Posts by Blitheringeejit 469 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2008
My thought exactly - though my plan would be to TELL everyone that the team are flying SR-71s, but obviously they are flying too high and too fast for anyone to see them. Which means we don't need to actually buy and run them at all, saving a fortune in taxpayers' finest.
And if anyone in the beancounting dept insists on seeing actual footage, this could easily be sim'd.
All this battery stuff is clearly not fit for purpose - we need to rethink how we do power storage/delivery. I think mobile devices can take a leaf out of the National Grid book on this, by carrying a tank of water on the roof, and generating power by letting it fall onto a pelton wheel at the bottom of the machine, and run away harmless and pollution-free onto the ground.
Should have no trouble Kickstarting this, it's a stroke of genius, though I say so myself.
...to find this wasn't an update on our beloved Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator mission, but just some meaningless celebrity bollocks. C'mon El Reg, we read you precisely because you DON'T peddle this shit.
Friday afternoons used to be fun round here, where's our BOFH and/or Stob rewards for making it through another week?
Harsh, certainly. But once she's had her 15 minutes of humiliation, her life will go on - unlike the lives of hundreds killed on the roads by drivers trying to do stuff with their phones while driving. OK, in this case she only bent a plodmobile, but it could easily have been a child. It's a message which needs propagating, and you can't blame the plod for taking every opportunity to highlight it. After all, they are the poor buggers who have to deal with the bodies on scene, and inform the families, when the impact is a fleshy one.
(Where's the icon for "Unexpectedly serious content in a comment on a tits-out story"?)
'On the question of whether BT has historically under-invested in Openreach, he said investment in the business will increase by 30 per cent over the next two years. "Looking ahead case for more investment further is quite strong," he said.'
Or in other words - "Yes, we historically under-invested, and now recognise that this has made us so unpopular that we need to make some token increase over the next two years which might, if you're lucky, amount to about 0.1% of what we are spending on football rights during the same period. It won't be enough to make any significant improvement in connection speeds, especially in those difficult-to-reach rural areas - but it will give our PR and lobbying wonks enough sales-pitch material to keep the regulators wrapped round our little fingers."
Git.
But that was in the days where payments had to be made by cheque, or in person at a post office. We now have a huge array of micro-payment platforms which make it very economic for organisations to take large volumes of small payments.
Of course this depends on some kind of coherent IT implementation by HM Gov, which is a rare thing - but not totally impossible. At the risk of attracting major downvotery and a hail of rotten tomoatoes, I'll stick my neck out and say that I think they've done a half-decent job with the DVLA.
Raincoat icon in anticipation of rotten-tomatoes --------------------------------------^
Many moons ago, before health and safety was invented, an amateur rock band stage tech of my acquaintance cooked up a machine for setting off flash pods using cables which had a 13A plug on one end and a quarter-inch jack on the other.
As a guitarist, just looking at one of these cables gave me palpitations.
That's how it's SUPPOSED to work. How it works in practice is very different - in order to resell OR services, you have to use their systems, comply with their processes, and now even use their recommendations for routers. But their systems and processes are not fit for purpose (see all comments above about OR engineer callouts, my experience has been much the same), so it's impossible for the reseller to give anything resembling decent customer service.
BT Retail and OR are supposed to be separate, that was the condition of their (barely) regulated inheritance of the network following the initial privatisation. \But what this actually means is that if you can get a better service from OR by going through BT Retail, BT is in breach of its commitment to give all OR resellers a level playing field.
Of course no-one in their right mind would have set up this situation in the first place, as it's so ripe for abuse. OR should have been separated from BT at birth. But it was done by politicians, who are by definition not in their right mind, and were probably having a seat kept warm for them on the BT board in return for rolling out this nonsense of a regulatory structure.
I'm not sure how long you've been a comms wonk, but you clearly haven't spent as many years and as much mental energy dealing with the nightmare that is BT as most of us here.
I looked at our local coverage map, as linked from the new Openreach site. It noted these caveats:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Important information about the map
Please note that not all premises in an exchange area will get access to fibre based broadband.
Not all premises served by a fibre enabled cabinet will get a speed enhancement.
Not all cabinets in an exchange area will be fibre enabled.
All information, including forecast dates, is only indicative.
Planned coverage for all areas is subject to survey and may be subject to change.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Which basically means they don't promise that anything will get better even if they do finally get around to updating up your cabinet. If it was shit before, chances are it will still be shit. If not more shit, according to an Openreach engineer I asked about it. He said that if you already have slow broadband because of a long copper last-hop (>3Km), it will probably sync even slower after they fibre the cabinet.
Their site also says:
"If you are unsure of which cabinet you are connected to, follow this link and enter your landline telephone number to find out. "
The link is to
http://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.TelephoneNumberOutput
The response at the time of writing is a 404.
So clearly we're not connected to anything. At all. And never will be.
Muppets.
<Please can we have a Muppet icon??>
It was.
But I think it's fair to characterise this whole referendum as a choice between which particular group of unfettered global capitalists you want to get raped by. The EU's favouring of TTIP suggests that they are no better friend of the poor or the working majority than those carrying the flag for "de-regulation", AKA poorer workers' rights and a privatised health service.
May the Lord have mercy on our souls.
Or perhaps - may the Lord have mercy on arseholes.
...if you're a newcomer to the market. ISPs (and countries) who got in early reserved vast IP4 ranges which are still under-used, so IP4s are handed out like sweeties to the customers and residents of those ISPs and countries (including me). But if you were late to the party, you can't reserve any new ones, cos they've all gone.
@sysconfig makes a good point - ARIN should be finding and re-allocating dormant addresses before the crims get their hands on them.
But it would also be nice if some networks which use huge ranges of public IPs could implement some NAT and make better use of smaller address space. It's a bit of a culture thing - here in the UK most LAN PCs are NATted, but (if I understand it correctly from what I've been told) most North American colleges etc use public IPs for every client PC on their LANs.
Is that the case, and if so, could we ease the pain by pushing NAT into those places, and offer a reward for freeing up IP ranges? There would be a lot of rerouting to do, but if there's sufficient moolah in IP4s for the crims to get involved, surely it would be worth a go.
I'm a green - shameless and longstanding, right down to the pony-tail. And I want molten-salt technology, and fusion power, much more than I want anything renewable. I have solar panels on the roof, but would prefer a thorium reactor in the garden (especially if I can get the same feed-in tariff <ahem>).
This debate might actually be useful if we could all resist the temptation to over-simplify the views of those who don't share our own particular totems.
Facty bit: “We are almost certainly not talking about the possibility of new plants in England."
Reg hack conclusion: "...the UK isn’t windy enough for wind...".
The ghost of Lewis Page lives on.
By all means bash the hippies (we love it), but please try to stay honest. And if you can't resist over-interpreting and putting words in peoples' mouths, at least try be much funnier than this. Lewis usually was.
Similar issue a coule of years ago with Rapport, and after being ceaselessly nagged by the bank website to install it, I rang their online banking tech support to try to have a sensible conversation. More fool me.
My questions:
"Why does your site keep nagging me to install a piece of software when I'm a linux user (as your site can tell from my browser) and you provide only Mac and Windows versions of this software? If this software is so important for online banking security, where can I get hold of a linux version?"
Their *online banking tech support person* response:
"What's 'linux'?"
FFS.
The problem is that no-one will tell you if they have a brilliant hosting company, because they don't want that company to acquire so much new business that they become over-stretched and flaky. I did a decade of trial-and-error (including an early flirtation with 123) before I found my lasting life-partner - and you're not getting their number from me!
And this brave new world shall be called "Things As A Service", and will include free OpenThings, pretty but expensive "iThings", and flaky "Things365".
And these Things will monitor your every activity, and report your metrics back to Things Mega-Corp Inc, who will agglomerate everyone's metrics into a world domination strategy, and will therefore need to be regulated by the Ministry of Things.
Or possibly OfThing.
Please shoot me now.
...on your loss - feline companionship is generally more rewarding than most human companionship.
But I think you should be careful what battles you take on while your judgement is grief-impaired. In particular, proposing the mass sacking of Ops people might buy you the un-looked-for but very scary enmity of one BOFH of this parish.
I was going to ask how Auntie can possibly expect to get good service from a rival content provider - presumably BT's shareholders will ensure that BT's own subscribed sporting streams will prioritised over those of customers like the BBC when being transmitted across BT-operated infrastructure.
But then I noticed "The current broadcast network is provided by Vodafone UK through the BBC’s principal technology services provider, Atos.". So things can only get better...
>>The economics of last mile networks don't change just because you give someone else the keys.
Maybe not, but those same economics matter differently if the new owner isn't a purely-for-profit entity, but some kind of government-staked body with a public interest element to its constitution. The greater benefit to the country (including increased tax revenues, as well as happier people) could be weighed against subsidising the running of the network at a modest loss - something which the corporate sector cannot do.
The subsidy bit is already happening, of course - but it currently gets paid to BT for "rolling out rural broadband" (yeah, right) and trousered by their executives and shareholders (or possibly spent on football rights). Let's at least be honest about our national need to have this network, whether or not it can be run at a profit - like the NHS, the fire service, stuff like that - and create something to run it accordingly.
...is not whether the natural monopoly that is Openreach gets spun out of BT. The important question is - will the government acquire/obtain some kind of control of it, as they have with the National Grid and Network Rail? Or will it remain an infrastructure monopoly in purely private/corporate hands, run for profit?
If it remains private, the primary beneficiaries will be the telcos who resell Openreach's ADSL, who won't have to compete with (the currently unfairly-advantaged) BT Retail.
But taking control into public hands would reflect the reality that most of this network was built with public money (even some of the latest investment, which came from government subsidies to BT), and provides an opportunity for administering the network in the public interest instead of for the profit-trousering of executives and shareholders.
I know it's all very boring for you cosmopolitan types who have cable and 4G options coming out of your ears. But a remarkably large number of British people (and companies) still struggle to get an internet connection running at more than 1Mb/s, and that costs the country a lot of lost tax revenue. Public-interest control of the BT copper would provide a real opportunity to improve that lamentable situation.
...that it depends on where the f*** you're trying to farm.
Minimising carbon and environmental impact by growing and eating just veg and fruit (backed up with some seafood) makes perfect sense at the latitudes of places like Greece and Italy, because fruit and veg grows really well there.
But in colder climates, where anything more nutritious than grass and trees is pretty hard to cultivate efficiently, it's better to grow sheep and cows on the grass, and pigs (plus deer, beavers, birds etc) in the forests, to convert stuff we can't eat (grass, seeds etc) into meat. At the most extreme end of things, I would guess that a natural Inuit diet doesn't include much in the way of green vegetables.
PS1 - possibly fair, though I'm not sure that a wild pig's natural diet would include much stuff that humans would eat. At least not without boiling it for a long time first.
And as for PS2, I AM a veggie AND a hippy - but I accept that as I live in northern England rather than the sun-drenched Mediterranean, my being a veggie is irrational and silly.
Being a hippy, though, is sensible - the extra hair keeps me warm.
/afghan coat!!
It's not hard to demonstrate that growing lettuce in (say) a desert has more environmental impact than growing a camel or a goat there. Whereas growing lettuce in my garden, fed by my lawn clippings, has considerably less environmental impact than growing a camel there, what with the food-miles it would cost to import camel food from, er, wherever it is they make camel food. We can all play the the carefully-select-your-context-to-suit-your-polemic game, it's not clever and it certainly isn't telling us anything useful.
But there is one interesting aspect to this article - does it indicate that Lester has inherited the Register's official hippy-baiter-in-chief office from Lewis Page? Surely there should have been some kind of handover ceremony, accompanied by a generous quantity of bacon sandwiches and a hired chorus of close-harmony climate-change-deniers..?
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