Posts by John Naismith
379 posts • joined Tuesday 7th August 2007 16:51 GMT
Re: Unbelievable
You appear unaware of how the system works in 2013. They will (unless they seriously screw up) do a maximum of 50% of the sentence and unless they have previous convictions they'll be in an open prison within 3 months. If they do more than a year (any of them) I will be astounded as the prisons are overflowing now.
That's not a comment on anything other than our judicial system BTW - personally I think the sentence handed down should be the sentence your serve unless you show exceptional remorse. It shouldn't be the case that sentences are automatically cut by half, that's just a farcical situation for us all.
Re: I'm going
No, Plusnet weren't part of BT for some years.
Plusnet started out life as "Force 9 Internet" (IIRC) which was in turn an offshoot of Choice Peripherals, a PC parts company which used to be in Worksop. Insight then bought Choice Peripherals and spun off Force 9 as a company in its own right. Force 9 morphed into Plusnet, which BT bought in the middle of the last decade (2005?).
That's why I always grin when Plusnet adverts bang on about "good honest Yorkshire" and all that guff. They started out life in a (very) small industrial unit in Nottinghamshire :)
Re: I'm going
I'd recommend AAISP if its for business or you don't have a family. The good reverend takes no crap from Openreach and has a quite informative/amusing blog too. I wonder if Shaun (IIRC) can spell any better though after all these years :)
Re: Moving From BE LLU To PlusNet FTTC?
There's a "migration matrix" over at TBB :
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/migration.html
Might help?
Been with both...
... and frankly Be's routing/peering was and is crap compared to Sky.
I sync faster on Sky than I did on Be and the couple of times I've had to call up (daytime hours) everything was sorted out within minutes - which wasn't the case with the Bulgarian support Be used. Don't get me wrong, the Bulgarians were great but if anything actually required Openreach intervention they were just as rubbish as every other mainstream ISP out there.
I think people are over-reacting - I have no doubt at all that Sky's Indian callcentre is crap and you'd be better off asking next-door's cat what the problem is, but the same is true for all the other major ISPs. Call between 9-5 and Sky are fine in my experience.
tl;dr Sky ADSL on this exchange is faster, more reliable, has better routing/peering and is less than half the price Be was. YMMV of course.
Oh spare us from another New Labour hypocrite...
... she's the poster child of UK politicians - venal, self-serving scum without exception.
When she pays her fair share of tax then I might listen to her pontificate about Google - until then she can fuck off back to her tax-avoiding family.
Re: RIPA abuse all over again....
"What has anyone's private life got to do with anything in their public life, whoever they are?"
Nothing at all provided they're :
a) not a politician or involved in any sort of law-making. Not going to go into specific instances but but there are plenty of examples of nepotism where without someone working out who was screwing who - obviously the taxpayers get screwed anyway - it would never have been exposed;
b) a celebrity who uses a publicist to regularly plant "news articles" (AKA complete bullshit) to boost your client's income with the full knowledge of the client. Live by the sword then die by the sword.
I'm not arguing people deserve a private life even when they are in public life but do you want us to be like France where the press are shit-scared of politicians?
Re: RIPA abuse all over again....
Publishing from another country isn't going to work either unless you have zero UK assets and aren't resident here - not with the clause about publication mainly for UK consumption.
You'll simply get sued in London and get hit with full costs whether you win or lose - something many of the commentards here fail to realise. If you don't defend the case, you'll get hit with exemplary damages but win or lose you ARE going to be paying the costs unless you sign up to be a LibLabCon lapdog.
It's coming to something when Russia Today is taking the piss out of the UK for having more restrictive laws than Russia.
Nice to see the OECD taking an interest though - that will be intensely embarrassing for all these Hon and Rt Hon people claiming we're one of the "free" countries of the world. Then again they just passed a law permitting secret trials so they have fuck all shame or conscience. Self-serving venal scum one and all.
Posted in Paying a TV tax makes you happy - BBC
Re: I want to like the BBC
Unfortunately you're living in dreamland if you think that "BBC content" is owned by the BBC. The vast majority of "BBC content" is owned by the writer/production company, even if it was 100% funded by the BBC.
You'd think that having what's very close to a monopoly position in the UK that the BBC luvvies would be able to negotiate rights which are somewhat fairer to the taxpayers who fund them but no that's apparently "not possible". This only becomes understandable when you realise there's shitloads of people/small production companies who do no work for anyone other than the BBC and thats where the funding goes without inconveniences like tax or NI being paid. Most of these "companies" are personal service companies for that reason and its a trouging merry-go-round.
Strange how IR35 doesn't apply to the luvvies mmm? One can only assume that they have a right of substitution but that's laughable when you're talking about presenters/actors/producers.
Anyway I digress but you'll find the BBC owns bugger all of "BBC content" past the early 1980s.
RIPA abuse all over again....
Here we go again. Just like RIPA is abused on a daily basis by councils up and down the land, this fucked up monstrosity WILL get used against individuals, you can bet on it.
All so the "great and the good" can carry on troughing/stealing/getting dildos shoved up their arse at Nazi-themed parties/getting sucked off by whores in alleys knowing full well nobody will dare publish.
When the next political scandal hits (like expenses) who's going to publish?
Fuck you Hacked Off, well done for helping us further along the road of a police state.
Re: O2's email is sidestepping all the important questions...
Your 12 month contract will be null & void unless Sky honour all conditions - which they won't, trust me on that.
As to traffic management - Sky Connect (which is a resold IPStream service) has shaping and is best avoided like the plague, its only where Sky don't have capacity on their own equipment; for the LLU service there is no traffic shaping/management at all.
I've been on both...
IME Sky broadband support between 9am and 6pm is considerably better than the Bulgarians* Outside those hours then best of luck to you as scrip-monkey land awaits.
Be within the M25 seemed to be fine. Be outside the M25 seemed to be a lottery as to how many exchanges you got daisy-chained through. Either way their peering and international connectivity sucked - and as Telefonica ran out of cash is sucked harder. I remember a memorable instance of being routed through an overloaded link in the Canary Islands/South America to get to New York. Oh and no that wasn't a fault, it was Telefonica's cheapest route as they own the cable so it lasted for weeks.
I switched from Be to Sky a year ago. The Sky connection works better than the Be connection did. Support is comparable depending on time of day. Connectivity is better.
*I always felt sorry for these guys, they tried so hard but ultimately didn't have the tools/support to do much from 2000km away.
Gave up on freeview
Waltham Tx has been a pile of shit for months - in fact since they started work to shift muxs out of the 4G bands.
Its so bad that its impossible to receive any muxs above C49 here (NW Leicester) - antenna installers doing a roaring trade turning the antenna around to face Sutton Coldfield Tx. That however loses all the programmes local to the East Mids (no great loss) and substitutes them with West Mids programming (no great gain).
So I got a Freesat box.
DVB-T rollout in the UK has been (IMHO) a trail of incompetence and dithering. Typical of the UK these days. 15 YEARS to roll it out; pretty much all the early boxes obsolete due to later QAM changes; a DVB-T HD format which nobody else on the planet uses (or intends to use) and now the 4G nonsense.
Total fail.
BT are so full of shit.....
"The national telco claimed that its offering would not be hampered by bandwidth issues like the ones that recently crippled BSkyB."
Oh really? So what's the matter with most of (all?) your FTTC enabled exchanges in Leicestershire then? Its not oversubscribed backhaul that's causing peak speeds of under 5Mbps on BT Retail?
BT are totally full of shit. Sky may be tossers but unlike BT they at least admit when they've fucked it up.
Anyone believe Oracle these days?
I don't believe a singe thing Oracle says about any of its Sun acquisitions.
Nor will I ever use Java again.
I think that's probably the safest approach :)
Re: Good
Well guess what? Jordan was much the same in the early 1990s - it had weeks of torrential rain followed by prolonged cold/snow. A local there told me it was worse than some year in the 1950s when the same sort of thing happened.
Bloody awful place in winter, not much better any other time of the year.
Been coming for ages....
Telefonica have been selling foreign assets off for the last year or two in an attempt to reduce their debt and try to cope with the collapse of their home market. The only thing Telefonica really wants from their new UK network is 4G backhaul.
tl;dr this has been on the cards for a good long while, looks like they need the cash now
Re: Real calls indistinguishable from spam
Yep get a Truecall box - they're the dogs bollox. Just checked the stats on ours and for the last year it has rejected 79.6% of calls on the basis that they are one of the following :
1) Known spammers;
2) Invalid numbers;
3) International calls (we don't want any thanks);
4) Number withheld - if you don't want me to know who you are I'm not taking the call.
Forget Ofcom, TPS, ICO etc. They are useless.
Even when Ofcom slaps a fine on the spammers all that happens is the company closes (without paying the fine) and reopens with a brand-new name a couple of weeks later. Rinse/repeat until they eventually get struck off as directors (takes at least 5 years) when they have to use relatives to front the business.
The telecos don't want to stop this because they make shedloads of cash out of the spammers and the govt won't do anything because there's thousands (if not millions) of people working for the spammers.
The only option is to deal with it yourself (Truecall/something similar) or simply don't have a phone plugged into the landline. Nothing else will work.
Re: A floor that supports 400kg?
Long-term loads are significantly different to your example. 400kg load would need to be spread over multiple joists otherwise you'll rapidly end up with a dip in the floor which will not recover.
Re: VGA
The VGA port isn't as useless as the reviewer thinks it is.
On NVidia mobile gfx cards you can in fact drive 2 external displays independently - one from HDMI and one from VGA.
You can't do that with any of the other digital outputs from NVidia mobile gfx cards - eg if you had HDMI and DisplayPort then only one of those outputs could be active.
The Pi makes sense if....
a) you are going to use the GPIO pins;
b) you are going to use it for an purpose which cuts existing power use (eg - mediacentre box taped to the back of a monitor; works very well in that instance, plenty more too)
Its really not logical to use it for a general purpose coding device and I don't think that it should be viewed as such.
It is basically an embedded computer capable of running moderately complex tasks - its an ideal platform for control engineering tasks but its certainly not the ideal platform to create "apps", for want of a better word.
tl;dr needs peripherals on GPIO to make sense - that implies some electronics as well as coding; alternatively makes a great mediacentre with MPEG/VC-1 licences and uses about 8W doing it.
PS - I have one.
Re: Software was it....
I think it was Colorworks rather than PMView. Not 100% on that though.
For usenet I just ran a Win-OS/2 session and KA9Q, can't even remember what the client was - probably whatever the Demon package had. Some USAF guy stationed in the UK developed a decent native OS/2 client which worked on/offline around 1997 but I can't remember whether it ever got finished or not.
Software was it....
I gave up on OS/2 around the time that Stardock Systems (Brad Wardell) gave up on OS/2. By that time about the only people that used OS/2 were Germans - gods only know why.
Software availability was so bad that there wasn't even an offline usenet client for years - the only native ones available assumed you didn't pay for dial-up local calls. Mail clients were bloody terrible until PMMail. There was a decent graphics package but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
The bottom line for consumer machines is software availability. If you looked hard enough and paid enough you could live with OS/2, but it was a PITA which soon became tiresome.
Very good OS, shame IBM was a crap company at the time.....
I loved OS/2
There I said it :)
I remember having WORKING voice recognition software when such a thing brought Windows machines to their knees and fucked up every sentence. I had an integrated TCP/IP stack which wasn't a non-compliant pile of shit tacked onto the OS (hello Windows 95); I had REXX which is still one of the best scripting languages I've ever seen; I had DOS virtual machines more than a decade before Windows; I had Fixpacks when the idea of Microsoft issuing a patch was ludicrous - the list goes on and on
The only criticism I had of OS/2 (apart from IBM's total inability/unwillingness to market it) was the infamous SIQ bug. OS/2 had a single input queue for passing messages and on occasion it would refuse to accept any input from the user - everything on the machine was still running except the errant application so if you ran a headless system you'd never notice.
Posted in RISC OS comes to Raspberry Pi
Write your own TCP/IP stack?
So given you need to hack it to even enable the network port do you have to write your own TCP/IP stack too?
I'm only being semi-facetious here as ISTR the simplest (and most reliable) way to get the last model of Archimedes online was to buy an add-on card which was basically a 486SX25 with 4MB of RAM - and run Windows For Workgroups or Win3.1 with trumpet winsock.
There was some sort of belated TCP/IP stack on the Archimedes but it was pointless given the RiscOS internet apps were crap.
I'd load it up to see but my current Raspberry Pi issues are more demanding - getting a couple of HDHomeruns working with OpenElec. DVDs play fine now with the MPEG2 licence so the HDHomerun ought to be fine. Annoyingly I had OpenElec+HDHomeruns "working" (it'd find channels but not play them) before I got the MPEG2 licence, then I decided to start fresh and can't remember what the hell I did before. Not the first time that's happened :)
What a load of crap
You can't be "carbon-neutral" when :
"NAB’s tri-generation facility is an on-site, natural gas-driven generator that supplies one of NAB’s existing strategic data centers with over 60% of its total energy requirements."
Its bollox, as are most of the lunatic carbon trading/offsetting ponzi schemes.
My favourite lunacy is wood-fired stoves, which eco-loons seem to like. Lets burn wood and someone will grow precisely the amount we burned so we're "carbon neutral".
Lets not bother about the other pollutants which occur when you burn wood shall we - oh and we'll assume that the people selling us the (cheapest) wood are actually growing/transporting wood in some mythical "sustainable" manner.
Total bollox as is most of the "carbon-neutral" stuff - eg wind turbines that create more carbon when built (just on concrete bases/access roads/infrastructure) than they'll ever save in their operating lifespan.
Sorry for rant, I live in the UK where we pay lunatic subsidies for windfarms/RoCs/nonsense.
Re: Have they patched WPS yet?
It is in terms of a crime number, doubt insurance would pay out though.
Re: Have they patched WPS yet?
@ukgnome - try reading mmmm?
Which part of "other than me telling them" did you fail to comprehend?
Frankly the first time I did it was by mistake, was beta testing Sky's new "hub" (out 1 Sept, bugs and all) and I selected the wrong BSSID in the list of local wireless stations. Was rather dismayed with the results until I realised it was the Virgin "superhub" I'd cracked. The Sky "hub" at least locks the WPS after 3 failed attempts, unlike the Virgin "superhub".
Anyway the neighbours know now. Howver given that they got a car broken into last night which they left unlocked, and that they have a set of housekeys missing from said car I suspect WPS flaws are "above their pay grade" for security :P
Have they patched WPS yet?
I can still crack our neighbours "superhub" wireless in under 90 minutes with a Backtrack Linux LiveCD and reaver.
No indication at all that it has happened either - other than me telling them.
Why is the UK govt going to these lengths?
The charges the guy faces in Sweden don't have an equivalent anywhere else in the EU. They are staggeringly weak by any standards. They're not something to cause a diplomatic incident over.
Like a lot of you I'd initially assumed if the US wanted him then extradite from the UK. Then I thought "we've been trying to get rid of Abu Qatada for 15 years and that's going nowhere".
The problem is that after the way Bradley Manning was treated then Assange would have no problems at all getting extradition refused on human rights grounds - after all the UN's special rapporteur on torture labelled his treatment as "cruel, inhuman and degrading", along with 300 or so US legal academics.
Now it doesn't matter whether you think Bradley Mannings treatment did amount to torture/break the 8th amendment or not, there's enough evidence that it was excessive to have extradition held up for years, if not decades. The reason would be the same as the Abu Qatada case - evidence which may have been obtained via torture/inhuman treatment etc.
One thing the UK does more than any other EU nation is respect the ECHR's decisions (Abu Qatada being the poster child of that). Other nations simply ignore it when inconvenient.
I'm not sure where Sweden stands but I'm sure it'd be harder to extradite him from the UK to the USA at this stage of proceedings.
Someone however is putting serious pressure on the UK govt and it ISN'T Sweden.
PM is on holiday, as is deputy PM, Olympics over and why did Hague get left in charge instead of Osborne? Kind of convenient that, don't you think?
Firewall?
I can see a market for "content firewalls" here :D
You could have the following presets :
1) No god-botherers under any circumstances;
2) Right-wing Christian nutters/NRA TV;
3) Jihadi Muslims;
4) Paranoid Jews;
5) Intolerant Hindus;
6) Bloody Annoyed Sikhs;
7) "Suits you sir" Mormons;
8) No blood thanks we're Jehovahs Witnesses;
9) Church of England/Atheist TV
10) I'll believe any old crap, show me all the imaginary friends' channels.
Symantec could do the software, you have to believe in miracles to think their software does anything anyway :)
Posted in UK physical game sales hit rock bottom
No surprise
What's the point of buying the physical product unless its pre-owned and sold with at least 70% discount?
The games are all DRM'd or require a subscription anyway, so there's no benefit in having a physical product - unless you're into hopelessly out of date manuals or have a bloody awful broadband connection.
It would be interesting to see how many of the physical game sales are for consoles - the Wii for example pretty much requires physical media. Probably 95%+ is my guess.
I can't remember the last time I bought physical media for the PC, nor in fact can I remember the last time I looked in a shop selling games. Bought a few in the last year though....
Posted in Ten budget inkjet printers
Only use Epson if...
...you print at least a few sheets every day, otherwise you'll end up with clogged nozzles. They are absolutely appalling for the average home user.
If you do print a lot then Epson compatible cartridges will save you a fortune over the printer's lifetime, otherwise buy another printer - HP are decent all-in-ones and last for ages.
tl;dr Epson if you print a lot, otherwise HP.
Re: Ofcom regulating?
Well I'd say early 90s they lost any technical ability but 2003 was the point at which Ofcom became a total joke. I do hope the current arsehole in charge of Ofcom gets the DG role at the BBC so we can get rid of the licence fee ASAP.
Sounds OK to me....
....given that current ICT GCSE can be passed by knowing how to "use" MS Office and nothing else.
I think a few people here have no idea how utterly fucked up "ICT" in schools is - and that's pretty much due to the intransigence of the NUT.
We used to joke about the standard of Comp Sci people a decade ago, compared to the dross now those people are exceptional. E
veryone leaving school in England now needs to be aware that the exams you "studied" for are complete crap and in most countries 13 year olds are WAY ahead of you.
Ofcom regulating?
Ahahahahahaha.
Good one.
Ofcom haven't regulated anything in a decade.
Get to fuck with this nonsense, Ofcom are there to rubber stamp anything telecos want to do.
Posted in Ofcom king Ed Richards seeks BBC throne
Re: The sooner he leaves Ofcom..
Au contraire - with his ability to "overlook things" he would fit in PERFECTLY with the BBC. Same political allegiance as most of the BBC senior staff too, no surprise given who appointed him to Ofcom mmm?
Doesn't really matter who gets the BBC job, nothing much will change - the BBC will get shittier in all respects and the senior staff will continue to fill their pockets at taxpayers expense.
Time the licence fee got scrapped.
Re: Pot meet kettle
He's trying to blame Italy's woes on the city of London. Much like its the Anglo-Saxons' fault that the Spanish banks engaged in wild property speculation in Spain, the French banks lent money they didn't have to everyone in the Eurozone and the German Landesbanks moved state funds to Ireland for speculative purposes.
One of thse days the "Europeans" might accept that the Euro and all the damage done by it to everyone within EMU is in fact THEIR fault and not some UK-USA plot. Our politicians (and bankers) don't have the brains for that.
Sadly I suspect that will take a revolution in Spain or Greece before any politician in the Eurozone faces the truth. Neither country is far off the 60% or so youth unemployment which triggers these things and neither country has been "democratic" for very long.
Anyway way off-topic.....
Posted in VCs back P2P game booster
tl;dr is...
...you pay for the games AND our bandwidth.
Not happening here and any game which uses it gets deleted, just like the shit that used "Pando Media Booster".
If I'm providing bandwidth to deliver YOUR game content then if you think I'm paying for the game as well then you are quite delusional.
Re: It Strikes me...
In the late 80s/early 90s the cost of pre-PC/PC games rose "due to piracy" - because they were distributed on 3.5" floppies. Uhuh.
Then came the CD drive. Very rapidly became ubiquitous in machines. CD writers cost thousands of quid and were stand-alone units. Casual piracy didn't happen.
Did the price of games fall? Did they bollox.
Then they went up again "due to piracy" because people had CD writers. Uhuh.
Rinse/repeat from tape to DVD, same old crap coming from publishers.
It's all a load of bollox. Piracy can't be eradicated and was never the problem anyway. Now the "bogeyman" is legitimate customers selling second-hand games.
Give me a fucking break. Nobody believes this horseshit anymore guys. You just want to keep selling the same product to the same customer every time it format-shifts or equipment dies.
Long-term you are going to have to make the product cheap enough or ubiquitous enough so that the average punter won't consider piracy. If you can't make it cheap then you damn well better not tie it to a device.
Tying the game to a single device while NOT reducing the price is unlikely to achieve anything other than a large increase in the number of people saying "fuck you" to the publishers.
Will be amusing to watch.
Re: Interesting infographic
Or perhaps in envelopes ;)
Re: Meh
Technicolor router, looks like its Telefonica wholesale as thats the router they're pushing on new O2/Be customers.
Meh
Looks like ADSL from Telefonica wholesale (Be/O2) - good luck with that, their network is currently being rebuilt - and VDSL (FTTC) from BT. Come to think of it, might be Easynet (Sky) for ADSL.
Phone is simply WLR3 - price tells you that.
I think it will be a total disaster for the John Lewis brand. They have no experience and will be totally reliant on third-parties to fix anything that goes wrong.
Whoever thought this one up needs to be sacked ASAP.
Vettel is a twat
Coming out with a statement like "there's a lot of hype surrounding this" simply shows him up as the rich kid he is.
Likewise Brundle is totally detached from reality.
Bad bad mistake F1 and your sponsors will soon let you know about it - some of them are already getting the backlash.
Amusing article Andrew
The enemy of my enemy is my friend seems to be the tl;dr
What people tend to forget is that prior to Amazon entering the market books cost a LOT more, at least here in the UK. Waterstones, Dillons and WH Smith was it for most towns - if you were lucky. Attempts to order books were treated as if you were some sort of nutter.
Amazon made significant investment in the physical book market. I bet a load of authors nearly fell off their perch when their ancient (to publishers) books started selling again.
Apple has done sweet fuck all for the book market other than push prices up and take their (very large) cut of the retail price.
Amazon pushed prices down for us plebs, Apple pushed them up.
Strangely I fail to see the monopoly pricing you predict in the UK - Amazon have been the major player for long enough now mmmm?
You sound just like the chairman of Waterstones bewailing why the status quo doesn't work any more (I'm sure you can find his wailing in Guardianista land).
Wholesale vs Price Fixing
As some of you clearly have no idea wtf you are talking about ...... :-)
Amazon basically say (or did prior to agency model) to publishers (figures are examples) :
"We will commit to buying 100 million of your books in the next year. For that commitment we want 20% discount on A-list titles, 40% discount on B-list etc etc"
Apple say :
"Sell via us and you must commit to selling no cheaper through any outlet. In addition we will take 30% of the retail price"
Now if you can't see the difference between that I despair of you all and you deserve to be ripped off.....
Nobody is claiming Amazon are "good guys", however Apple have lost the plot.
No
You have the choice to buy from Amazon or not.
Amazon are not (illegally) engaged in price fixing - Apple patently are due to their insistence that you cannot sell cheaper than the "app store" and that Apple take 30% of purchase price.
Nice try though - made it a bit obvious you're a fanboi when you tried to drag MS into this argument.
Re: Proof
Apple have been given the chance by both the US and EU to come to an agreement.
It would appear that in the US at least they have chosen not to do so. As such punitive damages are likely.
Wrong
It is 10% of worldwide turnover.
Apple are fucked and it serves them right. Agency pricing model was just one step too far in terms of arrogance.
Changed times...
.... and it won't be even vaguely amusing.
Back when the original series aired politicians actually took responsibility for at least SOME of their actions. Ministers resigned when they fucked up.
Now they have to be dragged kicking and screaming away from the gravy trough. Self serving venal scum - all of them.
Hard to find anything amusing in the total dross the UK has for rulers.
