Posts by Tom 38

Re: If its wrong most of the time...

It is trivial to calculate the distance between an exchange and a subscribers premises, but it is almost impossible to determine the length of cable used to connect them, the quality of the copper in that cable, the amount of environmental crosstalk in the cable, the quality of wiring in the subscribers premises, and all the other factors involved in determining your synch speed.

So, given a location, all an ISP can do is calculate a 'best case' and a 'worst case' bounds for your line. Obviously, marketing would prefer that the worst case is as understated as possible, so there will be outliers that have worse conditions even than the 'worst case'.

As an example of this, around Albert Dock in docklands there are some very curious routing of cables. Some locations in that area are extremely close to the exchange, but have 2+ miles of cabling, due to the strange way that the cables are routed around the docks.

Another example is my old man, who lives in the wilds of East Anglia. His line, if you check, says he should get 1MB, just about, because of distance from the exchange. He actually gets 3MB, because the line from the exchange is new, high quality, goes in pretty much a straight line across 7km of fields, and he has excellent in house wiring, including a fitted ADSL filter on the master socket.

With ADSL, you get the physical maximum synch that your line can handle. Switching ADSL ISPs searching for synch speed is inane, the ISPs and BT cannot change the laws of physics. Instead, you should either move, or see if you can improve the situation by improving your internal wiring, or STFU.

Re: "carrying out an upgrade"

Transport in London is basically semi-organized chaos anyway, on a good day.

Re: This could bite them in the arse

If you are interested in this, you should read about the Islamic golden age, roughly 750 AD - 1250 AD, during which Islamic scientists where the greatest in the world in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, ophthalmology and physics, discovering things which would only later be 'discovered' by western scientists.

The most important thing that Islam gave us was the scientific method.

Re: Sorry, late to the party, but...

Not quite right. MS have built IE10 for WOA, and to make it fast enough to run on WOA, they have used non-public APIs, which they are refusing to make available to 3rd party developers to use.

As a consequence, Mozilla cannot build a browser for WOA that would compete with IE10, since they cannot use the same APIs.

Thing is, 'Proview' isn't a company, it's a collection of assets owned largely by their creditors, the main one being BoC, who are largely owned by the government, who 100% own the judiciary.

Re: Should have applied for .dev

Since when would a server with a ".dev" suffix belong in production?

If its for production, you should be using a domain name you own. If you don't want your domain names resolvable externally, you should be using a split horizon DNS.

If you blithely ignore RFCs when they explicitly tell you you should not do a thing, you should not be surprised when the internet bites you on the ass.

Re: Smacks of the old scam

Isn't that a quote from Lock Stock?

Re: Why would you buy an android?

Can we have a 'Report to a Medical Professional' button please.

Re: WHAT!

I don't allow Adobe Anything anywhere near my computers, I don't download random executables off the internet and run them, I don't allow plugins in my browser, I only open known media types with trusted programs and the box is firewalled to buggery both ingress and egress.

I've been doing this for 15 years with no virus, trojan or malware. Kaspersky runs at £60/year, so that's a £900 saving. It's a bet, with myself. I bet that I won't fuck up my machine, and so far, I'm winning.

Re: Don't worry

It riles me that certain types of people want to infer everything from my choice of tablet. You're still doing it, for instance.

"""

Look, you're posting in a community populated by Assembly programmers, aeronautical engineers and bearded guys who code using only a magnetised needled and a steady hand.

"""

Indeed, I'm part of that community - that's why I'm posting here - although I prefer vim to a magnetised needle.

It's geeky that I got excited about a software update to a music player. What's your excuse?

Re: Lily's counter eexamples

Facebook have no visible revenue stream? Are you joking? Their ad revenue basically allows them to print money.

All (major) politicians are regularly invited/allowed to write OpEd in 'friendly' newspapers. If you read the Guardian or Mirror, then you will see OpEd from people like Wallace^H Ed Miliband, Ed Balls etc, whilst if you read the Sun, Times or Telegraph, you will see OpEd from Boris, Cameron, etc.

If you read student newspapers, then you will see LibDem OpEd :)

Re: @Admiral GH

I use my own mouse and keyboard at work. Work have standardized on some quite cheap tacky MS wired keyboard and mouse.

I'm someone who actually spends the vast majority of the day touch typing, not looking at the keyboard, so for me the most important things are consistency of keys, the action and travel on the keys and feedback.

These laptop style keyboards drive me nuts - I spend most of the day coding in vim, where the escape key is hugely important (switches between insert and normal mode), so after a day using these new keyboards, I bought a 2nd hand Model M. My desk is now easily the noisiest in the office, the reassuring sound of clicky keys fills the air.

Still trying to get them to upgrade our stupidly small 2nd monitors from 17" to something I can actually read a page of code on. 22" widescreen in portrait mode would go down a treat.

Re: Re "and probably should, in certain scenarios."

The problem is that it is very hard to ask an ISP for a list of the IPs that a user has connected to over the past month if the ISP is not already collecting that data. Hence the bill.

You can do it currently only going forward, eg once you've identified a terror suspect, you only know who he has been communicating with after the fact.

If, after an explosion, you are trying to work out who was in contact with whom before the explosion, and you only have details from after the explosion, then you can see it's a bit tricky.

Re: Btw..

Sure, but none of that applies to Apple. Apple don't need distributors to get Apple kit into the country, and they don't need independent retailers to flog their kit. The stores that sell Apple kit (Apple stores) don't need distributors to advance them a line of credit.

So why do the distributors feel that they are getting shafted by Apple, so much so that one of them is suing to force Apple to give them more stock? That is what I don't understand. On what legal grounds can one company sue another company to force the latter company to supply stock to the former? It's nonsense.

Re: Er wrong!

I really don't think it is that emotive, apart from for the pro-lifers.

The vast majority of people believe that it is the women's right to choose, and that is the end of the story.

Some pro-lifers take so much umbrage at this that they shoot people, bomb cars and practices, hack personal details of users of the practices, and just generally be very unpleasant. I'm not aware of any pro-choice advocates doing anything unsavoury.