Posts by AndrueC 5086 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
As far as Sharepoint is concerned, last time I used it a few years ago, it was even worse, there were whole project sub-sub-folders that refused to save to it. We stopped using it as a result.
Oh gawd, yes. I first encountered it when writing a data recovery tool for it in the early 00s. Its menu structure was a bit convoluted (menus to the left, menus to the right, menus along the top and context menus in the corner). But the most recent incarnation is worse. Why is 'Check Out' on the 'More' menu of the context menu? And checking in involves dragging the replacement document onto the browser then choosing Yes to replace it then you have to find the check-in menu item.
Sharepoint is very configurable so it's probably just that we're using the default template but it ain't pleasant. Oh and of course it's following the modern 'fat fingered tablet user' design methodology so that all I can see on my 1900 x 1020 monitor is the main menu and two documents.
The long path limitation is to protect older applications (and poorly written modern ones) where the developer might still be assuming that paths cannot exceed 260 characters. Such applications might not work properly or experience dangerous buffer overflows. I would imagine Explorer limits itself in order to discourage users from making directory paths that are too long for legacy applications.
Any application that is being properly written can either use the registry setting mentioned earlier or prefix all paths with the string "\\?\" when calling API methods. NTFS supports paths of more than 32,000 characters.
So it's a protection for the vast number of legacy applications and programmers that occupy the Windows ecosystem but easily worked around for those who know what they are doing.
I lived my formative years (7 to 16) in Exeter then went to Plymouth Polytechnic. I befriended a chap that had never been outside Plymouth. I used to wind him up by suggesting that the border ought to be moved so that Plymouth was in Cornwall "because we don't need it and it's lowering the tone of the county" :)
Basically true, although people within counties which straddle that line are not likely to see a North-South divide within the county.
I think Northamptonshire does. Down in the south of the county most of us look toward Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire for employment and entertainment. We consider ourselves to be part of the M40 corridor. Our county town is a long way north (over half an hour away even though it's dual carriageway) and most of us can't be bothered going up there.
But Northamptonshire is an unusual shape - quite narrow and very north/south.
And speaking as a resident of South Northants I wish that 'South Midlands' was an official term. My outlook is definitely southern yet officially I live in the East Midlands even though I'm only a few miles from the west midlands :-/
Our part of Northamptonshire sticks down in to the area known as 'the South East'.
It always will be 'up to'. Anyone that gets a 1Gb/s connection installed and thinks they are going to see 1Gb/s 24/7 is always going to be disappointed. Yes, it should at least connect at the agreed speed but actual throughput is another matter. Even if you can find a remote host that can serve you data at that speed domestic connections are always going to be contended and you're always going to see some kind of peak time slow down unless you pay leased line prices.
If the average speed for the UK is 5mbps,
It isn't, and hasn't been for many years, quite possibly not for a decade. Estimates vary but even the most pessimistic put us well into double digits now. Ofcom's latest figure (2017) is 36Mb/s.
I'm actually a little surprised that it's that high given that so many people only opt for the lowest spec package but Ofcom are using Samknows data so it's probably not far out.
The money would be better invested in forcing the telcos to roll out fttp to all premises in the country.
I don't follow what you're suggesting there. There have been various estimates for the cost of rolling out FTTP to all premises in the country and prior to VDSL they were coming in at around £30 billion. BT's work rolling out VDSL will have reduced that slightly by doing some of the work as they've installed fibre aggregation nodes at various places ready for expansion. Unfortunately that's the cheapest bit to do. The expensive bit is actually running individual fibres from the ag nodes to each premise. Looking at other FTTP projects around the UK (KCOM being a great example) a figure of around £300 per property passed is looking likely. The figures for truly rural roll-out (villages and hamlets) are harder to find and likely a lot higher than that due to low density of housing.
So you're likely looking at a cost considerably in excess of £20b. How do you propose to use £67m to force private companies to spend £20b between them?
And will they reduce the line rental charges when all upgrade work is done, and those engineers get the boot back to the dole queue?
No.
Actually Openreach probably will. It's been reducing line rental charges for over a decade now. It's just that the CPs haven't been passing those savings on and in fact have been increasing their markup.
However, many folk remain less than happy with Openreach, with Templeton, a town in Devon, England, burning an effigy of an Openreach van on Guys Fawkes Night in November to protest over slow broadband speeds in the area.
Which was uninformed and ill thought out. Openreach had already offered to cover that area in the next BDUK phase(*) but Devon County Council rejected their plan and went with Gigaclear instead. So responsibility for Templeton now rests with Gigaclear(**). If Openreach stepped in now there would (quite rightly) be howls of protests from the ALTnet providers.
(*)Not necessarily that specific village however. I don't think the plans they put forward were that specific.
(**)Though I don't know if Gigaclear are covering that specific village either.
Did they say how he moves the pen without a body?
Sadly the Wikipedia article doesn't elucidate and I'm not interested in following the footnote link on an article about the crackpot leader of a crackpot/evil religious organisation :)
I'll admit to reading (and enjoying(*)) Battlefield Earth 30 years ago - bought with a £5 gift voucher for good school attendance - but I am not an advocate for Scientology. I wouldn't be an advocate for any religious organisation although if pushed I could be persuaded to retaliate by rejoining Humanists UK aka BHA.
(*)The first half was good fun. The second half got bogged down in minutiae (how to prevent reverse engineering and how a gold-standard banking system works).
The network’s website and Twitter channels both have ominous-looking countdowns to the big launch, which is timed to coincide with the day Hubbard was born, 13 March.
Well if they timed it to coincide with his death it'd probably cause controversy amongst the faithful :)
"Scientology leaders announced that his body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another planet,[331] having "learned how to do it without a body""
Uh huh
And they realized they can connect from other places than the computer in the home living room?
If the platforms 'pseudo-suspended' the accounts for - say - 18 hours a day it wouldn't matter much where the kids tried to access them from.
I'm unsure about this idea. On the one hand I have never liked government interference in parenting (or indeed any other part of citizen's lives). On the other hand it's a difficult thing for parents to 'police' so maybe they need some help. But I'm even less keen on abdicating responsibility to corporations.
And..do we actually know it does harm? It is very likely affecting the culture their generation is developing but just because it looks different to the older generation(s) doesn't mean that it's bad. There were plenty of people who thought Rock 'n Roll would cause the end of civilisation.
Whilst actually true, it really missed the point. Namely that the register isn't taking credit card payments through their website and the only details they have on me are minimal details that can garnered anyway from other websites given a little time (I'm thinking professional communities here).
I take your point but out of curiosity I pointed the test at my personal web server's front end. I got capped at a B rating because 'This server accepts RC4 cipher, but only with older protocols.'.
So that's a web server running in my spare bedroom using a low-cost Windows solution (VPOP3 for anyone interested). All I did was buy a certificate and install it.
Yes, The Register doesn't know much about me (only a disposable email address) but still. It's a technical site that loves to pick apart technology and gloat over its failings.
Oh some of the functions are useful, it was more the faddy nature of it. Didn't they produce a watch with a calculator that needed a small stylus to operate it?
All I currently want from a watch is:
* Radio controlled.
* Solar powered.
* Tough enough to survive being on the wrist of a golfer.
My current model does all it needs but at eight years old I suspect the battery will be going in a couple of years and I'm happy use the cost of replacing it as an excuse to buy something new for my wrist. But most of the G-Shocks that are radio/solar also have silly things like thermometers, hygrometers (WTF?), compasses and altimeters. Great if you need them I suppose (though the first two presumably require you to take the watch off and leave it to acclimatise before taking a reading).
Something like my current model in two-tone red (or orange) would be nice.
Could it be something going on with the network?
I suppose it could be. There doesn't seem to be any obvious cause in the stats but Android stats aren't very detailed unless you root the phone even with paid for battery investigation tools. I just irks me - 0.5% an hour or 2% an hour. That's quite a jump :-/
Yah. My S7 Edge can last over five days on one charge(*). But every week or so without me doing anything out of the ordinary it suddenly jumps from losing ~0.5% of battery an hour to nearly 2%. Power cycling fixes it but Android isn't supposed to need that any more. I've invested time and (a little) money into investigating it and despite being an experienced (albeit not Android) software developer I have never managed to work out what it is that's increasing battery use.
And to cap it all, as I've mentioned before, it can no longer inform me the moment new email arrives. Even now that I'm using GMail for the initial notification. It will eventually tell me that a mail arrived but it can be anything up to three or four hours after the fact.
(*)I don't do much with it. The occasional phone call, occasional text and managing money. Oh and an hour every day streaming over Bluetooth.
I've always said that 'smartphone fever' will go the same way as 'digital watch fever'. I remember as a kid being envious of those with digital watches. Then the craze started for calendars, stopwatches, phases of the moon and data storage.
Casio seem to be keeping that alive a bit with their G-Shock series (of which I'm a fan but wish they'd produce a modernised but equally 'basic' version of my current ageing G-Shock-500E) but basically digital watches are just 'ho hum' for most people. Smart phones are going to go the same way.
One of the fastest ways to assign a repeating 16 bit value to an area of memory on any Z80 based system is to use the stack and unwind the loop a bit. From memory:
LD HL, SP
LD A, <inner loop count>
LD SP, <target address>
LD DE, <value>
repeat:
PUSH DE
PUSH DE
PUSH DE
...
DEC A ;// Although you can also use BC if you have a lot of memory to clear.
JR NZ repeat: ;// But you'll also need to upgrade this :)
LD SP, HL
A classic case of trading execution speed for instruction 'size'.
At least the membrane keyboard featured an early version of Intellisense, with commands and functions popping up while the user typed. A proficient user could rapidly fill the diminutive memory with only a few keystrokes.
Actually, no. Like all versions of BASIC that I'm aware of the keywords were tokenised once stored in memory. What the article author is describing is some slightly clever keyboard handling that knew the rules about keywords and automatically put the keyboard into an appropriate shift state such that keys generated token codes instead of letters.
With a lot of computers you typed 'PRINT "Hello"' and that was 13 characters. However a parser then stored that in memory as <PRINT token>"Hello" which meant it only occupied 8 bytes (note how the space after PRINT can be discarded by having the <PRINT token> expand to 'PRINT '.
What the ZX81 was doing (and the Speccy did the same) was to put the keyboard into a shift state whereby the 'p' key generated <PRINT token> (Character 0xF5 on the Speccy). This saved typing and simplified the parser but had no impact on the amount of memory consumed while entering program statements.
How interpreters optimise code storage is an interesting subject. My favourite 8-bit machine was the Amstrad CPC and its version of BASIC stored memory addresses alongside line numbers and variables to improve performance.
Is Openreach supposed to be forced to lay fibre and install a new cabinet because the existing one is 1/2 km away?
It's not up to openreach. It's the developers responsibility to order telephony infrastructure from someone. So your question should more correctly be phrased as Are developers supposed to be forced to order fibre regardless of location?
Openreach (or whichever CP the developer eventually signs up with) will do whatever is necessary to provide the infrastructure that the developer has ordered. As it happens openreach have been running offers for a couple of years now whereby they will install FTTP for the same cost as twisted pair for a certain number of properties. I'm pretty sure it needs to be more than six houses though so that developer would probably have to choose to pay extra.
If they are 'Brackley based' why does it involve Thames Valley police?
I live in Brackley and it most definitely is not in Oxfordshire. Northants Police should be the ones dealing with it.
I will say that 'Northamptonshire Honey' is very, very nice.
Being hit by falling bodies is less good. That actually happened at an airfield very near where I live.
Mind you it was also Hinton where Mr. Farage got into a spot of bother when his political aspirations got the better of him.
the planting date of a lot of the poles round here is mostly pre '70s and they are starting to go.
I get the impression that a lot of Poles want to go :)
Probably not. The price reductions by openreach over the last ten years haven't been passed on to consumers :-/
If BT can wholesale at (currently) between £88 & £89 per annum, WFT do they provide by way of "added value" for their retail customers, given what they (which includes me!) have to pay?
You should take that up with your communications provider. All the CPs have been steadily increasing rental prices while openreach has been steadily reducing them.
There's nothing special about BT Retail here. All the CPs are doing it. They all charge us significantly more than openreach charges them for line rental.
In this case it appears Ofcom are trying the same wheeze that led to FTTC. They are trying to make current xDSL offerings so unattractive to BT that it accelerates FTTP deployment in order to move it's customer base to a product with better returns.
Have you had to explain something extraordinarily obvious to a user or client? If so, write to On-Call and we might use your story in a future column.
Our customer support staff often have to explain how to use a web browser. Sometimes it can hilariously bad.
1. Explain what a browser is. Cue helpful suggestions like "It should be called Chrome, or Explorer". "It's what you use for Facebook"
2. Explain the difference between between the Google search box and the address bar.
3. Explain how to type 'start.com'. Hint: Type a '.' not 'dot'.
4. Repeat the access number several times until they type it correctly.
5. Ask them if they could go back to their desk where the problem is actually occurring instead of some other desk 'because it has a working computer'. Start again from (1).
It's a good job I do software development and never have to speak to anyone outside my team. I don't have the patience or tolerance to do tech support.
As true as this is, it boggle the mind why BT are still doing new-build copper installs. A BT engineer friend tells me it's just whatever the developer wants to pay for - they'll do copper (VDSL), or Copper+Fibre or pure fibre as requested.
Yup. It's entirely down to the developer to request the infrastructure they want. And for a couple of years now BT have been doing FTTP for the same cost as twisted pair copper. Frankly if I was in the market for a new build I'd refuse to consider a property if it wasn't FTTP. Unfortunately it seems most people just don't care so builders just keep on doing things the way they always have. I think that FTTP should have been the legal requirement for many years now.
Unfortunately there is one possible reason why it isn't. FTTP was installed on some sites in the early 00s. Unfortunately it didn't support data (presumably only video) so the developers and/or residents had to pay for a twisted pair overlay so that they could use DSL.
Maybe that burnt enough fingers to put some developers off the idea completely.
One thing KCOM have got right is in its monopoly area is that it has installed FTTP/FTTH.
It's easier to fund when you know that you're going to get 100% of the profits. Both TalkTalk and Cityfibre also have a wholesale product but - as far as I know - it's unregulated so they can continue to charge whatever they feel they need. BT has no such luxury. If it's lucky Ofcom might give it a few years of freedom as it did with FTTC but sooner or later it will be told what to charge other CPs.
It's quite right that BT should have Ofcom breathing down its neck but that must be a significant discouragement to investment.
So how will the total cost to the country be less if we have two or three or four companies digging up the same roads and sending different blokes up poles?
Agreed. The trick is reconciling the needs and desires of the multiple companies involved so that they don't overlap each other. The cost of major changes to infrastructure varies a lot around the country as does RoI.
About the only way out of this is to force a monopoly onto the industry. But that provider still has to justify its existence so it will still target cities first to be seen getting the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. But as it moves out from cities to smaller communities the cost will increase and the number of connections per £ will drop. Will its backers be prepared to continue putting in the same amount of money to provide connections to the last 2 million properties as they did for the first 30 million? Will they be prepared to increase their payments to keep the number of connections created per unit of time constant?
No matter how you do it 100% FTTP coverage includes at least 10% that is going to be a loss at least within normal accounting time scales. In fact the hardest to upgrade 10% will probably require going on for half the total budget.
Well technically even BT's DSL solutions are 99.9% fibre if you include all of the backhaul. It's only the last few hundred metres that are still copper ;)
But yeah - I wish the ASA had stamped that out when VM first started it but instead they let it slide so BT joined in.
I'm not so sure about that. TalkTalk do already have a wholesale service as does Cityfibre.
Neither have to operate under Ofcom regulations like openreach does, though.
People in the UK order primarily by price. Speed is of secondary interest and only has to be 'enough'. On FTTC only a minority sign up for the top tier, even amongst those close enough to the cab to get a benefit. VM see the same thing - only a minority bother with the 300Mb/s service. A lot of people only move to something higher when VM decides it's time to close their slowest package and upgrades them for free.
So yes, FTTP take-up is likely to be lower than availability in the UK simply because most people can get all they want from more 'traditional' media.
This isn't to say that FTTP is a bad idea or not needed. It's just that it's needed more for the future than for the now..for most people. It would also be the most sensible way to address the minority of people who don't currently have an adequate service of any kind. Unfortunately those people are in that situation because they are not cost effective to provision. But if we want to jump up the FTTP league table then start rolling it out in the areas that are currently struggling on ADSL. But that will be expensive :-/
Sadly, it's beginning to look like Ofcom are going to allow that to happen. I really feel it should step in and somehow get all the CPs to work together. Maybe form a single company that the CPs have to buy shares in and prevent them laying fibre independently. They make their money back in the same way that shareholders do - as a %ge of what they put in.
Unfortunately that seems very unlikely to ever happen.
The CPs aren't going to be happy just handing their money over to someone else to invest 'where they see fit' with returns being 'whatever they feel like this year'.
Ofcom probably won't be keen to create an absolute monopoly.
But at the moment it looks like we're at real risk of having multiple fibre providers in the large urban areas and nothing outside. That's crazy. For better or worse the UK is only just starting a fibre roll-out. How about we try and do it the right way from the start? Just this once, eh?
Hmmm. How did they measure that speed and what are they using for backhaul? Sticking a 4G mast in the middle of a field isn't too difficult and I'm sure you could get decent speeds to/from it. The question though is what does the mast talk to? Most people want to talk to the wider world, not just a mast ;)
"Sam Barker, senior analyst at Juniper Research, said its likely the mast will need to connect to a standard base station, 40-50 miles away"
Well..quite :-/
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
