Posts by Bob H
313 posts • joined Thursday 20th September 2007 05:53 GMT
I agree, although this is mainly a problem with the operators of the spectrum. I have been in countries where you get fantastic, high-speed, 3G coverage. I was even in the basement of a shopping centre with excellent coverage. Mini-cells, microcells, femtocells, etc are the key and UK operators really need to step up.
I think 4G has a big advantage here, I realised that because 4G doesn't do voice by default you could just exclude the extensions. For London Underground or even planes we could have 4G hotspots which don't support voice capability and that way we can choose access or not!
Posted in Ten ancestors of the netbook
I loved playing with my fathers Atari Portfolio when we were travelling abroad.
One small question... how does a politician know what is moral and what isn't?
That they are doing these tests is very good and they seem to be running them well, they are suitably funded so that consumers won't be adversely impacted, but what confuses me more is how do they know the impact when hundreds/thousands of handsets are operating in the area as well. Do they test with 100% channel occupation?
Re: insula
I travel a great deal and I rarely encounter free WiFi, I don't think the UK lags much and sometimes I think free WiFi offers are more common here. Starbucks is now free, McDonald's, City of London, many other cities are also offering free local WiFi. Hotels and airports around the world remain a pain though.
@AlbertH
As I understand it Huawei offered to tfl that they would supply and fit an entire system on generous financial terms but it was never made clear why tfl rejected the offer. Could have been concerns over the nature of the funding or just that a significant number of people don't want mobile coverage on the underground, the WiFi install paid for by virgin was a nice touch for 2012 but without significant further investment it remains a curiosity.
In Korea the trains themselves carry the WiFi AP.
But with respect to the logistics of connectivity... I would imagine a leaky feeder* is the best solution.
*Not a septic fetishist.
Re: Windpower is the answer
I did a couple of months with a company and one of their clients insisted that they switch one of their facilities from grid to back-up generator for a couple of days to prove it worked. They did the maths and found out that it didn't cost them notably more to run on generator than grid now, the only risk was long-term maintenance of self-supply for which they could just switch back to grid. Environmentally however I don't know how sustainable a diesel generator is over the grid (when including distribution and conversion losses).
... and we did it without building some magical new device, we found something we already had in the lab could do the job.
Re: Ancient news.
As you say, this is a well known thing, my fathers Vodafone analogue breeze block carphone would regularly lock on to France on a clear day back in the distant past.
In this case I surmise that a DFL* from the media was having a pint down the cliffs at St Margaret's and called one of their friends (specifically to annoy everyone else in the pub), then they realised they were roaming and how much it was costing them.
On a more important point, why were the French operators able to reach a mutual carriage agreement for The Tunnel but the British operators not?
* DFL = 'Down From' London as they are known
I'd love to get my hands on this for a little project I have, but I don't see which of the many Novec versions this is.
Differing opinion about what constitutes a small business obviously...
Re: Ha, ha!
I think O2/Telefonica is getting its existing spectrum liberalised.
Re: @ Bob H
@AC "BT is putting free Wi-Fi into 1,500 branches of Barclays Bank"
Re: Sympathy for him but
Agreed, Baylis put together some parts, made a product which filled a niche and a few others followed. But frankly the market for expensive wind-up radios was small. Some might say that £30 isn't expensive, especially when factoring in the lifespan of Alkaline batteries. But this is still a product which is useful either for camping or third world countries, anyone else uses battery devices. The rise of the MP3 player and improved life on smart phones has taken its toll on radio listening in the past decade. You can't ride the wave on one modest invention, you need to keep innovating or make something so special that someone buys you out. Dyson has kept innovating and has built a sustainable business. I would have hoped Baylis would have had a retirement plan and wouldn't have risked his house after his initial success.
I wouldn't say 1500 is small potatoes compared to 16,000, a coverage increase of +9% is significant in any business.
I saw a presentation by the guy from BAE who wrote the system which uses "Signals of Opportunity" (TV/radio transmitters and mobile masts), that is seriously impressive, seriously cheap and self calibrating. This proposal seems to tackle the same problem from a physical environment perspective.
In respect of the 2m accuracy killing people, I think if autonomous car designers used street maps alone for their navigation it would be very optimistic. Better to use a range of tools, like this one, combined with collision avoidance, road marking recognition, environmental awareness, etc.
The biggest problem that the OS has is letting everything know that the time has miraculously changed and ensuring the hardware is in a sane state.
Re: Instant on computer
The bigger question is when do we get the a position where we no longer make the distinction of working memory vs storage. Some micro-controllers could be heading this way with FRAM replacing Flash. Currently a computer loads code and data into RAM to be worked on, but with a hybrid model you can do away with such distinctions before the OS.
Posted in Why you need a home lab to keep your job
For a while I have been planning to turn my garage into a workshop, with benches, racking, bench tools, 3d printing, small CNC, test equipment, servers, etc. I am getting quotes to make it waterproof (it currently leaks rain badly) and then I will build out the lab.
My wife came home this week and actually said these words:
"the penny dropped today, you need to build your workshop so that you can progress and make your millions."
I love my wife...
Re: Liberty Global ?
Liberty owns UPC (large Dutch ISP)
What about the Solidoodle! That seems a bargain compared to half of these?
Re: "now they just carry an iPhone"
Thinking back to the days when I needed to do things like working on frames like those I would much rather have a phone than a tablet. The main reason being that I would generally have a tool or some test equipment in the one hand and the reference information in the other hand. You can then check the appropriate connections with confidence and if you need a second hand you can just put the phone in your pocket.
As for the comments about Windows 8, the article didn't give me any confidence that there was an advantage to it over Windows 7 and having tried it several times I can say with confidence that I won't be using it unless I am brutally forced to. Other than that I didn't see it as a shill article; it was an interesting review of a difficult deployment to replace a complex legacy system.
Yes... but what is it called?
I listened to the last SDN podcast that was on El Reg because I wanted to better understand what Software Defined Networking was, even if I had to skip through minutes of mutual appreciation and holiday stories there were some real gems in there.
The main take away that I got from the last podcast was that Software Defined Networking is being over complicated. In its first phase it should just be about unifying management in the same way that so many products are already managed, it shouldn't be about dynamic real-time packet routing as much as it should be about avoiding console management and proprietary tools. I despair that the network industry is taking ages to deploy this type of management on traditional "managed" workgroup switches, it is hardly a challenge. Instead the big boys are promoting advanced data centre solutions which just gratify those with deep pockets. Until the likes of TP-Link, D-Link and Netgear start doing stuff this won't be attractive to my eyes.
Re: He stuck to his convictions.
@Mahatma Coat
I was under the impression they sat atop mountains in a meditative state generating code with just their minds?
Would be nice if El Reg did a similar article for the cheap home made infiniband networking that I have seen, there are some good on-line howtos already, but would be nice to see a reviewer do one.
Re: I see trouble ahead......
I haven't seen what happened to the VM service, I imagine they will be rushing to launch it now that BT has announced theirs.
Typical imagineering bull, 1000fps in five years? Does this man even know that TVs evolve on an 18 month cycle? Does he know that frame capture at super high frame rates creates massive quantum-level problems for image sensors?
I could set myself up as an institute and spout crap but it won't mean that anything I say will become reality. Instead I just work with my R&D teams to make it happen...
Re: Reliability
We buy many thousands of 3.5in disks from WD and I can't say that we have any complaints about them.
Re: How about use in RAID systems?
If the RAID controller isn't aware of TRIM and other operating system commands for managing SSDs then they may not run in an optimised way and may even fail earlier than a non-RAIDed SSD.
I believe Linux now mostly supports TRIM in most RAID and LVM modes, but I don't know about hardware RAID controllers and Windows.
I thought Jimi Heselden was the founder of Segway? He died driving off a cliff on one.
Re: Just persuade Google...
Someone call Kim Dotcom, sounds like pocket change for that bad boy...
Posted in Intel's set-top TV effort snags on cable
Re: Why would anyone think that INTEL would be the one to buck the system?
I haven't yet seen an indication (from Intel) that they intend to do much beyond design a platform. There are indications that they've licensed RDK, but so has practically everyone else in the CE market and they might be packaging a technical solution (instead of offering a bare chip) but I doubt they will get into the content rights game.
I am waiting to see what point-to-point networking is like with Thunderbolt, the ability to connect to the server under my desk at bus speeds would be great. Does anyone have any idea how this would be achieved given that Thunderbolt is an extension of PCI-e? Would it need an intermediate device in the middle to pretend to be a 10GbE network card?
Much of the 'idle' capacity of satellites is allocated on what is called a "pre-emptive basis", satellites are known to fail, rarely but it does happen. So most satellite companies keep a little capacity in reserve so that when one does fail others can pick up the slack. Most of this "spare" capacity isn't idle all of the time, in fact the TV industry uses it extensively for news gathering, relaying sports events, big corporates use them for product launches and internal communication, there are many "occasional use" business cases.
It might be possible to rent this idle capacity on a parasitic basis, you could keep the transponders lit when they are idle and taken them down before they are needed. But your receivers would have to work on the basis that they expected the connection to fail and sometimes be totally unavailable. Plus I would be nervous about allowing these terminals to transmit back because although they should only transmit when the spectrum is available they could possibly contribute to unintentional jamming of commercial traffic. So it would be easy to deliver high bandwidth data on a unidirectional basis using just spare hardware and spare capacity, getting bi-directional access is way more challenging and would require significant investment.
(Bio: I spent enough years doing satellite comms into weird and wonderful parts of the world for a two large organisations).
Posted in Kim Dotcom flashes his rack
Surprised he hasn't looked at the Backblaze Storage Pod, seems like the sort of high volume appliance he would need.
Posted in Shh! Proxima Centauri can hear us!
Re: Take me to your ... Pope.
If you discount omni-directionality then I would suspect that the DTT transmitters from Germany or France might make a significant contribution because they form an SFN, essentially a giant in-phase network with lots of error correction.
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: Sad day
Plus if someone is really concerned about it they can always fork support and merge the kernel modules that they need. If it is holding the platform back to support a chipset that hasn't been in production for years and isn't a commercial or societal need then it can go.
Re: as much as you need
You do realise that 4k in the home isn't "around the corner"? IHS iSuppli states that 4k TVs will remain "negligible for the foreseeable future" and not account for more than 1% of the global market during the next five years. Don't believe the hype.
Re: @AndrueC
@Arrrggghh-otron
The problem with Google's proof of concept is just that, it is a proof of concept that it is possible to deliver gigabit fibre, not that it is economical to do so on a nationwide basis. Already there are problems with the Google project for example: not enough people in deprived areas have signed up even for the most basic package.
Woe is me, *only* DOCSIS 3.0! A mere 400 Mbit/sec downstream and 100 Mbit/sec upstream...
</sarcasm>
I have no problem with coax for the last meters because I am not operating a data centre. Yes, virgin shouldn't talk about their offering like it is FTTP, but their system is theoretically fast enough that that the distinction is moot.
Re: I am currently pricing up for new offices
VM offer BTNet if they can't service you with their own service and they don't tell you initially that it isn't VM providing the connectivity, there is a massive difference in cost between their own service and the BT Openreach version.
As for VM reliability, I've had them for two years and hardly had a problem at all (excluding the slightly questionable router software). I'll never depend on just one method connectivity for our office anyway.
Posted in YES! It's the TARDIS PC!
Re: Presumably they have paid the Beeb ?
It really seems weird that the BBC should have trademark rights over the design, given that it is an MPS design, but apparently the MPS didn't do well in its case against the BBC:
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tm//legal/decisions/2002/o33602.pdf
Re: I am currently pricing up for new offices
Agreed, our local cabinet has been skipped by FTTC, I assume because the rest of the road has Virgin. Unfortunately my building doesn't have Virgin so I can't get any next generation services. We had a BTNet fibre line but I got an EFM about 30% cheaper for a 5x faster service. So if they would provide FTTP on my old fibre then I would get very excited.
I keep hearing about FTTP but as yet I haven't seen an ISP offering it.
Coincidently the nice lady at VM Business who called me the other day to explain why our building couldn't be connected (even if it is over the road from a cabinet) said that the order from on high is that no new lines are to be dragged in to connect new sites, but in the new year that policy is likely to change. So Virgin may yet start new installations for business customers like me.
Re: 17:07
17:04 confirmation came through and the order says 1-2 weeks for 16GB
& For those who say 16GB isn't enough: I would have liked an SD card slot, I probably would have been satisfied with an 8GB model with microSD, but for me I find that my tablet with 16GB is sufficient. I can't put my music on there because that weighs down a NAS, my photos are over 30GB, so I just have some pragmatism or find a 1TB microSD card.
Great, more bloat-ware, soon it will be like laptops!
