Posts by Roland6 10751 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
> It won't be long before MVNOs compete by offering plans that give you a bucket of X data across as many devices as you want
Vodafone offered a multi-SIM with one phone number contract years back, not sure if it is still available.
Orange and now EE allow you to have multiple SIMs and provided you are on the right plan (£££) you can share the data on the master plan.
>Especially if patent holders like Qualcomm want to charge as a percentage of the sale price of the device.
Suspect this is the main reason for Intel et al wanting to bundle the chipset in a laptop.
>It's quite nice to see a brand new Android load up without any of the non-removable pre-installed rubbish.
So it seems there will be 'vanilla' Android phones that still have loads of non-removable pre-installed rubbish and Enterprise Recommended 'vanilla' phones that don't have the non-removable rubbish.
Good selling point, as I suspect with many handsets that is potentially another GB or more of memory available for the app's you actually want. Or is it that Enterprise Recommended is going to be a hidden setting, instructing the phone not to load certain pre-installed app's?
>That's a good few years of payments that eat up pretty much all of the £350m per week.
Well in the world of Brexit campaigning where figures are used out of context; "Brexit to cost £2,000m a week, says Government's own report". It must be true, I saw it on the side of a red bus; so to save sending the EU £350m a week, we will instead cost the UK economy £2,000m a week - bargain!
I’ll laugh when Jobcentres send our homegrown unemployed out to pick mushrooms, clean toilets and do all the other jobs which were done by “foreigners”.??
Personally, I will be watching with interest to see whether THTB really have the backbone to do this. I will laugh when our homegrown unemployed complain about being made to do jobs that "Johnny foreigner" should be doing, whilst admitting they voted for Brexit...
Yes, we do, but it's not much, and the cash is running out. I guess all he's saying is that he'll put a little bit more money in the pot
Well the BDUK money is running out, but the government has already committed £400m out of the TV licence fee monies to rural broadband infrastructure. So I expect more money to be found and for the existing £400m commitment to be re-announced as if it were new monies.
He also blamed the EU's rules on state aid having "prevented us from investing in broadband in a way that is best for the UK.
Er ... don't we keep giving large amounts of money to BT to get them to provide rural broardband?
The TPTB at Westminster and in Whitehall thought they could simply throw money at BT before someone told them this would contravene the EU state-aid rules - that the UK largely wrote and got the EU to adopt. (Remember one of the problems UK exporters to the EEC encountered was governments favouring local businesses, so the UK got rules about state aid adopted to help level the Single Market playing field between in-country and out-of-country companies bidding for work.) And so they went away and came up with the funding rules for the BDUK Programme which effectively satisfied the state-aid criteria whilst making it only really viable for BT to tender...
As we know, a reason why the government wanted BT to be involved is down to the existing arrangements for the monitoring of communications.
>M25 - planned in the 60's, built in the very early 70s.
Err no, whilst construction of a few small sections started in 1973, most it was built in the early 1980's and then widened in the late 1990's.
>The point stands - we need more roads
That is debatable, particularly as the main areas where we need more roads is within our urban areas...
However, that also makes assumptions about what forms of transport we will be using, its affordability etc.
>But that software had been paid for already?
You are getting confused between what is actually on the PC and the Recovery media.
As a private individual you can legitimately sell your old laptop complete with its pre-existing Windows install, attached OEM COA along with the master set of recovery media either supplied with the system by the OEM or created by you from the Recovery partition for your own use, these rights have been granted to you by Microsoft under the EULA.
Whilst real information about this case is hard to come by, it seems the real issue is the reproduction and distribution rights for the Recovery Media. From what we know they burnt 28,000 copies of Windows recovery discs with the intent of distributing them with refurbished PCs. By burning 28,000 disks it is clear this isn't for "personal usage", this is for business/gain; particularly as their stated intent was to distribute the disks with refurbished PCs.
As an OEM or Small Systems Builder, I get to purchase Windows licences at a discount on the basis that I provide certain services and to enable me to deliver these services MS grant me certain rights. One of these rights enables me to use MS branding in certain ways, another legally incorporate MS products into my own branded Recovery Media and to reproduce and distribute said media.
So I suspect because the guys didn't have either an agreement with Dell or Microsoft, they didn't have their permission to reproduce and distribute their IP and hence they effectively produced 28,000 counterfeit disks. As is the case with say grey import/counterfeit Levi's (made in the same factory and totally identical to the real thing) this is a trading standards issue and hence all MS or anyone has to do is to inform trading standards, who will then prosecute the case, calling on you as a witness. If you have observed markets where stall holders are selling counterfeit movie DVD's, it is Trading Standards people supported by the police who did the searches and initiated prosecutions.
>If the PCs had licenses stuck on them then who cares where the media came from.
Depends on what you intend doing with the PC's and when in relation the support lifecycle of the version of Windows you wish to install:
If you are doing something non-commercially for your own or a friend's PCs then one set of rules apply.
If you are working for a client to repair/refurbish their property then another set of rules applies.
If however you intend to resell used PCs as a business then yet another set of rules apply.
The people who care are those who benefit from the rules, namely: Microsoft and the law enforcers.
Remember one of the reasons for MS brought in licencing rules for refurbished PCs was to reduce the number of licences in circulation, specifically for versions of Windows going EoL. Remember a big concern of MS was it wanted people to move off XP onto 7; the last thing MS wanted was for all those EoL corporate XP machines to be refurbished and land in the consumer market...
So whilst currently you can download from MS ISOs for 7, I expect that just like with XP after 8-Apr-2014, come 15-Jan-2020 MS will kill the relevant download links and licenced Refurbishers won't be able to supply refurbished systems running 7.
>You cannot re-activate Windows Vista or older; Windows 7 is dicey.
Provided you can access the activation files you can transfer the activation from the old system to the rebuilt system, you don't need to reactivate. However, you do need to use both the correct version (Home/Pro/Enterprise) and licence variant (OEM/Retail/Volume) of Windows media.
I seem to remember the instructions I've used for an XP and W7 malware recovery came from a MS KB/Technet article. But it is much easier to simply drop in the relevant OEM's recovery media which not only handles the pre-activation for you but also instals the relevant (albeit old) drivers in the OEM's recommended sequence.
OEM Windows licenses were valid only on the machine that they were sold with, and only *for the original buyer*. More specifically, the licenses were non-transferrable.
MS complicated matters, an individual can sell a machine with the pre-installed OEM licence and Recovery media to another individual. Likewise a business can dispose of systems with OEM licences pre-installed, however, if my business is the resale of 'refurbished' Windows systems then I need to wipe the system and install a Recycler COA version of Windows.
>You need a license to distribute windows with hardware.
The article seems to imply he was only selling the Recovery media and hence wasn't himself directly recycling systems - just providing the Recovery media to allow end users to recycle a system. Hence why MS seem to have taken a back seat in this case.
So this guys mistake seems to be the reproduction of OEM Recovery media without having appropriate agreements with OEMs and thus infringe the OEM copyright over their Recovery media.
Having had to deal with systems with Recycler COAs, I like what the guy was doing, as technically because systems with Recycler COAs no longer carry the OEM COA, you can't use the OEM Recovery media to restore the system, but as Recyclers don't usually supply recovery media...
>But there is no EU mechanism to reverse article 50.
Yes there is no formally defined mechanism, however Article 50 doesn't define the contents of the "Withdrawal Agreement", only who has to agree to the contents. Thus it is perfectly possible to have a "Withdrawal Agreement" that agrees for the UK to remain in membership; as T.May said "Brexit means Brexit"...
>So, Everyone is advocating we comply with EU regulations, but without the ability to effect what said regulations are?
Not quite. What the Brexiteers are saying is that the EU will be so desperate to trade with the UK ("they need us more than we need them..."), they will rollover and simply make their regulations comply with whatever the UK says and thus rubber stamp the UK regulations...
>Anyone wanting to do business in Europe has to comply with GDPR no matter where in the world they are based so UK businesses would end up with two different data protection schemes that they have to comply with
Well given it is almost a certainty that UK law will be found to be inadequate the only real solution will be to have an EU registered and located business that does all the GDPR compliant work, complete with all the necessary 'walls' between EU and non-EU worker access to data; leaving the UK operation to deal with UK/non-EU work.
If you need a real-world example, just look at the EU-US data protection relatonship...
Naturally, few if any jobs will leave the UK, but all the new jobs will be outside of the UK...
>Although Maggie got the UK into a the Single Market.
No, she was one of the founders of the European Single Market, largely because it would be helpful to the UK's export trade. So it is even more concerning that people haven't been using this against the Conservative party. In some respects, Margaret Thatchers statue should be placed in Parliament Square, but in a position where MPs are constantly reminded of her.
The laugh is that Maggie, managed to change the EEC in fairly short time; something Brexiteers say is not possible to do with the EU...
Additionally, whilst she didn't want to be part of the EU political union, she was sufficiently astute to realise that the UK's interests would be best protected by being a member of the EU and so having a place at the EU policy-making table. The laugh about this is today we have a cabinet of supposedly intelligent MPs and an expensive Whitehall department who having spent umpteen months grappling with Brexit, all of whom seem to not have grasped this simple fact.
>So, instead of pursuing ever faster and faster speeds, please OpenReach, concentrate on fibre-ing up the whole country, not just 98% of the population.
Perhaps something Ofcom could do now (ie. something to help users out before FTTP is universally available) is to either regulate 'low end' non-fibre leased line services or encourage enhanced ADSL services, as clearly there is a gap in the market between bulk standard xDSL broadband and leased lines (*1). For example, it shouldn't be that difficult to enable both pairs in a typical telephone line to be used.
Such an action needs to be initiated by Ofcom, as if BT were to propose such solutions, people would simply claim they were trying to wring more profit out of the POTS network and further delay deploying fibre...
(*1) Whilst a leased line has differences (advantages/disadvantages) to DSL, A&A are quoting (prior to survey etc., but including VAT) £1800 install and circa £690 pcm for a 30Mbps leased line, compared to £42 pcm for a similar FTTC service (okay capped at 200GB pcm). Hence why I think there is room in the market for an offering in the £80~200 pcm price bracket. Ie. sufficient for SoHo and micro businesses, who don't typically buy leased lines and hence would have little impact on the leased line market.
>Yep. That's what 2Mb/s ADSL broadband did for me when it arrived in 2004. Made all the difference to my ability to work.
Agree, getting initially 1.5 and subsequently 2.5~5Mbps mobile broadband made a huge difference in my ability to work from home.
>Having twenty times faster than that now is nice, but makes very little difference.
Having had circa 35/7Mbps FTTC for a couple of years now, I would disagree, but that is probably more to do with having teenagers playing on the Xbox and watching YouTube etc. during school holidays and it not impacting on my work usage.
>I wrote some thoughts on rural broadband a while back.
Yes, it is clear from this short piece and your 'About' section, that you have zero real-world knowledge of the needs of rural internet users, especially farmers.
>The priority should be ADSL-grade always-on connectivity
What do you mean by this?
A local farmer, who had need to exchange red tape with government, was practically unable to do this using the ADSL-grade line they had, due to it being approximately 5.3km long [FYI: Chart of ADSL and ADSL2+ Speed Versus Distance ]
Now they have Gigaclear and completing the red tape is no longer the sole destroying chore it was before I got involved (we installed a mobile broadband router with external antenna - farmhouse with two foot thick stone walls, pointing at a mast ~1km away).
Yes, the focus should be on 'reasonable' speeds, sufficient for normal/typical usage - which is where the proposed Broadband USO bar of 10Mbps is pitched. However, to achieve this in some areas you need fibre, which comes as standard with 'superfast' speeds...
Aside: Given the rise of electric cars, and the associated demand for metals such as copper, I suspect BT will be wanting to remove the copper POTS network so as to take advantage of the increases in metals prices.
Yes, I found it amusing on the radio (BBC) this morning that no one wanted to say what the likely income was going to be for hosting a mast [Aside: funny how everyone thinks only of the antenna array and fail to notice the rather large box(s) of equipment at the base of the mast...]
So there was everyone thinking the reason was because rural churches would be getting thousands (a mast I had installed the roof of a local in town FE college, earned the college circa £12,000 pa. 20 years back), until a caller divulged the £600 pa figure, at which point I think people fell off their chairs laughing at the government, who once again have been shown to big things up; only to deliver pennies...
>The real question is: will it continue to "run fine" after an update to some future version of "normal Win 10 Pro" ?
This has to be a genuine concern, given MS have already signalled the dropping of support and thus eligibility for (Win10) updates for some relatively recent Intel CPU families that have entered Intel's End of Interactive Support phase and so have only been receiving security updates for the Windows 10 Anniversary Update version.
Given we've had CPU ID's etc. for some years now, I do wonder if a current or future version of Win10 actually ships with a 'current' supported cpu list, hence making it very easy to turn support on and off for specific cpu's...
>I waited and waited for the right version of Windows 10 to come along and glad I waited
Enjoy the 'right' version, in a few months MS will be replacing it with another version; no one knows whether it will be an improvement or not, but what we do know MS will be doing it's utmost to get you to install it over the 'right' version...
>Client of mine paid £8K for server licensing for W2k8R2 a few years back, just asked for upgrade cost to Server 2016 it was £35K, same hardware that runs his loads fine. That was the the charity price...
I assume the £35K includes the full take-up of his purchase allowance from TT-Exchange, where two core WS2016DC licences are £44 each.
>so a limit of 4 does seem reasonable
Err no!
I have a Fujitsu Celsius R650 workstation dating from 2007 running XP Pro x64, it has dual quad-core Xeon's. The 2012 R670 gave the option of dual Xeons with 6 cores/12 threads and a choice of XP Pro x86 or x64, Win7 Pro 64 or 32.
So it would seem MS don't really want this version of Win 10 to be used on high-end workstations, unless they mean a maximum of 4 physical processors...
"If all of my contract income were taxed under PAYE/NI etc. then all of the overheads of running a limited company are a complete waste, as I would, in effect, be paying more than a permanent employee on the same gross salary."
Yes, that is what happens if HMRC decides your contract is within the scope of IR35...
"How then will all these tax details be worked out?"
Somewhere on HMRC's website are the details, but from memory, the general approach is to take the total pre-VAT contract income and treat that as salary. From this some deduction - I think it is 5% - is permitted for expenses. You then calculate the PAYE/NI on this, deduct what you've already paid on the salary you paid yourself and pay HMRC the difference.
Obviously, neither yourself or the employer can reclaim the VAT.
Hence you can see why HMRC have a vested interest in determining a contract to fall within IR35.
>If you pay other employees out of your fee, then you almost certainly won’t be IR35.
I was referring to your companies 'staff' eg. the undergrad you've employed to get some work experience and do some research.
>Right of substitution is a very strong indicator of genuine self-employment.
It is; however, I suspect HMRC will challenge this if it hasn't been invoked - particularly in a long contract.
For many years, colleagues with long-term contracts with one client would swap around every few months for a week or so and get paid through each others company. This helped both with IR35 and with avoiding the 24-month rule.
>Wouldn’t this ruling now mean that she has quite a large income tax bill to settle but quite a substantial amount of corporation tax that should never have been paid?
Yes, however, she will only be able to offset PAYE and NI previously paid on her salary against the amounts HMRC deem is now owed.
What is a little surprising is that the employer, the BBC, hasn't also been landed a tax bill, as currently it would seem there is no financial penalty being imposed on the BBC for not correctly assessing the IR35 status of the contract.
>My Accountant explained that post IR35 and you were working through a Limited company and paid youself a salary then you had to pay both Employee and Employer NI contributions.
That is on what you pay yourself, which is typically less than what you invoice. This ruling is effectively saying your personal taxable income is the before VAT invoiced amount (minus a small allowance for expenses) and thus PAYE and NI should have been calculated on this.
If my memory is correct, this calculation ignores whether you have paid other employees out of your fee, VAT and any other tax collected and paid on the monies. Obviously, any taxes (other than your personal PAYE and NI) paid on the monies received are non-recoverable and cannot be used to offset your liability...
>Even if you assume she was taxed at 50% then she's in the top 1% of earners in the specified years.
It is worse, this is unpaid tax over and above what she has already paid.
Additionally, at this wage level if she had been with the BBC in 2016-17, her name would have appeared in the Pay Disclosure Annex of the BBC's annual report - potentially increasing the number of highly paid women and thus directly impacting the BBC's gender pay gap.
>Perhaps BBC news could do one of their "fact checks" on this?
Well this is what they are currently reporting:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-43074584
>You are conflating cost, return on investment and a host of other items here.
No, I was simply referring to cost (to BT) and how those costs can be attributed to an individual line(*). How BT goes about reclaiming those costs is another matter. Thus I don't dispute that BT (or any other provider) will charge what they like for dedicated services, just that BT is likely to charge more because the directly attributable costs are higher.
>So there is a great return on supplying 1 single line of fibre in the ground.
For a client, just had a quote from BT for providing 100/100Mbps service over the 20+ year old copper local loop, no new cable just new boxes at each end, laughable the price they are asking - so there is still a great return on re-using pre-existing copper infrastructure.
>20 years ago I had 40-42Kbps on dial-up, which people tend to forget when talking about their needs "today"
and 20 years before that we had 9.6kbps on dial-up, totally agree with the sentiment.
(*) Although I accept BT can at times be sharp, a few years back BT effectively told the neighbouring village give us £80k and we will FTTC enable your cabinet, the village didn't and now has FTTP service from Gigaclear...
>No, it's closer to 120MB/s
No, you are confusing raw data rates with TCP/IP payload data rates. After allowing for network fabric latency (not all switches are equal! ), protocol overheads, Internet connection dictated packet size constraints and window/ack latency, I would expect to see a user transfer rate in the 80~100MB/sec space. However, in the real world, after allowing for system limitations/bottlenecks you may find your maximum user data transfer rate to be as low as 38MB/sec.
>And we are apparently setting sail to rattle some sabres with China.
That's so we can soften them up in preparation for those new trade deal negotiations Brexiteers keep going on and on about.
The laugh is that China is also on Trump's hit list, so the UK is going to have to do some real good schmoozing to keep the Americans happy and talk hard to the Chinese, whilst at the same time sweet talk them to supply us with highly subsidised products (eg. solar panels) in exchange for Rolls Royces and Scotch Whisky.
Given the references to Marconi in the article, I hope future article(s) cover the Marconi Centre and monument and Poldhu Amateur Radio Club, along with the Lizard Wireless Station. Whilst these are much smaller they do complete a communications visit to Cornwall (well whilst Goonhilly remains closed to the general public).
>FTTP was installed on some sites in the early 00s. Unfortunately it didn't support data
Probably because the exchange and/or street cabinet wasn't fibre enabled...
One of the (few) good things to come out of the BDUK programme is that BT has no excuse to not have fibre enabled all of it's exchanges and the vast majority of its street cabinets. Plus, a new development can convert a "not economically viable cabinet upgrade" into a viable upgrade, particularly if the development is for 28+ houses (ie. above BT's default threshold for FTTP on new developments).
So if your cabinet is still languishing in ADSL hell, I suggest you, and your neighbours, individually submit comments on any new development planning application stipulating that planning permission should only be granted if the development has an operational FTTP service installed...
>Cat6 will do 10Gbs
But only reliably over 50 metres, by the time you've allowed for drop cables, that is really only 30~40 metres wall-port-to-wall-port.
Been having this problem with installers, who being used to the 100 metre/1Gbps constraint, haven't appreciated the difference between 1 and 10 - it's all Gigabit Ethernet to them...
There is a difference between total cost and when that cost is incurred.
BT are aware that, given the size of their network, a nationwide rollout of FTTP is going to be a very big project, so do you ramp up your capability to deliver the project in say 5 years (then make people redundant) or do you manage expectations and do it in 20 years (and manage manpower largely through normal joiners/leaver process) ?
Ofcom will point to their desire to create a "competitive market" to justify why some areas will get multiple local loop providers and others none and why they didn't manage things to minimise duplication...
" it's quickly apparent you can kill someone's Netflix just by clicking a big web page.
The issue here is the cheap router, I expect in the coming years for consumer grade routers to get better at traffic prioritisation and shaping.
"Multiply by, what, 8-10 devices in the average family household and you need 250-300Mbps to match the performance of a smartphone."
Your forgetting the device doesn't fully utilise the bandwidth, even when streaming. My household with 2 tech saavy adults and 2 growing-up digital teenagers, has yet to top out a 35Mbps FTTC connection - yes we do at times have to wait for the multi GB update, but for normal interactive usage not seen problems.
"I run my whole house from a 4G Wifi router including Chromecast, TV streaming (no TV, just TVPlayer.com, Netflix and Amazon Prime), console, tablet, laptop with Steam games, etc.
...
For me to part with £50+ a month just for a broadband connection, you'd have to be offering me 200-300Mbps or more at minimum, with a generous data allowance and no bundled shite"
Given the performance of EE's 4G network and their top offer of 200GB for £60 pcm, I would have thought you would take the hand-off someone who could offer you an unlimited 38Mbps service for less than £50 pcm - I certainly did when FTTC finally arrived in my neighbourhood two years back...
>I got downvoted into oblivion for pointing this out in the recent WINE thread...
I think you got down-voted for explicitly referencing Office 2016, many people wanting to use Wine want to use previous versions that MS are trying hard to make newer versions of Windows incompatible with...
Also for myself, the ability to run 'Office' ie. Word/Excel/Powerpoint is just the starting point, I want to be able to run the full set of Office applications including Outlook, Visio and Project from various versions of Office (eg. 2003/2007) without loss of key functionality...
Hence why I'm looking for full function Linux native replacements.
>I'm just displeased Microsoft no longer makes a 10.5"-11" Surface, it's a comfortable size when it's not your primary device but you need something small yet powerful to carry around.
Whilst I agree about the form factor, trying to use Windows 10 on a physically small screen for real work (ie. where you need to use the desktop) is just an exercise in pain, whereas whilst the iPad has its limitations, you aren't constantly reminded of them at every interaction.
> It means you have a better idea of where to start when looking for a less common option.
Been using the Ribbon interface since 2007, but still I find Google is your friend when you need to locate both where some less used, but important option may be lurking and how to get it to work, as it works slightly differently to how it worked in 97/2000/2k3...
Also, try talking someone through some action using the ribbon interface, over the phone... Yes, you can use shortcuts, but you want the person to be able to learn how to use the interface, rather than just key in the 'magic' key sequences you tell them to use.
The big mistake MS made with the Fluent UI and subsequently with TIFKAM was not understanding that the majority of existing users of Windows/Office had learnt how to navigate the GUI that had pretty much been standard since the 1980's, with it's evolution proceeding much like the QWERTY keyboard, where someone from 1873 would be able to find their way around a modern keyboard. Yes my kids needed something simpler than the standard Office menu's to get them started, but that wasn't difficult - until MS decided to EoL Works and not include a 'beginners' mode in Office...
>If I pointed out that the safe was actually a kids toy, and the combination lock was nothing more than a clicky wheel to amuse a 4 year old
Just hope the said safe isn't in the US being used by government agencies, as then you are likely to be on the receiving end of an extradition demand - remember in the eyes of the user it is a 'safe'. Also, TPTB will regard the use of anything more secure as defacto evidence that you are up to no good...
> the company that inherited FOC copper and preferred to squeeze every last penny out of it rather than manage and remove copper from ducts and lay fibre in their place?
You are overlooking the key role Ofcom (previously Oftel) has played: in trying to create a 'competitive market' they prevented BT from investing in fibre, in some respects if BT hadn't already started the upgrade of their core network to fibre, Oftel would have blocked it, instead they prevented BT from deploying fibre in the local loop...
So you can have a "national quality something" at reasonable cost, if you drop the dream of having a "competitive market".
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