Posts by Jacqui 563 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
Who DOES NOT enable this? Yes I have the key available, however it does not help much as I have to first add the MAC address into the box - and yes I picked my own key :-)
And yes if you are doing aproduct reiview on a technical web site, some details beyond the PR blurb would help.
is that she never was a real spy, but the russians wanted a hero(ine) and she was selected.
The only problem was it took so long to get the merkins to "catch" her - doing nothing
but looking suspicious while doing it just does not seem to work. In the end, the russians had to "leak" her spy status so that she would be caught and brought home as a hero or the state.
I'm sure there will be a film out soon :-)
to rip apar and place in a tile in the bathroom as a radio/audiobook reader/video player.
Which will only work if I can root the beatie and install a recent AD release.
However, I think CPW are in trouble with thier description of this product.
"internet browser, so whether you're a YouTube fan, a music buff or you want to get engrossed in the latest bestselling title from your favourite author, you can do it all with just one device."
I wonder how many returns they will get because youtube "don't work".
They all mean free or worthless. Anyone who does such jobs is tainted with the same description.
When they turn out to be not as simple as expected "incompetent" usually ends up being added to the keyword list ...
I do simple/quick for the boss (internally) but these are jobs and systems I know inside out.
Long long experience acting as technical resources to various clients has lead to a spidey sense for certain phrases coming from thier customers :-)
Jacqui
There are so many other options - but they all involve linux somewhere - which for a MS shop is a no-no.
Of course, linux is OAK on thier servers :-)
Jacqui
p.s. My desktop some 10+ years ago consisted of a IBM Power PC, a Sun3 and a SunServer. My main desktop was distributed across the three machines with dev applications and email etc runnning on the SunServer. The Sun3 provided the screen and the IBM provides the desktop manager.
Is the limit for my flatbed in the living room.
And yes I do scan small imagesin at well over 600DPI.
Yes, for original images you do get graining however if you know where to look you can clean the images up and interpolate - ending up with a better than original image.
I personally would have set the limit at 600DPI - otherwise print quality would be degraded.
Jacqui
Oh and its a lexmark - I just hate 'em - my epson B1100 with a CISS is a monster but lightnig fast and dirt cheap to run - and will print A3+ photos!
this is very orange SF like - its base and can be bought through tesco direct for those of us who dont like the idea of using cards over the net. Mine was for droid development but apart from the camera and battery issues I like it enough to carry around with me to meetings and it sits on my desk every day - plugged into a spare USB port :-)
You can stick a 16GB mSD in it (mine came from novatech who are just brill as usual).
I did have to reformat the card to get it to work but was done with a Windows box - I did not have to stick ext2fs on it :-)
Unlock is free and if you move to giffgaff you get free net and texts and a wadge of minutes for 10ukp. No tethering allowed but I can live with that. This eliminates the data use issue - which is a NIGHTMARE on VF - the racer cost me 1UKP/hour on VF which was very suspect because my credit was dropping even when I had the phone powered off!
Jacqui
The VBS is being used by many businesses and councils as a way to hire cheap foreign labour as they know they cannot vet immigrants. As budget cuts bite more and more low paid jobs are requiring extended VBS checks.
Also there is still the problem of teachers working at schools who because of unfounded complaints by pupils now fail to pass the VBS. This does not stop them from working as a teacher in thier current post but does mean they cannot accept promotions or move to another school. The VBS has and is still destroying the careers of many good teachers because "hearsay" is considered enough to bar anyone.
Anyone have one of these emails - care to share the full headers - did the email get routed through a TP MSP or was it direct from a bbc controlled IP space?
If the prior, then I can assume heavy greylisting etc would be in place and delivery rates would be as described. If direct from the BBC then delivery would depend upon just how much the BBC have pissed off the MSP.
Recently bought a ZTE racer for playing with android. First put my VF sim card into it and immedately saw my PAYG account start dropping by ~1UKP/hr even with all anroid services disabled.
I them tried switching the phone off and when I logged back in an hour later my bill had dropped by another 75p.
VF must be making assumptions about traffic and charging for this. I dont any other way a switched off (powered off/batt removed) phone could run up ~80p worth of traffic...
Replaced the VF sim with a GiffGaff sim and in nearly a week have spend 4 minutes of calls but no network or text charges.
To double check I put the VF sim back into the Tocco Lite and the insane charges suddenly stopped.
been a VF user for 10+ years but GG seems a far far better deal for me.
Its always been the case that a US business can pay some politico a back hander (or threaten to move a factory out of state) and suddenly a out of country TLD becomes a national threat.
Sorry but the only reason .com was so valuable was because the original browsers defaulted to trying www.word.com if "word" was entered at the URL.
If a localised browser had been configured to try .co.uk/.ac.uk, the value of .com would have been massively reduced.
If you work in IT, you have been and for the next few years will be impaled on the tax mans need for cash. Best response is to move abroad. My choice is canada, it is not perfect but very few places are currently worse than the UK. Escpecially if yiu have been hit with some insane notice by the tax man.
Why shoudl *I* pay for their incompetence?
we recently called tesco direct to inquire about stock in a local store - to try and save a run to the store.
we called three times - same result
1) its an 0870 number - expensive!
2) the AA forces you to wait before you can "press 1 to..."
3) Three levels down you get to a real person and...
you get a disconnect. Yes, you spend nearly a minute trying to get to speak to someone and the shits HANG UP on you.
In the end, we went to argos and paid 10UKP more but at least I knew they had stock!
I had a BBC employee on the doorstep two nights ago. He had a clipboard and ask in a roundabout way if I would be interested in a free sky box as part of a special deal to entice people away from virgin. I told him that we dont have a TV so a sky box would be useless to us.
I had had one hell of a day at work and should have
1) asked for ID
2) photographed him and his ID
3) reported the deception.
We *were* considering getting a sattelite dish and TV just after xmas (in the sales) but your most recent offensive, threatening letter made me feel that I would only be giving in so we missed our chance of a lovely sattelite system for 35UKP :-(
FYI we decided to try life without a TV for one year (about five years ago) to see how much more we could get done without a gogglebox, but soon after the threats, demands, attempted breakins and abusive calls started and I just cannot see how I can buy a TV and licence without feeling I am giving in to such abuse.
The "evidence" in these cases is usually just a tracker listing of IP addresses - which is nothing more than a list of numbers. The people who run the trackers have repeatedly said that they inject random IP addresses - past research has shown roughly one third of all IP addresses are random values.
What this means is that in order to obtain evidence the techies for the ambulance chasers have to run a torrent client (with auditing and obtain at least one checksummed) chunk of a pirated file AND show/log that the tracker showed that this IP downloaded to 100% AND continued to "seed".
What really happens is that these techies try every dirty trick in the book, including force loading pirated content into any torrent server they can find so they can pass on prosection details.
The effort in creating irrefutable evidence is far too much effort for the revenue these IP hunters get ~10 to 50UKP per successfull "threat"... The IP hunters take the easy route and simply scan every torrent tracker out there for any files remotely similar to the owners content and
pass every IP address to the vultures. Because of the nature of the content most decent families and lill ol' ladies just pay up. Easy money.
Real experts cost a lot and I assume this is what ACS::Law is trying to avoid having to pay - the defendants legal and expert witness costs of these outstanding cases.
GOOD BITS
I think I get roughly 2Mb/sec upload speed which is supposed to increase to 5Mb/s.
I dont care if I ever get the 50Mb/s inbound if fact I still have some 10Mb/s network cards on some
boxes, the outbound means my web servers ar just as good as those hosted in a company datacentre with a 4Mb/s cct.
OK no fixed IP, no rDNS etc but you cannot have it all for 40squids...
BAD BITS
latency is scary - almost as bad as satcoms - gamers beware unless you are happy with >300ms rtt's.
all http traffic goes through very very slow proxies and some traffic is corrupted - so use those checksum's :-)
DNS is a joke - - unles you run your own DNS server you will see random week long outages as their DNS servers decide to give the http "accelerator" IP address for *any* DNS A lookup!
And yes support is crap - roughly one day a month outage and a friends NThell phone line (cut off by the engineer while doing a cable pull) was out for two MONTHS before they could organise a repair to the cable pull. FWIU she was not the only NTHell customer with a deal line.
They initially charged her for a voice to mobile redirect but when she mentioned getting legal advice they said they would "re-imburse her account" - they part re-imbursed her :-/
They are not called nthell for nothing.
Jacqui
p.s. when phoning support, call the freephone number and if you get an "injun" HANG UP, wait 10 mins and redial. The scots and northeastern call centers are staffed by *people* who give a shit. My mates dead line was made, far far worse by an injun script kiddie who managed to destroy her service when all she wanted was a new feature added WHEN THE LINE WAS RESTORED. Instead the injun removed CLI and a host of other features, including her phone service... Dont ask the injuns anything, just hang up and redial until you get a UK call centre.
Branston will eventually get the message.
Carter has built and tested jump-copter aircraft before, but they seemed to lack one major PAV attribute: that of being easy to fly. Even experienced ex-military test pilots have suffered mishaps at the controls of Carter craft in previous years. According to the company, this has been addressed in the new PAV:
Hmm - I read somewhere that gyrocopter pilots consider helicopter and (mil) test pilots to be folks who crash ag's because of the wrong reactions. It seems a helicopter pilot automatically does the opposite to a ag pilot in a "stall" - which is where most mil test pilots end up pushing the envelope and due to wrong reactions end up dying with the machine taking the blame...
We used to do work for some housing trusts - many of which used a common commercial package. We were asked if we would be interested in provding (paid) support and development if the user group bought out the supplier...
We were very interested, but the deal fell through as someone else bought the failing business.
I do not see why the same economies of scale could not be applied to sofwtare used by councils across the country. The only downside would be increased reliability and no jollies/bungs from suppliers. I find it is impossible to convince a local .gov "head of IT" to consider software that will reduce support/staffing levels as it will reduce his/her budget.
are already doing this for free!
Members travel around, taking dumped ex-school or college (windows) kit and provide this to people who would otherwise not be able to afford a PC. Sometimes people have bet access
but not always. Quite often having thier photo collection scanned and stored with some basic games and eud software is a good enough start without the burden of an unwanted net connection bill.
I got involved but the problem was some of the folks I supplied machines to ended up having the systems taken by bailifs against outstanding debts. I got quite sore that I was paying to upgrade these boxes, find and renovate a decent monitor etc and these folks intentionaly use the machine as a way to reduce their debt.
There are a lot of penioners out there who would love such a box but there are an insane number of scum who will abuse this sort of service.
So companies who have the ability to take *civil* action against infringers cannot do so as they never seem to actually have any evidence. It seems the figures for "illegal" downloads include legal uses such as my recent grab of various linux distros via torrent etc. Also the figures are often based upon the range of UK IP addresses found on torrent servers - which have admitted they make up roughly half of these. Taken to extreme roughly one half of the supposed UK IP infringers are faked by the trackers and the "volumes" of donwloaded torrent materiel has to have the large numbers of linux distros and other legal context that is assumed to be multiple copies of some music or video files.
Sorry, but the figures are very very highly suspect. From discussions I suspect the figures are probably between one third and one tenth of what is being put forward.
And yes I could have downloaded linux direct but seeding a torrent is a much nicer thing to do - especially if you have the bandwidth to seed...
It seems my download of all versions of a recent centos and gentoo release ends up at roughly 30GB - which is assumed by the packet sniffers to be 40 CD's worth of music!
My understanding...
The plod ignored the techie who explained the recovered image was in a place on disk that means it would be difficult to prove "ownership/intent" and would suggets the images was never accessed by the suspect. They simply pass the image (on a CD) to the CPS and hide the information that would sop the CPS from starting a prosecution.
The defence ask for details - the CPS ask the police who forward the request to techies. Techies repeat what they originally said to the (now promoted) police officer and the case is dropped due to lack of evidence. This costs us taxpayers roughly 100K each time this happens!
Until we stop rewarding the plod for hiding/constructing evidence and (perjury) we are going to see more and more cases dropped where a competent defense shows how the police hid evidence for personal gain.
It would not be the first time a force has mixed up a complainant, accused and the guilty and ruined someones life.
FWIU if you *ever* make a complaint to the police, it will appear (probably negatively) on your CRB check, so being a witness to an assault means you can kiss goodbye to your teaching career.
And the police wonder why people go blind when a crime is committed.
Do not even provide a witness statement without first getting legal advice!
there is a 30mph limit that was watched by speed cameras hiden inthe back of a van in a side street. Due to massive complains the council installed a 8foot square sign listing the number of addicents on this road in the past N years.
A FOI request by a local paper revealed accidents were mainly drunks tripping over the badly laid paving stones - almost all accidents counted had nothing to do with traffic or speed.
Only after a lot of people who had been "done" for 31 in a 30 zone did a protest along that road between the roundabouts at each end effectiveky gridlocking fboro did they remove the speed traps, misleading "stats" and install 30mph "slowdowns".
Finally the pub on that section of road closed a few years ago - which massively reduced the accident rate!
speed cameras are almost always a revenue stream for the ACPO businesses - they have very little to do with safety.
The ACPO is the money marking arm of the police. In the old days if you ran a business you would be asked to make a donation to the police ball or retirement fund. Today they have the far better money making techniques such as speed trap "refresher" courses and publically funded databases as well as direct theft and resale of other peoples software.
Not seen one of those for ages. Last time was when I worked in the north east and some muppet plugged a yellow flt into a blue socket. (yellow and blue were dc charge sockets but reverse pins).
Not only blew a 300AMP high rupturing cap fuse, but ripped the door off the fuse cab and melted aroudn 100 meters of trunked wiring that also feb the oil heating system for the warehouse. The pictures fuse looks bigger but its state is similar to the 300Am p one I saw.
There is a *good* reason why you cannot have the power on with the door open ;-)
In out case $Boss replaced the trunked wiring but I had to sit and work out which wired went where as there was no labels and wires were all "black" or as good as ;-(
FYI HRC fuses hold a set of || fuse elements enclosed in sand. The plan is that as each fuse wire goes the sand absorbs the heat etc. However if the short exceeds the rating (by any significant amount - as in a reverse wired FLT) you get what I like to call a proper bang. In such cases all fuse element go pop at once and the sand and glass "cannae take it".
Jacqui
I *like* card based systems but wireless keyfob based systems can and will be hacked by people sitting in a van with wireless sniffers. Its a no risk - low cost strategy that thieves of valuable (high end) cars will use.
Once the car security key is found (VIN?) the van can act as the fob as long as it keeps within 20 or so metres. DVLA will even provide VIN for ~3UKP :-)
This all reminds me of the tale of a fleet of new ford police cars delivered to a midlands force. All the cars were parked in the undergound car park with the press et.al. As the press officer was extolling the virtues of the new cars, a "guard duty" plod used his then analogue radio and managed to unlock almost all the brand new police cars, flashing the headlights etc.
The trick of using a CB "key rattle" to open a ford had been know for well over a year - but that force had never come across it till then - press had field day.
Odd how when the big five consulting groups are to have thier fees cut, "open" and review is accounced before contract reviews are due. Anyone who thinks putting effort into providing evidence (aka free consulting, fed directly to the big five to help them "improve performance") will help anyone but the big five needs the men in white coats.
Companies focus upon the end result which is functionality, look and feel etc.
Security and stability only become issues *after* the fact. This is how lots of web businesses operate.
And from performance reviews of existing (current) live web apps, they are not the only company in this position - or worse.
Jacqui
As a friend who paid megabucks and jumped though hoops to become a "official" school photographer (in various locales), if they let *anyone* take pictures how can he make money?
The *reason* you are not allowed to take pictures of little tracey or Sharon winning the egg and spoon race or playing Mary is nothing to do with paedos but because the council would no longer rake in thousands from official school photographers.
Not to *fix* the Mbuf overflow bug that would panic a sun but to accept and process a fix staff at then $work wrote for the high end sun's by reverse engineering the relevant lib and recomiling with a fix. When the problem, test and fix was passed to Sun (no charge) they asked *us* for 10K (UKP) for "processing" costs. We declined and shipped our fix to customers direct.
Sun never properly fixed this glaring hole.
A long time ago we (as a small software house) were involved in discussions with a number of housing associations to roll out thier own "open" management software. This was after their common software provider was failing miserably to provide support and new features required to keep up with legislation.
I have always through it insane that each council spends seperately to buy in the same software even if thier operational procedures is slighly different. I *know* they talk to each other and I know there are plenty of small businesses who can offer local support etc. Owning the core technology as shared/open source would be cost effective. Managing such a distributed project no longer has to be a nightmare and can be done "on the cheap".
What you end up with is something that has no insane per desk licencing costs and you have no tie ins to a specific supplier - a council/housing assoc could have in house devs if they wanted...
Jacqui
makje sure you stick a pencil/cottonbud in the fans before hitting them with the air line.
The back EMF can eb nasty.
Just cleaned my desktop out - we havetwo white GSD's and the machine is on the floor - YUCK.
In the den(office) the machines are roughly at elbow height and can run for years between clean outs. In the rest of teh house boxes last a year at best...
Jacqui
Its a long standing joke that big business get very very cheap leccy and gas on the understanding that the can be cut off without notice, however big business will switch suppliers at a drop of a hat so the supplier would rather brownout the very highly profitable residential customer base rather than lose an estate of "droppable" factories.
Even if said corp install has a backup genset, they get preferential treatment and homeowners will end up without heating to ensure the genset diesel plant is never needed.
With internet traffic we have expensive residential and SMB net connects and as you move up the chain you start to get ecomonies of scale and hard fought (massive) discounts.
The important thing to remember is that like gas and leccy, the residential and smb users are profitable and the large corporates are not - we subsidise them!
Now the UK/US wants to add legislation to allow net "brownoouts" for individuals so that he subsidised coporates can keep going. This is the same plan as smart meters - cut off the residential users to ensure we dont lose the corporate leccy accounts!
Vote pastafarian or monster loony - the only parties that give a damn about us :-)
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