Posts by anthonyhegedus

BlackBerry won't kill BB10 until 2020, pulls regular Priv updates

Blackberry were flaky even in their heyday. Problems abound with things like phones suddenly switching to BES mode, BIS losing settings for an account because it's got to get a new 'service book' sent. These were all blackberry-invented annoyances that were meant to keep a legacy requirement, namely email, running 'reliably'. Small businesses couldn't afford a 'blackberry server' and in any case with email services moving into the cloud, having your own email server seemed a bit of a nonsense.

Blackberry's issues were that they were trying to solve a problem that didn't need to be solved. And the thing people really wanted, which was access to websites, really didn't work very well at all on blackberries. As for the quality of the apps, they were abysmal. I had never found a blackberry app that actually looked good.

What's interesting is that the blackberry messenger became so popular. What killed it was that they were so late releasing their BBM client for android and ios. I seem to remember it was announced and then months later, it finally became available. Too late. People had moved on.

It's ironic that blackberries were aimed at the corporate market and that they became so popular with kids - mainly because of the BBM.

A million UK homes still get crappy broadband speeds, groans Ofcom

Words fail me. We are still talking about 'at least 10Mbps'. It's plastering over massive, subsidence-induced cracks. Getting people who can barely get 1Mbps onto 10Mbps will shut them up for a bit, but it's not enough for a sustainable 'digital economy'. Nor is 30Mbps. Nor, even is the rather paltry 300/30Mbps that BT offer on their full fibre product that's only available to 3% of properties now anyway.

We need to, as a country, invest in nothing short of full fibre to every property, and a backbone that's capable of supporting 1Gbps up and down. Forget high speed rail links. It's solving a problem that either isn't there, or is certainly not as important as the broadband one. Having fast broadband (proper fast broadband) available to all will enable new use-cases, and new technologies far beyond what we have today in terms of sophistication.

I wish I were in a position to buy a piece of shit new build. To me, it's an unattainable goal.

"I have lived in a bad area for years in the UK but now I am enjoying 300MB(I get 390MB though) ;)"

You can only get 390MB? What happens if you want to download 400MB or 1GB? You should pick an ISP that doesn't have such a ridiculously low cap. What speed do you get?

Someone tell Thorpe Lane in Suffolk their internet sucks – they're still loading the page

Re: Call that slow?

It depends whether you mean talktalk wholesale or talktalk retail. The wholesale connections are far more reliable than BT.

"Let's say three people. It's enough to need 10Mbs for adequate performance."

No, it isn't. If you're viewing complex interactive websites, and all three of your working at once, sharing 10mbps would cause annoying delays while waiting for content to load.

And if you're trying to stream video, it's totally inadequate. You need about 30Mbps minimum for good 4K HDR video for a start.

We need to stop fannying around saying that '10Mbps is OK', '30Mbps is superfast' and so on. It might just pass today, but we need to build the networks out for the next several years. I have 30Mbps and it's only just about adequate. Next time I move, the speed of the broadband, and the technology used, is going to form a very important part of the decision-making process.

Could be worse...

In about 2008, I was talking to an American guy who worked for a company that wrote remote support software, and he explained that it does actually work with dialup, even poor dialup (but obviously not very well). I remarked that I can't imagine too many people on dialup and he told me a story of someone he knew who lived on a farm deep in the American midwest, and not only could they not get any type of broadband, but the dialup was pretty flaky too. He went on to explain that they only had one wire coming in from the phone company to the house. Not one pair. One *wire*. I asked how that worked and he told me that the return path was a metal fence that ran from the house to the telephone pole, a few hundred yards away. Now that's pretty basic!

Re: Progress?

"my dads never forgot "

Just how many dads do you have?

Re: Progress?

The company I used to work for used Motorola Codex modems. There were even bigger ones than the 326x series - about twice the size - which we phased out in 1993 or so. They were very impressive looking, with their lighty-up display and buttons. They were still using them in 2001 when I left. We used to connect them to the serial port of postscript printers so we could send our clients proof documents.

Re: Call that slow?

BT can't fix it, it's got nothing to do with them. It's Openreach who should fix it.

You could try another provider that uses talktalk's backhaul. It *might* help. Talktalk's DSLAMs are more flexible when it comes to choosing target SNRs etc. Also some routers allow you to specify desired target SNR values, and that might help, even if you continue to use BT.

Actually, scrub the bit about talktalk's anything.... I just checked and Seething Observatory can't even get one of BT's 21CN connections, let alone another provider. The only thing available is the old 20CN connection, which the status checker I used says will get 0.8-2.5mbps download and 0.1 upload, which is clearly not true, and clearly very poor. The annoying thing about 20CN tech (which was BT), is that even if it gives you a sync speed of 0.5mbps download, it'll packet-limit that to 0.25mbps. BT used to call it a bRAS profile, where the actual speed profile is slightly lower than the actual synced data rate. At low speeds it matters a lot.

I was amused to see there is an entry at your postcode "dark hole, toad lane".

NiceHash diced up by hackers, thousands of Bitcoin pilfered

I still don't see what problem a cryptocurrency is trying to solve. My limited understanding of blockchain tech is that is can be useful for decentralising transactions, but if your bitcoins can be stolen that easily, what's it all for? It seems that the value of bitcoins isn't actually tied to anything tangible. It's only of value because people say it is. I know that's how normal currencies work, but they're usually tied to something physical, like gold reserves, or a country with physical assets.

Bitcoin seems only of use for criminal activity, hipster coffee shops and getting stolen.

Tech giants at war: Google pulls plug on YouTube in Amazon kit

Send in our govt!

I've got a solution... send in our conservative government. Theresa May and her crack team of expert negotiators will settle it for Amazon, Google AND Apple. They'll come up with a simple, fair and equitable solution that'll keep everyone happy. It'll mean future decades of happiness for everyone.

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

Sorry!

I can't see the thing sailing endlessly on, it'll slow down and come to a stop when the fuel runs out. And another thing, I'm surprised the valves on the engines haven't rusted through by now.

Ofcom just told BT to up its game on fibre investment

I really didn't think Virgin put full-fibre into properties, it's coax isn't it?

Ofcom proposes ways to stop BT undercutting broadband rivals

Re: If BT can lower their prices........

It's only a week in the States if the circuit is ready. There are places where reachability is a problem too.

Here in the UK, most places (i.e. urban) it takes a few days to get a phone line in. We order phone lines for our customers, and most of the time it's 1-2 weeks. There's often an expedited service available which is 1-2 days (at a cost of course!).

Re: If BT can lower their prices........

I remember it taking SIX MONTHS to get three phone lines installed at a customer of ours in Wales about 9 months ago! Ironically, three months later, they were told they could get full FTTP, and that took only three months to put in. As soon as that went in, we cancelled the phone lines and they went over to VoIP!

Re: How about opening up Virginmedia's network

No, Virgin no longer do that. I trust VerminMedia even less than OpenWretch though.

Dawn of The Planet of the Phablets in 2019 will see off smartphones

Re: Age

As far as I remember, per-second billing through circuit-switched data (there's still a GSM profile for this) let you dial a regular dial-up internet service through your phone. It went at 9600bps. I remember dialling in to my office from my train at Waterloo and sending an internal mail with Lotus Notes, and it taking about half an hour once it managed to stay connected long enough on the half-hour journey home.

As Apple fixes macOS root password hole, here's what went wrong

I'm running a beta version of MacOS (10.13.2) and they obviously don't think it's important enough to release the fix for the beta software. I know it's beta software, but why not make the effort and release the patch for that too, seeing as they know about it.

Uber says 2.7 MEEELLION(ish) UK users affected by hack

Re: Boycott Uber

I'm boycotting them! closing my account now

Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password

It's harmless

It's just a small glitch in MacOS. It really can't be exploited by anyone much. A true Mac user would never accidentally type 'root' as a user name. And look at all the flaws in windows. One tiny flaw in Apple is nothing by comparison. I'd sooner use my Mac any day than Windows.

Seriously though, I *DO* use a mac, I do prefer using it, but for fucks sake Apple! This is TERRIBLE!!! Very poor show....

A certain millennial turned 30 recently: Welcome to middle age, Microsoft Excel v2

A company I used to work for had a sales director who was known for being a 'computerphobe' - and this was back in the 90s when there were a lot of them about. During a presentation, he handed out sales forecasts and figures that he had prepared using Excel, and everyone was pretty impressed that he had done that, as they know his particular ineptitude for all things computer-related. That feeling subsided when he announced: "This spreadsheet thing is great, so useful, but it would be better if it could actually add up the numbers for you".

The room went quiet, and nobody had the heart to tell him.

10 years of the Kindle and the curious incident of a dog in the day-time

I don't read that many books, and the ones I do are non-fiction like 'Sapiens - a brief history of humankind'. But when I do read a book, I read it on my iPad, or if it's not to hand, even my phone. If I read more books, I'd probably buy a kindle. But some books, particularly reference books, how-to books or books with illustrations, I feel would be better in dead-tree format.

But what's odd to me, is that my children, who are still just under 20 years old, for all the tech that they embrace, always prefer reading actual printed books. They'll generally eschew electronic formats if at all possible, even if it means carrying more weight around.

Linus Torvalds on security: 'Do no harm, don't break users'

Who is the Linus bloke anyway? Why do people look up to him as some sort of 'God of Linux'? Does he run Linux Ltd? No. He's just a dev and shouldn't be treated as some sort of arbiter here. Glad to hear there are other devs working on the kernel and not just him anyway.

Phone fatigue takes hold: SIM-onlys now top UK market

I knew I'd get heavily voted down for my earlier comments, but I stand by what I said. These cloud services ARE accessible by the majority of users, and the do work. Google do it with their Pixel and Apple with iOS. And millions of people are buying phones without replaceable batteries, and they can't all be wrong. Any phone user I've met who doesn't use cloud storage and isn't 'tech-savvy' has at some point lost their photos, because they're stuck on some old phone somewhere and not backed up, or on a crappy SD card which died.

So instead of voting this down, look at where people are heading: It's cloud this, and cloud that so we might as well embrace it - it works!

The only way forward is to progress and if that means binning your ten year old piece of crap, then so be it.

Why do you need a MicroSD? They're unreliable and FAR slower than the flash built into handsets. These days, with cloud storage, there's no need for that much storage anyway. And a swappable battery - Why? I used to have a handset with a swappable battery, and indeed a spare battery (a galaxy s3) and I never bothered - too much hassle - too long a boot time and I charged the thing every night anyway. I ended up getting a large battery for that which lasted two or three days of heavy use actually.

But I have to agree it's the long term support with android that annoys me. Any android phone seems to need to wait for not only manufacturer, but also carrier updates. Which is why if I ever end up getting an android phone it'll be a google one.

Microsoft's memory randomization security defense is a little busted in Windows 8, 10

Re: Conversation at Microsoft during Windows 8 development

You forgot the bit where someone said "but with these new tiles that replace menus, and this fantastic app store, not to mention the charms on the right, it'll bring about such a revolution in ease of use, obviousness and productivity acceleration that people will love us too much to care about any security aspect we've inadvertently forgotten about in the meantime".

This was followed by the ceremonial drinking of the kool-aid.

Chainmail tires re-invent the wheel to get future NASA rovers rolling

*tyre

please

BT boss: Yeah, making a business case for 5G is hard

Re: 5G versus better existing services

4G doesn't seem to drain any battery I've ever used on a phone which has 4G any quicker than 3G or 2G. We can phase out 3G slowly, the tech is now 20 years old. Time to go. And as for 2G, anybody still using a 2G phone really ought to get it replaced. It's called progress and unfortunately it costs money. Nobody is saying buy a smart phone, just a phone that works with current standards. TVs cost more than basic phones and nobody had a problem when we abandoned analogue.

Re: 5G versus better existing services

We don't need 2G and 3G - finish building out the 4G and start with 5G. It's impressive how 4G has built out in my area (Essex). For 10 years, there have been 3G 'not-spots' and then within a couple of years, 4G is available in far more places than 3G ever was. This could be because of the lower frequencies that 4G can use, as well as improvements in the technology used. Why not just get rid of the 2G networks, gradually phase out the 3G and reuse frequencies where possible?

Parity's $280m Ethereum wallet freeze was no accident: It was a hack, claims angry upstart

Re: RE:What is the end goal of these ridiculous crypto-currencies anyway?

"What was the point of a phone in your car ?

What was the point of a computer in your house ?

What was the point of rock'n'roll ?"

These are trivial to explain, and envisage even years before their introduction. But I have not been able to identify a compelling use-case for bitcoins. Is the point that the long-term intention is, in fact, to make it trivially simple to use, such that it will supplant cash? Because right now, as it stands, it doesn't appear to be ready.

What is the end goal of these ridiculous crypto-currencies anyway? So far, from what I've read, and a small amount of experience buy a bit coin once, I've determine that:

1. It's _fiendishly_ complex to buy, use and sell bitcoins. It's not like just going to a website and buying something. Advice is sparse and conflicting.

2. It's expensive to convert proper money to bitcoins and vice versa.

3. The exchange rate varies wildly, thus making it a poor vehicle for... anything.

4. It keeps going wrong. I'm not talking theft, I mean bugs and controversies, that only the very knowledgeable can even hope to begin to understand.

5. There seem to be more than one cryptocurrency, only serving to confuse people.

What the hell is it all for? how will this actually benefit people? Can we actually use these things quickly, conveniently and simply? In a nutshell, I see this as just a geeky experiment for hipsters that has no bearing on the real world. I've not seen anything anywhere to simplify this so that people can use it as conveniently as a debit card or cash.

I know I'm going to get voted down for this, but surely I have a point!

Automatic for the people: Telcos forced to pay for giving you crap services

It's Openreach, not BT Openreach. But anyway, my concern is that are Openreach actually going to compensate the provider? Are they going to favour BT, because they always seem to have?

User asked help desk to debug a Post-it Note that survived a reboot

I once did a home fallout for a blind man. My job was to set up a brand new Dell computer that he had purchased on the very specific advice of a charity who was helping him (it HAD to be Dell). He had also purchased a CD with some special screen reader software. So after he led me to the room (the lights were off!) he explained that his mother had been trying to set it up but there was an error on the screen that she couldn’t quite read, that just would not go away. On close inspection (once he showed me where the lights were) I found there was indeed a message on the screen. It said “remove protective film before use”.

OVH data centres go TITSUP: Power supply blunders blamed

il est down?! Excellent!

Parity calamity! Wallet code bug destroys $280m in Ethereum

How much money did those people actually put into this ethereum thing? Not $280m I suspect. However much that is, isn't that what they lost. All these posts here seem to talk about 'real' currency and ethereum. That's the whole point. It isn't real. It isn't really worth anything, except to the people who think it is. And there aren't that many of them.

Put it another way, if everyone decided to sell their bitcoins or etherea, what would they be worth then?

I don't profess to fully understand the whole thing, obviously, and I'm sure it shows, but that's the point too - it's a risky investment and I'd say pretty unstable.

Guy Glitchy: Villagers torch Openreach effigy

Re: Wut?

What bollocks! We have customers who run an office in a rural location called 'Just off Oxford Street in London' and they can only get 6Mbps ADSL and no FTTC. It's pathetic. I'm sure OpenWretch are 'working hard' to get them fibre.

We had other customers who were going to move from their current really rural location in Blackmore, Essex, where they can only get 1-3Mbps. WIth three broadband lines, it's still crap.

They were looking at a property in Stratford, East London. Near the Olympic park, near Stratford station, near the sodding main road. All they could get was 10Mbps ADSL. Utter shite. So they didn't move. The existing owner of the property lost out, our customers lost out and all because OpenRetch, with their maniacal love of copper, won't build out the country properly. All because the government thinks that a USO of 2Mbps or 10Mbps or even 30Mbps is acceptable in 2017! They'd rather build unnecessary rail routes and spend money on anything else.

El Reg assesses crypto of UK banks: Who gets to wear the dunce cap?

The Lloyds bank website tries to load some Flash before you log in.

Re: More interestingly is to scan the major security companies!

McAfee do an antivirus?

Openreach: Comms providers 'welcome' our full-fibre 'ambition'

Re: Has anyone considered...

The requirement to have a phone that works with no power is based on what exactly? What about the huge numbers of people who have got rid of their home phone altogether (what's a home phone *for* exactly?)? What about people who have just a cordless home phone whose base station needs power?

In France, if you get a new broadband connection at home, you tend to get switched over to voip. The voip works through the router. That needs power.

Hanging onto this is hanging onto an old fashioned paradigm.

Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

30mbps is NOT a good goal for a USO. The trouble is that more and more services will come that will need more and more bandwidth. More devices in the home, and bigger, faster downloads required. I get around 30Mbps through this ridiculous half-arsed FTTC/VDSL technology. It's good enough for most things, but not quite good enough for 4K at 60FPS, and certainly not good enough for 8K video. So who cares? Nobody too much right now, but in 20 years time when the ONLY technology that'll work well enough to go up to gigabit or multi-gigabit speeds is fibre, and half the country is still on a USO of 10 or even 30Mbps, we'll lag behind the rest of the world.

Put it this way: in 2017 the maximum speed I can get at home is 30Mbps (where I used to live, was 80, but I don't live there any more). In 1997, the maximum speed I could get was 30Kbps. That's a factor of 1000 in 20 years. Even at work, we only had 256Kbps.

Though we can't get 30Gbps now, we know that fibre CAN do it. So why aren't we planning properly for that. If the only way is to add £7 a month to EVERYONE'S broadband bill, so be it. It's far less than the cost of not being able to compete with more forward thinking countries in 20 years' time. The trouble is ensuring that the £84 a year 'broadband tax' goes towards getting us nothing less than full fibre to every single building in the country, if needed.

TalkTalk glitch causing mobiles and landlines to go off at the same time

We resell talktalk broadband and to be fair, it's just as realiable, if not more so, than BT Business broadband. Their backhaul network is reliable too.

But as for the customer interface - I'd NEVER recommend them for home or business use. As long as they use those dreadful indian call centres, they're always going to be shit.

LTE it snow: Microsoft to punt out LTE-tastic Surface Pro in December

Hang on, don't these devices use Windows though?

Can you get from 'dog' to 'car' with one pixel? Japanese AI boffins can

But AI is going to take over the world. We are all going to die.

NHS could have 'fended off' WannaCry by taking 'simple steps' – report

Re: Easy to mitigate

Are you trolling?

Dell forgot to renew PC data recovery domain, so a squatter bought it

Mind you, anybody trying to download a factory reset image from Dell would have had a lucky escape, not being able to download Dell's annoying bloatware crap.

Re: How do domain names expire?

Presumably that's because you MANAGE stuff, whereas the manager at Dell in charge of domains either doesn't exist or doesn't manage.

Sky mobe ad featuring beefcake Tom Hardy banned for being 'misleading'

Re: Meanwhile

But BT say their network is fibre too, and talktalk come to think of it. So it must be true.

Google slides text message 2FA a little closer to the door

Re: embrace... extend... bloat?

"... including astroturfing, FUD-spreading and all the other dubious tactics that we saw the best part of two decades ago." - OK I had to look up FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) but I really can't be bothered to look up Astroturfing.

The only thing missing from that post is the phrase "Wake up, sheeple!". Just another paranoid person, nothing to see here.