Re: Conspiracy theories
"izards from the lower fourth dimension"
I never did trust Eddie :)
5085 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
Its OK to shoot pretty much anything over there isn't it?
Some jurisdictions get snooty about discharging firearms within city limits. In those places you might be reliant on 'self defence' statutes and/or a lenient judge. Speaking personally I find the idea of someone firing a gun out of a bedroom window at a floating drone to be horrifying. Where's the bullet going to go if you miss? Come to that with a decent handgun the bullet will probably keep on going even if you do hit the drone. Even shotgun pellets could end up peppering your neighbour's garden.
It's bad enough firing a gun upward within a populated area but firing it horizontally from a second floor window is scary as hell.
But no relation to Anna Daptor :)
Ahem. It's not always the case that..
That's true. I wasn't aware of the Babe Station difference but if I remember correctly C5 used to be broadcast on two frequencies as well. Or was it C4 HD? Something to do with lack of capacity on the old Astra 2D satellite meaning they had to use Eurobird. Then when another broadcaster (the BBC?) lent them some of their 2D capacity the contract on Eurobird continued.
The reason Freesat can't use capacity on Eurobird is because it covers all of Western Europe (maybe into Eastern as well?). Broadcasting unencrypted on it means writing a big cheque to the rights holders. With Astra 2D the footprint is more or less restricted to the UK so rights holders don't charge as much.
Edit:Wow. Obviously I'm too busy working to keep up with these discussions. I posted almost the same thing as someone else an exact hour later.
will include TVs with integrated Freesat and customers who've discarded old kit when upgrading to the latest <free time> hardware
..also Sky customers who want another DVR to take some of the load off the Sky box tuners. It doesn't make a huge difference these days since for me it's a pretty small %ge of my viewing but it helps a bit.
but only a fifth of Sky viewing is time-shifted (the rest is live)
Really? I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
I've said this before - people just don't understand what a DVR is all about. I haven't watched live TV for many years now. I don't even watch F1 live although that's more out of habit than anything else and because even watching the finish live doesn't guarantee that you'll know the result immediately :)
Surely national broadband deployment is an issue for national governments not the EU?
You'd like to think so but:
BDUK - National Government Programme - Barely got off the starting blocks. Most regions have only just got around to choosing a provider. No spades in the ground yet.
Cornwall - BT/EU programme - Running very nicely with good progress being made. I think it's even on schedule to complete when predicted.
Moderately strong tea, milk in afterwards (I work with someone who sometimes puts the milk in along with the tea bag while waiting for the kettle to boil). Oh and at our office f'gawd's sake use the water from the filter jug. The water out of the tap tastes fine for drinking cold but boil it up and you get a nasty soapy taste :(
As a software tester, can I say that
As a software developer can I just say that I hate you :)
Nah, I try to maintain a good relationship with our testers. After many years I've finally realised that they help produce a better product and even help improve my ability. Some of them are house trained as well :)
> You can do those things with css in a browser, it doesn't need an app.
Not many do though. So the gist of Jason 7's argument "Your browser is crap, mine isn't, nyah, nyah" is not appropriate. It would be more appropriate to say "Reliance on specific apps for web services just reinforces the fact that web designers rarely bother to design their sites for optimum use on a small mobile device".
For what it's worth I don't like the idea of 'apps'. Never have. Even the terminology stinks. I fundamentally agree that a web browser should be all you need. That was supposed to be what made 'the web' so wonderful. I've been working with computers since the early 80s so I thought we were making progress and moving away from dedicated applications.
Unfortunately the proliferation of different browsers, the corruption of (or failure to adhere to) good standards and possibly developer laziness mean that ship seems to have sailed for now. My experience is that in a lot of cases a dedicated 'app' offers a better experience than using a generic browser. Things shouldn't be that way - but they are, and I don't think it's because 'your browser is better than mine'.
reinforces the fact your web browser isn't a proper grown up one with all the features.
What web browser features can fix the fact that my 46 year old eyes struggle to read text on my phone or that my fingers (not fat fingers either) sometimes hit the wrong link? I mean, yes, I can zoom in but the page layout doesn't always lend itself to that. It either mucks up the text(*) or else I have to zoom back out to navigate or to reach a button.
Do any browsers support orientation detection? Properly, I mean, not just re-flowing the text. A dedicate app will often adopt an entirely different layout in horizontal mode than vertical mode. Putting buttons along the top instead of down the side for instance.
Perhaps all of that could be done in a browser if HTML supports it but how many web designers actually do bother to think about that kind of thing? It's second nature for a phone developer but the most you can really expect a web page to do is flow properly so that page items aren't obscuring other page items.
(*)I don't mean corrupted, merely that the way it ends up being wrapped is unhelpful. Harder to read and/or puts hot links close together so it's a bugger to tap on the right one.
Other than off-line access, I don't see the point of separate apps for web sites.
Often it makes them more readable by having a better layout. Having bigger text and bigger buttons and being able to adjust properly for vertical/horizontal viewing can make life a lot easier - especially if you are over 40 and your eyes are starting to go.
> Hence my comparison with ISP's
It's not quite the same thing though(*). The 'up to' used by ISPs mainly refers to the connection speed between your modem and the DSLAM. In most cases this doesn't vary by much from day to day. So when you buy an 'Up to 24Mb/s' connection you're not buying a connection that sometimes reaches 24Mb/s. You're buying a connection that on some lines will connect at 24Mb/s. It's a different thing. If you only connect at 6Mb/s but always get 6Mb/s of throughput then your line is giving you 100% and doing what you have paid for it to do.
It's the difference between:
'Speeds on the M25 can reach up to 90mph'
and
'Vehicles powered by internal combustion engines can travel at up to 300mph'
What's important is that the latter does not allow you to complain if you drive a Nissan Micra and struggle to get above 90mph :)
(*)Congestion would be the same thing but usually what people complain about are crappy line speeds.
I have to say that I bought the boxed set of Saphire and Steel a couple of years ago and was a bit underwhelmed. The nostalgia was there but I was amazed that it seemed to just consist of them wandering aimlessly around trying one thing after another until they happened to eventually hit on the solution.
Rose tinted spectacles I suppose.
Still - it passed a few hours and I'm glad I bought it. It's just that not everything back then was as good as we might like to think when we look back from 30+ years :)
Apart from Joanna of course. She still looked good :D
Waiting for peaks to clip - I suppose that's okay if the lead time is short but it usually takes time to enable capacity during which your customers start to get arsey. I'm not sure about being able to spread it out either as that's reliant on the public being prepared to watch that way. The stats on PVR usage suggest most people don't want to record things first and would rather watch it immediately.
Multicasting would help with the current situation where most people watch live and BT have built it into FTTC which is good but I don't think any ISPs are using it at the moment. But time will tell. The indications are that broadcasters want to switch to IPTV and shut off transmitters (even Sky seem keen on the idea).
I hate 'Kft'. It seems to me that if people want to stick with ancient non-metric systems that have more than one unit for length that's their hard cheese. If they want the convenience of having only one unit to measure the same type of quantity they should go metric. They should prolly also be banned from using decimals. Make them use fractions like wot their grandpappy did. That'll learn 'em :)
Virgin fibre at end of garden? You mean you have an actual VM node outside your house? Or were you not aware that VM's offering is no more 'Fibre to the premises' than BT's? Both services terminate the fibre some distance from your property then rely on copper to connect to your premises.
VM's uses a coax loop which is good because it can carry more data but bad because it's shared by multiple properties.
BT's uses twisted pair which is bad because it is more bandwidth limited but good because you're not sharing it with anyone.
VM's system also has issues with upstream signalling and that's why they can't compete with FTTC on upload.
The exchange might have the bandwidth but I bet each cab is substantially less.
Hmm, that's a good point actually so I'll correct what I posted. You could be impacted by other users in your immediate neighbourhood. But it's unclear I think. Everyone has to use the cab to exchange link (even LLUOs) and BT at one point stated that they would guarantee the bandwidth from cab to exchange. But they have also put a 'best efforts' figure on it. With FTTP on demand being released this year I assume they are confident that the cab to exchange link can easily be upgraded.
Looking here shows the cab to handover as being 'Direct fibre multiple GigE links' so that's a lot of capacity.
Didn't realise it was such a contentious issue
Was that supposed to be some kind of geeky, engineer in-joke? It's not bad if it was :)
In throughput as seen at your premises, no. HD streaming as offered by Sky and BBC is only a few megabits a second so barely raises a sweat for a 76Mb/s connection. Even broadcast quality HD streams are only a dozen Mb/s so again would not bother your connection.
However this article is basically about congestion and the impact on it of HD streaming. That isn't down to your specific circumstances. It's down to the local and/or national usage patterns. You have to realise that if BT know that 1,000 people have 76Mb/s connections on your exchange they won't have allocated 76Gb/s of backhaul (76Mb/s * 1,000). That would be 1:1 contention and you're not going to get that on a residential service.
No BT will have provisioned somewhat less than that. The trick for them is to decide how much less. It's very much a black art. Just working out the current requirements is tricky. Then you have to account for growth patterns and spikes in usage. This is where ISPs control their profit margin. You never want to have spare capacity but equally you have to accept that for large parts of the day the network will be underutilised. It's a nightmare shared by road planners.
You wait untill everyone in your street starts streaming HD on a few devices. Contention is the bane of all networks...
Since the poster appears to have FTTC other people on the street are not the problem (setting aside minor crosstalk impact). It's other people on their exchange (ie; anyone else in the town) that matters. And of course everything from there on back to the ISP. And the ISP interconnects.