Posts by Ian Tunnacliffe 78 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2007
Every time El Reg runs a Ryanair story we get comment threads like this.
The whole airline industry has more capacity than the economy can sensibly support at economic prices. The reasons for this are many and complex but it's a fact.
As a result airlines are unable to charge fares that enable them to make a return on capital invested while operating a "normal" service. The rational response to this would be for airlines to merge or go out of business but in practice that hardly ever happens and the industry continues with over-capacity.
So in one way or another airlines try to make so-called "ancillary revenue" to try to bridge the black hole in their finances. Ryanair is the best in the world at the ancillary revenue caper. Something like 25% of its revenues are ancillaries (That's from memory. If I were wider awake I woudl look it up.) Other airlines look at Ryanair as a leader in this respect but they don't have the sheer brass neck to take things quite as far.
In the end Ryanair is just doing more of what almost all airlines are doing less successfully. It is the most profitable airline in the world so it's hard to argue from a shareholder point of view that what it does is wrong. From the consumer point of view there is always the option of not flying with them.
In my personal experience Ryanair's on-time performance is better than Easyjet but where possible I avoid flying either of them. It's usually possible to fly with a more "traditional" airline for a little more money. Then it's a simple economic decision. Is the extra discomfort and annoyance with the ten or twenty quid I could save? For me the answer is usually no, but I fully understand why others may come to a different conclusion.
@Dave
If you have tried it and don't get on with it then fair enough. I am perplexed by how that would have happened but you and I are different people and so I must accept that it has.
@Vincent
Yes, there are some apps that are only available for Windows. Games in particular. However my experience in the corporate world is that 99% of users need no more than an office suite and a browser plus access to the corporate back-end apps - to do serious work. If you are in the 1% then you may have to grit your teeth and run Windows. Good luck to you,
Naturally this debate will go on as long as there are computers and people who want to argue about them. But here are a few observations from a happy Mac user.
1. Macs are not perfect, especially the hardware. My last Macbook Pro was definitely a Friday afternoon model. I had endless problems with its sleep function and eventually the screen just died on me.
2. BUT when I took it in to an Apple Store they took it off my hands and fixed it for free, even though it was out of warranty.
3 BUT I was buying a new Macbook Pro at the time so they probably had an incentive to be nice to me.
4. OSX is so far superior to anything from Microsoft that the debate is hardly worth having any more. Any Windows die-hards out there who disagree, please just use it for a month. Interesting thing is that most Mac users have long-term experience of using Windows every day. Not sure the same is true in reverse.
5. I agree that using a Mac is far more likely to be a personal choice than using Windows and so people have more invested in the choice.
6. I know that Mac's market share is small - around 7% I believe. I suspect (but cannot prove) that if corporate IT departments allowed users a free choice the Mac's share would increase enormously. There is no reason that this could not happen. The extra cost of supporting two platforms would be offset by the reduced costs of security management and user bafflement. Possibly by more than 100%, but that's just a guess. Since my small company decided to go Mac two years ago we have had only one compatibility issue with our Windows-centric clients. And we spend a lot of time in their offices working on their networks.
7. The one issue is with the way Powerpoint handles images - oh and that's Microsoft software that's incompatible between the two platform versions.
8. And the price premium - for similarly specced machines - really is quite modest, in the laptop space at least. Maybe you can get a Windows desktop machine for nuxpence - I did once (from a major Japanese manufaturer). It exploded - quite literally. Now that was extreme but you get my point?
9. And finally, if in doubt cite your mother. My mum had a Windows machine that she could only ever use to play a bridge game. Anything else, including email, was simply too baffling. A year ago I got her an iMac and now you can't get away from the emailed photographs from her digital camera - and she books her rail tickets online.
James Lovelock is interviewed in the current New Scientist. He simply takes it as read that catastrophic climate change is coming and there is now almost nothing that can be done about it.
That may still be an extreme position but it's not that far from the scientific consensus as exemplified by the IGPCC - which has historically been extremely conservative in its assessments.
Now, I'm a physics graduate so I can understand the basic science (not that the degree is necessary - any intelligent human prepared to put in a bit of effort could do so). If I were able to put a bet on it would be with the scientific consensus and against the deniers, almost regardless of the odds William Hill might quote.
There is an opportunity to ameliorate some of the worst effects if we take it seriously, but we should still be planning for a world in which Bangladesh is under water full-time instead of just when a cyclone strikes.
I still have one Windows machine that runs my mail server. Someday I will get around to finding the right mail server software to run on Linux or Mac but in the meantime I still have the one.
So, I tried the "fix" from Microsoft because this has bugged me for years.
Result?
"Windows cannot find the file gpedit.msc. Make sure you have typed the name correctly ...........etc"
There is probably a good reason. It's just that life is too short to go looking for it.
The usual half-informed stuff here....
LH - If you have been getting on aeroplanes without boarding passes then you are more or less unique. They have not gone away. In many cases they look different to the way they used to. Lots of them are printed at home on A4 or Letter paper, complete with bar code. Others are printed from a kiosk using thermal paper. So, you may not have had your old familiar ATB2 mag striped boarding pass for a while - depending in which airline you use - but you most certainly have a boarding pass.
As to the main thrust of the piece, mobile phone boarding passes are not being introduced as a security measure. The airlines have wanted them for a long time because they expect them to increase the use of self check-in, which costs pennies, in place of check in at an airport desk, which costs dollars (substitue pounds, euros, zlotys or dongs at your preference). The security issue is that various authorities, including the TSA, have not been prepared to accept them until they could be at least as secure as printed boarding passes. Which is not all that secure, but as part of a managed process including searches and profiling and all the other "security" measures is deemed to be an acceptable risk.
And, to all the other Chicken Lickens, no airline that I have ever talked to has any intention to go for exclusively mobile phone boarding passes. All the Luddites, children, users of non-standard devices and all the rest will still have the option of old-fashioned paper.
Oh and another thing. Gate and Check In Systems are the same system in the vast majority of cases. Where there is a case for better integration is between the airline Departure Control Systems which include check-in boarding, baggage and a bunch of other stuff, and the security screening systems used by TSA, Immigration authorities etc. To some extent this does happen but there are some real issues of technological compatibility (which are largely soluble) and data protection/privacy which on the whole are less tractable, as regular Reg readers will be well aware.
In the years after 9/11 a couple of shoe manufacturers started to make shoes without metal stiffeners expressly for the use of travellers who had to pass through TSA checks. I had a pair of these and they were fine for about 6 months until one day I was told to take them off. When I pointed out that there was no metal in them and that they were specifically designed for the purpose I was told "We're not looking for metal - take them off". So I took them off and walked through the metal detector.
The checks have almost zero practical purpose and They are almost 100% about P/R and image.
Where is the icon for hyper expensive mega stupidity when you need it?
"not many airlines I know announce which planes they will use on specific flights"
Actually, all airlines do precisely this. They publish them in various places but the most widely used is the Official Airlines Guide (OAG). From there the information is disseminated to the Global Distribution Systems that provide the information to travel agencies in both the real world and cyberspace. Some airlines provide even more information to GDSs and each other via direct data feeds but the OAG data is the base line. Even low-cost airlines that do not distribute via the GDSs and travel agents still publish to OAG.
Mind you there is always the possibility of a last minute change due to technical or operational issues that could mean a flight is operated by an aircraft different to the one planned. Even then though the overwhelming probability is that any substitution would be like for like in terms of aircraft type.
Just downloaded the "patches" and applied them. They included a keyboard firmware update.
Previously my Macbook Pro suffered from the well-known "doesn't register the first character keyed into a form box" bug that Apple has been denying for several months. Now when I am working in an Excel spreadsheet, about 50% of the time it only registers the first character typed in a cell. When I click on another cell then go back for a second attempt it's usually OK.
What is going on Steve?
Paris because she had some experience with cells.
When I was a working programmer (yes, back in the dark ages kiddies) a patch was something you did at four o'clock in the morning because the system was down. It was keyed in at the console in a hex representation of machine code. Twenty or thirty bytes typically. 100 tops. Then next day you would fix the problem properly, reassemble the segment(s) and load it/them to the system. That's not a patch, it's a new version.
All this talk of "patches" being 100MB or more just bemuses me.
Mines the very very old one with the muffler.
I didn't know that the Beeb sends out its digital streams from Maidenhead. Who says El Reg isn't educational? Thing is, I live in Maidenhead and DAB reception here is appalling (TV reception is pretty poor too. No chance of Freeview without a rooftop aerial). I have a couple of DAB sets. One is connected to an external antenna and works fine. The other is a top of the range Roberts and works on its own antenna, in one or two spots in the house. Sometimes. And it needs to be on mains power unless you own Ever Ready.
So DAB provides a satisfactory service when tied to a fixed location. A bit like streaming IP radio. It does absolutely zero for me when I am moving between rooms, out and about, in the car or in the bathroom. Precisely the times when I most want radio.
I recently rented a car in the States that had satellite radio fitted. It was a revelation as I cruised up I-75 in Georgia listening to the BBC World Service in crystal clear quality. I could have chosen from roughly a gazillion other stations and I did try some of them out.
So my view to add to the debate is that DAB is a dead end. Bring on Satellite radio in Europe.
Sometimes you just have to admit that someone has said exactly what you were thinking - even though you didn't know you were thinking it.
When I slid the Arcade Fire Neon Bible CD onto a shelf in the same room as my original 7" vinyl copy of Love Me Do (bought for me when I was very young), the whole of my musical life was stretched out between them. I knew there was a reason I still buy my music on a physical medium.
Apart from DRM, record company greed and the fear of being locked into an obsolete format of course.....
Not really a comment on this review, more a general moan.
Here in the heart of the M4 corridor my DAB radio (top of the range Roberts) will only get a signal in one very specific corner of the office - which happens to be the other side of the room to my desk. My kitchen radio at home is OK but only because I have it connected to a roof top aerial.
Until DAB can be used in the same way as conventional AM/FM radio ie carried around in a pocket, run on cheap batteries, used in the car and simply WORK reliably there should be no question of "shutting down" the analogue signal as I have seen suggested in some corners of the press.
Until then, this is a very pretty toy but will have no measurable impact on real-life radio use.
RFID tags only do what the existing bar coded tags do. The only justification for using them is if they improve the accuracy and reliability of reading them as they pass through the baggage sortation (I know that's a hideous word but it's the one they use) systems - at both ends of the flight. Which is one reason why implementing them in one airport only is of limited value (not completely valueless in a major transfer airport like Heathrow).
Most airlines are still very reluctant to spend the money on these systems as they are yet to be convinced that there is any substantial improvement over bar codes to justify the investment.
As a widely traveled cricket enthusiast who spends far too much time in uncivilised countries, I have lost count of the number of times I have followed test matches via Cricinfo's unique (and free) service. The only possible upside to Disney's involvement would be if they let Pixar loose on the animated commentary. That might be worth seeing.........
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