* Posts by Timmy B

990 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Mar 2011

EE: Data goes TITSUP* for Brit mobile customers

Timmy B

Today fine - yesterday I'd have gone mad

Yesterday morning I cruised through 6 gig of my allowance downloading test data and code to my laptop. If it had gone down then I'd have been stuffed. See... some people occasionally use mobile data for something other than YouTube.

Symantec ends cheap Norton offer to NRA members

Timmy B

@Jemma

"Giving any American a gun is like giving Jimmy Saville a 9 year old. It may not happen straight away but it'll happen eventually and it won't be good."

No. You are simply wrong. An American gun owner is less likely to be involved in a killing than a Japanese gun owner. I've proved it.

You are wrong and other that huff and puff you've backed nothing up.

Timmy B

@DuncanLarge

"If the constitution gives the right to have firearms then who the heck says it needs to be any particular type of weapon?

Honestly, let the army have the rifles and the public can make do with a modern version of the musket."

Simple answer - because the person invading your home won't have that kind of gun. If they are allowed for protection then you need to look at something that will protect you.

Timmy B

Re: The Land of the Insane @timmyb

@Jemma

You said a mass school shooting in the USA. Please list the 8 mass school shootings in the USA so far this year. And the BBC said there had been 18 school shootings this year too! A soundly debunked number (unless you want to include a person committing suicide in a car outside a school that had been previously closed down as a school shooting).

I want to see the list of mass shootings the BBC have or I call BS on your quote.

Timmy B

Re: The Land of the Insane

@snorlax

Back at you.

1. The issue at hand is gun control. Control of access to guns. Thus I've conflated it to be the gun that is the issue. It's kind of obvious if you read what I'm saying and don't try to find issues.

2. Irrelevant - If you look at the odds of a gun owner killing someone it's either about the same odds or way more likely in Japan. We're talking about gun control. Looking at a place with very strict gun control and you see that those deemed worthy under that system makes them no less likely to kill.

Timmy B

Re: The Land of the Insane @timmyb

@Jemma continued...

To help, there have been 2... Just 2 ( 3 if you really stretch what a mass shooting is) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

Timmy B

Aside from the Gun Issue

A friend took up a sales job with Symantec and on his first day a multi-national company returned over 150K copies of their AV stuff. The company weren't too bothered and carried on nicely. This is just virtue signalling.

Timmy B

Re: The Land of the Insane

@Snorlax

I understand guns don't kill - it's obvious from what I was saying.

Objectively you need to factor in all the relevant information - such as the number of available guns and the number of gun owners. You're not doing that.

Timmy B

Re: The Land of the Insane @timmyb

@Jemma

Woah there. There is not a mass shooting in a school every week. We are 8 weeks into 2018 - please list the 8 mass shootings.

Some facts, please.

Timmy B

Re: The Land of the Insane

Edit: I'll use the Wikipedia page you posted. Per 100K people has 0.6 guns. and 0.6 deaths. That's on death per gun. The USA has 101.05 guns per 100K people and 10.16 deaths by gun per 100K people that 1 death per 10 guns in the USA. Thus each gun is 10 times more likely to kill in Japan despite their far tougher training and control.

Timmy B

Re: The Land of the Insane

@Potemkine!

Read what I said. I said the odds of any particular gun killing someone. Not the number of deaths. If you look at the number of deaths per gun and not the number of gun deaths then Japan and the USA are a rounding error apart. IIRC - 0.0001 for Japan and 0.00013 for the USA. The UK is 0.00003 I think. I'd have to check but don't have my sources to hand.

Timmy B

If people actually wanted to make a difference and thought that taking any kind of guns away then the whole brouhaha about assault weapons and AR-15s would not be what they should talk about. If people really think that lessening the numbers of guns will make an impact then pistols is what they should be complaining about. The majority of deaths and the majority of crime with guns in the USA is with pistols.

Timmy B

Re: The Land of the Insane

Whilst you are right, Potemkine! the USA has more gun deaths individual guns are quite unlikely to cause a death. The likelihood of any particular gun killing someone is roughly identical to Japan, and they have some of the toughest gun regulation in the world.

Timmy B

@Boohoo4u

You allow hunting rifles but disallow semi-automatics. The issues is that many of these are functionally similar or operationally similar. I've seen people use lever action rifles quicker than some can use a semi-automatic. A revolver pistol can be operationally similar to a semi-automatic pistol (one trigger press = one shot and no manual reload).

Timmy B

@DryBones

Well said. Totally sensible. And therefore will be met with a torrent of down-votes. I'd say 18 over 21 but you do have some weird age restrictions in the USA....

Voice assistants are always listening. So why won't they call police if they hear a crime?

Timmy B

Re: An actual usefull scenario...

@Lysenko.

Those things already exist. You can get g-force monitors to see if people have fallen and proximity monitors to see if they leave a particular area, also bed pressure monitors that call a care company if a person has got up within certain times and not returned after a set period.

Timmy B

Re: An actual usefull scenario...

Careline..

This is the service we have. But they charge for the equipment, batteries and the service. £14 to change a battery that's £3 on ebay....

The one time we have actually needed them they spent more than 20 minutes trying to get sense out of a 98 year old with dementia before ringing the ambulance.

Timmy B

An actual usefull scenario...

We care for a couple of very elderly and infirm relatives. We currently have an emergency phone line with buzzers and such that they can use if one of them has an emergency. Alexa could perhaps do this job quite well. Have buttons that trigger Alexa to make an emergency call and then turn into a wireless phone that they can use to talk to the emergency operator. Much cheaper than the subscription we have to pay for the current service.

User presses button - Alexa calls 999 and says "I have an emergency at such and such and address where there are x elderly people with x medical needs. Please send an ambulance. Do you wish to speak to them?"

There are some issues with power cuts but then the current system has to be plugged in too.

Nobody expects the social media inquisition! OK, everybody did, UK politicos

Timmy B

"Only if you ban The S*n and The Daily Fail first."

Only if you ban Piers Morgan first.

Apple Macs, iThings, smart watches choke on tiny Indian delicacy

Timmy B

"(2) Why is this bug able to exist in the first place?"

We would use the phrase "How would we prevent this happening again?". If you ask how it happened originally you may get an answer as vague and unsolvable as human error. If you look for way to mitigate and prevent then you may even stop that as much as possible. For instance we have rules where variables have sensible names above a certain length limit - this limits typos and the effect thereof.

Chrome adblockalypse will 'accelerate Google-Facebook duopoly'

Timmy B

Re: Pages prediction ...

"Hopefully enough punters will say "fuck that, my phones already running 100 apps ...." and we'll see a change."

Without everyone cancelling their contract and saying that is the reason I don't think they'll care. They could just bin the apps because of lack of use and save some money.

Charity accused of leaving sensitive notes behind after office move

Timmy B

@Cynic_999

"Much of the information in the case notes of social services and similar organisations are 33% very selective truths, 33% gross exaggeration and 33% outright lies. "

I see you've had involvement with social services at some time. It's amazing how putting a condition on something becomes a refusal. "I will see you on such and such a day as it fits in with my work schedule" became "x refused to see social services". Bonkers!

Bloke sues Microsoft: Give me $600m – or my copy of Windows 7 back

Timmy B

Re: What I did

Were the points 4 to 98 figuring out how to get Linux to play nicely with printers an/or wifi cards. Something that never ever seems to go right for me...

From tomorrow, Google Chrome will block crud ads. Here's how it'll work

Timmy B

Auto playing videos is one thing.....

The worst is those that create a sub window that follows you round the page as you scroll and don't respect the fact you've paused the main window.

Facebook gets Weed-whacked: Unilever exec may axe ads over social network's toxic posts

Timmy B

Re: What's worse?

"What do you mean by child workers?"

Children between the ages of 8 and 14 that are used on palm oil plantations. You seem to be arguing that this is ok as it gets them money. But a little money in the short term and denying them the ability, through education, to get far more in the long term is surely wrong. Or would you say it's fine for your children to go back down the pits or up the chimneys?

Timmy B

What's worse?

Moany fake news on facebook or child workers and rainforest destruction?

Apple's HomePod beams you up into new audio dimensions

Timmy B

We have some echo stuff...

The thing is that I like my music and already had a fairly decent speaker setup so I only needed an echo dot to allow it to work with my current stuff. I would never consider another £350 purchase that would add very little to what I have. I think that this is the sweet spot that amazon and google are trying to hit that apple will miss. I'm sure it sounds great but better than a properly amplified setup with several good speakers? I doubt it.

Web searching died the day they invented SEO

Timmy B

Re: I think you forgot one

@phuzz...

nope - googling "cats AND hats" gives different results to "cats hats". I actually did the searches.

Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report

Timmy B

Re: Critical?

"There's a book for that:

https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/natural+navigator"

There is indeed, and I've spent some time studying under the author. There is no substitute for doing, though.

Timmy B

Re: Critical?

"Well yes, if people can no longer read maps.

Oh wait, GB and America have become that stupid."

It's a sad state of affairs. As someone who can navigate off road by map and compass I know it's not exactly rocket science and I could teach most people how to do the basics in an afternoon. I'm fairly OK in navigation without map and compass using natural signs and clues too - that would take a bit longer to teach.

Timmy B

If only....

...there was some kind of paper based backup that could tell you the layout of roads and such. It would be handy if it came with some kind of useful direction finding device too.

sigh.....

Should ISPs pay to block pirate websites? Supreme Court to decide

Timmy B

I recon...

A centralised scheme that companies opt into that is responsible for blocking sites. You're Nike and you want fake Nike trainers sites blocked you pay for access to the service for registration of sites blocked as the result of court orders and then ISPS check that service for free. Easy. That way anyone has fair access. Dammit governments if I can come up with these ideas, anyone can!

Electric cars to create new peak hour when they all need a charge

Timmy B

Re: Answering a few points in the comments...

"All of the pro-EV ideas here only make sense while EVs are a tiny minority. None of them scale to full use, due to tax or practical infrastructure issues."

I agree and in may ways we are benefiting at the moment. I say that we should and will need to pay tax of some sort and that it is not maintainable long term like it is. It would nave to be far in excess of the current system to make it more expensive, though.

I'll bet you got a subsidy, and the "fuel" is charged at domestic 5% VAT, not road fuel VAT+duty of "61%. Remove the subsidy and price your electricty at the same per km as petrol or diesel, as must happen long term, and the cost wil be the same."

We didn't get a subsidy as we bought an ex-demo. I agree about VAT and tax as above. It will need to be changed or we'll have loads of car users paying no money to maintain roads.

"But they can't produce the same amount of power as the 'classic' methods. If all cars were EVs the UK would need to double it's annual electricity production to charge them. Can't be done with today's green technology."

Agreed - but I am an anomaly in that I am an EV driver that likes nuclear power....

"Double the range means double the energy stored in the battery. Inevitably that means double the charge time, or double the charge rate. "

No - a charge for newer versions of my car are the same as ours in terms of time. Improvements in efficiency and battery technology are helping loads - you will, of course, pay more.

Timmy B

Re: Answering a few points in the comments...

@Nial

We didn't get the £5K grant as we didn't buy new - we bought an ex demonstrator.

We paid for the external charging port - it cost less than the last service for our old car.

So taking all that into account has already been done.

Timmy B

Re: I've been pointing this out for years.

@Jake: "The pro-EV set always shouts me down ..."

Why?

Timmy B

Answering a few points in the comments...

Our EV works out cheaper by far than the car it replaced. We pay less now including the repayments for the car and all fuel and servicing, etc. than we did for just the fuel on the car it replaced. The EV does very similar miles to the old car.

There are suppliers of electricity that are committed to only using greener methods, such as ecotricity in the UK. They are a little more expensive but even factoring this effect on the anual bill in, the EV still works out a little cheaper than just the fuel of the car it replaced.

We can pick and chose when the car charges. We can decide to charge it in the wee small hours negating the effect. I think that suppliers may offer EV rates where this promoted. If you have off peak tarrifs then this works out cheaper anyway.

Ranges, whilst still not up to scratch, are increasing each year with the latest model of our EV coming out this year able to do double what ours can (purchased 2016). I would say that unless you never do trips less than 50 miles you still can't currently run an EV for all journeys or have it as your only car, as you can't always depend on there being a functional charger at the destination. But this is slowly getting better.

A lot of people do need to get used to the idea that in the lifetime of many readers the only car you can buy will be something that doesn't burn fosil fuel.

Customers reporting credit card fraud after using OnePlus webstore

Timmy B

"Spyware on the phones, CC fraud if you buy one, not that cheap any more, poor after-sales support."

This is why I didn't get a 3T or 5. It's a bit sad really as the 3 is an excellent phone.

Hold on to your aaSes: Yup, Windows 10 'as a service' is incoming

Timmy B

Re: It's an OS not an Ecosystem

I think, actually, that it's you that doesn't get it. The average user does want an ecosystem. They want something to manage their photos, browse the net, do some emailing and some word processing, and watch some entertainment.

If all these things could be done in one place then they would only go to that one place. This is why tablets are so used. They do all this thing in something you can easily carry about. People only have tablets because their phone screens are too small.

If MS could get all the above things that 90% of the people do 90% of the time done well in something they could easily use and afford then people would buy it. MS know this and this is what they are trying to do. So do Google, and Amazon and Apple and Facebook. Everyone is trying to make a one stop ecosystem for the 90%

1980s sci-fi movies: The thrill of being not quite terrified on mum's floral sofa

Timmy B

Re: CGI is killing sci-fi

I am just old enough so that I can remember my Dad taking me to the first Star Wars all those years ago. What I see comparing those distant memories to today is this; Once kids went with their parents to see a film that was made for both and now it's kids taking their parents to see a film made for kids. The Last Jedi and the Force Awakens have only had good reviews from people I know who took their kids and their kids loved them.

Now that's sticker shock: Sticky labels make image-recog AI go bananas for toasters

Timmy B

Am I the only one wondering....

... what happens if they put that sticker next to a toaster?

Windows 10 bundles a briefly vulnerable password manager

Timmy B

Re: Which version of Windows 10

I agree - I just installed an MSDN copy of 10 Pro and no sign of it there. I can only find references to the original story. Do we have any 3rd party sources to confirm this? There is a Keeper enterprise that seems to be able to install keeper automatically. I wonder if this is actually what happened.

Timmy B
Pint

"Genius, I tell you!"

It took me all year but I finally came up with the good ideas....

Timmy B

"This could all be avoided if you just use the same password for everything and keep it on a post it note on your monitor."

I am far more secure. My passwords are all Pa$$w0rd. So easy to remember I don't need to use a post it note.

Tired of despairing of Trump and Brexit? Why not despair about YouTube stars instead?

Timmy B

@AC... "Grow up and stop being such a whiny fucking snowflake."

Irony is that this is what I think when I read most of what Kieran writes.....

Timmy B

Re: Well Article'd

"But I maintain that there is a significant difference between watching twenty two top athletes working as two teams with talent, determination and occasionally breathtaking skill"

That would work if that's what football was. I only see a couple of dozen prima-donnas worried about their haircuts and how they look then falling over and crying foul when somebody goes too close to them. And that's from watching highlight programs to get the "best bits". It's like a fashion show where occasionally something almost like a sport accidently appears.

No, BMW, petrol-engined cars don't 'give back to the environment'

Timmy B

Re: There is no such thing as a zero emission electric car...

Indeed - well done for the B5 - but it's an a not an o. But I suppose he'd actually like you getting it wrong as it's kind of expected....

Timmy B

"There is no such thing as a zero emission electric car..."

You know that's not what is meant by zero emissions. It is shorthand for "The driving motor/engine of this car produces no emissions during normal running" and to act like it doesn't is a bit dishonest really. As a consumer society Everything we do produces waste and emissions of course but that's not what is meant - and you know it.

Tech giants at war: Google pulls plug on YouTube in Amazon kit

Timmy B

Not quite sure what you mean about Nest...

There is a whole load of Nest stuff showing when I search Amazon including items "Recommended By Amazon". This is a pest, though as one of the reasons I have a Fire TV stick is to watch YouTube. Not the end of the world as I got the Fire for free.

Lap-slabtop-mobes with Snapdragon Arm CPUs running Windows 10: We had a quick gander

Timmy B

Is it only battery life...

... that makes these different from other i5 based SSD 2 in 1 laptops? I can get very similar for a couple of hundred pounds less and the only thing that's different seems to be battery life. I'd also get better performance without the emulation. If all you want to do is a little browsing and word processing and youtube then one of the really really cheap convertibles would do the job and you'd save £500 - some of these have data too. I got an atom based Surface 3 for £250 that can do all that.

Is Oomi the all-in-one smart home system we've been waiting for?

Timmy B

no more leds!

"The smart plug glows a low purple when not turned on and a brighter green when it is"

I am fed up with everything having to have bloomin lights on it. Some things have more than 3. I understand if it's a standalone device but If I have something plugged into a plug then the thing plugged in being ON will let me know if the plug is on or I can use the big tablet thing to tell me. Any smart device with an led should give me the ability to turn off said led.