Posts by Andrew 13 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Apr 2007
"BTW, I had heard that Huawei only won because they were ridiculously cheap, when compared to anyone else. I still can fathom why BT had to go out to tender on this anyway, were I running a program like this, I'd only buy kit that I could see worked, by buying n units from each possible supplier, and trialling each device to see if it actually worked. Perhaps that's too simple."
They did do this, we had entire text labs dedicated to trialling the hardware and making sure they would work together nicely, the Marconi iNode was the only one I was aware of that ticked all the boxes needed (hell, one piece of the Ericsson (not the iNode if I recall) kit had a few outright dangerous vulnerabilities, one of which I discovered by accident, which they went on to use too). The decisions were made by bean-counters, not the guys trialling the kit, it annoyed a few trial customers in the area when one day their free broadband/voice lines disappeared with no warning (Marconi, quite rightfully got in a huff when they were told no and came and reclaimed all the kit it had loaned BT for a live (and working) trial)
My family has been building/fixing machine as full time work for many years.
Personally Ive only had one drive fail on me, and it was a Maxtor (old ~1GB drive).
Though I prefer WDs as they always 'feel' a little more responsive. Ive had probably a dozen of each (Maxtor/WD/Seagate) drive make, and a few of the lesser known makes too. I remember quantum bigfoot drives those were fun :-D Slow but big capacity for a low cost.
Obviously the worst make of HDD is Fujitsu after their utter screw up a few year back which basically killed thousands of drives, due to someone further down the supply chain changing the adhesive in a control chip to something that became corrosive when heated!
Ive just recently signed a new 18 month contract with O2 (I wanted a non crippled N95 8GB at a semi reasonable cost)
Im tempted to phone their CS and play the deeply offended customer routine see what I can get (with the aim of at least getting onto the proper 3g speed profile)
Ignoring the obvious get a new email address at gmail etc. Whats to stop a sex offender also registering my address as one of their addresses and getting me blocked from social networking sites?
Or are they going to implement a email and click back to authenticate the address?
Hang on ... being blocked by SN sites .....that could be useful ... can someone register every single email address please, and get these waste of space/time/energy/bandwidth off the net in one fell swoop.
Err but they gave the name of the father...... pretty sure it could be worked out from that by anyone near by.
Ive pulled disposable cameras apart and accidentally discharged it into my arm .. it hurts a bit, but mostly feels a bit fuzzy and tingly for a while afterwards.
Worst one Ive managed was an electric shock from a plasma lamp through a motherboard (don't ask), up one arm, across chest and down the other arm. And that was quite painful, and I felt iffy for about an hour afterwards.
While I'll admit I haven't looked into this case too deeply, Im wondering how many of the "you don't know what your talking about' comments on their blog came from Google Fanboys who think the big G can do no wrong.
The statistic of 20PB of data is fairly pointless to unless you know how much computing power they are using to process that, it could be the traditional methods could process only a fraction of that, but we don't know.
I was looking at getting this phone just before Xmas, but was wanting a T-Mobile Web'n'Walk tariff, but Vodafone has exclusivity on the phone in the UK (other than buying sim free).
I hope this has either very recently changed or is changing soon. Whats Vodafone fair use on their data plan again? 130Mb?
Dates given below might be out by a dayish Im relying on my bad memory
A few years ago about Xmas time I ordered a few items (for presents) through Amazon UK, with a delivery due date of something like the 19th Dec, when they hadn't arrived by the end of the 20th I emailed them, I got a very pleasant reply saying sorry, they are out for delivery, its probably just delayed due to Christmas.
On the morning of the 22nd(quite late morning) I emailed them again, stating that they were presents, and got a very quick reply saying something along the lines of "oops sorry, we said they'd be there in time, here have you money back, and go get them in the shops, if they arrive, dont worry about it, if they dont you havent really lost out" They arrived about an hour after I got the refund email.
That made me think Amazon's customer service is brilliant.
While he is subject to offences under the CMA in the UK (as the act took place here), the CMA has been used to claim jurisdictition of cases where the attack originated abroad, but the system was in the UK, whats the difference here? The "damage" was done to a US computer so by our own standards, they have a claim for jurisdiction.
Another interesting point Ive thought about is what section of the CMA does the UK think he might be guilty of? If its section 1 , "unauthorised access" and there is no evidence of intent of use of this access for further criminal activities, then until the Police and Justice bill changes to sentences ACTUALLY filter through the maximum sentence in the UK is 6 months, which (under the old rules at least) was not extraditable (minimum 1 year jail under UK law for extradition to be considered, IIRC)
However, yes I agree that amount of effort and focus the US is putting into ruining a man's life for (effectively) a PR stunt is ludicrous.
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