Posts by paulf

Re: Money burning a hole in your pocket Sat Nad?

While I was writing the above comment my regular Monday delivery of LinkedIn Spam arrived, right on cue. Time to sort out the disposable email address (long over due) before it gets fully borged into the MS collective.

Re: Blame the customer

And how many of them did want to leave but the TalkTalk shyster they spoke to told them it would be £200/£500/think of a number to break their contract mid term and just didn't have the energy/knowledge/gumption to tell LieLie to do one. Even if they did push on with leaving they would have risked ShitShit wrecking their credit history in revenge.

To put it another way: I agree with you but only in respect of people who've joined or renewed their contract with ShitShit since the most recent and high profile data breach (or they didn't leave as soon as their existing contract commitment ended after that breach).

I especially agree with you in respect of those who said "It didn't happen to me and they're cheap so it's a lot of fuss over nothing."

Re: I think you should have a warning here.

"Something about never giving unexpected callers access to your computer."

True but when the legit callers do this kind of thing how are we supposed to tell the difference?

On phone calls with the bank, they want all manner of personal information to prove I am definitely who I am. That's all well and good when I call them, but when I get an incoming call I have no means to verify they are who they say they are but I'm still expected to prove my identity.

Companies all do this - call the customer and expect them to prove their identity yet they called the customer on details given by the customer. Point out how silly this is and they just mumble "Data protection, innit".

I refuse to hand out personal information on incoming calls. It causes no end of problems trying to get back to someone on a published number and running the gauntlet of call centre droids who want to know what it's about first and wondering why they can't help me with the problem but if I never give out the info there is no risk I can give it to a very well executed scammer's confidence trick. Unfortunately it's a war of attrition - I need to be lucky every time, the scammers only need to be lucky once. Until the big companies/banks realise they need a secure way of calling the customer that doesn't encourage us to hand over identifiable personal information educating people not to trust random incoming calls will be VERY difficult.

Re: About to be evicted...

Former Rocketmail.com user here also.

I now use fastmail.fm. You'll pay $20-$40/yr for it but it's damned good and they won't be pushing adverts at you, nor scanning your email to target them.

Also when you have a problem it gets fixed. In two years I've raised two tickets and when first level support were unable to resolve they were passed up to one of their senior devs (who really knew what he was talking about).

I have no connection with the company other than as an existing customer. YMMV etc.

If you want "Free" because you don't mind ads and creepy stalking GMail is pretty good and throws in Calendar and IMAP.

Re: H-1B

It's not the "Plebs" that matter though. It's the CEOs, who offer ample campaign contributions to the Congress critters, knowing H1-B will help push down salaries, that matter. Note Modi was addressing Congress, not the Plebs.

Re: As I see it

Considering the point you make about Tesla's home storage battery. UK Power Networks (they own the REC distribution part of the network that used to be EDF Energy Networks (London and East of England). They are trialling a massive battery in a substation near Leighton Buzzard which can charge up during usage troughs and then start supplying during demand peaks:

http://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/internet/en/news-and-press/press-releases/Minister-welcomes-trial-of-pioneering-energy-storage-project.html

Note that the linked article flirts with alternative units:

"The building itself is approximately 760 square metres – about the size of three tennis courts -"

This moves the storage out of the consumer premises into the network, where it should be more efficient than a domestic unit.

I think Wind and Solar do have a roll to play in satisfying our energy needs but since we can't control when the wind blows and the sun shines storage becomes an inherent part of the Renewables system. If you can store electricity from wind at 3am when it's worth, say, £1/MWh and release it into the network when people are making their morning cuppa and get £10/MWh for it (example values) suddenly the economics of wind power are turned on their head. It certainly wouldn't need subsidy any more.

As we've seen with solar, more deployment drives research into improving the technology and the same should be true with storage; and this research may well feed back in battery technology in general.

Re: One thing I hate

That's one thing that annoys me for similar reasons as I often struggle to find trousers/jeans long enough for me because I'm not wide enough!

Why do they automatically assume people get taller as their waist line gets wider? Humans are a diverse bunch - you can have fat short people just like you can have thin lanky people.

Re: Fly agaric..

@ itzman

"If you ever go picking wild mushrooms, don't."

TFIFY.

If you want to know that a mushroom is safe to eat - pick it from the shelf in the supermarket.

Some mushrooms=tasty, some=near certain (and probably very painful+lingering) death and there isn't much wiggle room between the two extremes. If, like me, you're not much of a gambling man those aren't appealing odds for a game of mushroom Russian roulette unless you're really fucking certain you know which chamber holds the live bullet.

It wasn't just with KCOM itself where opportunities were lost. The local council made a fat pile of cash from privatising Kingston Communications (as was) and proceeded to (as I understand it) squander the lot such that they now have little or nothing to show for it.

Re: what?

"On the ickiness of personalised advertising and its source being data individuals freely give to social networks, he says it's more pleasing to receive targeted ads than random stuff you don't care about."

ALL adverts come under the definition of "random stuff I don't care about".

If I absolutely MUST have ads flung at me then ads without "creepy stalking your every move" will be quite enough. The content of the site should be enough to target the adverts; for example if I'm looking at the Register I expect ads about computers. If you're into Golf you're probably looking at websites about Golf which I imagine will show adverts for Golfing stuff. If you're getting adverts for purses [Handbags] perhaps you're looking at a site that is generally aimed at and relevant to people who buy Handbags (usually, but not limited to, Women).

"On privacy, he says the company complies with all applicable laws wherever it operates and pays appropriate attention to security. "

Sounds like the typical refrain from tax dodging persons/companies who always say they've paid all required taxes and complied with all applicable laws. Of course they have. It means fuck all when the laws themselves are broken because they're written by the very people who benefit from them (or for them as a result of their lobbying).

I didn't murder anyone yesterday (today isn't over yet - there's still time) so I'll be making a virtue out of telling everyone I've complied with all applicable laws on not murdering people.

</rant>

@ Tim Warren RE: Biker change of address

Previously when I've moved house I've written my new address on the paper part of my license and popped it in the post to Swansea. An updated paper copy arrived a week or two later. Nice and easy.

When I last moved (roughly three years ago) I thought I would use the online "prove your identity with your passport" way of changing the address on my Driving License in the hope it would save me a stamp. (Yes, I know, it's funny *now*).

I went through all sorts of hoops and steps to prove I am the person on the license including all my passport details (now helpfully and permanently linked to my Driving License). Eventually it came back and said "Thank you, your address has been changed. We now need you to return your old paper license in the post - you are obliged to do this.".

FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL

Icon -> "WFT?" "FAIL" "Big Brother" "Terminator" "Facepalm" are all relevant here. Unfortunately there isn't a "Quietly weeping while hitting head against keyboard" icon.

Re: TiVo FTW

Our home alternative is TV capture cards in a system running Mythbuntu. Myth TV packaged up with Ubuntu. It isn't flawless but is perfectly capable and seems to run on an old 3GHz Athlon with 8GB of RAM. That comes with 30s skip forward which makes skipping adverts easier. It can also flag adverts and, optionally, auto skip them but this can be a bit hit and miss so best to manually skip the time it thinks is an ad break when the ads start.

Added bonus - TV shows can be kept as it simply saves the MPEG data to the HDD.

Re: Is Waze still alive?

I'm finding it ok in the less South Easty parts of Blighty - it was useful on a recent trip to the bottom left for example. That said, a big problem I've found is submitting reports just doesn't work if the data connection at that time is less than 3G. Sometimes I can't even open the report incident popup if it feels the data connection isn't adequate so I don't bother reporting stuff as often.

On 2G (i.e. EDGE or GPRS) Waze just complains of no connection to the server in the mother ship and refuses to take details. A sensible approach would be to cache the report and upload it automatically when coverage returned but I guess Waze/Google just assume people only drive where there is an excellent 3G/4G signal on all networks.

Trying to report road closures only works when you're on the specific bit of closed road. Since it's pretty involved to make the report it makes more sense to do it when you next stop rather than at the closure itself.

Re: Apple could spend

@AC

"For iOS I'm in my usual 48h wait time for any OS updates and it appears it was already worth it"

I used to update pretty quickly but that all changed with iOS 8. Now, for n>7, I usually skip the n.x.0 version and wait for n.x.1 (n.x.2 for x=0) and then usually wait a few days after release. In case anyone gets upset I do the same wait on Win 7 updates.

"I'd recommend you also wait with OSX 10.11.4 as there are reports about random crashes that have as yet not been addressed and I now had a few as well (once every 3..4 days or so - it simply freezes)."

Thanks for the heads up on this. I had planned to wait until near the release of 10.12 in the hope it meant 10.11 was tending towards stability. Looks like I'll have to wait a bit longer and I note 10.11.5 is now being seeded to Beta testers.

"Is four some magic number that protects consumers then?"

Magic? No. Likely sweet spot between each MNO having high enough revenues to make adequate investment in the business without having dominant market+pricing power? Probably, Yes.

As others say above - markets with fewer than 4 players have higher prices than those with four or more.

Remember that building a Mobile Network is exceptionally capital intensive. The UK has a TAM of ~60m spread over a relatively small land mass which isn't going to support 27 separate MNOs! But also it is big enough to support 4.

Previous experience shows the UK can support 4 MNOs but seems to struggle with 5. When DCS1800 licenses were awarded (via the Beauty Contest method) in the early 1990s Mercury was awarded a license by default. The other two licenses ended up merging before launch, returning one license+spectrum to HMG and by launch became Orange. Three was a contrived effort to create a fifth challenger network when 3G licenses were awarded, realising the four incumbents wouldn't risk having no 3G spectrum but five again became four when TM and Orange were allowed to merge. I suspect if Three and O2 had tried to merge before TM and Orange tried it they may have got away with it (notwithstanding the stakes in MBNL and Cornerstone problem) and prevented TM and Orange from doing so.

So to return to your question: In the UK at least, "Four (sic) is the magic number"

Re: Housing transactions crashed too

Considering house prices were at stake I'm very surprised to see this didn't attract the beady eye of the Daily Fail.

Perhaps Barclays Bank is to Viscount Rothermere as HSBC is to the Barclay Brothers over at the Tory-graph.

Re: Catch them young...

What I find confusing is people are offering that colouring in book in the used section. Surely buying a used colouring in book defeats the object - unless you've run out of crayons or colouring in is a bit too challenging (as it probably is for the target demographic).

Re: Interesting

@ vgrig_us

"1. Final Cut Pro / Final Cut X debacle - almost all install base lost to Adobe on Windows because of that."

1b. The summary EOL of Aperture, which also cast those that don't know about alternatives towards Adobe (Lightroom).

When I was looking for a RAW processing package I trialled Lightroom and Aperture. In the end I reluctantly opted for Lightroom as it came with Win 7 and Mac versions in the box whereas Aperture was Mac only and depended on Apple's mercy for its continued existence. With the FCPX stuff going on at the time I wasn't keen to take a risk on that continued mercy and good job I didn't*.

*Not that Adobe is a bag of happiness but at least Lightroom is still supported

Re: Poor technical decisions....

I've seen this point echoed elsewhere. Retain Airwave for the superior voice coverage and things cellular can't do like PTT and back to back operation, then if you really want to stream video from a helicopter tack on a 4G radio which is enabled when required for data. That way when the cellular network falls on its arse during a major incident Cops and co can still speak to each other albeit without the fancy stuff like video.

"How do you fix it?"

Here's a suggestion which may help although I don't claim it is the silver bullet.

Limit the number of call origination attempts from any particular line on a per minute, per hour and per day basis. This is a limit below the inherent limit imposed by the capacity of the network.

I have a paid for IMAP/Webmail service as I'd rather pay than use the usual personal info snooping suspects. Despite being paid for (they have no free option, only a short free trial with much lower limits) they still impose limits on the number of emails sent to prevent people sending bulk/junk emails. In normal use (even business) you shouldn't hit the limits unless you're definitely up to no good.

All outgoing calls placed (even invalid numbers, engaged and voice mail etc) count against the attempt limits to prevent randomly calling numbers to build a list of valid numbers.

There is a chance you may hit the call limits if you're trying to phone up for e.g. high demand concert tickets but I suspect the limit can be set to a level that curbs the spammers but also doesn't impinge on 99.9% of subscribers.

Once someone hits one of the call origination limits (per minute/hour/day) the network locks the line into incoming calls and 999 only for 24 hours after the attempt that hit the limit. Since this would hit telco revenues it would require legislation. Some companies may get around the limits by installing extra lines to keep their calling within the limits. That's fine since their costs would escalate massively threatening the viability of their business model. Alternatively allow higher limits per line only if the company pays 100x across ALL their lines.

Icon: Robocaller not only wants your clothes, boots, and bike but also wants you to press 1 if you've had an accident in the last five years.

Re: Whut??

I can't think why a subtle plug for Satellite broadband has come from a user called, "Satellite TV Shop UK".

A quick look at the website of the Satellite operator you mention returns pages where the prices are conspicuous by their absence; but I can get a quote from one of their resellers (of which I assume you are one?).

Since, as a likely spammer, you're an easy target I'll just ask exactly how much allowance is included in that £39-49/month? I'm guessing its ≈ √(fuck all).

Re: Confused... Advertising pieces disguised as articles?

"I've noticed the Reg has several of these one paragraph articles every day now. "

I'll take, "What is the new Newsbytes section for $200", please Alex.

What's all this? Welcome to The Register's News Bytes

"Hackers will be swarming around [it,] like flies around a massive steaming pile of shit."

Fixed it for you.

Re: WTF!

@ Anonymous Coward

"Fucking Silverlight? I wouldn't even kiss it."

See icon!

Re: It's time for government in general to stop being weasels (UK version)

As described in Yes, [Prime] Minister:

The civil service is really the government.

The Government is really the opposition.

The Opposition is really the opposition in Exile.