Posts by AndrueC
1859 posts • joined Thursday 6th August 2009 10:42 GMT
Page:
Yeah like phoning Barclaycard. The system asks you to say your card number right at the start. Then what's the first thing you're asked when you finally get through to a human? Your card number.
Engineering commentary: Bloody good show, chaps! Seriously well built bit of kit.
Management commentary: Clearly over-engineered. For the next one cut the budget.
Re: Look before you leap
Those aren't the only alternatives. I can recommend IDNet but last I heard there are several dozen ISPs who resell BT's FTTC service.
Re: Upper left side?
But go during the night otherwise you'll be blinded looking at it.
And both think it is time for you to build or buy a cloud
I thought the whole point of Cloud Computing was that you rented space on someone else'?
Re: 5G WHY at All ?
I'd quite like to see it used for broadband - much easier to deploy than "better copper" or fibre
Trouble is it's a shared medium. Something that's often overlooked (deliberately by marketing departments) is that whatever the mast/technology throughput - it's still shared by everyone within the mast footprint. 10Gb/s sounds great but if the mast is in central London it's not so hot, especially for streaming.
At least with wired solutions the medium has very low contention. Even better cable technologies can usually fix localised contention issues. For BT's FTTC you just light another fibre to the cab (worst case is blow another bundle but that's easy enough). For cable it's a bit more awkward and involves installing a new cab but still - it's not that big a deal.
For wireless it means building a new mast and providing backhaul which is a lot more complex and the laws of physics may prevent it altogether.
Re: This
The other.
I run an Atom based server at home.
Mine's the one with a server in the pocket :)
Re: 5G WHY at All ?
For movies...on the phone ?
But it'll mean we can watch them in ultra high definition on our mobiles with 5G. At 2am. Standing within a hundred metres of the mast. On a fine night. If you have superhuman eyes or like to watch through a magnifying lens you might even be able to see additional detail.
Re: I agree...
I really miss the Start menu. It was my single port of call for all my programs. I listed them all. Now I have to open a search box and type in the name (if I remember what it was) to get to my program (especially the former built in ones, like calc or paint!)
That's a common problem. Or at least it used to be. Then someone brought GUIs to PCs and the problem went away.
Oh.
Re: Smoke and mirrors
You know a company...
Oh they're all at it. How can you tell when a politician is lying? Their mouth is open.
Re: @zmodem
Why would a company that only makes money by selling you electricity cut you off? Why would the government or local authority want you cut off - if you have electricity at home they can be reasonably sure they know where you are of an evening.
It simply doesn't suit anyone in authority nor the provider to force you 'off grid'.
Re: Private companies DO do this
There's nothing particularly unusual in Apple wanting to check the identity of their customers.
Except that in the other examples there's no change of ownership and you are entering into an ongoing relationship. Those transactions involve trusting that the customer will continue to honour the agreement and/or respect the issuer's property.
When you're buying an iPhone you own it (last I heard). There is no need for ongoing trust between the customer and apple. Or if there is it's trust in the opposite direction eg; Will Apple provide support for me when I want it?
But I don't think any private company should have the right to ask you to send over such personal documents by email.
Having the right to ask isn't the issue. Choosing to comply is where the problem lies in my opinion.
Anyway just 'cos it's in the T&C doesn't mean it's enforcible. If a term is unreasonable it's null and void. Just tell them to stuff it and take your business elsewhere.
Oh for the love of...
So BT working with the EU in Cornwall can roll-out ahead of schedule but the UK government has to fight with the EU when their open bidding results in only BT winning the contracts.
Someone, somewhere, is being an ass. Or several someones :-/
I put some plasterboard up and laid some loft insulation last week. Can I have an article too?
I got IPv6 working at home last night. Can I have an aspirin?
Re: Cause to dig the speccy out I reckon
still find the screechy white noise comforting in a way.
Load up your favourite emulator. Type the keys 'T' 'CTRL+SHIFT' 'L' then '1' '3' '3' '1'
Then hit 'ENTER'.
Enjoy :)
This starts executing machine code at that ROM address. The colours will be off but the sound is there. Press 'SPACE' to cancel.
Re: Works for me
Oh it works for me. I rely on TI2010. I just have to accept that:
*It will take nearly a minute after double clicking the icon before the UI is capable of responding to me.
*Clicking on almost anything will have a half second delay minimum response time. When moving between major areas of the UI that will be a couple of seconds.
*If I try to look at too many historic snapshots the UI will crash.
*When restoring from USB boot(*) it will be nearly 15 minutes before I reach the 'go for it' point. It actually takes nearly as long to navigate the recovery UI as it does to restore the data.
So yes. It works. I rely on it. But bloody hell it's like having my teeth pulled sometimes. My server is only an Atom based thing with 1GB of RAM but I don't experience this with anything else.
(*)Something I do every couple of months with a scratch HDD I keep to hand. I like to know that my backups really will restore.
Re: HOW DARE YOU!
The old Speccy was a BREEZE to load tapes on compared to the Vic20 and the C64!
Would have been better with some more parity though. I loved the way the BBC format was stored in blocks. If one failed you knew fairly soon and could rewind. With the Speccy all you had was a final byte(**) which (IIRC) made the total either even or odd. So you could churn your way through over 40k of data and have it fail just because the very first byte got blatted.
Firebird produced a block based loader which was nice.
My favourite though was the Fairlight loader. They dispensed with the lead-in. So you got a normal short load to get the reader in memory. Then silence for 10 seconds. Then the screeching started and the screen loaded from the top down(*). Seriously cool. And when loading was complete it had polyphonic sound coming from the piezoelectric buzzer. Clever stuff considering the only thing you could do with that speaker was move it in or out by writing 0 or 1 to a port 254.
(*)Which took a little bit of effort because the in-memory layout was a bit odd. Split vertically into three blocks then within each block the top row of each group of eight rows, followed by the second row of each group. The ROM used mathematics to work out the address of the byte for a pixel coordinate but I worked out the logic and managed to shave a minute amount of time off it by bit shifting. Happy days.
(**)Pretty sure that's right. If you saved 100 bytes of data the tape contained 808 bits - 800 bits of data and 8 bits of 'parity'. Oh the anticipation of loading a game from a dodgy tape :)
Strange to say I had to do the same thing in the 90s. I worked for a data recovery company and a tape came in from a suspected kiddie fiddler. I already had quite a lot of knowledge of the 'format' because when I was at college I modified the ROM code to see just how fast the routines could reliably go.
It's actually a very simple format. You just need to time the interval between signal transitions and differentiate between long and short. Pretty much just Morse Code for computers. The tricky bit for us was that it turned out to be an adventure game (featuring bronze tanned boys which was where I stopped reading it) written in BASIC and I had to find a table of tokens and codes to complete the job.
Rather amusingly at the time we were trying to develop off-spindle HDD platter reading and had an expensive analyser rig in the office. So there was one guy trying to come to terms with MFM recording with signal analysers and there was me decoding Spectrum tapes. At least I completed what I was working on :)
Sod a new app. How about increasing the bitrates they offer. They've never been very generous in that regard. Watching ITV Player is like watching iPlayer from ten years ago.
Re: Why not use a helicopter?
Then they just walk the last bit
You make it sound like a Sunday afternoon stroll.
Re: SI prefixes are useful
Really? Two ways of writing the same unit in one sentence!?
At least both values are in the same measurement system :)
At least he'll have an internet connection. Will it meet the UK target speed of 2Mb/s?
To be fair, McAfee A/V is pretty effective at preventing infection. When it's running I have so little CPU left over that there's very little trouble I can get into.
Does this mean that the next version of True Image will have the bloat and confusion removed from the UI and there will be less chance of it crashing?
I'll be back.
Re: do not understand open source ... prefer not to be honest about it
Ubuntu is open source, but if you hire canonical to do something proprietary for your company that is not an open source solution. It simply sits on top of an open source platform.
Thank you. That's what I was getting at in my downvoted post. It wasn't a dig at Open Source. I was asking 'how can it be Open Source if someone else is making all the changes'? The only way it could be Open Source is if we're saying this third party provides support and they do so by inviting the community to help. That doesn't sound like a sensible business relationship to me.
I've nothing against Open Source. I just dislike the evangelist attitudes it seems to foster. Open Source means fix your own bloody problems or hope to hell someone else does. That often has big advantages and I'm always happy to consider Open Source but it's dangerous to assume that Open Source is always the best answer. As with most things in IT - think first. Then have another think before committing.
Re: Once again...
we seldom get anybody on here posting any decent explanation of why open source is so great.
Indeed. Perhaps some of those downvoting my last comment would care to stick their heads above the parapet and explain what the difference is between buying an Open Source solution from a third company and paying them for support and proprietary software.
Note: I was addressing a specific comment here. Of course being open means there are alternative support avenues but I replied to someone talking about handing all that off to a third party. If we can leave out the snide comments for a moment - what is the difference between me paying for support from Microsoft and me paying for support from Joe Soap? From my POV it's the same thing. I'm trusting someone else to sort out my problems. Either Joe can sort it out for me (in which case he's just a smaller version of MS) or else he palms the problems off onto the community.
Re: Once again...
However if you do your due diligence and select well established projects backed by companies that offer paid support you will generally come out on top.
I'd agree with that but if you're going to rely on a third party company to provide the software and the support it's not much different to proprietary software.
Re: Once again...
Open source is all very well IF it (a) works, (b) does what you want.
(c) continues to be developed.
It's okay for geeks and people that like to get their hands dirty but not so much for unsupported end users. Off the shelf proprietary stuff might not have all the bells and whistles and might be bloated but at least most of the time it works and you can usually find help for it very easily. It's the difference between a Ferrari and a Ford. The former is technically superior, has better performance and is more 'fun' to use but no-one would choose it as a family car.
Of course that analogy stumbles a bit on price but given the support costs of OS the gap may not be as large as some might like to think. Choose Open Source by all means but do so with your eyes open. It isn't always a panacea.
We need a 'Careful now' icon. In the meantime that's me getting a placard out of my coat :)
Why, did the users no longer know how to shut down?
Er...no. They didn't, actually. Only last week I had to Google to find out how to restart a Windows 2012 server from an RDC connection. And it's not obvious when you're at a console even for a workstation. Several of our VMs now have shortcuts to 'shutdown -r' or whatever on the desktop.
I've put Classic Desktop on the VMs I use most often.
To be fair the few users I know don't have huge problems with Metro. What concerns me is that IT staff and developers hate it and avoid it. That could be storing up problems for the future if the people writing for the platform and the people supporting it rarely use it and dislike it.
Re: Bar humbug
No doubt you're making yourself available for this onerous task?
Don't be so tight. You can buy us all a round if you want :)
Re: @grahamdawson
That sounds like it must have been the most dangerous stretch of road in the world.
Yeah, the planning process really failed on that one. If they'd done their due diligence the road would never gone straight through the customer waiting area :)
Re: Out of curiosity ...
Are you expecting the machines to rise up soon?
Soon? Have you used Windows 8 yet?
Sell-by and use-by dates on a lot of things can be safely ignored for anything from a week up to a month depending.
That's true. The corned beef I had in my sarnies this week 'expired' over a month ago and It's been fine. It was vacuum packed though which probably helped. I've also got some nearly a year-old Tabasco sauce in the fridge although to be fair it's hard to tell what difference it would make if that had gone off :)
Posted in Star Trek: The original computer game
Oh wow, yes. I remember playing it on a Bleasdale at Polytechnic.
As a new user, saintcroix's comments required moderation. The above outburst was moderated straight into the bin.
On the plus side it also got their post into a headline article :)
Re: If I read that correctly....
Ran out of edit time.
The main divisions of BT are basically:
BT Openreach (aka BTor) - Responsible for the physical layer.
BT Wholesale - Create services for the wholesale market based around BTor's products.
BT Retail - Just an ISP. Like any other.
And supposedly all these are separate and buy/sell from the free market the same as any other company.
Re: If I read that correctly....
I don't think that's right. What TT is saying is that BTor is making too much profit but BTr is making too little. I'm not sure about the former but on the latter front BT Infinity has been very competitive all along.
But it's all very complicated. I thought no-one bought direct from BTor except for BTw. But TT may be using GEA in which case perhaps that is bought direct from BTor.
Anyway the important thing to note is that despite the names BTr should not be able to subsidise itself from BTor. But reading between the lines I think that's what TT is implying.
Sounds like a cock and ball story.
Re: Rude is as rude does
not how one holds themselves while talking
Most cultures would frown upon someone 'holding themselves' while talking :D
Re: The wisdom of the crowd!
The overall intelligence of any group of people is inversely proportional to the number of members in that group.
:)
Re: True but misleading
Same here. Three main passwords for me rated for security - unimportant, important, very important.
Re: Download, schmownload
My FTTC connection gives me 17Mb/s upstream. That's enough to send at least a couple of HD video streams with a half-way decent encoder.
To me the Orion B cloud looks like a horse's head (a unicorn actually) while the bit that's been zoomed in on looks like..er..nothing much. Anyone else see that?
at least 2Mbit/s to almost every Brit by 2015
Whup-de-doo.
I don't generally get on the 'faster is better' bandwagon but we're way beyond 2Mb/s as the minimum now. By 2015 we should be aiming for a universal minimum of 20Mb/s.
Re: Scrum Development Process
shouldn't you be designing unit tests as you go?
Absolutely but with some management styles standing up at the review meeting and saying you spent half your time writing code that would never be shipped to the customer could be unpleasant. There's nothing wrong with scrum if it's done properly but it seems to me that there is greater opportunity for steps to be missed or poorly executed. A team is after all a largely self-contained and self-policed entity. That's one of the advantages of the system - but also a weakness.
Re: Testing updates prior to release
More people adopting scrum perhaps? At least the traditional waterfall method had a clearly defined sequence of 'develop then test'. I do like scrum but with increased freedom comes increased responsibility and a careless developer could forget to create a separate testing task for their PBI.
Also pressure of management who just want a product out of the door on a certain date. Scrum aids that by allow efficiency gains but in a weak environment the gains could come through corner cutting.
