Posts by Richard Cranium

Scottish islanders' wave power hopes sunk by 'massive costs'

Power from Norway and Iceland?

Both have proposed projects. Iceland has plenty of geothermal and some HEP. When I visited an Icelendic HEP station there was talk of disposing of their surplus by running an undersea cable to UK. Norway has/had a pumped storage proposal - ship surplus power (like wind generated peaks at times when the grid doesn't need it) to Norway for pumped storage in high altitude dams. Both projects demand much longer cables than Scottish Islands. Are they complete non-starters or is the Scottish costing model wrong? Is this just another case of "why invest your own money if you can make a case for Government to stump up".

Are there any viable alternatives - use the power to create chemical compounds that can be shipped and the energy released? I'm not up to doing the science but naive ideas starting with simple substances like sodium, phosphorous, calcium carbide?

ICO sets cookie-law flouters deadline - to open an HTML editor

Re: third option.

The ICO is supposed to police the law in respect of telesales calling numbers registered with the Telephone Preference System, potential fine of £5k per instance. Despite thousands of reports a day the ICO has NEVER fined anyone. I find sales calls much more intrusive than cookies, I have to shift my fat arse to the room where the phone is and answer in case it's something that matters (like my granny calling because she's had a fall and needs help) only to find I need to tell the low-life caller to F* off (not granny).

Re: ICO = FAIL

...the Germans love it...

I just had a quick look for high profile German companies with a Cookie alert on their websites, failed to find any.

Massive DDoS attack blasts 123-reg offline

Re: Business as usual then?

Frankly I'd be looking elsewhere for the problem - like the broadband connection or FTP settings.

I've never had that problem with web fusion servers (though I do see that kind of issue with a couple of other providers I have to use sometimes) and I and my office staff make extensive use of FTP.

Can't blame them if it's a massive DDOS...

... at least they got it fixed within an hour - I host a couple of hundred domains on dedicated servers with them. I could access the server intermittently. It was showing load averages barely above 0%. I got (almost) straight through to support OK at 11:20 (call queue for less than 30 seconds).

Unplanned downtime is a regrettable fact of life - International Banks, Gmail and most if not all major hosting companies all get problems - for what I pay I've historically had very high levels of server availability at Web Fusion, I guess better 99.99% taken over 10 years. When one of my dedicated servers suffered a fatal component failure at 10pm on Christmas day 3 or 4 years ago they swapped in a replacement within a couple of hours.

Just do a search for [name any big organisation] on El Reg and see how many entries relate to service outages or successful hacks - e.g. HSBC gives:" HSBC UK systems major outage Customers can't use cards, online banking or ATMs" 4 Nov 2011. And believe me service loss to a Bank HSBC means a lot more than a blog about your new kitten.

I do have gripes with Web Fusion - primarily I'd like to move to a more powerful server and their sales people said they'd transfer most of the data for a few hundred quid but I'd have to copy across email account settings and any non-default DNS settings myself - try doing that for 100 accounts...

That's the only reason I've been looking for an alternative host (but so far failed to find one I'm happy with).

Admittedly their support has gone downhill since they moved some of it to India. A recent trivial example: domain name renewal paid, email some days later from Nominet to say "not renewed" so we assumed payment to 123reg had gone wrong so paid (again) they did renew - and promptly took the payment twice. India said "non-refundable". (Got it escalated and sorted in the end but at the cost of time, incredulity and anger). But show me anyone that doesn't outsource support somewhere cheap and incompetent.

So if anyone does have a better solution at the same level of cost I'm interested but I'm not holding my breath...

Adobe backs down, patches critical Photoshop CS5 hole

Re: $199 != £124 in Adobe Land

Adobe have long suffered from the belief that £1=$1.

A while back when the true calculation was closer to £1=$2 I tried to buy some Adobe software from a US source. Even if I used the shipping address of a friend in US I couldn't do it with a UK credit card. However I had a client in US and traded some work for him for the software I needed.

Perhaps someone with a UK version could confirm that Adobe have invested man-years of developer effort into translating the US mis-spellings into UK English (color/colour for example) hence justifying the price differential.

Want to see a worse Adobe rip-off? Acrobat X-Pro in US is $400 in UK £478, that would be $768 (Amazon prices)

El Reg posts dirty pics for old computer buffs

Re: Picture 11 barrel printer

Brings back happy (?) memories as an operator in the 70s, we had to scrub the barrels with toothbrush and alcohol every 4 hours. Dirty work. Otherwise the print got fuzzy as the letters got clogged with fluff off the inked printer ribbon. If I recall we had about 16 of these printers each about twice the size of a large domestic fridge and despite acoustic hoods on a peak run (when end of month, weekend and bank holiday all come together) they'd all be going hard at it for 48 hours. I think someone said the paper passed through at 3 mph - then the laser printers turned up printing at 30mph!. Yes our drums did have rows of all one letter but didn't blow a fuse. Test prints would print rows of all the same letter so you could spot degradation of the speed of an individual hammer.

Thousands of Brits bombarded in caller spoofing riddle

Re: Truecall

The problem with trying to waste the time of the telesales person is that they are only earning a few dollars a day in India, any time you spend dealing with the call is costing you orders of magnitude more than its costing them.

And when you look at the scams as opposed to "legitimate" telesales (if there is such a thing) the money generated by one success is a week's pay for the caller.

As for TPS - yes register but don't waste any time reporting the calls you still get. There's the power in law to fine £5000 for each offending call. Beyond "contacting to persistent offenders and instructing them to stop" no enforcement action has ever been taken. But in any case it's powerless to act outside UK.

Molesworth and the New Latin

Choice would be a good thing...

There may be a place for a "computer skills" course which is about learning to use applications or one a bit more management oriented covering stuff like systems analysis, writing system specs etc.

Then "The IT course" could be the kind of mentally stimulating exercise many of an older generation of IT workers got from their ZX80, BBC micro, Archimedes etc. Every student gets a Raspberry Pi as base hardware they can expand on hardware and get into coding. Frankly I think our schools system couldn't cope, it would be better done as an Open University type scheme but maybe a bit of a hybrid so in school there is a facilitator, who also participates in the learning and keeps an eye on individuals activities.

My kid started an IT A level at what has been called "the best state school in Sheffield". It was deadly dull, the teachers seemed to know little about what they were teaching and probably misunderstood the syllabus. At the end of year one all but one kid failed the AS level so the school withdrew the option to do year 2.

Roberts reveals radio with raunchy recording features

Hope they've solved the software bugs

I got an earlier model with the record to SD function years ago, 200 quids worth. Trouble is it eats D cells so fast it's only affordable on mains and it gets "blue screen of death" every few weeks and needs a reboot. I did read that they have a software fix but email to their support desk gets no response.

Plus the record function is too basic. Something like a sky+ setup to schedule recordings and give a replay menu would be useful. I bet the "24 hours recording" is a single file you have to listen to from the start, no skip to 1hour 30 mins, far less "skip to [start of my favourite program]". I'm afraid Roberts have lost the plot, need to keep up with technology. Things like integrate radio with WiFi/ethernet connection into domestic LAN and integrate to desktop software or maybe some Bluetooth and smart phone/tablet integrations. Maybe mute when the phone rings for example - or even pause program...

You may ask why bother with a discrete radio at all? My answer is that I can wander round the house and garden doing my chores and carrying the radio, big speaker and decent amplification so I can hear it above noisy background without resorting to earphones/headphones which I hate.

Punters even more dissatisfied by Virgin Media's package

"The VM cable service is quite good, consistently fast ..." Yes but my 20MB cable connection is now consistently fast at 7.7MB. At least when it was a 10MB connection I used to get a consistent 9.8MB.

As for their email luckily I'd ditched it long ago as it was never "best of breed", but I had it in my Mailwasher config so still checking in case anyone still had the old address - until it stopped working altogether then it was easier to forget it than try to get it back to life.

Brussels: Water cannot be sold as remedy for dehydration

Put the boot on the other foot...

Drug companies have to prove their claims. If the bottled water industry wants to make health claims surely it's their responsibility to prove them at their expense, not the EU to disprove them.

The "drug testing trials" would be interesting - 100 patients were treated with water, while 100 were allowed none. Those denied water all experienced premature death - case proven...

Google will ignore your Wi-Fi router ... if you rename it

I admit it...

"Some people set them to stupid names just to entertain the neighbours."

Never lose that .uk again: Decade-long renewals OK'd

Makes the situation worse...

My proposal is that UK domains should be £10 one-off setup admin fee - but in addition Nominet hold a £100 bond from the owner for each domain, refundable at any time.

Nominet is then funded on the investment income from all those £100s.

Name speculators will be more selective about what to hoard.

£100 shouldn't be enough to discourage small biz. I don't recall the reg fee I paid at the point Nominet was set up - £100 or £200, and that was to buy the name not "lease it". (Rather annoyingly 10 years later Nominet tried to reclaim it saying they had no record of our ownership so we weren't entitled to use the highly sought after name - until we proved them wrong (like a 10 year old letter from Nominet relating to the domain name and signed by Willy Black) - and agreed to start paying biannual renewal fees) .

Businesses or individuals no longer needing a name would be more inclined to reliquish it to get their bond refunded.

New businesses looking for a suitable name would once more stand a chance of getting something meaningful rather than finding loads of suitable ones all held by speculators with unrealistic valuations. Or else be driven into the hands of a less desirable TLD.

The only losers from this approach would be domain name speculators and domain name renewal scammers.

Renewal after 10 years will lead to more accidentally lapsed domain names. Business ownership, phone numbers, email and physical addresses could all have been changed.

Whereas a lapse of registration of the primary domain name like yourcompanyname.co.uk would be spotted immediately, secondary names (like your-company-name.co.uk and your-main-product.co.uk) pointing at the same underlying internet properties (web/email) may well go unnoticed. But even when the lapsed registration becomes evident, will anyone know how to get it back? Business has been bought, moved to new premises, maybe even changed name, changed employees, can they even prove they are entitled to renew?

Finally I predict that the domain name scammers will be in action any day now. You will get an official looking mailshot announcing "Your UK domain name can now be renewed for 10 years", the scammers will offer to provide this service for you. You pay, they collect as much as they can then abscond without paying nominet.

Google explains 'why' ads target user's Gmail

ISP free email

Yes most ISPs do provide free email but to them:

It's a cost centre not a revenue generator, a black hole for them to pour money into.

If you move ISP you lose the email address (maybe after a period of grace). That means you've got to change all those places where you registered and they use it as your contact address, and your personal contacts. For me that list is in the hundreds.

If there's an outage, its a free service so not imperative to fix urgently. Real life examples abound.

The spam filters are notoriously poor, the worst issue being false positives, mail you want being treated as spam. If you're lucky its in a spam folder so you stand a chance of recovering it but it may just be trashed or bounced.

Are any ISP email accounts as feature rich and versatile as Gmail? None I've seen come close.

BTW I believe my ISP provides free email accounts that are in fact gmail but with the branding changed, I guess they pay google a few quid a year per user and that's cheaper than trying to maintain a system themselves.

I use gmail with my own domain name, the adverts are not intrusive and if they want to read my christmas round-robin email, great, none of the intended recipients give a damn about it. If I were concerned about confidentiality of a message I'd use encryption, if I had significant volumes of confidential email then a commercial email provider or my own mailserver too. But if GCHQ want to read my messages I'm sure they'll have little difficulty intercepting them whatever I do.

Schoolteachers can't teach our kids to code, say engineers

CSS or Flash

My lad was in deep s**t when he made navigation buttons for his ICT website using CSS instead of Flash - the teacher didn't understand CSS. Apart from that it was largely learning how to use MS Office - but not at a very deep level.

An earlier generation of IT developers was largely self-taught on the BBC micro. What's required isn't teaching but the availability of an easy to use toolkit that delivers interesting results fairly easily but has scope to dig deeper (like transitioning from BBC Basic to inserting bits of machine code).

Successful teaching is stimulating a desire to know more. Stick the teacher with a strictly defined curriculum and learning goals and the task of "inspiring" goes out of the window.

Microsoft dumps Gold partner accused of scamming customers

I played along

...with the call from "windows support" having "demonstrated" that "Oh my god your machine is badly infected with a polymorphic virus" (on the basis that there were errors listed in the windows error log file).

Next they sent me to logmein.com (which, shamefully, doesn't give any security warning that naive users would understand WHY NOT, I emailed LogMeIn asking, no reply) so a "technician" could investigate the problem.

Crooks push fake anti-virus via Skype calls

I played along...

...with the call from "windows support" having "demonstrated" that "Oh my god your machine is badly infected with a polymorphic virus" (on the basis that there were errors listed in the windows error log file).

Next they sent me to logmein.com (which, shamefully, doesn't give any security warning that naive users would understand) so a "technician" could investigate the problem.

Obviously that's where I stopped but looking around the web, there's people who've been scammed out of $200 - that makes an annual salary from this scam of $50,000 if they get one "success" a day.

EU recording copyright extension 'will cost €1bn'

Cliff Richards?

... will 70 years be enough for him?

But the income issue is only part of the story. Cliff doesn't want his songs to be used to advertise Soap Powder within his lifetime. And BTW on his death the record companies don't get to keep everything, his estate should be getting his share of royalties. Not that I'm an apologist for the greedy parasites that live on the backs of musicians and composers. The PRS means we can't listen to the radio in my office because they want £400 a year license (of which the performers/composers get to see very little while PRS staff lounge on generous salaries) - and the Radio Co has already paid a license fee to broadcast it.

Google flight search engine lifts off

What flights out of a city

I needed the reverse, what flights into an airport. Searching for flights Manchester to Malta on Expedia I was getting stupid expensive routing with multiple stops. Then I looked up the airport website in Malta to find what airlines were flying in from any convenient UK airport. Having seen who was flying in I then went to that airline's website and got a direct flight at a sensible price.

You can try the same, look at the airport departures board, many let you see several day's worth of departures. Having found a destination (and airline) you can use other tools to find costs and availability. But it would be nice to go one step further with automation and be able to ask something like "where can I fly to from XXX on a budget of $YYY in a date range of AAA-BBB" - but is there the demand to justify the development cost?

UK slashes red tape in apprenticeships scheme

McD - great place for "apprentiships" [sic]

Attention to detail, hygiene, consistent quality, personal appearance, youngsters learning to handle discipline, work in a team, handle sometimes demanding and difficult customers, wide skill set (as compared with production line or call centre).

A good keen worker should end up earning more than his mates who went to uni, spent heading for £30k on the course, same again on living costs (in London) to emerge into a jobs market where employers are more interested in experience than in devalued degrees in questionable subjects. What are the figures? something like 20% graduates unemployed, average starting graduate salary allegedly over £20k but an awful lot of employed graduates grumbling about ending up in jobs paying under £15k and which don't require a degree anyway.