Posts by Tony Green 240 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007
In the land of Google, Beta doesn't really have the same meaning it has elsewhere. There are loads of things that have been in Beta for years but are heavily used. Android Studio only came out of Beta recently, for example.
It probably depends on the app - <smug>the one I wanted to use is working nicely.</smug> The only moderately serious bug I've found is that if you try to install a second app, it tells you it wants to remove the first one (and does, even if you say "no").
Obviously it's not going to be useful for every app, but there are certainly apps where being able to run them on the desktop as well as the 'phone could be very useful.
For example, as well as on my 'phone I also run my own Beermad app in an Android emulator because I use it to keep my website's database up-to-date, which often means doing a lot of typing and that isn't an attractive prospect on a 'phone. While newer emulator images are far quicker than they used to be (Lollipop on an Atom emulator is surprisingly fast), not having to wait for the emulator to start up will make this a definite "must have" for me. Of course I can't use the app's GPS or camera functionality, but that's no problem.
"The question I ask is; Why is the UK so far behind?"
Perhaps (without knowledge of the situation in the other places you mention) because since Thatcher privatised BT its one and only function in life is to return a profit to its shareholders.
A public utility, on the other hand, would have the primary function of providing service to the people of the country.
I'd add that their customer service is second to none.
Things don't go wrong very often, but when they do there's no bullshit trying to fob me off, just competent engineers who want to help AND KNOW HOW TO!
I could save £500-£600 a year by dumping my BT line and moving to Virgin cable, but what I've heard about their customer service has scared me off. Surely it's time network providers like Virgin had the same conditions applied to them as BT so that you can use any ISP on their wires? I'm no advocate for BT (despite over 30 years working for them and happy to have left) but it seems unfair that they have to open up when the rest don't/
Since what the plods currently get to charge for processing a firearms certificate is much less than what it actually **costs** them to process it, the public is subsidising gun-owners. Who generally tend to be people like the landed gentry and others who are far better-off than most of us.
So perhaps it's no bad thing that they should actually have to pay enough so that we don't have to feather-bed them?
After all, most guns are used for no better purpose than blasting birds out of the sky so chinless wonders can pretend they're wonderful "sportsmen" just because they've slaughtered a bit of wildlife.
A simplistic generalisation based on "I love chocolate so I assume everybody else does".
Can't stand the stuff myself. Tastes horrible and is only made edible if you stuff it full of so much sugar that your teeth start rotting while you're chewing it.
Now if you'd been giving away the delicious sourdough bread they bake at Pump Street, I WOULD have been interested.
The very phrase "coolest brand" is enough to tell me that all this means is "appeals most to the kind of fuckwitts who are unable to think for themselves".
Of course there are people who have weighed up the options and decided that an iPhone is best for their needs, but it seems the vast majority of people buying them are only doing so because of the fact that it's fashionable. Same people who un-failingly buy whatever they're told is "kewl".
They want the whole thing to look as awful as possible to discredit the idea to get it canned. So that's why they're making sure ridiculous demands, especially over high-profile media sites like the BBC and various national newspapers (and the Daily Mail), get as much publicity as possible.
Back in the 1980s, green-screen terminals attached to our ICL mainframes had their "protected field" (ie, the parts of the screen you couldn't type anything in, such as labels) half intensity.
Software support bloke: I don't know what's happened, but all the protected fields have disappeared from my terminal.
Me: just to the right of the screen, you'll see a little knob marked "brightness". Can you try pushing that up?
Bloke: ooh wow! They're back!
I'll tell you how to stop that.
Get the company CEO's email address from http://www.ceoemail.com/
Email him explaining that you consider the constant bombardment of letters as harassment under the terms of the harassment act and if they don't cease immediately, you will issue proceedings against him personally as the person in charge of the company harassing you.
I did, and he crapped himself and stopped the junk mail very quickly.
Most things breaking are (relatively) trivial to fix. If Grub goes tits-up, it's a serious problem.
Funnily enough, Grub updates are the reason I gave up Ubuntu and moved to Debian. Four or five routine Grub updates threw up messages that they'd failed and my computer may be un-bootable.
I can restore my system from backups easily for almost any problem, but if the Grub bootloader's bust, I'm in the shit!
No mistake. They've always used their "training" courses as marketing tools.
I remember going on a number of them and a good part of each course was given over to the sort of cross-promotion normally associated with Murdoch media outlets. They even gave incentives to hand over the email addresses of colleagues so QA could spam them.
As I remember from when I transferred some domains out, 123-Reg don't even HAVE to tell Nominet. You just fill in an online form and it's all done electronically. So cost to them is the power for the server while you do it.
I suspect it's more to do with deterring people from transferring domains away from their crap service.
Though that was at least better than Webhost UK, who I wanted to leave because their staff were bloody useless. I had to ask them and THEY did the transfer. Had me worried they were going to screw it up for me...
Here's a tip that worked for me.
Email their CEO, Tom Mockridge, tom.mockridge@virginmedia.co.uk, telling him that you regard their constant unwanted communications as harassment under the terms of the Harassment Act 1997. And that if you receive any more communications you will take action under that act against him personally, as the person responsible for the company.
You'd be amazed how quickly they get their arses in gear to get it stopped and just how apologetic they get.
"Replacing one drive takes about 15 minutes of work. If we have 30,000 drives and 2 percent fail, it takes 150 hours to replace those. In other words, one employee for one month of 8 hour days. Getting the failure rate down to 1 percent means you save 2 weeks of employee salary - maybe $5,000 total? The 30,000 drives costs you $4m."
But what about the cost of any outage between the drive failing and your engineer getting it back and restoring the data?
Or the data you lose because they were written after the last backup?
Or the reputational damage if the failing drive takes out a customer-facing system?
Anybody who thinks the US will actually respect any agreement it might claim to sign up to is a naive idiot.
Uncle Sam considers the rest of the world to be his property, to do with as he wishes. If it suits American business interests or imperialist aims, the US will spy on, murder or invade anywhere necessary. The only sane way is to work on the basis that America can be trusted about as much as Soviet Russia could.
Understanding the demented mind of a man like Hitler can be useful in countering the demented ideas of those who still idolise him.
And it's useful in other ways. Religious groups often try to portray atheists as monsters, "because Hitler was an atheist". Which is rather disproved by, "And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord."
"The government wants us to offer filtering as an option, so we offer an active choice when you sign up, you choose one of two options:-
Unfiltered Internet access - no filtering of any content within the A&A network - you are responsible for any filtering in your own network, or
Censored Internet access - restricted access to unpublished government mandated filter list (plus Daily Mail web site) - but still cannot guarantee kids don't access porn.
If you choose censored you are advised: Sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP or move to North Korea. Our services are all unfiltered.
Is that a good enough active choice for you Mr Cameron?"
I'm assuming that as well as a mechanism for telling them that they've wrongly blocked a site, there should be one for telling them there's one they've missed?
Maybe with enough complaints about the filth that the Mail Online publishes whilst hypocritically railing against much less pernicious stuff might get it blocked.
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