Re: Not quite
Not so easy to charge money for though.
Oh I don't know. Have you seen the number of different brands of bottled water in your local supermarket? And in the UK at least it's no better that what comes out of most people's taps at home.
Posts by AndrueC
5086 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
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Intravenous hangover clinics don't work, could land you in hospital
Official: Toshiba pulls out of European consumer PC market
Sunday 28th February 2016 21:32 GMT 
Re: What to buy?
I've been using Acer laptops for some years, and like them a lot.
Same here. Currently typing this on an Aspire 5732Z. I replaced the HDD with an SSD. The webcam has stopped working but then I never used it anyway. It's just that now I get random USB warnings from it. But at nigh-on five years old the laptop is going well. Only other issue is sourcing replacement batteries (I think most have now been sat on a shelf for a while by the time they ship) but I mostly use it on the mains anyway so I can live with that.
My previous Acer developed a dicky power switch but it was easy enough to replace.
How will Ofcom reduce our reliance on BT if it won't break them up?
Friday 26th February 2016 16:02 GMT
Re: Access? Not a problem in VietNam!
Not with GPON fiber to premise
True, but they didn't have that option. FTTC is a compromise derived from the realities of the situation. Have you not read that Thinkbroadband article? If BT had gone straight to FTTP they'd be nowhere near finished yet. Forget arguing over the last 5% in 2016. I doubt we'd even be at 50% coverage yet.
Friday 26th February 2016 15:23 GMT
Re: Access? Not a problem in VietNam!
BT has code powers in the UK but they are still subject to planning consent from local councils. Another problem they face is getting power to their cabinets. That can involve considerable expense and lengthy delays while waiting for the local grid operator to wire the cab up.
The biggest problem BT faces is the existing network. I'm sure most of us as readers of this site are aware of the cost and hassle of dealing with legacy systems. Well BT is dealing with a huge nation-wide legacy system. Even worse the legacy system does a damn' good job at what it was designed for and a not-too-bad job at what we now want from it. Scrapping or deprecating the UK's copper local loop just doesn't make financial sense. It is still a huge asset. It's like that wonderful VMS server in the basement that just keeps chugging along day after day, year after year doing what is asked of it. You'll never get the CFO to sign off on replacing it.
Friday 26th February 2016 13:53 GMT 
The article overlooks the financial and practical issues involved which maybe isn't a surprise for an MP. There's an attempt here by someone with a great deal of knowledge and experience to look at the costs and practicalities of FTTP. It's quite depressing.
"So with an engineering team 19 times bigger at Openreach, in four years working at the same rate they would passed 855,000 premises with FTTH, or if they had started in 2009 we would have 1.5 million FTTH premises passed. Of course to scale this up to a roll-out that matches the VDSL2 footprint of 23 to 24 million premises, it is not a simple multiplier as the number busy dealing with existing copper issues will remain static, so lets assume around half the Openreach staff are involved in the FTTH roll-out and the rest are doing the usual faults and installs. Scaling this up Openreach would need an extra 130,000 staff with an annual wage bill of £2.6 billion to have kept pace (Openreach engineer starting salary is in the £19,000 to £21,000 region, and we have ignored the extra costs of training, fleet vehicles etc for this simple projection)."
My devil-possessed smartphone tried to emasculate me
Friday 26th February 2016 10:25 GMT 
Deskphones can have their moments though. Mine occasionally changes from showing my name and extension to 'Mr X'. And at one previous job I managed to crash my desk phone and it had to be power cycled.
Being a software developer at a company with dedicated support staff means I now hardly ever have to use my phone. But recently someone's errant dialling meant I had to redirect a call. Except there is no redirect button. In the end I had to admit defeat and take the caller's details so that they could be called back.
So I checked with our IT bods how to redirect a call just in case the need ever arises again. Apparently I have to press '*6*'. Now what puzzles me a bit is that it's a modern-ish Cisco unit that has four soft buttons. Only one of them is currently in use. It's labelled 'dire' which I assume is some kind of 'unlike' button for annoying callers. I asked IT if *6* could be assigned to one of the other three but I got That Look. The one that says 'who is this fool?' so didn't push the issue.
'I bet Russian hackers weren't expecting their target to suck so epically hard as this'
Wednesday 24th February 2016 12:34 GMT
Re: Just use known patterns ffs
I'm always a bit leary of embedding '++' and '--' inside expressions. It stems from many (many, many) years ago when one of the versions of Turbo C++ had a bug. As I remember we had a loop that processed an array and the array subscription was incremented during element access.
The bug was that the subscript indexer inside the loop was only incremented once regardless of how many times the containing for() iterated. I think it might have been related to compiler optimisations so only showed up in release code as well.
Anyway for me despite the passing years and a move from C++ to C# I still always treat ++ and -- like they were procedures rather than operators.
Intel shows budget Android phone powering big-screen Linux
Tuesday 23rd February 2016 11:27 GMT
Re: "Low-end == 2 Gb"
The belief that because of moores law, no care is taken regarding well optimised code as machines will just get quicker.
But they do generally get quicker :)
The problem with optimisation is that it often makes code harder to debug and maintain. That means longer development cycles and higher skill levels from the developers. The world already struggles to produce enough software developers so putting more demands on their ability and time could be a none-starter. For damn' sure it'll bump up the development costs.
It would also require cooperation from management. An understanding across almost the entire company that quality matters more than time and cost to market. Except that in reality much as we developers might whinge the truth is that for most companies time and cost to market are most important.
Windows has (so far) been the world's leading computer desktop software. Does anyone think it got where it is today by being high quality, well optimised code?
We have to be smart about it. Optimise where we need to. Take more care where we need to. Try and develop tools that help us generate better code.
Sir Clive Sinclair in tech tin-rattle triumph
Friday 19th February 2016 14:07 GMT
Randomize usr 1302
Well I never knew that! I knew about 1331 and the format because I spent a happy week writing my own turbo loader for laughs but never discovered 1302.
On a related note I've always credited The Sinclar Spectrum ROM Dissasembly (PDF) as one of my landmark reads. I will always remember the moment that I realised why you could use the most significant bit of a mantissa to hold the sign flag. A little light bulb glowed bright in my little head back then :)
That and the eponymous Zacks bible Programming the Z80 (also PDF) between them kindled my interest in programming. Not so much 'doing something clever' as that involved a lot of work. More the idea of 'being the perfect servant in the back room'.
Thursday 18th February 2016 20:10 GMT
Re: 30% chance of failure?
and entirely didn't bother with error correction, so even the original cassette was hard to load.
Nor did the original Speccy format. It just recorded an additional byte (or maybe just a bit) at the end of the data stream which when you counted the number of set bits made the total odd or even or somesuch. That's why you never found out about a bad load until right at the very end. At least the beeb format split the data into blocks and checked each block.
The original speccy format was 'reet crude'. When recording it toggles the output signal on/off. The interval between each transition indicates if it's a 1 or a 0. After eight transitions you've got a byte. After 8192 transitions you have 1kB. No blocking, no error correction. Just a stream of bits.
Thursday 18th February 2016 19:59 GMT
poke 23609, 6 gives you a nice beep as you type. Oh and I was wrong about the key for 'USR'. It's actually 'L'.
On this emulator it's:
* Select 48 BASIC.
* 'T'
* [Ctrl][Shift]
* 'L'
* 1331
* [Enter]
Oh and does anyone else think how weird it is that you can write a Spectrum emulator in an interpreted language like Javascript? Lordy how technology has moved on!
Triple-murderer prisoner keeps mobile phone in his butt for a week
Terrified robots will take middle class jobs? Look in a mirror
Thursday 18th February 2016 14:48 GMT
Re: Argh!
Had argument with my GP about Statins despite being within NHS guidelines for BP, Cholesterol, weight etc. It came down to her saying "all men your age should be taking Statins"
Lol. Got the opposite from my GP. My cholesterol was a bit high when I had my 'over 40s MoT' but everything else was good. His comment was "It's only one bad mark on your record and statins carry their own risks. It's best if you avoid them for as long as you can".
Facebook tells Viz to f**k right off
Tuesday 16th February 2016 15:23 GMT
A terrible decision. Viz is very informative. I remember one letter they printed sometime in the 1980s where a reader had determined that 'a watched kettle boils in exactly the same amount of time as one that isn't watched'. I note that more recently another researcher was able to extend the research further.
It's that kind of research and dedication to the truth that has made Britain what it is today :)
Ofcom must tackle 'monopolistic' provider BT, says shadow digital minister Chi Onwurah
Tuesday 16th February 2016 12:05 GMT
There's a shared fibre to something like an FTTC cabinet and then individual fibres from there into the buildings.
As BT intend to roll it out, yes. So far BT has always used TPON so there's nothing other CPs can do other than ask for the traffic to broken out at the exchange so that they can use alternative backhaul arrangements (as per FTTC). I don't know if any telcos have gone for a a genuine 'one premises, one cable' solution. Given fibre capacities it probably never makes sense unless you're connecting up a data centre for Google or Microsoft or some other big player.
But I'm not sure the LLUOs are too bothered anyway. It would be very expensive for them to push their equipment further into the local loop. At the end of the day most of what made LLU attractive was the backhaul separation. Separate DSLAMs (and later MSANs) are just a maintenance cost. As long as BT can more or less keep up with demand I don't see anyone complaining.
Monday 15th February 2016 16:05 GMT
Re: Clueless
G.Fast has nothing to do with the economics of small cabinets.
Well of course its primary reason is to push the DSLAM closer to the end user premises to boost speed, that should go without saying. But there are going to be something like ten times as many G.FAST nodes as cabinets. BT have to bring the cost of a G.FAST node down. That inevitably improves the economics of smaller installations.
Exactly where the break-even point will be is anyone's guess. But I think it possible that a small cabinet that isn't viable for FTTC could be covered by four or five G.FAST nodes for less cost. Of course getting the fibre to the nodes still won't be cheap but it's an improvement.
Whether or not BT actually choose to use this to extend the footprint of xDSL is another matter. But they may think that a village currently struggling on ADSL will give a higher takeup of G.FAST than a large cabinet in a town that already has FTTC.
Monday 15th February 2016 12:06 GMT
Re: Clueless
my cabinet moved several miles back to the exchange
That sounds unlikely. BT would not go to the expense of re-routing telephones from one cabinet to another. I think what's more likely is that you were on an EO (Exchange Only) line which meant you couldn't get FTTC at all (VDSL equipment is not currently allowed within exchange buildings). To resolve this BT had to install a new cabinet then move the EO lines over to it. Network topology meant that the best place for the cabinet was nearer the exchange where it could provide the most improvement to the most people.
Another possibility is that yours was a a number of distant cabinets that were connected to a secondary cabinet closer to the exchange (a kind of mothercabinet/daughter cabinet arrangement). I can see the 'mother' cabinet being upgraded to help those directly connected to it but the daughter cabinets might not themselves be viable.
It's a sucky situation either way but hope is on the horizon. BT are looking at something called G.FAST and that should improve the economics of small cabinets.
Monday 15th February 2016 11:48 GMT
Re: Is the issue Openreach
BT have been paid a shitload of public cash to do what they are reluctant to.
True but most (possibly all) of the councils were offered a choice. They chose BT presumably because the other offers weren't as good. As it happens take up has been so high that in a lot of cases claw back clauses are coming into effect and projects are being extended.
VM etc are still in debt for their fibre rollouts.
Indeed. A salutary warning to everyone contemplating major network roll-outs.
Monday 15th February 2016 11:38 GMT
She commented that BT's current focus on fibre to the cabinet "is probably a symptom of a lack of competition, because if other people were rolling out networks they might not be so complacent."
Other people are rolling out networks. Sky are rolling out FTTP in York. Hyperoptic are rolling out FTTP in several cities. Even VM (the descendant of the companies expected to offer competition in the 90s) is finally extending its network with Project Lightning.
Then there's the several Altnets (eg; Gigaclear) who working in the rural areas.
But one of the biggest obstacles they all face is equivalence of access. Ofcom demands that all the big players (of which there is currently only one of course) open up their networks to other providers. That puts a big dent in the RoI for network expansion. It will be very interesting to see what happens with VM because they might soon reach the point where Ofcom will decide they need to offer a wholesale service to other CPs.
'Build them and they will come' is a very hard sell. When you modify it to 'Build them and they will come then another company will take a chunk of the profits' it gets even harder. Equivalence of access is a good thing for the consumer as far as price and sometimes service is concerned. But for businesses that own the resources it's a bit of an arse.
Hey cellcos: Guess who's got your backhaul still? That's right. Big daddy BT
Tuesday 16th February 2016 11:52 GMT
I think the important bit is the C-RAN stuff. There's some wiki-info on it here. It appears to be The Next Big Thing(TM) in mobile data.
From a quick scan of that article it sounds like the radio signals are piped to the cloud (sampled analogue?) where they are processed and converted to their actual payload. That offers various advantages which I can't quite get my head round at the moment :)
More info here (PDF).
Send tortuous stand-up ‘nine-thirty’ meetings back to the dark ages
Boffins freeze brains, then thaw them – and they're in perfect order
This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs
Wednesday 10th February 2016 14:41 GMT
Re: Code Review
Resharper > Part of loop's body can be converted into a LINQ-expression
Developer > Go on then..hey, cool!
{a bit later}
Resharper > Part of loop's body can be converted into a LINQ-expression
Developer > Go on then..this really is neat.
{a bit later still}
Resharper > Part of loop's body can be converted in to a LINQ-expression
Developer > Oy, Bill! Come and look at this..'click'.
Developers > What the <censored to protect the innocent>. Okay, let's not always do that, okay?
Wednesday 10th February 2016 11:07 GMT
I reordered the words in it to isPenUp. I'll leave it to you work out the original variable name.
Ha, ha. I always used to chuckle at an identifier that Microsoft came up with. Mind you it was the only thing that was remotely humorous about their shell API. Still, to a Briton, 'SHITEMID' does offer a small glimmer of pleasure while fighting the idiocy :)
Fleet of 4.77MHz LCD laptops with 8088 CPUs still alive after 30 years
Tuesday 9th February 2016 09:09 GMT
Apparently the unchanged fact that most solid-state electronics are most of the time happily chugging along for decades without any issues
But not all. I finally found out last night why my Squeezebox Touch has been having issues when powering on. It turns out one of my Netgear gigabit switches has been failing for several months and last night finally expired. It probably explains the minor glitches I've been seeing and largely ignoring with various bits of my A/V kit.
So it might be digital but it seems there's a third state. On, off and 'mostly on'.
Big hybrid iron swinger Infinidat bigs up its own growth
Government hails superfast broadband deal for new homes
Monday 8th February 2016 14:42 GMT
Re: Still building mud and sticks.
I know that in the places we rent out I wouldn't do it. Mind the last place we bough was built in 1992 and didn't have RCBs!
My current house was built around then and it doesn't have them. In fact it has fuse wires in the consumer unit. They look like it ought to be possible to replace with fuse cartridges but I think a sparky once told me that wasn't allowed. Since they rarely blow I've never properly looked into it.
Blame Wilcon for that :-/
Monday 8th February 2016 12:50 GMT
Better late than never I suppose but this deal should have been in place a decade ago. Five years ago at least. Ironically some new builds did get fibre as part of the initial build late last century but then BT had to lay copper overlay in order to provide ADSL to them.
Madness I tells ya. Sheer madness.
Cisco recalls switches that could short power to the case. And hurt you
Forget Tiger Woods – here's Cyber Woods: Robot golfer hits hole-in-one during tournament
Sunday 7th February 2016 11:05 GMT
The golf swing is all about repeatability so a robot ought to be good at it. Humans don't guide the club head into the ball - we just hope that our posture during the swing results in it happening. The ball is long gone before the meat inside our skull can do anything about the point of contact.
As for a hole in one..meh. I did that once on the 12th at Cherwell Edge Golf Club where I'm a member and I'm a 21 handicapper. Reaching the green from the tee on a par three is the definition of a competent golfer. If the ball then rolls into the hole that's just luck. Worth celebrating of course but still luck.
What would be impressive would be an autonomous robot. Even more impressive a bipedal one since I imagine the balance requirements of swinging a golf club would be difficult to get right.
While we weren't looking, the WAN changed
Friday 5th February 2016 15:57 GMT
networking is pretty boring
I don't agree. When you actually sit down and work out how a chunk of data gets from my laptop in south northamptonshire to a server somewhere on the west coast of America there's a helluva lot going on. All those protocols, wires and switches playing 'pass the parcel'..and yet it works.
Maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember when computers mostly only talked to themselves but I find it almost fascinating, both the technology and the politics of it.
The Mad Men's monster is losing the botnet fight: Fewer humans are seeing web ads
BT broadband is down: Former state monopoly goes TITSUP UK-wide
Thursday 4th February 2016 15:42 GMT
Re: Just BT then?
Your own post seems to explain that adequately:
"I've been struggling to get to bt.com and btplc.com."
and (from TBB):
"The main bt.com, btwholesale.com, openreach.co.uk sites appear to be down"
So nothing there to suggest that the fault has 'spread' to Plusnet. Just a failure on BT's network that affected some of its customers and also knocked some of their web sites off the wider web.
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 16:51 GMT
Re: Just BT then?
SKY seems to be working fine and IIRC they use BT's equipment.
Only some of it..and you have to be careful what you mean by 'BT'.
Sky use the local loop which is owned and operated by BT openreach. For ADSL they have their own DSLAM inside each exchange but for FTTC (Fibre) they are reliant on openreach DSLAMs in the cabinet. Sky may also at some (most?) exchanges use openreach cabling to get to the nearest Sky POP.
This fault seems to be a BT Retail issue (I suspect a server room outage of some kind). There is no relationship between Sky and BT Retail so no reason to expect faults on one to impact the other. Think of it like a major fire at a DHL distribution hub. All couriers use the same road network but only parcels passing through that DHL hub will be affected. Other couriers can carry on quite happily.
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 16:05 GMT
Puts me in mind of the last chapter of A Fire Upon the Deep.
I wonder what (who?) the countermeasure was aimed at this time?
German Chancellor fires hydrogen plasma with the push of a button
Thursday 4th February 2016 11:09 GMT
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
FFS are people really still trotting out this lefty scapegoat? Get over it. Thatcher left power TWENTY SIX YEARS ago.
Exactly. It's a smokescreen. It complete hides the appalling policies of Pitt the Younger. That man should be vilified for the ongoing harm he caused this country!
'Printer Ready'. Er… you actually want to print? What, right now?
Monday 1st February 2016 16:52 GMT
Re: adobe reader
Speaking from personal experience, the genuinely nice people who work at Adobe simply won't be told.
I noticed during the summer that one of their Reader software updates didn't put the utterly useless icon back on my desktop. Sadly it came back with the next update. Who the hell do they think actually needs the Adobe Reader icon on their desktop?
Home Office lost its workers' completed security vetting forms
You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors
BT dismisses MPs' calls to snap off Openreach as 'wrong-headed'
Wednesday 27th January 2016 16:38 GMT
Re: Publicly owned business
As a counter to that suggestion, let me point you to the success story that is the railways under national ownership.
Although I'd like to draw your attention to the curious correlation between passenger numbers and ownership ;)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
