Posts by David Roberts

Does look like a turd

I wouldn't want to meet whatever parted with it. Giant mutant star goats are scary at the best of times.

Windows Live Mail?

"in 2017 found Windows Live Mail had one per cent market share"

What has this to do with the Mail app in W10?

WLM has been abandonware for years now and difficult to get hold of. I haven't spent much time on trying it out on W10 (upgrade from W8.1) but it didn't seem happy.

Still running it under W7 and W8.1 because it reminds me of Outlook Express and I like the user interface.

Thunderbird is my emailer of choice on socially supported W10 systems for friends.

20$ for kiddie porn?

American Express?

That'll do nicely.

Generational thing. Passed me by.

By the time this came out I had been computing on mainframes for a long time so had no real idea that small computers were a thing.

Only really got into it when the kids were old enough to take an interest, and got an Atari STe which also did word processing and spreadsheets. Games for the kids, of course. Dot matrix printer that could do imitation hand writing instead of the usual fonts.

Fascinating how a decade of enthusiasms can pass you by if you are the wrong age.

Sparse file system?

Some parts are so sparse you can't even locate them!

Still trying to digest that the lower levels of the OS report an error but it just gets ignored. Still, nothing special about writing data these days, is there? Plenty lying around spare in those bucket thingies.

Alternative suggestion

AWS scan the bit buckets and mail the owners asking for positive confirmation that the bucket should be public.

Without a positive response the bucket is locked down until the owner confirms in writing that it should be public.

That should at least clear all the forgotten ones, and may even make some people think before they click on the prompt to open the whole thing up to the world.

Interesting story

However my initial take on it (and nothing so far seems to contradict it) is that old trusty was replaced with new shiny but IT was far too special and busy (or perhaps not even involved) to perform a proper customer handover.

Otherwise somebody would have done the "This is how you dock and undock, and you can use it stand alone like this." talk.

I assume some budget cutting strategy where you throw the kit at the punters and hope they will help each other to sort it out. Followed by "but surely everyone knows that" when the support calls come in.

Nobody should be given new kit without someone confirming that they are familiar with it and basic methods of operation.

My sympathy is with the poor, embarassed user.

Much of what was reported seems strange.

Running a test bed for viruses and anti-virus packages (presumably just firewalling the reporting channels) doesn't seem to fall into a major crime area. Nor does encryption technology (at the moment).

If it was clearly marketted as a service to develop viruses and conceal them then it makes it look dodgy, but apart from that you are close to making running your own development server with crypto capability illegal. Is it illegal to test if code triggers an anti-virus package? Or is this all based on intent?

It reads as though the headline is there to boost law and order's news profile and pretend they busted a mega criminal instead of someone playing a minor role.

The false claims for refunds seems one of the dodgiest bits.

Bitcoin is largely irrelevant apart from providing an eye catching figure. Which no longer applies.

Look! We caught a crim with half a million in Bitcoin (at last year's value). Doesn't even say the Bitcoin was illegally obtained.

That cover photo

Please tell me that it was photoshopped.

An employee for tax purposes

Last time I looked there was a wierd legal fiction that a tax finding did not confer any employment rights so the deemed employer got off scot free.

The poor sod of a deemed employee had to pay the same PAYE and NI as a real employee but got none of the benefits of sick leave, holiday or pension. The taxed income then went into the personal service company where it was all taxed again. Absolute bare faced robbery.

I doubt that it would have gone quite so easily if the BBC was fighting to avoid 7 years of holiday pay and pension contributions. No idea who copped for the employers NI on the deemed employment. Wouldn't be surprised if it was the deemed employee because HMRC must get the money regardless.

Picking up a few points

"If the clowns at Ofcom don;t address this soon, then people getting new Talktalk, Vodafone or Cityfibre connections will be permanently locked into single ISPs providing high speed broadband at whatever price they like. Customers of Virgin Media will be familiar with the "benefits" of this lock in, such as appalling customer service, ineffective technical support, a monopoly mindset, and rampant price increases. And once an area has one high speed broadband network, who would invest to duplicate that? Nobody in their right mind."

and

"One of the main reasons given by Openreach for not immediately running FTTP into every building in the country is the cost - they have a point, digging up roads, sending blokes up poles with reels of stuff all cost money. Billions."

So riddle me this. I have a VM fibre/coax service and have had for years. I've always found their customer service (at least for line faults) to be outstanding. Same for previous house half way across the country for 4 years. None of this crap about charging for an engineer's visit either. I think the service you get very much depends on your local office. My package is good for 200 Mb/sec but I'd have to agree to a Superhub 3 so I am staying on my original Superhub with a solid 160 Mb/sec and sometimes more. Currently looking at a free upgrade to our old Tivo which is getting a bit long in the tooth.

I was prompted to look for alternatives because the local telephone poles have recently sprouted (via cherry picker) reels of black something and a black block with loads of sockets on the top. The contractors said it was fibre but they didn't know when the tails would be pulled back to the exchange.

Online checking also shows that my location is supplied with FTTC, which implies that there is already ducting running fibre, although not that it has any spare capacity.

Trying to track down a ready date established that nobody apart from Openreach knows anything about this. One person said that if you had FTTC available it was very unlikely they would roll out FTTP as well. I have a query in with OR and they say that they will get back to me within 28 days.

Anyway, in my specific instance it looks as though fairly shortly I may have the choice of VM, FTTC and FTTP.

Which suggests that the quotes above may not apply to everywhere.

To my cynical mind it also suggests that OR may be rushing out some installs in quick and easy locations (very close to the exchange, fibre already run to the local cabinets) for a quick win in the numbers game so they look to be ahead of the competition.

Preview pane?

I suppose the average punter uses this without much thought, but why would you want to automatically open an email before checking it?

Roses are red, violets are blue

Fetch me a coughin, I've got the man flu.

Payload?

Roughly highest payload cheapest per mile.

Canals

Railways

Road transport

Air

You note, of course, that the slowest is the cheapest.

So the payload of a drone to go between distribution centres must match large lorries which do the job now. Or a number of drones combined must be both faster and cheaper than road transport. Meaning an order of magnitude cheaper than small to medium planes.

Nobody so far has really explained the cost benefits of flying drones over driving lorries. Lorry drivers aren't expensive.

Replacing local delivery drivers with drones would be a "brave decision".

The original lost me in the first few minutes.

When they revealed that the mission was to populate a new world with three men and one woman.

Completely the wrong way round; very much all your eggs in one basket. She arrived dead anyway.

Presumably so they could focus on the manly crew doing manly things as they were killed off to leave one alpha male as the main protagonist. With no adverse reactions to apes killing (or otherwise mistreating) fine examples of American womanhood.

Not a bad romp, though, and thoroughly enjoyable.