Posts by anthonyhegedus 1145 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2016
Until we get fibre to every premises, we are stuck with this antiquated fallback to using copper, and trying more and more ingenious ways of squeezing bandwidth from it. And even then, most of openreach’s Fibre is connected to old equipment that can’t handle more than 330mbps!
It's an absolute disgrace the state of our country's cobbled-together-with-bits-of-copper-and-aluminium network. But one thing that puzzles me, is how are Openreach going to get rid of all POTS telephone lines by 2025. What are they replacing them with, and how will this work, in practice? Or is it just BT doing it, and they'll put in some god-awful router with VoIP capability so you can plug your phone into that?
I'm currently looking to hire a car for a week. I found one place with simple pricing and a total, and even then I'm doubtful. All the other places I found online seem to start at "£10 per day" and then end up being "plus £11.50 plus £80 a week plus £8 a day plus £250" or "£2500 excess on any scratch more than 1 nanometer in diameter". Or it looks good and says "200-mile limit, extra miles charged at 30p/mile". Basically every site seems to deliberately make it impossible to compare like for like -- and that's another sin: Customer confusion and obfuscation.
They used to do it at PC world. You'd have a range of 3 or 4 crappy computers in front of you - starting at £400, with each one being around £50 more than the one to its left. So the one on the right might be £600. But then behind you is a range starting at £500, which includes the thingy that the middle one on the first row had, but not the thingy the last one had - that one is £700 but it includes a 250GB drive instead of 200GB so it must be better. And so on.
You end up being frustrated and confused, and buy the most expensive one.
The point is that the company is using deceptive wording on their website. They say they use various techniques etc but they don't actually say outright that "we negotiate with the blackmailers". They should say something along the lines of "we negotiate on your behalf with the blackmailers to get the best possible outcome for your data", But then they need to make their pricing transparent. Like quoting a fixed fee of, say, £500 for up to 5 hours work, and then £150 an hour thereafter.
Yes, the customer could do it themselves, BUT it's not always so simple. What if it's a server environment, with several PCs and a server, and online backups affected? The decryption algorithms don't always work properly, and the customer may need their hands held. If they can do it themselves, then they should do it themselves, but there's nothing wrong with a company advertising a service where they'll do it for you. Just not like this company in the article does it!
Yes, I wrote a script to pretend to be a login screen, on our PrimeOS system. This was in 1984.
But I never did anything to break the computer. What I did notice however, was that the line printer in one of the terminal rooms was particularly noisy when doing a line feed. I then wondered what it would sound like if I sent several line feeds to it. So I created a file with 1000 line feeds, and sent it. There was a lecturer doing a tutorial session in that room, or at least trying to. It was the room next door, and I could hear it. About 1 minute later an angry man runs into the room I'm in and shouted at me "did you do that?". I denied all knowledge, including knowledge of HOW to do it. He couldn't work out how to prove it was me, and left.
I love apple products... the ones I can afford... like a 7-year-old MacBook Pro. BUT: do they really want to be known as the Waitrose of tech? Selling only luxury goods that you'd better be rich to be able to afford. £3000 laptops, £1000 monitor stands and the like, digital watches that cost over £1000. It's one thing to be reassuringly expensive, but to be outrageously expensive just prices you out of markets that you can ill afford to lose. Apple, please stop being ridiculous.
Back in 1989 I hired a camcorder for a road trip. It came with two nicad batteries that only lasted 20 minutes each from a two hour charge. While we were on the road, to charge them, we connected them directly to the 12V supply coming out of the cigarette lighter with a butchered cigarette lighter adapter we had. After just 20 minutes of charging, they'd give us 30 minutes of usage. If anything, they worked better after a few days of this. I didn't tell VisionHire what we did.
That's nice, I can go to the Microsoft Store to look at a load of nice-looking Surface-book things (that I can't afford) and crash when you first turn them on, then mosey on down to the Apple store to look at a load of nice eve more unaffordable computers that work straight out of the box, and top it off with a walk down to the Nespresso 'boutique' where I can get a free sample of coffee that I can barely afford but I buy anyway.
I *was* with O2, but recently switched to EE, because of a problem with wifi-calling. I had also recently moved house. And where we lived has absolutely zero O2 signal, and practically zero EE signal. I thought it wouldn't matter because I have wifi calling on O2. Well, sort of. I had wifi calling but not wifi texting. This made it impossible to receive notification codes from various services, message from customers and soon banks. O2 told me that they do not transport SMS over wifi. However, EE do. So I moved to EE.
Ironically, a week after I switched, O2 put up a new mast near where I live, and they now provide a full signal, albeit 2G only, which is fine for texting and phoning.
What I've noticed with EE is that the 4G is much faster in actual use - ping times are better and accessing the various things I need to for my work. Speed tests can be as high as 200Mbps download and 50Mbps upload on my iphone, not that I need it, but it's good to know it's there if I need to tether my laptop for a big download. I've also noticed that 4G voice works in more places locally to me than O2 did (Near Brentwood, Essex). This is good, because it means that if I'm on the phone, I can still access websites. With O2, most places would force a switch to 3G for a voice call, which meant slower website access, but that would frequently switch to 2G, which doesn't provide for data access at the same time as voice, and doesn't switch back till you end the call anyway.
So all in all, not all networks are equal in what they actually provide and how they work. Hateful though their customer service is, EE actually provide a much more seamless and functional network for my needs.
I once had a customer - a residential customer - call me to say the inkjet printer I sold her was jammed. She said she'd called the manufacturer, and they tried talking her through it, but she didn't get anywhere. She described it as the 'print head', and that it was stopping the paper feeding through. She could move it, but only a little bit.
In the end, I went round to her, with a new printer just in case. I took a look at the paper 'tray' and saw small plastic-looking thing, that looked like some kind of old-fashioned paper guide. I pulled at it gently, and it slid out. It was a drinks coaster! It had fallen in somehow, and the customer thought it was part of the printer.
The problem works in reverse too... when the support person is convinced I’ve rung the wrong number. I once had a xerox LCD monitor that died, so I called the helpline. Got straight through to a support person in the screen dept. Or so I thought. I explained the problem that the screen was completely dead.
Xerox: “can you give me the serial number?”
I give them the serial number,
Xerox: “that’s not a serial number”
Me: “yes it is, it’s right where it says serial number”
Xerox: “no, can you find the serial number?”
Me: “there is no other number, it’s right on the back of the screen where it says serial number. There are no other numbers apart from the model number”
Xerox: “What’s the model number then?”
I give them the model number
Xerox: “that’s not a xerox model number.”
Me: “yes it is. It says xerox”
Xerox: “what type of photocopier is this exactly?”
Me: “it’s not a photocopier, it’s a screen”
Xerox: “what? We don’t make screens! This is photocopier service. “
Me: “I can assure you that you do. It’s definitely a screen and it definitely says xerox on it in big letters”
Xerox: “well why did you ring the photocopier service department then?”
Me: “I didn’t. I rang the number on the back of the screen and pressed the option for screen department”
Xerox: “no you didn’t. We don’t make screens and there is no screen repair department! Stop wasting our time !l”
And they hung up on me!
I eventually found another number on the internet.
This highlights a fatal flaw in the whole concept. Any device with hinges and movable parts will wear out. It's in their nature. Laptops have hinges, and these wear out. Foldable phones are going to be opened and closed far more often than a laptop. The screen is clearly going to suffer from stress as it's opened and closed, possibly onto dirt and debris.
The point is that there is a significant difference in FTTP vs FTTC in terms of technology, future-proofing and reliability. Whole countries have infrastructure projects to improve the broadband by using fibre. It's not all about speed. But now the average consumer will see no difference between ”fibre” and ”fibre”!
Th bank accounts used for Fraud are typically in the UK - they usually belong to unwitting mules (“your job is to receive money into your account and buy vouchers with it”). The fraudsters will have a field day. Once they know they’ve scammed someone, they’ll go back for more. We do need better checks in place.
Same sort things happened to a friend of mine working at a computer dealer in London. He had the note stapled to a floppy, the photocopy of a floppy AND the floppy folded in half and stuffed in an envelope.
In a similar vein of totally not comprehending the point of technology, I knew someone who would format all his floppies, restore the (DOS) system back to “factory settings” and erase all files on the hard disk. Every single night. So that the next day it was like new. He didn’t even realise that he could keep stuff he’d been working on (like Wordstar Documents), because he wiped absolutely everything and because he had never done this in the past (pre-computer), he never realised a need for it after starting to use a computer.
At least on LV426 there isn't a gravel car park half a mile from the terminal with little walkways placed in random places to make it harder to reach. And in the main building itself there aren't surly operatives telling you to queue here, queue there, then wait to be called. You know where you on LV426. You do need to know where your flame-thrower is though.
'Purely Marketing'? Not quite. It's also public perception. If it wasn't important, they wouldn't have put up the bloody thing in the first place. I imagine the perception among the general public is one of nothing too important, but the fact sticks in there that BT is associated with silly meaningless error messages on a display. The next time there's something silly and meaningless on a BT hoarding, it'll reinforce negative thoughts of the brand.
It's hugely important: It's a bloody big tower in the centre of a very big city with the words 'BT' on it and some utter nonsense scrolling underneath!
This is all very well and good, but there isn't a scheme for OpenWretch to refund the ISPs when delays and outages occur. It follows that there is no incentive (at least not a financial one) for Openreach to actually do anything about problems. There are many times when we've ordered broadband for our customers that Openreach are late; many times that customer's broadband goes down due to a faulty contact, or a problem at the exchange, or a 'battery fault' - and each and every time it's Openreach who fixes it. Sometimes they do it quickly, but other times we have to wait a few days while they allocate and reallocate engineers, find that the wrong type of engineer has been assigned, and then reallocate again.
Openreach operate in a way that benefits them, not the end-users of phone and broadband services, and with no financial penalties for delays, they'll continue to behave this way.
Look at Sage accounts - if you dare! Everyone uses it, not because it's any good, but because everyone's accountant, suppliers and customers use it. A bigger heap of disjointed, buggy, flogged-to-death-but-still-bad and crappy code I could not conceive. It's HUGE. And it's based on very old code from the 80s, with bits added on over the decades. The only reason it works is because there's Sage maintenance available, and almost everybody uses it. Basically Sage software keeps working because there are dozens or hundreds of support staff helping the users when the database goes wrong every other month.
We support several small companies who use it, and it's their biggest problem. The updates never work first time for example. We support accountants who use it to support their customers: they spent literally tens of hours a month on the phone to Sage support.
There's no incentive to make the code work better, because they make plenty of money from support contracts, and people keep buying the new version every year.
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