Posts by Mage

Re: IP Addresses

"So it made sense for big organisations to be given class A or B addresses. "

No, it never did. USA greed.

There must be 100s of millions of unused never mind wasted IPs in USA.

Re: Traditional EV

Sealed or not, there is really no fire risk on Lead Acid powered vehicles such as a traditional milk float. The sulphuric acid is dangerous but easily and quickly diluted with water. The biggest danger is the sheer mass of each battery pack.

Re: Labelling for Sales

Yes, it's mostly nonsense.

I can hit 107Mbit/sec outside my house

Maybe the neighbours are all on WiFi and it's not near major road and you have near LOS and people in the area are using other providers. Just three people there streaming HD video will take it under 20Mbps. That's a meaningless report simply aiding the Mobile industry who are mis-selling Mobile as an alternate to real broadband and undercutting price by subsidising data with voice call charges.

Re: Dumb display

A Smart TV almost was twice the price as a basic TV when I was buying yet it had less video connectors and the "smart" in any smart TV is not worth the extra compared to a cheap tablet / laptop / phone with along HDMI cable.

Actual real monitors are meant to be used perhaps 0.3m away and have much finer pitch pixels to be any use. Screens for TVs are used at a distance of 1.5m to 3m depending on size. TV screens to be most useful want to be 16:9 and 1920 x 1080 and more than 36" for a normal room. Monitor screens ought to be nearly twice the pixel density X and Y as a TV, even if the low for computers resolution of 1920 x1080, that's four times as many pixels per square inch, minimum, that's more expensive to make.

Re: If you're worried about an evil device disguised as a charger,

"Public" charging points

After market USB chargers of no-name in high street supermarkets etc.

The problem is USB HID and gadgets where you can't turn USB off on a port, or even worse, gadgets with "debug mode" enabled and then it's trivial to remotely root the gadget.

Micro USB was a wasted opportunity compared to mini-USB. So is USB C.

Actually the only thing worse than USB as a concept is Bluetooth.

I can think of many things that could have been done better at USB 1.0 time. However they were only thinking of joysticks, mice and keyboards, replacing 5 pin port and analogue joystick. No peer to peer communication, no User control of HID, not reversible and stupid limits even then for speed and power, should have had more options from day one, been reverse-able connector (easy) and switchable full / half duplex (four wires for data, double speed in half duplex mode for block read or block write)

Re: Virgin Mobile out too

Actually there should be NO competition at physical RF, everyone should be an MVNO as that would double or triple capacity, because spectrum is such a limited resource.

You'd need a MUCH better regulator than Ofcom with serious teeth.

Then make 100% Geographic coverage at a minimum data rate / voice quality at typical indoors downstairs.

It's not like making baked beans, handsets or cars in terms of competition.

Similar applies to Electric Grid (but not Generation), Gas network, water network, sewage network, fibre to home, letter delivery, rubbish collection etc as you only want to have ONE of these for efficiency.

By all means have as many retailers you like.

It needs seriously good regulation to work, which SHOULD have been put in place before BT was privatised. Ofcom is useless as they don't care about any interference unless it affects big licence fee commercial operators. They only care about a level playing field between big commercial operators, not critical infrastructure, protecting broadcast from SMPSUs, Electronic Ballasts and "power line" ethernet (really illegal transmitters). They do not care about the consumer.

FCC is pretty broken too or "Lightsquared Fiasco" would not have happened.

Comreg copies all Ofcom's and FCC's worst ideas and only exists to raise revenue.

All three want to abolish broadcast, Ofcom and Comreg bizarrely want to abolish FM and AM even though the spectrum is no use for anything else (DAB licences and DAB benefits National broadcasters and blocks out of area / out of state, so politics?).

Re: Does this mean...

Yes, years ago I made a slipstream disk for XP with SATA drivers, as the SATA drivers don't come on floppies (and you can't swap the CD / DVD). In the olden days the SCSI RAID controller drivers came on floppies, so you could add the driver at install.

If there are drivers that work on windows version < 10, someone will figure out how to install.

Re: Embedded systems!

An ordinary 3.5" 720K DS drive works fine on a PCW, and the 3" PCW drive on a PC (though you need utillity SW for the CP/M FS), it's a dumb adaptor cable is all that is needed. Also 37 way 8" floppies work on 3" or 3.5" drive cable with a dumb cable adaptor.

There was a HDD for the PCW, but that didn't use the floppy cable.

Horse and cart

Yet people HAVE been prosecuted for being incapable / drunk etc with horse and cart.

Planes have good auto pilots. Automated take off and landing was demonstrated more than 40 years ago I think. Pilots can't fly if they are drunk. A plane is in many ways less difficult than a car.

Prove the technology with trains, then planes, then ships. Then trams. Cars and trucks should be last, not first. Exactly what is the motivation?

Re: sympathetic towards these agencies and support the backdooring.

It would just be the death of any USA related products that use encryption outside the USA.

All USA commerce etc would be open season for other Governments and criminals and terrorists.

Either he's totally deluded about how security and encryption works or this is about something else, noise, a distraction.

If the FBI has a backdoor, then sooner rather than later every script kiddie in the world will have it too.

Re: Confusing

It's worse than that. Not all iPlayer content actually counts as material needing a TV licence!