* Posts by Paul Shirley

2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Cheap call? Hardly. GSM gateway judicial review to settle whether UK Home Sec can legally push comms watchdog around

Paul Shirley

Re: years ago, there was a growing market for cheap overseas phone calls.

It's a jungle if you just need odd calls and don't want to open an account with a VOIP provider. But at 30p+/min it doesn't take long to burn through more than the minimum topup on somewhere reliable and cheap, with local rate access numbers if you can't SIP.

Thanks to phone phobia we find it massively cheaper throwing a couple of £ at Localphone each year than having bundled landline or mobile voice minutes even for local calls.

Paul Shirley

Re: SIP is not that bad

In the typical UK pattern, an old tech made irrelevant a decade ago by SIP will finally have it's legality ruled on!

Paul Shirley

Re: "eye-wateringly high per-minute rates demanded by telcos back in the early 2000s"

They may have done data, it was so ball tighteningly expensive SIP would bankrupt the user.

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

Paul Shirley

Re: optical mouse problem

When we replaced our incandescent lights with CFLs my rollerball mouse started misbehaving, the barely visible flicker enough to trick the rotation sensors. Had the sunlight problem with the previous one as well. It's a miracle they work at all.

Paul Shirley

Re: Mice are not particularly intuitive

Intuitive or not, for gaming the optical mouse user will almost always thrash every other controller option. It's a really precise & fast input. Old roller ball mice not so much, even if the balls were clean the rotation sensors often couldn't keep up.

The lighter side of HMRC: We want your money, but we also want to make you laugh

Paul Shirley

Knowing what bastards they can be I submitted my 'I've taken the year off, reduce my payments' application in early Nov18. No response in the promised 15 days, after a month I submitted a second request referencing the 1st one. That provoke a nearly instant response - that went straight in my spam folder! HMRC, even mail apps know they're scammers.

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Paul Shirley

Re: SKY Recording

Encryption of HD recordings is a Freeview licence requirement for using encrypted EPG streams on Freeview. It's a semi-clever workround for the legal requirement to not encrypt transmission for free channels, they encrypt the EPG and force OEMs to encrypt video locally.

If Sony are encrypting SD channels on disk that's disappointing, assuming the licencing hasn't changed much it's not needed.

Mediaportal doesn't have a Freeview licence and my HD recordings sit there unencrypted. They should have used stronger encryption...

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

Paul Shirley

Re: Does anybody actually use a .eu ?

Failing to remember this isn't the deal the UK will have to live with. It's the one while you do real negotiation with a EU doesn't have it's hands tied. You think you did badly in the withdrawal deal? You're going to be apoplectic in the future relationship negotiation, where the EU have no time table to worry about and no treaty obligation to you.

The EU have been vocal that they don't like this transition deal, it gives undeserved cake to the UK and they don't trust you to leave the cake shop. They tolerated it only because it would end in a few years, there's not much interest left in giving you any deal if you continue wasting time.

Paul Shirley

Re: Wow, it's almost...

In reality exercising that independence in a FPTP, party based parliament is usually a career damaging/ending decision.

Paul Shirley

Re: Wow, it's almost...

You didn't account for the protest voters, I'm pretty certain most voted against Cameron, very protest voter I've talked to did. A last minute change of side by Cameron might have reversed the result!

Question: How fast is the Windows 10 October 2018 Update rolling out? Answer: Not very

Paul Shirley

Re: If you start with the premise...

I assume few here will be running Home. Even hacking the registry probably can't help Home users.

Paul Shirley

Re: If you start with the premise...

Marking your external network interface as a metered connection kills most unexpected updates. Now disableable from network settings, probably the only useful thing in recent updates. Then group policies need hacking.

Paul Shirley

Re: Tried to update

Same here, windows update,, updating from the media downloader or the downloaded ISO, even from a bootable usb all churned away then rolled back. Logs gave no clue, just cutoff midstream. Eventually i got lucky and it told me it failed white installing updates. But didn't manage to log the event.

Yanking the network connection before it to tried dialing home let it finish. Remind me why always connected windows is supposed to be a good idea?

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

Paul Shirley

Re: Germany

Seems like a reasonable response to the orange baboons recent threats.

Paul Shirley

Re: Ca$h...

It's probable gov had a hard on for smart meters on the assumption they might be able to finally measure electricity supplied to the network instead of the blanket assumption of 50% of generation capacity. The current shower seem intent on wiping out domestic solar and it would have helped before they just nuked support from space.

Whether that's a good or bad thing I'm not going to get into, or whether the meters will ever be able to do it!

Paul Shirley

Re: Nah.. They won't be getting a grilling..

An LED lamp is a combination of these components:-

1) The LED chip aka the diode.

2) The heat sink

3) The power supply

I'm looking forward to finding out how long my filament LED lamps last. They dispense with the heat sink relying on convection to cool the suspended strings of LEDs. Helium filled ones are claimed to have better cooling than old style heatsinks, it's believable even in plain air they do well enough. The 7W bulb above me is just warm to the touch right now after hours on.

They also need much simpler power circuits to feed those serially wired LED strings, in theory you could even run them off mains voltage with just a bridge rectifier. A simpler, cooler PSU is guaranteed to improve lifespan.

I bought them to replace CF bulbs because they look good, after rejecting fugly old LEDs for years, if the reliability claims pan out that's a massive bonus and potentially will become a much cheaper LED bulb because of the simplicity.

Can your rival fix it as fast? turns out to be ten-million-dollar question for plucky support guy

Paul Shirley

Re: Not just assembly.

RISC design driven by realising compilers are crap at using complex instructions.

Dodgy constant encodings allowed by realising compilers are really good at using them, especially on RISC designs intended for compiled languages not asm.

Really happy assemblers were also good at quietly looking after that sort of trick coding by the time I needed to hack much RISC asm.

British fixed broadband is cheap … and, er, fairly nasty – global survey

Paul Shirley

Re: Is this Time Warner's site?

Averaged over time streaming will throttle down towards the playback bitrate, file downloads won't but also don't need to maintain a minimum rate. Downloading as a stream or block are very different things and measuring one has limited relevance to the other.

Budget 2018: UK goes it alone on digital sales tax for tech giants

Paul Shirley

Re: They should cut out the middlemen

"I am wondering if the 50p will be an attempt to remind some people what the result was."

Why? Have you forgotten the UK voted to split England&Wales from NI&Scotland so soon?

Sure, Europe. Here's our Android suite without Search, Chrome apps. Now pay the Google tax

Paul Shirley

Re: Ignore and continue as usual

"Juncker's Commission took over (which was much more German-influenced) and gave them a billion dollar kicking. So Google have history of being stupid."

Maybe Google made more than $1bil in the time they stalled the EU... if you believe the complete bolloxs coming from the complainants they must have been minting much more.

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

Paul Shirley

Re: The gift...

I've watched a previous update check for space then later abort and rollback when it ran out of space. Which was better than the last update that wiped the os drive partition entry and thankfully tried rebooting to the same partition before trying to overwrite it. Recovering a partition being massively faster than an image restore of a bloated Windows.

Paul Shirley

Re: Not a good look here.

If it was just storing settings in os drive folders, no problem, even in Documents. I've got multiple apps storing log files in them, sometimes 100s of megabytes of them, thumbnails, temp files and all sorts of other non critical shit I don't need filling my ssd or the daily drive images. Win10 is bloated enough without this.

Fortnite 'fesses up: New female character's jiggly bits 'unintended' and 'embarrassing'

Paul Shirley
WTF?

Bloody Boobs - the game

Anyone looking for something more than the half-assed Fortnite jigglage might find https://store.steampowered.com/app/545250/Bloody_Boobs/ 'interesting', available cheap at https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/dollar-carnage-bundle

Making no comment on the quality of the gameplay (or buying it) ;)

How an over-zealous yank took down the trading floor of a US bank

Paul Shirley

Re: Chess?

You could play a passable port of Sargon Chess on the original Gameboy by 1992! Wouldn't want to crank the search strength up much compared to PC ports though.

Paul Shirley

I think as late as WinXP a damaged audio CD was capable of causing chaos, on a good day just stalling the PC for seconds, sometimes totally locking up. The Windows CD subsystem was an epic clusterfuck for most of it's existence.

UK networks have 'no plans' to bring roaming fees back after Brexit

Paul Shirley

"Gina Miller managed to string the whole thing out by around a year with pointless and meaningless legal challenges for no better reason than she didn't like the result."

Leavers should be worshipping her. Her intervention guaranteed brexit met the legal requirements of the EU and A50, she ensured it could not be aborted by last minute challenges. For the EU27 she ensured you will be leaving, whether you change your minds or not. What UK voters choose no longer matters.

It's been 5 years already, let's gawp at Microsoft and Nokia's bloodbath

Paul Shirley

Maybe after Nokia continually failed to complete or release new platforms they turned to a company with experience of releasing unfinished software. Perhaps Elop dumping everything for a new unfinished platform isn't so far from what they hired him to do, pushing unfinished crap out till the market accepted it, only surprise being when he chose an external bit of crapware not the internally one!

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Paul Shirley

Re: UK has the resources

very successful a long time before the EEC/EU?

Those of us old enough remember a very different desperately unsuccessful UK just before (and for years after) it was finally allowed into the EEC.

Microsoft takes another whack at killing off Windows Phone 8.x

Paul Shirley

Re: On this site

My friend did like his WP for the first month or two. Compared to the "free with a pack of cereal" Chinese android it replaced it was indeed a fine device. He liked the Samsung that soon replaced the WP much more.

Everything's relative. Microsoft's efforts were relatively good if you looked far enough down the usability range.

If you drop a tablet in a forest of smartphones, will anyone hear it fall?

Paul Shirley

I guess I was thinking more of stand-alone software in the music and graphics sectors.

There seems to be quite a lot of use of iPad drawing software by comic/graphic novel artists. Some pretty spectacular art turns up in my Twitter feed. Music software is a poor fit for a tablet, musicians seem to prefer physical inputs over 'dead' touch screens and PCs do that better.

Paul Shirley

Re: big screen landfill

"If you actually need a screen as big as a tablet then you need a decent keyboard"

When I'm playing games on mine the last thing I need is a keyboard. A screen large enough my fingers don't block too much view is why I no longer play much on my massively more powerful phone. Also nice to see what I'm playing now the eyes are showing their age.

The keyboard I do have for it hasn't been used for a couple of years now. The screen keyboard is faster!

ZX Spectrum reboot latest: Some Vega+s arrive, Sky pulls plug, Clive drops ball

Paul Shirley

Re: The consolation prize

Paying up front for the original Spectrum long before any finished versions were built isn't a lot different!

Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you

Paul Shirley

The extreme version of picking up the box and dropping it from an empirically determined height to "reseat the chips". My Atari ST needed about 7cm to remind it where half the RAM was.

Boss helped sysadmin take down horrible client with swift kick to the nether regions

Paul Shirley

not seeing the switch for the forest

I have a friend who gets paid large amounts to drive out to failed trains and get them moving before Network Rail fines get too bad. The number of times that ends with quickly looking at the drivers cabin then flipping one switch is frightening.

Paul Shirley

Re: Am I missing something?

Because it soothes the users into thinking something useful and important is happening

Even if you know someone just guessed what % of the total time each phase of whatever you're showing progress for should take, completely ignoring wildly different phase times because computers aren't prescient. Yet a wildly jerky loading bar is still more reassuring than a smoothly spinning 'I'm working, don't bother me' spinner.

Heatwave shmeatwave: Brit IT departments cool their racks – explicit pics

Paul Shirley

True but hot air tends not to leave enclosed spaces very fast without being nudged and cool air prefers to kip on the floor instead of working :)

Paul Shirley

shoelace, when cable ties won't work

Instant flashback to the many jerry built cpu cooling solutions I've used down the years. The 12cm cooling can tied onto a fan 12to8 reducer and stupidly heavy copper radial heatsink with a shoelace worked surprisingly well. As in didn't fall off or break the vertically mounted mboard or CPU holder.

Still always a surprise how well popping the case and aiming a deskfan at the mboard works as well.

Tech support chap given no training or briefing before jobs, which is why he was arrested

Paul Shirley

Re: I don't know if anything has changed

Not yet seen a manual written before ship that matched the product

Paul Shirley

Re: Back in my day

Insulating tape, for when you can't find anywhere to thread the cable tie...

ICANN't get no respect: Europe throws Whois privacy plan in the trash

Paul Shirley

Re: Slippery slope

"no more unlecected as they are in any government."

You're forgetting many Americans believe it's better to expose civil servants to political pressure and the dumbness of the mob via election, instead of choosing them based on competency, honesty and balance. Depressing that so many this side of the pond imagine ours are selected in the same dangerous way.

Great news, cask beer fans: UK shortage of CO2 menaces fizzy crap taking up tap space

Paul Shirley

Re: Gas shortage

I remember finally enticing some of the older local CAMRA members into out favourite continental bar 20+ years ago and watching the idiots have a meltdown over CO2 bottles on the real ale lines. Some of them self professed experts but clueless about pumps. Couple of the current crop needed it explaining at the weekend, they weren't claiming expertise though.

Paul Shirley

Re: Bravo madam!

Orwell wrote 1984 about a LABOUR government.

The 2 halfs of our 2 party state are increasingly hard to distinguish, just slight differences in their choice of evil.

EU negotiator: Crucial data adequacy deal will wait until UK hands in homework

Paul Shirley

Re: Requoting from another thread

"should START with the definition of the final instance for conflict resolution"

But that's a UK red line that guarantees no deal. If A50 allowed the EU to walk away or say no deal immediately the only 'negotiation' happening would be the technical details needed even for the no deal scenario. But they're forced to hang around listening to impossible UK scheming and there's no advantage in doing only essential detail work.

This has left the brexiteers with the mistaken belief the EU is weak, just a matter of time and repetition before the EU abandons it's red lines. Worse it allowed the UK gov to avoid preparing it's voters to accept what must be done to achieve a deal.

Android users: Are you ready for the great unbundling?

Paul Shirley

Seems like a lot out trouble to avoid buying a dumb or feature phone...

Paul Shirley

Re: Google & Contacts

> You can't remove GoogleMaps, YouTube, Chrome etc on my tablet or phone.

If you want to recover the system partition space they occupy you'll have a route challenge. I highly recommend not attempting to resize partitions so you won't really get the space back. Converting user apps to system can do that but just don't do it of you value security.

Do the easy thing, use apps settings to disable them. Malware laden devices might fight back but otherwise they vanish and user space they're using gets freed. Well, that works now...

Paul Shirley

Re: stimulate innovation and increase choice for consumers

Sony do it to all their phones. Pick a less abusive brand.

LG at least require you to enable their relatively small bunch of apps, infinitely preferable. First phones I've not immediately rooted.

Paul Shirley

I remember taking 3 passes deleting APKs and rebooting just to excise Facebook from my Xperia, it was so deeply hooked into the OS. Had to root the phone to do it. Or doing the same to remove useless duplicate mail, store, maps and more from my wife's Orange mangled San Francisco.

It was a happy day when Google started restricting how and what crap OEM's could peinstal. When I disable built in stuff on my current devices they stay disabled, even googles system services, without root. Then again I don't install malware like linkedin or Facebork.

Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work

Paul Shirley

copy protection fail

Long, long ago we decided to ship Spindizzy Worlds leaving the game editor included as a secret bonus. Where secret really meant we'd leak the access hack and manual in time for launch as part of the promotion grind.

All going well till the copy protection was bolted on and no one remembered to check if the save function still worked...

More successful was the non standard MFM floppy disc coding cobbled together so I could nuke the Amiga OS, that confused the disc duplicators when they spotted it but worked anyway.

Whois? Whowas. So what's next for ICANN and its vast database of domain-name owners?

Paul Shirley

WHOIS makes carpet bombing users with threats effectively free. Like spam they don't need accuracy, consent or any shed of proof to turn a profit from the hits. Making them actually approach a registrar for the information destroys the most abusive business plans economics, make them fight for records and the evidence needed should stop most cases before the target knows about it.

Most IP lawyers aren't freelancing, they're employed in-house by companies. They're job is hunting down violations to keep their employer happy, this will force them to do just their job, not pad the numbers with blanket sweeps.

Paperback writer? Microsoft slaps patents on book-style gadgetry with flexible display

Paul Shirley

Re: "The hypothetical device pictured contains two flexible displays hinged, like a paperback book."

Ideas that the patent office is supposed to require you demonstrate an implementation of. Though someone needs to remind the US patent office...