I beg to differ...
On the rare occasion I've had to deal with Zen customer service I've always found them helpful, friendly and knowledgeable.
Unlike BT who won't move from their script.
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52 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2011
"Thankfully, 85% or so of the great British public live in urban / suburban areas and should have a choice between where they live / work and how they travel between the two."
Sorry I gotta disagree with your rose-tinted view of public transport.
I live 9 miles from where I work. Public transport would cost me about 3 to 4 hours a day and be a deeply unpleasant experience in the winter. Great for work/life balance! Not. And knowing the area, I'd suggest its not unusual. So I drive, mostly. I'd like to cycle but as I've got older I've become very wary of the number of maniacs on 4 wheels.
When I lived and worked in London I didn't own a car and that was workable. But having lived and worked in several cities over the decades, I can say that id very much the exception.
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A thought:-
Instead of sending the energy to Earth, it could be used to drive space-based industry. At our current level of technology the two biggest constraints on our space activities are energy and raw materials. Orbital solar combined with asteroid capture would solve that. Then the only thing we'd need to send into orbit are meat-bags :-)
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It wilfully ignores the relevant case law:-
Hall v Lorimer (Court of Appeal November 1993)
In arriving at the decision Mummery J said:
‘In order to decide whether a person carries on business on his own account it is necessary to consider many different aspects of that person’s work activity. This is not a mechanical exercise of running through items on a check list to see whether they are present in, or absent from, a given situation. The object of the exercise is to paint a picture from the accumulation of detail. The overall effect can only be appreciated by standing back from the detailed picture which has been painted, by viewing it from a distance and by making an informed, considered, qualitative appreciation of the whole. It is a matter of evaluation of the overall effect of the detail, which is not necessarily the same as the sum total of the individual details. Not all details are of equal weight or importance in any given situation. The details may also vary in importance from one situation to another.’
Its a 'qualitative' (as opposed to a 'quantitative') exercise so is probably very difficult (if not impossible) to capture in an algorithm. But in any case for HMRC its just window dressing. They just want everyone on PAYE.
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(BTW I hate the new Reg design. I'm down from several visits daily to once a week.)
I agree. Especially in light of my experience of selection in York (one of the hold-out authorities) in the early seventies. Having just moved back to the country I faced doing an 11+ in a room at the local education office one dark December evening without a clue what it was or how it was going to set in fucking stone the very limited educational opportunities available to me if I failed. When the useless waste-of-space dolts realised I was considerably brighter than the original test indicated, all they would offer me was a move to another 'secondary modern'. I suppose moving me to a 'grammar' would have been an admission of their flawed testing.
So, while in principle the idea of selective education has some merit, the practise would probably leave a lot to be desired. Knowledgeable parents would game the system so that it wouldn't be a test of the child's ability but rather the parents.
(Icon for what I'd like to have done to the hellhole school I went to)
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Not sure I agree. Especially in light of my experience of selection in York (one of the hold-out authorities) in the early seventies. Having just moved back to the country I faced doing an 11+ in a room at the local education office without a clue what it was or how it was going to set in fucking stone the very limited educational opportunities available to me if I failed. When the cunts realised I was considerably brighter than the original test indicated, all they would offer me was a move to another 'secondary modern'. I suppose moving me to a 'grammar' would have been an admission of their flawed testing.
So, while in principle the idea of selective education has some merit, the practise would probably leave a lot to be desired. Knowledgeable parents would game the system so that it wouldn't be a test of the child's ability but rather the parents.
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They're not too bad but I still use an ad-blocker as that dumbass teaser takes up a ridiculous amount of screen space. And now that I've just checked with ad-block off I find the ads too intrusive. At the moment I can see 17 articles I might like to read. With ad-block off in the same size window I can only see 7 and far too much space is lost to a pointless, irrelevant and distracting picture.
In my experience WSUS does not do removal well or reliably. Hence the need to have a test group and a time lag between MS release and approving patch for release in ones domain.
While WSUS works 'OK' when used in a fairly 'textbook' manner it's in desperate need of an update to improve the console, reporting and various other bits.
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a few months ago. I've already got a Dell U2913WM (2560x1080) at one of my desks which I really like but I sometimes find myself pulling one or the other closer when I'm reading (yes, I wear reading glasses). The ultra-wide curved monitors seem to have stuck north of £500 probably because Samsung seems to be the only producer. Then I found the Samsung C24F390 (1920x1080) for about £150 each. Even with the cost of a twin arm monitor stand its still waaaay cheaper. Don't notice the bezels. Much better then using 2 flat wide-screens which I've had to at some clients.
I agree it would be useful to have more room vertically.
Can't see the point of curved TV's but curved monitors are the way to go.
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Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...........
Have a pint and an upvote. Spot on about Horizon.
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I don't see how this tool is possible given that the judge in Hall v Lorimer (Court of Appeal November 1993) explicitly said,
"This is not a mechanical exercise of running through items on a check list to see whether they are present in, or absent from, a given situation. The object of this exercise is to paint a picture from the accumulation of detail. The overall effect can only be appreciated by standing back from the detailed picture which has been painted, by viewing it from a distance and by making an informed, considered, qualitative appreciation of the whole. It is a matter of evaluation of the overall effect of the detail, which is not necessarily the same as the sum total of the individual details. Not all details are of equal weight or importance in any given situation. The details may also vary in importance from one situation to another. The process involves painting a picture in each individual case."
Note the use of the word 'qualitative' (as opposed to quantitive) which means that any weighting in the tool runs counter to one of the most important pieces of case law on the subject.
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If my hand is already on the keyboard then fine. But if my hand is already on the mouse then it would be more convenient to have a link back to the front page.
Can't see the "Week in Summary" but no matter as I tend to read the Reg daily so is unlikely to suit my purposes. YMMV. In any case since I started using AdBlock since the redesign to remove that waste-of-space "top_tease" the front page still works for me :-)
Edit:- Do you mean "Week’s headlines"? Don't like it. Easier to see more at a quick skim from the normal front page.
I enjoy reading and very occasionally contributing to the article comments. However I do find it a little laborious at the bottom of a long page of comments to either 'Home' key (when I'm already on the mouse) or to scroll back to the top of the page so I can jump back to the front page. I think it would be useful to have a button or link back to the Reg home page at the bottom of the comments page.
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I rent as well but I still installed Cat 5e. Here in the UK most houses since the 70's have stud & plasterboard internal walls and dot & dabbed plasterboard fixed to the external walls. So its fairly easy to run cable where you want it with the right tools and a bit of know-how (and make it look like it was always built-in).
Yep AFAIK. But one can also use the Pinsentry function on the mobile app which is handy as it saves having to carry the calculator-sized Pinsentry device around. I get the impression that they are steering customers to the mobile app as they charge for extra Pinsentrys.
HSBC had an RSA-type key fob.
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Dumbass white elephant!!!
Upgrade West Coast mainline to 4 tracks at least as far as Manchester so that current fast (enough) inter-city trains can be kept separate from slower local trains. Probably cost half of HS2 and use balance to get rest of country fibre-to-premises which would reduce need to travel.
But what do I know.
Ah, Tom Sharpe's first two novels - "Riotous Assembly" and "Indecent Exposure" were the first ones of his I read. Had me in stitches. Re-read them recently and the scenes they conjure still had me laughing out loud :-) Not very PC but then apartheid South Africa wasn't very PC (tell the young 'un that and they won't believe you ;-) ).
... launcher mounted above the flight deck loaded with laser homing guided missile. Perhaps with a ground proximity fuse (say 50m) that triggers a parachute and ignites a flare to light up the perps so the police can spot them. Or the payload could be a blob of that anti-theft marker dye that paints the perp.
"Virgin reach most UK homes"
Hah hah hah, Hah hah hah, Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah,Hah hah hah.
Try 50%, which isn't "most" in my book.
Original setup had the NAS type storage 3 switches (inc 2x 2510G) away from the hosts and other servers on an un-segmented LAN.
2510G-48 - packet buffer size: 1.5 MB
1920-8G - packet buffer size: 4.1 Mb
So it should be an improvement in terms of performance. It will certainly be an improvement in resilience and upgrades will be easier to implement (without having to take everything down). Granted its nowhere near the sort of enterprise environments I usually work in but, given the budget constraints, its better then what they had.
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Check out the HP MSA 1040. The client has 3 x DL380 G7 with VMware Essentials Plus and I'm just putting one of these in with a couple of HP 1920-8G switches to create a proper SAN. The MSA + disks + switches + cables came to less then £7k. It can scale in performance and capacity easily.
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Plenty of content on Freeview, more than I'll ever watch. Trouble is its scattered all over the schedules so how to harvest it. I've had hacked Series 1 Tivos for over 12 years and its ability to capture program series and other things via 'Wishlists' can't be bettered. The main problems are the lack of multi-tuner support and the faff of watching content on other devices. (Don't even mention Virgin Tivo - I'm in a not spot and pay TV would be very poor value anyway.)
I have messed around with various Linux media centres (XBMC, Myth TV, OpenELEC, etc) but they take the piss. Especially when it comes to tuner support. I've wasted days at a time googling, reading fora, wikis and howtos and still haven't had a working TV recorder. Great media players but nothing that will just sit in the corner and harvest programs from the schedules using the installed tuners.
Contrast that with the WMC I have sitting in the loft. Done and dusted and operational in a few hours. I'll need to sort a few add-ons to tweak it but the whole driver bit just worked. Don't get me wrong - I wanted the whole Linux thing to work and had useful outcomes using Smoothwall and Freenas but the media centre thing made me lose the will to live.
Dumbass routing! Travelling back from York to Midlands it always tries (very insistently) to send me down the A1M and M18 and doesn't shut up til I'm way past Barnsley! Granted its about 6 miles longer via the M1 but come on! 3 lane motorway vs 2 lane A road with truck sand self-appointed coppers in the outside lane. Duh!
Useless live traffic! Just renewed the service (only because it was on special offer) because I'm in and out of Brum 3 times a week. It still tries to send me down the A38 Aston "Expressway" even though it takes over an hour to get to the M6. Ring-road around to the A45 is 9 times out of 10 better. I thought it was supposed to get real-time info from speed and density traffic sensors. S*#t S*#t S*#t
Anything better?
and nuke it from orbit. Its the only way to be sure!
Seriously though, I always install from a SA ISO and and add the drivers. That works with whatever product key you have, be it OEM, SA, retail, Action Pack. I've done that with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer and Tosh.
Finding the drivers is the pain. Tosh are the worst, their site is all over the place. At least with Lenovo you just need to install their 'System Update' utility which will detect your hardware and download all the relevant drivers (especially useful when there are 2 or 3 different cardreader/audio/etc used in a given model) and deselect what you don't want. Pity the other manufacturers don't have something similar. Combined with vanilla Windows install media it would make nuking and reinstalling windows much easier especially for home users (given all the dodgy sites that come up when looking for drivers).
(Note to self - get my own MDT instance setup soon!)
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And the 'Expand comments' is dumb beyond words. If I'm interested enough to read the comments then I use the PgDn button. The 'Expand comments' crap forces me back to the mouse which doesn't help my RSI!
The Register
Biting the eyes that read IT
What's the point of having duplicate infrastructure? The last place I lived had the ridiculous sight of two sets of slit trenches and manholes in the pavement (sidewalk to the merkins) where both BT and Telewest/NTL put their cables in the ground. It doesn't make sense for either the consumer or the businesses concerned (except maybe the guys digging the holes). Openretch should be treated the same way National Grid is. Then all the (phone/net/cableTV) service providers would pay equally and have the same access. A competitive market is all well and good but most of the BT's infrastructure was built out at taxpayers expense and BT are (naturally) hanging on to that advantage for all their worth which means its not a level playing field.
I don't know what the numbers are but it wouldn't surprise me if all the money wasted on duplicate infrastructure would have easily have paid for fibre to every house in the country by now.
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I assembled something to do this a few years ago. Used a PIR of the type used to control a flood light to control a socket into which I'd plugged a 12v transformer which powered a 12v water valve (from a washing machine). This controlled the water supply to a impulse sprinkler. This worked pretty well once I figured out how to shade the PIR from the sun as it had to face south. Also had a bit of fun finding a PIR with adjustable sensitivity (got it from RS in the end).
It wasn't pretty but it worked. There is an all-in-one device that does the same thing:-
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contech-ScareCrow-Motion-Activated-Deterrent/dp/B005MW9VOM
but its good to feed your inner Heath Robinson :-)