Posts by paulf 1250 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Aug 2009
@ as2003 "Seems to me carriers not adequately protecting users' voicemail is the bigger problem here."
I guess these carriers, many of which have some kind of operations in the UK, have learned nothing from the various tabloid newspaper phone voicemail hacking that went on over here.
If she does indeed get it, and isn't just spouting the usual empty platitudes, then she needs the ability to dish out some proper punishments (i.e. permanent disqualification and jail terms for company directors instead of the usual "big fines" that just get ignored by liquidating one shell company and setting up another) and the will to pursue those in question to apply those punishments.
If that happened things would change pretty quickly - which is probably why it won't happen....
@ Schlimnitz
"Ha, I'm on 2007 :) And even 2003 on another machine."
I have Office XP (2002) on my main Win 7 machine and it works perfectly well while my Mac is happy running Office 97 for Windows via Crossover.
"I did consent to ditch the disks for Word 2.0 a few years back." I still have Office 95 Pro kicking about somewhere although I don't like my chances of installing it after the way Windows 7 complained bitterly about Office 97. I seem to recall it came with Access 2.0 which couldn't run on a machine with >1GB RAM. I guess those "640kB is enough for anyone" beliefs were hard wired!
This is exactly it - make sure the cost of roaming is in line with the savings an operator would make from not having to build a complete base station but not so high that roaming has to be mandated by law. That should avoid the unintended consequence of operators not building anything to piggy back on the others via roaming.
Operators should be championing this idea - you don't need four separate* base stations to serve some small village with five houses and a shop miles from a main road. Have one operator build a suitable base station and charge the other operators to roam onto it**; or have all four operators share the cost of construction. Unfortunately that means they're colluding as a monopoly and would need protection from competitive laws - risky territory with Telcos unless it's done very carefully!
* yes I know it's really two with MBNL and Cornerstone.
** Roaming at the MNO level so a roaming agreement to use that base station signed by O2 would apply to all MVNOs on O2 e.g. GiffGaff and Tesco.
Not just that but AIUI they removed the right to anonymity retrospectively so those who donated in the past under the promise of anonymity had that removed long after the fact. In my book that major shift represented a significant breach of trust so it's no wonder they're short of donors.
FTA: "Remember when group buying was the hottest marketing tactic ever and Groupon and LivingSocial were duking it out at the top of the market?"
Yes I do - and I remember the last time it was "the hottest marketing tactic ever" when letsbuyit.com tried it then crashed and burned when the .com bubble burst in the early naughties.
Oh and are Groupon still a thing? I thought they'd finally died a death due to a lack of people wanting fish nibbling pedicures at 600% off.
I remain completely staggered that they've systematically dropped the Magsafe connector from their portable computers. This, at least for me, was one of the more compelling aspects for the MacBook [Pro] machines as it offered a genuine benefit - trip over the mains cable and it safely detaches without wiping out the machine in the process.
As for connectors - completely agree. The chase is on for removing as much functionality as possible in the name of "courageous" decisions making it 0.1mm thinner. This seems to be a disease pervading Apple under Cook. If you want it super thin get a MB Air. If you buy a MacBook Pro you are probably planning to do some serious work with it so it should be connectors galore.
I've been with Voda for 10 years since leaving the former Orange. Orange CS truly was (shit)^2 and that's why I left them as a customer of 10 years (since the Hans Snook days).
I've not had many problems with Voda (but I don't doubt others have). The online chat resolved an overbilling issue - it took a while but I just did it in the background while working on something else (probably like the agent was doing). The Level 2 support in Egypt got Wifi Calling working during the Christmas break last year and even called back as promised while also being friendly and helpful.
With no disrespect intended to either those Voda staff who are trying their best nor the people who have had shitty service from them and hate them with a passion, I'd put them down as the "best" of a truly bad bunch:
EE: Terrible before acquisition by the utterly dreadful BT
Royston Vasey Three: You'll never leave (as we don't give out PACs)
O2: Crapita (Enough said)
Alistair: "...the issue of to big to fail. Really. even *wall street* should get this by now."
Wall street definitely gets "too big to fail". They rather like the idea as it makes things closer to a one way bet. Getting more "too big to fail" generally involves campaign donations and directorships for suitable congress critters which is why they like it too. The downsides from too big to fail are like taxes - only for the little people.
David Roberts: "Edit: going to make it hard for El Reg to fill those column inches if Twitter goes Mammaries Sunwards and they can't publish Tweets any more."
I think that's going to make it difficult for all news outlets IME. They may have to re-employ some journalists to actually research and write stuff rather than the current MO of "Scrape frothing indignation from Twitter. Boom: Journalism".
"Then Cyanogen Inc made a completely baffling move – one that continues to puzzle readers. It signed an exclusivity deal with Micromax in India...."
I agree this decision does sound baffling but having watched the first two series of Silicon Valley it probably made complete sense to the VCs that delighted in constantly meddling and were pushing for a big deal so they could cash out ASAP after.
Yahoo Groups used to be pretty good, but is now a shadow of its former self having been hacked to bits during refurbishments and upgrades over the last few years to the point it's barely usable. I know of several groups that have migrated away either to custom solutions or groups on Facebook (yes, I know). One group remains there, clinging to the wreckage, simply because they can't provide their own bespoke solution and it's not been possible to locate a suitable alternative.
I can only conclude that Yahoo Groups is a loss maker for the P0wnage palace and they've deliberately broken it to encourage people to sod off. If it was profitable then paid for alternatives would have popped up to grab those departing the mess at Yahoo. I've looked and nothing I've found (paid for or adverts) offers anything close to the same features and functionality.
The P0wnage Palace was reporting the quarter to 30 Sept. I'm not convinced the full effects of the 500 million user hack and Yahoo secretly handing over info to the US Government would have been reflected at all in those numbers.
IIRC the hack appeared on the dark web sometime in July but was only confirmed by Privacy sell-out Yahoo! a week or two before the quarter end (that was good timing, eh?!). The USG spying news started to break in early October (i.e. after the quarter end) so any revenue consequences on the NSA's bed warmer from this won't be reflected in these figures.
TL;DR big surprise it all stinks of bullshit. I'd be more interested in the figures for the current quarter (to 31 Dec) and the quarter after that (to 31 March) as they will really show the effects of people actually going elsewhere and presumably not coming back. If I was Verizon I'd be demanding access to current numbers to see any hit.
Seppuku swords is a satisfying thought but it also implies they have an ounce of honour among them which is unlikely.
Verizon has already hinted at renegotiating or walking away as there has been a [quite substantial IMO] material change so I imagine the Yahoo execs are shitting themselves that the deal gets called off. Any eBay thoughts the Yahoo execs are having will be limited to either 1. Can we flog Yahoo! to eBay? or 2. I wonder if we can put Yahoo on eBay and get a few quid for it (Paypal only - no time wasters)?
I suspect this will be one of those unusual times where the board fail to get out with their massive golden parachutes before the whole lot implodes.
FTA: "Yahoo! says it won't stage the call “Due to the pending transaction with Verizon”."
"All our Execs are very busy arse kissing the Verizon board to the greatest possible extent so they are not available to attend the earnings call. Melissa is especially keen for this transaction to complete as agreed in the interests of her $56m bonus all investors."
FIFY
AIUI it wasn't officially released in the UK at the time they gave up so I can understand them being less inclined to offer payouts.
That said there is prior art on this kind of thing. Left pondian VW Diesel owners are getting their engines fixed and something like US$1000+ compensation. Right pondian owners (like me - my car has an EA189 engine in it) are still waiting for the sodding fix and probably won't see a fucking penny out of them. I'm not a big fan of the opulent compensation culture but they should treat all affected owners roughly the same not limit payouts to the most rabidly litigious.
@AC "Weren't Hutchinson Telecom French btw ?"
No Hutchison Whampoa (now CK Hutchison) are based in Hong Kong. You are probably thinking about Orange group plc - which was based in the UK and had Hutchison as a majority owner (and owner of the Rabbit service mentioned elsewhere in this thread). That Orange was acquired by Mannesman AG in 2000, Mannesman was then swallowed shortly after by Vodafone Airtouch plc (as it was then) which meant Voda had to dispose of the former Orange group, which they did to France Telecom more or less in tact. Over time FT migrated to using the Orange brand on all their services not just wireless stuff and would be considered Orange now. In the UK FT's Orange and DT's T-Mobile merged to become EE, now owned by BT, consigning the Orange brand to history apart from some still on old legacy contracts.
@ DougS "I think Samsung ought to push a software update to them that causes them to stop functioning at the end of the month"
I agree with you there should be some action to forcibly stop people using handsets that are subject to a recall but this leads to a bit of a quandary. The type of Note 7 owners that want to keep their devices because they've not exploded are the same kinds that would reject the update if they have the option to do so. The alternative is Samsung putting out a forced update that the user cannot override/reject which raises questions about how long this ability has been baked into the handset and how much we trust them not to remote brick other devices in the future just because they want to. I understand Microsoft have been experimenting with the whole forced update thing recently and didn't get exclusively happy responses.
I've got 8*2TB Green drives in my NAS boxes. I know they're not really intended for that use but this was before WD started doing the Red drives for NAS/SOHO use. In 6 years I've had one mechanism fail - that was within 3 years of purchase and WD did a simple swap for a new one. Thankfully no data loss as the NAS boxes are set up in RAID 1 mirroring (they're rather old SPARC ReadyNAS Duo boxes so that's as sophisticated as it gets).
The big desktop PC has Black drives in it though.
@ Anonymous Coward Re: Bet you.... "All the people going on about removable batteries are grossly oversimplifying the problem !"
I'm all for removable batteries but I'd offer an extra entry for your list. I'm not sure if the charging circuit is implicated here (or if it really is just shitty batteries) but if the charging circuit hardware is the problem a removable battery doesn't help you much as the batteries will keep exploding and the phone still needs to be recalled.
About three years ago I tried to get the "Reply to" option to work on my Y! mail account (not my main account). Y! resolutely refused to include the reply to email address in any email sent out through it with the header entry set as "Reply-To: ;" (generating a bouncy email to ";" for anyone who did click reply).
This should have been pretty simple to fix but three support tickets in as many months yielded nothing and I understand it remains broken. I gave up and moved everything on that account to a paid for IMAP provider which has been faultless over the last 2.5 years.
The only explanation for this sudden rash of development/debug work at Yahoo can only be nefarious. I'd go with the lock in theory if I thought Yahoo were clever enough to think it up...
FTA: "Sensors in the billboards would determine if pedestrians slow their pace or if drivers ease the gas to rubber neck at the so-called "smart billboards"."
Translating actions like that into advertising effectiveness is quite a leap. Will the billboard be able to realise if vehicles are slowing down for other reasons like traffic?
The other year there were bus stop adverts for a fruity soft drink that were quite amusing. Once or twice I did slow down to read them, chuckle, then I just carried on but I've never bought that brand of drink. Back in the day I used to find those adverts for cigars amusing (the ones with baldy man in them) but I've never smoked. I suspect this kind of feedback will be as much use as that from the creepy on line tracking done by Google et al, "You've just bought a toaster - look at all these other toasters".
Oh and El Reg are on form with stuff like this: "Privacy sell-out Yahoo!...", "The NSA's bed warmer..." and "The P0wnage Palace...". Please keep hammering home how rotten Yahoo is, in case there's anyone who doesn't yet know.
@ I Like Heckling "If they can't sort out providing 4G, why the hell should they be given the opportunity to roll out 5G to an elitist minority."
Slow down there, Grandma!
This might be only one use case but I've had pretty good (and perfectly usable) 4G on my various visits to Cornwall, including some real backside of beyond wilderness areas where I wouldn't have expected more than simple 2G Voice+SMS (if anything at all). There are still gaps but such is life. Other networks may offer better/worse than mine in those areas - you pays money and takes choice.
I'm sorry to hear you have coverage problems (which presumably extend across all four MNOs in your area?) but don't assume those who are able to get 3G/4G are an "elitist minority".
It probably dates me if I confess to doing that very prank of swapping mouse/keyboard cables on the RM Nimbus machines we had when I was at school. The machines were back to back so the mouse at this computer would be connected to the one behind. Ah, different times!
As for rearranging keyboards - you just need to pick something with no repeated letters. I'd offer "fuck this" and "scrotum" as two options. Repurposing numbers (upside down calculator style) gives you more options as if you wanted something more exotic like "Sag Bag" you could use a 6 as a G.
I have four EI fire alarms in my place (3 smoke alarms and a heat alarm for the kitchen). They network together so that when one detects they all sound, but aren't "smart" or IoT. I found they would start beeping "low battery" after 9-12 months on brand new Duracell PP3s. Once replaced the tester shows the old ones (still in date) have gone down from 100% to 99.9% so hardly low and more likely an overly sensitive aspect in the battery detection circuit than a fault with the battery itself.
I swapped to NiMH rechargeables. The alarms get tested once a week and the batteries get recharged once every three months regardless so the low-battery never gets a chance to chirrup.
I have nothing else that uses PP3s so I was faced with ditching ~£15 of PP3 Alkalines each year. It's a waste of money plus the environmental cost of chucking otherwise decent batteries. It's all very well saying "Get cheap PP3s" (elsewhere in this thread) but I'd rather have a decent rechargeable than a crappy alkaline and the environmental cost to make and dispose a cheap PP3 is still there.
@fidodogbreath "Pardon my ignorance... ...but do iPhone users have to use iMessage for SMS?"
Simple answer is No. You can turn off iMessage which defaults everything to SMS/MMS which your mobile network charges for accordingly. Only downside is they haven't implemented SMS delivery reports - read reports are only available if you use iMessage.
If you turn on iMessage the iPhone will attempt to use iMessage for everything it can, only dropping back to SMS/MMS where the recipient doesn't have an iPhone*, has an iPhone with iMessage turned off* or there's no data connection.
In my case I leave iMessage off - SMS for text, then use email if I want to send pics. If GCHQ really think my ramblings are worth intercepting they can go to a court in the UK to get permission wiretap my carrier rather than asking the NSA to do it for them via Apple's servers.
*I think the iPhone queries Apple's servers to check if the recipient has an iPhone and is/isn't using iMessage. I suspect this is how the phone determines if a contact can receive a Facetime connection also.
*While we're remembering PCMCIA cards, let's remember the acronym describing the venerable peripherals-for-laptops standards was often satirised as “People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms.”
Wow - PCMCIA and yes I do remember the snarky expansion of the acronym you mention!
Many years ago I had a Panasonic CF-41 laptop (The first to have a double speed CD-ROM drive built in!). I think the CF-41 still works and I have a PCMCIA modem and joystick adaptor for it somewhere in the big box of antique computer gubbins.
@Mage
On this bit: "Plessey, GEC". Plessey Semiconductors was acquired by GEC when GEC and Siemens captured Plessey and tore it apart between them. GEC Plessey Semiconductors (GPS) carried on until 1997 when it was acquired by Mitel. Mitel separated the PBX bit from the Semiconductor bit around 2002 which became Zarlink Semiconductor. That got rogered into submission by a bunch of 2nd division manglement/bean counters from Nat Semi who left just enough of the company behind to be acquired by Microsemi.
Oddly enough the Plessey name lives on as it was resurrected by the company that now owns the former Plessey foundry at Roborough, near Plymouth.
@Mage "Formerly part of Philips, once the flagship Electronics giant of Europe, the TV and AV are badges for Asians and they have retreated to 1926 and making only light bulbs and health care."
I don't know about the healthcare but the light bulbs aren't much cop these days. They all seem to be made in the middle kingdom; dumb light bulbs die with shocking (ahem) regularity* and the "smart" ones are full of DRM.
*The 42w eco-halogen bulbs in the living room seem to go after only a few months use, and it's not like they've been used much over the Summer. The Homebase own brand bulbs last about 2 years in comparison!
Not where I work. They've recently put the stationery room on access control whereas before that you could just help yourself. Now you can only get a crappy BIC biro or pack of own brand "Paste-It Notes" with gracious permission from the department Admin. The Admins are usually pretty good but it's a move that really says "Fuck you!" to the question "Do you trust your employees not to pinch the cheap crappy stationery you buy?"
@WatAWorld "The browser isn't going to fix the security holes in the OS and hardware."
True, but for someone who has decided they need to be running XP or Vista (for reasons that presumably make sense to them, having weighed up the risks of an OS with unpatched security holes) an up to date browser will be more likely to stop attacks getting as far as the OS compared to an out of date browser (assuming the system isn't air gapped).
@ Frank Bitterlich "Maybe a public apology in the form of a full-page newspaper ad would be nice, too."
Nah, hit them where it really hurts and demand the cheque as this guy did (don't settle for gift cards that cost them next to bugger all to issue). Sending out lots of cheques for $650 will eventually start to hit home what they've done. Even if only 1% of those 400 million Win 10 devices yields a claim that's $2.6bn - material even on MS's accounts even if it is a one off. Perhaps it will become big enough to spawn a sleazy claims handling industry? Those PPI claims management shysters must be looking for a new gig, "Were you tricked into getting PPI installing Windows 10? Call us now!"
As for a newspaper advert - if you're really keen I suggest it is featured somewhere before page 5 and explains in clear terms (using large unmissable text) that they used Virus/Malware techniques to get Win 10 onto machines with the massive heading "WE AT MICROSOFT ARE DEVIOUS AND DECEITFUL".
This is the downside of quad-play offers - you're stuck unless you move the lot and some options (like pay TV) have few alternatives. The industry likes them because they deliver more loyal customers but that's only because of the hassle of splitting all your services back out of the bundle. Customers like them at first because of the initial discount to get you to put all your eggs in the one basket but start to feel otherwise when they realise it just means the operator will gouge them harder and deeper when the initial discount ends as suddenly their negotiating power is weaker.
@AC "ermmm... let's forget about phone calls, you do realize I hope that a lot of fork lift drivers and warehouse workers around the globe use voice features on different terminals ?"
The whole point of the article is the accessibility features (or lack of them) built into the iPhone, and how this impacts people with reduced motor functions to place/answer phone calls.
The terminals used by warehouse operatives are normally custom designed devices (i.e. not sodding iPhones), they're not personal phones (as per @Halfmad's point), and they're using it as a necessary part of concentrating on their primary activity. That's a bit different to taking a phone call about going down the local later for a pint (Icon it's Friday), confirming what you want for dinner that evening or anything else equally distracting while you're dashing across the warehouse floor with a metric shitload of gubbins filled pallets.
"And the women with fingernails find it almost impossible to get on the exact date."
I can't help thinking that if these women have fingernails that mean they can't select a date from the sliders they are likely to face wider problems than that with any capacitive touch screen device unless they use some kind of stylus.
"If you are a worker driving a forklift truck, or a warehouse worker, and your hands are busy and the phone rings then you might appreciate these features."
No disrespect intended to the main topic of the article but I'll respond to this side aspect. If you're driving a fork lift truck or other form of plant machinery, I'd respectfully suggest that you either fully concentrate on what you're doing OR safely stop what you're doing then answer a phone call, rather than trying to do both with the real risk of injury/death. It's one thing to be taking a call hands free while driving on the motorway, but quite another when you're trying to navigate a large load carrying vehicle around the limited spaces in a warehouse while avoiding various squishy meat bags.
Automatic "Withheld Number" call rejection is perfectly possible on the network side. It usually gives out a message informing the caller they must un-Withhold their number for the call to be put through (dialling 1470 is usually the way to override a default withhold). The downside is scammers could just use a fake CLID but it should stop some of the dodgy calls.
Unfortunately Telcos like to charge something like £5/month for this service because profit. Since the cost of offering this service is near negligible (the software is built into the LE switch gear it just needs someone to enable it for that line) I can only conclude that Telcos are gits...
You'd need to make sure the train involved had SDO (Selective door opening).
I can think of a myriad of problems in implementing this but the biggest problem would be more than doubling the "Dwell" time in the station (the time the train is at the station loading/unloading fleshsacks rather than travelling at line speed to the next station). One of the main reasons double decker trains aren't as viable as some people like to think is because they increase the station dwell time substantially which gives a substantial reduction in the capacity of that line.
Another easy spotted problem with double stopping trains is the bit of the train not in the platform may be fouling (blocking) a junction just outside the station which further reduces the route capacity. Indeed it could be fouling a Level crossing leading to exceptionally unhappy road users if the crossing is closed for 5 minutes at a time 10 times per hour!
When you're trying to push 10+ trains per hour along a commuter line every minute counts which is why Dwell time is important.
Dismissing a large number of your safety critical staff would be the start of your problems, not the end. You'd have to train new Guards with almost no one to do that training, while running no services due to the chronic lack of guards you've just created.
To answer your question (AIUI and IANAL) yes you can providing you dismiss ALL striking workers and don't cherry pick BUT it is a very high stakes gamble and you'd have to be pretty damned sure you don't blink in that game of poker with the unions.
Xerox Phaser 6140 (basic colour laser with duplex unit and Ethernet as standard. A bonus was drivers for Win 7, Mac and Linux).
It's done about 1000 pages a year since purchase in early 2010. The cartridges are a bit pricey but the print quality is as good as the day it was unboxed. The printer claims the imaging unit is only 20% through it's life too so fingers crossed it will keep going a while yet!
FTA: "The bank trojans were being dropped until Kafeine and fellow researchers reported the attacks to advertising networks whose infrastructure was being abused."
So the Ad networks were quite happily dishing out copies of the trojan software all over the place until they were notified by security researchers. Even a small amount of cursory scanning of files distributed over their Ad networks would have detected the booby trapped files. Oh, wait, that would have cost money. At the risk of generalising, I imagine that people who don't run Ad blockers are probably those least able to rectify all the problems introduced by such trojans.
And these Ad networks still don't get why we use ad blockers?!
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