Posts by -tim
229 posts • joined Friday 10th July 2009 16:06 GMT
Education?
The training on my CV is along the lines of "ran a class on $FOO at $SHOW".
My first and only MSCE cert was when they needed you answer 10 questions at a trade show.
Where are these numbers from?
How are they going to make the rate? To do this work, you have to be a licensed cabler and have the telco ticket. You also need about at least $50,000 worth of kit all for a job that you will not have (if any promises are kept) in a decade. The pass rate for the decade old HFC networks where much faster to complete and they never got close to this rate.
Who is the hypocrite?
Yet the ambassador is happy to have copyright material he didn't pay for on his department's web site.
Re: It is commercial if it has a camera
I was just reporting what I heard and that was if it has a camera it is commercial and requires that license.
That would explain the high cost of HFC
Those calculations show an interesting figure when you turn their "pass" rate into connected customer rates. The Telstra HFC network will pass nearly all the same customers as does the phone network. Since 90+% of the homes will have phone service, that leaves the cable only connecting about one in 4 in areas with 50% HFC connections (which is very generous). That would imply that at least $40/mo for cable TV or cable Internet access is a result of pole rental.
I wonder how this compares to Google's pole rental costs in Kansas City.
It is commercial if it has a camera
The comments at a recent UAV talk suggested that CASA claims that you need a commercial license for any commercial use if it has a camera, the device is considered commercial. It is not allowed to fly above 400 AGL and real planes aren't to be under 500 ft AGL in rural areas unless they are landing or taking off.
Hype, facts or just political comments?
The Liberal policy at the last election involved two things that I expect will also be included in the next policy. First is that all ISPs that rent space in exchanges get their own dark fibre to nearby exchanges where they also rent. That will end the Telstra monopoly and drop most ADLS costs for about half the population. The second item was that if an ISP updated a node (aka RIMS), they owned it. That means if a remote node was updated to ADSL2+ by Internode, then Telstra would have to pay them the same way Internode now has to pay Telstra for DSLAM access for customers where they don't have backhaul or their own DSLAMs.
Most RIMs have 2 pair all the way to homes which could be used for much faster connections that most people who are close to exchanges get today.
The reality is the home wired internet connection is going the way of the landline and I don't think NBNCo's numbers properly account for that. Many of my friends feel if they are already paying for their mobile devices to have fast wireless anywhere, why pay extra for slightly faster connection at home.
I see our options are Tolerable (ADSL2+), Good (Let ISPs put DSLAMs in RIMS), Better (An optical cable TV network aka NBN) or Best (Google Fiber like with 1G+ bidirectional point to point to the box in the house). There is a reason Google isn't using GPON on their network so why is the NBN so insistent on that technology for the rest of time?
How to benchmark the impossible?
Try dropping in a new $500 switch and see how it performs compared to the other two. If you can't tell the difference with that load, you are not going to be abel to test the differences between these two more expensive switches. In my tests, it looks like the cheap generic switches are just as good as the ones that costs 20 times as much.
What is new?
If their last few upgrades are any indication, this new one will have a band new upgraded RoHS sticker.
I wish they would put a real power chip back in these things. When Apple was doing OS X for the PPC, they were still building for x86 internally and they found many bugs doing the dual platform development. A Power 7/8 device would regain their title of having the fastest desktop computer again and would help reduce their bug count in their products while keeping a core customer demographic very happy. Too bad they won't even consider that anymore.
/mines the one with the g4 laptop in the very large pocket
Delivery for which packets?
Would this be part of Google's "connect the world" program where they throw lots of cash at places with 3rd world infrastructure (like Egypt, a few SE Asian countries and Kansas City) in a hope for an improvement for everyone? I was wondering if Eric Schmidt would announce N Korea would be the next Google Fiber area.
Re: What about direct buried cable?
How about all the subdivided lots where the phone line attaches to the front house with no options for buried or overhead lines? The last time I looked, they would be getting NBN via satellite since there won't be much 12 mb NBN wireless in urban areas.
Wrong shortage
There is no IPv4 address shortage, there is an IPv4 route shortage which has resulted in a vast minority of IPv4 addresses not being useful for anyone.
The slash notation was originally a plan to steal bits from the source and destination port addresses so that a 1.2.3.4/34 would extend the host address by taking two bits from the ports much like NAT and PAT do today. The problem with that approach is no one came up with a clean notation system or rules about exactly where the bits came from.
I was a strong supporter of not consolidating routes in 1991 (since it was a temporary crutch) but Cisco routers at the time just couldn't cope with many routes and claimed it was impossible but AT&T delivered a router that could treat the entire address space as Class-C in 1993 and cope with 16 million routes.
The artificial route shortage has another drawback in that dual homed systems are only for the large players. If IANA was doing their job, I should be able to go to them and say "I want a /28 that works with both Telstra and Optus" or "I need a /32 to work with these two ADSL providers" and they should be able to allocate me a block that both ISPs have agreed to broadcast and would properly route between them dealing with normal failure modes. If IANA had a clue, they would force all remaining addresses to be allocated this way and ensure that ISPs would never get another address as long as they wouldn't do the right thing and work with their competition to ensure that the end customers of the net got what they needed to provide the redundancy that is now essential for many small businesses.
How has it changed the world? I'm not sure that pretty graphs can be done any better today than they were done back then.
Re: This is the main reason why the US originally built GPS, in fact.
The early Navstar satellites also had another feature, they had EMP detectors so they could spot nukes going off and detect exactly where they went boom. One of the requirements was to be able to tell which side of the wall in Berlin vaporized first. There had to be more stuff on the SVs as well since they were about the size of a bus.
One way to fight stupidity
I'm just going to tell people that the new TLDs are like 900 phone numbers and they may get a bill for going to those sites.
Is he too old for Google?
Google doesn't have a good track record with people of his age group with a few age discrimination law suits in the past and Ray is just a bit older than Brian Reid.
Posted in Last moon landing was 40 years ago today
That launch was very Impressive
I was lucky enough to get tickets to a beach site inside the restricted zone. The loud base was incredible as it rattled everything but the most impressive thing was seeing part of the sky turned blue.
Re: Offsetting Vodafone's efforts
It may also be due to the Kiwi regulator asking about how to regulate this field.
Re: Status > Landing
The biggest offender seem to be cheap talking toys. I have yet to find a GSM phone that can't make an ADF point a different direction at the same time as it is causing noise in the headphones. I know if I'm on a plane doing a IFR approach close to the minimums, I would prefer if anything that can be turned off is off.
A long sordid history
The high 800/900 MHz ranges were originally split by NATO so that the US military could bring their radios and not step on the local Army's radios but with the small problem of stepping all over the local civilian frequencies. There had been a US amateur band centered at 915 that is often copied around the world with different widths but that was declared an ITU ISM band between about 902 and 928 (or 932) with some countries making it slightly wider or narrower. The problem is that most 900 MHz gear made for the US tends to want to use everything from about 900 to about 928 which makes for unhappy GSM carriers in places like Australia where the band below 915 was sold for mobile phone use.
I believe the University of Oklahoma has some radar signatures for fire tornadoes that influenced the construction of their new weather radar called OU-PRIME which is 3 generations newer than any government weather radar and 5 to 6 generations newer than the radar run by the BOM.
The charts used by the Seabees to plan some of the improvements to the ports and airports in Queensland during WWII were out of a history book about Capt Cook that one of the officers had brought along for light reading.
Posted in Welcome to 'Vulture South'
Can we avoid the geocoding?
So when are we going to get the following?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/uk/
http://www.theregister.co.uk//us/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/au/
http://www.theregister.co.uk//baa/
Trolling...
So Tony wants to set up a government department that the trolls of the net can troll all day and all night and guarantee a response?
Did this start out with someone saying "I have a cunning plan"?
Which history books?
So a boffin reported this but wants to make sure before releasing the full details. Why do I expect the result is something like "this type of crystal is more reddish when it forms on Mars than on Earth"
Posted in NSW contemplates smart licenses
Just what is a license?
Is a "License" the correct word since the document is a certificate of a license and the license is held in a computer database somewhere. The general use for the document by those authorized to verify it tends to be only as a token to help speed up the checking process.
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Light or Gravity?
I've always wondered what would happen if we were to learn that c was the speed of gravity and light was limited to that for some reason.
Re: Intel & IBM & MS
C required nonstandard keywords as hints to the early multi-CPU attempts to get it to work across cores. There were hacks such as a replacement for statement such as parallel_32(a=0;a<1024;a++) ... which would run the loop on 32 cores (a=0..31 on 1st, a=32..63 on the 2nd etc) but you have to be very careful about memory and variable scope since the system had to ensure that the code, heap, stack and malloced vars had been moved to each core. You would run into problems with a non reentrant libraries and the thing would just die if any system calls were used.
FORTRAN on the other hand had a history of vector processing that worked very well if you followed the normal procedures and the compilers could move looped code onto several cores while dealing with a much simpler memory model.
/Mines the one of a ray traced self portrait of a 286 intel hypercube in the pocket
I wish I had read this earlier
If I had seen this news sooner today so I could have told the caller from "Microsoft" that their scamming operation had been shut down.
Phone number plans need to be more sparse so that people can't war dial everyone. I would like about 10 extra digits in my home number. No one I want to talk to would have any problem with extra digits.
Posted in Adelaide hospital rolls out RFID tagging
Re: So then why is it...
You know that noise that your cheap phone causes when it is next to speakers and rings? That is why your phone can't be used in hospitals and airplanes. Most of the time the noise isn't a problem but it is much harder to get everyone to turn off their phones on a plane when only a few are on rather than every single one of them. Besides who wants to be next to people talking on the phone all the time.
Funny enough both the Japanese, French and New Zealand anti piracy web sites are using images that I own the copyright for. So do they go to jail or are they subject to 3 strikes as well?
When the metadata is data?
So what do they record when the message is nothing more than a knock at an electronic door?
How long do we keep mistakes?
Do you know how full of real data that meta-data will be?
Take a look at email addresses. Do you know how many people have an email address like 411...111@gmail or go to www.some_thing_private.site.com? I don't know if they are accidents or not but if you run something like Card Recon on your web, email or dns logs, it will find credit card numbers for any large organization.
Hackers don't care if your card database is encrypted, they can just grab the "name on field" or "telephone" number and find plenty of valid card numbers unless they are scrubbed.
Why fix the problem when you can reinvent the wheel?
The / notation started with a simple concept... steal bits from the 32 bits used for the ports.
That would mean a IPv4 /34 would take two bits from the source port bits and allow a /24 allocation to support 1024 hosts (minus broadcast and oh so useful network addresses).
The problem was that two decades ago, the problem wasn't the number of addresses but the number of routes and that problem was solved by consolidating address space that may never be used to simply reduce the number of routes. Today we do things nearly the same way and still have major core routers trying to cope with more routes than they can and dropping thing. The IPv4/32+ solution works with nearly every modern router today using their NAT tools and a few simple changes in the TCP stacks allow most end point machines to cope with it transparently and most non-peering routers don't need to be changed at all.
Re: Calls to mobiles
It started out as the phone owner was paying for air time. The US also doesn't have phone numbers that indicate if they are mobile or land line so you can move your old land line number to a cell phone and ditch the copper pair without needing to let everyone know your new number. The system has some advantages and now that air time is almost the same cost as copper pair maintenance, I can see this model showing up as an option as countries reevaluate their number plans.
Re: Hybrid drive query
Flash drives use a small simple CPU to manage the wear leveling. If the flash cells it stores its meta data in stop working and it can't use its backups, then the flash array is dead. Now if there was just some way to use a much more sophisticated CPU with access to far more memory and the ability to long term trend analysis maybe these problems would go away but every flash vendor wants to do their own thing at the interface level and not just provide a bunch of blocks and let a more advanced file system deal with the real world issues.
Re: "Saying this out loud"
My local movie and CD store has a few bins of sale items. What I found interesting was the large number of albums and CDs in the bin are titles that I know the artists don't get anything from a sale due to losses based on Hollywood accounting. I don't know one actor or musician or anyone else who worked on a production who has made any money from royalties yet most of them have contracts saying they will get theirs once the production breaks even. Just like an architect or a lawyer or painter, you better get paid when you do the work because you won't see any money after the work is done. There is no reason the music and movie business can't adjust their business model to deal with the modern world. Their current practices are borderline illegal making promises about payments they have a decades of experience knowing they will never pay.
Posted in Dr Who shoves BitTorrent in the Tardis
They did broadcast it to the world
When you broadcast something half way around the world, it can be picked up downunder but not many people have access to a Parks type receiver and the ability to do noise rejection of the hundreds of other stations that are transmitting on nearly the same frequency but there are some who can.
Posted in Boffins confirm sunspot-weather link
Its a good start
Now all they need to do is extended this to who the edges of the low sunspot activity relates to the world wide El Nino and La Nina cycles which are tried to seasonal tipping points. We also need better data on how the solar output of the sun changes through the cycle since its total output is nearly identical, the frequencies of visible vs IR light do shift around a bit yet there is hardly any documented evidence of any change that causes at ground level let along at high altitude.
Does anyone have a video of Judge Rya W. Zobel or the Supremes singing Happy Birthday?
Posted in GPS trigger will light LOHAN's fire
GPS Limits
The GPS limits may be implemented as an OR, not an AND logic condition. GPS units also have G limits that may come into play. If your GPS gets confused, have a backup plan.
Royalties?
Funny enough, the designer of the body panels only got paid to do the job once and not virtually forever. The same goes for the guy who wrote the user manual.
Full steam ahead!
If passive optical is so future proof, why do the world's fastest home connections not use them? Why is NT&T looking for ways to not have to rebuild their PON network for faster speeds? Google's fiber is going with a non-shared pair and they will be rolling out gigabit upload speed on links that could do 100g/100g with todays hardware. PON is also fiber to the Node but the Node happens to be a prism. Then NBN is rolling out 2.5 gigabits to their nodes (with long term plans to up that to 25 gig in the future if the technology matures) while point to point fiber is delivering dedicated 40 gigabits cheaply today with options in speed limited by the costs of the endpoints. The shared long hall links use very expensive optical equipment that is way beyond the budget of this project and there isn't a way to upgrade the segment your on to 25 gig unless everyone else gets upgraded too and if they need upgraded, will the shared 25 gig be enough?
An end to fiat currencies?
Carbon taxes seem to be a way to tie currencies to energy. That works great if you're in a country that has plenty of energy and not so good in others. If we look back at history, we can see Golgafrinchans learned using carbon for a basis for finance makes perfect sense.
My coat is the one stuff full of leaves.
Re: For [Insert Diety here] sake
Your ssl keys better be protected or when one of your machines gets hit, it and every other machine you connect to will become part of someone's ssh scanning network.
SSH Communications' ssh server allows key and password but openssl currently only allows key or password. Both products allow the key to be password encrypted on the client end.
The major brown coal plants are selling power at $25 per megawatt hour. That accounts for about $.025 of the $.20 or so per kwh as seen on the power bill. Many places only average about 4 kwh per kw of solar panels so there is a long way to go to be close to parity. The main reason power consumption has gone down is all the extra rain has reduced air conditioning consumption combined with people installing newer air conditioners that are sometimes 10 times more efficient than the ones they replaced. There are also programs to replace electric heating with gas which cuts down on the consumption as well. I still find it very odd that Victorians spend more on heating than Canadians who have to deal with real winters.
South of the border?
If this goes through, it would be a great way to increase the international bandwidth at the new cable landing points in Tijuana.
Posted in Boston flexes its own ARM server muscle
$50k to play seems a bit on the pricy side with a CPU that everyone seems to associate with handheld devices. Maybe they should be looking for a way to get a 4 or 8 node unit into the hands of the open source developers. A chassis with 4 or 8 disks slots in a 1 RU friendly pizza box might be just what the developers would need to consider these things as more than just toys.
Proper home automation would be your GPS figuring out that you're heading home and telling your heater to crank up only if its cold outside and increase a degree or two if its wet and humid.
Where did the money go? You don't have that level of cash sitting around mid-transfer without it going to a suspense account for a bit and even those have to balance.
