Posts by AndrueC

We need to "reach out" to some VCs!!

Are the Viet Cong still around?

Re: Ohm My Gawd

I thought it was shocking.

Re: 24 Mbps

24 Mbps is just not true.

I have many friends who are, officially at that speed..

I doubt it. They will have signed up to a product advertised as capable of connection speed up to 24Mb/s on some lines. However the retailer will have taken details from the customer at sign up and given a specific speed for their line. Unless many of your friends live within a hundred metres of their telephone exchange (which seems unlikely) they will not have been told they will get a connection speed of 24Mb/s.

This should not still be confusing people, especially patrons of this web site! FFS - it's been nearly two decades now and 'up to' should not be confusing anyone!

'Up to' in this context does not mean 'your speeds will vary and could sometimes be as high as 24Mb/s' it means 'The quality of a particular telephone line will dictate what actual speed it supports and the highest quality lines will connect at 24Mb/s'.

As it happens I did used to know someone who got full speed on ADSL2+. They lived about 60 metres from the exchange. When last I heard from them they were moaning because their line was EO (meaning no cabinet) and therefore they had been left out of the FTTC upgrade. Now that's sad.

Re: Iconic satellite dish ?

Ah, BSB owned a number of satellites at first but they were sold off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_(satellite)

Re: What do we do now?

Apparently, yes, some people did. The mind boggles somewhat. But maybe he's in a safe seat where there are enough die-hard Conservative voters to ensure that whoever is in that seat will get voted in. Most seats in the UK are at least fairly safe, elections are usually decided on a relatively small number of seat changes.

I live in a very safe seat (Mrs. Leadsom's) and there's nothing I can do about it. Every time in recent history the Conservatives win by a clear margin. Often so large a margin that even if the votes for all the other candidates were pooled together it wouldn't make any difference.

This is what passes for democracy in the UK :-/

Re: Why is there a choice?

I was on a flight out of Birmingham a couple of years ago that got held on the apron. We sat there for over an hour while engineers came and went. Eventually they closed the door and restarted the taxi. The captain announced that although they couldn't fix the fault the plane was cleared to take off.

So..worth waiting an hour to try and fix but not bad enough to stop us flying.

Hmmm.

Re: Going metric

1.81 metres, and I usually weigh a bit less than 80 kg. Weight measurement was the last thing I switched to, albeit many years ago now. I inherited the use of stones from my family but when I bought some digital bathroom scales I made the decision to set them to metric. It took me about half a dozen weighs to become happy with kg and I no longer know what my weight is in stones nor care.

Re: Is the target obsurd?

There's money to be made (for somebody) in laying fibre.

Debatable. Looking at the market at the moment there's very little evidence of a mass desire for ultrafast broadband. Most people are buying the cheapest package they can afford. Only a minority of VM customers choose to pay for the top tier and historically VM have had to close their lowest tiers and migrate customers upwards for free because they won't move by themselves.

Also, looking at the market, internet use per-capita in the UK is very high and it has been for several decades now. What the market seems to show is most people are content with the lower end of speeds or at least unable to justify paying for anything better.

A last risk factor is mobile internet. While I will always tout a physical cable as being better than anything done by radio I was at a friend's house recently and they use a mobile adaptor and it seems to do everything they need including UHD Netflix streaming. Whether mobile internet could handle a sudden influx of people should FTTP not materialise fast enough is another matter.

For sure there are still some places (less than 5% probably) where residential internet is truly inadequate but it's hard to see where sufficient demand can be found to fund the costs of a complete FTTP roll-out, least-wise not a rapid one.

he can flash the Jolly Rodger any time, just open the curtains at will.

What has Will done to deserve being flashed at?

Re: Ahhh, TeamB... :-)

I think by the time I joined TeamB I'd stopped using Delphi so most of my contributions were on the C++ sections. I probably spent most of my time trying to police .off-topic. I was never as prolific as RudyV, though. Wasn't he also a dentist at the same time?

Re: Good consultancy work

That'll be a turnip for the books then :)

So why produce the report if no one is going to do anything about it?!?!

Gotta keep the staff busy, lest your budget be cut.

Re: "she hasn't seen phone-induced bone spurs in her practice"

They are very common in front of the heel bone at the point where the Plantar Fascia attaches. At one time they were thought to be the cause of Plantar Fasciitis (the mere mention of which sends shudders through those of us who've experienced it). However more recent research suggests they are far more common than cases of PF so not likely to be the cause.

For the 300k a year maintenance cost I would be willing to have a mobile phone on me 24/7/365, and manually manage a folder with .txt documents created for each individual.

And if you used the license number as the name you'd have B+ Tree searching courtesy of most modern file systems. Many years ago I did a data recovery where someone was doing exactly that on HPFS. It was hell to pull the files off though as our servers were running Netware and we were using DOS and neither of them played nicely with tens of thousands of files in one directory.

Re: Did anyone else notice

Yeah, I remember CD caddies. It was probably late 90s before slide in CDs came into existence. From what I remember of those Compaqs the 5.25" disks slid in and kind of clicked into place. Not as forcefully as a 3.5" but a definite click. Then the button caused them to spring out slightly.

Re: Or elvis.

From memory I can think of:

[ESC]:x[RETURN]

[ESC]:wq[RETURN]

[ESC]ZZ

and if you don't want to save:

[ESC]:q![RETURN]

I also prefer the C-Shell. I've always liked its command history list mechanism. I used to be able to keep track of the last few commands in my head and use search/replace to execute new ones. Occasionally a colleague would borrow my terminal and when I got back to it I'd be annoyed and confused by the unexpected history list.

Being able to cursor through prior commands is nice but if your terminal doesn't support it then:

!-3:s^fred^jim

Is your friend :)

Re: What does it mean when they say "BT or KCOM"?

Does that mean "provisioned over", or must you (e.g.) switch to BT before you can complain? If so, isn't that anti-competitive?

It means that only openreach and KCOM have signed up to the deal but in principal that covers every property in the country anyway, and most ISPs. So, no, there should be no need for anyone to change ISPs to take advantage of this.

However I think they can consider other technologies when deciding whether to help you or not. If so then this won't apply to properties that have access to other CPs such as VM. Openreach can just tell you to sign up for their service instead.

Re: Nice write up! Excellent fact checking!

The laws of supply and demand also apply in the digital economy. Tripling the supply of domain names should reduce the value of any single domain to almost zero due to oversupply.

No, because domain names are not fungible.

If I've told you once, I've told you a million times. Don't exaggerate!

Re: Oh really?

I'm damned sure that keyboard and mouse provide for much more flexibility and capability than a meaningful gaze.

If Visual Studio understood the expressions (verbal and facial) that I direct toward it it'd shrivel up and die. In fact I've probably told it do that on several occasions. Something and die anyway.

Re: Not environmentally friendly

Will they be branching out with a new material?

Re: Huh?

No where in the Ofcom report do they actually define what "Access to a download speed of

300Mbit/s or higher (ultrafast)" actually means.

It doesn't really need to be defined. It's fairly well understood that 'Access to...' means that should a given property owner wish to purchase such a service they can do so. And since VM covers more than 50% of the country and with all the other CPs offering 300Mb/s or higher (including BT's lamentable G.FAST since that does at least provide some properties with 300Mb/s) it's quite easy to see how Ofcom and other industry watchers come to that conclusion.

No-one thinks that Ofcom is claiming 50% of properties in the country already have the service. That would be ridiculous. All they (and other industry watchers are saying) is that at least 50% of properties in the UK could have a 300Mb/s or faster service if they wanted to.

I don't think you'd find many industry pundits who would disagree with that.

Re: Bug class

When you find a vuln, the best thing to do is assume they’ve screwed up in the same way more than once and go looking for the same mistake elsewhere in the code. It’s a very efficient method of finding vulns.

That should be part of standard bug fixing process. That and trying to come up with some kind of change (code, or even process) that would make such a bug hard to repeat in future or at least raise a red flag if it did.

Gold plated TOSLINK cable anyone?

"High-grade optical fiber for distortion-free sound

Gold-plated connectors provide precise contact for the best sound quality"

Ian describes it as "taking a break from the screen" which sounds like quite productive behaviour. Very often the insight into a difficult problem happens when taking a break or, as I've often found, on the journey home.

Yup, I've had a lot of good ideas while out walking or in the toilet.

Um...that doesn't sound good does it :)