Posts by James

Street View vehicle kills Bambi

Re: Outdated scale

Your scale is missing a few important entries.

Chav - 100 points

Chav and his mates - 100 + 100 for each of his mates

No blood on the car - Triple points

UK.gov backs ISPs on charging content providers, throttling P2P

@AC, RE: Tiered can be ok

If you buy 2mb you will only ever get 2mb on services / protocols that the ISP deem to not be bandwidth hogs. You'll never get more than YOU pay for. Your ISP might just not throttle content providers as much, making the higher quality service available to you if you're also willing to pay for it.

So if you pay for 2 mb, on services such as bittorrent, nntp (usenet), and other p2p you'll only get 2mb if your isp only have, say 10 broadband users online, more likely you'll never get 2mb because that service will fall into a lower tier and therefore priority will go to users doing other things which are not considered to be bandwidth hogs.

Typically when implementing QOS on a network you start off by prioritising mission critical services and deprioritising the least important services that hog bandwidth. So what you'll end up with is webmail, social networking and news sites being insanely fast as I imagine these are the majority websites most broadband users access regularly. Youtube and other video / high bandwidth sites will then take a back seat as no prioritisation will be applied to those services and then the you'll have the dog slow services like p2p being throttled to hell and back.

Of coarse, being a broadband user you'll already be taking a back seat to people / companies paying for dedicated bandwidth (Leased lines etc) who I imagine will be exempt from the tiered network as they are actually paying for their bandwidth.

In short, broadband will just not be the same, and we'll all go back to free 56k dial-up because there will be no point in having 50meg broadband just to read your email faster. Because lets face it, the only reason you want 50mb is so that those DVDs can download in 10 minutes rather than 400 mins on 2mb.

I don't think I need to explain the pirate flag.

Virgin puts 'legal P2P' plans on ice

Idiots!

Clearly they don't want our money. The funny thing is, it's the one thing they're continually bitching about losing.

Paris because she's probably more intelligent than the clowns behind major labels.

First Windows 7 beta puts fresh face on Vista

Remember...

Windows 95, and then Windows 98...

Need I say more?

Man trademarks ;-) emoticon

WTF!

Seriously! WTF! So now one day I'll get a letter saying I owe some twat x amount in fees for emails and text messages I sent that contained a smiley face. Oh, and lets not forget IM and IRC etc...

What Rob said.

Roadpricing satnav spybox trials under way

WTF!

<rant>It boggles my mind. As the driver of a big engined car and someone that likes to do what most would consider to be stupidly dangerous speeds I can assure you that the answer is not to slow down traffic. That just makes a bad situation already worse. Let me explain. When driving slowly because I'm stuck behind some dick head that thinks he has a right to do 50 in the right hand lane I get a) frustrated (naturally) and b) bored. Bored is the real problem because this is where my concentration on the road starts to deviate and I start looking around at other shit. I can honestly say that I've had more near accidents going slowly than I have at speed and it's because I'm not concentrating. So yeah, great idea, make all the road users bored and cause them to concentrate on everything but the road. Great plan. Not to mention how frustrated everyone will become because motorways are now even slower.

Add to that, that I already spend £280 - £300 per month on fuel of which half of that goes to the government. And now they want more? I don't see how charging us more to run our cars for longer is going to help reduce carbon emmisions. All that's going to happen is that the government is going to pocket even more money to spend on stupid shit that doesn't actually benefit our society, and because we're all on the road for longer, carbon emissions will actually go up.

Now here's the part that really pisses me off... A rail card for my journey costs £330 pounds (petrol £280 - £300). So already, driving my big ass gas guzzler is cheaper. On top of that, on a quiet Sunday morning I can get into work in 30 mins. That same journey via public transport is at it's very quickest when everything runs smoothly and people don't block up the underground platforms, 2 hours. So how about, instead of taxing 7 shades of shit out of motorists, they actually do something with the train-wreck they call public transport, because if I could travel door to door in an hour (slightly longer than it takes to drive) on public transport, I would probably opt for the public transport option, and of course assuming that it cost the same, or which it should, less than driving.

I could probably rant for another 10 pages on these issues and I haven't even touched on stupid drivers yet but I figure I'll save that for another day.</rant>

OMFG, what have you done?

RE: wtf by Double Dekkers

Not had a good chance to look at the site until now but I agree fully with what Double Dekkers had to say.

Fixed width is a work around not a solution to whatever problem you're experiencing with css.

The other thing that really poor is that the width is 960 pixels and you've chosen to use just 600 pixels for articles. 60 pixels are wasted on borders and padding etc, and then you have a f'kin 300 pixel wide advert!?!?

The new layout is toilet!

Heathrow T5 security tackles Transformers t-shirt threat

WTF?

I think the military should be armed with t-shirts. If a "terrorist" can use one to hijack a plane, then I don't see why the army can't use them to take out "bad" guys.

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

False advertising

20mb downstream.

Lets do the maths, starting at midnight I start downloading at 20mb

10:30: I'm cut down to just 5mb which lasts for 5 hrs.

15:30: my speed returns to 20mb.

16:30: I'm cut down to 5mb again.

21:30: I get 20mb.

14 hours at 20mb

10 hours at 5mb

So they're claiming that for 10 hours of any day, I'll only receive 5mb (if I use the service, which is after all why I subscribe to it). So what I'm really paying for is about 13mb service which they're advertising as a 20mb service that they can't support. I'll only ever get 68.75% of the bandwidth they've sold me.

Virgin Media in talks to trial three strikes regime against P2P

Usenet

Giganews + SSL = problem solved.

This however does not solve the problem of throttling.

UK to fly the flag for OOXML

Before being allowed to vote...

... delegates should have some kind of IT background. If they did, OOXML would not even be up for discussion.

Treehuggers lose legal fight to solar-powered neighbour

@GrahamT

That's the thing about common sense... It's not that common.

Computer system suspected in Heathrow 777 crash

RE: Doesn't square up ...

"3 diffrent computers running 3 separate control systems, from different vendors. The idea was they "voted" on what action to take, and the majority won (no idea if the 2-1 votes were logged or investigated)."

So what happens if one system fails, and the remaining 2 decide to vote against each other?

UK gov sets rules for hacker tool ban

I wish...

...that politicians would stop meddling in things they know nothing about.

hax0rs use the bus as much as they use nmap. We'd better outlaw the use of buses now too.

UK.gov loses driver ID data

Has no one in government heard of a VPN?

I'll get my coat.

Orange to offer unlocked iPhones for €749

We've seen...

how popular the jesus phone is in Europe, so stop reporting on it. Honestly, somewhere someone everyday feels the need to do something to put possibly the worst phone ever made into the headlines and inflate jobs and the fanboi's egos even more. Stop doing it!

French record industry, ISPs in entente to boot off file-sharers

Encryption?

What they don't know they can't block.

Idiots the lot of them for fighting change instead of embracing it and adapting their business models to fit the market.

TV-Links man: 'I'm no master criminal'

Bollocks!

Providing links to pirated content is very different to hosting pirated content. Following this logic, google, yahoo, microsoft and probably every other search engine out there is guilty of piracy on a scale thousands of times bigger.

eg. type "ed2k simpsons" into google and count the number of ed2k links that get returned to download the simpsons film or even tv episodes.

Ubuntu's latest OS not so Gutsy

IPv6

Should only be installed when the user doing the install consciously selects it. I've had many issues with packages that had ipv6 support compiled in.

Police bail OiNK admin after filesharing raid

Layer7

Layer7 is an example of how P2P would be blocked. It looks for patterns in traffic rather than just blocking ports. http://l7-filter.sourceforge.net/

This of course will just lead to encrypted P2P networks so that ISPs are unable to control content. We should be using encrypted P2P already in my opinion and there are some encrypted networks out there, they're just not popular or fast enough. GigaNews already offer encryption to their news servers. A wise move if you ask me.

(We need an anti RIAA thumbnail)

UK gov advisor proposes 'licence to smoke'

As an ex-smoker...

I feel that it's my duty to provide the following link to all those smokers out there:

http://www.cheap-cigarettes.co.za/

El Reg goes virtual with e-Symposium on virtualization

For all those readers not in the US...

Pacific Standard Time (PST) = GMT-8

Cops crash invite-only BitTorrent network

I wonder

... if the music industry will ever realise that there is a HUGE demand for cheap, high quality, DRM free music.

Supply and demand, only there's no supply.

Virgin Media pins hopes on the broadband donkey

Throttling.

<quote>Neil Berkett was deployed to tell several newspapers about his plan to steady the listing cable firm</quote>

Get rid of throttling?

We can only hope!

50mb. Assuming that the 50mb throttling point will be 7GB, it should still take only 15 minutes to have my connection reduced down to dialup.

If only there was another "telewest/blueyonder" out there.

Safe drinking guidelines 'plucked out of the air'

Glad to see...

... that we're all turning a blind eye to the government's recommended weekly allowance as I'm into triple figures.

As for heavier taxes. Bollocks! That's not going to stop people drinking more, it's just going to make government's pockets fatter.

(We need a pint glass icon)

Cannon runs amok, kills nine fleshies

@Stuart Van Onselen

Maybe all those who commented are from South Africa?

So there was loss of life, errr yes, it's one of those things South Africans very quickly get used to. It happens every day in that country and normally on a much larger scale. (see Andy's comment).

After months of denial, Microsoft cops to IE vulnerability

@Simon

There are many reasons not to use IE. The biggest being because users who do ruin the web for users who don't. Pages get coded for ie and then don't work properly in browsers that actually bother to support standards.

Germany enacts 'anti-hacker' law

@Keith T

If you want your web site, or any internet connected service to be secure, then it is your job to secure it. You think that by licensing security professionals you're going to magically stop people from hacking into your site. HAH! Mate, are you living in a dream world? If I were to lookup yesterdays ssh attempts I can almost guarantee that 90% of them originated out of 3rd world countries.

Also, do you think that by making security software licensable you're going to stop people from using those tools? Hands up how many people here have ever run an unlicensed version on windows?

Australia declares war on net porn

Reply to anon

You're right, I don't particularly like your Christian point of view. I don't particularly like any religion, group or organisation which tries to indoctrinate the rest of the community / country / world.

You're missing the point. It's got nothing to do with the fact that 99% of the male population masturbates. The point is, if you block porn, then why not block everything else YOU deem unacceptable. Why not sniff everyone's email, block all P2P services, IPs in Eastern Europe, in fact, why not just have a white list of sites and IP addresses that you feel would not taint your child’s mind and then force that same white list on everyone else.

This is also not just MY opinion. The above policy on porn is not going to affect me as I don't live in Australia and even if I did, I wouldn't be too concerned for myself. I could already bypass that stuff at 16 and I only got my first computer when I was 19.

Something fundamentalists seem to be unable to comprehend is that what's true for them, is not necessarily true for everyone else.

If you really want to protect YOUR children, then buy a book and learn how to set up content filtering at home. Leave the rest of the world out of it!

So...

So you have children and for that reason alone my internet experience should be restricted to what you think is acceptable for your kids?

On top of that, it would be like trying to keep an angry mob at bay. If your kids really want to see porn they'll find it.

Extremist tunnel-vision christians are trying to ruin it for everyone yet again!

Russian copyright wars to continue despite AllofMP3 shutdown

What I want as a consumer...

As a consumer I want high quality, DRM-free, digital downloads of any artist I can think of.

The only way to get what I want is to buy a hard copy and then to rip it. The next best option is AllofMP3, P2P and newsgroups. Following those options is leeching off my mates and then and only then maybe, itunes or whatever other commercial crime syndicate I can find on the web that offers "legal" downloads.

There is a demand for high quality drm-free music. Why is no one supplying to the demand?

Apple's Safari 3: a crashing experience for non-US users

apple.com broken

I know it's a beta, but if it were my product I'd at least want my own website (default home page by the way) to look look like it should.

In response to the proxy query, it picks up your proxy settings from internet exploiter.

Virgin Media tech support goes premium rate

That's just great news...

What used to be the best ISP (the old Telewest) in the country is slowly becoming just like all the other ISPs out there. Crap! First bandwidth throttling and now premium rate call centres. I wonder if they'll charge me for all the time I spend on hold, the next time my line goes down, while I wait for some clown to answer and then not understand when I tell him that I don't use windows and that it's not my computer that needs rebooting.