Posts by Hubert Thrunge Jr.

I don't

I don't run an ad blocker on YouTube, I run it on my browser, so that's OK then.....

And I block pop ups from most sites.

£11.99/month - just not worth it when you consider I pay £7.99 for Netflix.

With the detritus that is on YouTube, £3.99/mo is the max I'd want to pay. Maybe £11.99/yr then....

Google/YouTube, load the Blunderbuss with grapeshot, take aim at your foot, fire!

Statistics show that Smart Motorways are safer per mile travelled than any other type of road in the UK.

The issue as with all roads is the people who drive on it.

People say "I won't drive on the Smart Motorway because it doesn't have a hard shoulder - it's not safe".... The same people are happy to drive up the A1 still doing 85-90 with the possibility of coming across a moped doing 28, a tractor or other farm machinery doing 20, or lycra clad fanatics with numbers on their bums "racing" and not paying any attention to other traffic.

If they really want to make roads safer then they need to introduce time expired licencing with tougher mandatory re-tests every 5 or 10 years. Now that should make people happy about road safety.

So not running on a 386 then

And there was me hoping that this whole thing was still running on a 386/25 based box with a 20Mb HDD and 5-1/4" drives.

Silly me.

As the bloke at the Council IT department said "Look after your server"...

Moon on a stick

This is what happens when you want the moon on a stick, yet nobody had planted the seed that would grow into the tree that would supply the stick.

I recall phrases like "it'll be an app that will run on our Blackberry phones", and the alarm bells going off in my head.

The people who wanted the ESN had no idea about anything to do with Comms, RF, or reality if the truth is known.

They were just desperate to dump Airwave and it's growing costs as the tapering contract signed by the minister at day one meant that it just got more and more expensive.

When Macquarie decided to get rid of Airwave, the Home Office should have bought it and that would have ended the massive cost burden in one hit, but they seem to be allergic to owning anything. Should have been in-house from day one.

One thing ESN has done is accelerated the development of secure apps and functions within the 3GPP standards.

It's a cluster-f**k of a project. It will never do what it was asked (D2D being one function) and let's not forget, the only reason it's EE and Motorola, everyone else walked away.

FFS Wake Up!

Haulage and distributon fleets have been fitting camera & driver monitoring systems for years.

The emergency services have had cameras for years.

If you operate a haulage company and wish to go to London, under TFL rules you have to meet the DVS requirement for vehicles over 12T gross weight. That requires 360 cameras, plus a raft of other "safety" requirements (to make up for the inability of people to look the f**k where they're going).

In the case of "witness cameras" as fitted by Amazon, they give them (a) recordings of any incidents where "your Amazon vehicle clipped my car and broke my mirror" which are usually settled privately and not via insurance - they're a money maker for the scum of society, (b) in the event of a real accident where it's not the driver's fault, they provide the video evidence to back it up, thus saving the drivers skin from prosecution, and persecution. And then (c) driver profiling - where the G sensors in the camera detect high load / sudden brakiing, they can review the footage and see if the driver was driving like a twat or if that mysterious black dog did indeed run out in front of the van.

The vehicles are already fitted with telemetry for both delivery tracking and security, that data is also used for driver profiling, which in a responsible organisaton - as Amazon claims to be - will lead to driver training to reduce incidents, and thus reduce the chances of a vehicle being off the run due to accidents, and the subsequent delays in deliveries (and payouts because it didn't turn up).

Going back to the emergency services, most ambulance fleets have full camera systems now for not only driver monitoring, but for crew and patient safety. Some fleets are still hampered by backward union demands who claim "they'll use it against us" rather than "that patient assaulted me, look at the video footage for proof"

Have you noticed how some fleets used to be full of dents and drive vans that looked ready for the scrapyard, and now suddenly they're all dent/scrape free? That's because of two things - cameras, and the driver has to pay the insurance excess if they caused the damage. As if by magic, they actually give a f**k about their work equipment now.

I shall decend from my soapbox, and have a G&T to calm down.

Judgement Day

Listen and understand. That Facebook A.I. Bot is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with, It doesn't doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it will absolutely not stop,ever, until you're banned.

£5Bn from Government

With the small profits that BT/Openwretch group makes, why is the government throwing cash at them.

As someone who lives in the sticks, the government subsidy (Gigabit Voucher) for BT bringing me FTTP-OD is a waste of time because BT are not interested in connecting me unless there are six in the "group buy", considering my nearest neighbour is another half a mile away, and so-on, and I'm a SME so *should* qualify for £5K of govt cash.

Not according to BT, it's their Rural Voucher scheme for me... £750 max, eh, it says up to £3K, no says BT, not how they do it, It's pay £13K or not have it. As there are no alternative "pipe" providers out here, I'm royally stuffed.

BT don't give a shit about customers, only that HMG is daft enough to keep spunking billions of £££ into their open mouth, all to give to their shareholders.

How does this incompetent bunch of fools keep winning contracts.

Oh, I forgot. OJEU rules do not let you take an organisations past performance into consideration as it may disadvantage new bidders trying to win contracts. As they have no track record, you have to discount the track record of every other bidder and treat them all as new.

Normal human beings learn from their mistakes, to really f**k it up requires things like OJEU procurement rules.

Perhaps after Brexit is sorted, the leadership of Crapita might have unfortunate accidents.

Omnishambles

Whichever way you look at it, it's a shambles.

It was born out of the will to get out of Airwave as fast as possible because the original PFI terms were crippling.

The solution was not ESN, it was hold Airwave to account for the missed performance targets that happened every month, and withhold payment until they sorted themselves out. As Macquarie ran the business with an empty bank account, they would have been forced into administration, and HMG could have bought them for £1 - thus owning the network, and then only having the running costs to pay, not the exorbitant fees that they were being charged. They could then instruct Motorola to upgrade the network to TEDS2 or better, and then go out to tender for a composite device that could do high speed data over LTE leaving critical voice on the now government owned Airwave network.

Nope, can't do that because government seems to be allergic to owning things.

What we must also remember bus that EE won the network deal because everyone else pulled out, and Motorola won the implementation deal because... everyone else pulled out. They could see it was a poison chalice, and would be fraught with issues due to unrealistic timescales with it needing 3GPP standards that still don't all exist yet, and hardware that also didn't exist.

And six months ago they gave Crapita an expensive lifeline to do something that was already easily possible - a bit of VoIP routing. FFS you can do that with a Raspberry Pi and a copy of Asterisk!

Still, it's all keeping me gainfully employed!

I refer the reader to my subtitle.. omnishambles!

What could go wrong?

Fujitsu, Crapita, Atoms, et Al.. oh wait....

How do I set up the reminder to this post when it all goes titsup in about 12 months?

Someone mention Nokia?

Powered up my N9 the other day, still works.... The phone that should have been.....

I blame climate change, on Jupiter caused by those Martian tourists!

The planned East West Railway here, effectively re-laying the Varsity Line between Cambridge and Oxford is part of HMGs plan for fast transit routes between the two great technology and education centres. Govt want it fast. Yet the local councils are doing what the French coal community did between Paris and Calais. If it goes the way the local councils want it, it'll still be quicker to drive there (especially along the new Oxford-Cambridge Expressway) or catch a train to London, the across to Oxford. Just the reason they closed the line in the late 60s (the crap DMUs didn't help then either).

Robots (misprint)

No no no.... You'll find its one in four would sleep with a Robert. They mis-heard / mis-read the question and started thinking about Robert Downey Jr, or similar.

Either that or they consider their Ann Summers Rabbit a robot?

Makes 5L you say?

Hmmm do they offer discounts for people wishing to buy 14 in one go?

Is there a pod for Abbot Ale?

government allergy to ownership

When Airwave was bought by Motorola just the other year for £816m (ish) it makes you wonder what planet the Home Office are on.

They should have bought it instead, this saving around £300m which is more than the ESMCP project would save them over the same period.

They just seem to be allergic to owning anything in-house these days.

Omnishambles

Whichever way you look at it, it's a shambles.

Motorola WHOLLY own Airwave, and paid just over £800M for the network and all of its contracts.

Had the Home Office had some people with a bit of common sense they would have bought Airwave and then they'd have however many years they would have liked for ~£800M not three for £1.1Bn

As for the project, it's what happens when you want the moon on a stick, where the seed for the tree hasn't even been planted yet!

It'll be ready in 2023, maybe. Maybe not.

How much?

The numbers I was given for thr ESN portable device were £1100 for the "phone" and £500/yr for the SIM / Network management.

There is currently no mobile device and the only "gateway" type device that they *need* is around $8000

On Airwave, a portable (in volume) is around £400, the DH are charged £900/yr/terminal.

Vehicle sets last a long time. Most are heading for 15yrs now. Portables, under contract, can be refreshed every 5yrs in the Ambulance contract.

What Motorola should be doing now is upgrading the Airwave network to TEDS2 with its more useable data rate, and having a composite device that can use 4G where high speed data (for video etc) is required.

I do get a feeling that there is great unhappiness in the Home Office that Motorola won it (pretty much by default), and had it been Pye or Burndept, things might be happier for them....

They'll do anything to avoid import taxes....

Will it carry a CE mark?

Or will the package be marked as a "Gift" or "Children's Toy" to avoid any duty when it lands?

Kempston Keyboard & Joystick

Who had one of those as an upgrade to their Sinclair?

As a teenage yoof, my friends and I "tested" the prototypes of those as the founder of Kempston Micros was out maths teacher.

He was a very clever guy, but not much of a teacher sadly, or we were just a completely unruly bunch!

He left the school and set up Kemspton Micros and the rest is history. One of my classmates went on to write software for him while he was at university.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be!

Make the letters stop....

Though thinking about it, what will I use to light my fire?

After four phonecalla, six emails to the Crapita team tasked with dealing with it, they refuse to acknowledge that my other house, which was a bit of a building site for a while, is unoccupied, and has no television of any sort.

So, the letters keep coming.

I take them to my new home and use them when I light the fire.

I'd have to buy a newspaper if they stop, and I have difficulty grasping the concept to paying for biassed reporting whatever side.

We don't get free papers out here in the sticks, and with no current Foot & Mouth outbreaks, there are no sheep to burn either.

Deep joy.

N900... N9...

I had a N900, loved it, even though it was feature limited until the indie Devs came up with features like MMS for it. Still got two of them somewhere, one is running Mer now.

I grabbed a N9 as soon as they were released. It became one of the longest used phones I've ever had as I used to kill phones in a year. It lasted almost two years before battery life tailed off to make it unusable for me. I resisted Android, went BB10 with a Z10 - great phone. Replaced that with a Jolla, drowned it within a week, so bought another one! Still got it. That's where the N9 was going.

Had Nokia not had Elop, and pushed the N9 globally from it's proper planned launch date, I honestly think the world would be a different place. The iPhone was still in its infancy, it's features were nothing to write home about and lots of things we took for granted didn't work. The N9 was full multitasking, even android didn't do that at the time. The OS was years ahead, but it was murdered by Elop, aided and abetted by the Symbian developers who thought they had a future...

Nokia would have been no.1 and Meego would be on other devices.

But, that didn't happen, and we have HMD selling Nokia's marque in the market, and they are doing very well.

I bought a Nokia 5 for my lads 13th birthday. Well under £200 and much better than a Shenzhen Special Landfill Android jobby.

Signal strength

-110dBA is silence.

-110dBm is a weak RF signal.

Re: Many

Around here, when I was a lad, there was a Porsche 944 with the registration 10 RAL, with the spacing slightly different. She looked like she did too.

Not to mention ol' Stavros Parrish with PEN 15 (which he sold some years back)