Posts by MarkMac

Virgin Media calls foul on web speed testers

@fnord

Nice quote - shame its for the ADSL service. Cluefest: this article is about the cable service...

As for the people claiming they get throttled to "dialup" speeds- since when was dialup speed 5,000 Kpbs?

UN urged to prep for non-fiction Deep Impact

@solomon

Responsibility does not mean blame. http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Responsible

Cloned US ATM cards: Can they fool Brit self-service checkouts?

Furrin parts != easy pickings

Maybe US cards can be trivially scammed in the UK due to current lax security by supermarkets etc, but in Spain the supermarkets require either chip/pin or sight of your passport. We got found this out in Consum when our checkout line had a broken C&P machine. Fortunately we had enough cash on us.

Do the same here: non-UK card sir? Can I see your passport / ID card / Driving license? and this problem goes away.

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

thieves, slander etc

Comment as usual sharply divided into the "holier than thou" brigade and the "free love" brigade. How about some sense? This is how VM do it at the moment.

1) The BPI do the initial investigation, identifying IP addys they believe to have downloaded copyright material. They don't need to snoop on your PC, merely set up a torrent client and listen.

2) They then supply VM the list of IPs and dates. Supposedly, VM review this and decide if they agree the evidence is valid. If so, VM write to the account holder

3) Er - thats it.

For the BPI to take it further they'd need to get a court order to release the account detals. Theoretically to get /that/ they'd need some actual evidence but I doubt most judges would be tech-savvy enough to know the difference.

Now - as for the theft-or-not arguments - they're irrelevant. Copyright infringement is a civil matter and the BPI have to take you to a civil court. Its worth remembering that in such courts its a 'balance of probailities' not 'innocent till proven guilty' - which may make things trickier for both sides.

But as someone said, how will the BPI know its copyright material? Names mean nothing. They'd have to join every concievable torrent and actually play the files. Othewise I could rename my CV to "Some_rubbish_by_Aylanna_Myles.mp3" and off we go.

So top guess - they'll target a few popular torrent sites, blanket spam everyone who appears to be using them and hope for the best....

UK abandons train and tube scanners

@Dan White

Elected - I think you'll find the electors of his constituency got the chance to vote for him in the first placae, and then the Labour Party MPs got another chance. These would be the MPs who were elected to represent a majority of seats in the country.

And please try to remember we do not have a ruling President, voted for personally, we have a ruling Party, voted for collectively. Blair may have /acted/ like a President, but he was still just the chief exec of the party with the largest number of seats.

@Anonymous Coward / Hospitals

"Do you solve hospital overcrowding by shutting hospitals? "

Flawed analogy - people don't have a choice about needing to go into hospital, they do have a choice about how to travel.

Make it hard /expensive / tiring to travel by method A, and people will start to use method B. Petrol prices (which are NOT controlled by the Govt, let it be noted) are a case in point. As prices rise, people reconsider non-essential trips. I've stopped driving the kids to the nice leisure centre for a swim, because it became cheaper to pay for guest passes at my local gym. We didn't do our son's birthday at the jungle-tumble place because some parents were unhappy driving the 20 mile round trip.

Think tank slams paedophile paranoia culture

hesitation, or accusation?

If I see a child in distress, I invariably ask if I can help. It shocks me to see adults passing with their faces turned. If a child is crying / lost / hurt, every adult around should be hurrying to look after them, and shame on those of you who walk away.

I am of course sharply aware that some fool might assume the worst ("he must have hit her / frightened him / be trying to abduct her / stuck his finger somewhere") but I care more about the child's welfare than some idiot's mistaken opinion. And realistically unless the passer-by knows the child (in which case why aren't THEY helping, eh?) how can they tell its not your child?

As for what teachers can and can't do - its ludicrous. I've been called up at work to get me to come in to give my child a dose of calpol. Staff waiting for CRB checks (which can take months) can't take toddlers to the loo - even if the result is a puddle or nasty smell. As for cleaning it up - ha! No chance.

Oh and @Jullien: you're a perfect example of the sort of paranoid wimps our society is breeding. Shame on you. I can't imagine how you look at yourself in the morning.

Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap

Its impressive...

...the way the rabid anti-greens have jumped on this article. /Naturally/ an article from a scientist essentially supporting their already-formed opinion is reasoned, logical and well thought through. Curiously, articles from scientists opposing their opinion are always riddled with mistakes.... hmm, anyone else spot the flaw here?

I also liked your selective quoting: 10% of the UK covered in wind-farms = half the energy required to drive a car 50km. Kinda implies wind is ludicrously useless. But hang on - what has wind power got to do with cars? And thats still 150,000,000 kilometers of driving each day. And most of us dont drive 50km a day anyway... So what the prof is really saying is: if we car-shared and used efficient public transport, we could get the entire country's transport needs met from wind power. Sounds good to me!

Oh look - I've spun the same numbers entirely differently.

What's that quote about statistics?

UK watchdog barks at MPs' expenses

But hang on...

Its all very well to decry various apparent wheezes MPs use to get extra cash. Then again compared to private-sector jobs with similar responsibility they're underpaid so perhaps we ought to pay them sensibly. You know the saying about peanuts.

Talking of idiots - would you prefer ignorant MPs or ones who bothered to find out the facts about stuff they're being asked to vote on? Would you prefer MPs with no experience of 'real life' or ones who were actively involved in community, industry, commerce etc? Yes - some of them take the p... but don't tar everyone with the same brush.

The 'family members' thing is more complicated than it seems and often it is /cheaper/ than employing a 'real' secretary or researcher. On the other hand all such ought to be vetted and approved by a non-political expenses board and available for full public scrutiny. /Thats/ the only real message in this story.

As for paying from your own pocket to furnish your office - thats just unreasonable. Bear in mind that, doctors, physios, and indeed anyone else working from home is legally entitled to tax breaks, expenses claims etc for necessary workplace equipment. Which includes furnishing a room to meet clients/constituents, telecoms costs etc etc. How do I know? I work from home.

TfL hands out contracts for congestion charge tags

@jeremy

"losing the tax disc?" ..."another one of labours double tax scams"

Er no actually. Road Tax has been around since medieaval times, and is one of the few honest taxes around. You use the roads, you pay tax. If anything, it has recently been made fairer with lower tax for smaller cars.

As for "40 a month to sit in your drive, triple if you use it" what are you talknig about? if its off road its free, and its not the govts fault you drove a truck. And how does it triple when you use it?

So get your facts right.

Government orders data retention by ISPs

not the content...

"so all they can store is the fact that you were on the internet"

Thats going to be interesting for them - the last time I turned off my router was during a power cut back in 2007.

That said, people are being amusingly hysterical. ISPs already keep this info for their own records, the only difference now is that they can't claim to accidentally 'lose' data when under investigation.

What did happen to all those London mayoral votes?

@Mike Banahan

"So, if the PM's salary is a notional 150,000 or whatever and 40% of a 30% turnout voted for him, he gets 12% of the rate."

And this would encourage high quality representation - how exactly?

You pay peanuts, guess what you get.

On the other hand, you can't be a*&^ed to vote, you get what you deserve - no say - and if you don't like the incumbent, get out of bed next time and vote for someone else.

As for the topic: pure e-voting machines can't be constructed which meet the current UK requirements for an election. Plus public trust in such a system would be close to zero. Plus it would cost a mint. So scanning a paper copy is by far the most realistic way to operate.

That said, I betcha humans can count crumpled paper votes faster provided one avoids stupid multiple-vote models. Stick to OPOV and counting is easy.

Plus most people don't /have/ enough of an opinion to have a 2nd choice....

Is the earth getting warmer, or cooler?

Statistics - not

I can only assume the author is neither a statistician nor a scientist.

So your thesis is that because much data before about 1970 seems to have been adjusted down, and much data after that moved up, it must be a conspiracy.

Here's a thought: maybe the methodology for calculating the mean temp changed in the 1970s. Maybe a previous error in the model was noticed and fixed, but not backdated at the time. Maybe someone recently reran the old raw data through the new model. Maybe someone refined the model and ran _all_ the data through to remove another error. Maybe technological changes (computers anyone? hmm, 1970... sounds significant) meant the 1970 onwards data was better processed. Maybe a billion billion other normal things happened which caused the analysis to need updating.

Or...its an enormous conspiracy by NASA to make us all - what? Invest in space homes? Buy more space shuttles?

Or maybe we should read up on William of Ockham.

Apple update trick triples Safari share

Not even MS do this...

Annoying, but unsurprising. Even with MS update, non-essential upgrades and installs are unticked. If you don't ask for .net framework or mediaplayer, you don't get it.

Meanwhile presumably Apple think they need all the help they can get to penetrate the market, even if it is underhand help. And wasn't there a period where Quicktime updates automatically installed iTunes - or at least appeared to give you no choice by autoselecting the "with itunes" version and putting the tunesless version way down the page in tiny print.

Apple mgmt remind me each day slightly more of Snow White's stepmother...

Windows Server 2008 is better than Vista, but why?

@Bob Davis

"only standard look-and-feel is the command line"?

Clearly you have ZERO experience of Linux. Sure you can pick window managers, but for most users either KDE or Gnome is autoinstalled, and both are close enough to MacOS and even Windows that anyone with a brain could use it on day 1.

As for Vista - just "experienced" that again this weekend. Two-three second pause between pressing delete and getting files deleted. And no, this isn't a hosed install. Its a brand new dual-core machine with Vista Home Premium, taken out of the box on Friday, booted into the follow-the-bouncing-ball autoconfigure that MS wrote, allowed to patch itself from Windows Update and then rebooted.

Brit tourist blags his way onto Iron Man set

The picture...

is on the Iron Man publicity website for the movie. The first link in the article takes you to it... Do'h.

Mozilla CEO blasts Apple for putting security of the internet at risk

@Grant Mitchell

Er, the point is, you have control over this in Firefox. READ what people post maybe?

How the BBC plans to save your ISP

Laughing at the "technical comments"

Some of these comments are hilarious. Everyone thinks they're an expert in bandwidth costs and network topology but the truth is that most of your posters are clueless. If they think bandwidth costs are being exaggerated or multicast is the fix, let them set up an ISP :-)

Truth is, bandwidth costs money. ISPs operate a shared resource model at both the backhaul and customer ends. If backhaul or local capacity requirements grow then costs grow too. If capacity demand grows because of customer demand, then yes the business model has to chnge. And yes, that will mean higher costs for consumers. Either that, or many ISPs will go bust - and the only survivors will be BT, VM etc.... TAANSTAFL.

And by the way putting IPTV caches in exchanges is just like building TV broadcasting stations, its entirely reasonable for the BBC to consider it as a means of reaching the population.

BBC calls DRM cops on iPlayer download party

@not getting paid

"Why bother? will probably be what the makers of quality drama ...will be saying ... when they can't paid for their work...."

This is the usual "blame the customer" attitude that too many rights holders are taking. They need to think outside the box instead of blaming customers for wanting flexibility. We're not still living in the 1950s with 2 rigidly controlled TV channels as the only broadcast video medium. The old revenue model doesn't work in the web era and producers need to get used to it. Look at where music is going, finally.

And if they can't think of a way to earn - hard luck. Luckily the creative people /will/ still earn a crust, because someone bright and inventive will work out how to sell their product. Its the dinosaurs manning the barricades who'll drown when the tide comes in. $%^&metaphor overload +++redo from start

Dear ISP, I am not a target market

Who cares about the ads?

The ads are the least of it, its easy to add oix.com to the blocklist along with doubleclick.net.

The real issue is your browsing history being handed to a 3rd party surely?

And no, they won't be injecting entirely new adverts into the stream, merely serving up "relevant" ads on webpages which already have hooks to their system. So you won't suddently get adverts on the BBC website, or injected into a "wget"...

UK government data protection is a shambles

garbage in...

The point is that the info is often wrong because the sources are tainted. For some years my NI number was wrong in 'official' records because someone mistook a 7 for a 1.

I suspect some of my NI payments were being misdirected - but its impossible to find out - well until my state pension is missing that is...

And @Avi, actually you should care. What if the police national computer has you down as a suspected paed? These days you need a CRB check even to run a cake sale at your kids' school, and imagine how /that/ CRB check would look on the headmaster's desk...

BT targets 10,000 data pimping guinea pigs

the point isn't the adverts...

'Targeted' adverts are a red herring, tho there have to be concerns about adverts targeted at the adult male of the house being served up to the preteen girl who happens to use the same computer.

The issue is that irrespective of the "opt out", Phorm's servers (which currently seem to be in China) will scan your web traffic and webmail. If you opt out, they'll still gather it even tho they promise not to process it.

And what happens when Phorm's servers are hacked? Which /will/ happen, sometime, it always does. 10 million of us will start getting 'targeted' spam.

Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia

@Broken up?

He 'broke up' with her on Wikipedia in the sense that he posted an open comment explainnig his ex-relationship with her. Apparently this was the first time she knew the relationship was over. The comment itself is mentioned in the Register article, and even linked to....

Spammers crack Gmail Captcha

Surely the fix is...

for Google etc to disallow the setup of more than say 3 accounts from any given IP address in any given 24 hour period? What real person wants to set up 500,000 accounts, or even 50 accounts?

Microsoft cuts Vista price

Still overpriced...

by several hundred dollars..

I played briefly with Vista on a brand new laptop. A week was quite long enough to tell me I needed to learn Linux. Vista was slow, annoyingly dialog filled, forced me to upgrade many other apps, didn't work with my wireless network, didn't work with a brand new supposedly vista-compatible printer, hid important stuff etc etc etc. Grrr.

So now I've been dual-boot Linux/XP for 5 months, and the only reason I drop into XP is because my office VPN requires it for a secure remote desktop. Everything else is either native Linux or runs under Wine. And Compiz rocks, way better than Aero...

HMRC pays criminal for 'tax dodger' discs

Extraordinary bunch of whiners

Some people are astonishing. They live in the UK, they expect the roads to be maintained, street lights to be lit & rubbish to be collected, they send their kids to our schools, benefit from our health service and fire brigade, are protected by our police & armed forces - and they object to being asked to pay their fair share. Perhaps they should move to, say mongolia, where the tax rate is much lower because you don't have any of that stuff.

And as for paying informants - heck thats been going on since the dawn of time. It's disingenuous to act all outraged.

Finland censors anti-censorship site

@Togneri

"In this day and age there's no such thing as "accidentally" viewing porn Er, no. Much of the billions of spam emails will links to goodness knows what. Yes yes, you shouldn't click on unknown links. Not everyone is a computer security genius.

BitTorrent busts Comcast BitTorrent busting

@Skirting around the real issue...

"Why are they allowed to sell a portion of my 8Mb of bandwidth to someone else, simply because they don't expect me to make full use of the whole 8Mb?"

Er, because you bought a /contended/ service, so its not all yours. If you want full access to the entire 8Mb, buy uncontended service.

Be prepared to pay ~25x more for it tho....

legal uses?

"remember BitTorrent has legal uses as well before you spout the Piracy argument... WoW Patches, Linux Distros the list goes on."

Sure, but you really think that these will be a major contributor to BT traffic? Be sensible. The guys I know using p2p are downloading TV shows from the US, DVDs from Russia and pron from everywhere.

Healthcare at your fingertips - a Choose & Book roadtest

Choose? Book?

I recently had to make TWO appointments via C&B, for unrelated things.

I live within a mile of hospitals that specialise in the two things I needed tested. My C&B forms offered me half a dozen places between 20 and 50 miles away...

THEN when I tried the net, all the hospitals turned out to be "not on the system yet".

And when I phoned the helpline, same answer. We can't do it they said, sorry, talk to your GP.

In the end I called the local hospitals direct, getting their numbers from yellow-pages. Appts sorted. No issues, except for the giggling when I mentioned C&B.

And then for WEEKS afterwards, the C&B system kept sending me 'reminders' that I had to book - with commentary to the effect that my failure to respond would be regarded as hostile, my notes would list me as a troublemaker, I'd be billed for wasted time etc etc. At least, that's how it felt.

*sigh*

French motorwonk savages hybrid cars

@Brian Miller

"There isn't much that can't be done that really requires a car, "

try getting six children to/from school, with school bags, sports bags and musical instruments ! (not all mine, we carpool with 4 other families).

ObTopical: we looked at a hybrid when we bought our peoplecarrier. Unfortunately mileage and space was too low. Maybe they're better now, but I don't get that impression.

RIAA chief calls for copyright filters on PCs

@Linux?

"you need a Windows PC to watch your Films?"

Huh? I watch films on a strange object called a Telly. I plug my DVD player into it to watch DVDs. Bizarro eh?

ObTopical: The RIAA are doing the classic: pitch in with an outrageous opening bid then concede some changes and everyone thinks you're being reasonable - even tho your revised idea is still outrageous.

Police launch hunt for bogus bobbies

motherboards

Yes, most probably mainboards out of high-end server. With say 4 cpus and 64Gb memory they fetch £200K new. They'd definitely have to export them tho, the UK market has a limited population of buyers who would all inventory the serial nos.

Oh, and @anonymous coward, if you think NI was a police state, you're deluding yourself - how many public enquiries into police methods did they hold in China or Korea last year? And as for the right to bear arms, you're in the wrong continent. We grew out of such childish things long ago in the UK.

Russians offer Terry Pratchett-style droid luggage

Reg angle

Reg angle:

More use if it could be "biting the hand that steals IT" ?

Google launches YouTube video-blocking contraption

@Eddie Edwards

>The chances of a false positive on a 13-cut segment ....

>can scan 200 CDs and it will only happen about once.

Sure but if there's a million videos on YouTube, thats 5000 rejects.

Mars rovers can keep on rovin'

Operating system

VxWorks I'm afraid. They need an RTOS to be sufficiently autonomous I would expect.

See http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/mer_computer_040128.html

Ballmer: All open source dev should happen on Windows

no he didn't...

Actually Microsoft did not say that 640K was enough, or that filenames needn't be longer than 8.3. The latter comes from CPM (which gets it from an older OS), whereas even if you swap microsoft for gates the former is simply an urban legend.

So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum?

@ A J Stiles

I assume you're being ironic - but in case you're not, a joule would be a ludicrous unit to use if you were measuring your water in pounds and your temperature in F.

By the way, its even harder to measure gas today - cubic metres is useless since its energy content varies with season and quality... at least BThus related to a real-world property!

Cells 'react' to GSM signals claims research

So what...

So all this article does is say "cells react to energy".

Whoo, how incredible. Newsflash: if they didn't, we'd all be dead. How else do people think muscles, digestive systems, brains, eyes etc work?

By the way cells react to water - notice how your hands go wrinkly in the bath? And air - notice how your hair blows about on a windy day? Maybe we should start panicking about that too...

Patch Tuesday update triggered Skype outage

forget about corporate PCs

>But most PCs are corporate, so are likely to have their patches applied

>at the same time thanks to a site or company wide policy.

Yes, but probably some weeks later. Also - how many companies with a patching policy will be letting their staff use Skype? Corporate PCs are a red herring.

That said, so is the Patch Tuesday idea. Most normal people turn their PCs off overnight anyway.

When 'God Machines' go back to their maker

Fast selling - just like Windows.....

>>the iPhone. The fastest selling phone in history.

And Vista was probably the fastest selling Operating System in history. Do you really want to compare your darling Apple product to Windows Vista?

Oh, and by the way, its only the fastest selling by virtue of the many millions spent hyping it. I'm not sure thats actually something to be proud of.

automatic ignition

Oxo may want to invest in this newfangled gas heating to replace the slaves stoking the hypocaust - automatic ignition has been commonplace in central heating boilers for decades....

Fancy an earful? Click here for tech support

absurd CS - still broken, too

irrespective of how the customer talks, and this one wasn't especially bad, you should never respond like that. All it'll do is enrage the customer and people have been sued and/or fired for less. Far better to gently point out his mistake, and chortle to your colleagues privately at how dumb he was.

And of course despite all this sound and fury, the button is still broken - the url for the firmware is still commented out in the html. If that is giving "people are support the best you can" (sic) then....