Posts by myithingwontcharge

Capita hops on UK's years-late, billions-over-budget Emergency Services Network to keep legacy system alive

Re: EE only?

Actually you'd find that a) You would be tied to one network with no chance of any backup or alternative.

That'll take the spring out of your step: Apple warns of iPhone shortages, revenue miss due to coronavirus

Are you telling us everything?

Also, they're out of coffee.

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: "Labor is pro-remain, right?"

"The remain campaign not only lied but used the power of government to directly threaten the population."

We're talking about the EU referendum not the Scottish independence one.

Three UK goes TITSUP*: Down and out for 10 hours and counting

Re: Never Heard of...

You could say the same about almost every part of modern life. For example if you need a car to get to work and it breaks, you have a single point of failure. If you need money for food and your bank's systems stop working so you can't get paid, you have a single point of failure.

The point is we pay these companies to remove that risk, in the same way we have breakdown cover for our car. When they fail to implement redundancy themselves they have failed in their core duty.

When a moble phone network goes down people can die due to not being able to call for help. This is serious and Three should be facing the stiffest penalties any company serving the pubic could face as well as explaining exactly how they could allow an entire network to fail, presumably due to their own single point of failure or cascade failure.

Dixons hits back at McAfee's £30m antivirus sueball: Your AV didn't work on Windows 10S

Re: McAfee Vs Symantec

"New keyboard please."

Keyboard? I need a whole new terminal!

Loose Women woman's IR35 win deals another high-profile blow to UK taxman's grip on rules

Re: Everything

Someone actually downvoted that reply? Can only be the nutter that made the original bonkers claim. :-)

U wot, m8? OMG SMS is back from dead

Delivery receipts are already part of SMS and guess what, every network charges for them. Per message. Even if you have unlimited SMS. So you go from "free" to an extra £10 on the bill and like MMS everyone turns them off or gets hit with confusing random bills. Any new standard including read receipts has to ensure it can not be integrated into a networks billing system in any way, or it will die an instant death.

Solder and Lego required: The Register builds glorious Project Alias gizmo to deafen Alexa

Re: Waste of a good pi.

Silicon heaven is too good for it. :-)

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

Re: Goodbye Youtube?

You are confusing "terrorist" with "freedom fighter". I think that was the entire point.

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Re: Can't use smartphone GPS in Australia

What do you do if your car has Onstar or any of the similar mobile network based services (as all new EU cars are supposed to have). Surely they must be common in AU? Basically most cars would be un-drivable for new drivers?

Mini computer flingers go after a slice of the high street retail Pi

Oxford?

A roll out to Oxford eh?

Not only do we not have an Apple store, we don't even have a 24 hour McDonalds! Even the larger Tesco is in Abingdon. If those guys can't make it work I'm not sure a smaller outlet's going to have much of a chance, unless they brand them as tourist trinkets. :-(

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

Re: Bad news...

It's perfectly cromulent.

UK transport's 'ludicrous' robocar code may 'put lives at risk'

Re: Missing the obvious

The trouble is bad drivers are rarely visible until they have an accident. You just have to travel down any street to see cyclists with big dazzling frequency flashing strobe lights signalling "I'm an idiot" to anyone who's not had an epileptic fit.

If most punters are unlikely to pay more for 5G, why all the rush?

At launch 3G had NO internet capability!

"But when Three launched the first 3G network in the UK in 2003, it performed the most rapid "pivot" of all time. Instead of multimedia, it went for value. 3G had been so over-hyped, it easily disappointed."

Actually when Three launched, despite all the hype of high speed internet, they had none. No internet connectivity at all at a time when the 2G networks were all pushing GPRS, WAP and "internet on the move" (even at a snails pace).

Three having to go for "Value" was more because the network was so technically poor at launch (as a launch customer I would even say unfit for purpose). It was long after the other networks had caught up that Three managed to sort out internet access and even then they only managed to get their credibility back by launching "value" unlimited packages.

4G launched without the capability to make voice calls!

If 5G is mis-handled as badly as 3G and 4G, they'll probably forget to specify SMS capability.

Microsoft shoves US govt IT contract where ICE throws kids: Out of sight in a chain-link cage

Goodwin agrees!

https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/896884949634232320?lang=en (well did back then)

Mozilla's opt-out Firefox DNS privacy test sparks, er, privacy outcry

Re: Making DNS communication more secure

Disabling audio unless Pulse is installed! FFS! Thank you. You've just solved a long running issue of why I've had to run Chromium!

British Level 4 driverless pods are whizzing along ... er, a London path

Re: One issue....

Given that in many places (such as parts of London) you're actually supposed to park your car on the pavement not the road (and these are the same pavements that were around long before they painted parking bays on them) I suspect this is a non-issue.

Huawei guns for Apple with Mac-alike Matebook X

Key question for any review:

How well does it run a typical Linux install? For example my Thinkpad E565 despite being on the approved Ubuntu list, has no support for the weird internal broadcom card (and needs an ugly USB thing stuck in the side due to BIOS whitelists), which apparently is major issue with some newer Lenovo machines (seems the quality fade and cost cutting is kicking in - they get approval with one card, then swap it out mid-cycle on the same model).

If this machine has full hardware support, it would be top of many people's list now Lenovo are jumping the shark. But we need to know for sure (and also have some guarantee that the manufacture's are not going to try the quality fade trick and change the spec without telling anyone).

Sorry, I can't hear you, the line's VoLTE

Re: It's only a challenge...

"What we really need is for the carriers to interconnect at something other than G.711."

Um, if you've used a phone to call cross network in the last year, you'll realise they already do! (cross network HD voice seems to work fine now) :-)

Still not on Windows 10? Fine, sighs Microsoft, here are its antivirus tools for Windows 7, 8.1

Re: Marketing vs reality again

"No, corporate Windows versions dont slurp at all. Its consumer versions you have to opt out of it on."

Windows 10 Enterprise slurps by default and requires a group policy to stop. "Profesional" (which I would counter is nothing of the sort) has no option to stop the slurp as it ignores the policy (there is even a warning about this in the group policy editor).

So just which "corporate" version are you referring to?

Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

"Which programs? I'm curious as to what still doesn't run in Windows 10. I've yet to find anything, though I confess most of the tools I use are written by Microsoft anyway."

How about Microsoft's own Visual Basic 6? Still widely used in enterprise. Though some third party has written vb6installer to mostly solve this.

EEk! Mobe network's customer services down for more than 24 hours

So the revelation here is that EE seem to believe they had customer service to start with. I work for a radio station and our EE text number stopped working. After several days of banging our heads against a brick wall of 150, it only got resolved because a director spoke to their press office.

Re: Who cares

@Jeffrey Nonken

EE are in a bit more than just England. They cover the whole of the UK!

Forget One Windows, Microsoft says it's time to modernize your apps

...and they wonder why people still use VB6. In fact, without a logical upgrade path VB6 is almost all that's left!

Why the Apple Watch with LTE means a very Apple-y sort of freedom

Re: It's LTE folks...

LTE is just American for 4G, since they started calling HSPA 3G, 4G!

As for VoLTE, most UK networks support this, for example Three call their VoLTE service "Super Voice" (because it gives you in building coverage on the lower frequency LTE bands where their 2100 MHz 3G signal can't reach). Oh and the watch does support 3G (WCDMA at 2100 MHz).

d3vy that appears to be exactly it. An embedded internet connection that can link to the internet, your remote iPhone and Apple's servers. Everything has to come through that and you can only get that connection via Apple and a participating (presumably by bending over) mobile network in your home country. Looking at the specs it doesn't even seem to support LTE at 1800 MHz or UMTS at 2100 MHz so god knows what the coverage will be like outside the USA.

Reality strikes Dixons Carphone's profits after laughing off Brexit threat

Well I was all set to upgrade to the latest iPhone last year, then I realised it would be a downgrade from my 6 as it had no headphone port. As a result I now pay £9 a month instead of around £40 and that's enough saving to rather concentrate my mind on if any future upgrade is worth it.

If the manufacturers are actively removing features from new products that are a key requirement for existing users, while putting UP the price, what on earth do they expect?

Oh no, EE! More UK mobile customers face sluggish roaming abroad

Re: Isle Of Man

Just wait for the bill! Remember the Isle of Man is NOT in the EU! :-)

EDIT: Though it seems networks may be treating it as such.

Bloke takes over every .io domain by snapping up crucial name servers

Glue records?

This sounds like an almighty cockup. Since his nameservers were on the same domain, the .io TLD would need active glue records for his server names under .io, which it seems were actually present.So maybe someone at .io removed or renamed their servers but forgot to remove the glue records?

While they could have fixed this by removing those records and allowing him to keep the domains which would then be pointless, it sounds like they revoked his actual domain name purchases. Which doesn't in itself sound enough to properly fix the problem?

It's the iPhone's 10th b'day or, as El Reg calls it, 'BILL RAY DAY'

Still waiting for the obvious

Ten years and they've still not brought out an iPhone shuffle. You know, with no screen and just a single button that dials one of your contacts at random.

Anti-TV Licensing petition gets May date for Parliament debate

"Theoretically you may not need a license just to have a TV set, but in practice you will not get away with just showing a connected device and claiming you never use it for live TV. Will not fly."

Can you get points on a TV license? :-)

Re: Good going cobber - Pollution reasons

"So this means at least 50mph as many cars are most economical around 56mph.Bzzt. Not True Alert!"

Well for years European economy figures have been based on a car doing 100kph (56 mph) so manufactures had a massive incentive to make them most economical at this speed. This is mainly done by making the top gear have lowest revs at this speed. You could get better economy by using a lower gear at low revs, but then you'd be doing about 30mph on the motorway, which is even more dangerous than 80 in free-flowing traffic. Not sure if this is still the case, but it certainly was for most of the cars large and small I've had in the past.

How Apple exploded Europe's crony capitalism

The networks pushed themselves into irrelivence

I always remember back in 2003, spending hundreds of pounds on one of Three's "amazing" new NEC 3G phones which had been advertised as having amazing data speeds and video capabilities..... then when I got it home having a major WTF moment when I realised the Three network (back then) didn't support ANY internet access whatsoever at any price (the other four 2G networks at the time already all supported (rather expensive) GPRS and dialup internet access)!

That a new entrant like Three, launching with a new technology (3G) that had been massively promoted in the press as a new era for data (and by definition Internet access), could launch with such a broken product speaks volumes of the contempt some people in the industry had for their customers (it seems Three were attempting to sell premium downloaded videos including I believe even porn and appear to have decided not to offer any internet access as a business decision to trap their customers in a "walled garden"). None of the other networks made that mistake and Three was regarded as a joke for nearly a decade because of it.

Since then Three have turned their marketing on it's head and now claim to be the network for internet, however when ever I see one of their adverts that's the first thing that springs to mind.

BTW I am a current Three customer. I joined them when they were the first to offer "unlimited" data, which was also the point they started to turn around their reputation.... however if they don't get their 4G act together soon they may regain it.

Uber and Volvo take on Ford in race to launch self-driving vehicles

Stop!

Ummm... Why has nobody mentioned that Ford basically own Volvo? :-)

Edit: Then again it seems they've just sold it again... Those motor industry types move fast....