As the tenant, once, of a new build home in the UK it’s not just the file that’s important: it’s the channels to patch the file too.
I spent almost a year having to enter my address manually because the postcode DB — or whatever old version pets.com, cameras.com, and looroll.com had — lagged behind the reality of my infill bungalow for seemingly forever. I’m 8A godamnit, not 8. (Thank you Mrs. No8 for accepting my packages throughout those dark months btw.)
It’s just like tzdata. A precious resource not just because it compiles the history of geopolitical wallclock settings, but also because it is meticulously updated, on time and on budget.
It’s all very well liberating PAF.v2024_08finalfinal_v3_final.doc, but who is also going to keep it up to date?
I’m not a hater, just a realist. TFA is spot on: we’ll never be able out compete with or recreate or leak a sufficient version of the PAF. It, and it’s entire infrastructure, needs to be wrested into public hands ASAP. And we should be prepared to fund the updates.
I've been a consumer of the PAF for many years through work.
In the bad old days (10 years ago), when we got it from a well known credit check company, it came on CDs. We then moved to "automatic" updates via their rubbish, buggy software to our on-premise install. That wasn't such a huge upgrade, because as soon as you looked away from that software it would stop working.
Now we pay a different, altogether better company to access it via a web service. I would expect that the speed of updates through to websites is now mostly as good as the frequency of PAF releases. Unless this has changed recently, the PAF isn't created by Royal Mail itself, it's outsourced to a company called AFD based on the Isle of Man.
My only complaint with the service we get now is that the value is quite poor - our total cost is somewhere around 30p per lookup on average for addresses which I suspect are rarely even used in our line of work.
I spent almost a year having to enter my address manually because the postcode DB — or whatever old version pets.com, cameras.com, and looroll.com had — lagged behind the reality of my infill bungalow for seemingly forever. I’m 8A godamnit, not 8. (Thank you Mrs. No8 for accepting my packages throughout those dark months btw.)
It’s just like tzdata. A precious resource not just because it compiles the history of geopolitical wallclock settings, but also because it is meticulously updated, on time and on budget.
It’s all very well liberating PAF.v2024_08finalfinal_v3_final.doc, but who is also going to keep it up to date?
I’m not a hater, just a realist. TFA is spot on: we’ll never be able out compete with or recreate or leak a sufficient version of the PAF. It, and it’s entire infrastructure, needs to be wrested into public hands ASAP. And we should be prepared to fund the updates.