Posts by Trev 2 149 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
They need some better SEO people for starters. 15 years ago when I was dealing with SE rankings, the content of the page was only part of the story. As important was who linked to your site as more authoritive links were looked upon more favourably.
When I search for their main phrase all I get are articles about how you send encrypted emails, not links to products. So get listed on those pages for starters.
He wasn't working for them by this time and it doesn't say when he left (could have been years ago). Possibly recognised the victim or maybe just saw them driving out of GCHQ.
Never underestimate the ability of someone to look relatively normal when they are evil (found that out from personal experience).
That works until they suddenly discover the water, electric or other pipe is not where it should be. Unlike digging an hole, you can't immediately see the damage.
Eg: our main water pipes for the whole street and neighbouring village are on the completely opposite side of the road to where they should be. And they have been for likely 70 years.
I would have thought even the people at Now Pensions wouldn't have access to do a data dump which this sounds like. Or did someone annoy the databaee admin?
As a secind point, very the heck does a 3rd party have anything to do with pension data? Surely tuey should he able to do their own processing or is this for "data analysis" rubbish?
Pleaee tell me this isnt going to be an unsecured AWS container... again!?
Exactly - in my admittedly non scientific checks with ordinary people (ie not techies), not one of them has ever given two hoots about cookies, tracking etc.
They do however get sick of these stipid things popping up and interfering with their experience. I am a former techie, and I fully agree with them.
Can we have extensive which blocks these stupid messages!?
Honestly sounds like he had an overblown ego and figured "if they don't appreciate how brilliant my skills are and how I single handedly hold up this company then I'll show them".
Delt with plenty of people like that in all kinds of jobs - never ends well although is usually a relief for their former coworkers.
Exactly, its only "cool" until it becomes uncool and the next thing takes over. Then it becomes MySpace or Friends Reunited. Absolutely worthless.
I seem to remember some mention of the US tax payer getting a cut. Wonder what the other countries in this 5-eyes thing will think of that.
Ah well, good to see Larry wasting money.
In reply to the unasked questions, I think we can give a few answers on behalf of their boss.
- Financially sound...he can't answer that.
- Backgrounds...not allowed to say (special ops).
- Project comparisons... for gods sake don't mention Vega+
As for the switch. Its launched ontime by an established software and hardware company who know exactly what it's specs are years in advance and have the money to produce ot without begging.
I had an entire shelf of games that would run on the 16K one, although it did get a lot better when they switched to 48K admittedly. Pretty sure Hungry Horace would run on 16K.
There was even a 3D tank game, well kindof, it was 3D but with line drawings only but for the time that was impressive. Plus everytime you blew something up it had to redraw the objects exploding ...slowly...very slowly. But we had patience back then. :)
These science bods need to change the way they describe things like "cold molecules" - can't imagine anything getting dragged into a blackhole is remotely cold!
Not sure about the other bit, but wouldn't be surprised if they are split into their component parts way beyond atoms? Really can't imagine many gas molecules surviving getting too close and still intact.
That's when you send it back for repair (at your expense), although guaranteed out of warranty and thus wait 2 months and pay out about half the cost of the device in the first place while they just rumage around in the basement to find an unsold one to send you...if they don't lose it.
Of course you could buy the shiny upgraded model as we'll offer you a 10% discount, and it'll only be 25% more than the cost of repair and it'll make our sales figures look good.
Not that this is in any way part of the evil plan of mega corp. :)
Really surprised Amazon haven't contested this one especially the single click ordering patent unless it's simply cheaper not to bother. In the US at least it does seem a utility patent lasts 20 years which I think would be the type mentioned in this case. Can't find any mechanism by which it can be extended beyond that however except for the little bit of time it takes from filing to actual approval.
"A U.S. utility patent, explained above, is generally granted for 20 years from the date the patent application is filed; however, periodic fees are required to maintain the enforceability of the patent. A design patent is generally granted protection for 14 years measured from the date the design patent is granted."
https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=How-Long-Does-Patent-Trademark-or-Copyright-Protection-Last
Not sure however if Groupon is UK or US based, or maybe has a US operation?
Reading this, it sounds like there's less magic leap and more magic mushrooms being consumed if they actually believe their own hype. Either that or they are just waiting to hookup with the Scientologists and zip off to their magical universe riding on the back of a unicorn next to Tom Cruise.
They are using an identical tweet about the problem and they mention data centres in the same locations, so presumably they are the same company these days. I know Iomart went round buying up lots of hosting providers a few years ago, but don't know who bought who in this case.
On a side note, it's nice to see all the bumf from Easyspace about reliability including "Cross Connection to a number of Tier 1 carriers" - so it seems that didn't work too well. Suggests that maybe it's a config (aka upgrade just before Easter went badly wrong) issue rather than a hardware break?
Or even 56K modem with a rather dodgy phone line, then he'd have to listen to the annoying "boing boing" and cross fingers that it actually connected this time before mysteriously dropping after 20 mins...! :)
(I know only one of the 56K systems did the noises, but just make sure it's that one).
Only use i can see for this is those tablets without 3G or 4G built in, but love to see just how much coverage you'd get in the UK trying to use 4G on the go. Leave house if lucky enough to have 4G and two miles down the road it drops to 3G, then 2 and rapidly Edge. Pretty sure some Peugeots have 3G built in, but you supply the sim card...prob preferable solution.
AOL probably don't have anyone forwarding mail from say x@domain.com to y@aol.com because in my experience it takes a single AOL end user two clicks of the "spam" button for the entire forwarding server IP to be dropped into a blackhole pretty much forever. Reading lots of forums over the years, this has been happening for many years.
If mailing lists are still getting through I am *very* amazed as their policy seems to be block everything, deny it's an AOL issue and then AOL subscriber will hopefully not be clued up enough to realise they're lying.
@AC regarding blocking AOL...did that years ago and no one seemed to notice. :)
Based purely on the film Apollo 13, couldn't they have changed the angle of re-entry by a degree or two just before it ran out of fuel, thus causing it to burn up in the atmosphere much quicker? OK, not entirely scientific, but re-entry angle does seem pretty critical.
I can get the lack of support for CD's and old TVs - fair enough.
But not being able to run PS3 games or use PS3 hardware (controllers etc) sounds like a massive backward step alienating all the users who bought the previous product and would be more likely to be PS4 games and controller customers IMO,
I want to know how long they think this op is going to take. In the UK there seems to be 2 versions:
1) Have it in hospital which requires a 4 - 6 hour wait around, some surgeon who was doing a varicose veins op 10 minutes before and might know where to cut.
2) Privately (via the NHS) when in and out in 20 mins and that includes 10 mins waiting to make sure you don't have any side effects from the antithetic afterwards. Luckily had this one and he did at least 20 that afternoon.
If the latter than this is going to be an awfully short programme. As for the first poster with the massive side effects - ouch, sounds like someone pulled the tubes way too hard!
Personally I suspect this was a test by the machines to see if they could destroy humanity or at least the infrastructure and take over while we're trying to sort out the mess.
- Machine in Syria talks to machine at rouge login Twitter server and gains access to feeds.
- Rouge Twitter server sends out the tweet.
- Machines in Wall St. oblige by "doing as they're programmed" and sell, sell, sell.
- Finally the machines put everything back to normal again ready for the global version.
Of course this doesn't work against Mr & Mrs Jones sitting on their farm in Wales with pitchforks at the ready incase Skynet becomes self-aware so perhaps the machines will have to start playing "Thermonuclearwar" afterall....oh I forgot they tested that over Wales (or at least the sheep), it was called Chernobyl...!
Unless the AP password was "appassword"?
For login security, Limit Login Attempts plugin seems pretty good and you can lock people out for a long time with it. Not perfect when they're hitting from different IPs however. Still baffles me as to why the default doesn't include that.
One really dumb thing about WP is that you cant easily change the admin account name which was until recently also the default. Can't actually remember if you could select another name, but that's why so many have admin as a name. Either needs a plugin or database editing.
As for why hit Wordpress - going by a hack I saw a month ago it could work something like:
- Hack into the Wordpress admin account
- Go to plugins -> upload a PHP script pretending to be a plugin.
- While it's waiting to install the "plugin", it puts the PHP file in a public directory not /tmp!
- Said script is now available at example.com/blog/wp-uploads/evilscript.php from memory.
No messy FTP details required, just access to the WP blog admin account and you're sorted. The one I saw even upgraded itself as required so I'm sure any new ones will too.
Since the website linked is currently down, it seems the Low Orbit Ion Cannon has been initialised, all fancy flashing lights are flashing, the big red glowie thing is glowing....and oops.
From Viper point of view - "what you mean the data centre lines are all engaged" as the data centre team, sitting round at a weekend read this news on El Reg and decide to send all calls to /dev/null
Do feel for the Viper tech support bods who'll be fielding calls on Monday.
Oddly Python . co . uk doesn't even seem to be used.
Would have happily kept buying Gateway 2000 machines and had a P75 running from approx 1995 until 2012 when it eventually died and wasn't worth trying to fix. Even had the original hard drive in it although the original monitor failed several years before.
Now had to deal with 5 ACER laptops and 1 desktop in the past 3 years and every single one of them has had major faults. Never had an ACER without a fault or known anyone who has one that not faulty.
- Mouse & trackpad mysteriously fail unless you take the power lead out (x2)
- Overheating problems on one with no obvious cause (fan running, no muck).
- Almost all of them developed problems with the power connector.
- Wi-Fi would go down on 3 of them while on power, but instantly work on battery.
- Desktop suddenly refused to work with the monitor, but worked with another...then switched.
- Desktop then just died and it was only a year old.
Other computers and laptop makes, basically few problems that aren't the run of the mill and all fixable. Btw, acer's make good frizbies! :)
I would guarantee that 90% of the complaints never saw the app by a simple set of assumptions:
1) The people who complained are almost certainly members of said pastor's church.
2) The followers of said church division and very likely to blindly follow his every word like sheep.
3) Being the sorts who follow like sheep, they'd never buy anything but an iPhone.
4) It wasn't released on a iPhone and thus they'd never have seen it.
Before this gets too downvoted, the assumptions are based on this being one of those marginal and very brainwashing American churches where the congregation just follow the pastor religiously regardless of stupidity just to boost his / her ego.
So far not looked at Skype to see if it has a typing chat system, but really don't like the idea as lots of people will want to video chat suddenly which will be an even bigger pain. At least with MSN you can go into away mode and don't have to cover the camera or pretend it's gone down when you need to nip out for 5 mins.
From what I've read on their site, this YourView system seems to be a vaguely specified internal system for their clients so would have to agree it's not likely to cause any serious confusion to the clients or the public, most of whom won't even see it. Presumably the only similarity is it involves in some way looking at a screen?
Whether that makes it legally right is another matter, although I really do wonder why if it's not public facing, they bothered to trademark YourView.
Reading between the lines on their site they also hinted that it was very integrated into everything they do, which I can't help but think means "we've got it as a header on web pages" and might just possibly be an angle to say to YouView later on - well if you pay us X we'll go through the huge hassle of changing the name in a few places and changing the logo. Perhaps I'm being too cynical?
Thats what I was thinking - either they're spending a fortune on R&D or they really need to look closer at where the money is vanishing to as the actual "cash at the end of the day" is hardly moving.
What happened to businesses that actually made some decent money from their sales? Does this not exist in the IT world anymore?
I am wondering if it was a deliberate way to partly defeat the pirates by releasing a broken version, that gets pirated immediately with the same broken files will be copied over and over, and then release the fixed one.
That way most people downloading an illegal version will find it doesn't work and some might go buy it instead?
Timelines as in chronological type list details in a logical and ordered way which makes sense to 99.8% of the human population, even those not previously familiar with them.
Facebook Timeline which basically seems to be the "profile" page (as the frontpage and such hasn't really changed in concept), lists things in a totally random order mixed up around the page with no reference to any date system I've ever come across, and therefore isn't a chronological timeline.
Exactly what Facebook Timeline's purpose is however seems to be a total mystery, along with the equal mystery of why the heck anyone would want to lay prior claim to something resembling that mess...!?
As mentioned Kansas is in the middle of Tornado Alley, thus wouldn't it make more sense to create the network somewhere that is a bit more stable?
Can't have the northern US due to snow and ice storms, the middle has tornadoes / earthquakes / or they shoot the engineers in Florida and further south they likely think the Internet is the work of satin, so there's only one place that this should be trialled - the UK.
Anyone at Google listening...? :)
Am wondering if there's an unofficial quota that states all government systems must have x% of downtime per year, so that the badly written systems look a little better compared to the good ones? Having a login glitch is an easy way to keep this quota...maybe.
I don't know about being more efficient. Having delt with them a few times before and after the changeover, things were very "council-ified", ie: took ages for anything to be done anywhere. Plus even in house, the depts still weren't co-ordinating properly, but that seems to be typical of councils.
Cumbria is fairly rural, but 80% of the coverage would mostly still be in the towns and Carlisle as most of the really rural houses are owned as holiday homes, so we can ignore those (yes I come from Cumbria).
The trouble is the towns seem to be very late in getting anything half decent Internet wise. It wasn't that long back that Keswick got ADSL well after most of the rest of the country and Kendal which is pretty big still doesn't have ADSL2.
Re. wireless - there was a company in Kendal offering it years ago, but the Lake District (in the middle of Cumbria) kindof gets in the way, along with making it hard enough to get a blinking mobile signal.
Oh and no, we're not in Scotland yet....or in Wales.
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