Posts by Headley_Grange

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know how to use HTML5

Maybe ElReg could hire these guys to make the videos work on The Register's site

Instead of having to pop out to Vimeo to watch them.

I've got the 'fastest growing THINGY ever', boasts Google+ chief

Re: Ads?

I've never paid a penny to Google, so I don't see how they are "making money off me". If you are correct that they get paid by their customers based on the number of ads they send out, rather than evidenced increase in revenue due to the ads then their customers are fools, and we all know what happens to fools' money.

Re: Ads?

HT for Ghostery. Thanks.

Ads?

Google's collection and analysis of my web habits might be a bit sinister, but there are add-ons which make sure that I don't see any of the advertising they push my way. They'll also block the G+ icon from websites - although it takes a bit of effort.

Google avoids tax with ‘Double Irish Dutch Sandwich’

Re: It's the wrong discussion

Exactly my point. Google would miss out the Ireland step and pay the tax they currently pay in Ireland to the Aussies. The Australian tax take would increase.

It's the wrong discussion

Governments love this because it distracts us from what we should really be discussing; why is corporation tax in Aus (and UK) so bloody high? If Aus corporation taxes were as low as Ireland's then Google (and all the other companies) wouldn't have to bother with all this tax avoidance and the net cash tax take would be higher.

I assume that all those who criticize Google and the other companies who avoid tax in this manner are squeaky clean in terms of tax avoidance; no ISAs, no Premium Bonds, no shopping in duty free on the way out of the country.

Apple MacBook Pro 13in Retina display review

Firewire Power

Did you try any firewire kit via the thunderbolt adapter? The port on the MBA hasn't got enough poke to drive many peripherals.

Copper-obsessed BT means UK misses out on ultrafast fibre gold

Faster Infrastrtucture is Pointless for two reasons

Faster infrastructure is pointless (1) because the capacity will just be used up until it's as slow as it is today and was 10 years ago. It's just the same as widening the M25 - it's all good for a few months then more cars use it and pretty soon it's as clogged as it was.

Faster infrastructure is pointless (2) because the ISP's throttle capacity based on some random process designed to annoy me. I was getting about 150 kbps so complained to my ISP. ISP blamed BT. BT came and measured the line. BT said 4 Mbps - computer said 150 kbps. ISP said Oh! then admitted that at peak times they restricted throughput but they were sure I'd get the full 4 Mbps after 2AM. BT technician said that he gets this all the time.

Microsoft's Bing bods exploit fanbois' Apple maps misery

Re: Oh Dear - It's Crap

If I'm looking for an address by postcode then it's no good at all. If I put my postcode into Bing maps I get a map of the whole city (about 6 miles across the width of the screen), with no indication of where the postcode is. I suppose I could assume that it's in the centre and zoom in, but it's a bit of a leap of faith, isn't it?. One would think that something as simple as an "X", or an arrow or a blob to give me a clue would be given. This, and the fact that after one search the search box disappears requiring an app shut-down and re-launch to get it back makes it less useful than Apple maps IMHO. I'll carry on with google website, but it's really too clunky to use in the wild without 3G.

Oh Dear - It's Crap

I was so excited by this. I've just downloaded the Bing app; it looks good and hopefully they'll get it working soon.

If you search for a postcode it just gives a map of the town. No marker for the street or address, just the whole town. It then uses half the screen to say "Leeds - LS1 1AA - Get directions" so half the screen is unavailable for the map. I suppose that since the map is useless it doesn't matter whether or not it fills the screen or not. A bit of further playing has resulted in the search box disappearing and no way of getting it back. Now it's frozen, white and non-responsive.

If you thought that Apple maps were useless then Bing will set new levels of uselessness for you.

Watch out, PC disk drive floggers: Cloud will rust up those spinners

Re: I'll miss them

"Uh, how about using the cloud as (an additional backup) for the stuff one finds important." - -precisely because it's important stuff. No point having important stuff backed up to somewhere I can hardly access and which could disappear at any moment.

I do daily backups when I'm at home. I carry a backup disc with me when I'm on the road and keep it up to date (mostly). Additionally all my "working" docs are backed up in plain on an Iron Key so if my PC dies a big death on the road I can be up and running with clients pretty quickly (albeit after the expense of a new PC).

There used to be a scam where a virus locked all the files on your PC and they were only released after a payment. The way that the "Cloud" is developing feels a bit like a legalized version of this. I'm sure there are some people for whom having files current on many devices via the cloud is useful and I think they're being sucked into finding it indispensable before they suddenly start getting hit for ££ to maintain a service they used to get for nothing. I'm not one of them and should the day come that I need global access to all my stuff across more than one device I'll pay my ISP the extra for a business account and static DNS and stick it all on a server.

I'll miss them

I don't use any cloud services and, as long as I have a choice, I never shall - mainly because I don't / can't trust people with my stuff, but practically because I wouldn't have access to it most of the time. The concept might be great if you live and work in central London or Los Angeles - where WiFi can be sniffed out and 3G coverage is good, but my experiences in most of the UK is that I'm, effectively, disconnected from the web most of the time. I need (and have) two phones so I have simultaneous Vod and O2 just to guarantee voice calls to clients as I roam about the UK. Last week (Mon-Fri) I only had 3G access for about 4 hours (Norfolk, Scotland) - and a lot of the time there was no mobile signal at all. Most of my written comms is done by SMS because email isn't really available. I dream of Edge!

I'm sure that I'm a tail-end charlie on this and the article is more-or-less on the button and I guess that in ten years' time I'll be paying a fortune on eBay for those old drives (disk or solid) - a bit like the money I still spend today on Vinyl ;-)

HP must throw its PC biz overboard to survive, says analyst

HP PCs and Printers Are a Disgrace to the HP Name

When I started work in the 80s HP were the byword for quality. My HP11C calculator gets almost daily use and is still going strong. The first computer I used was a 9826 (the second one was a 9836!) - a fantastic bit of kit for its time for everything from controlling test gear to running FE analysis. Nearly all the test gear I used was HP and all the other manufacturers just had to answer the question "is it as good as its HP equivalent" before I'd even talk to them about an alternative.

On the basis of these formative years when I first bought a laptop I paid a premium for an HP product - and bought an HP printer to go with it. They were rubbish. Poor build quality, poor performance, impossible to get them to work together wirelessly and no support whatsoever. The PSU was recalled twice due to danger of it bursting into flames. Full reboot needed to get a DVD to play. Screen hinge useless after 6 months. Printer impossible to use wirelessly and scanner function intermittent. I learned my lesson; both were consigned to the bin after less than a year of use. I'll never buy another HP product again - unless it's a vintage HP11C to replace mine should it get run over by a tank - and the tank comes off best. Good riddance to them.

E.ON to flog stake in wind farms to private firms

Re: Subtle withdrawal

You're right. It also protects E.On from any massive decommissioning costs. The operating company can just go bankrupt and then it's up to the taxpayer to make them safe. This is what has happened in some parts of California.

CIOs on the scrapheap - The Register wants your input for vox pop article

Re: Re: What's a CIO?

No feigned ignorance nor superiority intended. The original article was about doing a vox pop about CIOs. I just wanted to register the fact that I don't know what one is.

I agree that I could look it up on the web (I still haven't) - but that wouldn't give me any valid insight or view about CIOs - just evidence that I know what the letters stand for.

I read el Reg every day, I don't work in IT except to the extent that, because I have my own very small company, I do it all myself - from specifying and buying equipment, to setting up networks and fixing(or not) most of my own problems. Maybe I'm a CIO and just didn't know it.

What's a CIO?

The post is required, and must contain letters

Experts: We're stuck with passwords – and maybe they're best

I use mSecure

It syncs from PC to mobile devices.

They're not protecting you....

They're protecting themselves. They don't care if your password is weak - as long as there is a password. if it's compromised and you lose money then as long as the site can show that the loss was caused by someone using correct account and password information then the problem must be that you told someone your password or wrote it down somewhere. This way they don't have to pay up.

Passwords rule until....

Many organizations have a clause in their Ts&Cs stating that passwords must not be written down. Many people who have, say, 40+ logins to remember write their passwords down in some way or other. I foresee a court case in the not too distant future where, after losing money due to someone stealing his/her list of passwords, a user claims that such a contract clause is unreasonable on the basis that an average person cannot be expected to remember dozens of different passwords- after which banks, shopping sites, etc will find an alternative to passwords.

TomTom axes 10% of workforce

You need to re-format your hard disk.

Now, what's the problem?

I swear that if I told them that the windscreen sucker no longer stuck they'd tell me to reformat the hard disk and install the latest software.

When they work they are great

Much better than a smart phone. Problem is that mine only works well about 10% of the time - and I don't think it's unusual. The rest of the time it can't find the network for traffic, it can't find where it is, it resets itself at random, the speed camera alerts turn themselves off, map updates delete saved settings, etc etc etc.

Perhaps if they listened to users, fixed bugs, made improvements to HMI and employed help-desk staff didn't say "you need to re-format the hard disk" to every problem then they might not have to sack people. My TomTom is a perfect and fantastic piece of kit for the 10% of it's operational life when it works properly. The rest of the time its a piece of s*hite.

Good Riddance

Hope they sacked the idiots who developed the SW for the Go740 series.

Greens abandon science to tie down mobile towers

Fewer Towers Mean More Handset Power

There's no evidence that RF causes damage (at these levels) but if we believe it might then it would be better to put the towers closer then the phone would cut its output power and the user gets a lower RF dose.

Could a snapshot plug your backup window?

Having used Acronis software and had some experience of their help desk I wouldn't believe a word they said to me. I'd rather they fixed their software and responded to questions instead of arguing the differences between backups and snapshots.

Why so shy on pay-by-wave, Nokia?

Pay by Wave?

I've had a Barclaycard that does PayWave for 2 or 3 years now and I've never seen a shop that takes it in the UK. The only place I've seen a terminal is abroad, but It doesn't work outside the UK. Maybe Nokia are waiting for retailers to decide on a technology and rolling it out before wasting their money on it.

BlackBerry BBM, email offline AGAIN

Some people buy them because the BES is pretty secure compared to other mail servers. The more waggish might suggest that denying access to everyone is about as secure as you can get.

NHS claws back £170m refund on duff IT system

Stage Payments?

It's astonishing that the company were paid so much before delivering anything. A good contract will only pay a small percentage to the supplier to cover start up costs and nothing more until some sort of value has been seen to have been delivered (e.g. system requirements analysis, design reviews, acceptance tests, etc). Where are the contracts managers in the NHS?

Painters wrap Forth Bridge job after 121 years

@ Graham Bartlett

Thanks for you post and the clarification. I've been labouring under that misapprehension for years.

The real reason Google bought Motorola

Revenue is not profit

Corporation tax is paid on profit, not revenue.

Ultra-cheap HP TouchPads to hit UK at 6pm

Not Sorry for HP

I was an early adopter of HP tech. The 9826 was possibly the best computer I've ever used. My HP11c calculator, which I bought about 200 years ago, is still going strong and is probably the best engineering calculator ever made. A few years ago I bought an HP laptop and a HP printer and after this experience the only thing made by HP that I'd ever consider buying would be a replacement for the 11c should it get run over by a tank and come off worse (pretty unlikely, I know). Good to see them reaping the benefits of forgetting that it's what customers think that matters.

LightSquared blasts GPS naysayers in FCC letter

Agree, but not as hard as it appears

GPS is speared rectum with about 40dB processing gain, so filtering is possible, although not cheap. Non-portable military receivers have front-end filters - usually because they sit on a platform right next to something radiating very close at high power (e.g. SSR ).

iPhone 5 less than a month away

Everything's worse

You could publish a fake review now, then we could all vent our spleen about how it's a backward step, not as good as the 3G, etc. I hear that the r.f. reception will be worse (I made that bit up - see how easy it is).

I'd feel better getting it all out of my system now, rather that when the kids are back at school and the stress levels of the school run, homework, sports kit, etc coupled with a new iPhone review could just kill me. Does it come with a defibrillator app?

'Up to' broadband claims out of control, says Ofcom

Survey It

Why not have an app that samples users' upload and download rates and then sends them to OFCOM? They could then publish min, max, mean and median access speeds by time of day for all the ISPs. Then consumers would be able to make their own choice.

Next iPhone to sport thinner, lighter casing, says paper

Is it just me....

Just out of curiosity, am I in a minority because I'd prefer the 5 to be the same thickness as the 4 with a longer battery life than thinner?

Dig deep! Radio asks taxpayers for blank cheque

Too Power Hungry

The battery in the 1960's transistor radio in my bathroom lasts about 3 years. The batteries in the DAB radio last about 6 weeks before needing re-charging. It's a real pain.

Now - before you all tell me it's easy to just re-charge - it''s not. The power fails half way through my shower. Being an old git, by the time I've finished grumbling, drying off, finding my cleanest dirty shirt (thanks, Kris) and rushing for the door I've forgotten about the radio - and the next morning is groundhog day all over again. It can take weeks for me to remember to charge the battery.

The advantage of the 1960s radio is that it necessitates a trip to Maplin to buy the PP6 battery and the joy of buying solder tools, wire, die-cast boxes, BC108s, .......... aaahhh, food for the soul.

Acronis: We're snatching Symantec market share

Acronis needs to support users

I agree with AC - Acronis treat customers like carp. The user interface is unfathomable and not being able to recover from network backups is a serious gap in functionality.

iPhone 5 rumors: bigger, smaller, cloudy, keyboard-equipped

iPhone - it's a nostalgic experience

For those of us who have used Nokia, Siemens, etc for a few years, using an iPhone is a nostalgic experience; constant worry about battery charge and always losing signal. It's like 1997 all over again! If Apple wants to improve the phone then leave it as it is, give it a real 5-day battery and real-world signal sensitivity so I don't have to get on to the roof to talk to my clients.

MP: Googlepoly hurts British business

Google Wins Because It Has the Best Products

With Google Maps I can plan a route with waypoints (including pubs, ferries, museums) on google and on my PC and then use it when I walk round the city on my phone (iPhone excepted, obviously). I can send the route to friends as a browser friendly map, with a commentary on the route (handy for cultured pub crawls). Try doing that on multimap. The google map app on my iPhone has bus timetables in it and is more easy to use than the local bus company's website - can't do that with streetmap. They need to stop whingeing and innovate.

Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo 2TB Nas

Static IP

Thanks AC - I've had a quick look at the website and it looks interesting. If I can summon the energy I'll go another round with the kit.

Regards,

HG.

Remote Web Access - be careful

I have spent about 60 hours trying to get the remote web access to work. If your ISP will not give you a static IP then you will not be able to get remote web access to these servers.

Leica M9 rangefinder camera

Stop saying it's got a tiny body

M-series cameras are not small. I've owned one and with a 50mm lens it was bigger than my Olympus OM4 SLR. Nice camera, but this myth that's grown up about them being small and pocketable needs to be quashed.

Apple's draconian developer docs revealed

The long and lonely search for Nvidia drivers

Why the hell am I looking for Nvidia drivers to stop it rebooting halfway through the night!? - well, because often if I leave my laptop on overnight I get up the next day to find that the laptop has re-booted. When I log in and go to windows problems it tells me that an Nvidia driver caused my laptop to crash. I'd rather it didn't crash - so I spend time trying to find out if I can fix it. Nvidia's tells me there's something I could try but it's at my risk and not to blame them if my PC never works again. HP's website doesn't help much and device manager says I'm up to date and there's no problem. The search goes on and my PC keeps on crashing.

So what's wrong with preventing people desinging shoddy software that buggers up my machine?

My PC, in common with most others gets slower and crankier as I load it up with various bits of software, both bought and free and I bitch like hell about what a pile of crud it is. Ditto my Nokia. If the results of this control by Apple are products which keep working as they were intended and don't need a barrage of after-market apps just to manage disc use then I look forward to the day that Microsoft takes the same approach. I can't ditch my PC for various reasons, and I'm envious of my friends who have Macs and don't spend 10% of their keyboard time waiting for them to boot up, doing backups (I spent hours on Saturday configuring a wireless backup disk and it still doesn't work properly because I don't know my TCPIPs from my UPNPs so my firewall won't play nicely; my mate just plugged in a white box and it started working) de-fragging disks, deleting bloatware, installing updates, deleting updates, searching in vain for invidia drivers to stop the pc rebooting overnight half-way through the backup or virus check .........................................................If Apple's approach is what's needed to make my PC boot up in the same decade that I first hit the power button and stay stable enough to run 4 hour monte carlo sims without crashing then the sooner they start locking down my PC with rules about what developers can put on it the better. I'd pay extra for that.

TomTom Go 550 Live

They aren't reliable enough

When the tomtom live works it's up there with the best bit of kit ever. I travel a lot in the SE of England and it's a useful piece of kit. Like I said - when it works.

Here's what happens in my experience at least once a week.........Turn it on - plan a route. Wait for the live traffic to load. It doesn't and tells you there's no network coverage. Turn it off and on again. Traffic might load. If not hold power button for 30 secs to reset device. Traffic loads OK(unless it's a weekend, when there's a fair chance that the server will be down. You won't find this out until after sending a support request - following the instructions to re-format the hard disc - wasting 4 hours of your Sunday afternoon doing this 3 times - only to be told on Monday after ringing the help desk that the server was down). So, having got traffic working I want to connect to my mobilephone via bluetooth. It doesn't pair automatically (I've had 3 different phones and none of them pair automatically with the tomtom) Although you only paired it yesterday it won't pair and just tells you there's no response from the phone. Turn phone off and on - no pairing. Turn TomTom off and on - won't pair. Delete pairing from phone and TomTom. Go through the nausea of the discovery and pairing again. Of course - now you've turned the tomtom off so there's a fair chance that the traffic isn't available (GOTO start).

By now you're either 15 miles up the M3 without having looked at the road once or you've been sitting in the car park for almost 10 minutes and any time the tomtom might have saved on your trip has been used up in making it work. Oh - by the way - if the car park is not on the map (new industrial estate) then you can't do any of the above until you get onto a piece of road that it recognizes -- it just sits in an endless "planning route" loop. You have to drive to somewhere it recognizes, find somewhere to park, then do it all.

The map update service is useful - but beware because it deletes all your favourites, your home and work locations and any map overlays you've downloaded. TomTom will tell you there's a way round this by copying to and from PoIs; it's true but you won't want to do it.

I agree that Nokia will never replace this type of device, and on the rare occasion that I get into the car and it just works it is a fantastic bit of kit, but it's just not reliable enough and the compay is not interested in fixing bugs.