Posts by HollyHopDrive

Re: I'm essentially on zero days notice, zero hours contract.

Because the umbrella company I'm actually employed with give you fuck all rights. All contractors have to use that umbrella company. Take it or leave it and there isn't much about at the moment so beggars and choosers.

We get statutory sick pay, 3% pension after 90 days and only accrue holiday against hours we've worked. If we want holiday before we've accrued it we have to take it unpaid even though we have a 4 month fixed term employment contract. If I was perm with the company I actually work for, 6% pension, 25 days paid holiday, bonus, 12 months full sick pay, health, share options etc etc. But they just want a short term resource (me) but they don't want to give me any of that. I used to be able to provide all that for myself, not anymore the chancellor has that bit as additional tax under the guise of panic IR35 implementation.

The house of lords essentially pointed out that tax law and employment law don't align, but the government essentially gave a shoulder shrug. It doesn't care. This is the flexible work force they want. Zero rights (we can't go on strike can we?) but lots of tax. Works for them, they don't care about the man on the street.

Re: Correction needed

@TOM7 - I've one a oneplus 3T and their "three in touch" application is shocking - needs rebranding to "out of touch". Used to be just about usable on my Nexus 6 but they haven't updated it in ages and its showing that fact by not really working, also, its fugly as hell.

Shame, its the only fly in the ointment with three these days. But I'm not going to apple just to get wifi calling, thats a walled garden I'm not up for playing in, but each to their own.

Re: When Will People Learn? Halifax Banking...52% APR / 68.4% APY

Worth reminding them the ombudsman charges the bank a fee between (iirc) 250-1000 per complaint regardless who wins (fee depends on the complaint type) so when you mention that you are going to complain to the ombudsman they will usually pay you back if it's less than £150 without quibble unless you are truly being stupid. Faster for you, cheaper for them.

And that also explains how the ombudsman is mostly funded for those that ever wondered.

Re: wtf

The problem is I'd imagine that because this was forced on them they

a) didn't think it would happen

b) didn't want it to happen when it's been such a nice little earner

C) didn't allow themselves enough time to be able to negotiate decent deals

So I imagine at some point the EU powers will step in (because I can't imagine it's only the UK networks playing this silly game of just about complying with the rules) and tell them all to behave. They don't seem to learn, if they had played nicely they wouldnt have had this forced on them. But they still aren't playing nicely so I imagine they will be forced to play fair by next summer. I'd also put money on three seeing a marketing opportunity to get 4g out there and advertise the "fastest abroad" campaign quicker than that. EE being part of BT will drag their feet with most resistance like the rest of their business offerings.

I've got shit loads of domains with them and was pretty pissed off with the costs rising last time. That's it for me, transferring the lot as they expire to easily.co.uk who I've used for years and I only used 123 reg for 1 feature that easily didn't used to offer but now do. This is the straw for me, voting with my wallet.

Re: Most people.....

Yes that's true, but for Google I get email, search etc in return for letting them know my browsing and purchasing habits, some of my privacy is the payment (they also let me see what they know). With Microsoft I *PAY* them for my overpriced licence therefore I expect I get at least the option to maintain my privacy. But I'm not given the option. The phrase "Cake and eating it" springs to mind.

I can't help but notice there that the enterprise option gets a very minimal option (less than basic) so they know the big corporates wouldn't upgrade if anything of real value was spaffed out so it's a case of we'll listen to the big corporates but fuck the rest of you.

Re: I'm an Android user

@big_D a bit harsh...but anybody stupid enough to let Facebook apps on their phones are certainly in that category.

Bit of a Schoolboy error on Google's part. Especially when you consider when apple says no to something everybody just says that's the apple walled garden and deal with/put up with it, but Google didn't take the same stance and in this instance should have.

I'm a massive android fan but this has face palm all over it.

Re: Yet again

Next they will claim there is an IT skills shortage, bring in a load of shit but cheap Indian resource. All justified because of their own policy and their inability to see their own stupidness.

The real irony is the fact they will (have to) use the large consultancies that pay little or no corporation tax in britain who use truly dubious tax schemes and will pay a much higher overall cost for the same resource level but actually collect less overall tax than if they had just left well alone.

Re: Expensive

Well actually I think it's probably a pretty smart move. It's a small ISP so it's a doddle to migrate systems (relatively) to their own billing systems for example. But more importantly they have all the links and processes in place for dealing with BT openreach and the like. Throw in a sizable chunk of marketing money to get customers with a massive advertising campaign. So three can now start to offer stupid broadband deals to three customers not to mention playing BT at their own game of free wifi. And three are finally sorting out wi-fi calling so maybe not entirely unrelated.

So daft, probably not so much. It's just not going to happen overnight but I'd say there aren't going to go down without a fight. And given how they changed the mobile market (a bit like orange did all those years ago too) I'd put money on some market disruption coming, or at least an attempt.

How much or how successful time will tell. Also, their customer service can suck badgers balls sometimes so they may want to work on that too before trying their hand at broadband.

Re: Would these Telcos and ISPs be the same ones...

@ac - and that is one of my main objections to the snoopers charter. My data is far more valuable to criminals than the government. I have nothing to hide (I.e. not a criminal) but that's not too say I want my surfing habits available to crooks. Consider the Ashley Masterson customers some of whom were blackmailed, consider that if crooks have my mobile number and know I was say a LLoyds or Barclays etc customer based on my surfing history how much easier it makes it to create a more convincing scamming angle. Text through the mobile operators system if they can compromise that two and a message saying to ring the bank on 0123456789 and related to online banking on date/time. Youd maybe drop your guard a little thinking only my bank knew that so it must be legit.

You could phone the customers due for an upgrade and offer them say an iPhone 7 for £20 a month and £100 up front. Can I have your card details and the three digit code please., Confirm your address Should be enough....

It's a massive disaster waiting to happen....

Tin foil hat on.

Re: Handy....

@chrismiller "I think it's equally likely that many who voted Remain will have realised they were conned by Project Fear."

The pound to dollar rate is fucked, pound to Euro rate fucked, Europe now hates us (more than before), uncertainty for many businesses, France circling to try and nab the finance sector. NHS not looking to be any better off. Foreign visitors/europeans treated like shit by "not racist honest" brexiteers (not saying all brexiteers are racist before you lot start, but the racists were mostly on your side, apparently getting our county back....not sure who from) and inflation likely to become very high very quickly if people keep on upping their prices by 22%. I bet none of us see even a 5% pay rise in the next few years.

To be honest the remain camp probably undersold.

But, if remain had won, would any of the above be happening now? Probably not. So face it, you brexiteers are responsible for the current state of things. The short term manufacturing export bonus will be exactly that, short term. At some point we need to import materials to make shit to export, which are at some point going to be 22% more expensive.

Re: A Spectrum? Being released on time?

I'm actually one of the nearly 4000 backers so nobody is more nervous than me about getting this bad boy. (Though it's only £100 so it's not like my house is at risk)

With only about 4 weeks to go we will soon find out. But I do feel for retro here, they say all is well and because somebody who probably claims to be in the know says it's not going to happen, all they can do is deny it. People are quick in assuming guilty and they have no way to disprove the claim in the short term.

Anyway, there is always some risk with a kick starter by definition but I'm going to stay positive for now unless something concrete should make me want to reconsider....

Re: No problem if they were clear about this from day 1

I bought one of those Epson WP-4535 printers after research on printing costs. While the printer was significantly more expensive than the bottom end of the.market, the official ink cost has more than paid for the upfront investment. Don't get me wrong, it costs best part of £100 to fill it up with official Epson (which I do), but I looked the other day I've had nearly 7000 pages out of that and I'm only on my second or third (black) set of inks and I'm going to easily make 10-12k with the remaining ink. I've had it nearly 3 years so running costs are acceptable.

I'd never go near HP because I used to begrude just how much the ink costs for so little output. And how unreliable they are too, always seeming to expire 3 months out of warranty.

Do your research upfront and make a judged decision. Mine has lead me to believe I'll never own another HP product.

Lets also examine those 5 points....

>Increase the effort criminals need to apply to commit the crime successfully;

Yes, seems as sensible, a bit like locking your front door to stop you being burgled. But that doesn't require a law change now does it?

>increase the risks criminals need to take;

Given they have decided to break the law I don't think this is valid. Remember, they don't think they are going to get caught or they wouldn't do it so surely setting the punishment from say 2 years inside to 10 years will have no effect. Also, people still murder people despite their being a pretty harsh punishment for it (usually anyway!)

>reduce the rewards of criminal activity;

Isn't that what the proceeds of crime act was for?

>remove the excuses for it;

They are young males, what are you going to do? And isn't the reward probably the excuse.

>and reduce provocation.

What does that even mean!

Basically, they want to do away with the bit where they have to catch and prosecute the criminals and prove they are guilty. The damn law, it just gets in the way for the police now doesn't it.

Re: That's customer service...

Totally agree. Refund and a free cable (when they fix it). In this day and age that's pretty good and also refreshingly honest.

I've used anker for loads of stuff and on the couple of times I've contacted them theyve been top notch with customer service.

It's thumbs up for anker and thumbs down for USB C (for now)

Re: Nothing new

@bombtastic - that was my point, but all the down voters clearly missed it.

Hey-ho, looks like people haven't had enough caffeine today.

Re: Dumbsourcing

Jobs that aren't easily understood by management and are simply just people "tapping at a keyboard". If they never interact with the "business" then management logic dictates that surely this job can be done anywhere. And will without doubt usually end up in India at half the price. (And a 10th of the quality, but it's cheaper so they just see the money saved)

But this is actually where the skills gap is. It's not that technical people aren't available (I.e. there isn't a shortage of workers) it's just management have a "skills understanding" gap and judge it by the only thing they do understand, cost. And they just think Tech's are overpaid, cos tapping at a keyboard isn't that hard surely, so why pay so much.

It's all fucked up, but that's uk management for you. Ruining businesses one promotion at a time.

Nobody is making you buy one. I know the tech was shit, the loading times awful and input devices were by modern standards rubbish. But I've gone for I it becuase I still love that era becuase of it.

A lot of 70's comedy was crap. Some mothers do have em, Terry and June etc, but open all hours is still top class, better than the modern remake. So I will still sit and enjoy it now.

The modern jaguar xf is amazing but I still want an e-type, the s type was crap despite being newer I just can't buy one for £100.

Well, I was one of those customers and given just how little Severn Trent seemed to know about the incident and how it happened it made me wonder too.

After 8 hours there was still much confusion. I saw them doing what looked to me as pumping out a water tower into a long like of waiting tankers the next day.

When I was down getting my 4 litres of free water (generous or what!) We asked the ST woman there why we couldn't shower in it and she said it's chlorine and it's way stronger in concentration that you'd get at the swimming baths. (She really couldn't stress just how much we really shouldn't use it to even wash hands). So if something looked like a computer error or hack this is a likely candidate.

Then again, could just be coincidence. Guess we will never know!

Re: Sclerotic motorways

And I hope they've all been trained/programmed for the gazillion miles of roadworks on the M1 too.

Still, I'm sure all the companies involved will be paying their fair share of tax too.....and I'm sure we'll be hearing that announcement......imminently......any second......really.......I'm sure it's just waiting to pop out.....

Re: How to mitigate the encryption malware?

I do all my torrent downloading from a Linux VM on my Mac.(nothing dodgy, Linux images and the like). One of the reasons is exactly that. While it's not guaranteed to keep you safe on its own, it's an extra layer of security and seperation, and if my VM gets trashed, just restore from the snapshot. It's 20gb of my hard disk I'm happy to give up on the off chance. I don't install much on my Mac unless I'm 100% sure it's safe as it can be. I.e. office, chrome. Everything else it's a VM and I'll live with the marginal performance drop off.

Regualr(ish) USB drive backups (multiple drives) helps mitigate losing it all too.

Seems my paranoia may be justified....

Most perms in IT probably paid more than that in income tax too!

Good to see the government make sure their suppliers are all good UK (corporate) tax paying citizens before they purchase their services.

Oops! Surely this is just a one off....er....anybody want to back that horse? No, thought not.

Still, I'm sure the inevertable tax rises in the next budget are because we've all shared the pain and they really have left no stone unturned in their persuit of finding every penny they can save or raise through existing taxation so the a little extra from you and me is a really a last resort to be able balance the books. Mmmm.....look over there at that big company that pays less tax than a middle earner.....hear those bells ringing to tell you something.....

Governments rarely use facts correctly, happily ignore things that conflict with the version of the truth they wish to convey or use.

I mean, allow government officials to use private companies to anonymise data. I mean, what can possibly go wrong. track records on this kind of IT stuff is soooo good.

Be interesting to see what happens when 65+ million peoples data accidently gets spaffed all over the Internet in the world's biggest data breach. And once it's happened you can't take it back.

And will crime be reduced as a result - nope.

Will the NHS improve as a result - nope.

Will education improve as a result - nope

Will povety be eradicated as a result - nope.

Will medical / life / other insurance suddenly become expensive for certain people becuase of this - inevertable to say yes.

Will large private companies make lots of money and pay fuck all tax - I'd bet my last £1

Do I need a tin foil hat, just making one now.

Re: Obligatory?

Also schools seemed to sign up to these platforms without checking this kind of stuff, probably because another school uses it and didn't think they may need to check.(or more likely didn't have the skills to check)

Not blaming teachers BTW (my wife is one) but a real lack of IT literacy in educational circles is shocking. My wife's school only implemented laptop encryption 6 months ago even though I pointed out they weren't using it 12 months ago when my wife joined the school. Her previous school didn't see my issue and refused to encrypt teacher laptops!

So this isn't a shock.....

Re: Dilemma

Mmmm.....and they didn't ask the question of "How much money has been obtained by selling / leasing / renting / lending / allowing access to the data to third parties" followed by "and how much of that was ploughed back into schools directly (not the wooly 'education system')" because I'm betting the second number is zero and the first number isn't insignificant.

And in these times of austerity that they keep insisting we live, the maintenance of essential databases is one cost we could clearly live without if its only about the money yet alone the far bigger issues privacy.

Camerons reign seems even worse than the blair years....and they were c-nuts for this stuff.

Leopard ... Spots...'nuff said.

Re: I will be worse off

And I'm sure there are a load of perms laughing their heads off and saying we deserve everything we get.

But consider this, how much did the UK gov give the big consultancies in contracts. How much corporation tax did they pay in relation and how much did they deliver vs not deliver. And then ask yourself who are the real tax avoiders and who are value for money consultants.

Once more the Tories looking after their mates and shitting on the hard working middle.

I didn't vote for the cnuts.

I have to disagree with this article for a number of reasons, but not least because you are suggesting letting the tail wag the dog.

There is the other problem of outsourcing....while I harp on about this a lot it is one of the reasons this will never happen. For a start, they are trying to keep things cheap, this means you are getting the cheapest resource india (or other favoured outsource nation) can provide. Its based on the goal of cost and if you want somebody who has been coding for more a year or so good luck with that. Also, a lot of 'learning on the job'. While there must be a place for this somewhere the whole 'ship it out' mentality means its all shit.

Then to counter the lack of experience/knowledge the then limit what is available for use within the business. And then because they (IT) themselves know the offshore lot are not much better than a waste of space they then limit what they can actually do with the platforms all under the banner of 'Governance'.

The the decisions on what we (the business) can do and the 'techies' can do are all set by a bunch of goons who've been promoted way above their abilities and only care about their department/area. So when the business request something (oh, like a database) they get told no, or yes but it will be delivered in 10 months.

So the invertible shadow IT pops up.

However, I make a tidy living from this nonsense and being more techie than most techies I have to deal with means a) they can't bullshit me b) I can make some inroads where others cant.

Then I sit in front of a load of business users and help get them to where they need to be, or as close as we can within the 'rules'. And I sell them a list of compromises and ideas to work around any real restrictions.

Stupid thing is the business I work for wastes millions on consultants and contractors (and me!) because instead of IT being just a business function that provides services to the business they let the IT dept dictate what is allowed within the business. Hardly a way to grow a business.

Its a hard fact to face, IT (in a non IT businesses) will never make the business money. Its a cost and a tool, pure and simple. (like running a VAN / Building / Machine etc). However, used correctly you can provide your product (the bit the company actually sells) with better insight and lower cost but it requires a monumental shift in thinking on both sides. (the one team pulling in the same direction philosophy)

Its been like this for well over the last 15 years and is getting steadily worse, so I can't imagine we will see a u-turn any time soon.

I'll await the down votes from all the techies who think the business make ridiculous demands (which I agree, sometimes they do with unrealistic nonsensical timelines and requirements) but thats an education thing which can easily be dealt with by not saying "No" to everything but rather 'lets discuss'.

Re: I don't mind this future

But that 10 dollars will be 10 GBP once converted on the 1:1 currency converter.

But that conversion rate seems apply to all foreign companies though.... That bit is not an apple exclusive.

Re: Nice

Its all a bit pointless - if my son's IT lessons are anything to go by he should have been learning powerpoint not word. Seems my Sons IT teacher thinks Powerpoint is at the cutting edge of IT. Apparently putting hyperlinks into your presentation to make them 'interactive' is all the rage.

Powerpoint is used for english homework too rather than say, a word processor, like er... Word.

But fair play to the lad, word is an overcomplicated crock of sh1t these days and anybody who can make that monstrosity do something vaguely useful and keep the intended formatting gets a tip of the hat from me.

Re: Henry VI part II, Act IV Sc 2 line 77

The bigger question for me is who the fuck allowed a contract for £750m to be signed without an exit clause?

Projects of this size are usually broken down into phases and one phase has to end before the next can begin. Each phase is costed and a project can be scrapped at the end of any one phase.(be it budget, performance, ability). This limits exposure by all parties. Usually phase 1 involves a pilot to prove the concept to stop stupidly convinced ideas becoming reality.

The stupidity of our overlords continues to amaze me.

Re: Yet another reason..

Which is enough of a loophole to give an insurance company a get out if you cause an expensive claim. Trust me, when they want a way out you need to make sure you don't give them an easy option to void your claim.(remember the question about car registered to your home address. And they will check that is where the car is parked most of the time... With the neighbours!). They aren't stupid these days. Gone are the days of using the parents address.

I hate it when some people who think for some reason they are exempt from the rules of the land. It's the law. If you don't stick to it yourself how can you take the moral high ground when somebody else doesn't??

Don't get me wrong, i understand it's because of leaks like this that people think this is the logical thing to do. But really we should be outraged and be expecting this to be dealt with with suitable repercussions that people are shit scared of ever leaking stuff on a badly protected website. If they were fined £1000 per record which was payable to the affected person this would be a nice incentive as a) you'd be real careful and b) the affected party would know what had leaked and the risks to them. Rather than not where nobody knows if their record has been leaked.

And this was the reason I opted me and my while family out of the sharing your medical records debacle. That's one database you don't want leaking yet is hugely valuable to legitimate and illegitimate people alike.

This company should be fined at a hugely disproportionate amount to encourage them to be more careful in future.