Posts by Buzzword 1030 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2010
KCom (the main telecoms provider in Hull) has fewer than 200,000 customers, yet all their fees are clearly listed on their website. Ok, not that clearly - you have to dig out a PDF from the support pages - but still, they're all there. How hard can it be to put up a three-page document listing your fees?
It's ripe for a hipster comeback. Remember how clunky they were, and you could clip them to your belt? Nothing says "I'm a trend-setting hipster" more than having an impractical ugly box weighing down your trousers.
Seriously though, I do miss the screeching sound of fast-forward and rewind.
The idea is to take away all the hardware management problems, and many of the software management problems. But their pricing doesn't seem attractive: $300+/year for a secretary-spec PC, bearing in mind you still need to provide keyboard/video/mouse and a fast low-latency internet connection.
Ok, but can you get just phone + internet from Cox/Verizon/Charter? There's the option of satellite TV too (again I have no idea how good that is in the states; but it's very popular in the UK).
I've had Netflix for a couple of years now, and the amount of broadcast TV that I now watch is perhaps two hours a month. With fewer people watching broadcast TV in general, the whole argument about who owns the set top box seems like two balding men fighting over a comb.
Isn't vim only popular because it's installed by default? That's like saying Notepad is the most popular text editor on Windows (which it probably is, even if everyone hates it).
As far as I can tell, the current version of Notepad.exe dates back to Windows Vista (2006), when they fixed a Unicode bug.
Dr North, on the one hand you say we can just absorb the acquis; yet on the other hand, the UCC can't possibly form part of this acquis, for reasons you don't explain. Why is it so easy to absorb a large part of EU law, but not one particular 1300-page part which relates to freight transport?
Well done for forecasting the demise of the smartwatch. But whatever happened to Google Glass and its ilk? I rather liked the idea. Like the smartwatch, the glasses can't do anything that your smartphone doesn't already do; but they're more hands-free than the watch. There's scope for integration with AI (e.g. Google Now) - for example you could look at a bus stop and have the bus arrival times appear automatically. The glasses would have to be cheap - below £150 - but if they are just dumb screens connected to the smartphone's brain, the glasses shouldn't be particularly expensive.
Re-reading the article, it actually says "large freight consignments". They weren't even using vans, just shipping containers. Only about one in twenty containers is inspected, and if they see a bunch of mattresses (containing hidden tobacco) matching the manifest, they might not bother to investigate any further.
The crims didn't net £10.2m: that's the amount of duty they didn't pay. If you import a pack of fags for £2 and resell it for £4, you've made a profit of just £2 but evaded duty of £5. You can't just sell each pack at RRP (unless you operate a vast network of newsagents). You need to re-sell all the fags outside of the normal distribution networks, i.e. to black-market dealers, each of whom takes a significant cut.
Don't get me wrong, making a profit of £4m or so would still be nice - but these are just imagined numbers, I have no idea what the actual costs and profits are.
They're just importing cigarettes without paying duty on them. Tobacco duty is about £5/pack of 20, so a £10m fraud means 200,000 airport-size cartons of 200. A luton van can carry maybe 18,000 cartons, so you're talking about a dozen round trips to some country where tobacco is cheap (Bulgaria is popular). Not exactly major-league crime.
Even if your business is completely legal, there would be a trail of money going from the bad guys' accounts to your company account. So when they arrest one of your customers (which is inevitable), the police will batter down your door demanding the names of all your other customers. Suddenly you have an angry Mob on your hands.
This strikes me as a bad move. Samsung's lesser phones benefitted from a "halo effect" from their top-of-the-range phones, meaning they could charge slightly more than any of the Shenzen popup brands.
The halo works both ways: a reputation for building good workhorses for the masses means an enhanced reputation for building high-end phones, just as Lexus benefits from Toyota's excellent reliability ratings.
Longer-term it can also cause staffing problems. Without a pipeline of juniors who know how to make cheap phones, you've lost a valuable talent pool for your high-end devices.
I disagree about Alexa and other so-called AIs (Siri, Cortana, whatever the Google one is called this week). They're about as smart as a 1980s text-adventure game:
"Alexa, where did I leave my glasses?"
"Bilbo heads north and is eaten by a troll."
Maybe in a few years they'll be better. But today I can't just say "Alexa, when is the next train to Barnsley?"; instead I have to say "Alexa, Launch National Rail app, go to Live Departures, go to my home station, query next departure to Barnsley"; and then it has the cheek to ask "Did you mean Barnstaple?". I exaggerate, but not by much.
These things are worse than mere toys. At least toys are fun for five minutes before getting bored of them. AIs are frustrating for several hours, before you go back to turning the lights off with a flick of the switch.
It's psychology. Would I pay £1 per episode of The Grand Tour? Probably not. Would I pay £12 to watch all 12 episodes? Almost certainly not! But am I willing to pay £7.99 a month for an ill-defined package with various benefits of questionable value (Twitch Prime, seriously?), but which happens to include a very popular TV show? Yes, I am. I like the predictability of monthly bills; and I like the fact that everything is "free" once I've paid my entrance fee.
The downside is that Amazon's content-discovery mechanism keeps trying to push you towards paid content (rental/purchase). There's nothing worse than paying for a buffet at a fancy restaurant, then being told that oysters cost extra. Even if you didn't want oysters, you can't help but feel ripped off.
> If you are correct about AGW being a hoax, what happens? Cleaner air...
No, not cleaner air. In the great race to cut CO₂ emissions, we've been encouraged to switch from petrol to diesel-engined cars. Diesel engines produce far more local air pollution (particulate matter, NOₓ) than petrol engines. We actually have dirtier air thanks to the AGW movement.
> downloading native apps weighing in at 17MB and 75MB respectively might prove prohibitive, a web app of less than 1MB
You're doing your native app wrong. Consider the Sky News app on iOS: 87MB, all for an app whose content has to be downloaded from the internet anyway. I have no idea what's in that huge package, but I doubt it's sheer lines of code.
> I would not plan to use JSON to read any document that I hadn't created myself
But if you have a public-facing website, anyone can POST a JSON document at your endpoints and potentially crash your server. How bad that actually is depends on how robust the rest of the system is at handling crashes.
Worse would be a situation where a single JSON document gets parsed by two different engines. For example the JSON parses correctly in the bank's deposit-into-my-current-account function, but throws an exception in the corresponding deduct-from-my-savings-account function.
(Unlikely yes, but there are other less serious examples which could still cause trouble.)
> "undermine policies such as the National Living Wage, automatic enrolment, parental leave, sickness and holiday pay"
There's a simple solution to this. Shift the burden from the company to the state. Instead of the company taking 1% of your wage and putting it in a pension, the state takes 1% of your PAYE and puts it into a pension. Instead of the company paying you parental leave, the state takes 0.1% from everyone's PAYE and pays it to people on parental leave. Same for sick pay and holiday pay, if needed.
That massively reduces the paperwork burden on companies, and eliminates all concerns about unfairness.
Whether the state would actually get it right is another matter entirely.
On the contrary: do absolutely everything online, including stuff that you aren't really doing. For example email Auntie Joan (who doesn't really exist) about your holiday to Colombia (which never really happened).
Then embiggen it: write a script which scrapes random texts off the internet, and sends them (via email/Facebook/Twitter/whatever) to random accounts which you have set up for this purpose. The spooks will be drowning in so much noise that they'll never be able to figure out which messages are real.
Superscript digits 1, 2, and 3 were included in character sets Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1, whereas subscript digits are only available in Unicode. Historically, a lot of email and content-management systems stuck with the old character sets. Even today some fonts don't include the subscript digits. When in doubt, stick with what works. Readers understand that CO² = CO₂, even if it's semantically incorrect.
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