Posts by AndrueC

Re: Don't know what you've lost till it's gone.....

Yeah and Barclays banking app's attempt at that sucks. It's fine for the front of the cheque but then it insists on a picture of the back and it can take multiple attempts before the software accepts the picture. It's particularly annoying since the back of most cheques are blank.

tailored to things that I'm actually looking for,

I see what you did there. Quite funny ;)

Re: re. I'll replace my S10 if/when it ever fails.

Well apparently that's just happened so I suppose I'll have to see what happens.

I think it's more likely that any civilisation capable of solving the myriad problems involved in interstellar travel will be so far ahead of us that we just won't be of any interest to them. Stuck down here at the bottom of a gravity well, squabbling with each other for a piece of dirt to stand on when they can experience and exploit the other 99.99% of the universe.

I think it's akin to us walking along a forest path. Maybe we notice an ant nest but probably not. If we do notice it we might briefly wonder what's going on in there but probably not. More likely we'll just continue our walk without conscious awareness of the nest.

We just have to hope that there aren't any aliens out there who take pleasure in kicking ants nests.

Re: Well then compete...

And there are plenty of places around here where there is no BT fibre, but there are enough houses to make city fibre worthwhile to lay (i.e. similar housing density to where they are currently laying)

Have you told them? It might be worth a try in the unlikely case that they have somehow overlooked the multiple possible locations you mention. However I think it's more likely that they are aware of those locations and whilst they might (or might not) be lucrative there are other locations which are more lucrative.

In all these kinds of discussions going all the way back to the ADSL roll-out there's always an intimation from some people that CPs are choosing locations arbitrarily or ignoring locations out of spite. This is not the case. All CPs are choosing locations according to sound business principals. They perform an extensive RoI analysis and pick their next target area based on optimising the return.

CityFibre are building where it makes the most sense to build. That means number of customers and the actual build costs. The other locations you know of might well be attractive but most likely CityFibre just hasn't got around to them yet. They can't build everywhere at the same time.

What I don't like about the way CPs target areas is that several of them are competing at the physical layer. This is stupid and The Powers That Be should never have let that happen. I live in a moderately small market town and by the end of this year I expect my house to be passed by Swish, Gigaclear and Openreach fibres. This is a waste of resources. Sharing a single fibre is not technically difficult. There is no good technical reason why my house needs three fibre cables passing it.

Re: Did I get this right?

By location. Although wealth will be a factor. Some properties are just difficult to connect and the costs of doing so are unreasonably large for any CP to bear on their own. In those situations it will depend on someone (the owner, their employer, the council etc.) to help fund the connection.

I think it's fair to say that by the end of this decade every property that can reasonably be connected to an FTTP network will be in a position for the owner to request it should they want it. Those that remain will be the true outliers - crofter's cottages in remote parts of the Yorkshire Dales or Bill and Jane's house that they built half way up Ben Nevis because they liked the views. There might also be a few small communities (hamlets perhaps) who don't have it by then but not many.

Something to consider - once Openreach winds down their current programme there will be a glut of trained network builders on the jobs market. Equipment manufacturers will suddenly have spare capacity that they need to use for something. The cost of rolling out FTTP will therefore reduce even further. That will open up locations that are not currently viable.

What %ge of the network in 2030 will be Openreach is unclear but I think it's going to be 'most of the country' for sure and could even be 'almost everywhere'.

Re: Artificial Irony detector required

One of my lecturers just stood at the front writing out what he was saying on an OHP and expecting us to write it down as well. He could have saved a lot of RSI by just handing out a copy of his notes at the start of the lecture. These days (though he's probably dead now) he could just put his notes on a website and go through them with us.

Unsurprisingly that was part of my HND that I failed. I just don't learn well by rote and have an aversion to memorising stuff that will be readily available to me from other sources when I need it(*).

(*)I agree that's a bit of an assumption but now that I approach retirement I cannot think of any time when I didn't have an 'external' source of information available. Learn the basics, learn how to diagnose and learn how to find information is my view :)

Oh I doubt that. Money that's 'sat doing nothing' loses value every day and no accountant or banker is going to tolerate that. Spare cash is always invested somewhere and in that way at least does some good. Even using it to buy a new Ferrari helps ensure the ongoing employment of over 4,000 apparently.

But it's not real money anyway - it's stock awards. Even if given to employees they can't eat stock awards nor can stock awards be used directly to buy food. And if they all tried to cash them in to get some actual money the value would drop quite rapidly. That might result in even more employees losing their jobs.

And as for it being better to give it to a government..hah.

But yes, it's still obscene and yet more proof that there is something really wrong with modern capitalism.

It may be for inexperienced or inattentive drivers or during rush hour, ...

All you've said there is that it isn't dangerous if it's done properly. Well no aspect of driving is dangerous if it's done properly. There are a lot of inattentive drivers (and probably quite a few inexperienced drivers) in rush hour. Thus in practice changing lanes on any road is dangerous.

it's a lot safer changing lanes on a motorway than on most other types of roads for most of the time.

As above ('most of the time', lol), it's still a dangerous thing to do.

"A study report [17] stated that the action of changing lanes is one of the highly frequent sources of crashes in the United States. Accordingly, the official statistics estimated that at least 33% of all road crashes happen as vehicles alter lanes or turn off the road. Furthermore, crash data recorded from 2010 to 2017 in Middle East countries indicate that sudden lane changes produced about 17.0% of the total serious accidents, followed by speeding (12.8%) [18,19]."

For an experienced driver, paying attention a lane change is not dangerous. But how many drivers using the M42 during rush hour fit that description?

It's more dangerous than staying in the same lane so should not be encouraged

Re: "coming ahead of concerns even such as security"

Not sure how you work that one out given EE and (i think) all of the other non mvno providers have just taken advantage of their one-sided contracts to increase cost by around 14%!

Well we're not powerless about that. The increase prompted me to switch from Vodafone to Smarty. My bill has dropped from ~£14 to £7.5 (half that for the first three months) and gain some more data each month although I don't actually need it.

Well what a change. MS are now saying that a fix will be in the next preview release.

No apology for their response to my ticket though.

..and whisky don't forget.

Re: Efforts to recall the mail failed.

Recall is unreliable even if trying to recall an email sent to someone else on the same corporate server.

Re: Lenses ?

They seem to bring the problem into focus for sure.

Does Walmart operate under license from a government body that has demonstrated an historic willingness and ability to enforce an open and competitive market? Has Walmart ever been forced to separate its distribution network from its sales arm and make the former available to competitors under the same equal terms? Has Walmart ever been forced to allow its competitors to set up shop within its own stores?

Even more relevant: Are Walmart's pricing choices constrained by a government agency (BT's are).

If not then I fail to see the point of your comparison.

Ofcom would not let the scenario you describe occur. That's precisely why it's reviewing this pricing change. Personally I'm ambivalent. Some of Ofcom's decisions are odd but it's a complicated market. This wouldn't be the first time that BT was forced to raise prices (or at least forgo a drop) because Ofcom wanted to make room for competitors. They are usually allowed (and even encouraged) to drop prices on new services. That happened with VDSL where Ofcom allowed BT to drop prices as low as they wanted in order to get people onto the service. Ofcom also forced BT to raise the price of the older ADSL service in order to help push customers to change.

It's an interesting discussion point is all.

It would also have to take latitude into account.

In a project I once worked on we had the full lyrics/script in a comment at the start of a file that contained our log generating class. It became a tradition that every time someone changed that file they had to add something like a copyright or a credit. The log file generator didn't change all that often but still it became a handy repository of anything you might like to know about that particular sketch.

Re: Speed Limits

My Corolla is okay with speed limits most of the time. Temporary limits and even variable limits don't normally bother it. If the camera disagrees with the satnav database it goes with the camera. Unfortunately the satnav is out of date for one road near me where the limit was raised from 50 to NSL. It's too short to have enough NSL repeaters to override the 50mph limit programmed into the satnav. Then there's the approach to M40 J11 coming down from Middleton Cheney where it decides to display the motorway sign on the dash. It'll be because it read it on the sign for the roundabout but I've never seen it do it anywhere else and what is the point of replacing the current speed limit with a motorway sign?

But the most egregious issue is driving along the A75 in south west Scotland. That road has separate speed limit signs for HGV and my car reads all of them and keeps telling me that the limit is 40mph.

Oh and it's auto-dip detection is poor. So basically it's great as long as you're not trusting it to understand what's going on.

Re: This isn't that new

It recreates its desktop icon on every update as well.