Posts by Terry Barnes

Re: On the other hand...

You're only really paying for your last mile speed. If you want guaranteed throughput all the way to a peering point you can have it, but it will cost you thousands. Consumer broadband is built down to a price - and that will be true all the time the vast majority of people buy broadband based on what's cheapest.

Contention of 50:1 means that things can slow down at busy periods - but it also means that the expensive part of the connection costs you only a 50th of what it otherwise would.

Re: What has it got in its pocketsess?

"So an MAC doesn't sound so different to a phone number."

The point being I think that it's trivial to engineer a reverse search to find an individual from a telephone number. Depending on how and why that's done, that can be legal or illegal.

With a MAC address - much harder. You'd need the co-operation of the mobile operators and they won't co-operate because they're complying with the DPA.

A mobile's telephone number is only used by the network you are taking service from and its transmission to that network is encrypted. A MAC address is transmitted in the clear to any device that asks to see it.

I can't see a way that the MAC address of a mobile phone could be used, in isolation, as a piece of useful data about an identifiable individual. Now, if the bins had cameras in them.....

Re: Rah Rah Rah

I'm struggling to see that they've broken any laws so the ICO can't do very much. The DPA doesn't apply as capturing MAC addresses doesn't let you identify individuals (though trying to match those MAC addresses with a person list would be illegal). RIPA might apply, but again - there's no information about individuals here.

Re: Packet Switching

Extra large packets are no good for real-time applications though - all you do would do with voice is increase the propagation delay while you wait for enough bits to fill your new super sized packet.

Re: The sad thing is ...

"I'd rather go with MeeGo / Sailfish than touching anything Google is behind. In fact, I'd rather go with Symbian, but that's just me."

The problem is that you're in a tiny minority which is why Nokia ended up in such a bad place. No-one bought the smartphones running their own OS.

Re: 7.4 million phones = 5 days for Android

"A quarters sales is being touted as a success when Android activates that number every 5 days?"

Android is an operating system. Nokia is a manufacturer. Do you see the difference?

Re: the market continues to reject WP

Don't extrapolate from your views to presume everyone else feels the same.

I don't get on with iOs. we've got four Android devices in the house and none of them work entirely properly.

When my wife and I bought new phones last month we *chose* Windows Phone deliberately. I like it - it works properly, it's easy to use and it's affordable. My Lumia 820 seems easily as capable as an iPhone and more capable than the Samsung Android it replaced.

Re: My left testicle...

"That said, a Nokia with Android would be a million times more marketable than the Windows Phone crap they are trying to offload onto unsuspecting consumers right now."

They sold 7m Lumia last quarter, let's call it 25M for the full year.

You're saying that if they dumped Windows and used Android that they'd then sell 25 BILLION phones in a year?

I suspect that's not true because if it were, they'd be doing it.

Re: No correlation betwixt one and t'other

It was slow to give you time to think about what you were doing, and to avoid the situation of lots of false calls being generated with a number like 111.

In the UK, the number you dialled corresponded directly with the digit train created - zero being ten obviously. This made the jobs of exchange engineers somewhat easier - the reverse system is less intuitive (ten minus dialled number equalling digit train).

In a similar vein my dad (who worked on the railways) told me once about the system to override the locking on points or signals in some signal boxes. The process required the slow turning of a little wheel about fifty times. Not for any overriding technical reason, but to give the signalman plenty of time to think hard about exactly what he was in the process of doing.

Re: Dials of WTF handsets

"It was to avoid BT's patent or so I am lead to believe"

BT (or GPO then) didn't have any kind of patent on these phones, the Strowger system was a US invention.

Re: Just the other day

Take him to one of the museums with a working electro-mechanical (Strowger) telephone exchange and let him see how the dial is remotely operating the bits of kit that connect the call together. The one at Amberley chalk pits in Sussex is excellent.

My 5yo daughter was transfixed - to the point where she wasn't bothered about actually talking to anyone once the call was set up, she just wanted to see the process of making the call, again and again.

Re: Gratuitous overnumerification

The action of dialling over time can smear dirt on the numbers underneath the dial, or take the paint off. Dial phones in garages used to have a black circular smear where the numbers should be. I guess the sticker is to counteract such wear.

Re: Pulse dialling?

When 112 was introduced in the early 90's as a pan-European emergency number (it works alongside 999 in the UK) there was a significant amount of false calls. At the time one solution was to disable loop disconnect dialling on lines that were prone to problems as a short-term fix until the underlying line problem could be addressed.

Sometimes the problem was overhead lines running through trees, sometimes it was dodgy internal wiring - often people who'd poorly routed the cabling for an extension so that opening a door crushed the wires and caused a short, and sometimes it was slightly mad people who tapped the switch-hooks a lot in the manner of Hollywood movies when someone has been cut off.

Re: Pulse dialling?

Loop disconnect (pulse dialling) is still a standard feature of the UK PSTN. All exchanges (or all BT / KC exchanges anyway) on the public network support it.

Milton Keynes

"1. BT putting in aluminium phone lines for cheapness (they only have to carry voice right?)."

I don't think BT ever put in aluminium. The GPO did in the 70's when the government of the day cut their capital budget. Copper was undergoing a price surge, the telephone network was growing rapidly - the only sensible approach (given what was known then) to meet demand was to buy cheaper aluminium cable.

Redundancy

Actually - It's highly likely that they did buy a resilient service. They'd be unlikely to publicly blame Virgin if it wasn't their fault - that tends to result in court cases and compensation.

It's fairly standard as well to buy your resilient service from a single provider - it's the only way to 'guarantee' that you don't pick two suppliers who both outsource the last mile to the PTT who then stick both circuits in the same cable. If you've ever tried to get two rival telcos to collaborate in delivering you a resilient service and sharing between them the cables, terminations and routes used, you'll know why. Resilience is holistic and buying from a single provider is necessary, but not sufficient, to achieving what you need.

Re: Countless, Needless, Artificial Obstacles

No - I think you fundamentally misunderstand the role of the EU in trade. It's almost as if the press in the UK don't give a true picture of what's afoot.

For trade to flourish and access to new markets to be equal, there has to be a level playing field. Everyone who agrees to play by the rules gets unfettered access to the market. The role of the EU in this context is to determine - with input from all the member states - what those rules should be.

Re: When SIMs disappear all I need is my number to roam

What you're asking for though is something that isn't a telephone - or at least not a PSTN device. Without a SIM, how would the network be able to tie together your device and your number?

I'm not suggesting that the thing you want is undesirable, but I'm not sure how removing a SIM improves your life any, all it does it break how current networks operate.

Re: When people think bad of you..

The UK has some issues with its outlook on Europe - don't make the mistake of thinking that such views are widely held across the continent however.

Re: Garages *used* to offer a battery charging service for regular customers.

"Secondly because you signed the contract with the company the battery can't be dropped into anyone else's vehicle unlike the "Calor gas" model described in previous posts."

But that increases cost for no benefit. A battery that gets used by lots of vehicles will have a higher duty cycle than one that just sits in your car - or one that sits in your car half of the time and is idle the other half. Given that the leasing company will want to recover their costs and make some money. all you've done is make your electric car much more expensive.

Why do you care if it goes into someone else's car? It's the energy you want, the container is neither here nor there. You've never been on a camping holiday where you put your iceblocks in the freezer and take out what used to be someone else's? All you care about is the ice - as long as the container is functional - and remembering that I'll be swapping it again tomorrow or the day after - what's the issue?

Re: @ Terry Barnes et al

"won't hold enough charge to get you home?"

I'm not sure what you mean. The point of the 'borrow' arrangement is that when a battery does reach the end of its useful life, the owners of it retire it. I'd imagine that vehicles using exchangeable batteries will report on how the battery has performed when it gets swapped again and ones that are on a downward spiral get taken out of circulation. This isn't a giant problem to solve, it's trivial.

Why would your new car have a new battery? It might do, but equally it might not.

It's *exactly* like Calor gas. If I extend your argument to gas, it would be like claiming that some of the gas bottles in the shop have got holes in them and the gas leaks out before you get home. There are processes in place to prevent that.

Re: What we need is...

"Safe Hydrogen storage in a fuel cell is a much better option then electrical batteries, at least for cars anyway."

How so? You can charge a battery at home and the enabling infrastructure (the national grid) exists to enable battery exchange or centralised charging in the future. Electricity allows us to build IC/Electric hybrids for longer range vehicles if we need them.

Hydrogen would mean starting from scratch. Importantly, we can do electric right now - the technology exists. The local council could arrange for charging posts to be installed in the local car park with a week if they so wanted.

Re: Garages *used* to offer a battery charging service for regular customers.

"Since they are leased they are your batteries and their charge retention (or lack of it) is your business and under your control. NO one else can use them."

But they're expensive, and what benefit do you get from owning them? Why would I want to increase my costs by leasing an extra battery I'm not actually using? It doesn't make sense.

Re: Battery swapping also has problems

"Getting on for half the value of an electric vehicle is in the battery"

I'm not sure you understood my point. You won't own the battery and so it won't be part of the value of the vehicle. You borrow the battery as a container for the energy you've bought. If the battery is faulty, it gets exchanged.

"going to need a hefty power supply"

Yep - But it's preferable to build a few sites with hefty power supplies than to try and build out the infrastructure to do this to every home. If petrol stations didn't exist today, they'd look tricky to build - thousands and thousands of litres of highly flammable liquid stored in urban areas? And you're going to trust people to pump this explosive stuff into their cars themselves? And how will you transport that flammable liquid safely and fill the giant tanks?

Re: The battery is only one part of the problem

I think we'll see a lot of street charging posts being installed - there are already some in car parks and on the roadside in the nearest city to me.

You presume as well that a vehicle will be empty every night and need a complete charge. That's unlikely for most users. They'll either charge only occasionally when a lower charge threshold is reached, or 'top up' overnight. And, you're forgetting exchangeable battery packs.

The problems you highlight are "if we do nothing" problems. The point, I think, is that we will do things. These are things to be solved, not barriers to progress.