Posts by Joe Montana 818 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2007
Most importantly, because you often have no control over incoming calls.
Caller ID can be spoofed, and many companies withhold their number anyway, so you have no idea who is calling. Why should people pay to receive nuisance calls? It's annoying enough to receive them anyway, but to get a bill for it would be completely ridiculous.
And it also gives malicious people the capability to cause you expense.
When a company uses a kickback number like this, they gain a financial incentive for keeping you on hold as long as possible. Some companies will actually work out the optimal length of time to keep someone on hold, balancing the revenue they make against the irritation of the customer.
Conversely, it's very rare to be kept on hold when calling an 0800 number, as the cost is reversed.
I don't think companies should be able to profit from inbound calls, unless they are offering a specific service directly related to the line (eg dialup access or chat lines etc)... And ALL such services should be regulated just like the higher rate 09xx numbers are currently.
It's completely immoral for a company to profit from keeping you waiting on hold...
To add my own experiences...
If you want to contact many insurance companies about anything to do with your policy, they expect you to call an 0870 number, yesinsurance are particularly bad, they will auto renew your policy unless you pay to call them and spend quite some time on hold before telling them you don't want it renewed...
And Barclays, despite offering an 0800 complaints line, will call you back to discuss the complaint, but if you don't answer they will leave a voicemail asking you to call an 0870 number... Paying for the privilege of complaining? Ridiculous...
If you don't call back, the complaint is simply discarded.
Just reading the phrase:
"Causing a loss to the company or another party (e.g. Supplier)"
Merely by leaving you could cause a loss to the company, if you were any good at your job then the company loses now that they no longer have your services...
It's also quite easy for vindictive bosses to use any excuse to put someone they don't like on the register, it's not uncommon for people to be extremely angry at losing staff, especially to a competitor.
For actual criminal acts, we already have the criminal record system... If you catch someone on CCTV stealing from the cash register, go to the police... That way future employers can check the police criminal records database, and the accusation will be proven by their conviction.
Drive cases seem to be made of various materials, some are aluminium and some are steel, usually older ones.
Thermite is very good for destroying drives tho, and very cheap.
http://www.ev4.org/thermite/ contains a few pictures and a very low quality video of the aftermath of 3 hard drives being thermited. One steel cases 9GB IDE drive, one aluminium cased 4GB IDE drive and one 2.5" 30GB laptop drive...
The 4GB drive melted to a pool of liquid that was stirrable with a stick for several minutes afterwards...
The laptop drive seemed to completely disappear, i assume it was completely melted and merged with the other drive.
The steel one stood up a lot better, and just had about 1/4 of the drive left as a stub while the rest had been melted away.
Some of the magnets were still identifiable after the melting, i guess we should have used more thermite!
For anyone who's interested, the components of thermite are readily available on ebay.
This is all rather hypocritical, from a company coming out with increasingly bloated software that subsequently requires ever more powerful hardware to run.
Most people do the same things on their computers today as they did 10 years ago, and theyre not getting done any quicker, just using massively more resources to run ever more bloated software written in higher level languages with more performance killing layers of abstraction.
Instead, you could have small efficient software - like people had to write years ago, running on systems with equivalent performance to a few years ago (which was more than adequate at the time) but produced with modern manufacturing processes to consume a fraction of the power.
Modern cellphones are already far more powerful than full sized computers of a few years ago, there's no reason why the workings of a cellphone couldn't drive a full size display and run everything the average user needs.
For that matter, why not connect a cellphone to a bluetooth keyboard and an external monitor, and you can carry your computer with you wherever you go.
The biggest problem on windows and osx is the lack of a centralised update mechanism...
There's a built in updater, but it's only for the core os, and osx's updater is only for apple apps.
Ubuntu has a much better system, a single centralised updater that not only has a huge selection of packages by default, but third party developers can register their own repositories when you install an app, so they will get updated automatically in the same place too.
By contrast on windows and osx, each vendor has to make their own update procedure, either making people do it manually (which they wont, resulting in loads of security holes) or running a background process to do it for them (which really slows the machine down once you have a lot of them running).
Currently, Power processors are out of reach of the mass market...
X86 systems are far cheaper and more widely available, with a wider range of third party peripheral support.
IBM need to come out with a lower end set of power-based systems, that people can buy cheaply. If their price/performance ratio is comparable to or better than x86 then enthusiasts and businesses will consider them for linux deployments at least.
It's obviously possible to produce the chips at an affordable price point, all the major games consoles run power derived processors these days.
Otherwise, very few people ever get the chance to try power, third party apps never get ported to / tested on them, howto guides never consider them etc... IA64 is in the same boat, too expensive for enthusiasts to try.
If PPC systems were price/performance competitive with x86, my next linux system would probably be PPC.
The problem is single domains (gmail.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com) with millions of legitimate users. Because of this, it's hard to backlist those domains without affecting those legitimate users. Not only that, but the shear number of users means that users will often have spam-looking usernames, like joebloggs432432.
The world needs to cut down on free mass used email providers, and go back to the days when you got an account where you worked/studied, or from your isp, or even bought your own domain and had it hosted (very cheap these days, and gives you some individuality). Lots of educational establishments used to give out lifetime email accounts, that seems to be less common now as they have to pay per user licensing costs for proprietary email servers like exchange.
Even worse is people using free email providers for business email, how can you take a company seriously when they have companyname43242@hotmail.com painted on the side of their van? Registering their own domain would have been cheaper than paying someone to paint their van.
I can already download movies, using bittorrent...
I can already take flash cards or portable hard drives to a market stall and have a guy copy movies onto them...
Yes, this is much more convenient to carry around than physical media, I can put a stack of movies on my laptop when i'm working away from home, and i can carry a much smaller laptop with no optical drive.
The pirates already realise this, and have already provided customers what they want. Gone are the days when pirate copies are poor quality and inferior to the legit media. Today, pirated media can be a direct digital copy at exactly the same quality, while offering other value-add features that legitimate media lacks (no drm, downloads, device portability, no commercials, no unskippable fbi warnings or commercials)
Couples like this are very selfish in their desire to have kids, they don't think about what it will be like for a young child growing up with a transexual parent..
Kids can be very cruel, and as soon as other schoolkids get wind of the situation, this child is in for a very unpleasant schooling.
//The problem was that people could keep the downloads and share them around the world. Being a license payer does not entitle you to take DVDs from the BBC Shop and send copies of them to your mates - exactly what people were effectively doing with the iPhone hack.
And this is different from people with a VCR recording the TV signal as it's broadcast? Or how about using a TV card in a computer to record the digital broadcast stream to a file in the standard MPEG2 format...
As it stands, if i miss a show i will simply find a torrent of it rather than using the BBC's download service. The torrents simply offer a superior service (no DRM, no platform restrictions, standard formats)... I can watch it whenever i want to, on whatever device i choose to.
Microsoft are by far and away the biggest cause of higher computer prices these days...
While the price of hardware has steadily decreased, their software has become more and more expensive.
While hardware that's a few years old, and therefore obtainable very cheaply, is more than adequate to run Linux, it cannot run the latest microsoft bloatware, and buying software from microsoft could more than double the price of the hardware.
Look at the new cheap computers becoming available, the OLPC project, the $200 PC walmart has been selling, and the Asus eeepc, all of these come with linux by default, are more than adequate for most peoples needs (certainly more than capable of allowing schoolkids to do online research) and wouldn't be able to run the latest microsoft software at a usable speed.
What the government really needs to do to achieve their goals is...
Move away from microsoft OS's and proprietary apps. By using open source apps they can save money for themselves and for the students, and as a side benefit schools can provide copies of open source apps to students.
Recycle old computers, companies throughout the compay discard thousands of computers every week, either because they schedule replacement on a regular basis, or because they are no longer powerful enough to run current bloated proprietary software. Many companies pay to get rid of these machines, and they cost money to dump/recycle. With the correct incentives these disposal companies could provide these machines to schools cheaply or free. Such computers could easily run linux, and could be provided free or cheaply to schoolkids. Free computers could be restricted to families below a certain income level or claiming benefits etc.
Introduce a national "basic" level of broadband, that is enabled by default with any phone line. Doesnt need to be anything special, maybe 64k or such. Quick enough for educational/research needs etc, and ensuring that everyone has connectivity, but faster connections would still be available to those who want more throughput. Failing that, perhaps offer a free dialup for school students, maybe even have a usage time limit or something.
Coming from the company who just released the most bloated and power hungry OS to date? Come on...
Making people throw out perfectly good machines to replace them with new more powerfull ones (lots of energy used and pollution created during manufacture, not to mention the landfill occupied by the disused machines)...
Then you have the extra power requirements from an OS that now uses far more memory, more disk space and makes much heavier use of the videocard than previous versions.
And at the end of the day, aside from a few hardcore gamers and specialist users, most people do exactly the same things on their computers that they've done for years.
We need smaller, more efficient OS's running on slower hardware produced using modern fabrication processes and using modern power management features.
A 200MHz processor built on a modern .65nm process would still be more than fast enough to do what most people need providing they went back to smaller more efficient software. And you could always use multiple cores, but have the more power hungry cores powered down when not required.
The scanner will only pick up known malware...
Antivirus packages already detect known malware, and known malware gets patched.
All this scanner will do, is give people a false sense of security as they're being attacked by new, unknown malware. If it's as profitable as it seems to sell stolen accounts, there will be plenty of people churning out new malware all the time.
Using a tool like netstumbler won't gain you anything, all it does is probe for available access points - which any OS with wireless support already does.
You won't see how many clients are connected, you won't see how much traffic is actually going back and forth and you won't see "hidden" networks at all. In short, the information you get from netstumbler will be virtually worthless.
Really, you need an app like Kismet/KisMAC which will promiscuously sniff the channels you hope to use, to see exactly what traffic is already being transmitted on those frequencies.
Microsoft and Real's DRM schemes are far more restrictive than Apple's. Apple have the burn to CD hole mentioned in the article, whereas other schemes don't even have these.
Everyone is going after Apple because they're the market leader, but the reality is other DRM schemes are even worse, and really something needs to be done about all of them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
