Posts by Number6 2296 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
If people were ripped off for $700 just to get the service then I'm not surprised it was making a loss. I wonder what the take-up is, and how much it will bump up when the up-front fee comes down to something more reasonable.
If it really does cost the city that much to connect someone then they've done something wrong.
Saw a fascinating article on Groklaw about the Apple-Samsung spat
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130416214944734
Apple are trying to get the current infringement lawsuit through to the point where they've been awarded damages and the appeals process has been exhausted so they get to keep the money. The rush is that there's a parallel process which may end up declaring the patents invalid, which they acknowledge might not finish its appeals process until 2017. Under the broken US system, if they win damages from Samsung before the patents are declared invalid, they get to keep the money.
As mentioned above, the standard port for mail submission is 587. Sendmail/Postfix and other common mail agents mention it in their config files. Just set it up to use TLS and authentication so that others can't use it to send spam.
The alternative is to try to pick an ISP that doesn't block traffic, but expects its users to be competent enough to run their own security. I agree that this is not always possible when it comes to mobile operators, but then you might just need one that allows you to run a VPN and connect to somewhere else that does allow you to do stuff.
I suspect this is one of those things that many people have to learn the hard way the first time. The lucky ones get to read about it in the comment section of El Reg and revise their target spec for a phone accordingly.
My HTC phone can be rooted with the manufacturer's 'blessing' (can be done via their website), at the expense of voiding the warranty. I guess I ought to get around to that now it's over a year old :-)
If you do the same level of business with them as your company does, yes. They probably qualify for a quantity discount, so you'd probably get charged at least a tenner for a one-off version of the same deal.
The bulk deal probably works on the principle that the average amount of data used is below a certain limit, but some phones will be using a lot and others hardly any.
Yes, same here. I figured out quite some time ago that it works out cheaper buying the phone outright and having a SIM-only contract that can be terminated with a months' notice. I remember with a previous phone getting hold of the manufacturer's latest release and flashing it over the telco's version and seeing all the interesting settings and features that suddenly appeared.
Based on past history, I seem to get a new phone every four years or so on this model, so it definitely works out cheaper than upgrading every year or two and paying the higher prices.
There should be a requirement on any legislation of this nature for the government and companies to disclose to those whose data has been shared, within a specified time period, exactly what information was passed and to whom.
Part of the problem with laws of this nature is that we have no idea of how much they are used or abused, so having to admit it either after prosecution or after two years if there has not been prosecution, might make the government think more carefully about how and when it asks for information.
Of course, none of the above detracts from the fact that it's bad legislation to start with, but at least it may provide the public with evidence as to exactly how bad it is.
That can be a function of the charge algorithm as much as anything else. The battery get to 100% and the charger cuts out. It then waits for the battery volts to drop slightly before attempting to recharge. If you take it off charger just after it cuts out then you do have 100% charge. If you take it off the charger just as it's about to turn on again, you might only have 98%. NiCads usually ended up on trickle charge, and so were always at 100% once it had been reached.
Li-Ion batteries suffer a loss of capacity over time, and that loss is worse at 100% charge than at lower charge levels. Most batteries are shipped with about 40% charge because that gives a good compromise between shelf life and loss of capacity. If the battery manages to fully discharge it can start gassing and explode/expand, so it needs to start with enough charge for a six month shelf life.
Leaving your laptop plugged in and sitting at full charge is going to cause it to lose capacity at a higher rate than leaving it at 80%, so certainly Sony have that right.
I run Adblock Plus and NoScript, and I have Statcounter in the block list. Does that mean they don't see my web traffic and browser choice?
It might have changed, but last time I looked, useful add-ons weren't available for IE, so one assumes that all its users were recorded, but for Chrome and Firefox, a proportion of users are supposedly invisible to the stat collectors.
I've accidentally installed the Ask toolbar that comes with Java updates before now, thought "oops" and gone back and uninstalled it. Now I know it's going to try, I go much slower through the update process. However, expecting a user to click 'cancel' to continue is definitely out of order, somewhere on a par with clicking the Start button to close down a computer...
I don't want any add-on toolbars on my browser.
Sometimes I would welcome Google having a tick box to specifically remove price comparison sites from search results. If I'm after information and specs on a product, especially if I already own one, the last thing I want to have to do is wade through several pages of price comparisons to get to sites that might actually have the information I need.
Microsoft are only moaning because it's not them in the driving seat. They had plenty of years in that position with their own dodgy business practices to put down the competition, now they're on the wrong end of the boot.
I don't know how much of this is technically possible, but a filter app that checked the phone number against a list of dial prefixes before allowing it to be called would be good. Even better if it had an option to override a block with a PIN, so that should the phone's owner actually want to call a premium-rate number, it would still be easy to do so.
No doubt someone will point me at a bunch of apps that do just this.
Even better would be for telcos to allow us to associate our phones with a customised filter list, or even a few standard filter lists that took out all premium-rate calls, or all overseas calls (except for one or two designated countries), then we'd have recourse for any failure of the system. I'd also like to be able to put my phone number on a list where it cannot receive expensive chargeable text messages, because I would not knowingly sign up to receive these.
There are three things against survival. Lack of oxygen is one, low temperature the second, and the third is the fact that there isn't much spare room in a wheel well, so being crushed is highly likely as the wheels are retracted.
That and I suspect that unless you're ready for it, the lowering of the undercarriage happens rather suddenly and there's a good chance of falling out even if you were still in a condition to care.
I assume that by 'on the server' means 'on a public server' rather than my personal server on my machine. Yet another reason not to use cloud services, at least if it's on my machine they either have to break into the premises or come and ask me first. It's definitely not in the public domain if it's in my possession.
Don't send your tax information to people with gmail or yahoo accounts...
For the fastest trip you wouldn't coast at all, apart from a short period in the middle where you changed the way your ship was pointing. Accelerate to the half-way point, turn round, and then decelerate to the destination.
Of course, the downside is that you'd be going quite fast at turnover, and if there was a failure, you'd be leaving the solar system at quite a speed. You'd also get perforated by a lot of micrometeorites. You'd also need quite a bit of fuel for a continuous drive.
Ah well, nearly caught by the timezone thing, given that it's still 31st March here (3/31 for the natives). Reading quite credulously until I got to the bit about the lawyer's name and I stopped to laugh, thinking that El Reg had decided to just publish his name anyway for a ridiculous lawsuit. Then the penny dropped.
The way I'd do it is to have a barcode as part of the receipt that can be scanned by the security guard to confirm that it's valid. That would make it harder to fake one, you'd have to be able to generate a barcode that referred to a recent transaction in that store. If numbers were allocated sequentially across all stores rather than just local, you'd have a hard time guessing a valid one for the store in which the thief was operating.
Icaza seems to be missing something. How many of us recompile the Linux kernel as often as every three weeks anyway[*]? Is he the IT equivalent of the HiFi fanatic who hears all the distortion and none of the music?
Perhaps if he didn't keep tweaking, it would just work, it's pretty good on most bits of hardware I've tried, so once he's got it stable there should be no need to change. My main desktop machine just sits there and works, with the occasional upgrade check, but that's no worse than dealing with the update mechanism on Windows or OS X. The laptop/netbooks I use are similar, although I've disabled the hibernate/suspend on the netbooks.
[*] OK, I do occasionally, but that's because it's for an embedded PC that needs a small, custom kernel.
I've yet to work out how they manage it, given the fences and brambles, but I occasionally get muntjac in the garden. So far they've confined themselves to eating things that I'd otherwise have to cut back so they're being helpful. One day I'll accidentally let the dog out before noticing one (they're a lot smaller than our dog) and it might get interesting. At least I'd find out their entry point.
I'd vote for nano as a really useful tool. It's a bit less obscure for a quick tweak to a config file than vi or emacs.
The awk and bash HOWTOs have been very helpful in teaching me script programming, I even managed to type a one-liner without looking anything up and had it work first time the other day.
In fact, the tldp.org website is a great help in understanding all sorts of Linux things.
Or accidentally uninstall all the kernels and rebooting before realising this. I managed that, it's an interesting exercise getting the system back.
Bootstrapping oneself out of a cock-up is a great way to learn things, even if it's only "don't do that again".
I've done in-place upgrades before now, but it does involve a bit of hacking that might unsettle a newcomer. I assume Fedora has improved since I last used it then, that was regular upgrades, whereas with something giving long-term support, such upgrades are minimised (Mint 9, 13, and also a bit of Centos 6 here).
I used to get sales calls from BT, which I generally treated with amusement because my home phone seems to be one of those that's avoided being in databases so it was a relative novelty.
It all came to a head the day they called me up and tried to flog me Home Highway (remember that). I politely observed that I already had it, and if their database was poor enough that they didn't actually know which services I already had, then perhaps they ought to put me on their Do Not Call list, and I never got another call from them.
From memory, the original reasons they gave were (1) they couldn't determine the reliability of the information provided and (2) they didn't trust all overseas telcos to reliably send the state of the withheld flag, so they might accidentally release CLI when someone had requested anonymity.
Even if they were valid at the time, I'm not sure that's true now.
I think we need a campaign to get BT to provide international CLI, even if all they send is an 00<country-code> if the rest really isn't available. It can't be any less accurate than a spoofed ID, and for those who get legitimate calls from one country and junk calls from another, it's a quick easy way to tell them apart and ignore the unwanted ones. Other telcos can manage it, so why not BT?
I'd object to locking a phone to a network much less if, once the contract has finished and the phone is legally mine, they didn't then extort more money to provide an unlock code. That should be automatically provided without the need to ask for it. Even better if it could be done by a system text message, although I can appreciate such a method is probably more easily hacked than sending something in the post to be manually entered. (I bought my last phone minus contract so it's not locked, thus avoiding the problem.)
Yes, I checked the date and it isn't April 1st. Nice idea, but it's not going to fly. Either FaceBook will refuse connections from French IP addresses or they'll start charging French users for access to offset the tax, or the French Ts and Cs will make the users liable to foot the tax bill on behalf of FaceBook.
Or they'll just ignore it, in which case we need to introduce their management to that quaint English gesture that was supposed to have originated from battles against the French, namely the two-fingered salute.
I filled in opt-out forms some time ago. The receptionist seemed positively pleased to receive them, so I'm guessing that the local practice was not impressed with the last attempt. I don't remember receiving any proactive health mailings either.
If I could trust them to implement it properly, and could trust all future governments not to abuse the information, then I'd be 100% in favour of such a database.
Sometimes it's worth paying a bit more and suffering a bit more inconvenience for a system that isn't quite so joined up.
Given that an erupting volcano dumps a lot of dust into the upper atmosphere and the planet cools slightly, perhaps we've got our approach to particulates wrong.
When Nature has a good burn, it releases a lot of CO2 from burning vegetation into the atmosphere, but also releases a lot of small particles which may well have the same effect as the volcanic dust in cooling down. This is where we've got it wrong, we're releasing the CO2 but taking steps to inhibit the small particles that might mitigate the effect.
No evidence apart from the effects of volcanic dust, but it's just as valid as any of the global warming theories.
It is possible to be in the UK and use an ISP with native IPv6, I've got it here. It's also possible to set up your home system to use a tunnel broker and have IPv6 that way. It wasn't that hard to set up a Linux router with a tunnel, although I appreciate it's not quite plug-and-play.
Two things are needed:
1. Router/modem manufacturers to include ipv6 in their products by default so that if connected to an ipv6-enabled ISP, it'll just work as easily as ipv4. I can see that it might be necessary to include an entry field for an ipv6 prefix address, but that's no worse than having to enter the DSL modem details. Most modern PCs (Windows, Linux, Mac) will trivially fire up ipv6 with minimal prodding, and even Android phones will use it if on a suitable network.
2. ISPs to bite the bullet and offer ipv6 as a default option so that it will just work, and most people won't even know it's happening.
I agree with the e-mouse above, it's too reasonable and sensible to pass. The vested interests will fight this one to the bitter end, while most consumers will carry on completely oblivious. I'm generally in favour of the referendum approach to the EU, but I'm happy to acknowledge when someone's trying to do something right. Sadly I think he'll be voted down.
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