea of one cost fits all has to change. We have to move to tiered services, and tiered costs either through bandwidth throttling, or by coming clean and telling the customer, yes you can have a 8mb/s connection for 10.99 a month but that is an average speed not an absolute (and by the way will probably only be achieved at 4am on a sunday morning), and if you want a real 8Mb/s service to watch eastenders or download Debbie does dallas its going to cost you 30.99 a month.

The confusion is that the people think the licence fee gives them a right to see Eastenders in High Def any way they want. It doesn't.

Net shoppers bullied into being Verified by Visa

BeachBoy
Unhappy

Retailers don't implement it properly

I have no problem with Verified by Visa or any other such scheme, however I do have a problem with the script kiddies that attempt to implement it on retailers websites and don't do it properly (in my experience over 50% of the time).

I'm lucky enough to be an Expat living in the sunshine, with a locally issued visa card. Sometimes I want to order stuff from the UK and thats where the problems start. The ordering process goes fine, the VbV goes fine and is passed, but then the site comes back with a declined message. This the upshot of which is the value of the now declined transaction is held as pending on my card (because Visa passed the transaction).

Having spoken to support on a couple of sites its because though VbV comes back as ok things like the postcode/address don't because some foreign banks don't verify on things like postcode (which is part of a non VbV transaction). If your going to accept VbV on a site do so, and do it properly.

Ryanair begins screen-scraping lawsuit

BeachBoy
Coat

Screen Scrapeing

Screen scraping on this scale is done by some reasonably chunky servers, surely its not beyond the intelligence of the Easyjet/Ryanair IT depts to work out the IP addresses of the servers from their logs and block them. While there might be a bit of address hoping going on, it won't be much.

Or is this all just a publicity stunt?

Mines the one with the blacklist in the pocket ......

Street View spycar prowls Inverness

BeachBoy

The problem is?

Frankly unless it happens to catch me banging the neighbours cat I don't see what problem is (People will give good money for those pictures!)

If I commute into central london everyday for work, my not so pretty face is captured in public on approx. 250 different camera's and saved for posterity. Some of these camera's are open for public access on the internet (Street/traffic cams) with no-pixel blurring of faces etc.

People get a life, or move to somewhere with no technology, it a peice of harmless fun. We've exhausted the black helicopters, now its time for thong watch.....

BBC vs ISPs: Bandwidth row escalates as Tiscali wades in

BeachBoy
Unhappy

Only themselves to blame

Sorry but the ISP´s have only themselves to blame, if they hadn´t spent the last 10 years playing the "my service is cheaper than yours" game, and insead concentrated on supplying quality at a premium over quantity then they wouldn´t be in the mess they are now. They have seen this coming for a while but done nothing about it, hoping technology advances would save them before it became a problem.

As for Auntie Beeb, as a content originator they do pay significant chunks of the licence fee money to several major ISP´s to put the Data on the internet in the first place (I have been involved in the sale of several these pipes to the BBC) so they are paying their fair share. Its now up to the end users and their mickey mouse ISP´s to pay theirs.

Internet bandwidth has been a commodity with a falling price for too long now, sorry to tell you all but like house prices this is something that is going to under go a "correction" in the near future.

Fixing the UK's DAB disaster

BeachBoy
Unhappy

Multicast

I have in recent years worked in technical sales for two of the global big 5 Backbone providers. Eight or so years ago they started to Multicast enable their networks. However neither of them launched Multicast as a product/service simply because they couldn´t figure out how to make money out of it in an environment where the cost per megabit was falling.

Yes it enables them to save bandwidth on the backbone, but at the moment they are charging content providers per MB for the high bandwidth connection to the servers, which they would lose. The little ISP´s whine that their backbones are clogged with streaming data. But someone is still paying to put that data on a netowrk somewhere in the first place.

Apple forbids Windows users from installing Safari for Windows

BeachBoy
Stop

Install Real Player instead

... and anyway you'd have to be totally deranged to install any Apple written software on a windows machine. Cross platform has never been their strong point, and don't even get me started on what several incarnations of i-tunes have done to my pc's, So much so I threw the bloody i-pods away and bought generic MP3's instead.

Mines the one with "Apples are not the only fruit" on the back ........

How the BBC plans to save your ISP

BeachBoy
Black Helicopters

The broadband drug

I must have broadband, I must have broadband, I must have more broadband .... ok little boy here's a nice shiny 45 Meg line, much better than that little 2 Meg one.

Of course what the dealer (woops sorry ISP) didn't tell you was it was exactly the same as what you had before, a 50:1 contended connection going into the same back haul from the the exchange all they did was magically increase the speed between your house and the exchange. Its all smoke and mirrors.

Ultimately if you want a decent connection you are going to have to pay for it. Tomorrow I could have installed in my a house a 45MB internet connection with a contention ratio of better than 5:1 that would actually give me 45MB in both directions. Its called a T3 connection, and several ISP's in the UK could/would quite happily sell me one including BT, the downside is the cost (approx 1500-2000 GBP a month).

Wake up consumers there is no such thing as free lunch, if you want something you have to pay for it, and until you get off your crack head approach to broadband the ISP's(dealers) will continue to sell you junk and then whine about doing so.

PS. here's a tip sign: up to BT's business broadband service, it costs more, but the contention ratio is much lower (only 20:1 last time I checked) so you're more likely to get what they are selling you

Should Europeans pay to receive phone calls?

BeachBoy
Thumb Down

Bonkers

The reason why Mobiles haven't taken off in the US to the same extent as the rest of the world is because the recieving party has to pay for the incoming call. This is also the reason the americans love their pagers so much.

iPhone may sidestep rubbish caller ID suit

BeachBoy
Jobs Horns

Only from an American

Only an geographically challenged American (most of them!) could design phone book software that doesn't recognise and convert internationally formatted phone numbers.

Scareware package planted in ITV.com ads

BeachBoy

On Yahoo too

This is also in the ad rotation for Yahoo mail. My antivirus (Nod32) has stopped it twice in the last week. Click on anywhere on the dialog box (including the X) and it attempts to do things to your machine.

Enraged vegan spitroasts Reg hack

BeachBoy
Dead Vulture

The one true IT diet ......

Of course with a career in IT, my chosen dietry preference is Beer! (Real ale not that Fizzy lager stuff). A food group in its own right, full of complex vitamins and minerals (esp Guiness).

Why? because like a lot of veggies in the presence of a bacon sarnie, I occasionally slip from the true path and have a steak and chips with my beer.

Web pioneer hits critics with Lisp gauntlet

BeachBoy
Happy

For the strange

I remember learning LISP at University in the 80's, in those days LISP used to stand for Lots of Indecipherable Silly Parenthesises and created un-maintainable code even by those bad old days standards, that only the very seriously strange could understand (or seriously drunk but thats another student programming story ..........)

Australia to get 1,000 megawatt wind farm

BeachBoy

Wind into Water

Here in the canaries the local government often likes to boast how it turns wind into water (are you listening in Oz?).

We have several de-salination plants generating drinking water that are powered by attached wind farms.