Posts by John Sager

Re: Auto responders

Well, I wouldn't like to be the one to test this in court, especially if the dosser was in the US. Then we get into all the extradition shit that a few naughty boys here have had to endure.

Re: For those who wonder...

That's why they are going to use DC for the big windfarms in the North Sea. The routes are so long underwater that AC would lose too much reactive power in the capacitance to the seawater.

Re: Note that they didn't bother with open source operating systems

I suppose someone might have considered impact, in that *BSD et al are far less deployed in critical systems than is Linux (downvote farming here...). Versus the more who know the quicker it leaks, as events have shown.

Re: Shiney - Lets Be Bad Guys

Last time I went into the US, last summer at Oakland, they had these ESTA checking machines, which had a long line of people trying to use, and they aren't especially easy if you've never seen one before. Then, of course, we had to join an even longer line to see the regular Immigration guy, with the usual photo and fingerprint dance. Since the desk guy has to scan the passport, why don't they do the ESTA check there?

This is one of the arguments for having a non-profit do the fibre build-out & then rent capacity to ISPs. But for heaven's sake don't let the government anywhere near the planning & build activity! The big problem of course is how to incentivise the non-profit to maximise capacity and reach whilst minimising cost, and to keep the network upgraded as technology & service requirements allow.

Re: Cow Orkers

Saw the second defn. Perhaps they meant 'norking'.

As for Lancashire, I'm very open-minded, even taking on, and liking, the other side's delicacies. But then I'm funny anyway, not liking Hotpot...

Re: I guess he gets points for trying?

No! If he wanted to try, then surely he could get a lot better advice on how to go about it, though consultancy rates in this area are not cheap. Now, of course, he has crapped all over what little reputation he may have had. Perhaps a decent web security consultant might have been a better investment?

Re: Exchange-only lines?

There are apparently regulatory & legal issues for BT with putting VDSL kit in exchange buildings, hence the FTTC cabinet outside. Go figure.

The village I live in finally got FTTC last year as there is an existing cabinet. They then took some of us who could benefit off EO lines and onto that cabinet so I now get 80/20 FTTC. However there are still dwellings in the village and the neighbouring one that are too far for FTTC and I believe that they are going to get FTTP eventually, in 2019 supposedly.

Well, I say 80/20 and that's what I get nominally. However the raw sync rate as reported by my modem varies quite a lot and can often dip below 80 even though I'm only 200 metres by line length from the cabinet. Not sure why yet - there's no obvious correlation with the weather.

Re: Ré causing, not curing chaos

Bloody Hell, that takes me back. As a teenager I tried to fix one of those. It had a dropper resistor wound into the mains flex...

Re: Kiss goodbye to that roadster

Nice idea, but I don't think even a Falcon Heavy has the delta-V to do that.

On a personal note, Musk gets a lot of flak, especially in the electric car field, but I forgive him all that faux-Green crap because of SpaceX and what that company has done to push forward the space business.

Re: It's all fun and games until someone's toes freeze solid and shatter,

We made silver azide at school, filled a drinking straw and set it off in the local park. I was deaf for several minutes - never heard such a loud bang. The other one was a paint tin full of a stoichiometric mix of Fe2O3 and Al powder. Because it was so fine there was lots of air in the mix so once it got going there was a beautiful silver fire fountain and molten iron flowing across the ground. These days we would be banged up in Paddington Green pronto!

Re: "No point using the nice stuff"

Ginger wine & cooking scotch in 1:1 ratio in the 'morbid' phase, then it has to be Highland Park in the recovery phase (and subsequent phases too!).

Re: Easy enough to fix

If you're developing stuff for the web then not using Chrome isn't an option. It is needed to be tested against if for no other reason. The Chrome stupidity, if I read it right, is that any request to a .dev url must use https as enforced by Chrome. Glad I didn't choose .dev for my own internal TLD many moons ago. I'm not going to change it, but if I were doing it now, I would probably choose something else.

Well, fan designs have improved a bit since Whittle's time so, as others have said, most of the thrust on a high-bypass turbofan comes from the fan. It's not outrageous to replace the jet core with an electric motor. I wonder why they haven't proceeded with a motor/generator integrated with the wing-mounted jets? That would give the same sort of hybrid performance as the approach that BAe are taking. Perhaps it compromises too many things (weight, diameter, length, etc) on the jet to do that.

Re: We're in for a bit of a shake up anyway

Hard to divine what motivates flat-earthers. Even I can see the earth is round just looking at the container ships at anchor off Felixstowe - you can't see the hull, only the containers. And simple (for a physicist) arguments about potential energy minimisation in a squishy planet under gravitation lead you to a spherical-ish solution.

Re: Such is life. Have a look around - it's a constant race of arms.

They changed the voltage a while back to 230V so as to be in line with the rest of the EU

No they didn't. The allowed tolerance was changed by EU administrative fiat so that both nominally 220v (in Europe) and 240v (UK) would fall into the new allowed tolerance bands. I don't know whether recently installed LV transformers in the UK network have moved to be centred on 230v - can't be arsed to google it.

Re: How does the government work in Germany?

Was this a rhetorical question? Most parliaments tend to follow the second model, with the 'authority' ranging from the Politburo via the President/Prime Minister to the most munificent lobbyists.

Re: Belisha Beacons

The public's attitude to politicians has evolved significantly since the days of Hore-Belisha, as witnessed by many comments here. He is obviously far too far up his own arse to realise this.

Re: Good idea, I think

Regulation will probably be the final blow to those security blunders

You mean, like all those CE-marked devices from China?

Re: ATSC 3.0 fixes a lot of problems with ATSC 1.0

Excuse me while I ROFLMAO! Being sorta involved when both DVB and ATSC were being developed, I never understood why the Yanks were so stuck on 8VSB. All the tests then in all sorts of environments showed that OFDM was better. Hence most of the rest of the world went with DVB or variants (Japan, Brazil).

Re: Sense of proportion

If Twitter is half the company they are supposed to be then they will have tweet analysis keyed to the T&C's, as well as lots of other stuff presumably. A phone no filter is not a hard regular expression, and they will get flagged.

Re: Curiousity and dead cats...

It works in space, but not on the ground - too much glare from the atmosphere. Flying high also lets them see wavelengths that get blocked by the atmosphere, as well as extending the eclipse period by flying along inside the shadow.

I can't imagine it goes further. 212MHz spectrum on a phone line, especially in a multi-pair cable? If it were made to Cat5e standards, perhaps, but the existing cable infrastructure isn't. Also as lines are never particularly well balanced, the spectrum pollution into the airwaves is just going to get worse.

Re: Tracking info freely available

Or use Gpredict on Linux. The object is catalogued as 2017-042F. I just looked at predictions on Gpredict. It looks like it won't be high in the sky in SE England until around midnight BST, so it may already be in eclipse by that time. Check it out looking NE at about 23:45 tonight.

Re: All my sympathy..

The Chinese are probably slightly more civilised than that now unless it was a really egregious & stupid mistake by someone. Now the NorKs probably have the more brutal approach, which may explain why their technical endeavours don't progress too fast.

Re: Mixing IoT with cellular networks

Privacy usually isn't an issue with such applications as they usually monitor things like pipe pressures or weather clock are still running

Speak for yourself. The pressure in my pipes is my own affair. And monitoring IoT traffic from premises will eventually tell you quite a lot about the behaviour of the occupants if it's in clear.

Being tech-savvy will hopefully help me avoid the most egregious horrors of the IoT world but I pity the poor buggers who can't evaluate this stuff themselves.

Re: normally

Yup, AAISP are a top ISP and unlike XKCD it's not a dream. They helped me with 2 problems that were/would have been call-centre hell with BT.

Re: That's why the EU has started Galileo...

Perhaps it's time for someone to build an NTP-disciplined oscillator. :) (NTP has lots of short time yitter, but obviously no long term drift, so it might work)

It does work, sorta. The 3G femtocell devices use long sequences (2hrs or so) of NTP queries to get enough accuracy to discipline the local oscillator. My device seems to do it every 24 hours or so.

As for local knowledge, that seems to be disappearing for all the services that need it. I was talking to a coastguard officer recently & he said that his area would be concentrating to the national centre in Fareham, but that his people didn't want to move to Fareham so their local expertise would be lost.

Cheap inertial devices are getting better so they may be stable enough soon for trips of a few hours, especially with road lock to estimate the drifts. Also the nav display function 'I think I'm here. Touch the screen where I really am' would set it up for a journey.

Re: Captain Bodge-tastic speaking

Just analysing my firewall logs for the last 4 months & I've had 36k hits on telnet and 6k hits on ssh port 22. Those are the top 2 TCP ports for hits, followed by 5358, 1433 & 7547. I occasionally see a hit on my obscure ssh login port - 1 every few months perhaps.

Re: cripple your own economy

There is a tipping point where solar becomes cheaper than coal

So where, and at what cost, is the backup generation/storage for when the sun don't shine? You have to compare like with like. Or should we shed the load at sunset and have a North Korea-style nighttime scenario?

Like it or not, a *lot* of the world's generation capacity will run on coal for decades to come Trump or no Trump, especially in China and India. And if they get their act together in terms of development, Africa too.

Re: FTTP?

I wonder if this is why, when I last enquired, we're going to get FTTP on our DP (in a year...)? I was very surprised at this. A FTTC cabinet went live in our village recently, and although it is <100m from me, my DP and another one close by are EO lines. The other DP is supposed to be re-parented on the cabinet very soon but, although it would be easier & cheaper to put both on the cabinet at the same time, mine is to be FTTP. I shan't complain though (except for the extra wait), if that's what actually happens.

Re: Why is that not adequate

A lot of the issues are to to with totally shit wifi routers that can't do QoS for toffee. However, it's not exactly easy. I had this problem with my own home-brew router - a satnav update I started totally clobbered my daughter's Netflix session. I spent a *lot* of time analysing that & coming up with a working solution using combinations of iptables rules to mark traffic and qdiscs to filter & queue traffic appropriately. I think recent versions of OpenWrt have something similar, and eventually the Cake qdisc should make this a no-brainer.

Re: If in the UK, I recommend

Likewise. I changed to A&A when the previous v6 support I had from Enternet broke and they never bothered to fix it. It was apparently something cobbled together for customers on BT's 20C network.

Re: but it's suffice to say IPv6 is so big,

My ISP gave me a /48 by default, which is equivalent to a /16 in v4-world. Not that I use more than a /63. I could, in principle, change my home network to v6 only, at least for the laptops, android, a couple of servers, as my ISP runs a 4-to-6 service to map v4s in the Internet to temporary v6 addresses. No such luck for the blu-ray player and DVRs though. I guess it'll be a long while before new models of them become dual stack.