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* Posts by Chris Comley

8 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Apr 2008

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

Chris Comley
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Re: So, this is why I keep renting keyless cars

> rental com,pany gives me two keyfobs

Rented a car in the US which had two keys. Tied together by a length of steel cable.

I of course managed to lock them in the boot by failing to realise that (a) the boot can't be opened without the keys (b) having heavy armfuls of shopping. "This happens a lot" the hire care company said, charging me $50 to send a man over from their office with a third key.

The next day I did it again! Fortunatly this time the car roof was up (did I mention it was a ragtop) this meant I could get into the boot via the back seat and retrieve the keys.

That evening, I took a pair of stout wirecutters to the steel cable and thereafter, stored the spare key in the wife's handbag. Thus, of course, ensuring that I never again needed it as even *I* couldn't lock the keys in the boot a third time in two weeks.

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Chris Comley

Computers and cars

Sadly modern cars are full of computers but instead of going out and recruiting people with a few clues about programming computers, the car manufacturers seem by and large to have assigned the job to Dave from Paintwork in his spare time.

The utter lack of thought buggers belief. My 2015 Land Rover will not let me lock it if the bonnet isn't closed. If the bonnet IS closed, but the switch SAYS it isn't, you cannot lock it. If re-opening teh bonnet and giving it a good hard slam (Way less subtle an approach than one would expect for a modern £40k car) it will lock AND switch the switch. If it ever didn't, I would have to either sit in it whilst waiting for the JLR repair man to pitch up and fix it, take it *directly* to the dealers, or go home and sit in it, instead of going to a meeting. Now, if it had a "beep" to say "I know the bonnet isn't fully closed, you should check, but, i've locked myself ANYWAY so you can go to your meeting secure in the knowledge that bad lads can't get in to any part of the car except perhaps the bonnet" it would show a lot more "real world" thinking.

I have other examples, but, typing them all in would cause a loss of the will to live here, and possibly with the readers.

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Facebook disses Effin Irishwoman

Chris Comley

No, facebook has done no such thing. it isn't banning her quaint village name out of spite, but merely out of stupidity. It doesn't allow ANY city name to be put in that it doesn't recognise. So I can't put MY village name (ballinger) in, I can't even put in the name of our nearest towns coz it doesn't recognise those either. I've given up and put "London" - all my friends know where I live, and anyone from american thinks we all live in London anyway...

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HP chief bows to Jobsian cult

Chris Comley

Too soon?

I'm a little baffled that this is happening less than a month after the Touchpad launched. Were they expecting to out-perform Ipad sales in the first two weeks? World domination by tuesday lunchtime?

I bought a touchpad early. The hardware is brilliant. WebOs is pretty good. The supplied apps are not bad though I had assumed they would be amenable to feedback and tweaking. They clearly needed to get more apps on board, I assumed this would happen and sat back to wait...

This feels like they've put their shirt on a horse in the 2:30 at Epsom, then torn up the ticket in disgust before the horses are even out of the stalls...

The only good news is, I've had my touchpad such a short time I shall surely have no trouble returning it for a full refund.

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Get ready for the coming data centre crunch

Chris Comley

Out-of-town

At least one smaller ISP (Merula) has worked out that its better to build your OWN out-of-town data centre than to continue renting off <the usual suspects> Though in part this may have had it's roots in the same problem. You couldn't rent new cabinets with the full 16amps of power you were used to getting. And with modern computers, you can only run about five or six of them in 8 amps, the rest of your 42U rack becomes coat storage space.

I can see other ISPs will go the same way.

It's also good news for their *customers* - I hate having to go all the way to docklands when I need to visit in person with my hosted servers. Huntingdon is the same distance, says my GPS. Well, I know which is *quicker*. And which is easier to park outside.

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Chris Comley

Oh and...

Our new servers are all 8-core monsters with 16Gb ram.

The upside is, we now only need two, where we used to have eight to ten individual boxes.

The downside is HUGE power demands from the new boxes.

The good news is, we've found a supplier of quality rackmount servers which use HALF the power of the most common Dell and HP models!!!

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Holidaymaker gets £31k data roaming bill

Chris Comley

Wrong Target

It doesn't matter who bills whom for what.

The point is if I usually spend £50 a month, I would *expect* a warning call from my supplier when my bill goes over, say, £250, or £500, after all, they know my number! Credit card companies shut down your card after ONE "unusual" transaction. A simple ruling - if the company don't attempt to contact the user when the bill exceeds (say) 5x its normal spend, then the customer isn't liable. He may not realise the charge levels, the phone may have been stolen, or like so many lousy phone designs, it may have been "pocket-activated".

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The web rip-offs nobody cares about

Chris Comley

Paypal "credit"

Bottom line is, if you have to use Paypal

1) Don't pre-fund it, rather, make specific funds available for the actual transaction.

2) Fight off PayPal's efforts to get you to pay by bank transfer and insist on paying from a credit card.

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