csmithuk

If it's unusable, tell them and say you will stop paying for it as it doesn't live up to their advertising. Your rights are protected outside the contract. Threaten to complain to Ofcom if they resist. They'll let you leave and give you the MAC code.

I'm in London and my exchange has Sky LLU support. Coincidentally I live in the same postcode as Sky HQ so any problems, I'll talk face to face with them as I have some contacts.

Sounds like my win phone. 4.5Gb free and it wont install a 200Mb app because it is apparently "out of space". WTF.

It wont sync with your windows phone either. And half the time ot wont play off SkyDrive.

Every ecosystem has a pain in the ass step somewhere either by design (Apple/iTunes) or questionable integration (windows live or whatever it is called now). It's frustrating. Android may be better but my only experience is with 2.3 which is ancient.

For music, I actually got pissed off with it to the point of buying a CD player.

I'm actually using my line for home working 100% of the time. However I have a backup (3G card in my laptop and friendly neighbours with different ISPs including different mode Cable and WiFi). I think that is a better investment than an expensive line to start with simply because regardless of who you are with, the end of the line is with OpenReach who are abysmal. The difference between £100/month and £7.50/month is moot then.

I treat my home connection like a coffee shop's WiFi.

The real meat and two veg of my setup is a hosted desktop I RDP into and a number of hosted Linux machines.

a) I know a lot of parents. Not one actually cares about this. They care more than some nasty piece of work will nick their child's phone on the way home, which is far more realistic and common. I reckon the 1% are noisier than the 99% here.

b) No - see my post. When you connect the router and hit it with the first WiFi connection, it is configured by default to allow everything. At which point you can then tell them you don't want oodles of fisting porn shoved at you or just ignore the question and carry on getting your fix.

The only thing these statements prove is that the noiser people are consistently more likely to be wallies.

I can't see any ADSL offerings on their site. Do you have a link?

Perhaps the parents should spend some time with their children and show them what is appropriate and what is not?

I have three children, all of whom use the Internet regularly and bar some passive monitoring, I've done nothing. They have healthy browsing habits.

Blacklists, censorship, firewalls and control are missing the point...

Plus you're going to get goatse'd at some point in your life...

Well I was an O2 customer. Sky bought O2 last year and in the effort to maintain their customer-base they will give you silly offers if you argue with them for long enough. It's usually £20.50/month including line rental but I argued it down to £7.50/month on the basis I stayed with them for 12 months.

No catch. Confirmed no traffic management, no download limit, free router, free migration. This is purely for customer retention.

I'm 800m away from the exchange and get 12.2Mbits down and 1.1Mbits up.

I pull an average of 120Gb/month over the line with no problems.

Edit: just to add I was paying £35.50/month with O2 before which is crazy amounts.

Sky user here[1].

Turn it off then!

This is entirely optional. It asks you when you first install and connect the router via the WiFi landing page if you want to use any blocking. If you don't answer the question or select no, there is no blocking at all apart form the IWF firewall stuff. Every kind of blocking comes with problems of some description. You either live with it or trust your users.

[1] £7.50/month for ADSL2 for 12 months with line rental and calls included was too good a deal to throw away. I'd go for Andrews & Arnold if I could afford idealism at the moment.

My host machine was MSDOS and this was before I was aware of things like VCS'. I still have the ROM and board so I could possibly disassemble it.

The actual loss was caused by a disk failure and an untested backup system (my bad)

I did this.

I built the hardware (Z80 SBC), wrote the OS (tiny single tasking Unix like UZI180), started to write an editor (like ed). Then I got distracted with something shiny and abandoned it.

Think I blew 200 hours on that and don't even have the source now.

Not necessarily. It may only have power control function. If you pull a USB device out it's the same as turning it off in theory and vice versa. It's probably just turning the device off or setting it into standby mode.

edit to add: some Intel south bridges have integrated EC which makes things a little uncertain.

As per my other post, the keyboard is most likely a PS2 keyboard interface (physical or emulated) connected to a simple PS2/LPC(ISA) bus interface inside the EC. It will literally deliver an IRQ to that bus (IRQ 1) at which point the EC has to suck down a character from the keyboard buffer and do something with it.

It's not clever, can't use DMA and generally is the dumbest thing in the entire machine.

If they somehow manage to work around it I'd eat a box of lightbulbs. It's hard enough to coerce it to work to start with.

Source: I used to design embedded PC kit from the board level.

Actually no. The keyboard is still an old fashioned PS2 device on the majority of laptops. It connects to the LPC bus (low pin count - similar to ISA) via a PS2/ISA bridge in the embedded controller. It's just like in an oooooold AT PC. There is no possibility for it to deliver anything but keystrokes. It doesn't go anywhere near the USB stack and can't inject devices or play with the HID drivers.

Connection-wise it looks like this:

http://i.imgur.com/ayFybSd.png

Keystrokes can be dangerous on their own but engineering a solution to this that assumes the correct state of the machine and can operate software is unlikely simply due to the margin of error.

This happens a lot, especially in the SaaS sector. However your purchasing people or IT people (or yourself) need to consider this up front as due diligence. If you don't do it, you're a wally not a license martyr.

Portable, open formats are more important than the mechanisms.

Very. Multiple updates, public contact addresses, good reviews.

Well I haven't disabled any filters, haven't been asked about filters and I'm a new customer as of last week.

Yes last week.

Stallman is infamous for this tactic to the point it's getting tiresome for me.

Take a look at the thread on openbsd-misc "real men don't attack straw men" (his title) which was used to attack the OpenBSD project. They didn't stand for the crap stirring then.

Whilst I think his basic principles are correct, how he conducts himself is purely extremism and compromises those ideals instantly.

Edit: fix a couple of typos. Damn phone!

This seems like bollocks because I'm on one of the "big four" ISPs and I can quite happily request anything I like other than a few sites listed here:

http://help.sky.com/security/privacy/our-approach-to-protect...

All of these can be trivially accessed by proxy sites.

Most of them are abandoned and have restrictive licenses so you're SOL then.

And we're still stuck on 1.4.2! Surprisingly difficult getting rid of older versions if your plugins all depend on an old version...

we've got to rewrite 4 plugins due to API breaks to get anywhere near this version.

Will never import any community plugins again. jQuery and jQuery UI only.

No. OS X is a bastardisation of Mach, FreeBSD and OpenStep. A completely new Frankenstein's monster.

This has to be the first time that Comic Sans hasn't offended me in some way.

On a more serious note, I will be donating to this.

Fair point although it was 1971 running a nroff typesetter at Bell Labs.

First external to Bell Labs deployment was in 1972 though.

This is normal.

They are the poster boy for a corporation despite having screwed up incredibly so many times over the years, nearly fallen off a cliff and treating their customers like crap ("you're holding it wrong" for example) and still only maintaining a minority market share on the desktop and handset market. Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their client-base rewriting the entire universe every time they move the goalposts.

For comparison:

MSDOS is 32 years old. Stuff still runs from day one.

Windows is actually 28 years old. Stuff still compiles from day one (windows' original API isn't much different to today's windows). Stuff still runs from circa 1995 on current machines.

Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974.

Actually 45 years...

I had a 2010 MBP and the magsafe stopped power cord tripping. That wasn't what killed it though. There ate numerous millions of other ways to kill a notebook.

Buying a machine that can survive relatively extreme drops and liquid incursion (for me a ThinkPad) covers way more possibilities than a magsafe cable. In fact I've fallen over the cable and pulled it off the table a few times and it doesn't suffer any damage. I think the wrong end of the problem is saved with the cable design.

To be fair windows 8.1 isn't that bad. I'm writing something at the moment which returns it to a usable state through group and security policies and registry tweaks. By definition it doesn't add anything to the OS like start menu replacements but it makes it usable for desktop and corporate users.

That's crazy. After 25 years, all I have is a 32Gb USB stick.