Posts by Tony W

Re: BBC

We should all revise what we expect from the BBC. Think about how you yourself would run it to keep the broad support it needs to keep going. In practice the only way to do this is to keep a broad balance between the main political parties. That is something well worth preserving as no other media outlet needs to do this. But it also has severe limitations, because the truth, even in broad terms, is never balanced.

Most people with an interest in politics think the BBC is biased one way or the other to some degree but still trust it not to tell significant lies. Once the majority stops trusting the BBC in this way, it is finished.

But the best you can expect is that the BBC does not broadcast actual falsehoods. Usually, on the basis of fact-checking organisations, I think it clears this rather low bar.

Re: *Takes a deep breath*

Nonsense. Many tools can be dangerous, such as a JCB, chainsaw or Neolithic hand-axe. As an engineer I needed spreadsheets constantly. For some types of calculation dedicated software was available but that was even more opaque and inflexible.

Mind you, it is so easy to get a complex spreadsheet wrong that I was terrified of them. I sometimes checked with dummy data and even constructed the spreadsheet two different ways to check that they gave the same answer, and I did sometimes find errors.

Re: Worked as intended

It is not a Serco app. They had no connection with the design of the software. If you know better please give references.

Re: Not just smart plugs!

Scary. But citation please.

Re: Any chance

Cummings not being prosecuted over his apparently clear breach of the law (the drive to Barnard Castle could not be called leaving home for an essential reason) is normal, probably not special treatment.

But that doesn't excuse him giving an explanation so idiotic that it is beyond satire, and an insult to any intelligent person. He has aroused huge rage among many Conservative voters - see the Daily Mail coverage - and if he had been a mere cabinet minister he would have been forced to resign. So either he has some sort of hold over Johnson, or else it suits Johnson to subvert his own message about the need for strict adherence, not to the letter of the law, but to government guidelines. Or both.

Re: Bugger AdBlock, it's Internet advertising that's theft.

I am astonished at the number of upvotes here, I thought The Register had a technically savvy readership. Does it really have to be explained that it is the web site owner who gives Google and others the right to place ads? In many cases, the resulting revenue is all that pays for the content. You could argue (and many do) that using an adblocker is theft. If you don't iike the ads, don't visit the site.

Having said that, I use Vivaldi browser with adblocker enabled for most sites. This is partly pure selfishness, and partly an anti-malware move.

Re: How is Vivaldi funded?

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

Re: WTF

I find the narrative of the thermostat contacts a bit strange. If the problem was increased current, why did the current increase? A higher voltage would require a lower current to do the same job.

But the increased voltage, rather than current, caused the contacts to melt, it must have been because of arcing. In that case the design must have been perilously near the limit even for the lower voltage.

Was the power DC? I'm not sure if the snap action bimetallic heat sensitive switch (as used in all kettles) had been invented by then, so maybe designing DC thermostats to avoid arcing would have been a problem. That makes the story more comprehensible, but running so near the limit doesn't look like good design. The obvious answer would be to use a low current thermostat to control a relay.

Re: "Only we guarantee Wi-Fi in every room"

Of course the BT disk system is mesh not extender so it's a lot more convenient for the user. Although it's not quite like other mesh systems because the hub is part of the mesh so you might need only one extra item. They sent me the special hub plus disk to say sorry, after they had sent the wrong powerline extenders three times in a row. (The cock-up was pretty typical BT, I've found their support system extremely willing - but their organisation is obviously very dysfunctional.)

The disk setup works superbly. I have had several goes at powerline systems and they were unreliable and far worse than the disk even when they worked.

The hub is not so controllable for the user as many readers here would want. But it's not aimed at you.

I have also used an acoustic modem and watched text appear on screen at the speed of a slow typist, but I am not particularly proud of it. Just another thing that comes with being quite old.

Re: PIM

Oh yes, Outlook the "standard". That's the PIM that had a non-standard system for attachments, incompatible even with other MS products. And that caused me huge problems when I moved from Outlook Express to Outlook and imported all my old emails. Too late I discovered that Outlook had thrown away all the From: addresses keeping only the names - a bit like the office junior saving space when filing letters by cutting off all the letterheadings. And it was a MS program - not sure if it was Outlook or Outlook Express - that had a very long-standing bug whereby certain attached PDFs would become completely invisible on the receiving machine (although still extractable from the raw email by devious means) because the number of bytes was incorrect.

MS Office isn't even compatible with itself because it has a habit of changing the way things display between releases. Word Art became crippled so any document that used it did not display properly after an update. (I admit, I used it when I was young and foolish.) More important, my carefully formatted spreadsheet charts also looked completely different depending on which version of Excel you used to open them. Even the colours changed. How hard is it to preserve RGB values?

Despite this it's inevitable that if appearance is vital you are better off sticking with the majority. But if you are mainly interested in the content, or prepared to convert everthing to PDF before sending to clients, then LibreOffice is fine.

Re: DIY Electricians

If the circuit doesn't have an RCD, a plug wiring mistake is potentially lethal. I had a very close shave once when I was alone in a building at night. My boss, a trained engineer who should have known better, had added a skirting board power point and wired it live-neutral reversed. It wasn't his job to do that, but working on a local radio station we were used to taking short cuts to be helpful to the programme making staff. A couple of professional reel-to-reel tape recorders, built into table height steel trollies, were plugged into the errant double socket. I had been woken at 2.30 am and called out because one of these had stopped working and it would be needed at 6 am to prepare for the morning broadcast. A quick check showed that it had blown its mains fuse so I replaced it and switched on. Luckily for me, the fuse immediately blew again and I realised more investigation was needed. I then discovered that although the plug looked OK, the whole trolley had been wired earth-neutral reversed. The fuse had blown because I had moved the trolley so it was touching its properly earthed neighbour while at mains voltage. If the machines hadn't been touching I could so easily have put a hand on each. I drove home quite shaken. Both faults had existed for some time with no apparent ill effects, and despite almost ubiquitous RCDs nowadays, I have been fanatical about correct mains polarity ever since.

Re: TV of the future

The TVOTF will be firmly locked down to make sure you can't show anything unless you're individually identified and/or have paid for it.

Your eyeballs will be tracked to make sure you actually watch the ads.

It will stop working one month after the guarantee runs out and be unrepairable.

None of this will matter much because there won't be anything on that you want to watch.

Google think it's fine apparently

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/adobe-and-google-open-redirects-abused-by-phishing-campaigns/

The ultimate URL does appear at the end of the string, albeit not necessarily including http:// or www, but I suppose it could be obfuscated.

What is the advantage to Google, Adobe etc of these redirects?

It's not just (or even mainly) about 'relevant' ads

If you say you don't want relevant ads, why do they still track you?

It's about amassing as much personal information about you as possible, in the hope and expectation that they will be able to make money out of it.

And for an ordinary person it is almost impossible to avoid.

Stopping tracking and privacy-busting scripts in a browser will break some useful sites. If your friends and extended family use Facebook to keep in touch, and all their friends do the same, you can ditch it yourself only at considerable social cost. And my most recent example: not wanting to use gmail as a backup to my independently hosted mail, I tried my ISP's email, only to find that it's Yahoo and I would have to accept an appalling set of anti=privacy terms and conditions to use it.

No

And yes to your question. On of my offspring has done this for many years.You have to explain your setup (incapable of receiving broadcast) and possibly respond to license demands and repeat the explanation several times..

Paramount

It is an organisation.

Therefore what is paramount is, firstly, the good of the person in charge.

Secondly, the good of the organisation.

Thirdly, if the organisation is honest, its stated aims.

This has been demonstrated time and again with charities, churches etc. No organisation is so moral that it doesn't need careful oversight.

Re: So, what's a good alternative...

I've been through five hosting providers in the past 25 years, and had to leave four of them because of rapid and extreme deterioration of service when they got taken over. Tsohost (however they spell themselves, I've never bothered to remember and it hasn't mattered) have lasted the longest and (typing with crossed fingers) are still good. For a cheap provider the speed of support is unbeatable. Which is not to say they are perfect of course.

Re: Does anyone still use GMail, or Hotmail?

So, does anyone know a reliable and cheap email only hosting company?

I wouldn't recommend ISP's email because you lose your address when you change ISP to get a better deal.

As far as I know, to get a good and reliable host for your own domain is a significant cost and unles you pay a professional to sort it for you requires tech savvy well above most. And it might be trouble free at the start, but four hosting companies I have used in the last 25 years started well but their service became dreadful after they were swallowed by bigger companies.

Not sure what I would recommend actually, especially to someone hard up for whom the cost of a domain means going without something else they want.

Re: All done

My Motorola One, bought direct from manufacturer, running Android One, gets patched around a month late on average. That's a lot better than most, but why the delay?

Re: And without learning regex

The attitude that all users need to learn regex is one of the major problems with open source software. I can do all I need in MS Office quite easily without knowing that regex exists.

Downvotes invited

I have zero respect for MS. I don't need to go over how the behaviour of their systems has hurt me in the past, any reader here will have had the same experiences. But when it comes to office suites you should face facts.

Libre Office works adequately for many purposes and as it's free you can hardly complain if it isn't perfect. Now that I've retired I can afford to use it, and on my next new PC I won't be installing MS Office. But Libre Office is an inferior product.

For example, to replace things such as newlines and new para markers (a basic tool for tidying up other people's documents) you have to use regex: a real pita for the average user.

And it's not compatible with MS. Going backwards and forwards between the two (which I do quite a lot) can muck up the layout of documents. With spreadsheets it completely alters my carefully set up chart formatting. I would never trust an important presentation generated in Libre Office to show properly on Powerpoint - I've been badly bitten. It's unfair that compatibility is a klller, but it's a fact.

Most non-professionals don't need office software at all or can manage with a free web-based system. But for many professionals, there is only practical office suite. So it's a monopoly: they can screw us and they know it. I'd be astonished if there aren't MS teams generating incompatibilities, so we can't expect that Libre Office will ever catch up.

Guessing is not good enough

The problem is far more basic: Google should admit when it is guessing. Then it would stop making my Japanese friend keep referring to "your" "his" or "her" mother, son, daughter etc., when she means her own mother etc. I can mentally strip out these wrong pronouns but why cannot Google mark words that it is interpolating or guessing the gender? And the same goes for Microsoft of course.

It is not about what is "reality." The relative number of male and female surgeons in various countries is quite irrelevant. If the original left the gender ambiguous then so should the translation, otherwise it has a good chance of being incorrect.

Re: not much better than AM

Radio broadcasting as a means of providing high sound quality is probably an anachronism. If you want hi-fi you can get it on line - if someone is prepared to provide it. BBC R3 on line has quite respectable sound quality - better than FM or DAB. And as for AM - don't make me laugh.

When DAB was invented, radio broadcasting engineers were excited about the possibility of overcoming the bad aspects of FM, particularly for car radios. What they didn't realise is that most people have no interest in high sound quality, and digital systems would allow the top management to decide on the balance between sound quality and the number of channels. The re sult was inevitable.

And for those extolling low distortion AM sound quality - when did you last listen to it? Restricting the frequency range to a theoretical best of about 4 kHz (from the 9 kHz channel spacing) is a serious form of distortion. And that's just the transmitters. When I measured a range of AM receivers in the 1980s the -3 dB bandwidth was typically about 2.5 kHz. Broadcasters use heavy multi-band audio compression, trying desperately to push more high frequencies through the system, to be louder than the competition, and to combat after-dark co-channel and adjacent channel interference. So the frequency response is continuously jumping about. That seriously alters any music and In my book that's distortion. I could go on. Yes, speech on BBC World Service DAB sounds nasty - but still better than AM. If you add typical AM background noise or restrict the frequency range to AM limits, it more than hides the DAB artefacts.

Re: Not Cloudy Here

Off-site backup?