Re: Please Sir …
"What's a RAN, Sir?"
And you call yourself a detective?
1503 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2011
If anything makes the case for Fibre this is probably it. I wonder if they spent more on the investigation and engineers than they would have putting fibre in. I do think it's unfair to blame the TVs owner for what is essentially an invisible problem. It'd have been nice to know that BT in the relief they didn't have to spend any more trying to fix the problem, had just bought them a new TV rather than them feeling mortified and embarrassed (according to the BBC article).
Well although you have put the joke icon, in a sense you're right. There's a lot on the Web now that is just commercial crap. When I started using the Web in the 90's there was lots going on that captured the Internet and the people who used it in personal Web pages (even Geocities!). You don't get that really anymore, Facebook and MySpace etc killed off the personal Web page and no-one bothered to put the effort in again. People cringe when they remember the animated GIFs and banners proclaiming 'this page is under construction' and several logos for the browsers your site works best in. I miss it. I remember when I made my first website on the AOL hometown Web space I had (oddly only AOL would work on my 486 loaded from floppies to get me barely online), and some random person from the US contacted me about some of the content I put on there. The Web was exciting back then, a bit wild but a community of like minded people nonetheless. What are they really archiving now that we will want to see in the future that isn't behind a paywall/walled garden or some such? From what I've seen of Wayback machine, sadly it missed a lot of what made up pages back then, images etc, through no fault of their own of course. The interesting bit of the Web, it's history, it's roots, that was the bit that was worth saving. We are going to lose a lot of our culture the day no one can or wants to pay the bills to keep the electrons flowing within this project.
"Not including 8K video capture/recording is a huge oversight."
Is it heck. Seriously where do these people get these ideas. I've got 8k on my S20. Do I use it? No. Am I ever likely to use it? No. I'll probably be too old to discern the benefit of it by the time playback equipment becomes properly main stream and I can afford it.
"There are immense economic costs caused by dishonest behaviour, such as tax evasion, music piracy or business scandals, so finding effective ways to reduce dishonest behaviour are of great relevance to policy makers."
So how will this realistically manifest itself? 'Oh its just a routine brain scan sir to see if you're telling us the truth' in any financial transactions or interaction with the law? This would be the very edge of my comfort levels. Perversely for those that find it hard to make themselves believed, then this kind of test could actually be a relief. I highly doubt it could be accurate enough to never be gamed or to give high levels of assurance. It would end up like current lie detector tests that cannot be relied on. If they can assure no less than 100% (peer reviewed and lots of testing) on accuracy then I might be open to police using the tech on potential criminals. Never going to happen though.
For those of you that were not aware. You can claim around £6 a week tax relief backdated to when you started working from home. Not a lot but may help someone.
https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/claim-tax-relief-expenses/who-claiming-for
https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2020/04/martin-lewis--working-from-home-due-to-coronavirus--claim-p6-wk-/
We are soon going to be in a position where the rural areas are going to be better served than cities and towns. Just because an area is well served by existing service providers, it doesn't mean those areas get good service or indeed much actual choice. I've had to swallow my pride and go with Virgin Media in my town to get more bandwidth. Everything else is Openreach. You'd think providers would want to keep things even across the board and have some easy pickings. It now seems to be going too far the other way focusing on sparsely inhabited population areas bringing benefits of newer technologies to fewer people. I wish companies like City Fibre would set up in my town and give the incumbents a run for their money.
I wonder if we will see a reversal of the "You chose to live there" argument when it comes to comments regarding broadband. Strange times.
Nightfox you've hit the nail square on the head. Now if only more people cared to understand the necessary simplicity of the rules there'd be less wailing and gnashing. People choose not to understand because it suits them. So many people in the world couldn't care less about doing what's right for everyone, so they carry on as normal and pretend the rules were confusing.
Anyone deploying this type of customer suppression is not doing it to help the customer. Very rarely have I found an automated system that actually helps with anything.
Eventually companies' call volumes will reduce and they will think they are on to a winner. Until they realise that most of their customers left for the sake of not being able to get a simple query resolved. It will take a while for that to kick in but it will happen, and by then it may be too late for them. Taking the human element out of customer service rarely works.
Let's be fair to this error message. Its not for a techie, it's for the customer who has come up to get a drink to tell them it can't serve them. Otherwise what else is meant to happen, it says nothing on screen and the customer gets frustrated because nothing is happening?
This isn't even a Windows error message, aside from the fact you can see Windows is present this really has nothing to do Windows. It's an error generated by the software running the vending. Not quite what I expect from the bork column to be honest. OS errors interjecting into customer facing applications is usually what's funny about these contributions.
Oh dear. Give it a couple of years and I fully expect them to be tendering again. I can guarantee this will not go well. I keep wondering where Oracle are getting the customers still and why their new customers have not done enough due diligence on this company.
Unfortunately, thanks to the way councils have to procure services by law, Oracle probably had a crack team working on fitting the procurement criteria to the letter and deep enough pockets to price everyone else out. I don't think there's anything a council can do to account for the fact that a company are known to be utterly shite on their application. They'd have more than likely had no choice but to go with them. I bet their IT department are absolutely dispairing.
Ah Mercury, I did extended work experience at their NOC at Small Heath in the mid 90's. Manager who was looking after me said he'd have offered me a job had I been old enough as I'd got a good grasp of PDH and SDH. Alas many years later and I wish I'd pursued that a bit more at the time as compared to the jobs I've done since it was a pretty cool place to work.
We will never be rid of people in our society who don't give a fuck. It's depressing. Most of us care, most of us try our hardest to do as we should and do right by others. Some of us don't want to and never will. It often seems they have better lives than we do because they just don't worry about the things we worry about.
But I could never, and will never, become one of them.
My inner geek said "Get the ultra" my sensible self said "No way am I spending that kind of money on a phone". I've got an S20 5G because I wanted an upgrade from the S9 and I'm glad to say it was thankfully worthwhile. I skipped the S10 as I thought it was their first foray into this form factor with an under screen fingerprint sensor and wasn't going to suffer any issues they've had (only to find they've used the same sensor!).
I don't understand why they've decided to alienate their customers who liked owning their flagship phones knowing they were getting better value for money than iFans by releasing premium varients of the same model. I won't fall for it and they can sod off if they ever think I will pay to be in their premium club. I don't imagine in the long run they will sell enough ultras to justify their decision.
Samsung succeed when they're not trying their hardest to ape Apple and chase their margins.
"Presumably it also does it for free?"
Yes, it is free.
"Frankly, sadly, changing a home router's DHCP server to hand out a different DNS server address is going to be well beyond what most parents are capable of."
If you've not got the technical smarts to put it in place yourself then you're not going to be 'censored' involuntarily are you. Censoring is a strong word and this is most certainly not what Cloudflare are doing.
"I suspect a significant chunk of parents have no idea how to go about restricting what their kids can access."
I suspect a significant chunk of parents don't care what their kids access and never will. There's plenty of advice and ways to filter the Internet for kids if you are so inclined to do so and they're not particularly technical. Companies have made it their business to provide specifically this for decades now. In this article we are talking about DNS filtering which can be done at the OS level if needs be which can be done following a step by step guide. I suspect most people will choose an easier software route if they're not capable.
They're not censoring the bloody Internet. People are *choosing* to use their DNS filtering service. There's a big difference. It can be removed just as easily as it was put in place. It's a filtering service, it filtered stuff. Others providers like openDNS are available and you can even choose to not block specific sites if you want to.
Bob, I appreciate the sentiment but I think the police have enough to be going on with at the moment. It's one thing the price gougers putting their wares on eBay but it's another that people are actually willingly buying them, noone is forcing them. This is eBays responsibility to Police and they will take the reputation hit if they don't.
Oh don't get me started on the waste of bandwidth and sheer annoyance of having to watch adverts before each and every stream I play on Amazon Prime. Can't even switch it off. At least Netflix have finally had the decency to allow you to switch off their shocking auto previews when scrolling through content. I suspect though that was more to do with competition coming along than listening to customers.
People are panic buying toilet roll apparently because if you're stuck inside isolating it's the last thing you'd want to run out of (other than food) and you don't want to be mixing with lots of potentially infected people in a supermarket to get more.