Posts by AndrueC

> f you're with another ISP over BT it's marketed as an iPlate and costs more

Or you could just do unscrew your faceplate and disconnect the ring wire.

Our office is over 4km from the nearest exchange. Both lines are over 50dB - 54dB I think. One syncs at 2Mb/s, the other at 3Mb/s. Bonded together we manage about 4Mb/s on a good day.

But without stats we just don't know. Cables are almost never laid in a straight line and usually they travel in bundles until the last possible metre. 2.5k from an exchange could be double that in actual cable length. Given the large area of open ground behind the exchange some cables might be diverting a long way to follow the pavement (which is usually where they go).

Re: just call me picky

And if you fancy a trip in a GCU I think avoiding Meatfucker née Grey Area would be wise. I think it might be in league with Teresa May.

Re: Well, while we're being pedantic...

> 365.256 days is only true if you're measuring the sidereal year

What? You'll be telling me that the Earth doesn't revolve about its axis in 24 hours next!

Re: Hmm...

>You shouldn't really be installing the GUI on a Win2012 server

In our environment that would be a pain. We are a software development team so none of us are 'highly qualified experienced adminstrators'. We're just a bunch of guys who have to have various test environments to run our product on. The advantage of a GUI is that you can usually muddle your way through whereas a console typically uses arcane and obtuse syntax. We do use PowerShell for some things because our product integrates with Exchange and SharePoint but for everyday maintennance a GUI is far easier to live with.

In any case - they gave us a GUI. Why saddle it with an additional pointless 'front end'?

Re: Hammer time

> Aren't you confusing Lucifer's Hammer with Inconstant Moon? It's the latter that features hot fudge sundaes.

Nope, you're wrong. Inconstant Moon is a novella about the Sun barfing at us and frying half the planet.

Lucifer's Hammer is about a comet that hits us and in the early part there's a scene where people are discussing the consistency of comets.

Re: Even worse are the "now give us feedback" nags

That's one bad thing about Amazon. I don't mind rating a seller but as far as I can tell you have to write some text in the text box before it'll accept the rating.

Re: unsubscribe

> However - email addresses do leak from Amazon to generate unidentifiable spam. It is presumed that at some point an Amazon Partner is given the address as part of your transaction - and it is the latter's security breach which allows the address to be farmed.

Er, no. For several years now Amazon has anonymised email so their partners won't get your address unless you give it them. It's all done through the Amazon Communication Manager.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=3149541

"All Seller communications should be routed through the Amazon Communications Manager which will deliver the Seller's message to you. The Communications Manager will deliver the message stating the Seller's name as the sender but from a unique e-mail address generated by us that will have the ending "@marketplace.amazon.co.uk". By replying to this e-mail your response will also be directed through the Communications Manager and will be delivered to the Seller, but again, from a unique e-mail address generated by us.

This enables Sellers to communicate with buyers without either party disclosing their private e-mail addresses and ensures Amazon has a record of all correspondence between buyers and Sellers. Please see the information on this page for full details."

If a third party got your address it must be because you included it in the body of a message or contacted them directly. It's one of Amazon's best features. To be honest it has a lot of advantages for them as well - call it mutual self-interest :)

> these customised to each company email addresses give you a nice big fat stick to hit them with

Sadly they don't always believe you. The publishers of Avast! refused to accept responsibility when I started getting spam using the address I'd given for registration. They claimed it was probably a trojan on my system or else the email had been intercepted.

Clearly a security company that knows what it's doing. Not :-/

I have my own domain and run my own mail server. I achieve the same thing using a wildcard alias system ;)

Re: The Blame

You blame Thatcher? That was 20 to 30 years ago. Why stop there? Why not blame Gladstone? Or how about Pitt the Younger?

Doing both is best :)

Re: Windows Pinball

Been there, done that (DOS to Win16 to Win32) over 15 years. Suite ran just fine thank you and many people benefited from it. Oh and we did that without a QA department and little to no management. And it was agile before we knew what it was called because we could get called off to other work at any time.

Re: I try to write clear code

> so that people reading it (or the API) know what I mean by "foo"

Why the hell are you calling objects 'foo' in production source? You shouldn't have an object called 'foo' and a comment saying what it is. Call the bloody thing by what it is in the first place.

> If you change the code, change the comments. Simple.

In theory, yes. In practice not so much. Comments are only read by humans so they can be overlooked and neglected. Source code is read by the compiler and although it won't enforce identifier names it can enforce structure especially if encode your logic in object constructors and well defined classes.

> It tends to be the well informed IT staff at larger companies who have no personal agenda

The only people working for large companies that don't have a personal agenda are the cleaning staff - and some of those would probably recommend a model of vacuum cleaner if anyone cared enough to ask them.

Re: More protectivism and monopoly instigation

The difference being VM only started making profits this year and haven't expanded their own network significantly in a long time. They don't even have market dominance in the areas they do serve. I don't know what the answer is but neither government intervention nor VM is the answer.

EU intervention is what's helped Cornwall.

Re: Have I got this right...

> If taxpayers have to pay for the network, perhaps it's time to take it back into public ownership. leaving BT with retail services only.

No. Never. No-one who remembers how the Post Office ran it could possibly want that. And, really, do you want to hand control over the Internet in the UK to the government? In fact - do you really trust the government to be better at managing one of the largest, most complex and most expensive infrastructure projects the country has ever seen?

I don't. BT might not be perfect but putting that project into the government's hands would be worse.

Yeah I don't understand situations where cabinets are not being powered up. I can understand situations where nothing has been done because it's not worth the money but if they've gone to the expense of installing hardware why not finish the job?

But as for time scales for this deployment I suppose that depends on the area to be covered. If they anticipate a lot of blocked ducts or pole replacement that could slow things down. Given the already questionable financial situation they probably don't want to employ an entire legion of engineers and if it means a lot of ground work fixing or laying ducting/poles that could be a real problem.

The EU and BT together have done a good job for Cornwall it seems so probably it's just down to money and willingness. I can imagine local councils being less bothered about it than the EU.