Posts by Kevin Pollock

Apparently whisky/whiskey does "age" in the bottle

Until a few years ago I was also under the impression that, once bottled, high alcohol spirits do not change. But I think the reality is that they do *develop*....whether you would classify that as "aging" is a different thing. With all of those complex chemicals in the bottle it's inevitable that something's going to happen.

I think this review by Ralfy on YouTube covers the topic, but as I'm on a train at the moment I haven't had a chance to listen to it to make sure it's the right one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIpaKQ8pueg

This is only one opnion, of course. And I'm not sure how you would establish any kind of sensible control. Even if Ralfy had tasted the same bottle many years ago would the difference in flavour be as a result of the development, or because his own taste buds have changed over the years, or even because his memory of that original tasting might be uncertain. If this is the example I'm thinking of it's a bottle that was sent to him by a channel subscriber, so he didn't even taste the original sample.

Perhaps if you were to cryogenically freeze some whisky to try to prevent chemical change it might offer a good control against a "room temperature" sample. I'm sure there's a PhD topic in there somewhere - and all you have to do is include the term "Global Warming" in the funding request and you're sure to get approval.

(Note, before your finger hits the down vote button I would like to point out that I am not an AGW or Climate Change denier, but it's common knowledge that research funding priorities tend to go with fashions).

Not that far from reality

As the headline suggests the method used here is pretty exotic, it's true.

But if the application is Data Centre Interconnect (DCI) then there are far easier ways to do this.

The DCI market generally needs reach of less than 150km, because it involves interconnecting a distributed "metro" data centre (one where the operator has leased buildings in different parts of a metro area and needs to interconnect them as though they were one big building). The big ICPs like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Softlayer do this all the time. And they have a limitless demand for capacity...seriously...check out some of their keynote presentations.

There's commercially shipping technology that can put over 27Tb/s on existing fibre (not this multi-core stuff, which is still experimental). This commercial technology uses the C-Band. By simply extending it to the L-Band you can double the capacity to a little more than these boffins achieved. And L-Band is easy-peasy. We've known how to do it for almost 20 years, but people have tended to stick to C-Band because it's the sweet spot. Next gen technology could increase the Baud rate, or the modulaiton order, and easily double or maybe quadruple the capacity. Check out this blog wot I wrote on two post deadline ECOC papers that use actual fibre that exists today. One talks about higher Baud rates, and the other 1024QAM modulation with a technique called Constellation Shaping.

https://www.infinera.com/infinera-makes-terabit-waves-ecoc-2017/

But if people really do need the capacity L-Band is there. And so is the O-Band, E-Band and S-Band (in most modern fibre...older fiber may have some water peaks in their attenuation chart).

Since the reach is so short we don't need in-line amplification on these links, and so all of these wavelengths are potentially "open for business" in the DCI market. And the key point is that you don't need exotic new fibre. This is good old SMF, LEAF, or whatever you've got in the ground today. And generaslly speaking there's shedloads of fibre around is you need it.

So I'm pretty scepitcal of the multi-core and photonic bandgap fibre experiments. Maybe one day...but there's so much capacity still to come in existing fibre (as long as you don't need to go a long way), we're OK thanks.

By the way...we don't make fibre, so I've no axe to grind there. If people do get this multi-core fibre to work (and can make enough of it, and can build an entire connector and splicing ecosystem to support it, and are willing to pay to lay it in the ground) then I'm sure DWDM vendors will happily use it.

The problem is complex

OK, we absolutely need rules. This guy is an irresponsible idiot in so many ways, and people were definitely in danger as a result of his actions.

The drone he flew is a DJI Phantom of some kind, and as a Phantom owner myself I would not like to be hit by one dropping from a hundred feet or so. The flying weight is 1.2kg.

As somebody already pointed out, there's a lot to go wrong on these (and zero redundancy) so, even if you are flying responsibly, it will drop out of the sky like a brick if (or rather when) something fails.

Thanks to guys like this there will now be an over-reaction by the establishment (and the media). Pretty soon UAV pilots will need to be licensed, registered and insured.

This kind of official certification would be a good thing if the certification was simple and cheap to obtain, and I'd do it in a heartbeat if it meant I got discounted liability insurance, for example. But my guess is that the bureaucrats will make it complex, time-consuming and expensive, and as a result many people will continue to fly their quads "illegally".

Not sure there's light at the end of the tunnel yet

Alcatel's biggest mistake was buying Lucent, which resulted in a massive loss of total value for the combined company, and has saddled it with debts that are almost overwhelming.

The jewel in the crown is the IP division, under Basil Alwen. These former Timetra platforms are pretty good boxes, and there's been some good R&D on them to keep them competitive.

The problem is that the IP division has had to accept Alcatel's old Optical Division in the reorg. ALU Optical is losing money big time, and the loss-making optical revenues are bigger than the emerging IP division. Optical transport is a very competitive market (half a dozen competitors in Long Haul, and maybe ten competitors in Metro). And there's virtually no differentiation in their optical product, so difficult to see how they could hope to boost margins.

The article refers to Alcatel wanting to spin out the submarine business next year. In fact this (loss making) division has been for sale for about three years - most recently with Alcatel trying to get the French government to take a stake, or to buy the whole thing. Unless it's radically trimmed down and costs taken out of the business I doubt that anyone would want it.

The transformational act that ALU could pull out of its hat would be to monetize the Bell Labs patent portfolio. For some reason ALU management has repeatedly failed to exploit this option, and it's not clear why. It could yield billions of dollars in revenue, and could clear the debts at a single stroke.

I'm not an expert on this, but weren't the original Bombes designed (and at least two built) by Polish cryptanalysts, and gifted to the Allies (at that time Britain and France) after Poland was invaded?

I'm sure Turing and his colleagues significantly developed the design, but it seems a little bit unfair not to give credit to the people who designed and built the original models.

Likewise the Americans developed the design still further with valves and other electronic components to replace the electro-mechanical elements..

I say good luck to the guy if he can rip them off for that kind of money.

He's got a devil of a job on his hands though.

He could make an immediate impact by just telling all of his underlings "hey - why don't we just listen to what our customers are saying this time?".

Of course it would take a lot more than just "listening".

I've owned both Apple and Samsung tablets and found they both have great build quality.

As somebody who's getting on a bit I think a 12" form factor has some merits in terms of a replacement for laptops. It's easy to add an external keyboard and mouse for text-intensive work, and then you can just take it away and read the Sunday paper with a decent text size. These prices are a bit steep though.

Hopefully if Samsung proves the value of this form factor we'll get the usual Android competition mechanism happening to drive down prices in a year or so.

And if the form factor fails maybe they'll be selling them off cheaply (like HP and Blackberry had to - both were bargains at the time if you could get one).

Our IT department have just sent me a replacement laptop with Windows 8.1 on it.

I assumed I'd be OK with 8.1 because I read that Microsoft was supposed to put the Start menu back. That turned out to be bullshit.

I powered the thing on and literally sat there clicking things for about five minutes before something recognizable happened. To make matters worse this is a Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop, and it has a touch screen. What the fuck would I want a touchscreen on a laptop for? The lid doesn't even fold right back so I can use it as a tablet (if I was stupid enough to want to put greasy fingerprints on my laptop screen).

As soon as I could figure out how to download and install Classic Shell that's exactly what I did, and slowly but surely the machine became useable once I figured out how to disable the TIFKAM features.

The thing that cheeses me off is that this is a nice laptop...but it's crippled by this terrible operating system, and our IT department made the decision to move to Windows 8 without consulting the user base, and without providing us with training. And because they went for the touchscreen version, the screen is all "fuzzy".

Windows 7 seems to be really stable and useable. Why the heck would they dump 8.1 onto us?

To come back to the question asked in the title of the article...bloody hell yes, our IT department is too tough on users!

@John Smith 19

Actually it was a glide bomb guidance idea in WW2. Project Pigeon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

I saw this in a documentary a few years ago and apparently it was working pretty well.

It was revived as Project Orcon in '48, but that was cancelled in '53 because electronic guidance systems were starting to work reasonably well, and were more practical than using "wetware".

I'm not so much worried about the security as...

...the massive financial support the Bank of China gives to Huawei and ZTE.

Whenever I've mentioned that on these boards in the past people have retorted with the fact that Western governments have historically done the same thing.

But most of the examples people here have given are in the defence sector - which I agree is a corrupt cesspool of which we should be deeply ashamed. And any examples in the telecoms sector are dwarfed by the $32 Billion that the Chinese Bank gave Huawei to "win international business".

Having said I'm not worried about security...I look at my TalkTalk broadband service, with it's Huawei YouView box (which keeps freezing), which won't work unless I use the Huawei router (which has the shitiest WiFi signal I've ever experienced), and connects to the Huawei DSLAM in the local exchange. Gosh - that's a lot of dependence on one vendor.

BT is even worse. They literally could not run their national network without the army of Huawei engineers (most of them Chinese nationals) in Adastral Park.

Alcatel trial wasn't on a submarine cable...

...it was in a lab.

The reason is that this test was made with a new kind of optical fibre called "large effective area fibre". BTW - this is not the same as LEAF (where the "A" stands for "Aperture"). Here is an example for this new type of fibre,

http://www.corning.com/opticalfiber/news_and_events/news_releases/2010/2010051101.aspx

The key point is that this is not the fiber that is already under our oceans, so the Alcatel test isn't indicative of the kind of bandwidth boost that can be achieved in real submarine networks (which the headline suggested). Nevertheless it's an amazing achievement and points the way for the next generation of submarine cables.

I think the authorities are missing the point...

...maybe the Huawei gear is insecure. I'm not really in a position to judge that.

What I know for 100% certain is that Huawei and ZTE have been selling gear at massive discounts to UK and mainland European, African, Indian, and South American service providers for years. They used loans from the Bank of China to allow them to do this.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-25/huawei-counts-on-30-billion-china-credit-to-open-doors-in-brazil-mexico.html

This kind of dumping was the last nail in Marconi's coffin. I agree with AC: Posted Friday 7th June 2013 07:16 GMT that they were already dying on their feet because of incompetence, but the 21CN thing really did kill them off.

You could make similar arguments about Nortel (bankrupt, and now dragging Ciena down with the debt mountain), NSN (bankrupt and now owned by bean counters), Lucent (on the verge of bankruptcy and now dragging Alcatel down with their debt mountain).

One by one, companies are being driven out of business by subsidized pricing by Huawei and ZTE. When the customers no longer have a choice, that's when the prices will be jacked up.

One thing the Chinese (and Japanese) are good at doing is "playing the long game".

Not his fault...I suppose

Ben inherited the collosal train wreck that was Lucent. Before Alcatel bought them Alcatel was doing OK. I'm not saying everything was perfect - they had a huge French pension liability. But Lucent was just a boat anchor that had paid tens of billions in useless company acquisitions and was losing money. They paid $23B just for Ascend - and there was never a second generation product that came out of that purchase. The scale of their stupidity is awesome!

Verwaayen is "one of the boys" who keeps bouncing from Lucent to BT then to ALU. Contracts always seem to follow, so he obviously has good contacts. But trying to rescue ALU is a losing battle.

The IP products that Alcatel got from buying Timetra are good. It's about the only decent acquisition I can think of.

Alcatel is trying to sell their submarine optical business right now. Next up will be the terrestrial optical business. Both used to be jewels in the crown (the sub business is still #1 in the world, but losing money).

They are also supposed to be "monetizing" their patent portfolio, but why on Earth haven't they been doing that years ago?

How is it that ALU shareholders allow management to maintain this level of incompetence? There are tens of thousands of employees and former employees who are expecting pensions from this company. What's going to happen to them?

As others have pointed out, this isn't Nokia...it's the jont venture created in 2006 between Siemens Communications and Nokia's Network Business Group.

They are deeply in debt, with falling sales and are making a loss.

Late last year they announced they were selling NSN's Optical Division to Marlin Equity Partners. This was a distressed sale because the optical business unit had been on the market for over two years and there were no takers. Th terms of the acquisition wre not disclosed - that's how little money NSN made from the sale. One of the problems is that, thanks to the former Siemens unit, there are huge pension liabilities that make an aquisition of NSN Optical unattractive. My guess is that Marlin will strip away the liability of those German employees with big pension entitlements by changing their contracts. Once they've stripped away the liabilities then they might be able to unload the company to Juniper (who have a technology partnership with NSN). While this is happening the development of the NSN Optical products is stagnant, which means that by the time they are bought the products will be obsolete.

The next asset to be sold will be the Carrier Ethernet division (maunlt former Atrica Networks). As a US aquisition there aren't the same liabilities as for the optical division.

But once these two assets are sold then the cupboard is looking pretty bare for any kind of growth business. There are the service teams, which should be profitable on their own. But services is a diminishing business when the manufacturing portion dies out.

IMHO NSN in the current economic climate is a dead man walking - rather like Alcatel Lucent.

A few corrections

>>"One of the best ways to cut down networks’ power consumption is to get rid of the power-hungry electronics that does most of the heavy lifting."

It's not quite as simple as that. Service speeds tend to be a lot lower than backbone data rates (especially as DWDM moves towards coherent super-channels). So you *can* build all-optical networks, and they may appear to have a lower CapEx and power consumption, but they will be inefficiently filled unless you can do electronic grooming of services in the core network. There are several mathematical studies of this if anyone's interested.

>>"Optical communications is based on the 1530 nm wavelength band – the entire ITU frequency grid for DWDM systems (G.694.1) fits between 1530 nm and 1625 nm – a tiny amount of the near infrared (the vertical red line on the graph above)."

No. Let me see if I can rewrite this to keep it both accurate and concise.

Optical communications is based on a range of near infrared wavebands, including the C-Band (1530-1565nm), and the L-Band (1565-1625nm) - both of which are used for DWDM long haul optical transmission. Other wavebands (O, E, S Bands) are used, along with the C and L bands, in Coarse WDM transmission.

>>We don’t use visible wavelengths, because the ubiquitous Erbium-doped optical amplifier, cheap and everywhere, works at the 1530 nm band.

No.

We don't use visible light because the attenuation of silica-based fibers at those wavelengths is way too high - whether you have workable amplifiers or not. Multimode, lower data rate LAN systems make use of red LEDs, but only for very short reach applications.

You are correct that EDFAs work best in the C-Band - in fact they "define" the C-Band. EDFAs can also be made to operate in the L-Band (but they are different EDFAs). Because of the energy levels in the Erbium atom, EDFAs do not work in the O, E and S Bands.

Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOAs) work in all of these bands, but there is a long-held perception that SOAs are not suitable for WDM operation. EDFAs are defintely better - but the fact is that optical attenuation outside of the C and L Bands are generally too high for high data rate, long haul transmission.

...isn't Perth the capital of Western Australia, as opposed to West Australia?

I know I live half a world away, but I've never heard the latter usage.

The Government of Western Australia website appears to confirm my understanding:

http://wa.gov.au/

Trade barriers are a bad idea...

...but Huawei and ZTE both use low cost pricing options.

There was a multi-million dollar optical network in Eastern Europe earlier this year that was decided on an electronic auction. Basically all the bidders drop their prices until there is only one left.

The "normal" companies all dropped out when it dropped to their floor prices, leaving Huawei and ZTE competing with each other.

Huwaei bid one cent (I think the auction was priced in US Dollars or Euros), and ZTE went crazy trying to enter a zero bid - but the system kept saying it was an error.

ZTE legally challenged the Huawei win because they said they would have bid lower if the system would have allowed it. In fact they would have bid a negative number if the system would allow it.

Why do these companies do this crazy stuff? Three reasons:

- Several years ago the bank of China gave billions of dollars in loans for Huawei and ZTE to "Go out and win international business". http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-25/huawei-counts-on-30-billion-china-credit-to-open-doors-in-brazil-mexico.html

- Huawei and ZTE are trying to obtain dominant market positions becaus they think in the long term - whereas US companies think 90 days at a time. They are prepared to take short term losses in order to make long term gains.

- Once a customer is locked into a Huawei or ZTE network they often find that long term costs are prohibitive. These include expensive service contracts and higher prices on capital equipment after the frame contract has expired. By then it's too late and the decision-makers in the customer don't dare to say anything because they will look really stupid. In the case of BT and Matt Bross it was even better - he went from being the guy at BT who awarded Huawei the 21CN contract to being a CTO at Huawei itself. Nothing unethical there, surely!

So trade barriers are a bad idea. But allowing Chinese companies to dump products in this way is an even worse idea.

Alcatel is paying the price partly because they have chosen to take on Huawei and ZTE in their sweet-spot markets - especially mobile (for Huawei) and local loop (for Huawei and ZTE). Low margin, high volume markets are perfect for heavily subsidised businesses.

I agree with McBeese - 1200x800 is a very nice resolution on a 7 inch tablet.

At least Asus understand a tablet has to have a card slot! The Nexus is nice, but with no SD card slot it's useless to me. If I wanted a closed tablet where everything had to go to and from it by WiFi I'd use my iPad!

I recently purchased an Ainol Novo7 Fire, and it's a thing of beauty - especially for 109 quid (plus five quid for recorded delivery)! The days of cheap Chinese tablets being badly made seem to be over. Build quality is excellent, and it's just about perfect for watching films on a plane. The one feature everyone misses is an integrated stand. Didn't Archos have that feature?

The other thing that I suppose I'll never have is a properly fitting case. That's the good thing about buying a "branded" tablet - you'll get some custom after-market accessories.

Never realized before how good 7" of Ainol could be.

I was talking to a chap while on a plane last year who is a producer of hard core porn movies, and when I told him I worked for an internet equipment company he explained to me that for the porn industry the internet is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it's a great route to market, but on the other hand it's a great way for porn pirates to distribute their goods. In his opinion the ability to easily acquire "free porn" (most of which is pirated) was "killing his industry".

He said a lot of otherwise honest people, who can pay, and would probably prefer to pay for porn actually pirate it so they can remain anonymous.

I suspect that this filter would tend to block "legal porn", as opposed to "pirated porn", and the stigma of opting in so that one could receive "legal porn" would probably be yet another nail in the industry's coffin.

I'm not saying that the porn industry is a good thing or a bad thing. But under our current legal system (and the legal systems of most "free" countries) pornography is legal. So as long as he stays within the law's definitions (which is increasingly difficult to do) he has a right to conduct his business on the internet.

Note that I do not classify illegal content, such as child abuse imagery as pornography (despite most journalists trivializing this topic with the label "kiddy porn"). It is illegal content, full stop. And there are no circumstances where it should be tolerated online.

Will wait for the price to drop

So if I'm reading this correctly Crucial has used some older, slower components to build a low cost drive - but then slapped a retail price on it that's not low at all? I've seen SATA3 256G drives of various makes in the 115 pound range recently.

Moving to an SSD was the best decision I ever made for my desktop machine. But I have a few older laptops that would definitely benefit from a sub-100 quid, 256GB SATA2 SSD.

Hopefully demand for this model will be sluggish, and will result in rapid price erosion; at which point I would be happy to buy it.

One quick question. A while back I saw a hybrid disc - with spinning platters but a small SSD to act as a "huge cache". It was from ebuyer, I think, but I can't remember the details. It struck me as a great compromise because it delivered (I think) 500GB of storage, but performance that would be about the same as a SATA2 drive like this.

Oddly I haven't really seen it advertised since, and I'm wondering why.

I may be missing the point, but...

The major advantage is supposedly omnidirectional collection.

The example application cited is “solar clothing”.

Wouldn’t it be dark inside the clothes?

The digital divide widens

Sitting on a Market 1 exchange - wondering if this fiber will ever get outside the city centres.

I can't blame the company - they're not a charity.

Does anyone know the detail of this rollout? Will Cityfibre be obliged to include a certain percentage of rural homes in the rollout as condition of whatever authority awards them permission to do this?

It's not a lot, but at least it would be a move in the right direction.

One other question. If Cityfibre goes bust, where does this leave the users?

They should focus on bringing decent broadband to the "have-nots"

I agree with AndrueC - the focus is all wrong. We need:

- Better last mile speeds fo everyone - not just the lucky "majority".

- Better backhaul capacity, so if I can clock at 6Mbps then that's what I should expect as throughput in a speed test.

- Less asymmetry. I have a 17:1 ratio between my downstream and upstream clock speeds. I work from home and it would be great to do decent quality video conferencing. I can receive the VC picture, but can't send it back (some would say that's a good thing).

- All Market 1 exchanges (like mine) should have an obligatory 21CN date by the end of, say, 2012. I could get about 18Mb/s downstream if the exchange was upgraded to ADSL2+. They'd have to turn up the backhaul speed at the same time, obviously.

I have huge sympathy with Brian Morrison's plight of cable damage. The threshold for getting it repaired sounds like BS to me!

Cheers,

SPuD