Posts by Emmett Jenner

Shambolic search for new head of EU privacy watchdog halted

Abolish the EU

...it would be easier and cheaper.

Greedy Sky admits: We crippled broadband with TOO MANY users

@ac

I don't think that's the point. Corporates never guarantee anything or include anything in their T&Cs which would actually help the customer. Just a load of ar55 covering double-speak. In the case of these Sky customers they had something which was working as they expected... then service dropped off a cliff. Just because T&Cs say it's ok for Sky to offer crap service... does not mean it is ok.

Incidently, just realised I have Be There at home... it works fine... did not know Sky was about to buy them?

business package

Naa. Got BT's business package and they still give you all the same grief you'd normally get as a residential customer. If you want tech support they put you through to India. My business address is directly opposite the BT exchange where all the engineers keep their vans. It would have taken them longer to drive over than to walk. Still took them 29.5 days to come and install the analogue line for the broadband to go on. They disconnected me twice for alleged failed direct debits and on both occasions wouldn't reconnect me for 29.5 days... that was until I shouted at them. The connection goes down occasionally and isn't even that fast despite being connected to the first cabinet right next to their exchange. Zen were better when I used to use them. It was just because BT disconnected my analogue line so I had to switch to BT to get my internet back within 5 days instead of the 29.5 days it would have taken for Zen to get BT to reconnect my line. In other words they stole my business from Zen by disconnecting me and then offering a solution of ‘why do you get a BT account’ – Not that I think Sky would be better. Zen have been good whenever I have used them. Not a bad word to say.

Trust the cloud with my PRECIOUS? You gotta be joking

there was an ISP a few years ago where one of their junior technicians replaced a failed hard disk and then rebuilt the logical drive based on the contents of the replacement blank disk. This was the only copy of the customer data. I think it was Plusnet or someone like that. Can't remember now.

This is the sort of situation their system wasn't designed to compensate for and so the failure was unforseen. A backup would have helped a bit but would not have recovered everything if they had had one.

BT: Olympics cyber attackers were amateurs

Surprised

Surprised that hacking the olympics wasn't a more popular venture? I'm not. Don't think the olympics was very interesting to a majority of the population.... despite the hype.

Is that a truncheon in your trousers, officer, or ... an antenna, you say?

Re: The European Union

I did say it could be achieved via international cooperation.

The European Union

I don't like them... so in my opinion the wrong vehicle to deliver this project. It shows something good can come from cooperation of individual nations though. We could achieve this as a separate project. Faster and for less cost.

BBC Watchdog crew sink teeth into dodgy PC repair shops

Don't forget. It does cost £120.00 to run a company in the UK that sends technicians out to swap a jumper switch on an old mans' computer. Out of that £120.00 you have business rates, salaries for the office staff, salaries for the technician, corporation tax, rent for the office, costs for the phones, mobile phones and internet connections, office equipment, technicians equipment, insurance, a van, fuel, electricity, water, a sink in the kitchen. When the total cost of doing that job is taken into account it does cost a lot more than anyone would expect. Then you have the problem of whether or not the old geeza would pay up when you spent 5 minutes on site and asked for £120.00 - see the problem. The firm has massive costs required to operate. The customers will not pay massive prices for small jobs. Somethings got to give somewhere. It is wrong for them to lie and cheat their customers but there aren't many alternatives.

iPad mini to go on sale in one month?

What is the point of renaming the iPad to iPad 'maxi' after an iPad 'mini' comes out. We're getting close to the end of the year now and I've read a lot of crap sentences. That ranks pretty high on the craptograph. My mum could come up with better story-padding than that.

Beached whale on Suffolk coast - Reader snap

Amazing creatures.

Graun Aid: Don't They Know It's Christmas 2.0?

Yeah, but...

Not that I support this but the warped view on this sort of thing is that if it is for the 'greater good' and somebody with superior moral judgement (like a guardian hack) decides this is for the 'greater good' then it is perfectly reasonable to have a tax for it. Like supporting government efforts to provide shelters for homless people. Your not homeless but it's for the 'greater good' so pay up. It's no wonder the Guardian hate the free market. It does not treat them well. It's fair though, the free market hates the Guardian too.

Dixons: We had a good summer, though southern Europe was a drag

PC World is for stupid people. They have to have a different kind of shop and that's pretty much the end of it. Stupid people have their own kinds of food(all from Iceland), their own kinds of TV (Dancing on Ice), their own music (Beyoncé), their own kind of cars (Peugeot's) their own kind of clothes (tracksuits) and so on. If they want a computer, where do they go... PC World. The annoying bit is that they tempt in techies with their long opening hours and handy locations... when you get there you find a desolate wasteland with one or two really highly priced obsolete products which have already been returned faulty once.

It's time to burn the schedules and seize control of OUR TVs

Re: perhaps when my line speed is >=1mb

I pity you. Real shame. I've been using VOD for years.

As someone mentioned earlier, being able to get around having to watch adverts is a godsend. I'm not too bothered by one advert at the begining of a clip like when you watch YouTube but the rampant brain-washing-cram-cram-cram rubbish you have to put up with on some of the freeview channels really drives me crazy. Reliability would be nice to have as well. So many of these modern devices crash or fail to function properly and there's no real mark of quality you can trust as all the boxes are more-or-less the same sort of china quality.

New Nokia Lumia mobes fail to inspire investors

I have a wp7 HTC handset and it is the best phone I've owned so far. Other notable mentiones go to Sony-Ericsson P800 and Sony CMD-Z5 - I just think phones which work well for me always have several common traits, some hardware related and some software. One of the worst phones I owned was a Samsung (can't remember the model now) I left it on a train by accident and did not replace it with another Samsung. To be completely honest the HTC does reboot itself occassionally but this has never happened when I have been using it, when it is sitting on the desk I catch it out the corner of my eye and it does not happen very often - once every couple of months. As for people not developing apps for WP7 - total hs, My downloaded apps are Adobe Reader, audio recorder (to turn the phone into a dictaphone) a RDP app for remote controlling computers, a weather app, sky news app and a newswire app which feeds news in from all the newspapers and networks. There hasn't been an app I can't get so far. I will buy another windows phone and with Nokia's good reputation for hardware a Lumia might be tempting next time. I work in IT consultancy and our main customer uses HTCs, Lumias and Blackberrys. I have setup 4 Nokia Lumia's this week already.

Nokia CEO: No shift from Windows Phone

The windows 7 phones are actually good. The previous windows phones were poor. I'm expecting windows 8 phones to be an upgrade over 7. I've used an iPhone as well and the Windows phone is much easier to use and configure. Will be buying another windows phone at the end of my contract next year.

On another note, if they want to know why phone sales are down they've got to look towards these phone companies and their two year contracts. Of course handset sales are going to fall if people move from 12-months to 18-months to 24-months...

Tesla takes Top Gear test to task

Six of One, Half-a-dozen of the Other...?

I reckon. I don't believe 'simple fuse failure' - Fuses always fail for a reason and the solution isn't ever to install a new fuse. Perhaps if the fuse rating was too low in the first place... then yes, replace the fuse because it is tripping out from bad circuit design. Or if you find a short-circuit somewhere then fix the problem and then replace the fuse. I guess what I'm trying to say... a fuse blowing is the symptom and not the cause. When would it be a good time for a fuse in the braking system to fail anyway?

Clarkson said a lot of good things about their new car and I was fairly impressed. The price is high so nobody will be able to afford to buy one. But in theory it is great.

I would say any attempt to sue the BBC or TopGear for a bad review would indicate a serious error of judgment on the part of Tesla. They have no right to expect a perfect review of their product.

UK launches major road signage review

New sign?

Pot-hole Ahead

Google tells Congress it's not Phorm

Alternate

I like to load www.ask.co.uk as my default homepage as I feel it helps stop Google being the only search engine. You could do similar and use Yahoo or someone like that. Ask is similar to Google in that the front page does not take an hour and a half to load so it is a good homepage. I normally use google but set Ask as my homepage and load that every time I open my browser.

I don't want privacy issues to have an impact on my life but I feel this applies just as much in respect of going out of my way to avoid handing over details as it does with my data being handed over without my control.

This is really about the government taking control of the Internet.

RE- perhaps the EU should regulate... why do you think ISP's and other Internet organisations go to all the trouble of collecting your data in the first place? Are they trying to run a profit making company and is it free for them to collect and store your data and to buy and write and manage all of the software and to run all the datacentres required to support all of this data collection... I think not... so I conclude that the snooping is a result of regulation and is not going to be solved by additional regulation unless that regulation simply says that no data collecting facilities may exist anywhere on the Internet and that the only data collected must be handed over by the individual at the time of entry and with the users knowledge and consent. That will never happen.

I don't support the idea of 'nothing to hide, so why not' - mistakes will happen. You will be locked up for a crime you did not commit. You will lose your job, your wife, your home and your children while men from the Government probe your life looking for evidence to bang you up. If you are detained without notice and without charge then this scenario is entirely possible. If you really have nothing to hide then it will be assumed that you are trying to hide something and that you have deliberately covered your tracks. It will take them longer to investigate.

90mph police chief cops 42-day ban

@ alan

Why do you automatically assume all of the crashes you've seen in your many years of driving were all caused by speed? Obviously it's impossible to have an accident while you're sitting still (let's just be clear - a road traffic accident and not the other kind of accident- because let's face it; you're at least 61 so we can't rule-out the possibility of a stationary trouser accident at the traffic lights) so it's a fact that speed is a factor in every road traffic accident... But why must speed be the only cause? or the first cause? or the most significant cause... Personally I don't put the speed of the travelling cars at the top of the list of causes and I don’t think it deserves the attention it gets in this country. Especially when we're talking about the danger of any speed over 50mph anyway. Two cars hitting each other head-on at 50mph is a 100-hundred-mile-per-hour accident and you'd be lucky to survive. Likewise hitting a stationary object, pedestrian, motorcyclist, child, animal, ect, ect... is almost certainly going to involve some death.

As you explained to that anonymous coward above (not that I’m taking sides or anything!) you said you never speed you can't really comment on what I'm about to say so I speak freely and without fear and with experience... things don't start to get out of control in a typical family car until you've passed something like 110mph. When you're up at 130, 140 or 150 mph in a standard road-going car the car does not handle well and your reactions aren't really fast enough to be able to cope with anything unexpected. I've driven on many race tracks and the German autobahns and I know how speed feels. I have also passed the test with the IAM so I also know what it's like to drive at 29.5mph in a 30-limit with a pile of traffic sitting behind you itching to overtake.

So I don't think you make a valid point.

Speed in itself is not the issue. It is the inappropriate application of speed in the wrong place at the wrong time. Consider the situation of a country lane with a national speed-limit (i.e. 60mph on a single carriageway) Would it be appropriate to travel at 60mph at night in the rain on a twisty narrow country lane with which you are un familiar? No - of course it wouldn't!! Under those circumstances the driver is allowed to travel at 60mph if he or she believes it is safe to do so but anyone who knows how to drive would not be so foolish! Likewise, if you are travelling on a dry, deserted, well-illuminated 4-lane motorway at 3:30am is 70mph the best speed to travel at? I think not!