Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Smoking

"There are ( and were in 2007 ) air filtration systems that were more than capable of removing enough smoke."

Try as you might (and many motorway services restairants did), these areas still leaked noxious smells

Re: Smoking

> if non smokers don't like it they can go somewhere else..."

We did., in droves. Pubs and restaurants are still picking up returning custom from people who got out of the habit of going out because of smokers

Re: Fumming

There are, but thanifully most sensible designs are pushing LiFe (which doesn't burn much)

Even so, don't put em in your equipment racks unless they're very small and have extra containment

that would make NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER - when a battery pack goes up nothing will stop it burning and it will outlast any extingushants you can provide

The only safe way to treat UPSes is to house them separately

Yup.

And I'll guarantee that anyone who pointed out the SPOF vulnerability was blasted with assurances "that will never happen"

Re: Sleepy Dorking

It does have a 12 foot high statue of a giant cock at one end of the High Street

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2358754,-0.3220652,3a,15y,224.38h,91.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1si9kOxJ2aOp45CfhKe4omMg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 (safe for work)

Re: Hopefully

"If someone else can provide good quality internet to hard-to-reach locations then that immediately takes Openreach off the political hook to get it done."

On the contrary.... Let me provide the example of Cranleigh in Surrey.

no broadband coverage, no BT plans to ever provide it - until a WISP got funding to provide it

2 weeks before the WISP go-live date, BT announced broadband plans for the village and launched a legal challenge which blocked the release of funding for the WISP (money only available because BT weren't interested). As soon as the WISP went bankrupt they dropped the urgency of the plans and finally put broadband in place 6 years later.

10 years later. there is STILL rotten coverage in the village, in areas the WISP would have covered , but BT have fullfilled their obligation of providing _A_ VDSL cabinet, which prevents anyone else getting broadband funding (locals have been ingenious in making their own micro WISPs to provide linking to people in dead spots)

Starlink is competition that BT can't put out of business and a lot of people are angry enough at their anticompetitive behaviour that they'll take any non-BT alternative simply to avoid being held over a barrel

Re: Hopefully

"30 MBPS is still better than a speed which varied between 8MB on a good day and 0.5 MB on a bad day. "

150MB/s is better still and it doesn't dropout when the ground gets wet. 300MB/s announced for the end of 2021 and that's just using 12/14GHz - the terminals are equipped to use at least 20 different channels between 12-60GHz so there's a lot of scope for expansion

Re: Hopefully

"But not as cheaply as competitors running fibre from an exchange on the corner."

I was quoted $5k for fibre. I have VDSL already and I'm on the edge of London in a residential area. The VDSL is suffering constant microdropouts (PPP level) and dsl dropouts in bad weather

BT's current published plans show no intention to sort the issues until 2026 or later

Starlink have already won this game for a lot of people

Re: Hopefully

The response from openwound seems to be a big yawn so far and they're stiocking to their guns about "no problems" in the face of lots of reports of issues

Which is to be expected until C-level staff have to start explaining themselves to shareholders

You'll knw they're worried when you start seeing FUD tactics being spread

Re: Intelsat

Iridium's largest customer is the US military. I can see them signing up for starlink in a heartbeat

Re: Different defects

"Autonomous cars can already deal just fine with urban environments filled with pedestrians, cyclists, and so-on."

Which (unsurprisingly) is where the greatest number of insurance claims (by number, not value) happen

Humans are lousy at dealing with multiple simultaneous inputs

Re: Different defects

"basically predictable"

Until they're not. And logic doesn't always enter into it

Re: Different defects

" it can result in accidents where people apparently haven't seen a pedestrian or cyclists that was in plain sign, and they have no idea why."

I can give an example myself from 30 years ago, not far from New Zealand's Parliament house

Narrowish but extremely busy one way road, cars both sides (various doors opening) slightly uphill, behind a cyclist weaving all over the lane, because I needed to turn 50 metres past her and didn't want to jump in front/cut her off

I was concentrating so hard on looking for car doors flying open and being wary of the cyclist (who seemed on the verge of falling off) that I completely missed the zebra crossing (cars illegally parked hard up against it either side) and pedestrian who had walked out onto the road without looking, until she was in front of me (my three passengers were also startled. We were ALL worried about the cyclist)

Thankfully I was going slow enough to stop even though completely startled. Although there were markings on the road for the crossing it was extremely faded and essentially disappeared in wet weather (anyone who knows Wellington knows this is "most of the year").

It was very much a case of if you knew the crossing was there you paid more attention to the footpath, but this crossing was a unicorn (it was a VERY busy road and the signage was nearly invisible).

Later on I lived in that area and as a pedestrian on foot I _never_ went on that crossing without checking carefully as it was too easy to have to dodge 40mph cars not slowing down (particularly on weekdays)

A complant to the council resulted in a safety assessment and the crossing being completely rebuilt/remarked and repositioned - apparently I wasn't the only driver who was surprised by the crossing and safety officers observed a bucketload of near-misses (which gelled with my experience on that crossing as a pedestrian)

Re: Dept of the Blindingly Obvious

"Of course there's fewer incidents if everyone obeys the traffic rules."

Just about every road crash involves serious failure of at least 3 parts of the safety equation

In a lot of cases, there's already been a failure on the part of road DESIGNERS and maintainers, which removes the safety margins down to the level that an unforced error lesewhere pushes things over the line

Blaming drivers is an easy way for local authorties to avoid criminal liability, but there's increasing pushback on this even in the land which made it illegal to cross the road ("jaywalking") so that cars could roam freely: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/01/05/states-highest-court-holds-nyc-liable-for-injuries-on-streets-without-traffic-calming

Re: But... but... we are driving because we like it, right?

This has been predicted for a while

Once actuaries show that self-driving cars are less llikely to get into crashes than the liability part of insurance premiums will reduce dramatically and that accounts for about 75% of what's currently paid

We already see this in effect anyway - the premiums for inexperienced drivers are HIGH because they're far more likely to get into a crash where they're at fault

DidYouKnow - the SINGLE greatest number of motor insurance claims are related to reversing incidents in car parks. Claims under this area outnumber just about everything else put together (but they're cheap to fix). Second most common is "Other incident in car park" (mostly: "drove into another parked car whilst turning into parking spot"

Road crashes are spectacularly expensive by comparison but the sheer number of low speed incidents demonstrates that many people have no concept of spatial awareness

One of the more interesting pieces of fallout of the change in this direction will be that insurers are lkiely to require "advanced driving certificates"(*) before even offering cover for manual operation and even the UK's driving tests will seem mild by comparison with the abliity levels required to obtain a manual license in the (near) future. PCV and HGV licensing requirements and restrictions are especially likely to tighten up

(*) Paradoxically right now a lot of them INCREASE premiums if drivers have these kinds of things as they're perceived to be on the road more and therefore a greater overall risk

Re: But... but... we are driving because we like it, right?

or seatbelts, or crumple zones, or brakes that actually worked

Re: Queen of Carnage

You missed the point

Her job is to funnel prodgious amounts of public money into private hands and whilst acting as a target for indignation

Let's not forget that her HUSBAND is the chair of the government anticorruption and cronyism committee

"If you can spend £1k on a phone, you aren't going to really gain anything by being given £50."

if it results in a £150 phone now selling for £100, that's a net benefit for a lot of people - and this is the more likely outcome when the dust settles

Qualcomm's rent-seeking licensing behaviour has a disproportionate effect on the pricing of devices as they head down the market

It'll be interesting to see what the ACCC does, as they've been stomping all over this behaviour recently

Re: Half a billion on chips?

"Of course, it could go on compensating the UK shellfish industry "

That's chickenfeed compared to the losses in the UK entertainment industry (about ten times higher and mounting) thanks to ideological extremism about working visas resulting in the EU not granting reciprocal access

"its saves 20 minutes from Birmingham."

It saves more for places further away (Manchester etc)

Of course the REAL benefit of HS2 is that it decongests the east and west mainlines and allows them to double their freight capacity. Faster passenger service is a side benefit

2% of track and trace?

Re: Marmite - hmmm

" standard Marmite bottle (250g) "

https://www.brentcorp.com.au/product/bega-vegemite-2-5kg/

"That oughta keep the little squirts happy for a while"

Re: own up!

I had a brilliant logitech trackball marble FX. It eventually failed through old age and couldn't be repaired.

You can't get them anymore *grrrr* - and no, the new ones aren't nearly as good because they don't contour to a hand

Re: Where can I find a link

We luffs our vegemite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNiOZInvLog

Re: Where can I find a link

"bovril has only slightly less MSG and is allegedly involved with cows."

And was banned in large parts of the world for a long time after some unfortunate incidents involving the BFFH(*) turning scrapie-infected sheep into ruminant feed

(*) Bastard Farmer from Hell

Re: Marmite

"I don't think it's the same as the genuine Pommy stuff."

That would be "Promite" in Kiwiland

Re: I haven't seen a good game of Reply-to-All Tennis in years

"The number of idiots doing a reply-all "

it gets more bemusing:

Once case I saw was a "reply all" saying that with "followup to" actually set to prevent people adding to the loops

People actually OVERRODE the followup to in order to respond with various inane responses, which would set off the loops again

Re: why not just pull the Ethernet cable?

because the thing was looping around internally and it would have gotten even worse for the system if not stopped immediately. Most older *nixes responded better to power recovery than running out of disk space

"Halt" commands or telinit S are also useful responses