Posts by JetSetJim

Re: internal vs external

> Is this internal or external signal reception

You won't know. All these organisations are reporting are the outputs of their apps, that are installed on a subset of subscribers of each network. The apps just sit in the background and sip the RF measurements from the phone, and perhaps also occasionally perform throughput tests if they are configured that way (i.e. the user doesn't care about their mobile data usage!). The phone doesn't have any inkling as to whether it is indoors or outdoors, although I'm sure you could possibly frig a reasonably accurate metric together based on GPS measurements (i.e. if the mobile is stationary and not on a road, or if there are no measurements available, then it's probably indoors).

Re: Goodbye Moto...

Motorola split into Motorola Mobility ( handsets) and Motorola Solutions (network infrastructure). Two separate companies.

Motorola Solutions fragmented with bits being sold off and all that's left in that company is the TETRA stuff. It bought Airwave in 2015, I think, so yes, win-win for them there (barring any penalties EE can foist on them, which I doubt). At the time, Airwave were suing Moto over the award of the contract by HMG to Moto - I've no idea what the merits, or even facts, of their case were, but there are plenty of news reports to read.

Re: Are we surprised?

In all honesty, I'd assumed Google was doing this anyway and wouldn't be surprised if Apple were doing it too.

Doubt I'd ever been asked by Google, and I wouldn't be surprised if the "fix" Google might apply is to merely add one more step to the Google account login you do when you power up the phone, possibly with a "no" answer binning you out and nothing works on the phone from then on - i.e. a requirement of having a google account is to allow location tracking by any means.

Re: @AC @imanidiot

> Ever tried driving in heavy congestion with adaptive cruise control turned on? Do it and I bet you'll turn it off again in very short order because the ride is just f'ing annoying

I suspect ACC is getting better and better. I just got a new car with it and it's perfectly ok in congestion and I suspect is at least trying to maintain a gap proportional to the speed as in slow traffic it closes the gap to a few feet. Equally it's wary of undertaking with a large gap in front of me, but less concerned if there is a small gap in front. It's pretty good in city traffic, too. The only annoying bit is in mild-to-heavy traffic on multi-lane as it starts to slow down quite early with a slower moving vehicle in front, meaning you have to pull out a lot earlier than you might normally do, but it does seem to take account of relative velocity when pulling out behind a faster moving vehicle, so it doesn't instantly brake.

Re: Not a single mention of the word 'fibre' or fibre backhaul in the article.

The same statement is also true of 4G - an LTE site running *at capacity* should be throwing out 150mbps easily (a 5MHz system should get you around 15-7mbps usable data in a single cell - most deployments are 20MHz multi-cell (usually triple) sites), and that's before you consider LTEadvanced with carrier aggregation) . But there is a fair wedge of fibre out there - I wonder how much of it is designed to have lots of breakout points for these cells though...

Re: RE: JetSetGim

That may well be the case, but equally (or possibly less likely) it may well also be that the movement to avoid the pothole was excessive. Other possibilities include the cyclist undertaking in traffic and swerving, or some other irresponsible action.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to pin blame on the cyclist, the driver or the Tesla autopilot, there are lots of ways either party could be at fault, but because it's a Tesla - with their claims that their driving software has a stellar safety record - it makes headlines before anyone knows any facts.

I was a bit stunned at reading that you have to send your photo to FB for it to be hashed by them, and then they look for that hash in photo uploads to block it.

Wouldn't it be better to hash it client side and just send them the hash of photos you don't want other folks uploading? I dunno, perhaps invent some new and exciting way of creating the hash at image creation time as part of the camera software

No doubt some naughty peeps would then hash various news photos to prevent their dissemination, but perhaps some mechanisms could be used to minimise this.

There's a Grauniad article which states:

Facebook will store these images for a short period of time before deleting them to ensure it is enforcing the policy correctly, the company said.

which seems to imply a human will be looking at each of these images..... Yeah, that's a good idea

Re: May I introduce you to...

I always liked the "I before E except after C", and then QI ruined that by saying there are more exceptions to that rule than words that obey it

Re: The exciting future of ... personalization

I agree - I made the mistake of watching a few bland war films on Netflix and now it's difficult to find anything other than war films

Presumably this was a while ago. Nowadays AI & ML is all very trendy, with lots of conference speakers foaming at the mouth with these buzzwords, typically including "big data" & "deep learning". A quick search on Monster shows the first job in the region of £70k-120k for a data scientist. Not too shabby.

Re: Colonist motivation

> What's really needed is an economic reason to go. I want to go but it's hard to see how you can get a job on Mars when anything you could do out there could be done much more cheaply here.

Nah - I'd do it for the props, not the money. There are other motivations than currency. Others may do it to avoid nuclear fallout from when General Trump has a hissy-fit and pushes the other red button on his desk (however likely that scenario may or may not be).

Re: Post

Almost as legit as the email I got, allegedly from my company's HR dept, saying that we were getting a years credit monitoring for free - just click on this link that looks like it has the company name in it, but is actually on the wrong domain, and it's been leet-ified and so looks like myC0mpany.mp2.io domain.

Re: OK, so if there are any coders

I see your MHEG-5 and raise you Malbolge, where the "Hello World!" program is (apparently) written as:

(=<`#9]~6ZY32Vx/4Rs+0No-&Jk)"Fh}|Bcy?`=*z]Kw%oG4UUS0/@-ejc(:'8dc

Re: A word can be patented ?

> So the question in the FIRST SENTENCE of this article was - and remains - nonsense ? :

> "Did you know that the word “hovercraft” was once patented? "

Perhaps it was merely an extension of Betteridge's Law

Re: Race over? I doubt it

I doubt it, it's probably "just slightly different". Intel have longed to get into the handset (and base station) market which QC dominates - to the point of attempting a partnership with Apple to supply chips to at least one model of their iPhone (sadly not as well performing as the QC variant, perhaps because of missing IPR that helps QC with their performance in LTE).

Cars are all starting to be configurable with a wireless charging pocket/hole, which is infinitely preferable to fiddling with cables on entry & exit. If only their was better adoption of the screencasting-type connection to get (suitable) phone apps on the car display - e.g. your satnav of choice rather than the shite that is usually bundled with the car.

Re: One thing I always failed to understand....

> The system looks at which SSID's your device is trying to connect to

No, no, no - RTFReport:

"When a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet has WiFi enabled, it will search for a WiFi network to connect to. This involves the device sending out a probing request that contains an identifier specific to that device, known as a Media Access Control (MAC) address. If a WiFi network is

During the pilot, if a device was near one of the 1,070 WiFi access points in the designated area, and it had WiFi enabled, we would have collected the request(s) to connect, even if the device did not subsequently do so."

Every mobile with WiFi enabled transiting through TfL's system will be probing their APs, even if they don't register. This leaves a MAC address record in the AP, which is harvested with a timestamp. This happens in shopping malls and airports (at least) for footfall analysis and is a fairly standard feature in the boxes. TfL have merely put the information together from their many APs in a useful way.

Last year TfL held a hackathon and exposed a wide variety of data feeds to the entrants (traffic light timings, road status information, traffic queues, ...). For all their flaws, they're being quite good at attempting to find ways to embetter their service offering.

Re: I want a smart water meter

A modern washing machine uses 40-50 litres of water per wash, apparently. A flush is 5 or 7.

Re: Use cases please?

> That's my point, the vast majority of the country don't live in shared student digs, or have 4 teenagers at home. For them, a reliable 30Mbps will be more than adequate. Landlords of HMO student digs can pay extra for FTTP and flog it as an extra benefit.

640K was more than enough RAM for anyone (Bill Gates [1]) and there is a global market for, at most, 5 computers (Thomas Watson, IBM [2]), and there is certainly no reason for anyone to want a computer in the home (Ken Olsen, [3])

Currently, perhaps it is only the "premium" users who feel the need for more than wet-string between themselves and their local green box, but isn't that how the world works? People will find uses for it, and service offerings that use more bandwidth will become more affordable - even if it's just to watch ultra-HD cat videos. Kids are being brought up using devices that have more compute power in than was available to the whole planet 50-60 years ago (or some such number).

FTTP should be made to be the norm for *anything* new, and funds should somehow be made available (taxes / subsidy via subscription / ...?) so that non-fibre folks can upgrade.

I've seen a document showing that Openreach's new copper cables are in fact copper around a fibre core, so they've got that box ticked, and I'd guess that the copper could even provide a little bit of power to guarantee the ability to make a call in the event of a domestic power outage. All they need is to swap out DSL cabs with FTTP cabs (yes, they have lots of cabs, so it won't happen overnight, but then nor is their "superfast" FTTC upgrade rollout).

If BT don't do it, other folks like B4RN and Gigaclear will, and BT will lose customers, as will Openreach as they migrate onto competing fibre networks. Bye-bye BT, it was good to talk.

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[1] - meh, probably fake, but excellent urban legend

[2] - probably over-interpreted, allegedly only speaking about a single model of a single computer on sale at the time, but the spin applied since then makes it a juicy quote

[3] - over-interpreted remark, although current IoT moves are bringing it more into context, IMHO, if the discussion on http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp is anything to go by

Re: Why doesn't she talk to Trump?

Please don't give her ideas (in the unlikely event that she, or one of her minions, read this rag).

It's a shit idea, nuff said.

Re: Facts are... hard

Any repeating decimal can be expressed as a/b, i.e. is rational. The others are irrational. Lambert proved that pi was irrational 250ish years ago.

Re: Workaround

Although I wonder if the 3-D scanners are also scanning paint colours, in which case painting over it before scanning may not be the best solution - might make it a 2-step process, though...

Re: Max power

My understanding is that they're using MIMO technology to boost the gain, not transmit power. Unfortunately this adds cost to the routers, which (I'd guess) Sky, Virgin et al. haven't been doing in the past, but may well be doing now.