* Posts by Gavin Park Weir

46 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2007

AWS rakes in half a billion pounds from UK Home Office

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Interesting detail in the contract

Looking at the contract I see that UK Government has signed up to a contract based on USD thus opening them up to FX risk over the life of the contract. Having signed various contracts with the government working while working for US companies they have always insisted that its impossible to to have USD rates.

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

Gavin Park Weir

Why can't they donate them to a number of good disaster charities (e.g. www.dec.org.uk) who then arrange to sell them for a profit and use the money to help people? It would be like a $1bn+ donation to charity and avoid the royalties issue.

Vendors are hiking prices up to 30 percent and claiming 'it's inflation'

Gavin Park Weir

Re: It's shit like this...

This is pretty basic contract management stuff: Have a list of all your contracts and expiration dates, don't wait until the last minute to renew or update, engage with your supplier regally talking to discuss what your ongoing needs are.

I work in sales and clients who don't/won't engage until they need something get little attention and little sympathy.

Note: be ready to give free stuff to help negotiate a better price: be a reference for your supplier, agree to a case study, present at their quarterly internal call.

Supply chain blamed amid claims of Azure capacity issues

Gavin Park Weir
Mushroom

I don't think a multi cloud architecture will necessarily help this scenario. If one cloud reaches capacity, then all the users with multi cloud architecture will try to re-balance workloads to the next cloud, overwhelming it and so on. Automation will could this even worse similar to Black Friday.

Users really need to keep some on prem capacity to run critical workloads, if this is sized correctly then you get high utilisation and a lower cost than cloud. At cruch time you can choose to keep running your critical apps.

Of course you can ignore all of the above: the current round of security services, RAS, CDN, Teams, Contact Centre, telco core management, network managemnt tools etc etc etc are all being run in the main clouds (Azure, AWS and Google), so when the clouds evaporate (groan) all of the services will also stop functioning. IT apocalypse

Blockchain may be the machinery of mischief, but it can't help telling the truth

Gavin Park Weir

Re: "There's little point in stealing physical objects if they can't be traded without their NFT."

One of the big worries in the illegal art work (apparently) is that fakes are sold to dodgy types because they have little ability to check if its real.

NFT would also prevent stolen art work from even being brought back into the market after its been "found" 10 years later. The buyer can check if the person selling has the original NFT. If not they are either flogging a fake or stole it. This massively devalues stolen / illegal art work.

Imagine the scene: Evil genius has been lording it over the other lesser evil types, inviting them round ot his underground layer to show off his Picasso when BAM the same Picasso come up for auction but auction version they have the NFT* to prove its the original. imagine the sniggering at the annual evil convention. What a dupe...

* OK so Picasso is a bad example due to the recent NFT thing but you get the picture.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Nothing wrong with ads ...

Its a bit weird how bad the ads on YouTube are - I mostly watch on my phone. Terrible targeting.

Given I have never clicked a youtube ad maybe they are getting desperate? Women's panty liners, baby formula are just two in the last 3 days which are so massively inappropriate and unsuccessful.

Perhaps the algorithm has accidentally developed a sense of humour?

Seriously, advertisers should pay for success (clicks) only. That way all the spam would earn Google et all nothing and targeting would improve.

I might end up having to pay for youtube (never clicking anything) or lose it

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

Gavin Park Weir

Re: So, to get 1 liter of water you need to process 3 cubic meters of regolith

Thats low earth orbit I assume? I'm guessing many, many more times per kg out near the moon.

Big Telco freaks out as unknown operator with great political connections vies for valuable 5G space in America

Gavin Park Weir

Classic timing

Classic timing: So two yanks get the Nobel Economics Prize for their work on auctions, specifically spectrum auctions and how they maximize the value/revenue the government can generate from selling/leasing it to private industry.

Then boom - no bid deal.

My guess is that all the cronies (either party) in the US think there is a reasonable chance the current administration won't make it so they are doing their best to make hey while the orange sun is shining.

Arm, Vodafone flex their muscles to show Cisco they’re fighting fit on the edge

Gavin Park Weir

I'd like to point out ...

The the US telco I work for has had uCPE actually deployed for 5 years and had 10,000+ boxes in customer sites 4 years ago. We have two uCPE vendor choices now but adding more to the portfolio is hard to justify when you have to maintain a supply chain to for supply and breakfix in 198 countries. I can't believe VF are only just doing this.

I would note that it has not all be plain sailing, getting it all to work like the marketing slides has been hard work...

Congratulations Peebles. Felicitations Queenzieburn. Openreach is bringing you FTTP (yes, they're real places)

Gavin Park Weir

Some sort of bond

Funding fibre to urban or rural areas is expensive, take up varies enormously and so telcos (OR etc) sensibly try to deliver where they get a return or subsidy.

There should be a system where you as a resident or business can provide that subsidy in return for share of the profits as more people take up the service.

We got FTTP to 50% our rural village after 6 years of working with Hampshire CC and OR. The other have 50% of the village had FTTC delivered as part of the Hants program. The FTTP 50% of the village has to raise a significant sum (£25k) to fund share the infrastructure. In the end Hants returned our money as the take up of Superfast was higher across Hants than expected and so OR gave them some money back.

Some sort of bond where local funding lowers risks for the telcos and provides a long term return for those who can / will provide the upfront funding would make sense and drive community engagement.

Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Is it really

You need to at least have the law in place in order to have a chance at demanding correct design and of getting the right people in place.

Having the law in place will not guarantee the latter two but its lack pretty much ensures they won't be met.

Facebook to surround all of Africa in optical fibre and tinfoil

Gavin Park Weir

Re: someone explaining

I would have thought that there will need to be both EDFAs and proper reprocessing points? My recollection from 20 years ago is that there are 2 forms of signal reduction in fibre optics:

Attenuation - the light getting dimmer over distance

Spreading/scattering - gradual elongation of the "1" light pulse into the "0" dark due to boucing off the wave guides and glass particles etc.

EDFAs would only address attenuation not signal spreading.

UK snubs Apple-Google coronavirus app API, insists on British control of data, promises to protect privacy

Gavin Park Weir

Both

Given the resources to create the app, processes, roll out, response etc are small in comparison to the national cost of extending current restrictions, why not develop both in parallel? There will be lots of parts of the process that are common: internation with testing and health teams, messaging reporting etc.

Ex-TalkTalk infosec exec's equal pay and unfair dismissal claims tossed out at tribunal

Gavin Park Weir

If TT was in any doubt in their case they would have settled before the tribunal. They might have played a game of brinksmanship but they would not have risked the CEO in the dock...

The cost of the tribunal woul have been ten of thousands of pounds in lagal fees let alone the distraction for the senior staff.

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Gavin Park Weir

Re: I have a simpler and lower cost solution

Live in rural Hants and all the local roads are effectively what I would call "cart track". Going over 30mph is a risk to the vehicle.

I find it hard to believe that sat photos are a better solution than one of the below

- cameras on bin lorries with "AI" to spot holes

- Deal with Google, Waze or other to correlate user pot hole experience (is driving, phone shock detected, with position etc)

- making it easier for users to report issues

I'd think having existing road users as automated detectors would be best.

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Thank you Andrew

And thirded from me

Small UK firms laying fibre put BT's Openreach to shame – report

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Comparing like with like?

I can't believe there are not more Gigclear like competitors set up. In addition small companies should be able to access the same funds as Openreach get bunged by the county councils for connecting properties.

Vodafone won't pay employee expenses for cups of coffee

Gavin Park Weir

I agree with some of it but the point about "company should re-reimburse lunch because you are travelling" is dangerous. If your job requires travel and you sign up to it knowing you will be inconvenienced then why should your company pay for lunch?

You can pack a sandwich in tupper wear and take it with you?

UK hospital meltdown after ransomware worm uses NSA vuln to raid IT

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Time to move off Windows

If you think waiting times are bad now, removing most of the computers from the NHS would be a disaster. The time saved just from electronic scheduling must be in the ten of thousand man days a year if not 100s of.

Gavin Park Weir

Having been a supplier to the NHS in the past. The reason none of us greedy bastard, no good, only out for ourselves, shoody outfits provide the right high quality solution is this:

NHS: Can I have a good thing to update / fix / provide (delete as needed) this service

Supplier: We would recommend X which costs £Y

NHS: We can't afford Y because we are not able to negotiate the budget we need to fix update / fix / provide (delete as needed). What can you for £Z?

Supplier: How about this 2003 PC running XP?

AT&T fingers BT's brass neck, wishes it could throttle it

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Evidence?

I have fields outside the window, sub 2mb and only one provider to choose from. What's your point.

Why do driverless car makers have this insatiable need for speed?

Gavin Park Weir

Re: The end of any driving pleasure

One of the huge benefits of automated vehicles is that we can rip up and pave over the ridiculously inefficient railways.

Their use of capacity compared to a road is tiny and cost per passenger mile is huge. Convenience (lack) is a joke - drive to station, park car, walk in rain to platform, wait for train (late), arrive destination, wait in rain for taxi etc etc. We can use the capacity in addition to the existing roadways.

I also would like to see a change in ownership models. Out family currently have 2 cars that spend 95% (or more) of the time idle. Either parked in the train station or by the house. I assume that automated vehicles will turn every trip into a taxi ride. Everyday commute: small single passenger unit. Family holiday to wales: bigger unit etc.

In which case, if people are not buying cars who will the big manufactures be selling to?

More UK broadband for bumpkins, but have-nots still ain’t happy

Gavin Park Weir
FAIL

Agreed - we are 7.5km from the exchange but despite BT finding that they have existing ducting between the exchange the village which they could put fibre in, they decided not to because they don't want to cough up for a cabinet in the village.

The irony: it is a rare day when there is not a BT (or several) van on 7.5km stretch between the village and the exchange. The annual cost of the engineer time must be many multiples of the cost to fibre and put in a cabinet which would dramatically shortening possible length for the copper to fail.

Estimated 240 copper pairs over 7.5km = 3600km of copper most of it installed 60 years ago.

Data centre doesn't like your face? That's a good thing

Gavin Park Weir

Because very few companies can afford to invest in the types of physical security and redundancy/resiliency a good data centre provides.

Boffins: It's EASY to make you GRASS YOURSELF UP for crimes you never did

Gavin Park Weir
Stop

Erm parents of students?

I can sort of see this happening. Parents of students are mostly unaware of the ghastly and generally dangerous stuff their little darling gets up to in their absence.

No doubt a reasonable portion of the student body have done a number of illegal things that generally not widely known about.

So when a researcher makes up something uncomfortably close to the truth the subject make it fit.

I am sure that for the completely innocent there would not be convinced.

97% of UK gets 'basic' 2Mbps broadband. 'Typical households' need 10Mbps – Ofcom

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Typical households need 10Mbps

Scotland has generous grants to rural areas to develop that own rural broadband programs. they seem to be awash with cash for this sort of project. We can't even get £350 per household in deepest darkest Hampshire in order to deliver fibre to the cabinet.

Coughing for 4G, getting 2G... Networks' penny-pinching SECRETS REVEALED

Gavin Park Weir

I would like to know what time of day this was tested?

about 6 months ago I had a 2 hour wait in Waterloo from 4pm to 6pm. I connected PC via tether and ran a ping test throughout.

4pm I was seeing around 120ms.

By 5:05pm rose to around 2200ms

by 5:15 stopped working - no packets were pass

All tests to bbc.co.uk using Vodafone 3G.

This bears out my daily commute experience which is that I can't do anything internet in waterloo at rush hour.

Given I have wifi at home, wifi at work and wifi in the pub I only need it when commuting. Generally a bit rubbish then.

Be your own Big Brother: Monitoring your manor, the easy way

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Security?

If someone wants to break in they will. If the burglar is in anyway organised cameras will make no difference as they will avoid being caught.

However as much as anything its about making your property look difficult / riskier than another one they drive past: If you have good security lights, gravel that makes lots of noise, good quality doors and windows, powered burglar alarm and cameras then you look prepared and probably not an easy target.

It does look like you are protecting something but to a casual thief probably one to avoid. The types of thief who target you for a specific item are well prepared but I have nothing that valuable.

Wall Street woes: Oh noes, tech titans aren't using bankers

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Makes sense

If companies had a little more backbone when acquiring they would bind the banks the to the value of the deal. Offer to pay cash based on cost of the bankers work and then shares in the new company that only vest after 5 years.

That would tie the bankers income to giving good advice all round.

How about printing your electricity?

Gavin Park Weir

Re: Bring it on!

I have been puzzling over this exact problem for some time. Certainly if becomes really cheap it will make for some interesting changes: Every home becomes its own power source and able to refill the car with H? Goodbye southern electric and not before time.

Thorium and inefficient solar power? That's good enough for me

Gavin Park Weir

Hydrogen Cycle

Great article if only because it reinfornces what I have been thinking is probably true (I don't want my theories tested).

My thought is why can't my roof be generating H2 for me to use when I want it? I could fill my car, run my house etc. Additionally it would make a big difference if our grid did not have to support a very peaky power usage profile. Even out the peaks and Nuclear (traditional or thorium), wind etc could be more efficient.

We would get round big electric organisation the moment local generation costs in without subsidies.

Brits give thumbs-up to shale gas slurping in university-run poll

Gavin Park Weir
Meh

Re: Gross stupidity

>Problem is - corners are always cut, sooner or later.

I agree that it is always an issue however after the BP Gulf of Mexico incident, those with the money are going to be much more careful.

I was going to talk about empowered regulators but I don't think I bother.

The terrifying tech behind this summer's zombie assault

Gavin Park Weir

Bandwidth

Why are these guys moving all the data around? Why not have one big datacentre and have everyone log in via VDI. The cost if 10gb/s connections is high and would support 10,000s of VDI connection. Typically only high frequency traders can justify international 10gb/s connections and they max them out 24/7. I bet these pipe are empty most of the time.

When you actually need to move the finished product around, send a person on a plane with hard disks - cheaper and probably as quick.

Hitch climate tax to the actual climate, says top economist

Gavin Park Weir

Re: The debate

I agree with the evolution sentiments. Life will continue. Its the individual and collective mankind that is causing all the fuss. I.e. I don't want life to be much harder. I too am sceptical over the science.

The most important thing to discover is what if any impact is our activity having and what do we need to change to minimise negative impact. I.e. Spending money on carbon reduction is pointless if the ecosystem will scrub it out of the atmosphere.

Space elevators, vacuum chutes: What next for big rocket tech?

Gavin Park Weir
Coat

Space elevator

I like the untethered design space elevator. Basically you balance the (~30km) bit of string so that one end is at say 20km above earth and the other is beyond geo stationary.

It must help solve some big issues. Lots of the friction will happen lower down with air, you can leave it in the shade or sun as you need. I'm thinking that balance would be done with liquids and pumps.

Mines the one with the infinitely strong carbon nano tube in the pocket.

Corporate IT bod? Show 'em what it costs and management WILL pay

Gavin Park Weir
Meh

Service providers are not the underlying success factor

I work in sales for a global SP. I am constantly amazed at how few of the IT leaders I meet can easily and coherently articulate the company's strategy and how IT are aligning their projects to match.

IT needs leaders in the same way that any organisation needs leaders. Where IT is brilliant and aligned to supporting the business the organisation is given a boost in every area. Where they simply providing services at the lowest cost with no focus on the major initiates then they are drag holding back the whole company.

Using SPs is not the critical factor in the success of IT.

PS - if you are going to us SPs then find one you trust and get them to help you sell to your business. You will have to trust us though.

Everything Everywhere bags 4G monopoly in UK - for now

Gavin Park Weir
Megaphone

Re: Three

It will be interesting to see what happens with the backhaul.

In order to sell 4G they have to upgrade the backhaul in area where people use their phone. In order for EE to sell anything approaching a significant number they are going to have to invest in a huge backhaul upgrade. That will be time consuming. To get to a useful number of masts I expect 6-9 months. For good coverage 24 months?

Assuming my time scales above are correct....the others can start the backhaul upgrade now and by the time they have the spectrum they can launch with decent presence giving EE only a nominal advantage.

Look at sales of 4G in the US. It only happens once the area consumers live in has the technology rolled out effectively. Here is a link to AT&T's map: http://www.att.com/network/

Soup up your home network

Gavin Park Weir
Meh

BT Home Hub 2.

Does anyone have any experience of the standard BT Home Hub 2.0. I'm getting rubbish transfers across Homeplug and I suspect the router.

I tried connecting the NAS and a PC together just using ethernet (without Homepulg) to the BT router but speeds did not improve much. There could be other culprits (PC or NAS, FTP method etc) but my next plan is to change the router. Anyone else done similar and got good results?

AT&T plan: Let content providers pay your bandwidth bill

Gavin Park Weir
FAIL

ISP revenue

ISPs just don't get it. They are currently charging the maximum they can in their market to both the content providers and consumers.

If they want a slice of the content revenue then all they have to do is to create content the consumers want. Creating content is a much riskier business than infrastructure. Some bets pay off and others don't

If their distribution method is so valuable they would be able to charge more than they are. As it is competition keeps the prices where they are.

EU telecoms to Apple, Google: 'Pay up!"

Gavin Park Weir
Go

Backbone

OK so I work for a global telco and part of our business is providing large organisations (Google etc) and ISPs (Tiscali or Vodafone etc) with large chunks of bandwidth. We operate in a competitive market and sell GB of bandwidth and try to make margin.

We need to keep upgrading our fibre backbone around the world to keep up with capacity that our customers increasingly demand. However the cost to upgrade the backbone keeps falling per mb.

As we operate in a competitive environment this means that as the Googles and ISPs of the world order more bandwidth they buy it cheaper per mb.

The challenge for ISPs is to estimate if the future cost of BW is going to to drop faster than user demand rises. If does then they make margin, if not they lose money.

Frenchies, Germans wave fat pipes at embarrassed Brits

Gavin Park Weir
Stop

Backhaul

OK so everyone has 10 or 100mb to their home and starts to use it. The local exchange is going to need to be in 1gb to 10gb range. Local backbone in the 40 -100gb range (currently just about available) and national backbone into new and as yet undeveloped 1tb+.

The cost of this equipment is astronomical even when you consider the numbers of users involved.

Getting this kind of change wrong will bankrupt a company and its not easy to see what the actual revenue from these services is going to be.

NuLabour 'Bribo' laptop pops up on eBay

Gavin Park Weir
Thumb Down

Re: You have to admire Labour's neck

No one is saying the Tories will fix anything (apart from the Tories). What we hope is that they will continue to be rubbish but cost us less in tax.

Angry Ginger Man

Guinness to hit three quid a pint

Gavin Park Weir
Pint

Re: No, it won't

Rick,

Take a look at this link. Its probably out of date but still a useful scale for cheap boozin':

http://www.foodfight.org.uk/other/images/trampindex.pdf

Darling promises IT cuts, years of pain

Gavin Park Weir
Thumb Down

Complete waste

That is such a minor change in the status quo. 5bn cut in IT spending but over how long? The only thing now that can save the government deficit is if RBS and other banks we own somehow manage to gain in value and the gov can sell them to get our money back.

Sadly all the good (I mean successful) bankers are going to leave and the non gov funded banks are going to make millions taking all the profitable business while we end up holding all the toxic debt.

German bomber crashes on Moon Google Earth

Gavin Park Weir
Alien

Floating sunken ship near lake with no plane

Have a look at this amazing floating sucken shop just off the coast. Scary place stay away.

http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=t9nz4pgm31y9&style=b&lvl=2&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&scene=29551600&ss=ypid.YN1076x198195459~pg.1&sp=Point.t9nz5hgm31r7_Junkers%3F_Rotate%20the%20birds%20eye%20view%20until%20you%20get%20to%20the%20one%20with%20wind%20blowing%20on%20the%20water___&encType=1

Firefox-Google marriage on shaky ground?

Gavin Park Weir

Target Adverts

It seems to me that web site owners are complaining to the wrong audience. If the advertisers were putting out acceptable adverts then we would not need ABP. Problem solved.

Also the general user population of the internet has no particular head or structure. I'm sure that ABP could be shut down but that would really piss all the users off who would go even further to avoid the adds ultimately having a negative effect.

On the advertising side you have a nicely organised group with good lines of communications. Why not complain to them and get them to change. Fighting a battle with the who internet community is not something website owners are going to win.

Gav