You're right. It also protects E.On from any massive decommissioning costs. The operating company can just go bankrupt and then it's up to the taxpayer to make them safe. This is what has happened in some parts of California.
No feigned ignorance nor superiority intended. The original article was about doing a vox pop about CIOs. I just wanted to register the fact that I don't know what one is.
I agree that I could look it up on the web (I still haven't) - but that wouldn't give me any valid insight or view about CIOs - just evidence that I know what the letters stand for.
I read el Reg every day, I don't work in IT except to the extent that, because I have my own very small company, I do it all myself - from specifying and buying equipment, to setting up networks and fixing(or not) most of my own problems. Maybe I'm a CIO and just didn't know it.
They're protecting themselves. They don't care if your password is weak - as long as there is a password. if it's compromised and you lose money then as long as the site can show that the loss was caused by someone using correct account and password information then the problem must be that you told someone your password or wrote it down somewhere. This way they don't have to pay up.
Many organizations have a clause in their Ts&Cs stating that passwords must not be written down. Many people who have, say, 40+ logins to remember write their passwords down in some way or other. I foresee a court case in the not too distant future where, after losing money due to someone stealing his/her list of passwords, a user claims that such a contract clause is unreasonable on the basis that an average person cannot be expected to remember dozens of different passwords- after which banks, shopping sites, etc will find an alternative to passwords.
Much better than a smart phone. Problem is that mine only works well about 10% of the time - and I don't think it's unusual. The rest of the time it can't find the network for traffic, it can't find where it is, it resets itself at random, the speed camera alerts turn themselves off, map updates delete saved settings, etc etc etc.
Perhaps if they listened to users, fixed bugs, made improvements to HMI and employed help-desk staff didn't say "you need to re-format the hard disk" to every problem then they might not have to sack people. My TomTom is a perfect and fantastic piece of kit for the 10% of it's operational life when it works properly. The rest of the time its a piece of s*hite.
There's no evidence that RF causes damage (at these levels) but if we believe it might then it would be better to put the towers closer then the phone would cut its output power and the user gets a lower RF dose.
Having used Acronis software and had some experience of their help desk I wouldn't believe a word they said to me. I'd rather they fixed their software and responded to questions instead of arguing the differences between backups and snapshots.
I've had a Barclaycard that does PayWave for 2 or 3 years now and I've never seen a shop that takes it in the UK. The only place I've seen a terminal is abroad, but It doesn't work outside the UK. Maybe Nokia are waiting for retailers to decide on a technology and rolling it out before wasting their money on it.
Some people buy them because the BES is pretty secure compared to other mail servers. The more waggish might suggest that denying access to everyone is about as secure as you can get.
It's astonishing that the company were paid so much before delivering anything. A good contract will only pay a small percentage to the supplier to cover start up costs and nothing more until some sort of value has been seen to have been delivered (e.g. system requirements analysis, design reviews, acceptance tests, etc). Where are the contracts managers in the NHS?
I was an early adopter of HP tech. The 9826 was possibly the best computer I've ever used. My HP11c calculator, which I bought about 200 years ago, is still going strong and is probably the best engineering calculator ever made. A few years ago I bought an HP laptop and a HP printer and after this experience the only thing made by HP that I'd ever consider buying would be a replacement for the 11c should it get run over by a tank and come off worse (pretty unlikely, I know). Good to see them reaping the benefits of forgetting that it's what customers think that matters.
GPS is speared rectum with about 40dB processing gain, so filtering is possible, although not cheap. Non-portable military receivers have front-end filters - usually because they sit on a platform right next to something radiating very close at high power (e.g. SSR ).
You could publish a fake review now, then we could all vent our spleen about how it's a backward step, not as good as the 3G, etc. I hear that the r.f. reception will be worse (I made that bit up - see how easy it is).
I'd feel better getting it all out of my system now, rather that when the kids are back at school and the stress levels of the school run, homework, sports kit, etc coupled with a new iPhone review could just kill me. Does it come with a defibrillator app?
Why not have an app that samples users' upload and download rates and then sends them to OFCOM? They could then publish min, max, mean and median access speeds by time of day for all the ISPs. Then consumers would be able to make their own choice.
The battery in the 1960's transistor radio in my bathroom lasts about 3 years. The batteries in the DAB radio last about 6 weeks before needing re-charging. It's a real pain.
Now - before you all tell me it's easy to just re-charge - it''s not. The power fails half way through my shower. Being an old git, by the time I've finished grumbling, drying off, finding my cleanest dirty shirt (thanks, Kris) and rushing for the door I've forgotten about the radio - and the next morning is groundhog day all over again. It can take weeks for me to remember to charge the battery.
The advantage of the 1960s radio is that it necessitates a trip to Maplin to buy the PP6 battery and the joy of buying solder tools, wire, die-cast boxes, BC108s, .......... aaahhh, food for the soul.
I agree with AC - Acronis treat customers like carp. The user interface is unfathomable and not being able to recover from network backups is a serious gap in functionality.
For those of us who have used Nokia, Siemens, etc for a few years, using an iPhone is a nostalgic experience; constant worry about battery charge and always losing signal. It's like 1997 all over again! If Apple wants to improve the phone then leave it as it is, give it a real 5-day battery and real-world signal sensitivity so I don't have to get on to the roof to talk to my clients.
With Google Maps I can plan a route with waypoints (including pubs, ferries, museums) on google and on my PC and then use it when I walk round the city on my phone (iPhone excepted, obviously). I can send the route to friends as a browser friendly map, with a commentary on the route (handy for cultured pub crawls). Try doing that on multimap. The google map app on my iPhone has bus timetables in it and is more easy to use than the local bus company's website - can't do that with streetmap. They need to stop whingeing and innovate.
I have spent about 60 hours trying to get the remote web access to work. If your ISP will not give you a static IP then you will not be able to get remote web access to these servers.
M-series cameras are not small. I've owned one and with a 50mm lens it was bigger than my Olympus OM4 SLR. Nice camera, but this myth that's grown up about them being small and pocketable needs to be quashed.
Why the hell am I looking for Nvidia drivers to stop it rebooting halfway through the night!? - well, because often if I leave my laptop on overnight I get up the next day to find that the laptop has re-booted. When I log in and go to windows problems it tells me that an Nvidia driver caused my laptop to crash. I'd rather it didn't crash - so I spend time trying to find out if I can fix it. Nvidia's tells me there's something I could try but it's at my risk and not to blame them if my PC never works again. HP's website doesn't help much and device manager says I'm up to date and there's no problem. The search goes on and my PC keeps on crashing.
So what's wrong with preventing people desinging shoddy software that buggers up my machine?
My PC, in common with most others gets slower and crankier as I load it up with various bits of software, both bought and free and I bitch like hell about what a pile of crud it is. Ditto my Nokia. If the results of this control by Apple are products which keep working as they were intended and don't need a barrage of after-market apps just to manage disc use then I look forward to the day that Microsoft takes the same approach. I can't ditch my PC for various reasons, and I'm envious of my friends who have Macs and don't spend 10% of their keyboard time waiting for them to boot up, doing backups (I spent hours on Saturday configuring a wireless backup disk and it still doesn't work properly because I don't know my TCPIPs from my UPNPs so my firewall won't play nicely; my mate just plugged in a white box and it started working) de-fragging disks, deleting bloatware, installing updates, deleting updates, searching in vain for invidia drivers to stop the pc rebooting overnight half-way through the backup or virus check .........................................................If Apple's approach is what's needed to make my PC boot up in the same decade that I first hit the power button and stay stable enough to run 4 hour monte carlo sims without crashing then the sooner they start locking down my PC with rules about what developers can put on it the better. I'd pay extra for that.
When the tomtom live works it's up there with the best bit of kit ever. I travel a lot in the SE of England and it's a useful piece of kit. Like I said - when it works.
Here's what happens in my experience at least once a week.........Turn it on - plan a route. Wait for the live traffic to load. It doesn't and tells you there's no network coverage. Turn it off and on again. Traffic might load. If not hold power button for 30 secs to reset device. Traffic loads OK(unless it's a weekend, when there's a fair chance that the server will be down. You won't find this out until after sending a support request - following the instructions to re-format the hard disc - wasting 4 hours of your Sunday afternoon doing this 3 times - only to be told on Monday after ringing the help desk that the server was down). So, having got traffic working I want to connect to my mobilephone via bluetooth. It doesn't pair automatically (I've had 3 different phones and none of them pair automatically with the tomtom) Although you only paired it yesterday it won't pair and just tells you there's no response from the phone. Turn phone off and on - no pairing. Turn TomTom off and on - won't pair. Delete pairing from phone and TomTom. Go through the nausea of the discovery and pairing again. Of course - now you've turned the tomtom off so there's a fair chance that the traffic isn't available (GOTO start).
By now you're either 15 miles up the M3 without having looked at the road once or you've been sitting in the car park for almost 10 minutes and any time the tomtom might have saved on your trip has been used up in making it work. Oh - by the way - if the car park is not on the map (new industrial estate) then you can't do any of the above until you get onto a piece of road that it recognizes -- it just sits in an endless "planning route" loop. You have to drive to somewhere it recognizes, find somewhere to park, then do it all.
The map update service is useful - but beware because it deletes all your favourites, your home and work locations and any map overlays you've downloaded. TomTom will tell you there's a way round this by copying to and from PoIs; it's true but you won't want to do it.
I agree that Nokia will never replace this type of device, and on the rare occasion that I get into the car and it just works it is a fantastic bit of kit, but it's just not reliable enough and the compay is not interested in fixing bugs.
Register
34 posts • joined Wednesday 24th February 2010 19:28 GMT
Re: Subtle withdrawal
You're right. It also protects E.On from any massive decommissioning costs. The operating company can just go bankrupt and then it's up to the taxpayer to make them safe. This is what has happened in some parts of California.
Re: Re: What's a CIO?
No feigned ignorance nor superiority intended. The original article was about doing a vox pop about CIOs. I just wanted to register the fact that I don't know what one is.
I agree that I could look it up on the web (I still haven't) - but that wouldn't give me any valid insight or view about CIOs - just evidence that I know what the letters stand for.
I read el Reg every day, I don't work in IT except to the extent that, because I have my own very small company, I do it all myself - from specifying and buying equipment, to setting up networks and fixing(or not) most of my own problems. Maybe I'm a CIO and just didn't know it.
What's a CIO?
The post is required, and must contain letters
I use mSecure
It syncs from PC to mobile devices.
They're not protecting you....
They're protecting themselves. They don't care if your password is weak - as long as there is a password. if it's compromised and you lose money then as long as the site can show that the loss was caused by someone using correct account and password information then the problem must be that you told someone your password or wrote it down somewhere. This way they don't have to pay up.
Passwords rule until....
Many organizations have a clause in their Ts&Cs stating that passwords must not be written down. Many people who have, say, 40+ logins to remember write their passwords down in some way or other. I foresee a court case in the not too distant future where, after losing money due to someone stealing his/her list of passwords, a user claims that such a contract clause is unreasonable on the basis that an average person cannot be expected to remember dozens of different passwords- after which banks, shopping sites, etc will find an alternative to passwords.
You need to re-format your hard disk.
Now, what's the problem?
I swear that if I told them that the windscreen sucker no longer stuck they'd tell me to reformat the hard disk and install the latest software.
When they work they are great
Much better than a smart phone. Problem is that mine only works well about 10% of the time - and I don't think it's unusual. The rest of the time it can't find the network for traffic, it can't find where it is, it resets itself at random, the speed camera alerts turn themselves off, map updates delete saved settings, etc etc etc.
Perhaps if they listened to users, fixed bugs, made improvements to HMI and employed help-desk staff didn't say "you need to re-format the hard disk" to every problem then they might not have to sack people. My TomTom is a perfect and fantastic piece of kit for the 10% of it's operational life when it works properly. The rest of the time its a piece of s*hite.
Good Riddance
Hope they sacked the idiots who developed the SW for the Go740 series.
Fewer Towers Mean More Handset Power
There's no evidence that RF causes damage (at these levels) but if we believe it might then it would be better to put the towers closer then the phone would cut its output power and the user gets a lower RF dose.
Having used Acronis software and had some experience of their help desk I wouldn't believe a word they said to me. I'd rather they fixed their software and responded to questions instead of arguing the differences between backups and snapshots.
Pay by Wave?
I've had a Barclaycard that does PayWave for 2 or 3 years now and I've never seen a shop that takes it in the UK. The only place I've seen a terminal is abroad, but It doesn't work outside the UK. Maybe Nokia are waiting for retailers to decide on a technology and rolling it out before wasting their money on it.
Some people buy them because the BES is pretty secure compared to other mail servers. The more waggish might suggest that denying access to everyone is about as secure as you can get.
Stage Payments?
It's astonishing that the company were paid so much before delivering anything. A good contract will only pay a small percentage to the supplier to cover start up costs and nothing more until some sort of value has been seen to have been delivered (e.g. system requirements analysis, design reviews, acceptance tests, etc). Where are the contracts managers in the NHS?
This post has been deleted by its author
@ Graham Bartlett
Thanks for you post and the clarification. I've been labouring under that misapprehension for years.
This post has been deleted by its author
Revenue is not profit
Corporation tax is paid on profit, not revenue.
Not Sorry for HP
I was an early adopter of HP tech. The 9826 was possibly the best computer I've ever used. My HP11c calculator, which I bought about 200 years ago, is still going strong and is probably the best engineering calculator ever made. A few years ago I bought an HP laptop and a HP printer and after this experience the only thing made by HP that I'd ever consider buying would be a replacement for the 11c should it get run over by a tank and come off worse (pretty unlikely, I know). Good to see them reaping the benefits of forgetting that it's what customers think that matters.
Agree, but not as hard as it appears
GPS is speared rectum with about 40dB processing gain, so filtering is possible, although not cheap. Non-portable military receivers have front-end filters - usually because they sit on a platform right next to something radiating very close at high power (e.g. SSR ).
Everything's worse
You could publish a fake review now, then we could all vent our spleen about how it's a backward step, not as good as the 3G, etc. I hear that the r.f. reception will be worse (I made that bit up - see how easy it is).
I'd feel better getting it all out of my system now, rather that when the kids are back at school and the stress levels of the school run, homework, sports kit, etc coupled with a new iPhone review could just kill me. Does it come with a defibrillator app?
Survey It
Why not have an app that samples users' upload and download rates and then sends them to OFCOM? They could then publish min, max, mean and median access speeds by time of day for all the ISPs. Then consumers would be able to make their own choice.
Is it just me....
Just out of curiosity, am I in a minority because I'd prefer the 5 to be the same thickness as the 4 with a longer battery life than thinner?
Too Power Hungry
The battery in the 1960's transistor radio in my bathroom lasts about 3 years. The batteries in the DAB radio last about 6 weeks before needing re-charging. It's a real pain.
Now - before you all tell me it's easy to just re-charge - it''s not. The power fails half way through my shower. Being an old git, by the time I've finished grumbling, drying off, finding my cleanest dirty shirt (thanks, Kris) and rushing for the door I've forgotten about the radio - and the next morning is groundhog day all over again. It can take weeks for me to remember to charge the battery.
The advantage of the 1960s radio is that it necessitates a trip to Maplin to buy the PP6 battery and the joy of buying solder tools, wire, die-cast boxes, BC108s, .......... aaahhh, food for the soul.
Acronis needs to support users
I agree with AC - Acronis treat customers like carp. The user interface is unfathomable and not being able to recover from network backups is a serious gap in functionality.
iPhone - it's a nostalgic experience
For those of us who have used Nokia, Siemens, etc for a few years, using an iPhone is a nostalgic experience; constant worry about battery charge and always losing signal. It's like 1997 all over again! If Apple wants to improve the phone then leave it as it is, give it a real 5-day battery and real-world signal sensitivity so I don't have to get on to the roof to talk to my clients.
Google Wins Because It Has the Best Products
With Google Maps I can plan a route with waypoints (including pubs, ferries, museums) on google and on my PC and then use it when I walk round the city on my phone (iPhone excepted, obviously). I can send the route to friends as a browser friendly map, with a commentary on the route (handy for cultured pub crawls). Try doing that on multimap. The google map app on my iPhone has bus timetables in it and is more easy to use than the local bus company's website - can't do that with streetmap. They need to stop whingeing and innovate.
Static IP
Thanks AC - I've had a quick look at the website and it looks interesting. If I can summon the energy I'll go another round with the kit.
Regards,
HG.
Remote Web Access - be careful
I have spent about 60 hours trying to get the remote web access to work. If your ISP will not give you a static IP then you will not be able to get remote web access to these servers.
Stop saying it's got a tiny body
M-series cameras are not small. I've owned one and with a 50mm lens it was bigger than my Olympus OM4 SLR. Nice camera, but this myth that's grown up about them being small and pocketable needs to be quashed.
The long and lonely search for Nvidia drivers
Why the hell am I looking for Nvidia drivers to stop it rebooting halfway through the night!? - well, because often if I leave my laptop on overnight I get up the next day to find that the laptop has re-booted. When I log in and go to windows problems it tells me that an Nvidia driver caused my laptop to crash. I'd rather it didn't crash - so I spend time trying to find out if I can fix it. Nvidia's tells me there's something I could try but it's at my risk and not to blame them if my PC never works again. HP's website doesn't help much and device manager says I'm up to date and there's no problem. The search goes on and my PC keeps on crashing.
So what's wrong with preventing people desinging shoddy software that buggers up my machine?
My PC, in common with most others gets slower and crankier as I load it up with various bits of software, both bought and free and I bitch like hell about what a pile of crud it is. Ditto my Nokia. If the results of this control by Apple are products which keep working as they were intended and don't need a barrage of after-market apps just to manage disc use then I look forward to the day that Microsoft takes the same approach. I can't ditch my PC for various reasons, and I'm envious of my friends who have Macs and don't spend 10% of their keyboard time waiting for them to boot up, doing backups (I spent hours on Saturday configuring a wireless backup disk and it still doesn't work properly because I don't know my TCPIPs from my UPNPs so my firewall won't play nicely; my mate just plugged in a white box and it started working) de-fragging disks, deleting bloatware, installing updates, deleting updates, searching in vain for invidia drivers to stop the pc rebooting overnight half-way through the backup or virus check .........................................................If Apple's approach is what's needed to make my PC boot up in the same decade that I first hit the power button and stay stable enough to run 4 hour monte carlo sims without crashing then the sooner they start locking down my PC with rules about what developers can put on it the better. I'd pay extra for that.
They aren't reliable enough
When the tomtom live works it's up there with the best bit of kit ever. I travel a lot in the SE of England and it's a useful piece of kit. Like I said - when it works.
Here's what happens in my experience at least once a week.........Turn it on - plan a route. Wait for the live traffic to load. It doesn't and tells you there's no network coverage. Turn it off and on again. Traffic might load. If not hold power button for 30 secs to reset device. Traffic loads OK(unless it's a weekend, when there's a fair chance that the server will be down. You won't find this out until after sending a support request - following the instructions to re-format the hard disc - wasting 4 hours of your Sunday afternoon doing this 3 times - only to be told on Monday after ringing the help desk that the server was down). So, having got traffic working I want to connect to my mobilephone via bluetooth. It doesn't pair automatically (I've had 3 different phones and none of them pair automatically with the tomtom) Although you only paired it yesterday it won't pair and just tells you there's no response from the phone. Turn phone off and on - no pairing. Turn TomTom off and on - won't pair. Delete pairing from phone and TomTom. Go through the nausea of the discovery and pairing again. Of course - now you've turned the tomtom off so there's a fair chance that the traffic isn't available (GOTO start).
By now you're either 15 miles up the M3 without having looked at the road once or you've been sitting in the car park for almost 10 minutes and any time the tomtom might have saved on your trip has been used up in making it work. Oh - by the way - if the car park is not on the map (new industrial estate) then you can't do any of the above until you get onto a piece of road that it recognizes -- it just sits in an endless "planning route" loop. You have to drive to somewhere it recognizes, find somewhere to park, then do it all.
The map update service is useful - but beware because it deletes all your favourites, your home and work locations and any map overlays you've downloaded. TomTom will tell you there's a way round this by copying to and from PoIs; it's true but you won't want to do it.
I agree that Nokia will never replace this type of device, and on the rare occasion that I get into the car and it just works it is a fantastic bit of kit, but it's just not reliable enough and the compay is not interested in fixing bugs.