Posts by Christopher W
61 posts • joined Thursday 9th July 2009 19:13 GMT
Re: Well aimed
Shame Street View's recent visit to Manchester was slightly more prudish: http://imgur.com/a/s2vhw/all
Re: New legislation required - or Darwinism in action?
Awesome idea. I had a similar idea - any ad for a service offering should have a traffic light-style mandatory display, in a defined legible font and size, which clearly lays out total monthly commitment, total annual cost and minimum contract period, to be shown on screen (be it on TV or online) for at least a defined minimum amount of seconds. For radio ads, they could do spoken smallprint like for insurance / mortgage ads but with a defined reading speed.
Pisses me off too how people still seem to lack awareness about TCO, or just fail to adequately consider it which is bizarre when you consider the significant overall cost of these services.* "The phone was free even though the contract's £35 a month. But I got the phone free!" But did you cost out buying the phone sim-free on a 0% APR credit card, signing it up to a SIM-only tariff where the subsidy can be put into cheaper monthly cost? Thought not.
* No wonder the country's in so much debt. **
** And the answer to this problem is, of course, 42
Re: Try Talk Talk
To their credit, BTO's direct employees I've never had problems with. In fact when my ISP booked an SFI engineer improperly, the guy who turned up was just a standard engineer - with SFI experience and knowledge - and fortunately he had the tools, the wherewithall AND THE COURTESY to fix my problem anyway.
When I had a Kelly Comms subcontractor out, he was so keen to get to the next job and earn more commission that he effectively left the job half finished - with his termination equipment still on the line! - whilst he went to the exchange to presumably do two jobs at once. Even then, the problem wasn't fixed and I had to push him to rewire around a 50 year old hardwired GPO termination block and fit a new drop cable to the master socket.
Surprise surprise, when the problem recurred three months later, the BTO engineer stripped his work out, checked the overhead drop cable from the pole into my property then fitted a new prefiltered NTE5. Line's worked at max efficiency ever since.
I've always had good service from the BTO engineers, in Birmingham / West Mids at least they seem to mostly be experienced guys who are more pragmatic in their approach, probably due to the amount of shit they have to deal with caused by third parties and subcons. I had far more problems with the VM engineers during my office's protracted and VERY painful 100 Meg cable broadband installation.
Re: why is line-rental mandatory?
AIUI "Annex J" (wires-only PSTN access is) conflicts with BT's USO for providing voice and emergency service access. To disconnect the pair from the voice services for a pure data service without the usual crosstalk / interference problems could open them up for liability should customer attempt to dial 999 later.
That said, this situation may have changed now and it may in fact be ok to supply Annex J. However from a technical standpoint Annex M is superior to Annex J where supporting LLU ADSL2+ services are available.
If you're canny and find a provider who lets you pay upfront for a year, you can get some pretty decent line rental deals (a tenner month sound good?) Primus' Saver package, with appropriate referral affiliate site discounts applied on the web site - or deft haggling over the phone - will get you into that price band. If you go with a loss leader telecoms company as part of a double/triple/quad play package, you can sometimes get near those prices too.
BT Openreach's per-customer final mile access fees are so high I wonder how some of these companies actually make any money (or justify continuing in business given the potential to make such a loss...!)
Ah, spam.
I used to use OtherInbox to protect myself against exactly this kind of problem -- not just spam, but that middleground "bacn" which you don't hate receiving but which does clog up inbox arteries.
Amusingly I once had to supply an email address to download a WordPress plugin (the plugin was useful, so I caved) from MaxBlogPress. I supplied a brand new address on my OI account just for that... And within a day, I was receiving a dozen spam emails. I called out the MBP author on Twitter and emailed over with evidence of the unsolicited spamming - all of which was flatly and vehemently denied.
Until we can hit a button to electrocute the legitimate sender of an email when they send spam to us, this problem will persist unmitigated. SPF and DK have been shown to only slightly curb the influx of spam. I run a particularly aggressive combination of multiRBL and whitelist setups paired with tuned SpamAssassin and fail2ban on my busiest mailserver and it ditches about 95% of unwanted email -- but yet it still persists. And the amount of 'bacn' is so high now with every company fully committing to their 'online marketing campaigns' that after a while, if the boss maintains his habit of sticking his primary email address into every email form he comes across, there's not much you can do to prevent the influx.
I wish there was a unified, globally recognised mechanism for instantly unsubscribing - it would be the best elements of a good listserver combined with a protocol-defined mechanism for silently (or with confirmation message) unsubscribing from all mailing lists. It would require headers to be set defining the message as a mailing list which would then enable options in all mail clients which would need to support these parts of the spec. Never going to happen though. Oh well. Time for the pub.
Rapport? Repugnant
Bloated, inefficient, insecure and wholly unnecessary. Trusteer's known for having done deals with some of the UK's major banks (and some overseas) to push their Rapport security software. It probably works OK on an unprotected machine with no antivirus/internet security package but I've only ever seen it cause problems on a patched, protected machine.
Usually on those machines there's some fundamental loss of functionality - inability to access the Internet, error messages or crippled behaviour. Guess what fixes it? Removing the Rapport software. Terrible piece of sloppy programming which achieves nothing except infuriating the user.
Oh hello...
This looks like it could be fun. Count me in.
Posted in Compact Disc death foretold for 2012
Such utter tripe
Such utter codswallop. So the CD is dieing, just like vinyl? They'll always exist, there's means to publish smaller numbers for niche / cottage labels via duplication (as opposed to replication of pressed discs in a plant) but that tipping point of 1,000 discs will always mean there's a market for CDs. Once you get into low thousands, cost per unit is so comparatively minimal (like oldskool DVDs) they'll remain a viable distribution method for some time. Unfortunately it's the warehousing aspect which incurs most cost; we could almost halve the cost of our CDs if we could minimise the warehousing aspect free, it's what sucks up most of the wholesale price and results in us getting a very small return.
CDs are just so darned cost effective when you scale... Also, do not underestimate the twofold demand through by scarcity and the (more and more) 'deluxe' sensation of having full artwork, a CD and packaging to fondle. Intangible MP3s just don't get me excited like a hotly-anticipated CD album arriving in the post. (even though I might download it beforehand)
Sauce? I work at a record label. If anything, we're increasing the amount of CDs we're pressing over the next 12 months.
Not just big companies
I have several accounts, one of which was compromised and used to spam out links to a Rusky site of some disrepute. Twitter's automated systems noticed the breach and locked the account (sending me a link to reactivate and specify a new password) -- thing is, my passwords are never simple words, they include mixed case letters and also numbers. My shortest password is 11 characters long.
The Twitter automated message said that there was potentially a breach via a third party app granted access -- but on the affected account, only TweetDeck and HootSuite were given access. So, either TweetDeck, HootSuite or Twitter have some kind of undisclosed vulnerability which allows people to randomly compromise accounts through them... Or the Ruskies have developed MIND READING tech! In Soviet Russia, Twitter use you etc
Mine's the one with the one-time pad in it
Aha
Now that you're apparently embracing the Twitters, does that mean el Reg's social media policy will be updated to stop rampant crossposting of identical articles across multiple twitter accounts? (reghardware, regsecurity, regmedia, regmusic etc?)
Mine's the one with the self-penned styleguide in the left pocket
buh?
A friend of mine who runs an indie hosting service has a perfectly capable skype-to-asterisk bridge set up... I helped him bug test. (granted, it ain't native though)
Shurely shome mishtake
i frequently find myself reaching for the "Contact the Editors" page to inform them of misspelt words or poor grammatical constructions. It's really very disappointing.
I had English Comprehension, English Language *AND* grammar lessons at school. I grew to love my engagement with my mother tongue and I feel pretty confident that I can both speak and write to a high, consistent level with minimal errors. I certainly take pride in the fact that I can use their, there and they're appropriately (and the same for its / it's / its' - SERIOUSLY, IT'S NOT THAT HARD). The plague of hyphens slowly infesting written British English is a particular bugbear too... Hyphen-this, intersected-that! Unnecessary and illogical in some cases.
The old gem I always wheel out in these situations is a crudely handwritten sign outside the village where I grew up: "TRACTOR,S TURNING"
Mine's the one with the Oxford Super Compact Pico Pocket English Dictionary in it
@Mark 65 re: variable quality
Hardly, stop trying to provoke me into an argument. ;-)
I'd rather that people could buy FLACs, with appropriate 300dpi artwork (or ALACs in Apple's case) and have that copy available everywhere. I have no problem with people having music they've purchased available on all devices, it's the scenario of Match being used for nefarious purposes I have a problem with.
Ideally I'd like a service which built on what AllOfMP3 offered - you pay for the quality you want; the premium for FLAC, the lowest for 128kbps. However I'd have it so you could optionally buy the FLAC then have the service transcode to MP3 / AAC on the fly for mobile devices, or you could download a LQ copy as AAC or MP3 for your MP3 player but always have the master FLACs available. It's certainly feasible as Apple have shown, because this is almost exactly what they're doing (just with one fixed bitrate and no download of the lossless original).
Also I'm still sceptical as to how much labels (except for the Big 4) will actually earn from this.
I regard myself as outside of the music industry, it's clusterfucking itself into a bloody mess with the way it's going (and has been for a decade now). I wish the industry had jumped onto Napster and produced a legitimate model and service based on it, that would've been incredible and we probably wouldn't even have the issue of multiple siloed stores.
Certainly we wouldn't have the issue of digital sales being counted as physical sales, which would have knock on effect of digital music being cheaper (and closer to its actual retail value, as I see it.)
It was just one use case
My sister, who's one generation of kids after me, used to swap files mostly via sneakernet (Bluetooth via mobiles etc). She had (stlil has) LOTS of low quality MP3s.
For those who have massive collections amassed via P2P (Limewire, Grokster, even KaZaA or ripping audio from video sites etc) the quality will likely be very variable. Collections can go back five, ten, even fifteen years. There's still a lot of 96s, 128s and 160s floating around on P2P. I'm well versed on what's available both publicly and privately on BT and Tor, I grew up with Audiogalaxy, Napster, XDCC etc. ;-)
Even for people who download 16/44.1 FLACs, they can still get a guaranteed, 10-device-synced version of the file for their iDevices and have it legitimately tied to their Apple ID as long as they pay the almost token sum of $25 a year.
Please clarify
Andrew, you realise that the uploading of content-to-Match isn't transcoding or reencoding, the audio is identified via fingerprint? After that, a copy of the AAC file (as available on iTunes), encoded from the label-supplied lossless master, is made available in your iTunes library through your Match account. There's no transcoding of MP3s, that'd be horribly inefficient and error-prone if metadata was wrong/missing etc. That's what I took from where you wrote about it "chewing and spitting out" AACs)... You may want to rephrase that to clarify.
For the handful of files it might not be able to identify from fingerprinting, it will upload the original files and then (I hope!) make those originals available from the cloud instead of transcoding to AAC. Transcoding would make no sense, and Apple (to be fair) are pretty anally retentive about audio quality through iTunes.
I work in the music industry in the independent sector, and I think - as Apple will have already carefully thought about and realised - that there will be a subset of customers who immediately attempt to use it to 'legitimise' their huge catalogue of unlicensed (read: shonky) MP3s. However, once they're locked into that $25-a-year model... Boom. Pure profit from that customer after year 1.
Far more importantly for labels, it's yet to be revealed what the actual base royalty rate will be as paid to labels whenever a customer is given access to a track through Match. Given a track sale through the iTunes store only yields (on average) 50-59p gross to the label, I suspect iTunes Match royalties will be comparabie to Spotify levels of royalty, which are an absolute pittance. (You have to get multiple hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify to earn more than $100.)
I'm on the fence about Match at the moment. We could see another incremental source of revenue, but I guarantee it won't be a large amount (and lots of our catalogue has been pirated and shared online, particularly on filesharing blogs). We send out DMCA notices if we see lots of catalogue sprout up but we could send out hundreds a day and never get on top of the problem.
We'll have to see if Apple implements and enforces a FUP with regards to how many tracks you can fingerprint and get access to at once - the majors (whose favourable royalty rates haven't been disclosed, but still won't be amazing) will get really pissed off if the majority of Match customers use the service to basically download 128kbps (or lower!) MP3s then get a pretty-much-free upgrade to 256kbps, DRM free, A+ quality AACs. I know I'd be pissed off by that.
Mine's the one with a copy of the iTunes Music Store Style Guide handbook in it
Posted in A peek inside Apple's iCloud data center
Nor is it very ethical!
From the company that brought you unibody Macs (which seem fairly environmentally friendly) - coal-fired electricity to power their cloud services... Natch.
Producing RED devices with one tentacle, destroying the world's future climate with another. Perhaps they want the Earth to glow white during use like their flaming logo?
Apple of course!
Apple takes 30% just for being special. The remaining 70% will likely be split 58/12 - 58% of the remainder to labels, 12% for the US publishing. This will have to change for non-US royalties because publishing is administered differently in the US from almost everywhere else in the world because the rest of the world usually has just one unified collection agency per country, not two or three!
Thing is, the actual amount on which the royalty will be calculated will be an absolute pittance - revenues will probably be similar to Spotify (where you need hundreds of thousands of plays to earn $100).
Nope, cleverer
Neither - ID3s can go missing or be wholly incorrect, they'll almost certainly be going the Shazam-esque route and using previously produced fingerprints of the audio provided by the labels (through a third party service) to identify the tracks. These are VERY resistant to abuse, degradation, corruption or even transcoding / playing out of a speaker then rerecording back in via micrphone!)
Think of YouTube's audio ID and replacement system; this also uses the same fingerprinting solution (it's likely Audible Magic's platform). We've been courted by Audible Magic at work (indie label) to fingerprint our catalogue in the past (at the behest of Merlin); we've not done it yet as the cost is disproportionate and it wouldn't stop people uploading entire albums in RARs to blogspots.
Not really
Several moons ago, when I worked at Tesco, I sometimes had the job of oversight on the self checkouts. (they're all manufactured by NCR and the manual inside the top lid makes for some amusing reading - also some have keyboards in the cabinet underneath the main controller's station, they all run Windows XP!)
There's no way to manually adjust prices of things already scanned (deliberately!), you can only void off items if the customer doesn't want to buy them.
I'm sure they will have cottoned on though if every single customer just had three multipacks of Stella... However the tills could just as easily have been closed, forcing customers to go the manual route.
This = amazing
Bletchley Park is one of the most undervalued historical landmarks in Britain, nay, Western Europe. Incredible feats of both human and computer engineering were achieved there during one of the pivotal times in recent history and I find it disgraceful that parts of it continue to suffer from underfunding and lack of understanding about the Park's significance. Where's the EU funding for BP? What about some more from the Lottery Heritage fund? Surely there's some spare in the 2012 budget, we can't have frittered it all away on shuttle bus lanes and Underground extensions.
I can't stand to see how some of the Park is, quite literally, still falling apart, and I applaud the team of staff and volunteers for continuing to maintain it as best they can and preserve the immensely important site and its contents for future generations of visitors. (why is the whole site not listed as a national treasure already and fully funded by the Government?!)
I will most certainly be visiting the Park again soon to see this new exhibit, it sounds absolutely fantastic.
That's a shame
I used to live near Trowbridge when I was growing up, even went to school there. I remember when VM opened its call centre, quite a few people coming out of college or GCSEs who didn't want to do the Uni route were given their first opportunity into work (including a couple of my friends) and it sounded like a pretty good place to work from some of the stories I heard.
This last little bastion of locality means they might as well just port all their customers over to T-Mobile and be done with it, there's no real value left in the Mobile part of the company any more AFAIC. Will be sad to see more jobs leave Trowbridge too, it's not the prettiest of places but I still kinda like it.
Posted in Sage Pay, down and out yet again
Yet Another Alternative Gateway Provider
We've been using SecureTrading at work for many years, both their hosted SSL payment pages and we've been experimenting with their API (not for the faint-hearted). Probably not the cheapest around and the rates aren't the best either, but they're Rock. Solid.
They're also capitalising on the SagePay exodus on their Twitter feed :D
Posted in CodeWeavers pours Wine for the masses
Dirty Donkey?!
Shit, I'd buy it if it was called Dirty Donkey. Ages of endless amusement as it gradually topped my Wakoopa most-used software list.
Nice to see a C level talking plain English too for once...
Posted in Ace Reg reporter in career suicide shock
eJourno moves to Dead Tree media shocker!
I'm just jealous ;-) All the best and I might even pick up a copy of the Telegraph to read your stuff once in a while. (it'd be the first time I'd read the Telegraph in mannnnnnnyyyy years)
In other news, does this mean there's now a Technology correspondence post waiting to be filled by me at Reg Towers?
Mine's the one with the CV and an envelope with the interviewer's name on it full of non-sequential used twenties in it
Idiots in not reading small print shocker
Whodathunkit.
I hereby propose learned scholar and erudite student of the high arts Paris Hilton, because even she knows full well that first impressions can be very misleading
Posted in Windows Phone 7 gets unlocked
Pah to WP7, a pox on it
The first person to develop a 'translator' so I can run all of my (purchased!) WinMo v6.* apps on a WP7 handset gets a gold-plated cookie from me, and perhaps even a donation. I'm fed up with MS dumping an entire decade of platform back-compatibility just because it didn't suit them.
I'd wager they could've brought WP7 to market with an XP Mode-style compatibility layer, which is why I found it odd they aren't offering legacy support like they do with all of their other OSes. I won't buy a WP7 handset, irrespective of how pretty they are, until I can properly run WM6 apps on one.
...Or someone does a decent community port of WM6.5 to a WP7 device... (here's lookin' at you, XDA-Devs)
Mine's the one with a battered but perfectly functional Touch HD and HTC Hermes in the pocket
Posted in Virgin Media begins 100Mb upgrades
@AC
Sure, of course your old copper can handle 40/10MB - BT Infinity is effectively VDSL, hence the extra street cabinets required. Your DSLAM is inside the cabinet instead of in the exchange, so the line length is dramatically shortened. A piece of wet string could manage 40/10 at that distance.
The longer your loop length is, the higher its tendency to act as a massive aerial for EM and RF interference. Also dry joints / poor crimps or water ingress has less of an impact upon VDSL, but it still makes a diff. Once BT Infinity's max speeds are ramped up you'll see that you probably won't be able to make it all the way up to 52MB/16MB - VDSL2 can theoretically manage 100/100MB - without a rip and replace of your drop cable. VDSL's sync rate tails off dramatically past 300m from the street cabs.
Mine's the one with an ADSL2+ modem in the left pocket
Posted in Virgin Media begins 100Mb upgrades
Re: In a perfect world, sure
What you don't understand is that cable broadband is remarkably similar to ADSL except in how it presents the available bandwidth. Cable modems sync to available frequencies and then the bandwidth is contended all the way from the UBR to the CPE. This is why DOCSIS 3 makes such a big difference as it has far more available concurrent channels (and the bandwidth of each is significantly higher).
HOWEVER, if the provider decides to undersupply bandwidth to the UBR the CPE is connected to, that customer WILL ABSOLUTELY experience slower-than-headline speeds, higher pings, potentially higher packet loss and frustratingly slow internet access. Sure, the modem may say it's synchronised at 104857600 bits/sec downstream and 10485760 bits/sec upstream but realistically it might spike at that but average much lower. Same will happen for oversold areas, of which there are many. (Pick a town, any town)
Source: my previous experiences on cable broadband, just after VM bought out Telewest and finished the rebrand (and flushed it all down the pan by introducing 20MB followed sharply by unannounced STM)
VM, Vituperous Marketing
In a perfect world, sure
However my boss paid for plane tickets for two other people to Canada and back on the company debit card - he wasn't a traveller nor was he mentioned anywhere on the travel documents.
In fact, I gave the nice lady at Co-op Travel the card details. Third hand card details? Nice. I think I passed the phone to the boss for two minutes so he could verify his address but that was about it. What can they ask in terms of verification? They have no prior knowledge of him. I suspect most over-the-phone travel operators will do exactly the same thing, the whole system is rife with loopholes for potential fraud and CNP transations will continue to be a major source of revenue as long as the balance of liability isn't too harsh on the payee. Accepted losses?
Paris, because her credit card says Daddy Hilton on it
Posted in Nielsen cops to iPad stat cock-up
Nielsen is all thumbs
Maybe the poor sod putting the presentation together was using Keynote on a company iPad... Amazing what can result from careless multitouches.
Posted in F1 2010
Stuff and nonsense
I'm a racing game enthusiast but come on, this game has a bug list as long as your arm. Codies will hopefully redress these faults in the weeks to come (fortunately Steam will push the updates down for me as and when they arrive) but I get the feeling this game was hurried out of the gates before it was fully finished in order to beat the end of the IRL F1 season.
Very disappointed with some of the bugs, they really detract from the realism I come to expect from a market-leading (and eye-grabbing) franchise such as this one. Bit of a letdown for initial release.
I've said it before and I'll say it again
T-MOrange.
(say it quickly.)
I will chuckle away when the day comes where, once the "Everything Everywhere" branding 2.0 has been foisted upon us for so long, people just abbreviate it to " I'm on E" when asked what mobile network they use
Honestly I think they should stick with T-Mobile, it has a better brand image and customer service reputation than Orange (which I think you will find is almost universally dismal). Second only to Three in terms of rubish after-sales service.
Not quite
BT Openreach = physical network, "final mile". LLU ISPs pay regular access charges for SMPF and MPF access.
BT Wholesale = provide the actual backhaul and broadband services (their IPStream products and, for aggregate access, Central and Central Plus services, are used by ISPs)
BT Internet = the donuts to whom you pay your £25 per month for dismal quality service.
You're welcome.
Mine's the one with the LLU BE Broadband + telephone service bill in the pocket
Oh come now, Google can tell you this
1.5 gigabytes = 12 884, 901 888 bits Guessing it's using 1024bits/Kb.
Paris, because even she can type "1.5 gigabytes in bits" into your favourite calculator-equipped search engine
Certainly
In the same manner as when I see whiney amateurs complaining about their "important business web sites" not working on their Dreamhost account
Posted in Hackers spoof car warning system
Ooer
My Dad's previous car (Toyota Avensis, circa 2007) had, like most Toyotas built around the turn of the 21st century, a 100% fly-by-wire accelerator system hooked into the ECM/ECU.
I can imagine a time not too far from now when the entire pedalset is wirelessly linked, probably encrypted with WEP knowing how tempting it is to not bother with all that tricky 2048bit private key nonsense
Mine's the one with a real metal key to put into the ignition of my backup 2001 Ford
Posted in Council staff breach DWP database
If BT can see it
then they've already analysed everybody's profiles and are targeting them with 'relevant' ads.
Given that some people may have accessed their own accounts, surely they can't be sacked for that? They have a right to see what information is held on themselves per the DPA... Or are they denied access to their own information? Glossing over the technicalities and ethics a little, but on the face of it that particular scenario seems a bit arse backwards.
Why do UK cammers even bother any more?
First cams always come from Eastern Europe and have dodgy sound. If you can wait a few days or so, the DVD5s are always out with the line audio (love the irony of a crooked projectionist) but even THEN the quality ain't really up to snuff.
I could never understand the appeal of watching what might be a good film with an EXTREMELY dodgy recording. Some cams I've witnessed in the past are hilarious bad. But then, I'm 100% 1080p now. MKVs anyone? (no weight on my conscience here, I gave AMC another £12 tonight to sit and watch The Expendables - and bloody good it was too).
Cammers deserve to be locked up if they're stupid and brazen enough to continue doing a shit job. Moreso, they deserve to be mercilessly beaten in public by the police for attempting to profit from it. The history of the scene was always that nobody profited from it, it was done for enjoyment only. Whilst that in itself is a moralistic can of worms, and is to be deftly sidestepped this time around, the scumbags who try and flog binbags of £3 DVDRs down the local pub deserve to be taken out bag and summarily dealt with. Then exiled.
Posted in Man sentenced for DIY gift-card cloning
Curious
I wonder if using Tor would've helped mask his true location?
This could be a good little earner...
Mine's the one with the portable swiper in it
Chrome first...
(surprised they didn't recommend using Chrome Frame!)
First they suggest their users move to Chrome. Can we start placing bets on when they'll migrate hotmail.com over to Google Apps for Business?
Paris, because even she preferred it when it was called HoTMaiL
It's all in the wrist
You just have to do very tight circles as you fire. Have you never played CS:S?
Either that or he was singleshot headshotting but didn't take into account the updated hitboxes...
Now some remote trig C4 on the main doors as the remaining guests ran out? That'd be a classy finish.
This guy is my hot tip for the Decade's Finest round of the Darwin Awards.
Royalties, royalties, royalties
There's several sets of royalties in music. Performance, publication, songwriter, phonogram... PPL handles the live stuff, MCPS-PRS alliance handles songwriter and mechanical. In order for singles to chart on the OCC Top 40, there MUST be a minimum royalty paid which exceeds HMV's selling price in this promo - they're effectively swallowing the loss and marking it down on the launch campaign budget. A wise move IMO.
The artists will still be paid, eventually - minus the collection agencies' percentages of course... (Cynical? Moi?)
Also, HMV Digital has a Canadian site because they operate a nationwide business over there. The HMV brand has always been strong in Canada - it's been their number 1 territory for a long time. Go to Google Maps and search for HMV stores in Canada... There's hundreds of the things!
Paris, coz she thinks she's royalty (and constantly gets screwed)
Good riddance
Those fuckers should get a loooong stay at Her Majesty's pleasure for illegally selling on those records. I was (and still am) a TMUK customer, and I was disgusted to see such a flagrant breach of customer information - potentially including mine (which might explain why I had such a surge of companies calling me at the end of my last contract, around the time this happened).
They may be being made the scapegoats in all of this as everybody else managed to slither away quietly, but these chaps enabled the sale and are at the very least knowing accessories to the crime. I don't stand for these kinds of breaches in UK law so why should the CPS?
I wish these kinds of penalties were applied to people who lost UK.gov, military or confidential information - only today, yet another announcement was made by the MoD detailing the loss of a disc - in Bicester of all places! - back in APRIL:
"The disc was lost from the Defence Storage & Distribution Agency (DSDA) in Bicester, Oxfordshire, in April but staff were told this month.
Details lost included names, dates of birth, national insurance numbers and possible redundancy payouts.
The MoD said there was no evidence the information was being used for crime and an investigation had been launched.
The disc contained two-year-old information of civil servants who had applied for redundancy and how much they would receive."
When the law is adjusted so civil servants and Government contractors face the same penalties, then I'll finally be satisfied...
Not arf
I'd rather my security software be slightly overcautious than not recognise a potentially valid phish / badware site when I happen across it.
At least Kaspersky doesn't do Really Bad Things, like BSOD machines after laxly-compiled definition updates... Been a pretty satisfied KIS user for a couple of years now. Even better, Barclays online banking pays for my three machine licence, but I'd cough up for it anyway because me and KIS... We've become rather attached. I actually TRUST it, and I'm paranoic about online security.
KIS isn't without its foibles and slightly 'odd' behaviours, but on the whole it's one of the best all-in security suites.
Windscreen wipers are a non-story
This is a moribund news article, I watched the BBC News video earlier and it really is a dead donkey. I think almost everyone always uses screenwash to some extent when they top their washer bottle up; the amount of crap and grime that lands on windscreens in daily driving is so bad these days you need some kind of surfactant and detergent to work with the water, even in summer. I personally use a 80/20 mix in summer and 60/40 or even stronger concentrations in harsh winters.
I can't be bothered to explain this in more depth as I'm at work, but a poorly maintained aircon/climate control in a car is as dangerous, if not more, to your health.
http://www.lvvservices.com/aircon.htm explains it fairly well. Rule of thumb: if you have smelly aircon, time to get it recharged and cleaned.
Or just pour some beer into it...
Posted in Sky TV gets even more demanding
Crikey
They've missed a trick here. Many customers will be tied into contracts with their existing providers and be unwilling to change just to use this service - what's the point if half of your most highly-paying customers can't access the value added features they deserve? Seems a bit rich.
No doubt their justification is that they'll do some BT Vision style QoS prioritisation to give an assured minimum throughput for the digiboxen, but it still sucks that for people on decent ADSL / ADSL2+ (e.g. Be / O2) who are paying the premium amounts to Sky for telly won't be able to use this.
Paris, because even she knows when she's getting shafted
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaaa-
-aaaaahahahahahaha. Classic. I love the desperate attempts to deflect blame and admonish an innocent party for someone else's wrongdoing - Only In American. Hopefully this gets thrown out of court with a severe reprimand for wasting court time as soon as the case is heard, what a ridiculous couldn't-make-it-up story.
Mine's the one with a separate paper bill in it
At least they're reducing, reusing, recycling
That W looks familiar... http://www.venturethree.com/#/home/80
Paris, because she's good at recognising things upside down
from niche to the mainstream...
and the fanboi says, well, I can't jump because my weight only contributes to about 3% of the market - if I jumped out, it'd hardly register!
Mine's the one with a copy of Q110 industry sales figures in it
Meh...
Anybody who can avoid Voda's data packages already do so anyway. I've been a happy TMUK Web & Walk Plus customer for more than three years now. Three gig a month? More like it... Even though I hardly ever use more than half a gig ;-)
At least Voda are introducing a realtime monitoring facility to check up on bandwidth usage. It'd be ironic if a customer incurred a £5 charge from checking their remaining allowance and in doing so exceeded 500Mb...
I don't mind about this change to ToS on the whole, as long as they stop using 'unlimited'! I somehow doubt they will so no doubt it will incur further wrath because it's disingenuous and frankly condescending, to say the least. Lusers need to understand once and for all that unlimited != unmetered - and start appreciating the monetary value in all kinds of broadband a little more.
Paris, because even she avoids getting fucked by tariff changes
