Posts by AndrueC

Re: Probably not good enough

Theres no good argument for not doing complete separation.

There is but it depends on your definition of 'good'. As the article says there are issues arising from the BT pension scheme and properties that the group currently own. The properties issues are probably not the big problem. Rent can be agreed or property ownership transferred as required. No the big problem is the BT pension scheme. That is already in enough trouble without trying to split it off or agree joint liability.

"BT manages Britain’s biggest company pension fund, which has a £40bn war chest to pay employees past and present their retirement income"

I would also add that I'm a bit sceptical about how a completely independent openreach would get the funding it needs. A lot of money is needed. Many tens of billions of pounds. It's a easier to get that if you're part of a huge group of companies with a track record operating in an established market.

Re: This is a genuine question to all software devlopers...

One thing I've never understood is why software is released with known bugs.

Software is very complex. Some of the most complex things humankind has ever tried to construct. If we refused to release it until everything was perfect you'd be waiting a long time for it. So we have to be pragmatic and choose a level of quality based upon the target market and what that market will tolerate.

contention also applies for home wired (XDSL/DOCSIS/FIBRE) connections too.

True but with proper planning (esp ducting) you can just stick another cable in the ground. Especially with fibre optic due to lack of cross-talk concerns. Wireless on the other hand is using a finite resource. Signal propagation and information carrying characteristics means that we don't have an infinite range of frequencies available. And of course there's a lot of existing applications already using chunks of it.

We're already struggling to allocate frequencies and having to use strategies like white space use. Beam shaping might also help although I'm not sure I fancy having a mast following me around and beaming a signal straight at me :-/

and DOCSIS

Yes although they seem to be managing to extend it so far. Exactly how far they can push it before they have to replace it with fibre is anyone's guess. I was looking at some white papers last week and amazingly it sounded like they have it covered for a while yet. Then again they were papers from those selling the head-ends and nodes so possibly a little biased :)

Re: "Pure fibre"

BT already has special rules for valuation.

Re: Just out of interest,

What is so difficult about making every cabinet in the country fibre connected?

I'm not really sure what you're asking about here. Are you just asking what's so difficult about extending FTTC to every cabinet? If so the simple answer is because they have over 40,000 of them dotted around. For each of those you need to:

* Build a concrete plinth, run a duct over to the nearest voice cabinet. Mount the new cabinet to the plinth. Basically just civils but still going to take a couple of days.

* Arrange for the local power network operator to provide mains supply (can take a couple of days or maybe months depending on what's available in the ground).

* Install the first batch of line cards. A bit of wiring to do in the cabinets.

* Connect the two cabinets through the new ducting using twisted pair. Not much wiring to do there as lines are patched over only as/when the service is enabled on that line.

* Connect the new cabinet to the exchange using new cable. Sometimes that's overhead, often it's underground through ducting that may or may not be full/blocked/collapsed.

If we were optimistic and assumed that councils, civil construction company and power companies operate efficiently and to schedule and that most ducting issues can be resolved in a couple of days you're still likely looking at a week's work per cabinet.

So right off the bat you're looking at 40,000 week's work and that's being very optimistic. The two cabinets they put up near me had people working on them for two weeks (first one), three weeks (second one after first became full). This is a techie site so we should all understand that the above list of things-wot-need-to-be-done isn't going to have issues. Coordinating at least two other companies and the local council is a nightmare in and of itself.

Now if you are interested in FTTP then you can take all of the above and add:

* Pushing the fibre from the cabinets into each road and street.

* Installing a manifold somewhere in the street.

* Microtrenching from pavement to house (or running new dropwire).

Now the last step there can be done as/when required.

But this can all be summed up as 'it's a helluva lot of work and it's amazing how much can go wrong'.

Re: Sooner have an AI musical overlord than Bieber

So would fit well in the charts then

Unfortunately it's probably also learnt to compress the dynamic range before outputting the audio :-/

Obligatory Dilbert.

Re: 66.1kms

when you could be relaxing in a comfortable seat

Air-planes have comfortable seats? When did that happen?

I gave autopatcher a try tonight but it just keeps crapping out with various run time errors. Like I wrote before:

Oh well.

:)

Re: This explanation explains everything

At first sight maybe almost too well layered. When I first read Inside Windows NT many years ago I was amazed how modular things were and how object oriented the kernel is. In fact as a young software developer in the early 00s I kind of thought that was why NT performance was a bit poor. It felt to me like too much overhead and baggage for an OS.

A common discussion around that time was whether C++ sacrificed performance compared to C because of it's OOP features. And here was an operating system that used encapsulation, had methods and even ACLs for internal data structures.

Quite an eye opener for someone used to working with MSDOS :)

Re: Welcome to the Internet

There are worse protocols to work with. I've spent the last three months implementing support for HL7 (2.x - thankfully no-one seems to want the XML variant). There's no shortage of documentation about that. Vast reams of stuff. Pretty much every last aspect of it is tied down. But there's the problem. You go into that much detail and you're starting to come up with a protocol that defines the domain. The tail wagging the dog.

And you know what - no-one is exactly following the standard anyway. They probably all got sick of reading stuff like this. So after all the trouble people have gone to to describe every last field, component and sub-component every system has to be tweaked to get it to work.

I think that as long as you see JSON as just a convenient way to transmit POD and you validate accordingly the risks are minimised. I bet the attack surface for a JSON parser is a lot smaller than that of an HL7 parser.

Oh and I've been coding for over 30 years now. If someone wants to refer to me as a 'hot young radical' the only word I object to is 'radical' ;)

Re: Larger display - appeals to the older generation

I think it's going to depend on the demographics of iShiny developers. If the majority of developers continue to be in their 30s or younger we might run into a problem. At that age you haven't yet encountered presbyopia.

But the problem isn't just on small devices. It's computing in general. I'm going to be 50 next year and am already running into grief because I have to run my desktop and laptop screens at 125%. I would like to increase font size on Chrome but it breaks a lot of web sites. Barclays is particularly bad and becomes practically unusable. Tesco isn't much better as I can now only see one item at a time in the basket on my laptop.

I'm not worried that I won't be able to read the screen at all but it's getting to the point where I'm forever having to scroll around to see all the content. Something about modern web design is making it worse. I don't know if it's Bootstrap or attempts to cater for fat fingers on touch screens but so much screen space is now wasted. When you're forced to magnify the content there's no way it can all fit on without scrolling or risking layout issues. It's all becoming a bit tedious :-/

Victor Meldrew - you are my hero :)

Re: Prime target

Indeed, same with the antivaxxer crowd.

Oh, anti-vaccine. I thought it was a group of people who objected to venerable mini-computers from DEC.

Re: Interesting point...

Ah ha! Got even more detail here concentrating on the technical side. It does sound to me like the answer to your original question is 'BT TSO' but also that it's a tad complicated all round. Colour me-not-surprised :)

Re: Mandatory hemp farming

Even in the 1500s, England (the UK being a way off) needed to import hemp to keep the navy going.

But I bet at least they didn't blame Brexit for it.

Re: 'Digital Natives' are totally oblivious to how it works

In the UK automatics are more expensive to buy and generally use about 20% more fuel

The Honda Jazz claims to be more efficient:

Manual: 55.4 - 56.5 mpg

CVT: 57.6 - 61.4 mpg

But in my experience it's not the nuts and bolts that matters so much as the nut behind the wheel. Good acceleration sense and patience can save you more fuel than is lost through choice of transmission.

Re: Start investing and laying some fibre, then we'll listen...

Given that VM (or even NTL as they were then) are fairly well known for not actually laying any fibre

Until recently, yes, but as mentioned in the article Project Lightning involves laying quite a lot of new fibre.

"Virgin Media will extend its unrivalled fibre-rich network to approximately four million additional premises over the next five years."

Not that I'm a fan of VM but I feel that the telecoms industry has too much hype already so I do try to be fair and impartial. I don't think it's fair any longer to accuse VM of never laying fibre. Sadly the downside for their existing customers is an increase in prices. I would imagine the only way VM could get £3b out of Liberty Global was by promising a good rate of return.

That's probably why the first time they made a profit was in the run up to the sale. I guess they had to prove to LG that it was possible to make money off cable services in the UK.

Re: Trump visit?

Just think of the stunning views when you are teeing off on the ninth.

At 530km diameter your drives would be impressive as well. Mind you it would a whole new issue around teeing off.

"You lost it, how - sliced? hooked?"

"Nah - it exceeded escape velocity".

Re: Pitfalls of G.fast

Oh it's worse than that. Although they are keeping their cards close to their chest BT have indicated that at least initially their spangly new G.FAST units will be attached to existing FTTC cabinets. So they will be giving a speed boost to a subset of existing 'fibre' users rather than extending the reach of high-speed broadband.

That will also rule out this symmetric technology as good cross-talk mitigation is essential.

Re: SUPER.....oops.

(As it's the EU, I suspect the correct answer is; "Officially 1, but actually 2")

Don't be so narrow minded. It could be both.

My wife attracts the crazies on public transport.

Where did you meet her?

(sorry).

Re: Dilbert

More Dilbert.

Re: Oh Dear

* My phone uses more battery during the day than my old one did.

Actually this is no longer true. The battery is holding the second charge very well. Even though I've now white-listed several apps as 'do not sleep' it's managing 10% a day discharge. My Neo had an extended 4600maH battery and discharged at around 12% per day so the S7 Edge is a lot better in that respect.

I got the new phone on Tuesday and I've only had to charge it twice. It was last charged Saturday night and is on 84% at the moment. Can't complain about that :)

To be fair (sorta) Android Marshmallow users will only experience sync issues if they enable power saving. But it does seem pretty silly that Calendar, Contacts sync and GMail are not white listed by default :-/