Posts by Richard Cranium

Buy and try THEN comment

I was a cynic but saw the Sony 2 for not much over 100 quid so took a gamble. I'd expected it to be a gimmick but at that price - what the hell. A year later it's my much loved Casio that's gathering dust. You will never understand the convenience unless you try one. From my perspective the discrete vibration and on screen incoming text/email is a deal maker irrespective of the other apps.

Sure some features are gimmicks. I don't need a device to tell me I've walked 20 miles or spent 90 minutes in the gym, I already know, I was there... Anyway recent research reported that fitness trackers REDUCE the amount of exercise people take because they tend to stop exercising when they reach the tracker's target. But just because some apps are gimmicks (to me, others seem very keen on the fitness widgets) that's not grounds for dismissing the whole concept untried.

Battery life: less than 2 days compares poorly with the 5 years of my Casio! But then that applies smart phones too, I used to have a basic Nokia with 2 week battery, now I'm lucky to get much more than a day from Nexus. It's the same trade off: less battery life, more features.

The watch charges overnight on the bedside cabinet - and it's USB, finding USB power outlets is no problem (I've got an alarm clock with 2 USB outlets so that charges phone & watch)

Of course Apple isn't the way to go just get an Android Wear for a third of the price of the cheapest Apple watch.

I suggest smart-watch deniers try Android Wear for a month and come back here with educated responses based on actual personal experience.

Is there a wider problem with LIION tech? Remember the Dreamliner battery fire debacle.

Or is the problem with the accountants "if we can save 5 cents on each battery by the time we've sold 20 million we''ll be a millions dollar up". Or once again the accountants - expected battery lifetime is 3 years "we want users to buy new not just swap in a new battery after 3 years". My Nexus 5 is about to hit its 3rd birthday... I vote for replaceable batteries so I can carry a spare when travelling like my ancient Nokia.

Two bots battling it out: example

Google for "How A Book On Flies Cost $23,698,655.93"

When buying my new Toyota Satnav was an option at £850 (although sold as a bundle which included something else I didn't want like cruise control) and they said map updates were £150 pa. Decided instead to buy a newer TT with lifetime updates. Much better than the old one (that's over 10 years old).

That said it's not perfect (example: driving north on Northgate in Wakefield trying to find Laburnum Rd, it directed me through Gills yard - take a look on Google satellite view and see what you think of that idea!)

Also I use a dashcam (with front and rear rear cameras and GPS - only £60 from China), it would be nice to have that functionality built in to the TT

Misleading heading?

I found this misleading "Shipment slump means just the iPhone outsells tablets from all vendors". Shouldn't it read "iPad..."? My understanding was that iPhone is a phone not a tablet (the clue's in the name). And then goes on to say apple tablets have about a quarter of the market so "outsells all vendors" may be strictly true but most alternatives are Android based and surely the software platform matters more than the hardware.

what I don't understand is...

"As well as negotiating as a bloc, the banks want permission to conduct a *limited boycott* of Apple's payment system while negotiations continue."

Why do they need permission to decide not to adopt Apple payment? Is someone forcing them to take Apple contactless? If I recall correctly there was a rumour that Apple didn't allow some banks in UK (HSBC) to launch Apple contactless in the first wave (because they'd jumped the gun over Apple with an announcement??). Surely the opposite option is available - i.e. for the Banks to choose not to accept ApplePay.

As Apple mobile phones only represent about 15% of the global market why bother? Surely the banks best option is to declare that they accept contactless payments that use an open standard and leave it to the phone/app suppliers to decide whether they want to be part of that. A small player with 15% of the market doesn't want to join in? Their loss.

Do many people use mobile-contactless? I occasionally used contactless _card_ but don't see the point in increasing the value of my phone to a pickpocket by giving the thief access to my bank account too.

Last minute upgrade...

Because many people were reporting difficulties I had sidestepped the "free upgrade" issue. Instead I bought a new PC with Win10 pre-installed, kept my Win7Pro processor unit next to it and added a KVM switch so I could swap between the two easily. Took the opportunity to go 64 bit, get a box with plenty of RAM, SSD and latest CPU.

That made the migration of apps and data easier, primarily less haste to get everything shifted and tested, I'd got contingency against any Win10 problems.

My wife fell for one of MS upgrade tricks, inadvertently taking the upgrade a few weeks ago, it worked but at the cost of a day's lost productivity (and a load of stress for her local IT geek - me).

Last week I decided that Win 7 box was by now essentially redundant so I might as well try the upgrade. I'd never got the Microsoft nag messages trying to get me to do it so did wonder if, despite the box being up to spec, there might be an issue. I swapped out the HDD for a spare 1TB drive reasoning that I'd got an easy way back to Win 7 any time I want by going back to the old HDD.

I did have some problems - like couldn't get it to boot off recovery media and Win10 iso DVD so it took most of the day. Rather than try to find out why I tried USB, that worked. I chose custom install and said no to all the options which might feed info back to MS.

The final result was the cleanest machine ever, no dealer installed crapware just the OS. Boot times which had become miserable are now fastest ever.

My verdict is still remain with the OS you've got if you expect to replace the PC before the end of extended support for your version, the upgrade will cost you lost productivity for no real benefit.

My next problem is to find a good use for my "spare" PC.

Try it before you slag it off

Many of the comments here might be summarised as "I've not tried a smart watch but they're crap".

Well go out and get one, give it a fair trial with an open mind then come back and give a considered opinion based on your experience.

I was a watch skeptic but, as a geek, when I saw a Sony android SmartWatch 3 for about a hundred quid I though it was worth a gamble but expecting it to be a 9 day wonder. I was wrong.

I've read all the crap like "I can just use my smart phone instead", that's what I thought. I was wrong.

I could ramble on for a few paragraphs about why its a game-changer but you'll just disregard that as it contradicts your opinion based on zero personal experience. Like me, you may find you were wrong.

My advice is "buy an android watch" (at less than half the cost of the cheapest apple watch) and give it a fair trial, at least a couple of weeks, before you write off the whole concept. And yes, even iphone users can connect to Android Wear, you don't get the full experience but, for only a hundred quid chuck it in the bin if you don't like it. (BTW iWatch doesn't connect to Android phones - not that any Android phone user gives a sh*t.)

The disposable battery on my old-faithful Casio digital watch needs replacing (after about 5 years). I've not used it for a year, I don't think I'll bother.

There was a web page rating system many years ago when the web was still in short trousers (1990s) called PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection). As far as I recall a significant flaw was the need for third party validation of the rating applied by the web developer and which came with a price tag.

Since then there have been numerous other rating and filtering systems but none that "tick all the boxes". Inevitably at some point a human is involved in making the filtering decision leading to sites being blocked for using the words for humans' organs of regeneration (so blocking legitimate medical sites) through to extremes like religious nuts blocking sites that suggest the world is older than 6000 years.

As the cone of effective jamming expands with altitude, could this be useful for protecting such as airfields from idiots flying cheap quadcopter type drones while not affecting ground-level (automobile) navigation by disrupting their GPS?

ICO needs to strike early...

... rather than await hundreds of complaints. Hit them with a £1k fine for the first genuine complaint and for every subsequent complaint increase the rate per instance by 10%. They might even choose to pay up and clean up their act - a win for ICO and a win for the scammed general public.

Put a rocket up the EBU accounts dept

How can you run a business and allow customers to ignore their bill for 9 years? I bin customers much sooner. One month late: polite reminder, 2 months late: overdue notice, 3 months late: disconnection notice with 10 day deadline and (expensive) credit plan option. That usually results in immediate payment, an apology and a plea to keep their services running. If they ignore the disconnection notice then after disconnection (at 14 days) restoring service comes with a reconnection fee.

Linking ARM share price to Apple sales is a red herring. Apple has about 15% of the mobile market and mobile is less than half ARMs business so Apple might represent 3% of ARM revenue. So if Apple dropped by 20% ARM might lose 20% of that 3% (unless there is, as suggested above, a fixed price deal between Apple and ARM not linked to sales).

This is like the scare story I heard when Apple released their watch. I was told by someone I'd previously believed to have a functioning brain that the price of gold was about to take off because of the demand for Apple Gold edition watches (costing £8k - £13k and each containing about 1/2 oz of gold - current price about £850/oz, annual global gold production about 80million ounces).

More recent experiences with Dell have made me too go elsewhere. I expect corporates will stick with the big boys but smaller users are better served by fleet-of-foot smaller companies. The big boys currently have warehouses full of unsold old models. If I don't want "last year's model" but newest technology or something bespoke, the smaller guys win. On the same basis they can build an inexpensive box by buying last year's tech components at prices that reflect that it's been superceded. The issue for them is that the home user and SME markets are now much smaller with mobile devices nibbling away.

Virgin were locked in to an ancient version of Gmail (e.g. no 2 factor security option)

In any case ISP email has always been garbage. ISPs have to offer it as part of the deal, it costs them to do so. It results in a lot of ongoing end-user support costs with just a small benefit from the inherent "lock-in" and the customers email address "advertising" the ISP.

Were I running an ISP next time they're looking at hiking the monthly charge offer a "no frills" discount and gradually ease out of the free email (and some other add-ons) commitment. Similarly many ISPs provide some free web space and cloud storage - why bother to provide it? and as a customer why would you choose the potential lock-in and a (usually) inferior service.

As for other gripes here about Virgin broadband speed - no problem here I'm on the over 20 year old coax shared with half the street, I just ran a speed test 117Mb/sec download (upload 8Mb/sec, may sound a bit slow but I don't upload a lot)

Time to cut police budgets...

Hourly cost of manpower & 15+ police vehicles plus a 'copter?

On the other hand I read that one escapee cow jumped over the moon, they'll need a bigger budget to tackle that one.

Other responses seem split - broadly speaking those with agricultural experience think the cops were grossly over-reacting while the townies seem happy with a bigger show of force than for a mad-axeman on the loose. I'm guessing it was a nice sunny day, the cops were getting bored sat at their desks or, heaven forbid, dealing with crime and fancied an excuse to get out and wave their guns around.

coalition is what people want

How many times do you hear vox pop complaining that politicians should stop shouting at each other and work together to fix the problems.

Of course LibDems with 50(ish) seats with tory on 300(ish) didn't mean Torys would decide to follow LibDems manifesto but LibDems have exerted influence - placed a bit of constraint the loony right of torys - to the extent that some of them buggered off to UKIP.

Lib-Lab pact would have still been short of a majority. The coalition was truly representative with around 60% of votes, when did we last see a government with that kind of representation?

I'm old. I remember that Labour spells in office invariably end in economic near collapse. They can be guaranteed to max out the nations credit card. Think what better ways there are of spending the £50bn(ish) a year we're currently paying as interest on the national debt.

Labour's promised end to boom-bust was an acknowledgement of that dismal record ...and then they delivered boom-bust yet again. Milliband says that's because of the unexpected global recession and the banking crisis - but all "busts" are unexpected, the solution is not to hope the unexpected won't arise but to have some cash down the back of the sofa as a contingency against unexpected problems. In any case global recessions are a fact of life - we don't know when it'll happen again but we can state with certainty that it will.

We need Government finances to be subject to the kind of "stress testing" the banks are now subjected to.

but surely part of the purpose of locking is to stop the phone "doing its own thing" in your pocket - used to be just random dialling but on modern phones there's rather more scope. This may explain why my Android 5 unexpectedly emitted a burst of unfamiliar music from my pocket last week.

missing the point...

...arguing about how long is reasonable. My issue is: just who appointed Google as the global security patch police force?

We could end up with a tit for tat battle, Microsoft might find a problem with some Android code and declare that they consider it so serious that in their opinion 30 days should be long enough for Google to fix it so release exploit code on day 31.

Arbitrary timescales are no benefit to anyone - if a serious zero-day exploit crops up, Google's 90 days is inappropriate but by all means publish exploits for the "2038 Unix Millennium Bug" or the Y10K bug and if anyone has failed to patch over the next 23 years subject them to as much criticism as you like - but don't chastise them for not doing it within 90 days.

IMHO publishing details of a potential exploit before a patch has been released is irresponsible (I'll make an exception for the Unix Millennium Bug!). I'd like to think that any organisation which then suffered a successful attack using an exploit prematurely publicised would have a legal case for liability against the leaker upheld.

How long is reasonable to fix a problem depends on the problem. Some are trivial to fix others may have repercussions elsewhere in the codebase and need extensive effort and regression testing.

Some issues will be easy and damaging to exploit others are so obscure that the real world risk, even if details of the exploit are published, that the bad guys won't find it worth their while to utilise.

We've all seen bug fixes that result in an unforeseen side effect. We've seen fixes reverted. Many adopt a policy of not implementing (non-critical) patches immediately preferring to wait for others to deliver feedback on effectiveness. We may choose to hold-off Windows 10 but await Windows 10.1.

I don't want developers pulled off a serious problem to focus on an obscure exploit that a competitor has chosen to publicise because they've known about it for nearly 90 days.

By all means pressure developers who appear to be dragging their feet on patches but there are safer ways. How about publishing a simple graphical representation of known bugs by age, perceived severity and company without identifying the actual exploits. And how about that being done by someone without their own agenda of covering their own shortcomings while trumpeting those of their competitors.

This shouldn't be about corporates point scoring over each other, it should be about keeping your and my computing environment safe.

There is a solution

More TLDs does nothing useful. What do you think would happen if you registered microsoft.archi (as an example new gTLD, available now for USD119...) Would their lawyer keep quiet and say "fair enough, my bad for not getting in first"?

In any case what's the recognition factor? If Google returned two search results: microsoft.com and microsoft.archi which would you choose to click?

There is a problem with domain name squatters and I have a solution. At present we pay an annual fee for use of a domain. I'm not altogether sure what happens to that fee, the amount of work involved for the registrar is small. Compare .co.uk fees with .com - why is .com about 3 times the price for doing essentially the same task?

Anyway: how to solve the problem. Do away with the annual fee. In order to "own" a domain the registrant should make a loan to the registrar of a substantial sum, lets say USD1000. There is no need for any annual billing process so the cost of providing the service is lower and would come from interest on that $1000 deposit. The registrant can choose to relinquish the domain at any time and will get his $1000 back.

How many squatters would wish to lock up a million dollars in their "investment" of 1000 domains? Some no doubt, but surely even they would cast a critical eye over their holdings and weed out the less attractive names, freeing them up for others to use.

Google were grossly irresponsible but...

I find myself in the most unusual position of condemning Google and praising Microsoft! Ouch!

Google know MS release schedule, MS know Googles 90 day bug fix deadline and had asked for a couple of days extension to fit with that schedule. Who benefits from Google disregarding that request? Google (score points against MS) and the hackers (get a couple of days to break my system). Who benefits from a couple of days delay? You, me and every other Windows user less at risk.

Yes, MS could patch more frequently but that is disruptive to users, monthly is normally fine. And I often put my PC into sleep mode rather than shut down overnight just doing a full shut-down 2 or 3 times a week on main PC, less frequent on always-on but less used Laptop. I know about Patch Tuesday and take care to shut down then as the patches only get installed at shut-down and reboot.

I would expect MS to do an out-of-band update if a vulnerability is being actively exploited - and they do. That's the responsible approach and I commend them for it. Suppose they decided to bring Patch Tuesday forward a couple of days in the face of Googles intransigence? (BTW did Google just go ahead or tell MS first?) - I'd probably not reboot 'till Patch Tuesday anyway so I'd have been vulnerable

But: should MS go public with their complaint about Google before the patch has gone out? Surely that just advertises the bug more widely in case any hacker missed Google's announcement. I guess there may be an argument that if Joe public knows there's an un-patched vulnerability he can do something to protect himself - good luck with that...

Wife has a Doro phone with a drop-in charging dock which seems even easier to use than my Nexus5 with Qi plate (because with a cover on the phone, correct positioning on the plate needs a bit of care)

What use is listing Ryanair on comparison sites? Book for Paris expecting to arrive at CDG? or maybe Orly or Le Bourget? No, Welcome to "Paris" Beauvais.

Then if Ryan lists a price of £1 so you go for it then find that if you don't use all the complicated techniques to avoid extra charges you end up paying as much as for a better carrier but as you are then subsidising the successful freeloaders the overall experience is garbage.

Even if the price comparison site I use listed Ryan I'd disregard their offerings.

Having said that, my first flight to "Paris" about 50 years ago would have made Ryan look like a luxury. Coach from London to tin shack terminal at (not sure Lydd, or Lympne) very short flight, just over the channel to a similar one man and a dog airfield and coach to Paris. (Don't tell O'Leary, we don't want to give him ideas.)

Not exactly world shattering news. Below I list all the household name organisations that have never experienced an internet service outage:

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That's it

When I investigate the cause of my rather too frequent FF crashes the problem seems to comes down to the add-on developer tools I use. The vast majority of users don't need them so it makes sense to provide a developer-centric FF and stop even trying to support the developer tools in standard FF.

Sounds like that could mean both consumer and developer versions of FF could end up more stable, smaller, faster than the current chimera.

Good call, minister

Like myself it seems the minister has in the past taken a look at T and F as evidenced by the existence of old and barely used accounts and had made the right decision, just as I did with Myspace, Geocities and other failed platforms. And why just mention T&F what about the hundreds of others some of which may indeed turn out to have a future? Is the minister in fact an avid user of LinkedIn, G+, runs a blog or prefers some other communication channel?

The problem here is those T&F users too lazy to grasp the concept that there may be other valid communications channels. If the minister caves in to them THEN Persson loses my respect. (And I suspect that like many other celeb/politicos the T&F accounts will be serviced by assistants anyway).

Some uneducated reasoning...

The ejected waste we can see looks far less than the volume of the hole.

The distribution of the waste doesn't look much like that left over from an explosion, it's all very close to the hole. So try this for a hypothesis:

Forget about explosions, a relatively slow acting underground force has forced a body of ice to move upwards pushing aside the topsoil. Once exposed to warmer temperature the ice has melted leaving the lake at the bottom (and doubtless some water escaped hence the loss of volume). The "missing" material from the hole is just ice.

Perhaps it was historically a lake, not unlike some of those others in the area but froze and became covered in topsoil but recently something has caused the ice of that frozen lake to move upward.

Either that or when the aliens landed they needed a source of water so they dug a well.