Posts by James 42 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2007
There is a lot of BT bashing going on here, and I'm no big fan on them myself, but I can see their point. Why should they invest Billions of their money into something without then being able to control their own property? At the end of the day they area private company who's purpose is to make money for their shareholders. If they cannot see a future profit to be made from it there is no point in the investment.
If you have a problem with BT's monopoly then you're a couple of decades too late to fight that one. I wonder how many of the BT haters tried to fight it's privatisation back in the day.
The only way the state can legitimately keep control of the future network infrastructure is for the state to stump up the cash for it in the first place. Although a large investment the money would be made back over time by leasing the network to private telecoms companies. If the state aren't prepared to do that then they need to let the private companies get on with it, even BT.
BT was privatised to try and create a free market in telecoms (and of course earn a big lump of cash to finance tax cuts and stay in power), and it's not really BT's fault that the plan was poorly thought out and bound to fail in its aim.
So people can be screened to see the likelihood that they could be addicted to a criminal act? So if you get the all clear you can just go right ahead and break the law in the knowledge you probably won't get addicted. Alternatively people could not take the drug in the first place.
I'm not anti-drugs as it happens, but it seems a pointless task to be screening people for this gene.
How would it help though.
For example instead of knowing that it is GMT +5 in somewhere, and therefore being able to work out what time they start work there, you'd have to remember work start times of countries around the world.
Getting rid of Timezones won't make it any easier as you'd still need to know what time people did things in other countries. The only way your plan would work would be to have everyone go to work at 9am GMT, whether it was day or night there. It works for me in the UK, not so sure the Aussies would be so chuffed though.
I have been using one of these for over a year:
http://www.adslnation.com/products/xte2005.php
It makes a big difference to my BB speeds (about 7Mbit compared to about 4Mbit without).
What it does is split the ADSL and telephone signal at the point that it enters your property. Your router/modem goes in the ADSL connector, and as long as all your telephone extensions are on the other side they will not require individual ADSL filters. This and the higher than normal quality ADSL filter (apparently better than the BT supplied version) built into it means that you get as good an ADSL signal as possible.
You can also wire connection into the back of the faceplate to keep it tidy if you need to run the ADSL side of it to another room.
I was so pleased with it at the time I even wrote a 5/5 review on their website after I bought it.
To those that say BT don't allow you to tamper with the incoming telephone line, and that BT don't allow this - The rule is that everything out the back of this primary phone connector box is BTs responsibility, and everything in front of the box (including the faceplate) is yours.
Seriously, I recommend everyone has one of these. Best £12 I spent in a long time.
I once voluntarily gave my finger prints to police many years ago and was told at the time that they would be destroyed once the investigation was completed (I refused to give them otherwise). I have often wondered if they actually were destroyed as promised, or if they still appear on some database somewhere. Anyone know of a way to check up on these type of things?
I have 'The Knack'. As well as fixing things just by standing next to the user I have other abilities e.g. If I am outside I can sense rain 5-10 minutes before it starts. I can hear high pitched noises that no-one else can (and they bug me until I find the source).
It's obviously something that most technical folk have, as when the lights flicker in my office all the techies look up as they notice it while the non-techies are completely oblivious.
With a techie friend of mine I have known since we were both 7 we can have entire conversations by only speaking the first 2 or 3 words of a sentence and the other knowing what you are on about before you finish. For an outsider listening in it sounds like gibberish as the sentences go uncompleted. At our peak we know what the other is thinking so well we can establish facts with a series of 'yeahs'.
I have a motto that I pass on to my new support staff -
"Don't believe customers when they say they 'have tried that already'. They are either lying, or just don't understand what you are on about".
Whatever your opinions on the bands involved Radiohead and NiN have shown what can be possible using the Internet. As the first people to try out new ideas I commend them, even if they didn't necessarily come up with the ideal formula.
I'm a fan of both Radiohead and NiN. I paid £5 for the Radiohead album (including fee). I like the album. I also paid for the lossless files from NiN. I'm not so keen on that one.
If every album was released at the £5 mark I would buy loads of them. As it is with the rip-off cost of albums these days I buy very few.
Well I've just spent most of my afternoon clearing 110 bits if adware and spyware from my system. How many of those do you think were affecting Firefox? That's right, none. Whatever the reasons for this (e.g. IE more popular so more of a target), this is why I use Firefox.
If I could uninstall IE I would.
Security updates are a good thing, and the faster they are available the better. The Firefox updates are so painless as well, it even remembers what websites you had open before you ran it. Just because IE itself doesn't say "I have updates" doesn't mean they aren't being done.
Here we are in the UK all excited about this little quake (the Media are anyway). While looking at the EMSC website I noticed that Indonesia has had 10 earthquakes in just the last 48 hours of about the same magnitude or higher than the ONE we got this morning. That puts it all in perspective.
"That said, interviews with passengers on the British Airways plane say the engines were very loud just prior to impact. That suggests the engines were in workable condition, and the pilots inputs to add power eventually got through to the engines."
Aaahhh. So if the engines were slow to accept the command it must be that they ran out of RAM and it was using the swapfile.
The key is LINE distance and not how close you are geographically. Your line could do a several mile round trip before it gets to you, particularly in an area with a lot if streets. Lines often run up one side of a street then back down the other side, and then on to the next street etc. This means it can take in a few sights of your town before it gets to you.
Personally I have no problem with the 'Up-to' description of broadband. At least it is a grammatically correct statement unlike the use of the 'unlimited' term on capped broadband accounts.
"I just don't get this whole facebook/myspace crud. It's basically having a web page innit."
Unless your website is a method of contact people you have lost contact with, no Facebook isn't.
MySpace I grant you is much more of a 'look at me' kind of site where people just want to meet other strangers, and just be seen.
Facebook on the other hand is different. It's primary purpose is to contact people you already know. Unlike a website ONLY the people you have added as friends see your page, and not anyone that happens to stumble upon it on Google.
I only have information on my Facebook page that I am happy for anyone else to see. I also use an email address that is unique to Facebook. It does not get used anywhere else, so it is unlikely that my Facebook account will be linked with other online purchases based on email(although it also makes it impossible for people to find me using an email as a search).
If you take some simple precautions, and only publish things on your page that you'd be happy to discuss with your Boss, Facebook can be a useful tool.
For those that have never have a Facebook account then there is no basis to form an opinion on it, so it's probably best not to spout half-truths on something you know nothing about. It just makes you look like idiots.
Don't you just hate it when you can't find your Windows reinstall disk and have to go through stacks of CDs to find it? Imagine doing that on the scale of several offices!!!
Maybe instead of paying the cost of 47 police officers' time to do the searching maybe they should offer a bonus to their staff to find it on one of their desks.
"The survey... demonstrates that when it comes to meaningless celebrity, the UK punches far above its weight."
Does it? This was a poll based in the UK. If the same question was asked in the US I'd expect there to be few if any UK entires on their list. They will have their own bunch on wasters who's 'fame' has not crossed the pond. If anything the fact that there are Americans on the list at all is embarrassing for them!
I also find it odd that Johnny Vegas makes the list at all. It's not a name I would immediately think of when answering this question. Surely the 'researchers' didn't pre-list the candidates for people to choose from did they!?
It's good to see that the authorities have jumped on it and investigating.
Whenever people tell me a site is rigged I tell them to go practice and become a better poker player. If you can't handle the bad beats (sometimes several on the run) you should really be playing the game.
I have been following the threads about this on 2+2 forums and this is the first time I've actually believed that there was dodgy going on in online poker. It is important that the authorities handle this well to maintain the integrity of online poker as a whole.
The thing that strikes me here is that the cheater didn't do a very good job at it. It wouldn't have been too difficult to hide the cheating by playing a few bad hands and letting themselves get beat. To go and win virtually ever hand made it very obvious.
So all this company have managed to do is draw attention to a forum that most of their user and potential customers probably didn't know existed.
A better plan would have been for them to participate in the discussion to help their users and better understand their bugs.
Every piece of software has bugs and most users understand that. As long as a company is being seen to be doing something about the problems most people are happy.
I don't understand this bit:
"She bought her laptop from Dell with Vista regardless. In her own words, "it would have cost another £130 quid for a Windows XP license buying from Dell"."
I have just double checked on the Dell website and they charge the same for Vista or XP installed on their systems. What's this £130 extra all about!?
"If Linux would only stop having 40 + distributions and settle on 1 then games manufacturers could get involved"
You make it sound like Linux is owned by a single company. It isn't and this means there will never likely be just one flavour of Linux. But that's the beauty of it, developers will create niche versions that support specific tasks and users. While there are loads of distributions they are all still based on a Linux core and therefore software doesn't have to be written differently for each distribution. Sure there are sometimes incompatibilities, but it's not like that's a foreign problem to Microsoft.
Back on topic... I and many Windows users know from experience that you don't install an MS operating system for serious use (of course we have installed it, played with it, and consigned it to the 'what a load of rubbish' pile) until SP1 is available at the very least. If MS delay this SP there will be a lot of customers, in particular corporate customers sticking with XP for as long as they delay it.
I find it odd that the land of the free feels it is ok to restrict the choice of their citizens on where they are allowed to gamble. It's ok to gamble (in Vegas etc.), as long as foreign companies aren't making money out of it.
Fast forward a few years and the US will yield to the pressure and once again allow internet gambling. Except this time it will be monopolised by US gambling companies. The US missed the boat when internet gambling took off and this is a good way to relaunch it on their own terms.
If people looked after their email addresses better and were more careful about who they gave it out to there would be much less of a problem. It is all very well blaming Hotmail for the problem but if you don't want spam look after your email.
I'm had the same Hotmail email account for years and years. In the last 12 months I've had less than 10 bits of spam in my inbox. It's not even as if I have an obscure un-guessable address as it is in the firstnamelastname@hotmail.com format.
Why don't I get a ton of spam? Because I don't use it on untrustworthy websites. If I do want to give an email to an untrusted website I use my generic throw away account that I only look when I'm expecting an immediate response from the website I signed up for.
Even better I use an email account that lets me put anything I like before the @. So when I signed up for this site I used theregister@mydomain.co.uk. So if any of the sites I signed up for do pass my details on someone else I know which one did it.
My point? Don't blame Hotmail for failing to catch spam if you've done nothing to avoid it yourself.
"Just out of intrest, what is the benefit of being able to track everyone via DNA to the 'Evil' government?"
The benefit of course is cold hard cash. Data like this would be worth a lot of money to the wrong people. And we all know how much some Govt. officials / coppers like to make a bit of cash on the sly.
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