Posts by CM

5G masts will be strapped to lampposts and traffic lights – once £4m project figures out who owns them

When did radio antennas become "masts"? A "mast" stuck to a lamp post?

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

.. and universities' fees all ramped to the max £9k

Robot cars will kill London jobs – but only from 2030, say politicans

Re: A lot of 'hot air'

> Then they'll expand it back into Kensington and Chelsea

The current bloke has bigger plans: out to the North & South Circs. Call the whole thing "ultra" low emission even though the current cars that'll be allowed in emit more than the oldest ones. And the black cabs, pollutants all, get a free pass.

Security man Krebs' website DDoS was powered by hacked Internet of Things botnet

Akami?

Surprised at Akami. The world knows their limit now. They should have kept him onboard even if a short offline of the host was done to shut down the attack.

Uber is killing off iconic black cabs, warns Zac Goldsmith

> isn't Mr Goldsmith a member of that party who are apparently all about the free market and competition and such?

Such as expanding the very successful busy local airport?

How Music Got Free and Creatocracy

On a theme

So, let's pirate this book and maintain the galaxy's new equilibrium :-)

Paper driving licence death day: DVLA website is still TITSUP

On the plus plus side, the PDF is easy to edit! As some rental companies accept this, what's the point?

They can use the code to verify.. except for the http 500 internal server errors seen often this morning. The page is also clearly marked beta.

European Commish asks for rivals' moans about Booking.com

Booking.com charges 15% (a hotelier complained it jumped frrom 10%). The hotel could offer the room for less and come out ahead except for the same-price rule. That suits booking com as they know you won't do better elsewhere. Stifles other booking services who might decide to reduce their cut to 5% for example.

Hate the BlackBerry Z10 and Passport? How about this dusty old flashback instead?

I'm in an org where our territory hangs on to old BBs but the competence to administrate the BES is long lost. Regular mail failures, "desktop can't send" errors. The eye foners are smug since their mail doesn't have the extra BES failure layer.

What kills is boarding passes on ye olde BBs. Gate staff keep fondling the mini non-touch screen but it aien't gonna scroll. Luddites have non-touch stamp-sized screen.

Smartwatch sales off to a very slow start

People can't face these new watches.

Volunteers slam plans to turn Bletchley Park into 'geeky Disneyland'

Journalism note

"were furious about the Trust's plans to modernise Bletchley"

Do flag up all such uses of the m... verb. Do not use in a straight manner when it means "peddle some crap idea" or "sack volunteers" or "dumb down" :-)

EE and Voda subscribers to get 2G and 3G INSIDE the Channel Tunnel

"The companies said that from March this year their 2G and 3G mobile services will be available to customers who travel frequently on the trains" - not available to everyone but only "frequent" travellers?

The French signals are strong in their tunnel, stop ~1km before the exit. You then get UK networks but it's a pish-poor service from there to St. Panc. It would be ironic for Vody+EE to provide a good tunnel service and then the frequent drops out of the tunnel.

First the Yanks, now us: In-flight mobe use WON'T kill us all, say Eurocrats

Re: On more than expected

Guilty as charged, by accident once or twice (meeting reminders wake the phone up during take-off). If this was a real risk, the aircrew would have radio wands to find the offending items, and there'd be no trolly service for them unless they were Platinum Aluminium Plus. But staff are blasé about them. BA relaxed the landing to gate trip months ago, announcing you may now turn on.. The regular offenders were already on, others misheard "you may now" as "you may not" and glared.

Google loses Latitude in Maps app shake-up

Reputation..

Pulling something like Latitude with 30 day's notice - it'll add to the negative reputation google is working hard to earn. New goog service? Meh, better avoid it, it might be useful but vanish under my feet.

Sky asks Ofcom to unlock BT cabinets

Crowded streets

The old greenie box gains a twin for the FTTC gear, now Sky want to possibly bung more? Where will pedestrians walk (cyclists speed)?

There seems to be plenty of air in the tinny Virgin boxes near me. The local kids helpfully leave the doors open. How come Sky don't go for VM too? They have the infrastructure but badly need a kick up the ****

So long, Hotmail: Remaining users migrated to Outlook.com

Gurrr

Can't we arrange for automatic execution bythe most painful ways possible for anyone who babbles about "amazing journeys"? They weaken the genetic pool and are often a red alert for poison in any layer of an organisation. You know it's true.

Be sad to see Michael Palin go down but no exceptions allowed.

Waterstones stores surrender to Amazonian invaders

Re: Beating browsing proper bookshop

The paper/printing side of publishing is a tiny part of the costs. Pulping trees, printing have been ground down to a fraction of the total. Authors, staff, glitzy PR and big cheeses make up the bulk. An author did a breakdown of total costs on his web site if I could find the URL. Hector takes his unworked-for 1/5th for ebooks too.

New Oyster online service goes live at TfL

Missing a trick

The usage is similar to before, what is missing is any way to report or rectify faults such as the one I suffered where a transfer at LVic was treated as a brand new journey. Slog it to the call centre to fix. Some peeps have said they can email these in but it's never worked for me - /dev/null

FAA mulls scrapping in-flight iPad, Kindle ban

Hardbacks ok

Hard heavy objects? No, otherwise that Gideons bible you nicked from the hotel would be banned during take off/landing, in favour of $pulp.

I don't mind the no-lekky objects except when they force a too long off time. Many airlines have a release crew from seats beep when we're supposed to stay belted, said crew are busy firing up the sales carts full of dangerous liquids (bad for livers too!). Some like KLM release us quickly. some like that no longer lowcost lowcost lot keep us pinned in tiny seats for far too long.

Two UK airports scrap IRIS eye-scanners

It's been dying for a while

With a new passport it took me ages to (unnecessarily) re-register my eyes. The LHR and LGW offices were regularly closed during their posted hours. Why bother now when they have newer machines that use the pp's chip.. except that this is a 2 stage process whereas the eyeballs were ready for a 1 phase check.

You could often tell who was going to be trouble in the Iris booth - if they wiggled their arses and bobbed around, it was going to go Sorry.. and throw the perp back. Back into where? In LHR the rejects faced the non-EU "come when _we_ say so" queue.

Chrome beta promises super-fast URL loads

Data chewing

How much would pre-fetching on chance add to the costs if paying per MB? In other words, how about a skinny mode where slurping can be turned off.

It's time to end the Windows Wait

SSD destroyer?

Our Sales chum(p)s all have fancy smancy SSDs but the co. inflicts a disk encryption on laptops. Result is a write-everywhere layer of bad software which dramatically reduces the lifespan of SSDs.

EC parades common phone charger

Not all mobs

Why do some of the latest Blackberries sport a squashed mini USB socket when the earlier ones were standard mini USB? The EC should stash the Champers until all vendors play ball.

Ofcom proposes UK phone numbers prefix re-org

ofCon

Notice how they intend to keep some premium rate numbers (ones where you are overcharged, rates above the comms cost) but describe them as "business rates". The name predetermines the policy. The disadvantage to the punter is that these codes allow queueing, pay to hear some plinkety plink because your call is imporant to us, so why don't you answer it then? Shove those onto 09 for the same price and queueing would be banned.

saynoto0870 will live on.

Ofcom to TalkTalk, Tiscali: Stop over-billing

Stop.. or else

The problem is that they are a mess. I dropped Pipex in 2007, along in 2010 comes Talktalk with an "overdue" bill and a threat to disconnect. They duely "disconnected" nothing, sent a letter, followed by a Welcome To pack. Such incompetence beggars belief (worse than Virgin with their Dear Occupier letters offering a non-existant digital service).

Don't waste your time with call centres, local numbers or not. Use letters, build up a stack of evidence, be ready to take legal action. The official busybodies will take their sweet time and "threaten" but rarely deliver.

Daily Mail promotes 'the new Betamax'

It's not free!

Even if you assume you can get the tokens from a mate, they want £21 for postage, or £46 for that and a charger or case. And peeps eager for "priority" delivery can call a premium rate number (75pee from a BT line per min, poss 2 mins) to get a code to jump the queue or you might have to wait up to 57 days from the end of this token run.

It has s-c-a-m written all over it, apart from having to buy a paper you would not want to park your budgie on top of (I sneaked a read, no real money was spent on this research). I'd clout them on the head for this Ryanair-like non-free deal, after which you end up with boiling mud for audio.

Stephen Fry's truly terrible mistake

He has form

Those Direct Line ads. He purrs that you have to go to their site because DL quotes are not available on the consolidators, as if this is a *good* thing! That lost it for me. Plugging old valve radios, sorry, DAB with its wide lapel and bell-bottom codecs and complimentary boiling mud is more dosh to his account, and the last desperate attempt by a gov-subsidised sinking industry.

Handing in good radios as an "amnesty", what next? How failed can Marketing be?

UK e-Borders scheme thrown into confusion by EU rules

=CM=

This situation is confusing: Spain collects API so why can they continue to do so? Freedom of travel in the EU is disrupted by the UKBA and Spain, 1 gets clouted (rightly so). Isn't it time to push Schengen further to the refuseniks.

Ryanair dial into mid-air mobile calls

How they'll do it..

Each call will be £2/min, regularly interrupted by a "have you bought your Ryanair bingo card yet?" plug. Slip the harassed stewardess a £10 and she'll bump off one of callers 1-6 to let you make a all. The next person's £10 will bump your call off.

Cue air rage..

TSA says 'checkpoint friendly' laptop bags on the way

Darn laptops

Some of the London airports now want the laptop left in its bag. Their x-ray machines can see through the laptop to what they consider to be more important items to check. That means - from personal experience, in particular anything that shows up as a long thin metallic line: mini printers, mini scanners get extra attention. This move is smarter, even though the space left by a removed laptop can hold a lot of other items and allow me to bring the equivalent of 2 bags through.

Some airports = Heathrow & Gatwick, not Luton (hell) or Stansted. The random acts of senseless belt/shoe removal, or not, continue.

Software glitch hits Heathrow T4 baggage system

Can't wait for T5

I was at T4 yesterday but luckily using KLM. The BA announements were like an anti-advertisement for the airline: sod off if you're not biz class and rebook online at home, ta muchly. Now if T5 kicks off with a few glitches, there's your clue on how well it'll be handled.

Screwing transfer passengers should see all that business finallly clear off to CDG and AMS. No need for a third runway.