Posts by peterm3

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

Re: Reception

Are you going through the Chilterns by chance?

As Johnson / Cameron once said "'My faith is a bit like Magic FM in the Chilterns, in that the signal comes and goes."

broadcast is here to stay

Broadcast media, i.e. not needing a paid-for service from a telco is here to stay. DAB+ as used exclusively in Norway and soon Switzerland is superior to DAB and FM. If a better technology exists, why stick with the obsolete one? In Germany they made a switch to DAB+ only and it was a wise decision as the codec is much more efficient. An argument here was the power consumption of all the FM transmitters, digital radio is green radio. Simulcasting everything is surely not a good idea.

Germany also changed over to DVB-T2 with H.265/HEVC which meant viewers had to buy a new decoder after a short 3 year changeover from DVB-T. Simulcasting SD also ended, which is a far more efficient use of bandwidth. Perhaps consumers there are more willing to accept paying for better technology than always keeping the legacy option.

It's true – it really is grim up north, thanks to Virgin Media. ISP fined for Carlisle cable chaos

fine seems a bit low

640 defect notices and only a £385k fine? It seems that it is a good incentive to carry on doing jobs on the cheap.

Surface Hub 2: Microsoft's pricey whiteboard gets a sequel

A can't recommend these

I worked with the smaller version - they costs the best part of €10.000 and are fairly useless. Some end up just being used as external monitors. I guess we haven't completely bought in enough to the Microsoft Future Workplace enough to get enough out of them.

BT bets farm on consumers: Announces one network to rule 'em all

BT need more sympathy, they are running a huge lossmaking network with obligations to provide service in uneconomic rural areas. Any real profit goes to pay off their pension deficit. The cable and LLU rivals can cherry pick the most profitable customers. Murdoch and Sky have the political lobbying power to influence Ofcom and put unfiar pressure on Openreach to reduce prices, which makes it harder for BT to make the case to invest in infrastructure for the future.

They are making massive redundancies and even selling off their HQ building to cut costs. They also have a fibre first strategy now, so I think they are heading in the right direction.

And THIS is how you do it, Apple: Huawei shames Cupertino with under-glass sensor

interesting if the software can be improved too

I'm happy with my €330 Honor 9 but there is lots of bloatware and updates are not as rapid as I'd like. A stock Android is probably an unobtainable dream for phones like this which need to stand out from the crowd with "useful" features like a 3D moving lock screen.

I predict Apple will drop its iphone prices soon, like they did with the ipad to maintain market share.

German IKEA trip fracas assembles over trolley right of way

German shoppers can get quite aggressive. In my local Aldi if there is a long queue the customers start shouting "open another checkout" which is not very polite if you aren't used to it.

Fitness band-it Garmin adds mobe bank Starling to bonk-to-pay fold

take up rate?

I would like to know the take up rate of these various payment technologies. Given every bank gives you a contactless card for free, how can any value be added? Although the banks have more to lose strategically in that they and the credit card companies could become obsolete for payments.

Make masses carry their mobes, suggests wig in not-at-all-creepy speech

tongue in cheek?

He might have been making the comments tongue in cheek. I watched Secret State over the weekend, it featured a Blackberry with a second battery fitted by the intelligence services. It was very prescient given that it came out in 2012 and Snowden didn't come out until the following year.

I've got way too much cash, thinks Jeff Bezos. Hmmm, pay more tax? Pay staff more? Nah, let's just go into space

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists

I recommend the above work by Robert Tressell

Good though provoking article. There is no alternative to having a state to organise systems to increase the welfare of the citizens. Ideally a democratic state where every citizen can decide the priorities and whether they want less homeless people on an unpoluted earth, or pointless ideas like sending Musk's car into orbit.

On subsidising low wages - housing benefit also goes straight to landlords in a market with chronic under supply. The tenants can't choose a landlord who invests more, so they (or the taxpayer) ends up paying over the odds.

I know plenty of rentier buy-to-let millionaires who have let to local authorities or have tenants on housing benefits.

Apple to devs: Give us notch support or … you don't wanna know

why nothing about the iMac's 20th birthday?

An Apple article, but nothing about the iMac. Would be good to have an article soon :-)

Can't log into your TSB account? Well, it's your own fault for trying

why not do a review of banks?

It would be great to do a comparison of British banks. There aren't many to choose from so it wouldn't be too time consuming!

Brit MPs brand Facebook a 'great vampire squid' out for cash

political advertising is banned in the UK

Hopefully the Communications Act 2003 can be used to stop political advertising on Facebook?

It is good Government is finally standing up to these companies who pay very little tax and don't pay users for content either.

Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music

golden age

I think we're living in a golden age of audio technology - loads of choice. My parents have a HD television but half the time they are watching SD as Freeview has "1" for BBC1 SD!

I think hifis themselves are obsolute - I bought my Onkyo CR-505 in 2004 in John Lewis for about £350. I have retrofitted it with a Chromecast and Bluetooth input. I think John Lewis stock dozens of multi-room speakers and various bluetooth or wifi speakers, but nothing like a traditional hifi. The only question is whether a £350 system (or £500 taking into account inflation) would still be at all usesable in 14 years time. Probably not! Even buying something for £250 every 7 years would be a bit optimistic.

Chrome 66: Get into the bin, auto-playing vids and Symantec certs!

Field trial

I am rolling out Chrome in an enterprise environment with 5000 Windows clients. In Chrome 66 it seems to be the case that the default settings for site isolation chrome://flags/#site-isolation-trial-opt-out means that we are opted in to a field trial? Does that mean it will essentially be a case of random chance whether or not a particular client is using site isolation at a particular time? Apparently Google have fixed the issues with printing iframes since the beta (although I haven' tested it). So my only concern would be RAM usage, as many have only 4 GB of RAM.

Europe turns nose up at new smartphones: Beancounters predict 7% sales drop

Reminds me of my friend who used to get bought a replacement for everything he broke as a teenager. The expensive SLR for his photography college work he dropped and got a new one, he wrote off his parent's car and was bought his own one. He wrote that off and was bought another one. He then wrapped it round a tree. It stopped then as he was lucky to come out unharmed.

UK consumer help bloke Martin Lewis is suing Facebook over fake ads

I hope he can get Facebook to start making their adverts less anonymous. Then the question is whether he can find / sue the advertiser for using a photo of him and hist "M Lewis" name. He even has it trademarked I would guess. Although if they are a letterbox company in the Caymans might be like whack-a-mole. Follow the money as they say, and Facebook certainly has the money.

Compared to the old distribution systems like newspapers and post, Facebook probably offers much cheaper means to get to more consumers. So this is a new problem which needs new regulation.

Samsung Galaxy S9: Still the Lord of All Droids

no regrets

I've no regrets moving from my S5 to Honor 9, for about a third the price of the S9.

Any news on the 256 GB versions coming to continental Europe? Or with Brexit GBP are we limited to only 64GB?

Why is it called ROM in the table above? Surely you can't save photos onto a Read-Only medium?

It's April 2018 – and Patch Tuesday shows Windows security is still foiled by fiendish fonts

here until the bitter end

I can see Flash being used up until the bitter end, and beyond. Perhaps when we refresh to Windows 10 once Windows 7 is out of support, Flash will then be history.

Perhaps make it easier to lock down Flash to only work on an intranet site - I think Chrome can do this.

UK.gov: Here's £8.8m to plough into hydrogen-powered car tech

Re: why subsidise private car development with public money

A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.

Mrs. T

Re: why subsidise private car development with public money

No I live in a city with electric trams and an underground system running on 100% renewable electricity. Buses are useful in areas not served by the trams, underground or suburban train system. All state-owned naturally. Even my ISP is owned by the city. Of course my water supply (hot and cold) is also state owned, as is the electricity company. I don't live in Russian either!

I think rail use in teh UK has grown also due to population increases and from a very low starting point after Thatcher had run down the public services and preventing them from investing.

Quite amusing that most of the rail companies are actually state-owned. Just its the Qatari, French or German state, not the British one.

why subsidise private car development with public money

Given the UK has no mass market car companies not under foreign ownership, it seems strange to subsidise pie in the sky technologies. Why not leave the car companies to invest their own billions in the technologies they think are most promising?

Much better to spend the money renationalising public transport and reduce traffic and pollution that way. I am not sure how popular these eye-catching initiatives really are with voters - perhaps some gullible greens might start voting Tory but seems unlikely.

Cash-machine-draining €1bn cybercrime kingpin suspect cuffed by plod

Would be useful to know in which countries this took place? Eastern / Southern Europe?

Uni IT man stole £22k of Macs to pay for smack

Re: Cash Converters

It was introduced to stop people taking copper or lead and selling it with very little risk.

I know of cases where rural phone lines were taken out with landrover and winch. I building I worked in had its lead roof taken overnight. Seems fair enough to have an audit trail to sell quite valuable "scrap" someone "found".

Look! Fitbit's made a watch that doesn't suck!

But it can't beat the world's greatest watch: Casio F-91W

For me, nothing can beat the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W

well, perhaps the A168W because the metal strap lasts 5 years not 18 months as with the F-91

Huawei guns for Apple with Mac-alike Matebook X

Heise has a review of it, and a price of €1.500 so I think it is coming to the Bundesrepublik :-)

IT peeps, be warned: You'll soon be a museum exhibit

dial up days

I remember in the late 1990s someone in Oxford ran an ISP out of their house, and had rented 100 phone lines, each having an entry under his name in the Phone Book. He took up almost a whole page!

Crunch time: Maplin in talks to sell the business

I remember the Maplin Catalogue in the 1990s, you could buy it at WHSmith. I could buy kits to build amplifiers and spare components to fix stuff. Nowadays its cheaper to throw it away and buy a new one. A modern TV or home speaker cannot be repaired anyway.

I never lived anywhere near a Maplin store until the 2010s and then I didn't see the point when buying online was the norm for everything they stocked.

It will be interesting to see what happens to all the retail space in the long term. Hopefully developers can build housing on the out of town sites.

I bought my first (an current) multimeter there 25 years ago. Still works great. It must have cost £40 back then, probably would cost over £100 to replace it now.

Hua-no-wei! NSA, FBI, CIA bosses put Chinese mobe makers on blast

My Honor 9 is great.

Six things I learned from using the iPad Pro for Real Work™

POS

I see quite a few ipads used as Point of Sale systems in small restaurants / cafes. They do the ordering and print receipts, process credit card payments. Cheaper than the Windows embedded crap I remember dealing with. Orderbird is one example

Home taping revisited: A mic in each hand, pointing at speakers

the good old days

I have now got nostalgia for the Argos catalogue and looking at new models of consumer electronics.

My first television, a Sony KV-M1400D which I bought with my paper round money. Costs £200 as I recall. It was a real quality thing. My parents bought a VHS player very late, in 1994. The remote control had a clip up cover with buttons for start time and end time. Those were the days! Sadly both were stolen in a burglary.

I don't think charity shops accept VHS these days. No one would know what to do with it!

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

one inch of water is nothing

I once worked in a college with several computer rooms. Due to a blocked surface drain in a courtyard, a basement computer room started to fill up like a bathtup through the airbricks in the wall.

The computers were on high benches and the students sat on bar stools. As long as their feet didn't get wet, they were happy with a good 40 cm of water on the floor!

The computers were high and dry so to speak, so no problems :-)

Paging all Microsoft System Center users: Your treadmill is here

hyperlink kaputt?

https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1759/shttp://www.mcubed.london/

Tower ProLiants on the warpath: HPE takes on Dell 'n' white-box gang in SMB space

"HPE has taken on Dell and the white boxers in the desktop and tower server space with promises of special, low-priced deals and faster ships."

Makes it sound like you get a free speedboat thrown in!

2017 tablet market trended towards torpor

Re: the coming wave of ARM-based, always connected Windows 2-in-1s

There is a trend towards centralised systems that are reliable. In the 2000s we spent half our time disinfecting your laptop from viruses, and remembering to back everything up.

You now have the convenience of everything in the cloud and I even a chromebook can operate offline for a while. Think of the interenet as a utility like water or mains eletricity. Your holiday cottage in Wales might not have internet, but it might not have mains water or electricity.

Bluetooth connections can be flakey

My Apple Mouse (Mighty perhaps) loses its connection every ten minutes.

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

Erbspüree

I would eat the giant Yorkshire. They would go well with the essential Yorkshire Mushy Peas. Amusingly they are called Erbspüree here in Germany, which sounds rather posh.

Openreach ups investment plans: Will shoot out full fibre to 3 million premises

Re: Former Monopoly...

As I BT shareholder, I can confirm it is not a monopoly. My shares have lost 42% of their value in the past couple of years!

WhitTVman to head mobile-first media platform

She has built and scaled some of the most important global companies today

Euphemism for downsizing?

New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory

It will be interesting what happens. The UK is quite dominant in producing content - British detective dramas are shown all over the EU but apart from the odd Skandi drama, not much comes the other way unfortunately.

TalkTalk starts offering punters choice to shift-shift to O2

I was with TalkTalk from 2012 to 2015, I think I was paying about £17 a month for unlimited broadband with line rental. Cheap and cheerful. I even kept the mobile part until 2016.

My experience was that they suffered from having promotions with new prices every few weeks, and the call centres struggled to keep up. I was told something by the call centre, but they then did something else.

Murdoch to Zuckerberg: Cough up cash, nerd

Stop Press. Murdoch will have trouble taking over Sky

Competition and Markets Authority doesn't like the Sky takeover- Hooray!!

Murdoch

In fairness to Murdoch* cutting costs, the cash flow to traditional print media is in decline from both falling readership and therefore advertising revenues.

However Murdoch presides over the most disgusting xenophobic propaganda machine, second only to the Daily Mail / Hate.

However this is a trend. Over Christmas I saw the Telegraph and was shocked how like the Mail it has become. The reader of that copy were in there 70s and believe all of it. Sad state of the country's press, not wonder populism and Brexit happened.

* For an even more friendly take on Murdoch's early years, Ink at the Duke of York's Theatre was entertaining.

NHS OKs offshoring patient data to cloud providers stateside

Data protection?

If you use the NHS, it seems like the Govt decides what to do with your data. The data is also sold on without permission.

I've always wanted to sign up with a false name, it seems they don't give a f*ck about patient confidentiality.

America restarts dodgy spying program – just as classified surveillance abuse memo emerges

should we comment?

Great article. Although as some of us are non-US citizens, what we say here is [content redacted]

Crappy Christmas! Dixons Carphone dials back profit expectations

I remember just after the Brexit vote, the head of Carphone was happy - he looked forward to the bright future after taking back control..

Why did I buy a gadget I know I'll never use?

stock photo

I've just realised where the photos from our corporate broschure came from! In ours the same cabled-guy has a blue shirt however.

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

Re: @AC Not Surprised

I thought Google's 2FA can use a smartphone with wifi?

Make Apple, er, America Great Again: iGiant to bring home profits, pay $38bn in repatriation tax

Re: What will it do to the dollar

The dollar moves in response to market expectations of growth and the Fed interest rate policy. So neither of those has changed, so I doubt the dollar will change at all.

I have read in the FT that appetite for Treasury bonds is falling, so financing the national debt will get more expensive. That is unrelated to this Apple news however.