Posts by Kernel

Re: Starbuck coffee a reward ?

I believe they're not doing too well in NZ, either.

"What exactly are people going to use 5g for? "

Well, according to yetserday's new aricle, here in NZ the first deployment is being used to provide high speed fixed internet access for businesses in an area where there isn't fibre - not everybody has the same use case as you.

"Where is this 5g network equipment going to come from considering the current China spats over trade and spying?"

Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola?

"Actually, they started in the text messaging business, in the days when text messages were inscribed on sheets of paper. Yes, they were a paper manufacturer.

Then they moved in to rubber, including as insulation for cables, and they moved from that into other telecoms equipment."

Bog rolls and gumboots - I've seen photos of both with an old but easily recognizable version of the company logo on them.

The company name comes about from the fact that the the founder built his second paper factory near the village of Nokia - where the local museum has examples of said bog rolls.

"Customer has R18.7.1 greenfield installation of NFM-T, so detailed procedure is not required."

I think you'll find it's already trademarked in some countries by a company that publishes business orientated phone directories printed on yellow paper.

Re: No s##t Sherlock...

"Are private sector tenants Bad People who don’t deserve the same opportunities as public sector tenants??"

Unless UK law and property market is very different to the rest of the world, private sector tenants already do have this right - provided the owner of the property is wanting to sell and is happy with the money being offered by the prospective purchaser, the owner would have no reason to refuse the offer - that's not the same animal as the owner being forced to sell, whether they want to or not, at a below-market price plucked out of the collective arse of some government department.

It's nothing to do with whether private sector tenants are 'Bad People" or not - it's about the fact that Public Sector housing owners are often willing sellers by policy, with taxpayer funding behind them that allows them to sell at below-market prices to people who meet the criteria for such home ownership schemes.

Re: Its about time....

"There is a place for independent, self employed professionals, providing consultancy services to multiple customers. However companies have turned this into an employee lite kind of employment."

I'm not sure of the exact details, but in New Zealand this has been implemented in such a way that if the work you do a s an independent contractor is solely for one company, then you are deemed to have the same rights as an employee of that company, but if your work is spread out more or less equally over a number of companies then you are a contractor - although that also has it's own set of employment rights attached to it.

Re: It Shouldn't Be Possible

"But how could any compromise of a single point in the network deprive people of Internet service?"

Umm - because the average household isn't prepared to pay the extra cost of having diverse last mile feeds?

"Apparently someone of a delicate disposition had seen the memo and had taken exception to the prominent ASCII graphic and the matter was being taken *very seriously*. "

Many, many years ago the New Zealand Post Office (as it was in the day) published a new phone book which, as normal, included a new yellow pages section filled with exciting new ads - for the younger viewers, back in those days you actually had to persuade people to come and look at your ad, rather than just inflict it upon them whether they were interested or not.

Anyhoo, one of the ads included a graphic (well named, as it turned out) of a monkey up a coconut tree - it wasn't long after publication that the more observant members of the public spotted that not all the depicted coconuts were attached to the tree.

I believe that exercise cost some clever young person a future career in a printing works.

I can no longer recall exactly why the monkey was up the coconut tree, but I do know that the ad was not selling either monkeys or coconuts.

Re: When I were a lad ...

"I always liken this to the problem with paedophilia. A few decades ago, people who had illicit thoughts about children would hide away in their local community as being outed was inevitably going to become a big thing. Now the Internet allows lots of like minded people around the world to talk in real time and feel included in a community."

I think you'll find that most of the people who are having illicit thoughts about your children are actually hidden away amongst your family, friends and others that are already known to you.

Re: Can someone explain...

"That's my point, places that get 4G (and that will get 5G) generally have good fixed internet connections."

Yeah - living in a backward country like NZ, at our city home we have to try and decide which ISP we'll get to deliver service to the fibre that ends under the desk in the home office, whereas out at our beach house there's no fibre and we only get to choose between the four ISPs that will deliver a decent connection speed over 4G (good enough I can reliably do video conferencing for work).

How did the UK manage to stuff things up so badly? - you've got about the same land area as we do and quite a few more people eg., the population of London alone is almost twice the population of NZ.!

Re: A bit out of date?

"3) Apropos 2 above there should be a caveat as HMRC is undoubtedly trying to work out a way of generating the lost fossil fuel/ICE income. Possibly high EV car taxes earnestly labelled as "environmental taxes"?"

In New Zealand this issue is addressed with something called "Road User Charges" (RUC), which are payable by any vehicle which uses a fuel not taxed at source ie., one of petrol, CNG or LPG.

At the moment EVs are exempt in a bid to increase uptake, but IIRC this exemption ends in 2023. The amount paid in RUC varies by vehicle weight, number of axles, tyre and suspension type, but a typical EV would currently be paying $78NZ per 1000km.

Re: He should be proud that of that guy

"The long weight one is actually common enough to be both an urban legend AND true."

Having started my career many years ago with a stint of fixing faults on manual telephone switchboards, I can assure you that weights (to keep tension on the cords) definitely do come in long and short versions.

If you used a long weight in a board designed for short weights eg., the operator's position for a BPO 300-type PABX, setting the cord to the correct length to prevent the weight hitting the floor meant that it wouldn't have enough length to fully cover all the sockets an operator needed to reach on a multi-seat switchboard. The long weights were used for older main exchange switchboards.

Both types of weight were kept in stock by stores at the exchange I worked in.

Re: That's horrible.

"I had this backpack that I was given in the late 90s, nasty quicksilver bag that I used whilst skiing, for everything basically. By 2018, it was tatty as fuck, but still good enough to carry my laptop to and from work and keep it dry. Because it was so tatty, I never had any problems going to the pub after work and leaving my bag in the corner of the pub."

Many years ago an ex-colleague who was married to a Brazilian told me that when they went back to Brazil to visit family with he would carry his camera gear in the kid's used nappy bag and the used nappies in what was, to all appearances, an expensive camera bag.

He never did tell me what the going rate for used nappies of dodgy provenance was.

Re: Going Postal?

Relevant, but deceptive - from RFC760:

"The Time to Live is an indication of the lifetime of an internet

datagram. It is set by the sender of the datagram and reduced at the

points along the route where it is processed. If the time to live

reaches zero before the internet datagram reaches its destination, the

internet datagram is destroyed."

But in this case the datagrams were reaching their destination - which is the node at the other end of the fibre span for an optical supervisory channel.

Re: Options

Maybe in a similar way that it worked with Ma Bell and the creation of the RBOCs?

Not being in the US I don't know exactly how well it worked out in practice, but the concept was there.

Re: Touch screens

"Most cars have a hot-cold temperature dial which allows you to mix hot engine coolant with your cold air conditioner output, with little or no visible indication in the non-extreme cases."

This is a desirable thing to be able to do and over winter it could be said to be essential in most climates - cooling the air condenses a lot of the moisture out of it and heating the air after cooling it dries it out even more, preventing fogging of the windows.

Most of us don't have the luxury of living in a year around warm, dry climate where fogged up windows are never seen.

Re: Who logs in to an Oyster card?

"Also what does stealing an Oyster account achieve? Track my exciting movements around London and add up to £50 to my travel card for me?"

Yes to this - because everyone is exactly like you and what is good for you is good for everyone (your name's not Milo, is it?).

I bet you don't fear anything because you've got nothing to hide, as well.

Re: Bah!

"In a generation there will be nobody to notice plummeting literacy"

Given some of the responses to the line in the OP regarding math, I suspect that ship has not only sailed, but is now just a smudge of smoke on a distant horizon.

Re: Surveillance?

"An Orion is a very different beast than a 7kg drone with a 3hr loiter time and 5x5 mile or 1x10mi search capability. "

A 7Kg drone - I doubt it - think more like a specialised version of a military reconnaissance drone - more the size of a general aviation aircraft, but without the delicate meatbags inside it.

Re: Teach the value of life.

"Here in NZ we've just had abortion made easier (despite the many women who've made that mistake saying they wish they hadn't, and wish someone had told them what it would do to them for the decades to follow),"

Whether or not to have an abortion is ultimately the decision of the woman concerned - and only her - there is no role in that decision for someone else's "beliefs", no matter how right the person holding those beliefs might think they are.

For the record, I am a fellow Kiwi and when I met my wife 30-odd years ago she was still dealing with the after effects of having recently made that decision - you have the right to emotionally support a woman who has had to face a decision about abortion, you don't have the right to make, influence or comment on that decision.

Re: We have this saying...

"EASA will look at the FAA's inspections and run their own sets if they're not satisfied, as will CASA (who don't have a dog in the fight as Australia/NZ don't build aircraft)"

I'm not sure about Australia nowdays, but there is certainly a aircraft building industry in New Zealand - in fact a P-750 XTOL was spotted at a NORK airshow, where it wasn't supposed to be. Both these and the Cressco topdressing aircraft from which it was derived are built in commercial quantities, and there was the NZ designed and built Bennet PL-11 Airtruck (Transavia also built a Transavia PL-12 Aitruk variant in Australia).

There is also a specialist industry building replica WW1 aircraft - plus two of the world's three flying Mosquitos were built here.

Admittedly only general aviation level, but still aircraft manufacture nonetheless.

Re: Huawei revenue bump

"That would be Ericsson and Nokia, now that Motorola, Alcatel(-Lucent) and Siemens have withdrawn from the arena."

You do realise, don't you, that the network infrastructure part of Motorola became part of Alcatel-Lucent, which in turn was bought by Nokia - it can hardly be said that either Motorola or Alcatel(-Lucent) have "withdrawn" from the field so much as been re-badged.

"

I can imagine that some people might want to take underwater photos in a pool."

I can't help thinking that a GoPro (or similar) would be a better option for that - the standard housing for my Hero 4 Silver is rated to 40 metres and there is a dive housing that's rated for 60m - more than adequate for most swimming pools, although personally I'd be testing the case without the camera in it first.

So, you're basically saying that if you were in DOC's position you wouldn't be making official policy decisions based on some random tweet from the Great Orange Pillock?

Oh, ye of little faith.

Say what you like about the man, but there's no denying that he's a great source of on-going entertainment - just so long as there's always a grown-up between him and any button that does anything more than ring the White House doorbell.

If you don't accidently get shot first 'just in case' and it goes to court your lawyer just says: "They used the Axon Disaster to identify my client m'lud. Nuff said. We're launching a counter suit for knowing harassment of the generally innocent and being dick heads."

FTFY.

There is little value to the victim in a posthumous apology, no matter how sincere it is.

Re: Sage is right!

"Next would be a visit o every home in a 5 km area around the airport to check and make them sign, legally binding, that they either don't have a drone or proof of registration."

Yeah - because nobody in the UK owns a car is or otherwise capable of traveling more than 5km.

Mind you, it might work - my sister tells me that in the three generations it took for my grandparents to emigrate from the north of England to New Zealand and for her to end up living in Preston, some of her friends have moved as far as the next street from where their grandparents lived.

Re: Can someone tell me why there's an app with social activity tied to payments?

"Well, if Facebook has it (to be called "Libra" apparently, though I think the irony will be lost on the agency that came up with that), surely the Twats will want it to?"

Yes, it will be interesting to see how well FB's new "currency" flies with that name - in New Zealand, and no doubt other countries, it's also the name of a range of feminine hygiene products, so there may be some degree of resistance due to the name.

Re: How to choose a gadget...

"A brilliant retort which I still find hilarious to this day."

Occasionally I also come up brilliant retorts that I find hilarious - at the same time I'm also firmly convinced that attractive young women much younger than me find my sparkling wit, good looks and natural charm to be an irresistible combination.

But eventually the pub closes and I have to go home, waking up to a more realistic view of myself the next morning.

Re: Again?

Because not only does nobody get fired for buying IBM, but if you're really lucky (ie., the project is big enough) you might even get a cushy, well-paid job offer at the end of it all?

Re: license, hell

"Plus an ax - although I doubt that would be anybody's weapon of choice going against a polar bear."

The most effective way of avoiding attack by a polar bear, or any other angry and dangerous animal for that matter, is a somewhat slower-than-you friend who should be taken along (and kept close to your person) on any excursion where there is a risk of animal attack.

Re: At home

"Back in the days of dial-up, I twice had a PCI modem die after the telephone line was struck by lightning. Both times the PC was fine, and all that was needed was a new modem."

On one occasion I was woken by a flash of lightning and the sound of plastic blown off the top of one of the modem chips flying around the inside of the PC.