Posts by AndrueC

Re: Free market?

BT was gifted all that expensive (monopoly) infrastructure for a knock down price back in the 80s

And you think BT are still using that network unaltered from the way the PO left it? BT pretty much rebuilt the core using fibre optics (a condition of the floatation I believe) and upgraded all the exchanges to digital. A lot of the local loop is unchanged from PO days but a lot of houses have been built in the last 30 years so even that has been considerably extended since privatisation. And that's to say nothing of the roll-out of v90(*), IDSN, ADSL and now the installation of thousands of street-side cabinets.

Harping on about what BT may or may not have inherited from the PO is unhelpful. It was over 30 years ago and in telephony terms that makes it pre-history. What BT inherited from the PO was a network creaking at the seams, barely fit for purpose and in need of serious investment. BT has brought that network into the modern world and turned it into a world-class telephony network.

BT has earned the right to be judged on its own merits. Criticise if it you want but stop dragging ancient history into the discussion, please.

(*)That required BT to install modems in telephone exchanges so that one of the D/A conversions could be skipped.

Re: Devonian? @ ~Spartacus

Hypothetically, if a group of dinosaurs had developed technology, there would be little or no evidence of it.

This forms part of the basis behind a pleasantly readable science-fiction book called Toolmaker Koan. There's one scene where the humans are working with the 'aliens' onboard their ark looking at a map of modern Earth and suddenly the moon comes into view. The 'aliens' recognise it and realise that their ark didn't carry them very far after all. Quite poignant.

Re: John Lewis? An ISP?

Possibly over nit-picky of me, but I'm under the impression there are 2 ISP's in the UK - Openreach & NTL

Not really but you could be forgiven for being confused :)

BT Openreach is not an ISP. It's an infrastructure provider. It owns and operates the hardware side of things mostly. Its basic remit is to help move packets between the modem inside your house and the telephone exchange. After that someone else has to carry the packets.

If it helps any you could think of BT Openreach as being the telephony equivalent of Network Rail. Vital to the operation but you don't buy train tickets off Network Rail ;)

Inside the exchange there are several ways the packets can get carried further but simplistically it boils down to one of two options:

* BT Wholesale carries them from the exchange to your ISP.

or

* If you are with an LLU operator (eg; Talk Talk, Sky, maybe a couple of others) they pick up them up at your exchange themselves.

There are actually two ways BT Wholesale can get packets between exchange and ISP. Either they can carry them all the way or they can drop them off somewhere convenient where your ISP can pick them up.

Of course BT Openreach own the main national telephony network so whatever method is used at the exchange it likely rides over BT Or equipment at some point anyway. It's very hard to avoid BT Or's network because it's ubiquitous and actually pretty damn' good.

And it's worth adding that even if you do get broadband from BT as per the headline that is neither Openreach nor Wholesale but is in fact a third division called 'Retail'. All three BT divisions mentioned here operate independently. Ofcom insist that all CPs (Communication Providers) get equal treatment so BT Retail operates under the same rules as all the others.

You could think of BT Wholesale as being like a rolling-stock leasing company. In which case your ISP would be the company that leases the rolling stock and provides the drivers.

Hope that helps :)

A few years ago I was talking to a colleague and we got on to discussing pets. At the time I had a pet budgie and in his typical disparaging(*) way he said "why don't you get rid of that and get a parrot - at least they can talk".

So I pointed out that a budgie is a parrot and in fact they appear to be one of the best human vocal imitators :)

Taxonomy can be a funny old thing.

(*)He was, frankly, an unpleasant git and one of only two people that I can claim to genuinely hate. Thankfully we parted ways several years ago.

Re: Won't

I can't wait until it arrives

For ten quid more you could've gone with the matter transmission option.

In fact a huge proportion of F1 is based in Britain.

Yup all of them around the Northants/Bucks/Oxfordshire area. An internationally recognised area of motorsport excellence. It's something that Britons should be proud of, like our satellite manufacturing and operating industry. Unfortunately it seems some people just can't or won't accept that when we're good, we're bloody good.

I live in a small town in rural South Northants. We have a Formula 1 team that wins championships. It's opposite Tesco :)

Re: "Google will make you live to be 500"...

Further Correction: Google will take your brain and put it in a jar...

Or a box. :(

And they can't stick it in some kind of VM while they work out what to do with it?

These stats are measuring where XP is running. It's not going to make any difference whether it's on physical or virtual hardware. Of course if you have to run XP then running inside a VM is probably a good idea but still not a panacea. You might not be able to isolate the applications from the outside world and even if you can it's still possible to suffer a breach if the damage occurs within the VM itself.

Re: filesystem time on a Window box filesystem

You might want to think about (or look into) whether NTFS and FAT (and FAT32) all behave the same way in this respect.

That's true but you might want to consider that it's largely irrelevant. FATx is pretty much only used on USB sticks these days (and even then NTFS would be preferred unless portability with another OS was a factor). NTFS has been the default file system for hard disks since Windows XP. As a consequence it's pretty safe to say that 99.9% of documents created under Windows on a local disk file system will be created on an NTFS volume.

The 'Windows file system' is NTFS and has been for over a decade. FATx is just a legacy file system that Windows (in common with most OSes) supports for inter system compatibility reasons and is mostly only seen on portable devices.

Re: "Satellite is the ideal way to distribute 4K. We will drive it just as we did with HD"

720p had no traction in Europe either as acquisition format or deliverable.

Indeed not. When you have had PAL and SECAM already for several decades 720i doesn't bring much to the table especially if you get a bit carried away with compression. Some EU countries even made use of PAL+ to deliver widescreen format over analogue although in the UK I think only C4 did that and probably only for films.

Oh I'd go for a pint glass. My last one (an old TeamB glass from Borland cracked when I tapped it last month). And just 'cos I'm a programmer doesn't mean I can't play golf. I've got my scores down to double digits now I'll have you know :)

Re: Abolishing Corporation Tax

Is it really a good idea that everyone could defer tax indefinitely by stashing their savings in a company?

It's so good that we should give it a name. I suggest we call it 'Capital investment'. Maybe we could set up some kind of marketplace where the funds we stash away can be moved between different companies in order to best benefit us. Perhaps companies would see that as an opportunity to compete and we'd develop a kind of 'Darwinistic' survival of the fittest environment.

All we need now is a name for such a marketplace. Lemme think a minute.

Re: Sing it with me...

If you start impersonating David Essex I'm leaving.

Re: A few words of Interview advice

At 44 I'd consider that a risky strategy. To a manager it may suggest that you don't want too much responsibility, yet when you're 55 you'll probably stll expect a salary commensurate with your age.

It's a risky strategy and one I only slightly applied. I said I wouldn't mind being a team leader but loved coding so much I didn't want to be a manager. The trick is to demonstrate that you still have the passion of a youngster but tempered by many year's experience.

As for my salary at 55 - that's what a private pension is for. Not saying I will retire at 55 but I'm making damn sure that the option is on the table ;)

Re: Speed - what speed

However reality is that most times during the day I struggle to get 1Mb/s; video streaming is often so blighted with pauses I give up in disgust.

If you can currently connect at 17Mb/s at any time then you already have a pretty good connection. The fact you can't saturate that connection 24/7 is probably a separate issue to that being discussed here. It's possible that your exchange is congested but that's pretty unusual. BTor are fairly good at managing SVLAN/VP capacity. What does your exchange status say if you put it in here.

I'd be inclined to blame your ISP or possibly you are using a wifi connection and interference from your neighbours is limiting throughput during peak hours.

Re: He is right though, too many cooks does make for shite

Ah yes, I 'got out' of data recovery just about when the first 4k sector drives were coming onto the market. Our software would have handled it because we didn't hardcode block sizes. Good job too - we once had to do an AS400 recovery and those used 528 byte sectors IIRC. I think we also saw some 1024 byte sector sizes but I don't know where they came from.

Some of the last stuff I wrote was for Windows. The joys of SPTI. Lordy that was a right PITA from what I remember.

Re: Cheaper alternative to truecall

CPR call blocker worked fairly well for me but it doesn't have the screening ability. For me that's the big draw with TC. With CPR I'd have had to block all anonymous callers and that was a step too far. With TC they get screened and so far I've not had any marketing types bother to even leave a message. As noted previously my GP's surgery did though.

But CPR is definitely a more affordable alternative.

Re: There has been mention before

Lets face it, you need a news outlet to report a scare and not actually bother to check the source or facts first.

In the UK that probably means having the Daily Mail on speed dial. Hell they'd write up the story even if it never happened.