* Posts by Conor Turton

130 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2008

London cabbies to offer EVEN WORSE service in protest against Uber

Conor Turton

"I wonder what % of their takings the average cabbie actually declares for tax purpose? hhmmm..."

All of them other than tips as they're recorded by the meter.

Conor Turton

Re: Change is not fair!

"Surely GPS means we dont need drivers with the "knowledge" anymore."

Actually you do. One thing that I learned over 10 years of using Satnav, half of that as a lorry driver doing 100,000 miles a year, was that it was only really any good for someone driving as a living for the "last mile" or so and that even with things like Tomtom Traffic IQ it couldn't route for certain times of the day as good as someone with knowledge of road conditions could. There were plenty of times it'd route me a way I would never ever consider given the time of day I would be at a certain point.

Satnav will 100% get you from point A to point B, that there is no doubt. Whether or not the route is the best that it could be is a different question entirely and usually the answer to that is no.

Stone the crows, Bouncer! BT defends TV recorder upgrade DELETION snafu

Conor Turton

Re: Which box?

"Which box?"

The BT Vision+ box, not the Youview ones.

eBay cops $3bn tax bill after moving its profits back onshore

Conor Turton

Explains a lot.

No wonder they're shafting sellers even more than they usually do. The new TSR rules coming into force in August punish sellers who reclaim fees when idiot buyers buy things without reading the descriptions or idiot buyers buy the wrong thing then file a "not as described" claim.

Brit IT workers are so stressed that 'TWO-THIRDS' want to quit

Conor Turton

Another quality factually correct article from The Reg....

"Many IT staff also reported working above and beyond the 48-hour week set out in the EU working time directive, which the UK is not subject to."

Err yes we are. All EU countries are.

Reg hack hacked off by iPhone 5 repair notice

Conor Turton

Still not fixed it?

This is an issue which has been on the go since the iPhone 4. Seriously its long past due that they got it sorted. When I took my son's iPhone 4S to the local Genius Bar, two other people waiting for their appointments were in for exactly the same issue.

Samsung Galaxy S5 fingerprint scanner hacked in just 4 DAYS

Conor Turton

Yet another crack that has almost no real world application.

So they have to take a photo of a perfect finger print from either the digit in question or from the screen of the phone.

Look at the screen of your phone. Tell me how many complete fingerprints you can see on it. The answer will be somewhere between zero and none because you typically use the tip of your fingers and then it gets smudged as you swipe your fingers across the screen.

Personally I'm not worried by this.

Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever

Conor Turton

Re: Head to head

"What's the migration cost of moving from XP to Windows 8?"

A lot less than Windows to Linux as you're not going to have to change all your applications.

Three's money man reveals UK mobe firms' dark pricing dealings

Conor Turton

Re: A lot of common sense there

Only applies to new customers, not existing ones on existing or renewing existing contracts.

BT demands end to Ofcom wholesale broadband subsidies for BSkyB, TalkTalk

Conor Turton

Re: LLU?

Blame Sky. All exchanges are open to any provider.

Conor Turton

Re: When BT can...

They could but they're not allowed to by OFCOM.

Conor Turton

Re: As much as I hate to say this....

Putting a few network cards in a rack in a BT Exchange is hardly investing in infrastructure anywhere near the level BT have.

Conor Turton

Re: As much as I hate to say this....

Except BTs network was originally provided by the tax payer.

That has long since been retired and replaced. The original network provided by the tax payer was old electromechanical exchanges, long since replaced, mechanical phone boxes long since replaced and copper cabling virtually all replaced barring the odd "pole to property."

Broadband didn't exist when BT was privatised and all of Openreach's network which OFCOM applied the limits to were entirely funded by the privatised BT so your argument about the original provision is irrelevant.

Yet another Brit mobe tower borg: Three and EE ink network-sharing deal

Conor Turton

Re: different frequencies

Actually at VHF and above they're all line of sight and the operator who gets the highest spot on the tower gets the best coverage.

BSkyB sees first half pre-tax profit tumble as sales climb

Conor Turton

"Sky signal around my parts is utter pants, as is anything via aerial."

Sky uses satellites so as long as you're within its footprint and with nothing in the line of sight you should have no problem receiving it. The only people who would get a poor signal are those living outside of the UK on the fringe areas of coverage.

Plusnet is working on a network-level filter to block pirate sites

Conor Turton

All about the bandwidth.

The piraters are the biggest users of bandwidth and bandwidth is Plusnets biggest expense so it makes sense to them as a network to reduce piracy over their network as much as possible.

You can't price a service at the price they do if you have everyone on it downloading 500GB a month and still want to provide a usable service during peak hours.

Snowden to warn Brits on Xmas telly: Your children will NEVER have privacy

Conor Turton

Yawn

We grew up in the cold war and with the IRA. Tell us something we don't know.....

Three offers free US roaming, confirms stealth 4G rollout

Conor Turton

Re: 3 are great...

"Getting a signal anywhere but outside in a built up area is ridiculous."

As someone who has travelled all over the UK as a truck driver, lives in a county one and a half times as large as the inner M25 with 1/20th the population of London and been on Three for several years I can categorically say your claim is rubbish.

Conor Turton

Re: York

Weaverthorpe and Wold Newton are served by the tower a friend of mine has a load of repeater gear on at Octon. Hope they've improved the interconnect to the site because on Orange on 3G it took 10 minutes to load google.com

Murdoch stands between your kids and filth with BSkyB network-level SHIELD

Conor Turton
FAIL

El-Reg reporting at its finest I see.

I see they craftily cut the image to hide the Custom button as well as the reasonably sized Off option at the bottom of the page assuming they bothered to go that far.

Here's what YOU WON'T be able to do with your PlayStation 4

Conor Turton

Re: BetaMax comparison hardly fair...

"Do you really want to knacker an expensive games console playing legacy formats when there is a CD/DVD/BD player six inches away from the PS4 in your AV stack?"

My PS3 is my CD/DVD player as it is for many people. Many of us used the fact the current gen games consoles could play CDs and DVDs as a way to get rid of another box under the telly.

Apple's top bean counter: New spaceship HQ won't emit 'one atom of carbon'

Conor Turton

Re: For something closer to home

I can guarantee that it isn't, especially on the shortest day of the year.

Reboot the formula: F1 and FIFA tweaked for another year

Conor Turton

Author has never watched F1...

"You’ll also frequently find yourself outbraking opponents and taking three or four drivers at the first few corners of races. An unrealistic element that’s more Outrun than Formula One, and simply doesn’t gel with the sport as we know it."

That is exactly what the top 10 drivers do on a regular basis. I can only assume that the author didn't watch the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend.

Bill Gates's barbed comments pop Google's broadband balloons

Conor Turton
FAIL

Re: Intelligence!

"0) You could learn about Malaria and how to avoid catching it from the internet.

1) You could use the internet to ask for medical assistance.

2) You could use the internet to help you find the nearest clinic.

3) You could use the internet to discover how to treat malaria and acquire appropriate treatments.

"

I've not seen this much ignorance and and detachment from reality posted in four lines for quite a long time. You really do believe the internet is the answer to everything don't you?

Bloke in shed starts own DAB radio station - with Ofcom's blessing

Conor Turton

"The mask defines how square a signal must be, as radio transmissions trend towards the bell-shaped, thus spreading into neighbouring bands at their base."

Wrtten by someone with absolutely ZERO knowledge of radio communications.

Jailed LulzSec hacker Cleary coughs to child porn images, will be freed soon

Conor Turton

Re: Should be minimum sentencing guidelines for this sort of thing

Well in his case, over 40 images were of an adult having penetrative sex with a child, another considerable number a non-penetrative sex act with a child so yes that is kiddy porn.

Pttow! Ofcom kicks hams out of MoD bands

Conor Turton

Will hardly be missed

The frequencies they're wanting to move people off are barely used at all so it was inevitable that this would happen. There is very little interest in the GHz stuff other than a very small group of people and even fewer people using it - its not cheap with even a short 3ft patch lead setting you back £10. In my county I doubt the number of active users is barely more than low double digits in number. The Amateur TV repeater on 2.3-2.4GHz has been off the air for some time.

If you don't use it, you lose it and the 13cm and 23cm bands are a perfect example of this.

So you won a 4G licence. The Freeview interference squad wants a word

Conor Turton

Re: What?

The power quoted for transmitters is peak power. The nature of analogue signals is that the peak is rarely reached, and the average power is 5 or 10 times lower than the peak.

Oh dear. The analogue TV signals were FM `as far as I remember - the audio certainly was. As such they were transmitting at maximum power all of the time. If they were AM you would have a point as that varies the amplitude of the signal but they weren't so you're wrong.

Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus

Conor Turton

They already existed but weren't cheap

They already existed. We had the Dell Latitude D400 series, the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X series. However they' weren't cheap being typically £1200+.

But you can buy them used today for a little over 1/10th of that price. Because so many were used in business there are many on the used market that probably haven't been used at all.

I use a 2007 Dell Latitude D430 I use which cost me £100 to buy and £60 to upgrade to SSD. Core 2 Duo 1.33GHz ULV CPU, 12.1" 1280x800 screen, 64GB SSD. Various capacity batteries available including ones that will do all day. A 5200mAh battery can be bought for under £15 and will easily do 5+hrs.

Greedy Sky admits: We crippled broadband with TOO MANY users

Conor Turton

Never had anything other than virtually full throughput in the 18 months I've been with them. Even signed up to FTTC just before Xmas.

RIM adds 15,000 new BlackBerry 10 apps in one weekend

Conor Turton

Blackberry Playbooks bargain of the year??

All of a sudden those £120 Blackberry Playbooks are starting to look awfully attractive especially as RIM OS 10 is going to have even greater Android compatibility.

The LINUX TABLET IS THE FUTURE - and it always will be

Conor Turton

Asus Transformer Prime from a hardware point of view seems to have it about right. A tweak of that so you can choose to boot into Android or Linux but with both having common shared folders for user files would be great. Even better if you could get it to auto switch from Android to Linux when you attached the keyboard.

Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support

Conor Turton

Re: At that speed Windows 3.1 did not disgrace itself.

"It's amazing how little you can get on a 40MB hard disk, when it's already half full of DOS and Windows 3.1."

HAHA. I remember those days. When Doom came out I had a choice of having Windows or Doom on so I got very good at installing Windows. I actually still have that 40MB Hard drive. I tried killing it once by driving over it in a 38 tonne lorry several times but it lived and worked perfectly. They dont build them like that any more.

White Van Man could become a rolling radio relay

Conor Turton

Re: Why bother putting the relays on vehicles?

Exactly. I have a VHF repeater on a tower on a very high hill. I can talk through that repeater from 30 miles away with a 5 watt handheld radio using the stock rubber duck antenna. That repeater which itself is using only 5 watts can be heard from nearly 60 miles away.

Conor Turton
FAIL

Nothing to see here...

So they've discovered what amateur radio users and broadcasters have known for nearly a century? Why the hell did they think that repeaters and TV transmitters are put up on the highest hills in an area?

And how much money did they spend investigating something they could've got the answer for by walking into their local amateur radio club and asking even a newly qualified amateur?

Windows 8 fails to revive world CPU biz

Conor Turton

Re: good enough

This. My parents are running a Pentium 4 3.0D Compaq business desktop with 2GB RAM/80GB HDD I bought from an IT auction for £30 a couple of years ago. I shoved Windows 7 on it this year. For what they use it for it is more than fast enough.

Bomb threat lobbed at Finnish anti-piracy squad

Conor Turton
FAIL

Oh dear.

This is what happens when you let immature morons have access to the internet. They need to grow the hell up.

Sites knocked offline by OpenDNS freeze on Google

Conor Turton
Thumb Up

Working properly then....

"The fact the issue popped up suddenly on Wednesday would suggest that engineers at Google had been fiddling with SSL certificates"

I wondered why a site I use went offline for a few hours...

So OpenDNS system saw the SSL certificates as potentially dodgy and took action to protect its users from sites using SSL certificates it didn't see as authentic? I'd call that proof that it is doing what it says on the tin and its one of the reasons I use OpenDNS.

Better sunspot forecasts on the way

Conor Turton
FAIL

I wouldn't be worried

I am an amateur radio op. The general concensus of this solar cycle is "nothing to see here, please move along". It is absolutely abysmal with the numbers barely higher than they've been for the past 3 years and activity on the HF frequencies remaining low. Considering we're nearly at the maximum you should be able to talk to someone thousands of miles away on a wet piece of string by now.

Natty Narwahl: Ubuntu marine mammal not fully evolved

Conor Turton
FAIL

This is why I stick to LTS

I worked out ages ago that the only way to get the best out of Ubuntu is to stick to the LTS. All other interim releases are rushed out to meet what I feel is a stupid deadline. I treat them in effect as BETAs for the next LTS release.

As for the comments about apeing Mac OS X, I would say Gnome did that more than Unity and Unity is some kind of bastard child of Mac OS X and Windows 7 UI elements whilst adding things in an attempt to make it look like it isn't.

Also there's a well reported power management issue for both desktops and laptops which still isn't fixed as its a mainstream kernel issue.

Its a shame that with every new release of Ubuntu they always seem to break something important which worked before.

Hacker pierces hardware firewalls with web page

Conor Turton
FAIL

FAIL

Tested it on a Belkin. Belkins are utter shite so it comes as no surprise that it caved in so easily.

Nokia jacks up Apple patent complaint

Conor Turton
FAIL

I think Apple got this bit wrong..

"Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours." - Err I think that Apple will find that Nokia had smartphones with touch screen interfaces long before Apple did. As for inventing technologies instead of stealing them, thats rich coming from a company that stole the GUI from Xerox...

GSHP: The green tech even carbon sceptics will like

Conor Turton
FAIL

Money saving my arse...

Difference between gas and gshp is £190 a year. So say it costs you the least amount for the installation. Assuming no repairs whatsoever, it'd take THIRTY FIVE YEARS to break even compared to running gas. If you're looking at the top end of the installation cost, you are looking at a SEVENTY YEAR period before breaking even. Obviously these are variable depending on the cost of gas. You're still going to need a gas boiler anyway to top up what it can't supply. And as the climate changes, are you actually even going to need it?

Yet another "money saving" idea pumped by the eco-mentalists which doesn't actually save money.

Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy

Conor Turton
FAIL

Anyone told Google that the Patriot Act...

"we must remember that in the United States, we are all subject to the Patriot Act"

I'm not in the USA. The Patriot Act has no meaning, relevence or ruling over me. Surely a company such as Google should be aware that they're accessible worldwide?

Wall-punching Brit gamer foams (milk) at the mouth

Conor Turton
FAIL

Here's a fiver....

GO BUY A LIFE. Its a game FFS. What a bell end. 17 hours straight probably because he's got no mates and no bird and TBH if that's what the whiney little runt is like, he won't be getting any anytime soon.

What a dick.

Firefox nabs 30 million users in eight weeks

Conor Turton
Thumb Down

I smell a rat

Multiply that figure by three for people not browsing every day? Surely they'd be able to do a count up of each unique install. If not, how do they know the orginal ten million is accurate?

In short, as much as I love Firefox, this smacks of the same kind of bullshit bigging up of numbers that Sony did for the PS3.

Former FBI agent slams defence tactics in McKinnon case

Conor Turton

Two faced....

Somehow I doubt Mr. Gibson is all for allowing his fellow countrymen to be extradicted to a foreign country to face trial for an offence actually committed on US soil.

IT contractors aghast as FSA evicts self-cert mortgages

Conor Turton

Where is the problem?

I'm self employed and have accounts going back 3 years and thus can prove my income.

Self certification is saying that you earn £xxxxxx without providing any proof. Anyone who is self employed will have accounts and these count as proof.

For those newly self employed without accounts, how is that any different from someone who has just started a job? An employed person can be sacked without any reason given for the first 12 months of a new job so a bank wouldn't take that job into account until you'd been there over a year and as a self employed person, you'd have a set of accounts after 12 months anyway.

Where's the problem other than people not being able to lie about their income and those fiddling their books getting screwed?

Another non-story.

Database containing 1.8m UK postcode locations leaks online

Conor Turton

PLEASE....

Can someone please give the file to Tomtom so that they might actually have postcodes from houses built in the last 5 years?

US Spec Ops operates psywar websites targeted at UK

Conor Turton
FAIL

Working well...

Seems to be working well for them apart from the fact that they're still hated, the "war on terror" is still regarded as a waste of time and that we're still quite happy with our NHS compared to a US based system.