we won't know until the inquiry into the inquiry has been completed

hadnt they done the exact opposite with the V1's?

thought they managed to leak that the bombs were short of london and over time manages to get it to the point that a lot of them were overshooting

Re: This will be useful...

on a lot of call systems Zero is an unmentioned option, usually drops you straight to a human

Re: bollocks

"IF it's sent from an american server"

there just happen to be hundreds of thousands of servers outside the US you know,

even if it is an american server and you unsubscribe then congratulations you removed yourself from one list "the does this email address get read list" and got yourself added to 20 more "lets sell these confirmed active email addresses" litst

Re: Hard to know where to start...

it doesn't have to be a seperate usb dac

pretty much anything apart from on-board audio will generally give a vast improvement (on-board is generally there for office usage error beeps and maybe a few video calls)

this was highlighted to me by doing like for like comparisons between my computer and my business partners

both in the same room

both with identical motherboards

identical speaker systems

the only difference between the systems is that mine has an obselete sound blaster audigy and his is using on-board audio, words do not describe the difference in audio quality (and I know the audigy is far from perfect)

Re: Amstrad Faux Hi-Fi

I used to do a roaring trade in modified amstrad stereos by turning them into slimline wall mountable units, people thought it was amazing that they could be slimmed down to 4 inches in depth (with the loss of the turntable) and still work perfectly, very few realised that the rest of the box was normally empty on un modified stereos.

my system at the time was various sony tape decks, a cd player unbolted from the bottom of a combined system (cant remember the make on the outside but it was sony innards) a pioneer sa-706 amp (still have it in the loft) and some sony APM-101 speakers.

Re: Blocking access to Remote SMTP servers?

since I run my own smtp server I just told the server to listen for connections on an extra (non standard) port, using this port has successfully bypassed the smtp blocks imposed by every mobile operator I have come across

Re: No aerial APRS? I did not know that.

Hi DaveAke

I can confirm as a ham that airborne operation of any sort is specifically excluded from the UK amateur license

Re: News?

because Sophos thought they had been out of the spotlight for a while and now we're into the new financial year (in the uk at least) corporates heads might have a little bit of budget available to protect themselves from this new threat that they have never seen yet (because the spam filter already takes care of it)

Re: So umm.. Who decided to lend the money?

I was taught from a young age to always allow 30% of any income as the cost of keeping a roof over my head.

luckily I ended up in a situation where my wages were far bigger than the cost of where I was living (10% cost not 30%), rather than do what most of my colleagues did and spend the extra / buy a bigger house etc I carried on paying my usual amount and dumped the extra difference into a savings account (20% of my wages).

after a few years the dot com crash happened and we all lost our jobs and there were no quick prospects for new work. I switched over to running from savings. those savings kept me afloat with no income for just under 2 years, bills got paid as they should and I still had my house etc etc, without exception all of my colleagues lost their homes.

fast forward to now... my housing expenses are around £1000 per month with an income that averages 9000 per month... 2000 per month still gets piled into savings and I am back at the point where I have a 2 - 3 year safety buffer, anything over the 3 year safety buffer gets pulled out and used to pay down the mortgage earlier.

as in the article a lot of the problems were caused by lending to people that it should have been obvious couldn't afford to pay it back (I liken some of the lending decisions to lending money to a drunk on a park bench)

Re: next step - outsourcing

thin air... just like a lot of the figures quoted from that address

Re: I upvoted you

in my current location there not even edge available let alone 3G (tested O2, Voda, Three, Tmob and Orange)

Mobile for games that require always on connections is a joke

Re: Same goes for the high street. Why do they open at 9am and close at 5.30pm?

one slight downfall with this plan...

if the majority of business switched to a 2 - 8pm opening times then where would the majority of people be between 2 - 8pm?

I would imagine the camera needs to be on the same side as the display so that the camera gets as close as possible to the same vision as the eye seeing the display.

Re: No brakes? - Range Rover

Older range rovers have an inertia switch under the back of the passenger seat, its designed to shut the fuel pump off if the vehicle is in an accident, well within reach of the driver and can be tripped by pulling or pushing the plunger on the top (cant remember which) of flicking it with a finger.

unfortunately a lot of people found it can also be hit by children's feet from the back seat, it was quite common to see them "broken down" on the side of the road because a child had been waggling feet in the gap under the passenger seat

Re: Maybe these should be in Base Stations

I will admit that I didn't look into the costs of atomic clocks (I just used the previous comments costing) but even if you allow for the cost having dropped by a third from the price you quoted to $1000 it's still hard to weigh that cost against a $10 part that gives the same accuracy under most conditions

"Hell, you can buy your own 1-second-in-1,000-years atomic clock for about $6k USD. Not cheap, but you don't need many"

Errrr you would need one for every cell tower so that's roughly 23,000 atomic clocks needed for the uk alone (and that's assuming the 23000 towers figure is current) or a $638,000,000 investment compared to a $230,000 investment using off the shelf gps based time receivers.

given the situation where there is enough em radiation around to knock out gps time (which only needs a single sat in view) it's likely that the radio side of the cell tower is likely to be swamped with RF anyway, so the loss of timing is unlikely to be an issue because the tower would probably be unable to receive a phone anyway.

Re: The horror, the horror

from memory the connect everything approach is the plan in the UK, although part of the reason the uk is in a good position to weather an event like this is because the electricity supply is truly a national grid in that power fed in at any point can be consumed at any other point (in theory). also by having a large grid the odds are that where you have a large peak on one part of the grid you also have a large trough elsewhere and plenty of links between the two areas to allow them to equalise.

other countries with multiple smaller power networks would not do so well because they simply do not cover a large enough area to be able to dissipate the effects.

Re: I hope they catch all of the perps...

religion is like a penis...

It's nice to have and can give you a great deal of pleasure, just don't start waving it around in public

I would think that the highest figure quoted is below the fastest connection speed because akamai measured speed of traffic through their network, as a result it will be slowed down by factors like rate limiting on the source server or other traffic on the users connection.

with regard to contention issues and you suggestion being to switch ISP this ignores the exchanges where it makes no difference which isp you are with you are still going over Openreaches connections, if that is over subscribed (fairly common) you are screwed no matter what you do.

my experience of this was moving from a location where a single adsl connection would sync at 8mb but struggle to deliver 1mb (it was the same for the whole area) to a location where a single connection with the same isp (under the same contract) sync's at 7mb and never delivers under 6.5

both locations are served only through openreach, the only difference between them is the quality of the connection from the exchange to the backbone

Re: Um, yeah, but...

light bending (in its perfect form) you could hide while standing in front of the tree (or anything else) anyone looking at you would see what is behind you.

if done perfectly you should appear to be 100% transparent and non distorting from any angle, if the tech ever reaches that level I would think that the only way of detecting it would be laser range finders (since bending the light around an object or person would affect the length of the beam as they moved giving a useful doppler shift)

Re: Won't happen to me

Lead in face paints = bad.. fair enough

however I will continue to use lead based solder because I actually want what I build to work for at least a couple of decades

Re: Am I the only one..

I view most technology as a tool, I use it, treat it with some respect but am not overly protective of it.

a good example is my laptop which is covered in scrapes (9 inch scrape across the back of the screen) however after 4 years it is still working perfectly and has no damage to the keyboard or screen, if I was overly protective of it then it would be in pristine condition but wouldn't have done 75% of the jobs it has.

as I said.. it's a tool I will use it till it falls apart and then repair or replace it but I won't avoid using it because it might pick up some damage.

Re: How are they controlled?

I would imagine that they could be programmed along the lines of this...

fly to location 1

drop bomb & record results

fly to location 2

drop bomb & record results

fly to location 3

drop bomb & record results

fly to location 4

drop bomb & record results

return to base.

real-time two way communications are noce to have on a drone but they are not essential

similar rules apply to the uk companies too, since company directors (whether a large or small company) must always act in the best interests of the company

if an accountant says to a director "if you do this you can avoid £££ in tax and it's legal" then it would not be in the companies best interests for the directors to follow a different route

HMRC are probably sensible enough to work out that that it's easier to concentrate their efforts on 3 / 4 big companies than it is to try and go after 1000's of smaller companies when the amounts of money involved are equal.

put it another way...

if you have 2 people that owe you £500 each and another 1000 people that owe you £1 each which ones are you going to chase first for the cash?

as Brits we would struggle to copy winnie the pooh, since the character was created by the english author Alan Alexander Milne in the 1920's and was only licensed to disney in the early 60's by his wife after Milnes death in the 50's

Re: LED displays

from memory DMX is just an RS485 bus, normally supporting 512 channels each with 255 levels

an intelligent light (like a moving head) will use several channels, usually 2 for pan (coarse and fine), 2 for Tilt (same) one for shutter, one for colour, 2 for gobo's (patterns in the light beam) another 2 for gobo rotation or shake and a final one for prisms (split a single beam into multiple beams) so you can easily end up with one light using 11 channels

Re: Hmmm

I remember a samsung sgh9000 (may be wrong number, black slide phone) that survived 2 full trips through the washing machine and dryer needing more than a recharge each time.

Re: Public vs Private

and if you believe that I have a business proposition for you...

Porcine Landing Strips

Re: Cheaper to buy it outright

It's not that they don't want to accept it in cash, it's they cant legally accept it in cash in case you are money laundering,

I think the limits on cash are 10k for property purchases (land / houses) or 5k for anything else, anything over those limits is meant to be sourced from a bank account so it's traceable.

Re: UK law and pen-testing?

pen testing your clients network etc is fine since you have their consent to attempt to gain access, getting bored and pen testing their competitors however would not be ok.

Re: On the plus side...

Errr not since using the undelete command in dos have I come across a file recovery tool that couldnt rebuild the directory structure

Re: Keeping white-hat info unpolluted?

if you get enough users checking each others work (i.e. set the same task to 10 people and compare their results) then you instantly have a fairly good method for getting the right answer, of course the more users you have the more likely this system is to work reliably (if 99% of your users are truly black-hat then you're screwed)

over time you can use past performance to apply a weighting to each users result, i.e. fred bloggs has reported 85% of his tasks wrongly but john smith has reported 85% correctly, simplest method would be to say that before a decision is made there needs to be 1000 votes, John's vote counts as 85 but Fred's vote only counts as 15.

in this way it becomes quite hard to game the system because the more somebody goes against the majority the less significant their vote becomes.