Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: It seems that ABC is well aware of the Streisand effect

"in a corner of his own painting"

Well played, sir.

Re: There is of course a new approach here

"I identify as the grumpy old luddite at the back."

It's pretty crowded here at the back but Mr Hilbert says there's always room for another.

"Every time I see one of those hotel ads starring Anna Kendrick (Hilton I think, might be wrong though) and she enthuses about being able to open her room with her phone I want to throw something at the TV."

There's this thing called Fast Forward.

Cold shoulder.

Re: The joys of automation...

"There are many things technology can do, but as is often the case, it is not whether it can be done, but why."

Just because you can do it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Re: Copper

The installed copper is worth much more than the copper. It's the installation that provided much of BT's value.

Re: The 1980s called but British Telecom still hadn't connected your phone yet

"I and many of my fellow English people are fine with Scottish independence because we are sick and tired of hearing about it."

The whole of the UK should have been given the vote but I suppose the result would have looked like being thrown out and that wouldn't have suited the wee man's ego.

Re: Free FULL FIBRE?

Whatever's promised the actual delivery - at best - would probably be free ADSL. IOW broadband.

Re: For a given value of "free"

"So you'd like to pay for your driving per-mile"

I'd like what I pay for in car tax on a flat fee basis and indirectly on a per-mile basis in fuel tax to be spent on roads. I have no doubt whatsoever that if any government introduced per-mile charges it would be additional to the other transport taxes.

Re: Only nationalise OpenReach

"Having an infrastructure provider as Network Rail in public hands where private operators compete on is a good thing. Whether you agree that Train Operating Companies should be private or public is another matter. I see very few people debate that Network Rail should be privatised too.

Why not replicate the set up for rail similar to that for broadband?"

Why not? Because having the rail infrastructure separate from the operators gives the former no incentive to do a good job and denies the latter the means to do so. It was an arrangement guaranteed to produce little improvement on BR days. That's why not.

Re: LOL's

"not like it was done."

Certainly not.

We had companies paying to run shortish term franchises over infrastructure somebody else owned and ran. And I never did find out who owned and ran the station whose employee was still trying to find my pre-booked ticket and still had to sell me a car park ticket whilst the train was pulling into the station. I arrived by car about 15 minutes later than if I'd taken the train and would have been a good deal earlier than that if I hadn't bothered with the train at all.

Re: Infrastrucutre

Hmm. I wonder how old the text books and/or their authors were. By the late '80s the difference between the black telephone rationing company and the privatised BT were becoming obvious. Either the books date from the '70s or were written by authors too young to have been GPO subscribers back then.

Re: The bigger picture

But obviously the faster the better.

That's similar to the view Cameron seems to have adopted when promising a referendum.

"The few quid i spent joining Labour to vote for Corbyn to keep them out of power seems to have been a great move."

Except that the Conservatives then decided to join in the batshit insanity competition.

It would facilitate that. The further apart that OpenReach is from whoever you deal with the less the ability of that whoever to be forewarned and to pass on the warning.

It's bad enough already. One afternoon some months ago phone and broadband kept going down. I tried ringing BT to ask if they knew there was any work going on in the area. No there wasn't. They could arrange a call-out but it would coast £80 if there was nothing wrong. Rather than do that I went down to the village where the cabinets are. Two manholes with the covers off, each occupied by a guy sorting out connections which they told me were no in great condition. Essential work, the only thing wrong was lack of communication (yes, the irony) back to customer disservice and hence to the customer. If things are to be broken up there needs to be a real effort on communicating this sort of thing all the way to the customer.

Re: Marx would be proud

"Also that asset will be matched to a hopefully profitable company"

Hope is about as close to profitable as a nationalised industry would get. And a faint hope at that.

ECHR is not an EU court, that's the ECJ. I don't think that any of our politicians like the idea of any external authority that keeps them on the straight and narrow - which is an excellent argument for the ECHR, the EU, the ECJ and anything else like that.

Re: "Labor is pro-remain, right?"

"ou do realise that the people have been waiting 3 years for their will to be respected?"

Which will was that? The will of the more or less half that wanted to leave or that of the more or less half who didn't?

The impasse of the last few years has been the consequence of the fact that you need a decisive majority for a change that fundamental, say something like 2:1. Apart from the gung-ho ERG types I suspect most of the rest of the MPs are looking over their shoulders at the electoral consequences of a disrupted economy.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

"privatisation was a political decision"

The political aspect came in when the privatised BT was not allowed to move into cable. That it, not until the supposedly more commercial businesses had shown their commercialism in the extent to which they were going to limit their efforts to cherry picked areas. The BT was brought in late and more or less simultaneously berated for not having the universal fibre network it had been forbidden to build.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

"There are some nationalised industries that do well and I can't imagine the private sector doing a better job."

The reason BT was privatised was because as a nationalised concern it couldn't get the finance to do even a poor job.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

"the plan is to provide FTTP for every home"

The headline word is "broadband". Even if anything else is babbled you'd probably find that ADSL counts as broad band and if you wait in the queue you can be connected up in a couple of years time and use it 3 days a week.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

"barely understand"

I think you're overestimating them.

I live in a rural area. The other day someone from OpenReach came to the door surveying for FTTP. I pointed out where the existing, buried, phone line comes into the premises along the longest diagonal - in addition to the original retaining wall it runs under a hedge, some fruit tree roots, the greenhouse, the concrete drive and the concrete laid paving stones before coming through the 2' wide concrete foundations. As I'd downloaded both 32 and 64 bit Devuan DVD imagess via the FTTC connection just before he arrived I felt able to resist his offer of overhead FTTP and whatever extra costs it would have meant.

When your "slower" is quite fast enough for purpose I'm not going to throw away good money on something that produces no effective improvement.

Re: The big red button

A client had a SCO box on a UPS with a serial link to start a shutdown. I can't remember the details but doing something which shouldn't have touched the UPS at all started the count down to power-off. The phenomenon was repeatable. I was never able to resolve it but it seemed as if something in the IP stack was also affecting the serial link.

Re: Dinosaurs of a digital age

One of the great myths of finance is that growth should be expected to go on for ever. It doesn't. Every new market looks as if it's taking off exponentially. It isn't. It's sigmoidal. If you're dealing with something consumable it'll flatten out at a fixed level of consumption. If you're dealing with something durable it flattens out at a given level of installed base; sales are the first differential of the installed base.

Expect the market to saturate. For consumables it's at a highish level which is why HP is keen on making the most out of ink and really in trouble if it can't make the most of the market. For durables it's basically replacement plus what can be squeezed out of the market with "upgrades" and "enhancements". That doesn't mean they're dinosaurs, it just means that the market's matured, just like you should have expected.

Re: The man is certainly financially competent

I do feel sorry for their staff.

"even HMRC"?

Make that "especially HMRC".

Re: willing to pay them enough

Probably a bit more subtle than that in some cases. The magic number isn't salaries it's "head count". If a business can tell the stock market they're reducing head count by getting rid of X,000 staff the wise heads in the stock market nod approvingly, stock price goes up and so does the value of manglements' stock options. Of course the work still has to be done so the redundant staff have to be replaced.

In other circumstances things are closer to reality. Work load isn't constant. To some extent a manager can smooth that out by deferring some work at busy periods but not entirely, especially if an important project comes along when everybody's fully committed. There's also the factor that staff availability isn't constant; people go on holiday [mp]aternity leave, get sick, retire, even die. Nobody's going to be able to staff at such a level that even minimum staff availability leaves enough bums on seats to cover peak demand. The flexibility of contract staff evens things out.

There's also a few cases where someone only needs particular expertise for very short periods at widely spaced intervals: I had one client where it was a matter of visiting for a day every few months - and occasionally dialling in to sort them out when they had an urgent mess.

Re: Dangers of moving from outside to inside IR35

"Seems pretty dumb."

We're talking about management of large businesses here so are you surprised?

The contractors are being taken on by people working at the sharp end. The decision is made by people .... let's say not so sharp.

What's likely to happen is that either by April the word will have got back that those contractors are going to have to be kept on or, if internal communications are slower, sometime after April the word will get back that they're going to have to be got back.

As the article says clients are going to have to work out how to ensure the conditions are kept clearly outside IR35, something they should have been doing all along.

Re: No fact checking?

That would be fine if only people with critical thinking skills were allowed to vote.

Re: It's all about the money

"The curation by itself cannot be enough to invalidate 203a-type protections"

Why not? If the platform creates a problem then they should take responsibility for what''s on it. Limit the size of the platform to what they can curate properly. They can't make huge amounts of money from it if that's the case? Tough, there's no law that says they should be able to make that money and have society deal with the costs.

Making a knowledge of civics a requirement for aspirants to office wouldn't be a bad idea either.

"AFAIK, the newspaper is still responsible for what it publish."

In the UK - I don't know about anywhere else - the printer, i.e. the executive in day-to-day charge of actually putting ink on paper has personal responsibility or so I was told by someone who'd actually held that position.

"You can't obviously sue a newspaper if it is reporting what someone else has said, and they have evidences he/she said it."

They need to be able to attribute the quote and if they do it becomes possible to sue the originator. The big difference between print media and the web is the speed with which the lie can br propagated by re-posting. That's something new. If anything it should put a greater responsibility on the likes of Facebook and, frankly, if they should only be operating at the scale at which they can contrive to meet it.

Re: The law of Unintended Consequences applies....

"labeling the case "vexatious", which if done repeatedly means that you can get barred from using the legal system in the UK without permission."

AFAIK it's not the case that's declared vexatious, it's a litigant who brings too many of those sorts of case and then, as you say, a vexatious litigant has to go succeed at some extra steps to be allowed to bring another case.

This week's straw man prize

"Remember Facebook doesn't have to check the content of each post, it just has to prove that it followed the rules in Law3.1.4.159.2654 and it's competitors didn't"

You decide what form the regulation will take and then explain how it won't work as intended.

Re: The law of Unintended Consequences applies....

"The solutions to that are different and platform-dependent, what works for a call or email platform won't work for Facebook for instance."

It depends what you mean by "won't work". If it means Facebook wouldn't work any longer I don't see that as a problem.