Posts by Carl W

Pidgin is back, so let's talk about why a local chat client matters

Skype?

Does Pidgin allow us to continue to use Skype without having to transition to Teams?

UK government's cloud strategy: Pay more, get less, blame vendor lock-in?

Re: Krasnov

Didn't we have UKCloud who went bust after HMG dropped them in favour of AWS?

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

Isn't this a breach of GDPR?

UK watchdog hints Voda-Three merger will likely pass

Lots to unpick

Vodafone and Three already do mast-sharing, but not with each other.

Vodafone and O2 have a joint venture called Cornerstone while EE and Three have a joint venture called MBNL.

'Hyperscale customer' to take massive datacenter site near London

Re: Another one?

Apparently the North Weald site has been leased back to the council. And the council are taking bookings to use the site for the next 2 years.

Tax helpline callers left on hold for nearly eight centuries

Am I missing something?

Surely if the simple queries can be dealt with via the website (meaning call volumes go down), by definition the more complex queries will be handled by the call centre agents and the average call duration will increase? Wasn't this anticipated?

Bank's struggle to replace Atos threw system back to dark ages

Re: IR35

Not even necessary to move overseas, as long as you work for an overseas client

Techies at Europe's biggest council have 8 weeks to pull finance reports from Oracle system

EY, KPMG, PwC

What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Would be nice if Oracle stepped in

Oracle's professional services team is actually quite small as they prefer you to use implementation partners.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: Bolted Horses

Presumably you have broadband so can access BBC iPlayer, ITVx, C4, My5, UKTV Play, etc.?

HMRC: UK techies' IR35 tax appeals could take years

Re: Dumb question...

This is exactly what I thought when the scheme was explained to me.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Radio Rentals

Didnt' Radio Rentals get there first with this business model?

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

Re: Read chapter 6 of Ian Dunt's book "How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't"

Exactly this. Apart from the civil servants who have found their level, everyone else is just passing through. If you get promoted a grade and then there is a vacancy anywhere in your department at that grade, you get moved on to that.

Telco giant Vodafone to cut 11,000 staff as part of its turnaround plan

Re: "it has earmarked “significant investment” for FY24 towards customer experience and branding"

Lovely, who wouldn't want to live at the Vodafone HQ? Particularly if it floods again.

Re: "it has earmarked “significant investment” for FY24 towards customer experience and branding"

Yes

Re: "it has earmarked “significant investment” for FY24 towards customer experience and branding"

Except in this case the HQ has been sold

UK to test Starlink satellite broadband for those hard to reach areas

What happened to OneWeb, which was bailed out by the UK Government? Most of their satellites have been launched.

UK government rolls out £3.6bn management consultancy framework amid scrutiny of rising external expertise spending

SMEs?

This is confusing. Some of those companies are SMEs and have been awarded contracts of hundreds of millions of pounds?

UK.gov awards seats on £2bn 'digital outcomes' framework to suppliers – one of which doesn't even have a website

this isn't how Digital Outcomes and Specialists works

There are thousands of companies allocated to each lot. I assume the ones in the contract notice are just randoms from the list.

Fintech biz Wirecard folds into insolvency like two pair against a flush. Good luck accessing your chip stack

FairFX too

FairFX services currently suspended too -- apparently they use Wirecard as a card issuer

From Brit telly presenter Eamonn Holmes to burning 5G towers in the Netherlands: Stupid week turns into stupid fortnight for radio standard

Re: The RF nutters

These are the same people who will complain that there is no mobile phone signal in their house if you take the antenna away.

Britain's courts lurch towards Skype and conference calls for trials as COVID-19 distancing kicks in

Re: https://jitsi.org/

8x8 acquired Jitsi about 18 months ago

I'll just clear down the database before break. What's the worst that could happen? It's a trial

Re: never trust a PM

8MB RAM presumably?

In the claws of a vulture: Nebra AnyBeam Laser Projector

Good price

Paid about the same for a portable LED 720p projector last year, with no frickin' laser beams. Runs Android so has Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. as apps.

Boom! Just like that the eSIM market emerges – and jolly useful it is too

Re: So how is an eSIM better

You could, for example, sign up for an Australian SIM by scanning a QR code on an advert at the baggage carousel.

Apple macOS Mojave: There's goth mode but developers will have to wait for the juicy stuff

Will not install on a 3TB Fusion drive that has a Bootcamp partition on it. Unless you want to destroy the Bootcamp partition.

She's arrived! HMS Queen Lizzie enters Portsmouth Naval Base

Doesn't the landing gear impact the ski jump at 150mph+ on every takeoff?

NASA plans seven-year trip to Jupiter – can we come with you, please?

Heading off to Jupiter?

The Trojans are 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit, so a *long* way from Jupiter.

Stingy sapphire lens in Apple's iPhone 7 is as scratchy as glass

Is that a real person?

That guy sounds almost exactly like the "Tom" voice that macOS uses for dictation (which I think is provided by Nuance).

Maybe Apple's hardware is reviewing itself these days. Next it'll be interpreting attempts to switch it off as an attack and mobilizing the Skynet network.

Making us pay tax will DESTROY EUROPE, roars Apple's Tim Cook

Apparently, though, we voted to leave these truly independent 'well off' eurocrats to do what's right for the ordinary people of mainland Europe (and Ireland)

Corbyn lied, Virgin Trains lied, Harambe died

Re: OK Jeremy--renationalization--what then?

OED prefers endings in -ize apart from the exceptions listed here http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/ize-ise-or-yse

Blighty will have a whopping 24 F-35B jets by 2023 – MoD minister

Re: IMG @James 51

LOL, and even that report fails to mention the original report's basic maths error:

"The AMRAAM, despite its critics’ smears about its accuracy, has a kill probability of 0.59, 1 representing certainty of kill, so two AMRAAMs are enough to guarantee the shootdown of any enemy (0.59×2 = 1.18)"

DVLA misses out on £400m in tax after scrapping paper discs

Re: Either the figures are wrong or 1/15 drivers are not insured

Since when have you not been able to get insurance without tax or MOT? You can't get tax without MOT or insurance, but one of them has to come first.

Samsung Note 7: Probably the best phone in the world. Yeah – you heard right

Re: Still doesn't have front facing speakers..

Front-facing speakers also brilliant for conference calls.

SoftLayer embiggens its cloud VMs

Nice try Team Register

A reasonable attempt but it's not the same as a Lester article

XMA shutters its City pad, will service London from St Albans

"major hub inside the M25"

But St Albans is outside the M25.

Engineer's bosses gave him printout of his Yahoo IMs. Euro court says it's OK

Re: Separate work from private life!

Was that the BBC's "Make Me a German"? Which was an excellent insight that I have shared with several German colleagues.

BOFH: How long does it take to complete Friday's lager-related tasks?

COP Thursday

I had that same situation many years ago. The good bit is that having booked all of Friday's time, there's no need to do any of it. It's booked in the system so it must have happened, right?

Einstein's brain to be picked by satellites

Improved GPS accuracy?

Since GPS receivers have to make GR corrections already, will an improved understanding of GR lead to better GPS accuracy?

Lyft hits the brakes: Ban threat stalls taxi app's New York City launch

I used both Gett and Uber in NYC recently, so I don't see why Lyft shouldn't be allowed to compete. Gett were doing a promo where anywhere in Manhattan south of 110th St was $10. Almost as cheap as the subway.

Online VAT fraud: Calls for government crackdown grow louder

Re: Let's talk VAT numbers..

It's not profit, it's turnover. And I think the number is about £80k now. Don't need to sell many iPads to reach £80k of turnover

Virgin Media's SPAM-AGEDDON 'fix' silences mailboxes

All my mail goes to my own domain

As does mine. Or nearly all. I discovered a valuable lesson many years ago: do not make your domain's administrative contact an address in that domain, nor an address in a domain hosted by the same provider. Oversight on my part but I accidentally let the domain expire and of course they sent the notification to the administrative contact...

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

Re: Rolling roads don't work that way

When I had a 4WD car (Subaru Impreza Turbo) the advice was that the MOT stations had to do all of the braking tests on a test drive rather than a single roller rolling road, for fear of knackering the centre diff. Things may have changed since then.

Volkswagen used software to CHEAT on AIR POLLUTION tests, alleges US gov

Re: Let's not forget...

Reduced fuel tax? So why in the UK has diesel, apart from a few weeks about a month ago, been more expensive than petrol? Surely it's simpler to refine?

taping up body seams

Worse than that, they're not even done on the open road but on a rolling road (presumably with a wind machine). And as you say, self-certified.

EC mpg tests just as bad

Ever wondered why no-one in the real world can get anything like the manufacturer's claimed mpg figures? The EC emissions test is prescriptive and is x minutes and y mph, y minutes at z mph, etc. So the ECU recognizes that it's on the test and adjusts fuelling appropriately to get artificially high mpg figures.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Fancy a ham and cheese 'dry tree trunk' sarnie?

Re: Was looking good until...

Stansted has an airport. Stanstead (near Ware) does not. But it does have a level crossing in the high street.

Audi RS3: Keep running up that hill, with no problems

Had to sell the Scooby?

What kit do 2 kids require that doesn't fit in the back of a Scooby? I managed perfectly OK. When the kids were 11 and 8 we managed for the next 2 years with a TVR Cerbera and a Peugeot 206CC, so two 2+2s.