Posts by JimmyPage

The elephant in the room ?

Surely the bottom line is the market is just completely saturated ? Apart from the dearth of apps, my Windows Phone (January 2011) isn't missing anything that would make me go out and get a new phone.

Ditto the Mrs HTC Wildfire (bought Dec 2011).

Ditto the lads Nokia 5800 (bought March 2009).

Therefore, for this household, it's completely irrelevant what the price of handsets is. We can't be the only one.

Would *anybody* trust their business to the cloud ?

given the Patriot act, and the willingness of US judges to slap takedowns left right and centre.

LinkedIn losing the edge ?

funny, coz I care much less about my LinkedIn profile, since I started getting loads of agencies trying to connect.

And so we have another law

where no one needs to complain, for someone to get banged up.

I for one, am heartily sick, of seeing the criminal justice system being used to dictate some arbitrary morality upon society. I really have no interest in what people watch, or do amongst consenting adults, as long as no one else gets hurt. Endof.

Remember the extreme porn law ? Just taking a screencap of certain films, despite being BBFC approved will get you banged up. And you're forbidden to mention the clip came from a BBFC approved film in court.

I would have thought the solution was obvious

throw open a competition to crowdsource a name via the new Outlook.com userbase.

Both of them.

more about knowing *what* you watch

When I posted that comment, I was thinking more of a slightly creepy marketing dimension.

VM customers with TiVo are already in the vanguard of this. VM knows not only what you watch, and when, it also knows how you skip the ads, and how you channel surf. Put all that data together, and you have enough for some pretty smart targeted marketing.

Now, who do you think are behind the Lords ?

One thing that I don't understand

are MS going to simply stop @hotmail.xxx emails working - just like that ? Surely not ?

Anyway, have grabbed new @outlook.com accounts to match mine & Mrs Pages @hotmail.com accounts, so we're happy.

Is anyone

writing this as a screenplay ?

Virgin seem to cripple their kit before letting it out the door

Start of the year they upgraded me, and send me a new modem/router (not the superhub, the one down from that).

I have set my network up to be 192.168.1.x . Their poxy router simply couldn't be configured to take that - and it couldn't be put into modem mode to allow me to use my existing router. Repeated calls to overseas just put me through the same steps again and again, with the "technician" expressing surprised when I got the error message about not being able to use that address.

In the end I had to reconfigure my network.

A rare satisfied customer here ...

(note, I didn't say "happy")

We moved in 10 years ago, when Telewest were cable providers. Since they offered an all-in-one phone,TV and dial-up (!) package, we joined. The only criteria then[1] was "anybody but BT". We have stayed with them, and taken advantage of various promotions to get 6 months free broadband (in 2004), a free upgrade to V+ (2008) and this year a free upgrade to TiVo and the basic 30MBs package (which needed a new modem).

In that time, we've had 1 outage on the broadband. I think they had lost the pairing of the modem with the network, as I called up, and had to quote the modem MAC address. Fixed 5 minutes later.

Speed is pretty much as advertised. Never experienced issues with traffic shaping - maybe because I just set downloads running on my 24/7 server. When they're there, they're there. My only grumble is the slightly od mix of channels on the "basic" TV package. But since we're not sports fans, and our son is way past the cartoon network stage, we're not missing much - it's be nice to have Discovery HD for example. But we manage without.

Customer service on the whole is acceptable - yes you can have some problems with the offshore guys, but if things get too bad, hang up, redial, and select the "I'm leaving you option" - you'll get a UK person, who will knock a few quid off, or give you a discount on a new service.

[1]When I became a homeworker, 3 years ago, I got lumbered with a BT Openreach Broadband connection. The saga of getting it installed, and activated, and the billing sorted was WORSE than I feared. Since I was already expecting a series of missed appointments, incomplete work, and messed up billing, they really went some to go under a bar already set at -10.

Every so often, just for fun, I run a speed test on both connections. Here's todays results:

BT: Ping 39ms DL: 4.87Mb/s UL: 0.72 MBs

VM: Ping 20ms DL: 17.91 Mb/s UL: 1.98 MBs

and that's real. I can download a 1 hour programme in 3 minutes.

Compare and contrast with the in-laws who live a mile away, and have been with every combination of non-Virgin there is ... I stopped counting at the 5th incident they had where they lost internet connectivity in 3 months. Each time they had a round robin of calls between BT and the ISP.

I know VM are a premium service. But that premium saves a lot of hassle should things go wrong.

+1 for Webmin

OK, I'm never going to be a paid Linux sysadmin. But when I started dabbling with Linux, about 5 years ago now (slight pause for that to register) the one tool which I stumbled across which transformed my experience was Webmin.

Despite being able to remember DOS 2.0, I am unashamedly a GUI fan. My argument is a *good* GUI can help enforce some sort of understanding of what's going on underneath - a classic example being an input field that is greyed out unless a checkbox is ticked. The GUI shows you the relation between the two.

Thinking outside the box (pun intended)

maybe there's an argument we need a hybrid public/private TV model.

Public (BBC) can take risks and trial stuff that is new, experimental, niche

*if* it's successful, then private (Sky/ITV) can take it over to develop it into a series/franchise.

I apologise for butting in

as I've only been following LOHAN sproadically (and that pic of the two old geezers really isn't selling it to me) but is there no scope for an ignitionless system ? ISTR the return motors on the Lunar Lander were designed to avoid the need for anything that could go wrong.

Anyway - inspiring stuff. I speak as someone who turned down a job with the ESA in 1988 - one of my regrets.

I think people are missing the point

which has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with a judicial system starting to assert it's control over the internet.

Once the principle is accepted by the sheeple (bearing in mind how much of the internet we have lost in the name of child pornography, and terrorism) it's a simple administrative task to get whatever the government of the day doesn't like banned.

Hasn't Google already had to nobble autocomplete in China ?

On a slightly different tack

Could such a failure to supply so many people indicate that there are fewer unemployed than we thought ? Or alternatively, shed some light on the employability of people without jobs ?