Posts by Gordon861

BT's onshoring call centres scheme continues

Great

Next time you get an insurance quote check if the call centres are in the UK, if not go somewhere else and tell them why. Every call centre job being done overseas is another person on the dole in the UK who you are paying for with your taxes.

Bye-bye to bizarro bye-laws, says UK.gov

Nice Idea but ...

... this law won't be used to get rid of odd existing laws, instead they will use tha facility to create a whole new set of strange local laws to nick you for.

Acer Android tablet release date wobbles

Release Now?

Why not just release the damn things now with 2.1 or 2.2 and try to get some market share before they have to spend the next 5 years chasing Apple. As long as the OS can be patched to version 3 when it's released there should be no problem.

I know people that are looking for these now and if the delays keep going they will just end up buying an iPad before the end of the year.

Police told terror ads too terrifying offensive

Title

But isn't the Red Dwarf quote going to become true soon with people ratting on their neighbours for claiming too much Benefits in order to win cash rewards?

Council wins motorbike charges case

The fight goes on ...

All the people saying that WCC have added extra spaces and security devices in return for the charge are talking bollocks.

At the start WCC put in a few security devices and then stopped doing it for the other bays. Also WCC have not increased the provision for parking bikes in the last 4 years. The charge is £1 per day right now, it'll probably be a £1 an hour when they feel they can get away with it, then the scheme will roll out accross London and the rest of the UK. According to WCC just to impliment this scheme is costing the £430k per year, if that's true why continue with it.

In order to pay you need to stand in the street reading out your credit card number to a foriegn call center, this might be fine in the summer but wait until the winter when it's pissing down with rain and you are trying to shout over the phone to pay for the parking. At the court they claimed that anyone that didn't have a phone could use their underground car parks for free, but failed to mention that they were about to sell off the underground car parks.

We lost this court case, it's not the end it just means that now the gloves are off. People that have been avoiding Trafalger Square on Wednesdays had better get used to being delayed on other days. We aren't going to stop, we will be turning up at any location in Westminster at any time we choose and cause even more chaos. After the case we closed Lambeth Bridge roundabout with about 10 bikes, no cars got onto it for about 5-10 mins, we can do this anywhere. On Wednesday we blockaded Westminsters Offices for an hour in the morning, we can turn up any day we like.

We are organised, we can avoid the traffic that we cause, we can stop any part of London we wish, we are here, we are not going away...

If you go to London, take sandwiches because you may be a little while, see you on the streets.

For sale: Dr No's Scottish bunker complex

Eek Broadband

Availability for the DD10 0TA area on the Inverbervie exchange

Exchange Your local BT Exchange (Inverbervie) is ADSL broadband enabled

Line Your line should be capable of supporting download speeds up to 512kbps (around 10 times faster than dial-up)

Your line will be fully tested when you place a broadband order

Postcode-only checks are not 100% accurate

Oh well that scuppers that idea then.

Police Stop

I want it.

I would love to see the cops on SKY trying to raid that place using their puny enforcer.

Romford coppers try to stopper young snapper

V2 Rights Sheet

The only problem with that 'cheat sheet' is that it's so damn long-winded, you are probably just better off printing out the MET police webpage.

Oklahoma granny sues cops over tasering

True Story

I'm more inclined to believe the people suing in this case because the money they are asking for isn't like the normal sue-hungry idiots that sue for $15+million for a stubbed toe.

Voting chaos in not-fit-for-purpose electoral system

PR Hybrid

The system I'd like to see would double the size of the current constituances so we'd have half the MPs, and continue to run these posts using the current voting system. So that would be 325 local MPs.

Then run the other 325 MPs via a pure PR system. The MPs from the list could still be assigned constituances to look by their party, so some areas would have more than one MP people could go to for help.

This way you could still vote for a 'local MP' but you could also vote for a National Party that you prefer, often not the same when you have a good local MP. It would also give the more popular parties a chance to still get a pure majority in Parliment.

I would also add the prison population as a single constituancy with one MP to solve the problem with them not being able to vote.

UK polling stations turn away 'hundreds' of voters

Voting

I was one of the people working at this election in a London Borough.

We were open from 7am until 10pm, and the Polling Stations are all very local to the registered address of the voter so public transport is not required. Add to this the fact that if you were disabbled you can almost bet that one of the local parties would have been willing to give you a lift if they thouht you might vote for them there is no excuse not to get there on time. The staff were there from 6:15am until about 10:30pm and unable to leave the station or take any proper breaks unless things got quiet.

At our location we had about 5k people on the voter lists, this list was then split into three parts. So after the postal votes etc each station probably had about 1500 people to look after. We had papers for about 1200 people at each station, we could have got more if we needed them but it's very unlikely. Everyone wants us to stop wasting money and printing papers for every voter would mean an extra 30-40% of paper being paid for and wasted.

People have to go to the particular station and be marked off their list to ensure that they only vote once, so there is no way we could just add extra staff once we had started. Most of the day we had 30-40 people delt with each hour, at our peak 6-8pm we were dealing with 100 per hour (I logged the number every hour), and queues were stretching out the door but we were working as fast as possible. the voter cards made our life much easier because we could use the number to go straight to the place on the register instead of having to look it up via street name, house number and name.

We didn't have to turn anyone away for being late, but most elections we end up with someone that seems to want to see how fine they can cut it and still vote. The rules we were working to were if you have a Ballot Paper at 10pm you can vote but we will not issue any papers after 10pm.

I've seen a lot of posts/comments all over the place sugesting the use of computers for doing the lists so people can vote anywhere they like. The problem with this is that most of the voting is done for a particular Ward so the papers would need to be kept together in that ward for counting etc. If you moved the whole thing to an electronic system I think we'd have even more problems than we do now and more claims of tampering with the systems.

The great thing about the current UK way of voting is that there is a true paper trail that can be looked over later to see what happened and we don't require electricity to set a station up. If the only location available is a portacabin we can use that, there have also been ocassions where the start of the poll has been run from the back of a car due to keyholders not turning up.

The UK system might not be perfect but it's robust and for the most part it works well.

Couple More Thoughts

Weekend Voting

This has been looked at before including the 14hr voting window. A big problem with this is the fact that a lot of our Polling Stations are in church buildings that are often in use at the weekends, or would cost a lot more to hire.

Postal Votes

You can hang onto your Postal Vote and hand it in on the day of the vote but (in London) it needs to go to the station that you would normally vote at(due to ward boundaries) or the Town Hall. Also if you loose your Postal Vote you can normally get a replacement on the day from your local Town Hall.

HTC Desire

On Order

Spoke to T-mobile last week, they had run out of stock, and getting rid of them as fast as they come in. Mines on order now...

Xperia X10

It will be interesting to see this phone when compared to the Sony that should be out any day now. That's the only thing delaying my move to a smartphone now.

Mandy quango says Apple, Amazon are too obscure

Online Songs

I have never bought a downloadable song from anywhere and probably never will unless things change a lot.

I buy the CD and then rip it to whatever format I want.

Reasoning

1. Normally cheaper or close to same cost.

2. If I have a hard drive failure I can re-rip or use a backup.

3. I get to choose how much definition I loose.

4. I control what machines I can put it on.

El Reg insults 'millions of Irish Catholics'

They are Catholics

So forgive the reg, don't wine about it.

US broadband seeks ISP speed stickers

Good Idea

The whole thing looks like generally a good idea.

Pirate Bay blocking row silenced in Norway

Waste of Money?

It's only a waste of money if you loose, they must know they have no chance to win.

Blighty surrenders to Street View

Bin Days

Looks like they hit my street on bin day as well, they probably do that because some areas have parking restriction on the days that the bins are emptied, so they get a better view of the houses.

I also notice that the pictures seem to be at least two years on in my area, before I changed the car and before we got the recycling bins.

Employers call for end to Mickey Mouse degrees

Real Degrees

We should be funding people that do 'real' degrees like sciences etc, as long as they are doing the course and getting decent grades.

We should be encouraging people to do subjects like nursing/teaching by giving them an interest free student loan that is automatically paid of over 15 years of working in the public sector at no charge to them. If they go to work in the private sector they should have to pay back the fees.

But if you want to do things like French Lit. or Media Studies etc you should be paying for it yourself.

The 50% target was a stupid idea, we'd be better with a lower taget for Uni of people that will actually get something real from it, and start funding more apprenticeships for people that aren't suited for Uni.

Nazi-doodlebug-powered father of all paintball guns patented

Ball Bearings

How long before some nut decides to load this up with steel balls or marbles?

Ubisoft undone by anti-DRM DDoS storm

No more Ubi

I was thinking of getting the new version of Settlers when it comes out, not now.

And they won't even guarantee that they will un-DRM any game that is being removed from their servers.

Whatever happened to the email app?

Outlook

I still use Outlook 2000 on an old XP machine for my emails. During the day I can access them via GoogleMail and POP3.

All my mail is auto sorted into folders as it comes in so I can ignore the mailshots until I want to look at them. Never had any problems with it.

LibDems score copyright coup

Bye Bye Google ?

"The intention is also for the injunction to only be possible for sites where there is a substantial proportion of infringing material that is either hosted by that particular site or is accessed through the particular site in question."

Won't this mean that they could start blocking all the search engines due to that fact that they are often a very good way to find links to the sites that host warez or P2P links?

Global warming may be normal at this point in glacial cycle

no clue

The sooner the scientific community reaches a consensus and admit they really don't have a clue what's going on and start working with an open mind, the better.

The whole Global Warming/Cooling argument is a waste. We just don't have the knowledge to work out what the climate is doing yet, keep studying it though.

Nearly everyone agrees that:

1 Energy efficiency is a good thing.

2 Pollution is a bad thing.

If they just worked on these two things the chances are they would cut down on the CO2 levels and other crap in the atmosphere with a lot less resistance from most people.

T-Mobile UK earmarks two tariffs for scrappage

No Contracts?

I'm still on the free off-peak and weekend contracts and happy with it.

Top cop's 'stop stopping snappers' memo: Too little too late?

BBC Article

Very convienient bit of timing for the police : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8414254.stm

And the suspects aren't in the UK anymore so they can't sue the police for liable either.

Critics aim to sink Titanic ice cubes

US Only

So where's the UK supplier?

Logitech Squeezebox Radio

Too Expensive

When are they going to learn?

These things need to be around the £50 price point so sell them in great numbers. £150 for a WiFi radio is just too much.

I'm still running a Logik IR100 which I paid £40 for, which works well. I would buy a couple more if I could get them but all these companies want too much for them

Wikipedia sued for publishing convicted murderer's name

Don't Mention The War

Next they will be telling people to remove all mention that the Germans tried to invade all of Europe in the 1940's because they have served their sentence now.

Revolting postmen force early Windows 7 launch

PC World

I phoned them last week to ask about this and was told that they knew there was a potential problem.

But got an email from them earlier saying :

"PLEASE NOTE: If you have pre-ordered a copy of Windows 7 this will not leave our warehouse any earlier than Wednesday 21st October (the day before the official launch date). You should expect delivery to be 5-7 days after this date."

Even without the postal strike there is no way you'd actually get the package on the release day then.

North Wales Police says the law is what they say it is

Eye-Spy Police

We need some one to set up a website (outside the UK probably) and then run a competition to see who can photograph the most police cars/officers and upload them to the site.

The prizes can be along the lines of a t-shirt with "I photographed NNN police and all I got was this t-shirt'.

MCN could even run the next one during the next bike demo in North Wales, that would really get on the nerves of the police.

Talking DAB and the future of radio

Won't Touch DAB

There is no way I will by a DAB radio whilst they are still using 10-year old codecs for the signals and the radios cost so much. I was given a PSION Wavefinder a while back and it was fun to mess with but you needed a PC to be running so might as well just use an online service.

I currently use one of the Logik wi-fi radios and it does all I need.

The only way DAB will get any cheaper is if the whole of the EU adopts the same system to help push the unit prices down.

Intel crams four displays into one PC

Could be useful

These would be a lot more useful if they were standalone and plugged into the USB port.

Pulling up info like who's speaking on Teamspeak/Ventrillo or using them as configurable keyboards for game would be great.

Freecom MediaPlayer II 500GB

WLAN450

It sounds like a stripped down version of the old WLAN450 that they used to do. It also had problems with copying files via the ethernet due to only allowing a single FTP connection that is also throttled. The old version also had wi-fi built in.

I'll stick with the older version.

Vista and Lotus: Knowing when to let go of a brand

Lotus

My memories of Lotus are still tarnished by the freebie 'office apps' that they used to bundle on cheap PCs, enough to stop me even looking at anything associated with Lotus again.

Ridley Scott signs up to direct Alien prequel

Hope

I'm really hoping that Scott gets Geiger involved in the new movie.

I don't think Scott will let this be just the normal Hollywood crap.

The last scene has got to be the Nostomo leaving Earth on the way to do it's scheduled mission.

Whatever happens I'm looking forward to the 3hr extended DVD version of the movie that is bound to come out.

Microsoft ultra-thins to 'out cool' netbooks, Apple

Ultra-Thin Netbooks ?

If I buy a netbook it's because I want the damn thing to be small and browse the net etc whenever I want. But if they can combine the ultra-thin with the netbook and give me the best of both worlds I might consider it. Until then my NB100 is great.

A thinner, lighter and tougher netbook would be a plus though.

Pirate Bay sells out to Swedish software firm for $7.7m

The 'New' Pirate Bay

Wait for the announcement next week, Coming Soon The 'New' Pirate Bay, hosted in some small African country that no ones ever heard of, or multiple servers spread out over the world.

I rarely used TPB, there are better sites out there.