Posts by AndrueC

Re: But not for much longer

Oh let's be clear here. I'm not saying that what we have is great and we shouldn't aim for better. We are in danger of having a network that isn't fit for purpose. BT have just about kept ahead of the curve for most people but it's a close run thing and they are still letting down around 10% of the population.

But..

If you have an old, crap and inadequate network then it's sensible to make the case for ditching it and starting again. That's good engineering. It will help your company grow and increase in value.

If you have a network that you have just spent a decade modernising and that (as far as most of its customer's know) is doing a brilliant job then demanding that it be ditched and replaced with something else entirely is not good engineering. The accountants will scream - they may never trust your suggestions again (because it was probably you who initiated the modernisation just completed). The company will probably struggle to get funding from the stock market. You might even damage the company's stock if you go around telling people that it's biggest asset is, in fact, about to become obsolete.

So of course the UK should be trying to get FTTP rolled out everywhere. As techies we can't disagree with that aim. However as engineers we also have to be mindful of costs and other practicalities. Ironically the PO in the 60s suggested a fibre roll-out (there's an promo video knocking around somewhere). BT tried again in the 80s but wanted the right to broadcast TV and Maggie blocked that.

So there we were. A wonderful voice network recently modernised at great cost and now we have to try and get it to carry data. Damn.

Romania is still not a very good country to compare. As you say it had a creaking telephone system. I'm also pretty sure it wasn't available to everyone. Choosing to tear down and start again just isn't a big deal if what you currently have is crap or incomplete.

The UK's problem is that our telecommunications network was superb. It was available pretty much everywhere to anyone who wanted it and (at the time of broadband planning) did everything 99% of people wanted and did it well. Tearing it down was out of the question. Building something to replace it was pretty silly as well.

No we should be compared with our peers: France, Germany, the US. On that scale we actually come out quite well. The best last time I checked the stats. Perhaps more importantly we have greater use of the internet per capita than our peers. In fact we've been in the top ten per-capita for a long time. Our internet access might not be the fastest in the world but is hasn't stopped us becoming one of the world's top consumers of the service.

Re: We have the opposite

and you get to pay for heating your house all day in winter.

I was fine for the first year because my access machine was a manky old cast-off from the mid 2000s. It did a pretty good job of warming the study (it's only about 6sqm). Then we had a round of equipment upgrades at the office and my old office machine became by new home machine. The new machine was ten years younger and it did b*gger all to warm my study :-/

Re: Used to run my own mail server 6 or 7 years ago, but stopped

IMHO, running your own mail server (and believing you are safer that way) is asking for headaches. There are so many more threats these days that it takes a team of people working 24/7 to keep highly vulnerable systems (like mail servers) safe.

I sort of agree...and sort of don't :)

I agree because it seems like you will get attacked. My own little private mail server is under continuous low-grade attack. Random spam, probes on SMTP and POP3 ports. Occasional probes on the web interface.

I disagree because my server just shrugs it all off. The only time I had a problem was when I changed the rejection logic to quietly accept random spam. It didn't bother the email server but did chew through 90GB of my 100GB monthly allowance in two weeks. So now I reject everything at RCPT and that's that. My server is VPOP3 running on Windows 7 on a FitPC2.

Re: Push email for mobile?

The plan for next week, so far, is to go through the config for spam and virus filtering (the original plan was to do it all in this part, but I felt I'd have to compress things so much it wouldn't be helpful).

It'd be nice if you could stick in a bit about DEA. That's what I've been using for many years now with great success. I have my mail server set up with a wildcard redirect that sends matching addressees to my actual mailbox. That way I can hand out individual emails to new contacts with zero configuration.

Most random spam fails at the first hurdle because it doesn't match the wildcard template. If I do get spam I can see what address was used and immediately block just that address. It means I don't need to run any kind of spam filtering software.

I did try out Tesco home broadband; at least it was cheaper than BT

Tesco use the same infrastructure as BT so aside from saving money there is no reason to think it would run faster. In fact since one way to offer a cheaper service is to oversubscribe it you're more likely to see a slow down, especially at peak times.

But now, they've sold that side of the business to TalkTalk, so I'm expecting the service to deteriorate even more

I wouldn't. Talk Talk have more money to spend because they run their own network. The sale may mean more money being invested and therefore less of peak-time slow down. Or more likely you'll be moved onto TT's backhaul and network which will be better than what Tesco pay for.

But unfortunately it sounds like your problem is your telephone line so no change of ISP is going to fix that. You'll have to wait until someone decides to upgrade your phone line. What does the BT availability checker say at the moment?

Re: As I understand it

Hey, if we're going to start attacking marketing terms (and indeed, why not?) why don't we all spend a moment contemplating 'Fibre broadband'.

Let the screaming begin!

2) Windows let you run DOS applications in real DOS by booting into it. OS/2's DOS mode had severe compatibility issues.

That's not my recollection. OS/2's VDMs were very compatible. I played games in them - I remember playing Geoff Crammond's F1GP while downloading messages from CompuServe. IBM put a lot of effort into their VDM technology.

OS/2 MVDM.

Re: What problem will it solve ?

You're jesting I hope, from what I remember OS/2 was just as buggy as Windows and in such a case why didn't they simply use Linux.

A lot of OS crashes were caused by people running it on clones that didn't completely follow the PC standard. I seem to recall a conversation on the CompuServe support forums which ended with a comment something like: "If we ask a motherboard for 72ns RAM refresh and it tells us it's using 72ns RAM refresh we assume that's what it's doing because that's how we build our PCs. 74ns is not the same as 72ns!".

There also use to be an issue with printers because OS/2 insisted on using the polling facility and a lot of cheap parallel cables were cheap because that pin wasn't wired up.

Maybe also (stretching my memory a bit) a similar issue with joysticks because OS/2 expected to be able to talk to them before it started listening.

To my mind that was part of why OS/2 failed (and also the relationship between MS and IBM). IBM seemed to be old-school, 'do the job properly' whereas MS (and clone PC industry) was 'knock something up and if it sort of works sell it'.

Re: Who remembers Green Shield Stamps?

What I like about shopping online with Argos, is the ability to order online and then pick it up in-store the same day or have it delivered.

Last time I tried that (which was quite a long time ago) the web site was rather odd. When you told it your location it gave a list of local stores. But you had to click on each store in turn to find out which (if any) actually had the item in stock. It seemed like it had been designed to frustrate.

Ah, they've improved it. Now under each store in the list it tells you when you can collect it, today, three days, four days. That's a lot better. Might be worth considering that as an alternative to Amazon.