Posts by JimmyPage 3224 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010
Wifes WildfireS came preloaded with a Facebook app, which you can't remove, nor stop running (she hasn't got a Facebook account).
When you try and access settings, it lists all the permissions it has "Access my call data", "Access my contacts" etc etc (pretty much all from what I can see) with no option to deselect them.
"An amendment to the law which would ban employers asking their minions to hand over Facebook or Twitter passwords has already been blocked"
anyone who *did* hand over their details would be breaching Facebook/Twitters T&Cs.
Anyone any idea what the UK position would be here, if a candidate declined to provide these details ?
arguing over *which* eReader you like diverts attention from the facts.
1) Publishers often set eBook prices to be the same (or more) than the dead-tree version
2) We have to pay VAT on eBooks.
Why not put the same effort into addressing those as to a bunfight over Kindle/Nook/Kobo ?
there's nothing preventing a victim pursuing a claim in civil court. Talk Talk can hardly deny it. The only tricky thing might be to demonstrate that it happened. However, since you are only working on the balance of probabilities, I wonder if the court would accept it happened *unless* TalkTalk could disprove it ... would make for very interesting times ...
if the UK gov does insist on "digital by default" then presumably web pages become primary sources of information. Has anyone developed a mechanism for keeping track of websites so that you can prove what version was displayed when ?
Otherwise, I can see pages with incorrect information being put up, that people act on, and when they have to defend themselves ("the government website said this...") they find the page has mysteriously changed.
Or are they not *that* serious about DBD ?
Indeed ... the recent excavations in London have demonstrated that the Romans management of water was not to be equalled until Victorian London.
If you like your history and engineering, there's a cracking Time Team special about an experiment to recreate an amazing piece of machinery found in London - unknown anywhere else in the Roman Empire. It was a conveyor belt of buckets powered by animals.
although not in a boys toys way.
Mrs JP has MS, and it's knackered her vision (optic neuritis) making it hard to see at a distance. It's not a lens issue, so specs don't help. If these gadgets can be used to project a TV picture so it's viewable as if it were a foot from the eye as opposed to the 6-8 feet in real space, it could be a godsend.
So bring it on.
England no longer existed. He'd got that - somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonalds, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.
He passed out.
I wasn't saying there has been a slump of sales because *I* don't need a new PC. I was pointing out that if you extrapolate my situation, you can work out why PC sales are nosediving. All I was doing was using my personal situation to inform my professional view - with the appropriate level of caution.
There was a Samsung stand in my local shopping mall last week. Despite their being loads of phones, the few times I walked past it in a 2 hour period, the only things people were eyeballing were the tablets.
Hardly scientific, but it would cause me to want to know more before I invested in selling Samsung phones.
between the industry, and the market ? It's painful to see, and certainly isn't great PR for capitalism and the free market.
PC sales have tanked, because nobody needs a new PC right now. I'm working on a 3 year laptop supplied by work. My wife and sons PCs are 4 year old boxes I put Win7 on. I see absolutely no need to upgrade. Possibly replace in the event of a failure, but even then, I have some older XP boxes in the loft that would probably do.
Now, Win2000 ran software that people (especially in business) needed to run. Therefore NT4->Win2000 was a big event.
XP ran software that Win2000 couldn't. So there was a push to that. The first crack in the dam occurred when Vista didn't really add anything to XP.
Win 7 came along at a lucky point in the cycle, and drove a few upgrades, but given I am working on a Win7->XP machine, it wasn't essential
So here we are today. Win8 just doesn't add anything people *need*.
It's like mobile phones ... in our household (we've not drunk the Apple kool-aid) we're all happy with 2+ year old phones.
People still don't get it. MS are a US company. MS have to abide by US law. US law (PATRIOT act) means that Uncle Sam can ask MS to cough up data from *anywhere* it controls it - and to hell with any other arrangements they may have promised. Uncle Sam can also require MS to shut down any server they control - again irrespective of location. MS admitted last year that wherever they hold data, it's available to the US government if requested.
Also, (or so our Information Security guys tell me) if this were to happen, any person whose data was snatched would have a case for suing the company that lost it.
Two reasons for being *very* careful where your cloudy data goes.
will think we're making it all up.
*If* you were lucky, you could get a phone in less than 2 months. And as for a *second* phone ....
One of my first paying jobs in electronics was (illegally) fitting extensions for neighbours - because in those days only GPO engineers could do that (phones were hardwired - no plugs and sockets) AND you only rented the handset.
Anyone remember party lines ?
a suspicion that those in power *really* don't "get it". It would be funny, if it didn't result in ludicrous laws, and the appalling waste of money sunk into IT schemes that could have easily delivered with a managed FOSS solution.
And to the commentard who suggested that new eBooks are the *same* price as the dead tree version ... I have seen many eBooks that are *more* expensive than the paper version.
Bad form to reply to oneself, but just to add about routers ....
VM supply a crippled rebadged router, which would be flattered with the epithet "pants". However (although I had to await a firmware upgrade for this) it can be put into "modem only" mode, which allows you to use your own preferred router.
Make sure you do use the VM supplied kit though - it's DOCSIS 3.0
The caller identifies themselves, and then tells about a system called "government" which you have to pay into, and you can get the most fabulous prizes. They then threaten that if you don't pay them, they'll lock you up.
Despite me sending off over £15,000 last year, I haven't seen a bean.
Going back to my childhood, it was not uncommon to know some people who just did not have a phone. And this was London, not some backwater.
Clearly, at some point, it was decided that the telephone would be the primary point of contact with the state.
I appreciate it's a little more complex to use the web, but that's where we are heading.
"Below the fold". Because no one reads that. Oldest trick in the book. Beloved of politicians, as it can be done with absolutely (a) no money, and more importantly (b) no trail linking you to any media outlet.
Ever wonder why with the state of the country, newpapers have stories about X-Factor fallouts on the front page ?
Actually, that was a lie. Sort of. What I *could* have said, is that our DR plan has a risk of the office being unavailable and a compensating control of some rented war rooms to be available within 2 hours for key staff, and systems being switched to 3rd party providers. So airliner hitting building, gas leak, flooding, fire. They are all things that could make the office physically inaccessible.
And yes, it does get tested. The compliance guys have a secret pow wow with facilities, and when a fire drill is planned, key employees are stopped from going back into the building, and the DR plan is tested, so they have to make their way to the backup site. Quite a faff, but not quite as much as discovering your plan is flawed. Like one company that had a 300 page DR manual that was supposed to be issued to staff in the event of a disaster. Come the disaster, a murder in the estate their office was in, they discovered the only copies were kept in the office the police had sealed off and no one was allowed in.
Big boy businesses have backup generators, and disaster recovery plans.
Part of being a "businessman" is that you actually know a bit about "business". Axiomatic really. This is why there are so many failed "businesses" in the world. I know it's fashionable to knock people who get high salaries, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater - some of them are worth every penny.
I have known a few directors of "tech companies" who couldn't program a microwave, yet were very canny at managing sales, staff, and resources. They could spot flaws in plans and account for things that you just couldn't imagine.
ISTR aircraft crash investigators don't have any concept of "accident". The same should go for businesses.
Let's put it this way: our disaster recovery plan has an airliner hitting the office as a risk.
is that I don't want to see private business (especially non UK ones) being used to implement it.
I don't want government agencies to have Facebook pages, or Twitter feeds they expect you to use. Quite aside from the ethical question of why you must sign up with a third party to use a government service, would be the observation that if FaceTwitter were to go offline for any period of time, you've effectively cut yourself off from the world.
I've noticed a few companies have started now ... the *only* way you can contact them is "via our Facebook page".
worryingly there are lots of so called "techies" who have never heard of usenet. Take Virgin Media, for example. When I had problems posting on usenet a few weeks ago, I logged a support call. The first reply from the "engineer" asked if I had "contacted usenet to see if they had any problems".
Downvoted because that's not the point. If YOUR servers go down, then it's in your power to get things fixed. You can apply what resources (or not) you see fit.
If cloud servers go down, then you have absolutely no control over the fix, or how long it takes.
It's a little like owning a car, or choosing to cloudsource your transport needs to the bus/train. If your car breaks down you can arrange to get it fixed and possibly a replacement. Probably something you have mae allowances for, so your downtime is predictable.
If you get to the bus stop to discover all buses are off (strike/faulty fuel/whatever) then how long till you get where you're going ?
but they did confirm (and why it was treated as "news" was a mystery, it should have been bleeding obvious) that as a US company, irrespective of *where* their servers were, they were subject to the PATRIOT act, and therefore exposed to (a) a request for data from uncle Sam, or (b) being shutdown without warning.
Any company that uses any US connected cloud service is at the same risk.
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