Posts by AndrueC

Microsoft ducks politico questions on Copilot bundling and lack of consent

Re: Unsolicitied Goods

May be but only because the full title is Unsolicited Goods and Services Act 1971.

However the initial description doesn't really call out services:

"An Act to make provision for the greater protection of persons receiving unsolicited goods, and to amend the law with respect to charges for entries in directories."

So on that basis it might not be relevant. Wikipedia claims that the above act is largely superceded by the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 anyway.

Re: Wipe Out

LO is fine under Windows. Some of its terminology and the way the different applications do things can be confusing at first but I've only ever had one crash in several years of use. I've also had no problems exchanging files with Office users.

No big changes to UK broadband regs, despite no real competition for BT

but only EE (now the official provider of BT broadband) has access to the full 1.6Gbps

Not true. Or at least if it is true then BT is in big trouble with Ofcom.

More likely is that EE is the only CP choosing to market a retail product using the 1.6GBp/s wholesale product. Given that very few residential customers want such a thing and that almost none of them have any need for it that's hardly surprising.

Re: competition

Have I got this wrong?

Maybe. Depends where you live. A lot of people now have a choice of multiple providers. Put your postcode in here and see what it says.

It always feels a little bit odd when Ofcom prevent BT from reducing prices. Making consumers pay more in order to create a market where there is scope for competitors to undercut the majority player sounds a bit back to front and although altnets often do offer better deals and/or faster speeds I'm not sure it's benefiting all that many people.

On the other hand I do think Ofcom are right not to rock the boat at the moment. Things are progressing reasonably well and given the current economic climate I don't think drastically changing the rules would help.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: sure safety-critical airport functions

Confirmed.

This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer

Re: RMWeb

Lol! One of my long time wants is for an APT-E (that windscreen is so cool) but that has never been done in N. RevolutioN ran a crowd fund campaign but it failed. Then there was someone trying to do it on their own via 3D printing but I've lost track of that.

Another loco I wanted was a Princess Elizabeth because my Dad had let me use his on our childhood layout. There has been a brass kit for N of that at least but it was issued a long time ago and anyway building a loco from a kit is beyond comfort zone.

Re: RMWeb

They nearly aways have one N scale layout in each issue but I do agree that it's gone a bit downhill. Incorporating Traction magazine hasn't helped as far as I'm concerned because I have no actual interest in railways themselves. The railway is a just useful way to add interest to the scene and a technical challenge to construct. Also the digital reader is a bit naff making it less pleasant to read.

But in combination - magazine, forum without adverts and free ticket it works for me.

I also model in N.

Re: At this point, adtech can be considered malware

I owned a Humax FreeSat DVR at one point. It was a good machine. I've also owned a Humax Freeview DVR but vaguely recall there were some issues with that.

Both machines seemed better designed than the equivalent Sky box. Much lower power consumption in standby and helped by a more powerful EPG. I got rid of my FreeSat box when Sky Q came out and I gained the ability to record up to six channels simultaneously. Up 'till then I'd had to juggle things around recording from Free to air channels on the Humax box.

I still have one small bit of memorabilia from the FreeSat box. There was a time several years ago when The Horror Channel I think it was broadcast Alien Cargo - possibly only the second time it'd ever been broadcast in the UK. It's a favourite of mine due to its surprising scientific accuracy in a lot of areas. Anyway as you probably know the FS box allowed you to copy recordings onto USB if they weren't encrypted and it apparently wasn't.

Consequently I have a copy of AC on USB and (say it quietly) in the cloud.

Re: At this point, adtech can be considered malware

I've hated and distrusted all forms of advertising since I read The Space Merchants as a young boy back in the late 70s. I'm currently living an almost ad-free life. I was a bit concerned when I had to drop uBlock Origin (but thankfully UBLite is doing almost as well) and am a bit concerned about what is going to replace Sky Q in a few years. Sky's online service claims to allow ad-skipping for an additional fee which I'll pay but I have concerns that since they gain the power to prevent me skipping adverts they might start to slip 'special' adverts in which can't be skipped even if you've paid.

Re: How much?

There's only one site I visit that even offers a subscription option - RMWeb. I've been a paid up member for several years now. It helps that there's also a deal that gets you a monthly digital magazine and one free show ticket a year but the community is so good and valuable that I'd pay a couple of quid a year anyway.

SpaceX Dragon pod arrives at ISS to finally pick up stranded Boeing astronaut pair

Re: "it's not like some of the foam kind of scenarios"

Hopefully the pair soon have their feet back on terra firma

And to quote Pterry:

"The more the firma the less the terra".

Re: Rescue mission in space?

I think you'll find that it's Elon pulling the strings..

101 fun things to do with a locked Kindle e-reader

This way I could keep my Kindle in airplane mode and stop Amazon tracking every page I read, location, etc.

You can do that anyway. I've been doing it for years. The only change I've noticed is that I now have to manually tap on a book to trigger the initial download. But I thought everyone operated their Kindle in airplane mode to prolong the battery life.

As for '..tracking every page..'. Get a life. You're not that important. Really, you aren't.

Meh, I've subscribed to Kindle Unlimited for over a year now. Download, read, release. Much like TV series I've never encountered a book that I want to experience more than once. I currently get through two or three books a week.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Re: rare occasion

Multi Service Terminal.

But some things are obvious. Like the old water main near me that is constantly leaking, but they'll only fix 2m at a time as the other bits might not actually be leaking and if they are it's below the threshold anyway.

That's like potholes in roads. If a pothole is bad enough it'll be fixed but the one right next to it that is not yet bad enough will be left until it deteriorates to the same point it then gets repaired but the original one is ignored as it hasn't yet become serious enough. There's a couple near me that seem to alternate with each being fixed in turn then back around in a cycle.

But I'd better stop there otherwise I might get into a rant about the Tesco roundabout on Ruscote Avenue in Banbury.

Re: Asbestos

But apart from all that it's good idea.

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Re: If you’re not paying, you’re the product…

No, wait! Those Android phones are actually rather expensive.

Not all of them. If you want almost all the functionality of a Samsung S10 (no wireless charging, camera is not quite as good) and far superior battery life you can opt to be spied on by the Chinese and pay £80 for an Honor x6b.

I don't know how the CPU/GPU compares between the two as I don't play games but as a daily driver the only thing I miss from my old S10 is the wireless charging and I don't miss that very much because a single charge is lasting me five or even six days at the moment. My S10 couldn't do that even from new.

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: What about...

Then there would be far fewer programmers in the world and as there has been a shortage of programmers for the last fifty years with the situation possibly getting worse the IT industry would be in a worse state than it already is.

Computer programming is mentally difficult requiring considerable intelligence and diligence. Most humans don't have enough of either. Mistakes will be made and the earlier they can be detected the lower the cost of fixing them. Having a language catch them (ideally via the IDE but at least via the compiler) will catch a lot of inevitable mistakes and for relatively low cost.

Re: Speed of Transition

Well technically it would be fairly easy to recompile it. Testing, debugging the result and shipping a product that was at least as stable and functional is, as you posted, a whole different kettle of fish.

Microsoft's updated Windows battery indicator rollout runs out of juice

Re: FFS.

In honesty, human colour vision is stupidly designed

'Designed'?

I think the word you are looking for is evolved.

uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

I switched to uBlock Lite and it's pretty good so far. Mostly what I've lost is the ability to block elements (mainly the useless crap that designers put at the top of the page which forces me to scroll to see the actual content). Surprisingly even YouTube ad blocking still seems to be working although as I don't use that very often it could just be that I haven't seen any videos with adverts switched on yet.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

I have two HP laptops and the one I'm using to write this on is a Probook 470 G5 and was bought in September 2018. It's never let me down unless you count automatically upgrading to Win11 a while back, lol.

However I do get the points being made here that if you call a support line it's usually because you've exhausted all the alternatives and forcing a sneaky and underhand 15 minute wait on you is a shitty thing to do.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Re: Win 3.0

I suppose that considering what they had to work with the solution was quite clever. One of the issues Microsoft do have to deal with, something that doesn't plague Linux, is backward compatibility. In this case it's compounded by the fact that it's not just compatibility with previous versions of DOS/Windows but also with a huge range of hardware manufactured by companies they know nothing about.

Being the de-facto standard in personal computing for so long has become an unfortunate millstone around Microsoft's neck.

But whenever people set in to criticise Windows I often feel that they are overlooking the issue of backward compatibility that they have to deal with. They started with an 8-bit single tasking operating system on little more than a home computer. Everything from then on was an evolution that tried (and to be fair largely succeeded) to allow existing software to be supported. It's actually (in my mind) quite impressive for a product that is now approaching fifty years old and that is basically underpinning the world's desktops.

That's not to say that some of it isn't their fault for poorly designing things and having/choosing to throw away a solution when it's proved to lack longevity but I don't think I'd include the FAT file system in that. It has stood the test of time remarkably well all things considered.

Re: Win 3.0

What, even long filenames* are bloat?

The way they are stored on the file system isn't particularly elegant or efficient.

Re: A Mess

And honestly, I have yet to see the supposed ads that some people claim are there. (I suspect FUD.)

They are very few and far between. I have Home edition on two of my laptops and I occasionally get an 'alert' suggesting that I might be interested in something. At a guess it happens two or three times a year. Now I'm on record as being someone who absolutely loathes and detests advertising but this happens so infrequently and is gone within typically ten seconds that I struggle to give a damn about it.

The things I do give a damn about are:

• Every major update offering me various features including Edge requiring me to page (carefully) through a stupid marketing wizard.
• After some minor updates I get the Edge welcome page appearing as an additional home page on my browser. Now it only does it once but I still find it deeply offensive and am surprised that MS haven't been taken to task about it.

Other than that Win11 seems like business as usual. I've posted before that I fail to see any difference between W10 and W11.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: So US corps will do what they always do

As with all US corporations in Europe

That wasn't my experience of working for Kroll Ontrack several years ago. They put us under the umbrella of another UK subsidiary and never got involved in anything related to HR. It was actually quite funny. During occasional trips over to HQ we'd get lots of invites out to lunch because we were allowed to buy and drink alcohol during office hours and they weren't.

Voda-Three name post-merger top team, keep schtum on layoffs

Re: Layoff?

The press release suggests a new company that people are applying for roles in.

Voda has a lot of long-time staff who be happy with a payoff to see them into retirement. They may not bother applying.

I think TUPE would have something to say about that. You can't be laid off just because your company is merging with another one and if they wish to continue employing you it has to be on the same contractual terms as you had prior to the merger.

They can declare you redundant during the merger process but if you are outside of your probationary period they have to have a good reason for it just like they would have prior to the merger. And if you are made redundant after the merger completes you are entitled to everything that you would have been had you been made redundant prior to the merger.

The law is clear. Your employment contract remains valid and applies to the resulting company just the same as it applied before the merger.

James Webb Space Telescope to size up asteroid 2024 YR4 before it rocks our world

Re: It's OK..

Well, duh. He'll put a tariff on it so of course they'll be paying.

Re: Lucifer's Hammer

"You might have the skies, but we control the lightning!"

Which if I remember correctly is the last sentence in the book.

Re: The way things are going

Maybe it will strike the Earth on Sundae.

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: How about fixing LO?

I've almost never known LO to crash. The only time it has done was very recently - last week in fact. I was drawing something very simple which at that point consisted of a rectangle with a smaller rectangle inside and a triangle above it(*). For some reason I forget I decided to copy/paste it to a different page and when I hit paste LO Draw just hung. That was weird because I've used copy/paste on some far more complicated drawings (often as a way to duplicate something) so I've no idea what happened there.

I occasionally whinge about Draw because it's sometimes not obvious how to do something but that's largely because it is fundamentally different to Windows Paint. As long as you can grasp the concept of objects rather than just thinking about pixels most things become clearer. Although I would still use Paint to open an image and resize it as can't remember how to do that in Draw. I'm a recent convert to Draw's crop tool as well now that I now where it is :)

But there's some mileage in suggesting that if you're working with images rather than drawings Paint is probably a better choice for most use cases.

(*)If you must know I was drawing an image to be used for an access doorway in a building on my model railway ;)

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Re: Florida's name

Didn't the Simpsons or Family Guy describe Florida as America's Dong?

Homer Simpson referred to it as America's wang.

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

There might be lower cooling costs for a datacentre in Scotland though and it would help redress the London-centric imbalance that the UK has. As for grid charges I thought Scotland had a lot of windfarms and was a net exporter of energy?

But I have to admit that my first reaction to the headline was 'Good. That's helping reduce the environmental impact'.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Re: Big problems need bigger people.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Are you implying that it's not possible for independent garages to service hybrids and EVs because the information is being withheld from them?

According to this article the problem in the UK at least seems to just be a matter of training.

"National chain Halfords has also been investing in EV training, running internal programmes for existing staff and apprentices at its four training academies since 2016.

“We have more than 700 EV-trained staff at our service centres, and 80% of our 700-strong network of centres can service EVs. The majority of sites have staff who are trained up to Level 3 to work on EVs and hybrids, and the sites have specialist tools and equipment for working on these vehicles,” says the leader of Halfords’ apprenticeship team, Dave Nicholls."

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Error 42: Paragraph buffer overflow.

Well quite. I have three computers here. A server running on refurbed hardware, a newer but cheap laptop and an older laptop (which is my primary computer). Only the old laptop is capable of running Win 11 and it upgraded automatically several years ago.

I can't tell the difference between any of them.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

Openreach wanted to sweat their assets a little longer as is their right. Since most people were getting at least an adequate service I see no major problem with that. But the major factor spurring them on now is that the assets that support the copper network are becoming a liability in terms of maintenance because they rely on increasingly hard to source equipment.

But the bottom line is that apart from a small minority the UK has enjoyed perfectly adequate broadband since the turn of the century. There are a few relatively remote locations and some less remote (covered by old and convoluted networks, eg; some parts of London) some in places like London that have lagged behind but even now the copper network is providing a very adequate service to most of the UK.

So in my opinion BT's record remains as it always was 'adequate, not outstanding'. I doubt that many people have suffered significant hardship as a result of how they have operated and maintained their network.

The value of the copper is greatly reduced by the costs involved in getting it back out of the ground. For sure they remove it when its ducted if they can but I don't think it's a gold mine.

And come 2027 (unless the goalposts move again) it'll be "move to fibre or lose your service" for many.

No it won't. You appear to be conflating the switching off of the BT WLR (Wholesale Line Rental) service with removal of copper. They are two completely separate things. WLR is just one of several services that BT provides over copper. When it's switched off the other services (most notably broadband internet) will continue to be supplied over copper. The only change to customers wishing to retain a 'land line' is that they switch to a VoIP service. For most this will just mean plugging their phone into the router.

BT currently says they will not withdraw copper from an exchange until fibre take up at that exchange reaches 75%. No doubt they will start to offer enticements to move people across but 2027 does not mean the end of copper services.

35% take up is actually pretty good considering it's an additional service, one that most people don't even need and is often not the only FTTP service available in an area. 35% take up is higher then their competitors and apparently cheaper per premise as well (that one really surprises me).

I know it's de rigueur to moan at anything Openreach does but this roll out has progressed very fast, appears to be on target and with this take up figure shows it to be a very successful upgrade programme.

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Meh. It'll all become meaningless or valueless within fifty years anyway. It's nice to think that you and your memories could live on forever but they won't. Your children might be a little bit interested in your life but your grandchildren are unlikely to care.

Unless you have contributed something important to the sum knowledge of Humanity it's all just irrelevant stuff..and if you have contributed something important then it'll be stored or better yet incorporated into the 'current' dataset of Humanity.

Either way it won't be your problem. The one advantage of dying is that you won't give a shit.

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

Excellent. Sounds like there will be some surplus stock available for The Rest of the World(TM) to buy up.

This is particularly concerning because if Trump does move forward with an import tax on foreign semiconductors, US consumers could be hit by a double whammy as a large quantity of electronics assembled in China also contain foreign-made semiconductors.

It's only a concern if you live in the US. For other countries it sounds very much like an opportunity.

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

Re: And

As usual.

Yes. And since that was what usually happens the wise amongst us predicted it would happen again.

What did you think would happen?

Someone is slipping a hidden backdoor into Juniper routers across the globe, activated by a magic packet

Sorry.

Apple solves broken news alerts by turning off the AI

Not sure. I had a design containing nested elements (windows within walls basically) and I needed to change the colour of all interior objects so that they were cut first on a laser.

I was thinking today of a use case for 'AI'. I had to edit several design drawings and it was basically the same simple edit multiple times. I did what I could with copy/paste but it would have been really nice if the tool I was using (Libre Office Draw) could've seen what I was doing and offered to repeat the process across all four pages. Instead of it taking over an hour it could have taken me five minutes.

Then again that's a bit reminiscent of Clippy and that didn't end well.

UK gives Openreach £289M for 4 rural broadband contracts in 'gigabit by 2030' push

We've already lost the landline and everything has to be done over VOIP to save them money whilst making sure that in a power cut we lose the phone line entirely and have to rely on the very poor mobile signal around here.

That's not entirely correct and somewhat disingenuous. The problem with the old (soon to be discontinued) voice service is that it's getting harder and harder to find anyone willing to make the kit or spare parts for it. Anyone who does is charging an arm and a leg for the privilege. Hardly anyone uses a landline these days, those that do are probably using DECT units that are reliant on power and in any case power cuts of any significance are so few and far between that it doesn't really matter.

That sucks if you're a 90 year old living in a remote cottage relying on two miles of pole supported, tree threatened, copper for your phone using a Bakelite handset but for everyone else it's all very 'meh'.

For decades now BT has been maintaining a VoIP service hidden from customer sight behind AD/DA converters in the exchange. It is a technically archaic solution and the time has come to do away with the duplication and decrepit equipment just shift everything onto IP.