Posts by Graham 25
82 posts • joined Friday 19th June 2009 19:00 GMT
Wouldn't it be simpler ?
To just have BT and other UK carriers, block any calls coming from overseas which do not have full CLI attached so at least the recipient knows its a call from overseas and treat it accordingly.
That way, the majority of calls from India for example, can be immediately spotted by the recipient and safely ignored. If the caller then buys a block of UK numbers to use, they pay out up front and then lose them if they spam thereby costing them a small fortune.
My current bane is from the 0843 410 XXXX lot who are working each of those 9,999 CLI's to make automated calls.
This is how it works ..
You go online and go to a foreign hosted website.
You order stuff and you pay with a credit card whose systems are hosted overseas.
The stuff you order is made overseas and is stored overseas.
Your order is sent from overseas to a marshalling store as part of a bulk consignment.
The stuff is delivered to your home by a local carrier or Royal Mail.
You are not nor ever have been, dealing with a UK company. If the laws were changed, they could move their warehouse to mainland Europe and post your stuff to you - it would cost more and you'd have to wait longer. And a lot of folks would lose their jobs.
Thats the reality and there is no way around it.
Too many outraged Muppets with low IQ's
You buy from a website hosted in a foreign country, owned by a foreign company, and you pay on a credit card whose offices are overseas, on a clearing system also overseas. The goods are made in a foreign country, and are shipped to the UK by a foreign courier, until they arrive in the UK, when the Royal Mail or equivalent, delivers them. They might stay in a storage unit in the UK for a couple of days before delivery and the staff are paid in the UK, pay UK taxes, the warehouse owner pays taxes, and the company pays NI.
So no, Amazon is not a UK company and doesn't pay much in the way of taxes. If they wanted to be awkward, they could pull out of the UK, close down the distributions centre, and move it to Calais, and post the goods from there, and there still won't be aUK company. there will alos be 10,000? less employees in the UK paying taxes, several more empty factory units, a whole lot less NI payments but at least no "UK companies' are avoiding anything.
Karma.
Re: "Four buttons good, one button bad" ?
"Honestly, think about what you've just said there. You're advocating allowing people to die because they don't run fucking Android? Good man."
Its almost as daft as expecting to survive a scenario where they actually need to use a nationwide broadcast facility. If the event is that bad, you may well be better off not knowing the meteorite is coming and the type of handset is completely irrelevant. Besides which, even if your mobile doesn;t get the message, all the other folks around you will get it on theirs.
No, not exactly
"Google has piled money into its mapping software for years, having recognized that for many smartphone users (particularly those who drive), mapping is a very important application".
No.
The majority of folks use the route planner on a computer, not on an iPhone. the iPhone options available are more expensive than a standalone unit so people who drive and have an iPhone are actually likely to be a vanishingly small number of iPhone users.
So many cars have satnav as standard so the utility of a mapping and route following programme is marginal at best.
Meh ...
Yeah, its far from good. It'll get better though eventually. Its not as if Google maps was perfect first time around is it ?
If you want informed debate, don;t involve the great British public.
Do we really want laws set by people who avidly watch X factor, Katie Price and One Direction ?
Anyone got a decent table which clarifies this ?
Seems ideal for a diagram with frequencies on one axis, and operators on another with phone capability mapped out on the area. I'm just confused ....
Posted in iPhone 5 adaptors goldrush begins
Re: Not for me
Not touching Apple because they don;t use USB ?
The phone charges off a USB port.
The phone charges off a USB plug.
You only need one charger - one with a USB port in it for £3 and you;re sorted.,
All the difference is, is a small cable costing 50p which you aready get with every phone.
And thats the best reason you can come up with ?
If you don't want to buy then fair enough but using that as an "excuse" is pretty pathetic.
Re: But who *will* bid for HMG's barely spec'd super-mega projects with 4 yr supplier selection?
The issue with breaking a large project down into smaller contracts is someone has to be responsible for making sure all the bits work when connected back up - something the government is utterly useless at doing as it has neither the skills or the intellect to do.
People frequently forget that most if not all of these 'blacklisted' companies have hundreds or thousands of satisfied, content clients plus the UK government. The problem is the Uk government, its contract structures, its failures to adhere to its side of the contract in almost all cases. Without HMG contracts, these companies would be smaller but do just fine.
Blacklisting wouldn't help in the slightest as eventually everyone gets blacklisted.
Re: Ever heard of a hole? And things that go bump in the night
Yeah, burying delicate electronics six feet under the ground isn;t going to cause any heating problems is it?
And we never have any rain in the Uk so its not as if they would flood either or get filled with dirt ?
Dumb suggestion.
Do we sue roadbuilders ?
If people break the law on the road, are the road builders responsible for policing the road ? No. Those whose laws are broken (the government) does the collection of evidence and hands it to the courts to consider/prosecute.
The same should apply to the interwebs pipes - those who allege someone is breaching their copyright should collect the evidence before asking the authorities to prosecute, not ask the ISP to do their job for them.
TFl staff don't process any transactions on most Oyster cards - you top up at a machine using a CC/DD or do it online. Instead of one CC transaction (charges apply) and them multiple Oystercards (no charges) we would have multiple CC charges. Try getting a CC transaction authorised in M&S on a busy saturday afternoon in Oxford Street and it takes seconds as a minimum, with maybe 20 or 30 tills going in the shop at a time. Then try it with Waterloo Station gates at rush hour and you have something like 20 people a second trying to get through all the gates. It simply does not stack up.
There are absolutely no upsides to given TFL access to peoples CC's at ticket points.
Don''t try and fix what isn't broken.
Why bother ?
Just don't install the new FTTC systems at all and have a nice set of the objection letters to hand, and every time someone tries to order a new, faster line, send them a copy of the objection and ask the requester to sort a few of these folks out.
No reason why an operator should increase its cost base because the locals 'do not like the look of something'.
Next thing the locals will object to will be cars older than 12 months old or anything that doesn't require a second mortgage to insure.
maybe they could allow O2 users .....
to access the site to replace the removal of access to "The Cloud" and for the parlous state of the Openzone access spots there days.
I call Openzone 'CloseZone' these days as the vast majority of their hotspots clutter up your wifi choices, and are either not actually connected to the internet, or are chargeable, so one has to set devices to forget Openzone.
BT Openzone is also less than worthless
I have given up with O2 wifi offering on my phone these days - the Openzone hotspots are so polluted by a massive ratio of non-inclusive Openzone hotspots that its practically impossible to find one that you get as part of your inclusive bundle, and with them having the correct SSID, you find you're connected but effectively 'off the air' until you turn wifi off.
As soon as my contract with O2 is up, I am off to someone who actually provides a workable wifi bundle.
BT 'ClosedZone' more like
Spot on - with so many businesses using O2 broadband but not allowing people to use the Openzone 'free' function (as is their right) its a royal PITA when your phone is always having to connect to what it thunks is an available Openzone connction when 9/10 times in London its not open..
I would rather O2 took away Openzone and lef the Cloud alone.
Openzone should have used different network names for the public PAYG variety and the O2 'its in the bundle' sort. But that would be too simple I guess.
Posted in Adobe adds Flash sandboxing to Firefox
Good timing
Shutting the door after the horse has bolted and died of old age ....... some people never know when they have lost !
Door left open ....
Nurse, Nurse, someone has left the door open at the asylum again and they have found their way to a computer and the comments page.
Someone get him/her a nice drink of milk and a cookie please and get them back into bed.
and you you are all nutters.
If it ain't broke ....
........ why try to fix it ?
There is zero need to do away with the Oyster card - its cheap, it works, its safe and all the system needs is a few tweaks. I can top up with cash and TFL have no bank details of mine to lose, be stolen or leak. There's no way anyone at TFL is getting me to use a contactless bank card on one of their machines - its difficult enough with banks protecting their ATM's from skimmers so somehow I doubt TFL are going to have the money, inclination or skill to protect their machines as well. Some rather clever Eastern European gang will soon have figured out a way to get money out of folks cards and as TFL cannot make large predictable boxes move on fixed tracks with any predictability, I somehow doubt they will have a snowballs chance in h*ll of protecting folks bank cards.
I'll be one of the 'disadvantaged' still using Oyster as longa s it continues to exist.
Strike 2 and still out
The backbone of the London Underground communications infrastructure was a project called CONNECT. It was let in about 1996 to be finished in 2003 and is still incomplete. Ir was to cover both the extended radio network required by the 1987 Kind Cross Recommendation and the need for a digital backbone to carry all its communications services until 2020-ish. It was another PFI which was subject to the usual massive changes in specification, and delays brought about by the inability to allow the contractors access to the sites to undertake work.
Note that the TETRA infrastructure system in the Underground is still incomplete on two major line (Northern and Central I believe), and does not support the police, fire and emergency services ubiquitously as envisaged.
No National Audit Office report has been carried out, as to why nearly 10 years after its original completion date, it still is not. The person who signed the contract at London Underground is not a Peer of the realm.
Personally I wouldn't waste my time wit them anymore - if they want to buy kit, fair enough but the minute they get into design, we are back to a customised design which ignores the already working systems elsewhere in the word. Thats one way to keep TfL staff in a job !
You're missing the point ....
Apple can't have invented *everything*True but they don't claim that - just that the others have slavishly copied Apples work ?
"I foresee the day when the Far East decides the US just isn't worth the effort. " It will never happen - the Far East are fantastic imitators and copiers, but don't generate a fraction of the ideas of the west. Thats why there are no Chinese products out there that the west craves. All they do is make our stuff. Everything is imitation.
When was the last time that far east companies came up with anything that wasn't a copy of something created in the West ? Sony Walkman I think, but even thats pushing it as it was just a smaller copy of something that already existed.
How about they finish 3G coverage first ?
Given the huge swathes of the UK with large populations which still do not have decent coverage, they they should not be granted 4G until they have finished 3G infill.For example, one major commuter line into London, has large stretches of neither 3G nor 2.5G coverage and no, its not in a cutting. The whole of the Isle of Wight is no-go for O2 despite their alleged 100% coverage. The list is endless before one even start talking about motorway network.
Posted in Apple outs iPhone micro USB adaptor
Nail on the head ...
Future phones will ship with the adapter and no charger and no cable, which will become an extra which you can buy if you need it.
So many people have the Apple cables as well that those don't need to be replaced with every iDevice bought. There are so many iPhones out there in total that the percentage of people effectively buying a replacement must be quite high and so not getting a new charger and not getting a new cable is ...... meh !
I still have my old Firewire cables off the iPod Mini .....
Complete drivel ....
The whole point is that one company spent billions developing something and then another came along and copied a whole chunk of it, and you mistakenly think this is about choice. Its not, its about theft. I conclude from your initial statement that you are the sort of person who downloads music for free to avoid paying the originator.
There are plenty of alternative phones out there and Apple is restricting none of them. All it is doing is saying that if you want to design something then fair enough, but don't peel the label off my kit design and sell it as your own.
WTF has registering an iPad got to do with theft ? If I buy a car, it has a car key that I have to get from the manufacturer. thats not restricting my choice as there are alternative cars out there.
Buy Apple kit if you want, or not as you decide but stop moaning that Apple won't do business just to suit you.
If you want to buy Samsung, then buy Samsung but ffs stop moaning because you want to buy Apple with a Samsung label on because you mistakenly believe you have a right to tell Apple how to run their business just to suit you.
You sir, are the classic "entitlement kiddie" who thinks they have the right to decide how others operate. When you grow up, have a real job and find yourself being ripped off by someone copying you, then I will have a really good laugh however I somehow doubt you will ever originate anything but would instead try and copy someone elses design as its easier that having an original thought.
Yes, but .....
No one has yet managed to decommission fully any nuclear carrier so while you are right that its a cost concern, it is also environmental.
All the US obsolete ones lurk in Virginia, the Russians have dumped theirs on the shores somewhere and so the last thing anyone needs is more nuclear reactors around. Whereas a sub can run for six months plus on nuclear can stay submerged without supplies, the same isn't true of a carrier. It has to be resupplied, and so while they are at it, they can refuel.
Its all down to the individual
I have been working at home now for two years and find I am a lot more productive overall. Yes I have quiet days (like today, train in an hour so not much worth doing before then) whereas other days its 0800 to 2000 with stops for lunch and dinner with the better half acting as tea lady and cook.
Saturday and Sunday have become like old style work days - we never shop on those days as the 9-5 bunch are clogging up the shops so we either do the accounts, garden or anything else that keeps us at home. No point going out when everyone else is blocking the roads.
I am lucky to have a full office at home, so its easier to hide away and as I hate most crap on the TV, daytime TV is no attraction at all.
There is no right and wrong, just people making choices.
Sorry to rain on your parafe
The taxpayer does pick up the bill.
The Fujitsu contact is negotiated with the HMRC periodically, on a non-competitive basis and all Fujitsu has to show is that is cost base has gone up, and the HMRC pays more. The shareholders get the same non-competitive rate of return and are unaffected.
The public pays because we have no say and cannot use a cheaper alternative service.
This is not really a private sector business unit, but a public sector one that got TUPE'd over but which is still given a single stream of business with no competition, and able to choose what price it charge.
Hmm...
"And it's stopping them benefiting from new collaborative technologies, says ClearSwift Research."
For 90% of ther working population ....... b***ocks. people have been goofing off for years and Facebook just allows them to do it while presenting the semblance of working.
Simple solution we had at work - single machine in the middle of the room, with unrestricted internet access, but logins required to use it to 'benefit from new collaborative techniques'. Oh, and no access to shared folders, files etc so anything that you want to upload has to go on a flash drive so no excuses for accidental disclosure. Usage levels were monitored but not what was actually done. needless to say the machine had a direct link and no access to the rest of the network.
Worked a treat.
Well duh ....
Perhaps Cupertino isn't actually on the 20th yet ?
Apple always release on Apple time, not Greenwich.
Darn.....
Dropbox is great, as long as you only want one Dropbox accessible (or two at a push) as folders, at a time. I work with several clients simultaneously and it was great to access each others iDisk storage areas to keep stuff completely separate
How do I have several folders on my desktop with access to other clients individual 'Dropbox' style storage areas, without iDisk ?
iWeb is bu**ger - as has been said, quick and easy to use for us who have better things to do than code, so any bright sparks know of an equivalent as time is not being marked.
Agreed but there is more.
They need Exchange access without having to have a BES.
I would have changed to a BB from my iPhone to get at the better battery life, but it means paying more for access to my Exchange server. No good reason for it at all. iPhone does it directly, Android does it .... BB doesn't.
I want and need access to all my online email and if everyone else provides this then the BB feature of limiting access or paying more is bizarre.
And no, I don;t want to set up my own BES - for small companies a hosted exchange server does all that is needed and we demographic won't pay more for the convenient of RIM.
Posted in Gates defends Ballmer's Skype gamble
Now the NSA will be listening in .....
So once Skype is MS owned and US controlled, all the security goes out the window as the US government forces MS to hand over the security keys so it can listen in on calls?
Maybe thats the logic behind the purchase - US State Department tells MS to buy it in return for going easy on it in other areas ?
Bang goes any chance of a private conversation without the US listening in.
Posted in Is iPhone data collection legal?
Who says data is being collected ?
Its on your phone, in your possession, and on your computer.
Anyone got any evidence at all that a third party has collected it ?
Thought not.
Just because you have a brain and a mouth doesn't mean you only have to use one at a time.
Posted in Is iPhone data collection legal?
Yes you did
It was in the T&C's of the Line Agreement - there;s a box to tick for Ex-Directory which you must not have ticked.
Too many halfwits here
If the data is unreliable, as seems to be the case, forget the use of the data for legal purposes. Any half decent lawyer would be able to show from any other log that there was no guarantee 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that the data was accurate, and so none of it could be relied upon.
You simply cannot say someone was in Las Vegas using such a log, unless you can show that the person was in every other location in the log and there were no errors.
So put the 'oooo I might go to jail' argument aside - its puerile.
Why not just self-destruct the botnet ?
Genuine question - legalities aside.
If its possible to get control of the botnet, then I would have thought it was possible to instruct the compromised machines of the botnet to reformat the c drive or equivalent and thereby force the users to reload their system, or at least do something which removes the machine infection permanently ?
If a machine is compromised, why not 'inform' the users by changing the desktop image that they have been hijacked by blah blah blah and to visit the DoJ website page blah blah for more information which basically says we are going to reformat your hard disc as your machine is compromised and spamming ?
then it happens.
Annoying to say the least if its your machine, but possibly in the greater good is several million sources of spam are taken out ?
Not much of a story really is it ?
More trains = more cost = higher fares so people won't like that.
Most of the seats on the train are fine, and as has been said, its just the 3 seat bench thats a problem and thats only a problem for a few trains a day during rush hour when used at capacity.
I use the Portsmouth fast trains to an intermediate stop and out of rush hours its always two thirds empty. Even in rush hour, the person on the end has one 'cheek' half in the gangway, but so what ? Its not for hours and half the folks like me get off partway and people shuffle around.
If they MUST work on the train in rush hour, thats what First Class is for.
Or they and the rest of the passengers can lose some weight/width as 'normal' size people certainly can fit in as long as there is no expectations of being able to wave arms around etc.
Boring
Dear Everyone,
Buy what you want and stop trying to justify your purchase to everyone else.
We don't care.
Its each to their own.
Regards
Bored (stupid) of Tunbridge Wells
Old story, new spin
London Underground had an offer to do this in 1996 but balked at it due to half of the stations within the central 'bottle' being non-commercially viable. 'Huawei' bought the technology which was part of the original 1996 offer so its not entirely some Chinese bit of dodgy kit - its good old British dodgy kit !
The deep tube sections of the rail network do not have enough space to put the RF cable in the tunnel and not foul the passing trains so some lines at least are safe.
I'm not worried as people will soon learn they cannot talk easily with all the background noise and I predict the noise level will reduce as more people sit silently texting and emailing.
Times article ....
"The nine Nimrod aircraft cancelled at a cost of £4 billion were designed with the same critical safety fault blamed for the downing of an RAF Nimrod in 2006, with the loss of 14 lives"
anyone with any evidence prepared to confirm/deny ?
So then ?
This is not about companies which take advantage of people - it affects good companies just as much, possibly even worse.
When you employ someone in a small company and find they are a shirker and a layabout how do you keep your company alive for the dozen or so others to continue in employment ? You cannot as the shirkers take you to a tribunal, lie through their teeth, you spend a fortune defending the company and even when you win, you have lost a fortune. Suddenly you don;t have the money to keep the business going.
Everyone gets made redundant and nobody gets paid.
Thats what happens in small companies. The balance is too far in favour of the employee in my opinion. France is an extreme case, I will agree - thats why nobody recruits graduates much there anymore.
An inconvenient truth for all the liberals out there. I was an employer but like many others before and after me, will not employ anyone else again - too many freeloaders interested in doing as little as possible for as many rights as they can grab. Not a lickspittle at all , just someone who no longer wishes to subsidise the likes of you who believes that workers rights exceed the rights of the owners who create small companies which become the large employers of tomorrow.
If the workers don;t like it they can always invest their own money and start their own business and see how quickly their tune changes when they find the staff ripping them off.
Other countries don't make it work
The French system shows how things can become broken and that shows what happens when you protect workers fully at the expense of the employers. Most countries have far more harsh conditions and the worker just has to HTFU and find a job elsewhere. We are protecting our workforce against its own incompetence, laziness and greed and thereby destroying our competitiveness against other companies. The market will kill off bad employers/companies assuming the staff don't do it first.
Yes there will be employers to take the Michael, but equally there will always be shirkers and good for nothings who are looking for a free ride - balance is what is needed. Under Labour the balance resulted in a destroyed economy where companies would not hire die to the difficulty of runing an efficient business.
When we have near full employment, we can worry about the problems of the oppressed worker, as workers might actually be in short supply. The UK is not in that position. Companies are NOT going to employ people if a change in the market results in the company being bankrupt due to not being able to release staff to protect the majority, or if we have to spend tens of thousands defending frivolous claims - of which there are many.
Yes, workers should have protection, but not to the extent that their colleagues are put out of a job due to the company folding and not to the extent that the company is unwilling to employ due to the same problems in removing non-performing staff.
When you have s table job in a stable company, then that is the time to seek additional rights.
Looking for more for yourself when your company is on its knees and being crippled by alleged 'rights' is just plain stupid.
Not so much ....
10 years, £4 billion spent, one aircraft reached the Tarmac.
Given the others may never have made it, it sounds like £4billion an aircraft to me. There is no guarantee that any other aircraft would have ever made it into the skies, to reduce the per unit cost.
Dear Dave ...
If things were that bad, how well do you feel that the halfwits that have taken a decade to fail to get a working system off the ground, would be able to use all this data that it will allegedly will produce?
Methinks you assume that we will be worse off, but after 10 years of failure to deliver, the incompetents in charge have little track record of being able to deliver anything workable. Why should we believe that anything will ever fly or work ? Earlier versions never got off the ground.
If the MoD had stuck to the programme, they could have delivered it by now. Its not our fault that we do not have bottomless pockets, to continue to fund the ego of the RAF.
Buy Rivet Joint and have done with it and accept that any shortfall in capability lies squarely with the RAF and not with the taxpayer for being mean. Us taxpayers have been very generous for 10 years and now it time to take the broken toys, throw them away and close the nursery..
Yes we may be less secure, but its no worse than the same level of security and being billions out of pocket as BAE and the RAF continue to take the taxpayers for a ride.
Poor use of statistics ...
"Only five major incidents in 50 years flying is a safety record that very few aircraft can match."
Any aircraft that spends that much time on the ground, under repair or in maintenance, can easily match that IMO.
Every commercial aircraft by Boeing has millions of miles more of unaffected and safe service.
This 'superbly designed' aircraft, at its first engines one test, had o be delayed due to the cockpit being full of water due to unknown leakages.
The 'old girl' never entered modern battlespace and should have had the door slammed in its face for being late to the party, decades ago. I can recall in 1989 a bunch of incompetent project managers from the original MR aircraft looking for jobs - seems like there will be even more incompetents around this time as well.
Typical BBC wastage
Of course they gave it a makeover of sorts - thats what the BBC does.
Wasting money is what I mean.
TfL have done this for years
In the mid 90's when companies wanted to put fibre cables through the underground entirely at their own cost and even paying a wayleave to Tfl (LuL as it was at the time), refused permission unless they had full control of who and what was being communicated over the fibre.
TV stations they did not like were to be rejected, encrypted data between embassies was rejected as they wouldn't know what it was and just about everything was subject to their approval.
Barking mad control freaks the lot of them - with ideas well above their station.
FWIW
@L1feless "Now they are complying and the governments are getting angry?"
The government is unconcerned - its the dickhead plod who doesn't understand.
