Posts by Bavaria Blu 85 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2018
It might be possible to train people to have better social skills? Or is it impossble to teach an old dog new tricks? IT does seem to attract people with poor social awareness. Perhaps the idea of sitting a room with only a computer for company all day particularly appeals to them. I've had colleagues like that, who have real difficulty if they have to interact with users at all.
I would hope given how important credit ratings are to many citizens' lives, that they would be regulated like banks. This amount of data loss would ideally result in them losing a "licence" to store sensitive personal data.
It makes be reluctant to given them my information even just to check my credit file.
It is surprising no legal action can be take for gross negligence? I suppose if you can't prove you've lost out, what they did is not an offence which would result in compensation for the victims.
Considering London is the biggest city in Western Europe and had more banks and other data users it is to be expected it has the most data. In Germany many companies are spread out in other cities, not all centralised in one place. Frankfurt is a city about the size of Nottingham. Nine million Londoners must also contribute, cat photos and all?
How hard can it be to find the caller?
You could go along with the patter and give a false name & address. The caller has your phone number already. Set up an email address too to give them too. Then get them to email over the paperwork for the PPI claim - presumably it has a UK postal address to send it to? Otherwise if it is all over email the thing you are signing would have to have the company name on it?
Otherwise what inforamtion do they have to process a PPI claim on your behalf?
If they are UK based you could visit their offices and ask for some help with your claim.
I know with software these days freemium is all the rage - but surely banking is more important?
A monthly fee of 5 to 8 quid would mean they could offer a better service and it would promote real competition. Even paying for branch access would hopefully make better use of the space - less queues for a start.
Otherwise we are stuck with high hidden charges especially for international transfers which really shouldn't cost any more than domestic ones. It would also be good to have better integration between services - why not have a nominee account with all your fund and share holdings viewable within the same website rather than having to switch around.
People are so unwilling to switch banks, customer loyality is high even with banks which offer mediocre service like TSB.
Looks like my Honor 9 but a bit cheaper and with a 6" screen.
Funny that not much has changed in 7 months!
It is great dual SIM is becoming the norm at this price point. I think Apple will soon launch an iphone for £400 with similar specs, and then you can choose to pay the 50% extra for a phone without "operator/manufacturer cruft" .
I know Theresa May grew up in a village and calls people who go abroad on holiday "citizens of nowhere" but this is ridiculous. Our own GPS system? What does the G in GPS stand for? Surely for Brexiteers an evil source of globalising influence. GPS will turn us into citizens of nowhere! We won't be leaving the UK as the pound is so worthless, so why do we need a global navigation system? Why not just have a home counties navigation system, HoCoNS? Surely for the typical Tory MP navigation is something your driver or the au pair does on the school run anyway?
"That change makes it plain that the law is finally catching with the impact of internet technology and that some of the broader protections put around internet companies in order to help them thrive may need revising in the light of recent changes in technology and behavior."
Prostitution is surely not new and neither is the behaviour. The question is whether is is socially acceptable and whether the ease of going into business with the internet has changed behaviour so much that a new law is required. Any laws which exempt internet companies from an existing law seems the wrong way to go about things. If you want to encourage people to buy faster broadband, which will give ISP a reason to invest in infrastructure, there are better ways than making it the immune from laws medium of choice for pirates, pimps or porn slingers.
If you're a rich corporate user, your company will have purchased a global roaming plan with enough data.If you're a tourist going to a non-EU / roam like home country then buy a local SIM at a supermarket or the airport, pop it in an off you go. Huawei have had dual SIM for a while, hopefully it will catch on with Apple / Samsung as standard.
Much more interesting is the problem when roaming that your internet traffic is routed all the way back to your home country and then to whichever website you're on. That means a very sluggish response (That, and the problem that roaming is often 3g even with 4 plans!)
Also it confused geoblocked websites. View the BBC homepage in the UK with a foreign SIM and you'll see the .com with all the adverts.
Would it not be possible to have an option at registration - is this for personal use or corporate use?
OK, there would be individuals who could pretend to be companies, but then they have lied and the data they gave (ficticious or genuine) will be published. Individuals privacy would then be protected if they register their domains in an individual capacity.
Does ICANN publish any data itself? For whois I though you had to go to the regional registries (RIPE, ARIN)?
Banks really need to be better regulated. There should be international security standards mandating chip and pin or better still biometric. Some countries like Norway have had photographs on credit cards for years (I know that won't help in this case or online fraud). Is the cost really so high that the banks don't want to reduce fraud? The idea that you can go online and purchase things with just the card number is so 20th century. Its like using a typewriter or VHS player.
Websites are not outside the juristiction of the country in which they are based. It would be a more interesting case if the schoolkid had taken the image from Wikipedia under an American concept of fair use. If that image had a copyright owned by someone in Germany and the school website was also in Germany that would be a good test case.
In Germany the laws are enforced, partly because their legal system is Roman rather than Common / case law. You broke the law, you pay compensation. That is why you need public liability insurance even as a private citizen, and that is why there is a huge legal industry fed by this gravy train of money from insurance companies. Perhaps it means a victim is always protected but it does make for a quite adversarial day to day life.
I think unequal societies are more sustainable than you think. It is after all the rich and successful who benefit. They are able to lobby and plead a special exception to every rule. "If you tax us too much we'll live elsehwhere" and the Govt will believe it. Especially in the US even to be a candidate you have to be a multi-millionaire or billionair. It is unclear to me why they would even be aware of the falling real value of wages as they are unlikely to know what "work" is in the tradional sense, they are more rentiers or pure capitalists. Whilst capitalism needs consumers to consume and therefore have wages to do so, I do not see why they have to be sold good quality products, and they can buy them on credit too. The average American is also not as well educated as a typical European in a high tax high public service society.
In the linked article it is a bit of a fantasy to say 3 GB an hour for HD video. My movie streaming service lets me download a full HD 2 hour film for 1.5 GB so more like 750 MB per hour.
I think 5G will come in fairly slowly. Users value coverage just as much as speed. We need to get 4 G coverage up. I imagine Three will eventually be allowed to merge with O2 to form three main providers which will reduce the costs for the operators.
The German public sector (having some experience) has very comfortable working conditions for the workers. A works council will have the right to veto anything suspect. Windows 10 or Office 2016 might take weeks of negotiation to get approval. Linux is seem as the clean, cloud free and free to use solution.
Microsoft have created the "German Cloud" with Deutsche Telekom to help assuage worries about control. So hopefully more can move into the cloud and make these platform battles redundant.
Buying locally written software is also commonplace - I agree in principle with buying local, and for manufactured goods that makes sense. German software and computer hardware is not always the best, also SAP is the exception.
OK, perhaps vested interests but corrupt is a strange word to use about Germany. The people are very principled and somewhat nerotic about many things. The fairly luxurious lifestyle means people can afford organic food and tax breaks on cars mean owning a BMW, Porsche or Merc is not unusual. Perhaps wanting Linux instead of Windows could be compared - like organic food, it seems like the right thing to do!
The Diesel scandal was an exception which proves the rule of a generally strictly law abiding place. The UK is just the same in protecting the arms industry when bribes were allegedly paid to our best customers in the middle east.
That's like saying "it's my car, I paid for it" so I should be able to make the rules of the road. You're using Cloud services and you have to follow the service rules. In turn your can expect the cloud provider to stick to the rules too - keep data secure and always available.
I started using Google Drive ten years ago. In that time connectivity has been tranformed. You can now get more bandwidth over 4G than you could over ADSL back then.
I would have thought medium sized buisnesses with a small IT team of say four staff could benefit enormously from cloud. Office or Google Docs and then some kind of Citrix or RDP Windows terminal server for legacy apps.
I business I saw recently had 40 Mbit VDSL and then a bank of 4G modems (across 3 providers) as a backup. They were moving everything that they could into the cloud.
I know this is a forum inhabited by IT support folk, but why all the hostility to the cloud? Surely the boring parts of your job will go to the cloud, but the more interesting bits will stay?
Also user expectations have moved on. Unless a document they are working on is available anywhere and from any device, they'll just create their own shadow IT on dropbox or OneDrive and you will then have zero control.
Roll out the chromebooks / boxes and migrate legacy apps to the browser and cloud where they belong.
I was lucky, flying in to LHR on Tuesday evening. It does seem like some of the systems behind the front end could do with being updated. BA has a shiny app, but it doesn't know which gate I should go to, even though that must (hopefully!) be known in advance?
I always found it strange at Paddington that the platform wasn't annouced until a couple of minutes before the train arrived "for security reasons". Total BS as in Germany the platform a train will be using is known 3 months ahead. They are even planned so changing long distance train often just means crossing the platform. How can knowing which platform a train leaves from be a security problem?
In Germany Facebook posts are screened for illegal content, it is easy to get the big internet companies to clean up their act if there is a legal requirement to do so. If television had had no regulation, it would have developed into a 24/7 pr0n and violence fest too. In the US "free speech" means anarchy online as these ancient rights were not thought out for the modern world.
Don't through the baby out with the bathwater, just apply the same rules to Yourtube as you'd apply to ITV.
The UK has very little tax compared to out European peers with decent healthcare. In Germany the idea of putting away 20k tax free in an ISA forever is a fairy tail dream. €800 of interest and dividends and that's your lot. The public healthcare is comparible with private healthcare in the UK in my experience.
I think above average earners in the UK get away with paying very little tax. Council tax is the only local tax and it tops out at what 2k a year for a mansion?
I'm a bit confused with the terminology - there has been an app-store version of Skype - if that is the only one now supported, how is Windows 7 supported? If it is just a version / UI change, what's the big deal? I assume the app store version uses the new UI.
I imagine most consumers use a mobile for video calling, as I understand it Whatsapp can only do calls on the mobile platforms, and Google Duo is also mobile only.
Monetising the video calling market is impossible as users will just switch to an app which is free. Not sure how Google / Microsoft / Apple make any money on these products. The costs must be relatively low as its just data.
In about 2002 I though flat screen monitors would take ages to take off, the first generation were so fuzzy and had terrible coloour reproduiction and the viewing angles were also problematic. Within 5 years the best displays were LCD.
I haven't bought a hard drive in five years - laptops come with flash and the needs of most office workers are met with an affordable SSD. The big hard drive buyers must be for corporate datacentres and the main cloud suppliers, do consumers really buy hard drives these days? 1 TB on Google for €9.99 a month. Cloud storrage is as cheap as chips! Probably still hard drive rather than chips mind!
I feel sorry for the workers - 13,000 is a lot of people.
Germany does need energy for steelworks, car factories etc. Sadly some are a bit dirty still, also in the East they are still burning brown coal, which is obsolete. Replacing the atomic capacity will also take some time.
On the ground, in Bavaria it is typical to have an electric car and solar panels on the roof, funded by juicy subsidies. There is a public charging point outside my house. The electricity is 100% renewable as it is owned by the city council who have their own windfarm.
The same "city works" have also rolled out fibre to 70% of households in Munich. They own the roads and the utilities so digging up roads is not a problem.
Maybe with Corbyn the UK could one day catch up.
Although Bittorrent is very illegal here, so I'm not sure what people will do with all the bandwidth!
It would be nice if sharing data without the user's permission was a criminal offence and punished accordingly. It would also be good if legal action could be taken against the individuals involved as well as the organisations they were working for. Cambridge has billions in assets, they could also afford a fine of a few million.
I bet the £500k doesn't cover the costs of the investigation. The ICO doesn't have enough powers to fine people. It should really be part of HMRC and treat data like cash and freeze assets when it goes missing.
I have a Lenovo Yoga andI never use the touch screen, and it is too heavy to be used as a tablet. These form factors and computing power are different.
Also $400 is not exactly cheap, so this is going to be competing with lots of laptops already available.
For me - either a powerful laptop, or a light tablet or a chromebook where the processing power is in the cloud.
"But travellers may not mind, as regional jets let airlines fly routes that can’t be flown profitably with larger aircraft. With both big plane-makers pushing regional jets, new routes become a possibility, as does jet-powered replacements for routes currently served by turboprops."
Not sure that isn't logical - elsewhere it less less competition in aircraft supply means higher prices for airlines to purchase them. The fact that airlines are not offering regional routes becuse before now they planes had "embraer" written on the side, and now they will have "Boeing" will not change that, and perhaps just increase the prices for everyone.
I fly most months and I would say the greatest problem is airport capacity and passenger fees, as well as Air Passenger Duty. Heathrow really needs two new runways so that each terminal has one. A direct rail link to the west of England would also help.
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