* Posts by Florence

109 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2007

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BSkyB sees first half pre-tax profit tumble as sales climb

Florence

Re: The solution!

If you're referring to F1 like a few have here, I'm afraid these days have gone, and I'd point a finger at the FIA or whoever agreed to the Sky deal, not just Sky. In France Canal+ were hot on Sky's heels and snapped up the rights, and I believe similar deals have happened in other European countries now.

Florence

Re: if only they would offer

They changed that last year already when they changed the Entertainment packages and got rid of the HD sub (or rather - reintroduced it with another name, and minus Sky F1), and Sky Sports was already compulsory if you wanted Sky F1. I called them and got a decent discount (20% off TV for 6 months) so signed up to Sky Sports for the 2nd half of the season, and called them again to cancel when there was just under a month to go.

I should finally be able to get Fibre broadband in March, so I may try and negotiate a good broadband + sports TV deal then, otherwise it'll be BBC+streams. Having said that I have noticed today that my ADSL connection has been up and running for 57 days so I might just stick to that.

Facebook app now reads your smartphone's text messages? THE TRUTH

Florence

BB10 here too, never had an Android phone, and I was dismayed to read how Android app permissions work!

And then some of these people laugh at my choice of phone...

French drug dealers regretfully announce 'temporary closure'

Florence

Re: Calling the Académie Française

The one thing I'm most surprised about is I don't believe the Académie Française has kicked up a fuss about movie titles translated from English to bad English for the French crowds yet:

http://pardonmytitres.tumblr.com/

Cocky Spotify drops time limits on free listening, skint music-lovers cheer

Florence

Re: Self-advertising

I haven't heard it lately but up here in Scotland, we used to get ads from NHS Scotland or the Scottish Government about sexual health: "Sex: talk about it".

Considering I mostly listen to Spotify in the office I certainly didn't act on the advice, that would have been most inappropriate.

Didn't get a Nook for Xmas? That's OK, hardly anyone else did, either

Florence

Re: According to amazon.co.uk's snarky messages

You appear to have quite a naive view of Amazon:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/21/amazon-forces-publishers-pay-vat-ebook

Based in Luxembourg so they effectively pay 3% VAT. Clearly not going to HRMC.

Btw, that article is over a year old. Anybody knows whether things have changed since then?

Winamp is still a thing? NOPE: It'll be silenced forever in December

Florence

Re: And a lovely player it was

I used a 2.7x version for a long time too, before switching to foobar2k (and now Clementine after migrating from XP last year).

I installed Winamp 5 x? a few years back and it really wasn't that bad - certainly better than v3 when it first appeared! But the main reason was to be able to use the soundspectrum visualisation plugins, and foobar2000 remained my default player.

The video playing capabilities always seemed like silly bloat. I don't think I ever knew anyone who used Winamp to watch video files.

Florence

WOW, this post was brought to you from the year 2000.

Although it's doubtful that people were still using RealPlayer back then.

Sonos and I: How home media playback just gets SO FRUSTRATING

Florence

I bought this for £18 in 2009: http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/5180776/-/Product.html

and while it certainly won't solve the TV issues, it's an easy and CHEAP way of streaming music from the computer onto decent speakers.

I really would have expected to see better and cheaper solutions than Sonos by now.

Hey, is that CSI: Hackers on TV? Oh, it's Microsoft's Cybercrime Center

Florence

Talking of CSI

Some obvious Microsoft/Win 8 product placement there of late. In NCIS too IIRC.

BT Sport scores own goal with £897m Champions League footie rights deal

Florence

Re: Mental!

Actually you can get Eurosport without Sky. A sub to the Eurosport player costs around £30 a year iirc.

It's on some smart TVs, but or will otherwise run on your computer. USING SILVERLIGHT. *facepalm*

Still stuck with Sky then.

Facebook tests sinister CURSOR-TRACKING in hunt for more ad bucks

Florence

Re: So naive

@AC: I realise this appeared below your comment, but this was really in reply to the comments above yours.

I am actually surprised so many people on el Reg seem unaware the likes of FB, TW, disqus track users from site to site, whether they have an account or not.

Florence
Black Helicopters

So naive

Unless you run Ghostery or similar in order to block all FB trackers, then you do not even need an account to be a FB product.

Even so, chances are they have your name and phone number because you probably know people who have an account, and at least one of them will have sync'ed their phone contacts to FB...

UK economy to lose £198m if BBC and pals lose EPG slots - Ministry of Fun

Florence

When ithere only were 5 channels, I would settle for the least bad option. With page after page of crap on the EPG, I generally just turn the TV off and put the radio on instead.

'It's GOOD we stopped selling the iPhone'

Florence
Pint

Re: Translation

Doesn't Google translate 'learn' from users' suggestions? I can easily imagine some drunken Finns on a Friday deciding the literal translation did not sound rude enough in English and going for "m*****f****r" because that's the rudest word you hear in American movies?

Florence

Re: Translation

Hah right, pää is head indeed. I like that literal translation much better.

Florence

Translation

My swearing in Finnish is a bit rusty, but doesn't "perkele" mean devil? I know it's more sweary than devil would be in English, but where did that "m*****f****r" come from?

Opera debuts Chromium-luvvin' desktop browser Next 15

Florence
Unhappy

Re: Impressions so far.

Indeed, barely a tenth of the functionalities and customization options. I realise it's a beta, but they better get their act together as it's unusable for me right now.

TalkTalk's tiny package most certainly not 'best value', tuts watchdog

Florence

Re: Last year someone from talktalk ...

Interestingly the one and only time I had a TT cold caller at my door, she didn't try to flog TT products straight away, she first asked me my opinions of phone/BB providers. And after I gave my opinion of TT she knew better than try to sell me anything!

It was kind of odd in that I would expect cold callers to just try and sell something, but she appeared to be combining market survey and sales. I suppose that would help avoid time wasters.

Review: BlackBerry Q10

Florence

I played about briefly with one of these at a stall BB set up in a shopping centre last week. First gripe was indeed the lack of trackball, as that means no way round the touchscreen for a lot of navigation. But then the competition is all touch screens, so no matter what my next phone is there'll be a learning curve.

Type and Go is a huge plus though, and based on that review more powerful than what I'd been shown which is great. That and keyboard shortcuts.

I don't think I'll be replacing my Bold 9780 just yet though, £600 is a lot of money, and £35 a lot more per month than what I'm spending right now.

ISPs: Get ready to slurp streams from Murdoch's fat pipe

Florence

Re: I'm leaving

I wouldn't go anywhere near BT as a home customer! I haven't got the need for a static IP and my exchange isn't oversubscribed so Sky BB is absolutely fine for me. I had one bad experience with their customer services in 5 years, when my modem packed up late in the evening and I reached someone in an Indian call centre, and it took some "Can I speak to a technical person?" to get him to budge from his script...

Other than that their customer services and tech support have been excellent, I've had problems with the cable outside the flat which needed to be replaced. Explained my PD steps and they booked a BT engineer straight away. And yes the BT guy was very good too. I'm sure there are plenty of good people at BT, you just never get to speak to them as a first point of contact if you're a home user...

And as a home user it's that first point of contact that matters - you need someone to understand your issue so they can escalate to BT if required. Now with Sky my first point of contact will be someone who has tech training and understands PD 9 times out of 10. Not a BT or TT script monkey.

I can't actually judge TT from personal experience, and I never had broadband from BT, but my experiences with line rental were bad enough to put me off dealing directly with them entirely.

Florence

Re: I'm leaving

You missed some steps, I used to be a F2S customer many moons ago, and they were first bought by some other ISP the name of which I've forgotten - although I somehow remember their adverts featured D.Hasselhoff. This is when things started to go bad. I'd moved flats and signed with another provider (Entanet reseller) way before that ISP and its F2S brand got bought by Tiscali, which was then bought by Talk Talk. iirc F2S ceased to be an independent ISP in 2005.

Vinyl sales reach 15 year high, Blighty becomes No. 3 music buyer

Florence

Re: Face it, vinyl sucks

Not much more a pain in the ass as CDs. Slightly more annoying to rip onto your computer, that's true. But then 90% of LPs sold nowadays include a download code, which can often be for .wav files, if not a CD too.

Now if you want to moan, here's a good one: Audio cassettes are making a bit of a comeback too. MGMT's upcoming album is getting a cassette release for RSD eg.

Patent shark‘s copyright claim could bite all Unix

Florence

Not El Reg's finest Aprils Fools article

..but I wasn't aware of the Ern Malley hoax, so thanks for the reference, and thanks to the commenters who explained, I enjoyed reading about it!

Tesco: Every little (effort to kill Amazon, Spotify) helps

Florence
Unhappy

I unsubscribed from we7

Which used to be a rather good streaming service because I started getting fed up with the emphasis they put on chart topping artists. New releases on indie labels were not getting updated on the main page, but more importantly, so many new records just didn't seem to get added at all. Albums I used to find on Spotify but not we7 used to be the exception, but it started to feel like they were becoming the norm.

A real pity, this used to be a good site, now it's little more than an extension to Tesco's CD aisle, with the focus on the same acts as the Tesco CD aisle.

Microsoft: Office 2013 license is for just one PC, FOREVER

Florence

365/2013, radio ads

Commercial radio has been playing adverts for Office 365 for the past month or so, with its main selling point being the ability to install on *5* devices, so that should be good enough for all the family bla bla.

Now I don't use MS Office other than Office 2003 in an XP VM, so I have no idea what other differences between Office 365 and 2013 may be, and I would expect the majority of their target customers don't either. How many will hear "Office, install on 5 computers" on the radio and go buy a copy in PC World which may or may not be the one that grants them 5 licenses...

Mozilla to Adobe: PDFs don't need no more steenking plugins

Florence

Re: Why would you want to view a pdf in the browser anyway?

I've always found opening PDF files in an external reader (other than Adobe's obviously) to be much faster and far less frustrating than waiting for the Adobe plugin to load.

PDFs are absolutely fine as long as you stay away from the Adobe software.

Florence

Re: What about the other way round?

That sounds complicated. Are there still OSs out there that do not include a PDF printer by default?

END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH: TalkTalk no longer worst ISP in UK

Florence

Re: Note that "industry average" bar and also that there are about 450 ISP's in the UK.

Unfortunately the huge majority of those 450+ ISPs use BT's infrastructure.

If you want (and can get) a BT unbundled line you're left with one of the major players. It's a pity O2/BE don't appear in this study though.

The Lord of the Rings saga lies hidden deep in your Mac

Florence

calendar.fictional

calendar.fictional Fantasy and fiction dates (mostly LOTR).

OpenBSD calendar has it too.

Florence

calendar

I just installed calendar on my RHEL workstation, but no LOTR for me.

There is however a calendar.openbsd file, so RH must have taken their calendar from OpenBSD, not FreeBSD.

Anyway I do have the Discordian calendar, so I really couldn't care less about not having the LOTR one.

Firefox and Opera squish big buffer overflow bugs

Florence

Firefox ESR

Opera remains my main browser, but the work laptop came with Firefox pre-installed and that introduced me to Firefox Extended Support releases.

They clearly target organizations with them, not end users, but I only use ESR releases of FF nowadays - the major release sticks for about a year, with only minor upgrades in between.

You'll mostly get security updates with those minor releases obviously, not all the latest features.

But at least it won't break your extensions, and you definitely get a stable browser.

Which is exactly what I need for my backup browser!

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

Finns look to bring Phorm style stalker ads to UK radio streaming

Florence

Re:how many listen to Internet Radio through their phone anyway?

If your phone has a decent speaker and wifi, it can be a nice portable internet radio around the home.

Standalone internet/DAB radios are pricey too. A cheap stereo system with an AUX input a lot less so, plug in your phone and sorted.

One in four don't clean their stinky old browsers - especially Firefoxers

Florence

ESRs?

FF is my secondary browser, so I've decided to stick to the 10.x ESR branch as the updates aren't as frequent as with the main releases. I would expect that's also the norm for corporate desktops using FF.

I wonder whether Kaspersky included the ESR releases as up to date or not.

EDF: We'll raise bills 11% - but only 2% is due to energy costs!

Florence

World's largest* nuclear electricity producer has a go at renewables...

Who would have thought?

Well clearly not Lewis, although I wouldn't put it past him to conveniently ignore it.

*OK not 100% sure there, but the world's largest electricity producer according to 2010 figures, that mostly generates electricity from nuclear technology, and keeps on pushing for nuclear.

Big Blue beats off rivals to push out first LTO-6 tape drive

Florence

Re: Curious outsider

This does not address your increased density/other types of technology query, but you can get WORM media for Ultrium drives.

Perth porkfest crowned ULTIMATE BACON SARNIE

Florence

I'd missed the voting round - and all those pictures. The Behemoth definitely seems like a worthy winner to me.

The oddest thing was how few entries used a classic breadroll. White sandwich bread is what you use if nothing else is on hand.

Also if you toast bread, you get a bacon toastie, not a sandwich. And while I like a muffin or bagel with bacon and eggs too, this doesn't qualify as a bacon sarnie either. This is definitely reflected in the voting, so it can't be just me. Bacon sandwich = bread + bacon, butter and sauce optional.

Who queues for an iPhone 5? Protesters, hipsters and the jobless

Florence

Lattes

Sinking your shot of caffeine in two mugs of hot milk defeats the point. And they taste vile.

Mine's the black coffee, one brown sugar. Cold milk optional.

You'll be on a list 3 hrs after you start downloading from pirates - study

Florence

For the record..

Paris icon because I was playing dumb, not because I am. *SADFACE*.

Sometimes my network is slow and things go quicker when I click the Opera Turbo button.

Florence
Paris Hilton

Wait... isn't TPB blocked by UK ISPs?

Oh.

Why women won't apply for IT jobs

Florence

Re: womens' hour

I didn't listen, but was that comment really about difficulty? Couldn't they have been referring to programming not being the most social occupation ever?

Florence
Paris Hilton

Re: Sexism in the industry?

I won't forget any time soon the guy who told me over the phone "Whoa, you're the first woman I talk to who knows what a BIOS is". I managed to resist the urge to call him names or tell him he should step out of the server room every now and then, and just replied I knew plenty more.

Thankfully this type of remark was never a common occurrence, and indeed this only ever happened in end user facing roles.

Olympic athletes compete in RAYGUN SHOOTING for the first time

Florence

Unfamiliar horse

I thought that twist was added at the 2008 Olympics but wasn't the norm, and modern-pentathletes usually rode their own horses.

If unfamiliar horses have now become standard, then I'll definitely be watching, that was the most hilarious event in 2008.

Girl Geek Dinner lady: The IT Crowd is putting schoolgirls off tech

Florence

Re: I know I am going to get downvoted for this

I do believe that being female actually helped me get hired for a job once - but I wouldn't have been picked either had my technical skills not been at least as good as the male applicants (and they certainly were better than some of them!).

Does the IT crowd really mirror your experiences? Jen isn't hired for a technical job in the IT Crowd.

In fact I would say that the other women I have worked with in technical roles were on average better than the guys - probably because women won't end up in IT just by chance? I do find things are different in the channel (sorry about the buzzword) where you see people hired for sales having to pick up technical skills, with variable results.

I ended up in IT (the tech support side.. coding isn't for me) after doing maths and sciences at school - then languages at university - when I ended up spending more time learning to use computers, which I'd barely touched since age 12, than actually working on my degree..

When I finished school I wouldn't have considered doing science or IT - these didn't interest me very much in my teenage years as I was probably more interested in fitting in, and as a girl you're expected to study humanities, or if you're after money: business/economics or law. And my teachers did a better job at getting us ready for exams than they did at getting us really interested in the topics too. As long as that vision remains I don't expect things to change much. And picking on the IT Crowd is irrelevant - however I would agree that having strong role models on screen could be helpful, like 24's Chloe but with better social skills!,

Hitchhiker shot while researching 'Kindness of America'

Florence

Re: for our Euro friends

I'm rather puzzled why you're bringing Breivik into this. As he's clearly an extreme right wacko, which rather goes against your rhetoric. If I was to make any comparison between his terrorist shootings and something that happened in the USA, the Oklahoma bombings would be the first thing that spring to mind.

Shoreditch's sparkle smokescreen leaves BBC journo 'tech-struck'

Florence

Re: Glover was doing geek radio almost 20 years ago

Gideon Coe is still broadcasting: BBC 6 Music - Mon-Thu from 9pm to midnight.

I can't compare his show there to his and Ms Glover's breakfast show of the mid 90s, but it's excellent, one of my favourites on 6 music.

Ice age end was accelerated by CO2

Florence

Re: How do you find evidence in ice for the end of the LAST ice age...?

The colloquial use of "Ice age", to define a "glacial period" of an actual "ice age" certainly doesn't help.

We're currently in an interglacial period of an ice age if we are to use the proper terms. The article does indeed muddle things a bit by referring to the previous glacial period as an Ice age, but that's very common usage unfortunately.

Barclaycard pay-by-bonk fraud risk exposes Amazon's security

Florence

Non contact-less option

I received a contact-less card from BoS a couple of years ago, called the number printed on the associated literature and at first I was also told they couldn't change it.

I hadn't actually read the small print yet - started to as I was explaining my security objections on the phone and read I could go to my local branch and request a normal card. Read it out to the CS agent , who probably put me on hold for a bit, but in the end I did get a normal card.

So err, yeah, read the small print, don't just listen to the guy/girl on the phone.

Having said that, I'm entirely willing to believe Barclays would offer no such option.

HP's ProLiant Gen8 control freakery

Florence

Re: Are these planted stories?

HP have given a preview of these systems while other manufacturers are yet to show their Sandy Bridge servers, but I can only agree with you, the past couple of stories about G8 sys management totally read like advertorials.

I know El Reg does not only rehash HP's press releases, I'm sure we'll see similar once IBM and Dell announce their new servers - but isn't this the 3rd or 4th "article" on the topic? I could take one, but this is rather OTT.

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