Posts by Terry Barnes

Re: Re Linux Desktop

I think most people who grew up with a ZX81 used BASIC.

Hitting the metal directly is frowned on these days for all kinds of reasons - but mainly because lots of clever people will have already written a kernel for you, so why would you think that a teenager learning to program would make a better job of it? Why would you want to have to build your own networking, security and memory management modules when your task is to transmit video from a webcam, for example?

Those kids are learning useful contemporary skills, I doubt they're much interested in earning bragging rights about how old fashioned they are on niche forums.

How is the lifespan of the system reduced? If the PSU fails, you buy another one. Its lifespan equals the owners determination to replace failed parts until something becomes unavailable.

Re: A mear shadow of the Beast!

It was only really popular in the UK, Germany and Scandinavia. As many other manufacturers learned, you need a much bigger market to survive, certainly if you want to compete with PC makers and their wafer thin margins. Financially the C64 was a much bigger success for CBM. Most US IT folk I work with have never heard of the Amiga.

It's market got pinched - the gamers went to consoles, the home computer folk bought PCs. Money for R&D dried up, the owners decided to milk their cow until it fell over.

Re: Grow up

It tops the complaint list on the basis of complaints per customer - so the size of the customer base has no bearing.

Also, I don't believe that EE are the UK's largest fixed line broadband provider. I think the largest providers, by some margin, are BT, Virgin and Sky.

Re: No absolute numbers provided. Why?

Zero ever for Windows Phone however.

Re: Does being "raided" have a different meaning over there?

Regulators and other official bodies have the legal right to enter offices and seize stuff without notice in the course of an investigation. That's because people who've done bad stuff often shred, delete or otherwise dispose of evidence that may not help their case.

" they cannot prioritise or discriminate in their transmission of traffic."

Their transmission of *internet* traffic. There's nothing to stop an ISP offering me a non public VPN service to a content server hosted on a private network. That VPN can co-exist on my last mile access service alongisde my public Internet service that I buy from the same ISP.

All that the net neutrality rules will achieve is the movement of high-value services to networks that aren't the public Internet and new products that allow consumers and content providers to access those things.

Re: Call me suspicious

"Just take care of level playing field and invisible hand of free market will fix current mess"

The end result will be cheap Internet for city folk and none at all for rural folk. The market is concerned only with profit and profit comes from serving lots of customers who live close to each other in terrain that's easy to build through.

In Europe we take care of that - with varying degrees of success - through regulation, obligation and carefully controlled state aid where it's needed. Without that the farmer who lives 20 miles from the nearest town is never going to have reliable and affordable broadband because the true cost for that one circuit would be thousands and thousands of euros a month.

"The moral of this tale though... ...you need both redundant UPSs and redundant backup generators."

I'd say not really. If you can't afford downtime the moral is that you need site resilience.

Buildings can be affected by more than power outages or other infrastructure failure - they can flood, catch fire, there can be rioting, disease, hurricanes - if you want to stay up your n+1 needs to be in a different building, a different city is better, or if you can afford it a different country is excellent.

Re: Its about time someone came up with routing protocol

As far as I can tell, the Internet continued to function, so it appears that the protocol is working.

Individual node resilience is a commercial decision - what does it cost you to stay up versus what would it cost you to be down?

Re: Meh!

"It surprises me that Renault have never revamped the 2CV"

I'd imagine Citroen's lawyers might have something to say about that.

"customers had paid Telecity for the use of dual, fully independent power suppliers to avoid outages "

If you don't have site resilience you don't have resilience - you have protection.

It's the right call for a lot of business needs though - it's a case of balancing the cost of achieving very high uptime versus the cost of being down. Most importantly, don't write contracts for your customers that promise availability that isn't at least equalled by the contracts you have with your suppliers.

Re: Why only private companies

"It decreases the time available to react to any situation - whether that be a mechanical failure or a human failure on your own or someone else's part. It also increases the distance required for that reaction to occur - compounding the difficulty."

Absolutely.

One person travelling too fast can also force errors in others. An elderly or very young pedestrian may not be able to accurately assess if they have time to cross a road when a vehicle is approaching outside of the normal speed parameters for a road.

No accident is improved by having ithappen faster.

Re: Give me about 20 minutes to become familiar with each acronym

MVS is now a part of Z/OS.

"If the light is going to be red when you arrive, slowing down to wait for it to be green when you arrive will be dumb at best, traffic hazard at slightly less than best. "

No. Stopping and restarting uses a lot of energy. Traffic flows better when vehicles continue to move rather than stop and start (hence variable motorway speed limits during congested periods).

Re: "How on earth can you give meaningful speed ratings to the non-technical general public anyway"

"By telling them what they are actually paying for. Specifically: line capacity - not speed.

As the speed is fixed at a percentage of the speed of light for the connection medium used."

I'm not sure if that's meant to be ironic or if you don't fully understand.

For advertising broadband to the public the term speed is used interchangeably to mean last mile bandwidth. Even then, bandwidth isn't exactly the right term, it's theoretical maximum throughput. It's easier to sell 'fast' broadband than it is to sell 'wider' broadband.

Some issues then arise. They are too obtuse for most non-technical members of the public to understand so it's incumbent on advertising regulators to make sure that consumers can compare like with like.

The first issue is that some mediums have a distance dependent element in the theoretical maximum throughput. It can be hard to guarantee in advance what that throughput will be - hence the 'up to' measurement beloved of ISPs.

The second issue is that it may not be possible to direct traffic to a user's last mile so as to fully utilise the available throughput. That may be down to congestion somewhere in the Internet - maybe under the ISP's control, maybe not - or even limitations with the server where the traffic originates.

A third issue is how a particular ISP chooses to interconnect with content providers. An ISP that has private network overlays directly into its nodes, makes use of CDNs and invites caching servers to be put onsite will offer a better performance to end users than one that depends on public Internet for that traffic, regardless of last mile throughput.

All of these things are hard to summarise in a catchy advert intented to catch the eye of the masses.

Your water pipe analogy is wrong as it considers only the last mile. If there's no water in the reservoir it doesn't matter how big your pipe is.

I believe you are demonstrating what Taleb memorably described as 'the fallacy of narrative'; this happened, then that happened, so this must have caused that.

Re: Limited is Limited

For a phone?

"Surley 02 + 3 = 5"

Oh is a letter, not a number.

"I would suggest that the reason the nationalised east coast line only made money because they made no investment in loco's or rolling stock while it was nationalised."

The model used in the UK doesn't allow the franchises to own trains. The trains are owned by rolling stock companies (roscos) who lease the trains to the operators. East Coast couldn't have bought trains even if it wanted to.

Re: Not much difference in distances....

"you might hit 30MPH on a hill, I would be on the brakes at that point unless I could see the road a long way ahead"

Bikes are very light, they stop very quickly - even with limited contact with the road. 50MPH feels like flying, it's quite the most exquisite sensation. My last 50MPH experience was curtailed because the BMW convertible in front of me couldn't/wouldn't descend as quickly as my bike and I had to wait for him to zoom off when the road straightened out before I go let got of the brakes and release all that lovely stored energy.

Re: What ?

A ring of solar stations around the equator and hooked into a global distribution network can supply 100% of the world's energy needs, 24 hours a day. Local generation and storage can help to fill gaps.

One of the better scholarly articles is from Jacobson at Stanford;

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf

There's also this famous picture - amount of land required for solar installations to power the entire world's energy needs;

http://c1cleantechnicacom.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2015/05/Land-art-AreaRequired1000.jpg

Re: Dangling from a light fixture is no place for a loudspeaker

Kieren - Try them in a desk lamp with a heavy base. It's not possible to reproduce low frequencies or maintain phase if the mount for your speaker moves. I think there'll still be a problem with the shape of the enclosure but it might improve things a little.

Re: filter at the telco level?

You, erm, want them to inspect the content of your messages before they are sent to you? I think quite a few people would get cross about that.

"And why are boot times so slow on modern hardware considering how much faster it is than the old Miggys were?!"

There's a long answer, but the short answer is; "larger kernel, proper memory management, more system resources, and the need to ensure proper security and networking.

Or, erm, the vast majority of US drivers in automatic cars. US driving practice is different to British practice.

Re: Meh.

"(When you start up the phone, you have to sync it to a Microsoft Hotmail account, or create one if you don't already have one. )"

Erm, remind me what you have to do when setting up an Android or Apple phone?

Re: How about an app for safe cyclists?

How does that work though? I have two miles or so of city cycling before I'm out onto dedicated cycle infrastructure on my way home from work. The cycle lane is on the left. There are at least twenty possible left turns that drivers can make across me in those two miles. I'd be trying to move in and out of the motorised traffic (and across a bus lane) almost constantly.

Add to this that some drivers get pretty enraged when they see a cyclist in 'their' lane riding beside a cycle lane, I can't see how it could work.

Re: What is being modulated & demodulated, exactly?

Though I always think of FDM as an analogue voice multiplexing technique, xDSL does genuinely use FDM. The available bandwidth of the copper pair is divided up into channels by frequency and data is modulated to occupy as many of these channels as can reliably exist on a given pair.

The higher frequency channels have the highest attenuation and as line distance increases more and more channels become unusable. The 'upto' figure beloved of ISPs refers to a situation where line length is short enough that all the channels available in a given channel plan are available.

So, er, yes. There really is modulation and demodulation going on and that process is to move data in and out of FDM channels. I doubt though that measuring the level of a sine wave at 84.08khz will be much helping in troubleshooting your home Internet connection.

@Dave

I think the hardware could be better - it tends to be mainstream stuff that's been adapted. That's clearly a good thing in terms of cost and supportability but you always get the sense that it's made to fit the need rather than designed from the ground up. Kids have big switches and joysticks and trackpads and the like depending on need but nothing I've seen really escapes the rectangle screen one foot from the face paradigm. I get that it's difficult though - everyone with these kinds of needs is unique and there's really not any one thing that will suit all people - but perhaps a suite of potential solutions that can be picked from and changed over time?

There's a lot of great stuff going on with Microsoft's Kinect and I think that movement tracking is going to be key - more so for the challenges of life in general rather than specifically education but I think a fair amount of functionality is transferable. As he gets older (he's in reception year at school currently) I'm fascinated to see what might be possible with a network of Kinect like things around the house to turn lights on and off, open doors, move his hoist, all that stuff. Sometimes a touch screen might be ideal, sometimes it might be good to just say a command and move his arm or head or use his gaze. Time will tell!

Re: You're thinking of Lorenz

"clever as they were I don't think the Bombe has ever been accused of being the basis of modern computing."

Not the Bombe, Turing's work. His work to determine if a problem was solvable and thus computable is the basis of computer science. The use of the principle of explosion in the logic of the Bombe is pretty fundamental.

Re: But will they pay for access?

EE will still have to pay a termination fee to the called party's telco, so I'm not sure why it would be any cheaper. The WiFi is bypassing the portion of the call that they don't have to pay anyone for anyway.

Re: Peter2

It's perfectly possible to run a high speed data network at these frequencies - Vodafone's 4G network in the UK runs in an 800Mhz band, for example.

The issue is around the regulation and permissions of the band, not its technical suitability.

Pictures on the BBC website show emergency services folk congregating by the entrance to the Kingsway tram subway. Isn't it more likely that a fire is in there?