Posts by Dazed and Confused

Re: Money talks

> Actually, no it isn't.

Given 2 customers one of whom lives right by the street cabinet and one who lives at a distance from the same cabinet which one is going to get the faster connection and which one's line is going to cost more to install initially and then to maintain?

Your example of 2 users, one of an older fashioned ADSL line and one on an FTTC line are different, the ISP shouldn't be quoting speeds line upto 50Mb/s to customers on the normal ADSL line whereas they might do on a FTTC service. So the aren't comparable.

Re: Low tech

> Fortunately too, not only is Pu hard to obtain, it's hard to make it into an effective bomb.

See the "Oppenheimer" TV series for 1% of the difficulties involved.I'm sure they weren't allowed to show any of the other 99%. Interesting series though.

Re: The Lolberal Democrats and the Greens are quite strong on privacy.

History shows us that opposition parties are, but the day they get a riff of power they want all the power they can get.

Re: Lucky 7even.

Some of my PCs are still on 7, but it seems I'm not safe. The W10 machines in my office suffer from the well known "Thou Shalt Not Print" bug which means it denies being able to talk to any printer I chose to configure even though Windows is happy to ping them and all the web browsers installed are happy to open the printers home pages.

So I'd taken to breaking the embargo by moving files I needed to print onto my old laptop which I wasn't stupid enough to let W10 onto. Then I could safely print from there.

Well silly me.

Last week Microsoft offered me some updates for W7 and one of those has noticed that I was printing while banned by W10 and so has stopped me printing from W7 too now. I get a different error message "Print driver host for 32bit applications has stopped working" but I have the same problem. I can't f*&king well print out what I need to.

As to the creators update to W10, well I'm probably OK there since Microsoft are so totally inept that they are yet to make a version of last years update, 1607, work on my systems. Not that's stopped them trying constantly. So the chances of them being able to make the new update work I'd place somewhere below zero and digging fast.

Re: It's the 'Introductory' bit that's tricky

The Beeb's headline on for the story this morning was more accurate "Broadband prices penalise loyal customers".

Seems such a stupid business model, surely what you want is customers who hang around. "Churn" is not good for any business.Typically there is a start up cost of bringing a new customer online, we got a free router. The second year on a deal should be cheaper for the supplier but for the broadband line with the intro deal this year there will be no second year since it will move to another deal with another into.

> You want to go to Athens or Istanbul. Human drivers just make it up.

Not tired Athens, been to Istanbul lots of times, they are beginners when it comes to creative road use compared with Bangalore.

Re: Windows makes me scream too

> you have my sympathy, pity, and condolences.

Thank you for your understanding. I'm trying to find counselling to help me with my condition. But I've not found a cure. I've got an HP85 too, I find that helps.

Re: fortunately 3 do reasonable all you can eat data packages

> So when the Son's Plan comes up for renewal...

Actually it's only recently renewed. It's a better deal than he was on before and I tried to get them to give me that on my contact and my eldest's, no deal, they said I'd have to wait to see what was on offer when it was renewal time.

The contacts are already all SIM only, so no cash back options.

Re: Big Cable is why we DON'T have fiber to our homes

Have an upvote but

Holy crap, EVERY city should provide this! Cable companies are complicated, useless, middlemen in between me and the content. Just like record companies of old; why are they still here? I can fetch a song directly from a band, or from iTunes, again directly from a band. Gatekeepers charging for the sake of their gate-keeping. Smells like parasites to me.

Surely one of these also a parasitic middleman.

Re: "We need to promote women disproportionately, pay them equally or better..."

@Esme, I spent most of the 80s working in semiconductor research, there were lots of women scientist and engineers in the labs where I worked, perhaps not half but no shortage at all. Nor were there a shortage of them being promoted to being team leaders, managers and on upwards.

At the end of the 80s start of the 90s I worked for a large US IT company in technical support. There were no shortages of women engineers working there. Later I worked with the lab teams both in the UK and the US and again, no shortage of women.

In the last 20 years though I've seen the number of women working in support going down rather than up. In the SW development groups there seem to be more, perhaps still a little less than 20 years back, but not like in the support side.

I don't know why this is the case, why is it that women are now less inclined to enter the business than they once were.

All I know is that my wife who was a great Unix support engineer just ceased to be interested in the technology, then chose to leave to raise the family, something she said she had no wish to do when younger. I suspect that a number of her contemporaries made a similar choice. Ultimately it wasn't helped by fact that the flexible working that the company were happy to give just didn't fit with customers expectations which made life difficult.

Re: Aw Diddums...

> Stick to Win 10. It sounds just made for you.

Which doesn't work* on any platform in my (all be it limited) experience.

* for an acceptable value of work.

Re: Hmmm

It's not the time to reboot that's the issue its the time to restart all your apps and get back to where you were that takes time.

Re: How much ped could a pedant dant if a pedant could dant ped?*

> I should probably just chalk it up to a nervous guy that doesn't have to talk to the press much.

Given current incumbent's view of the press the nervous guys will probably just be allowed to turn up to these conferences in his Reaper soon.

Re: What? you mean

@cbars

Firstly it wasn't me that downvoted Cynic, any cynic is OK by me.

As to whether the article is clear, I clearly didn't feel it so, hence the original question about whether it was the IP address of the PC or whether it was the IP address of the router. I'd read the article as saying that the Windows media shit was exposing the IP address of the PC, as presumably (my guess from the article) that was inside any packets. OK, perhaps I'm in the tin foil hat brigade but when I resort to TOR I make sure there are no other routes off the PC.

> I also find it odd that you don't think someone knowing your name, address and phone number would be a problem

What I was saying was the exact opposite of this. I'd said that if, like me you run fully routed addresses which can be looked up in whois then you're wide open. But if it is the NAT'd address which is exposed then there isn't much harm and that everyone should do this to avoid casual identification.

Lots of ISPs also NAT the routers IP address and these are not persistent. So to the casual observer the only thing which would be visible would be which ISP you're using.

What I'd not considered was state sponsored snooping where of course the ISP is likely to reveal your ID to the hacker. Or perhaps where the hacker is the ISP.

My other mistake was not to realise that people using TOR would be allowing non-TOR traffic at the same time.

Thanks for the explanation and please accept 1 up vote for your trouble.

Re: binding

No, it's like a license agreement. You agree you owe them everything and they agree they owe f*&k all. The abitrator didn't understand this basic tenant of Oracle law.

RHEL/CentOS 6

I think I loath and despise 7 more and more with each and every passing day.

Re: let's now guess which screen my window is going to open on next

Actaully that's pretty much my experience of W10 with dual screens, or actually of 1 of my dual screen W10 systems, the other one isn't doing it.

The laptop I'm writing this on has a micky mouse 1920x1080 ulr (ultra low res) screen and then there's a 2560x1440 32" monitor I mostly use. Everytime I open MS Edge it opens on the laptop screen regardless of where it ran last time whereas FF will open of the screen it last used. If I open the dialog for text colour in TB it opens on the crack between the two screens. Some applications will move to the laptop screen when the screen saver blanks the displays... others don't.

There are other apps that display weird behaviour on this PC with dual screens.

Re: the local government websites are actually pornographic

Now that all political announcements are made via Twatter and Twatter is so called because there are more pictures of twats on it than even the most addicted of porn surfers can shake their sticks at, it should be easy to block all politicians.

Re: Wayland. Fedora 25

> Remote X sessions are an absolute requirement.

Remote X has a major issue apart from the security side of things which is handled by an SSH tunnel. A lot of X applications are latency sensitive, so while they work well over a LAN they are often a pain over a WAN. If you're sitting in Blighty and looking after a stack of servers in the US then using X directly can be a pain. Remotely displaying with VNC leads to much more responsive displays (and you can still tunnel it through SSH).

I've not yet played with Wayland, I'll have to have a play, been banging around with X11 for 30 years come later this year and of course X10 before that.

Re: 100% certain

> The full extent of Chinese subsidy of Apple assembly in China is now known

Hmmm, if China doesn't want to build them, and Samsung don't want supply critical parts might we have seen peak i-Thingy?

(oh no, commenting about Apple, bang goes my up/down ratio :-)

Re: Oops

> a not unattractive female teacher

As a teenager I was a very keen photographer. One lesson our teacher hadn't shown up and we had a relief teacher who just let us sit there and read. So I was reading through an article in Amateur Photographer, when suddenly the teacher came straight up to me and confiscated the magazine.

"You can have that back after school"

I was a little bemused, but found something else to occupy my time. After school I went to the staffroom to fetch my magazine back. Later that evening I think I realised why it had been taken away by this particular teacher. There was a lovely series of photos of her topless posing with some butterflies. I'd never have noticed it was her if she'd not brought it to my attention.

Re: less latency and therefore less failover

The difference in latency of using a direct link and leased fibre via an ISP is likely to be tiny. A leased fibre is giving you what? a 2ms latency via an ISP, at least that's what I used to see on a line from BT to a data centre in the middle of nowhere going to some other Internet sites over 10 years ago. Skype runs happily over comparatively large latencies or we wouldn't all use it. I'm not an expert on the human perception in communication, but I'd be surprised if you can spot a 100ms delay. delays of over 200ms are human recognisable but don't seem to affect how easily we can talk to people in Oz, delays of a whole second mess you up and you have to get used to not interrupting each other.

So I stand by my comment that it's generally wrong to associate latency to availability.

And no I didn't miss the story about MS having patched their patch, but if you can't get on the network you can't load the patch for the patch.

Re: Alternatives to skype

The problem with not using Skype is that everyone you want to talk to does use Skype.

If the grandkids say, Grandma why don't you use Skype, then you get your ears bent because the PC you set up for her doesn't use Skype.

It's also the case that abominations like flash on websites (which of course should be outlawed) exist and are easier to deal with in Windows.

If I knew my mother would only do things which worked on Linux I'd have setup her PC using Linux. My bother and I both work in Linux and would find it much easier. But she also gets very useful help from grand kids, and they don't work with Linux.

Windows is what most people use because it is what most people use.

I wish it wasn't, I wish there was something much simpler that just worked.

Facetime is not the answer unless all the people you talk to are also Apple users. As my mother knew 70 or more years ago, when your house is the only one in the village with a telephone you can't use it to talk to anyone else in the village.

Re: loss of business

Government's should do this, and I'm sure they can take on MS.

EU seems keen on doing this sort of thing.

Sadly they don't seem keen on wiping the whole EULA thing off the face of the planet. I really wish they would as no one else it likely to manage. Of course if the judge's PC were to bork part way through the trial it might help. If they felt the pain the rest of us do they might well reach of the black cap.