Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Why is the High Tech West so Technically Challenged?

"In Cambodia/Kampuchia in addition to cell service and cell InterNet there is live, streamed, wireless TV in the largest cities."

Just over the border in Burma, it's a bigger mess than BT and the government's "opening up" of the market isn't making much different.

If anything it's getting worse by the day as more and more people are connected out through the same bandwidth-limited circuits (and it's not the international circuits that are the problem. It's deliberate throttling between their gateways and the rest of the country).

Re: "and action is required now to deliver better outcomes for phone and broadband users"

"Ofcom's job is to control abuse of that monopoly and this crap is just another example of them not doing it."

Actually it's the competition and markets authority's job to do that. Leave Ofcom to regulate telecommunications technical matters.

This very british clusterfuck is precisely caused by Ofcom being incompetent at competition issues and it should never have been allowed to lay claim to this area of regulation.

Re: True Competition?

"If I remember correctly as BT is the ‘Monopoly’ it has to sell to resellers lines cheaper than it charges end users so the reseller can undercut them (BT) and make a profit."

BT (and many other monopoly Telcos worldwide) is a practised artist in the noble pastime of "margin squeeze" - where the wholesale price is so high that retailers make almost no money.

One of the ways they do this is by refusing to sell dark fibre or dry pairs. It's compulsary to have BT-owned NTUs on the ends of a leased circuit, never mind if the competing telco's NTUs are identical - so when a competitor sells service and the last mile involves a BT line, BT get the full cut of a leased circuit price at a few hundred to a few thousand pounds per month instead of a dry pair or dark fibre at a few tens of pounds per month.

This also means that instead of upgrading from 1Gb to 10Gb on your fibre circuit being a doubling of the charges to pay for the new SFPs, BT will install a complete new set of NTUs and charge you 11 times as much for the privilege plus a 6 figure installation fee, which takes the cost-advantage of the competing telco completely away when if it's BT end to end, they'll "only" charge you 8 times as much.

Re: Err.....

"The infrastructure was in a dire state when it was privatised and took many many £bn to bring it up to an acceptable standard, "

And from there, BT has never kept investments up with depreciation on the kit. The many many £bn that were spent was repaid many times over a long time back and now BT keeps kicking the corpse to see if it will give off any more money, in between extorting a few billion off the broadband initiatiave that it can piss up a nearby wall.

That's the thing about national networks. If you bring them up to speed and then ignore them for 15 years you're worse off than when you started. BT _might_ have put in mucho investment, but when that aged out and started falling over, all the remaining investment has been made with the assistance of HM Treasury.

$orkplace has a 2Mb circuit installed. It popped a power supply a while back - and BT had to scramble to repair it - the PSU was over 30 years old. they don't have spares, or circuit diagrams (in the end it was "fixed" by bunging in a PSU from something that had been rescued from a skip). The have no intention of replacing the thing and we've been paying 5 figures per month on it for the last 30 years. Work out THAT return on investment.

Re: "and action is required now to deliver better outcomes for phone and broadband users"

"FFS the problem is not who owns or manages openreach the problem is their monopoly."

A monopoly isn't necessary harmful. There are plenty of functional/natural monopolies which work well for everyone concerned.

Leveraging a monopoly (lines) to gain advantage in another area (dialtone) most certainly is harmful and that's what BT do.

BT are exponents of margin squeeze tactics and the only reason they're able to do this is because they hold the Wholesale monopoly (lines) and are therefore able to use income from the lines sales side (openreach) to subsidise the (supposedly) equal rates they're paying for lines access.

The other tactics used are things like forcing customers to use (and pay for) BT NTUs when you take a circuit from a third party instead of just plugging the ends together or allowing use of 3rd party NTUs This drives the costs up dramatically for competing providers and means that BT makes a handsome profit on last-mile services even if they're not selling directly to the customer (and as noted, BTOR techs are known to make statements that customers wouldn't have so much trouble if they were with BT, despite that being illegal)

Re: Openreach to the installs & repairs - facours BT customers

"Well I can only talk about myself but BT Openreach took more than 3 weeks to fix a fault after missing two appointments and twice suggested that if I changed to BT from my ISP I would be able to use the BT WiFi from my neighbours while they repaired the fault."

_If_ BT Openreach actually suggested that then there's a very serious breach that's happened from the outset and if you can substantiate that then I'm sure the competition commissioner would love to hear from you.

The reality about the large alternative telcos is that they pay a discount rate to Openreach for a lower levels of service and don't bother telling their customers about this. If you go with a smaller one (I'm with http://phone.coop/) they're far more willing to ride herd on Openreach not showing up and ensure that not only are you actually compensated for the no show, but that Openreach will show up within 4 business hours of a missed appointment.

They also don't close tickets about intermittent problems, unlike some telcos I can think of (where intermittent is "plays up when it's raining" - obviously a common fault cause but in BT or TalkTalkese, these are new, unrelated faults.

"had their been decent investment in nuclear power generation in this country rather than listening to the irrational fears of the un-informed we could have been, almost, energy independent by now."

The main barrier to nuclear investment in the UK has been the vastly higher than anticipated costs.

Which is what you'd expect when every single nuclear plant installed was a new, unproven design radically different from every other existing design - because that's what the british government and the electricity board used to do, instead of picking a design and standardising on it for long enough to amortise the R&D costs.

This was all at the same time as the british civil service picked winners - like dumping the UK's orbital launch program because there was no commercial future in satellites.

The vast majority of successful british businesses have become successful DESPITE uk government policy, not because of it - and a lot of formerly successful ones have been nobbled by misguided attempts to tell them what to do and who to merge with.

Re: Err.....

"Only by cherry-pciking the places where they could lay it cheaply for large returns. "

In a world where Openreach is able to sell to all comers, how long would it take before they cut a deal with Virgin to provide duct and lines access to all those small villages with 3 farms without having to pay the ludicrous expenses of tearing up roads.

The reason that there aren't "competitor" cables in BT ducts _now_ is because BT see them as rivals in selling retail services and won't let Openreach sell to "competitors". When Openreach is a pure lines access company, all those "competitors" are now valuable customers and WILL be courted for business.

Re: Be careful what you wish for!

"POTS does this by having the pairs powered from the switch. How do we manage this with FTTP?"

Battery, or a battery supply from the cabinet. The energy requirements are low enough that a supercap might suffice.

In the old days before central battery working, a pair of #6 cells used to be the norm at every house. Those cells normally lasted 20 years between changes.

Re: If Only OfCom Did What They Were Paid For...

"OTOH the Advertising Standards Authority does"

The ASA is a private association, with voluntary membership and _zero_ legal powers.

Even the bits which have been delegated to them mean that anyone who sticks 2 fingers up to the "fines" or "findings" can only be referred on to trading standards.

They've been been documented refusing to take complaints from anyone keeping stats on them.

Re: "Compensation" is crap anyway

"I would assume that "no one home" etc. provide reasonable grounds for refusing compensation, "

I'll see your BTOR claims of "noone home" and challenge with CCTV clearly showing them not showing up for 24 hours either side of the claimed attendance time - or in 3 cases driving up and sitting outside, then driving off after 35 minutes without even bothering to set foot out of the van. In at least 4 cases Openreach apparently went to the right address _in the wrong town_.

TT freely admitted that BTOR hadn't shown up. They just refused to pay compensation, claiming (correctly) that their T&C absolve them of any obligation to do so (nice little earner... and something that the CAB seem unaware of)

The issue is that BTOR's system only allows 40 minutes onsite and almost zero travel time between jobs, so a contractor can never physically complete all assigned jobs on any given day.

Similarly they only get paid for _fixed_ faults, so there's a strong incentive to sign things off as repaired when they're not.

Unfortunately for BTOR, I happened to be recording the tech saying "It's not fixed but I've done the best I can" when he signed it off as repaired - which makes fraud claims that much easier to pursue when you give such recordings to the telco/ISP.

Re: Seems to make sense.

"Yes, it's annoying that you've been messed about and don't have your broadband - but it's not actually costing you money to complain, unlike it does for your ISP to answer."

When you have to book time off work for an Openreach no-show. Yes it bloody well does.

Re: If Only OfCom Did What They Were Paid For...

"The ASA are a worse joke though."

Unlike Ofcom, the ASA are a trade association paid for by advertisers.

What? You thought they were a regulator?

Re: "Compensation" is crap anyway

!BT / OpenReach were 2 days late installing my fibre broadband but did manage to get the phone line transferred across. This was a couple of years ago."

Lucky, you. Openreach failed on to install mine on _13_ seperate occasions over a 5 month period. The best compensation I had was moving to another ISP after getting fed up with the lies from BT and TT(*) about people coming out or having knocked on the door with noone being home, etc.

On occasion 13 (the new ISP), Openreach didn't show up. 2 phone calls later and I had an Ofcom tiger team specialist on site within 4 working hours and the job finished in 35 minutes. That beats "You'll have to rebook and wait another week" any day.

(*) Yes, I should have jumped ship earlier and in hindsight I kicked myself thoroughly.

"many US ports are run by foreign organizations."

As are at least one UK port. (Tilbury)

Re: I am not sure if I should applaud that idea

"On another side it will be facing a navy which has..."

It doesn't overly matter what the PRC navy has, when the PRC _army_ has DF21-D and DF26 antishipping ballistic missiles that can strike well outside the enclosure of the SC Sea.

Those are the reason I call 'em HMS Sitting Duck and HMS White Elephant.

Re: So, umm

Interesting that he claimed to the scottish govt that it was making a loss whilst claiming it as profitable on his US disclosure.

If I was the scottish taxman I'd be sending him a bill and penalties for making a false declaration.

Re: net neutrality

People (customers) pay their provider for a connection to the internet. If their provider starts charging some of the sites that they're connecting to for the privilege of the customers connecting, then that's double dipping.

It's not much different to tourist bus operators demanding kickbacks for stopping at certain souveneri shops.

The problems started when content providers became ISPs too. It was never going to end well and is another area where separation of line side (ie, natural monopoly) and services (natural competition) would work wonders.

The USA has tackled this kind of thing before, one example being the breakup of the Boeing/United airlines comglomorate and another being broadcasters who sold radios locked to their stations.

Re: Flash Player update came in for MSIE before it came in for Google Chrome

"If the software maker seems to be ignoring you, formally disclose to your country's CERT. If your country's reports back that it is being ignored and that you should do a full disclosure, then do the full disclosure."

You assume that disclosure to the software maker doesn't result in a gagging order being filed or hacking charges laid - both have happened.

"This outage is not a technical issue, it is a major organizational failure. "

On par with the vice-provost of another university making pronouncements about the direction of IT at another certain London university, to the complete surprise of the people actually in charge of the stuff.

They were even more surprised when told they had better bloody well make it happen like the VP wanted, despite it not being the best path for the university.

Re: Hi Elon Musk. Welcome to El Reg

"Car manufacturers are slowly waking up to the fact that building cars alone is not enough to sustain them"

Ford has been primarily a financing company for the last 20 years. Cars are merely a means to sell the product (loans) and it's much the same with the other makers now.

Re: Hi Elon Musk. Welcome to El Reg

"So, fewer cars being built might be a good idea, if they are rust-free and not being damaged in accidents."

Carmakers are pretty easy about losing sales in the developed world - the world's potential markets are much larger than the existing ones even if ownership rates were to match the 80% reduction expected to be seen in western countries.

"Its a popular idea because ALL subscription models make the the people who run them more money in the long run than a traditional sale would."

It's a popular idea because automated vehicles eliminate the single most expensive part of a hire car - the driver.

The end result is that for most locations it will be substantially cheaper to use JohnnyCab than to own your own car.

It's already generally cheaper in cities with meatsack drivers but somewhat inconvenient. What changes even with a 80% (predicted) reduction in private vehicle ownership is the factor of nearly every remaining car being JohnnyCab. It would be unusual to not see a Johnnycab within hailing distance as soon as you step out your front door.

Re: Electric cars are a deadend

"That's why I bet on hydrogen"

Hydrogen has so many technical problems that the best way to use it is to bind it with lots of carbon atoms to keep it from attacking everything in sight.

There are more hydrogen atoms in a litre of diesel than a litre of liquid hydrogen

IE: for transportation systems where electrical sources can't be used, the liklihood is that hydrocarbon fuels will be syntheised using a modified haber process and nuclear energy source.

Re: @Lotaresco

"It's also true (as any laptop or phone owner will know) that batteries gradually lose their capacity after prolonged use."

With current commercial technology this is true.

10,000+ cycle lithium batteries have been in the labs for a couple of years and they lose around 2% of their capacity when ordinary LiPo cathodes are simply so much graphite powder.

As I understand it, the hard part is getting the compromise between charge/discharge current and durability.

"On top of that it seems natural processes tend to concentrate the materials,"

Yup, in particular fungi seem to like to concentrate them.

ie: DON'T eat the mushrooms.

"You'd need severe contamination by Pu-239 (24,100 years half-life) for the soil to be dangerous over 500,000 years."

Even with a 24k year halflife, Pu239 is far more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal than as a radiological agent.

Re: Twinkle twinkle

"A submarine sailor could not get BACK on the sub due to high readings..."

And having eaten radioactive mushrooms, where is he now?

"likely also practiced by the WHO whose numbers about health effects look suspiciously low, low, low"

The WHO were fully expecting much higher numbers than they found. The reality is that radiation exposure is far less dangerous than everyone believed thanks to decades of cold war propaganda.

Correlation doesn't imply causality either - the massive increase in thryoid tumours found being one example - Korea had a similiar detected increase when they rolled out enhanced screening programs and there wasn't a nuclear accident anywhere near the peninsula.

It seems the primary reason more cancers were being found was simply that people were looking harder for them in the first place - and the rotten health problems of the Chernoybl responders wasn't due to radiation exposure, but because they were treated like pariahs by uninformed people and authorities who thought they might be contagious, etc (in the following decades they had a hard time actually GETTING medical care at all.)

Re: Obligitory XKCD refference

"Uranium babies exist for a reason, and it's just due to heavy metal dusting."

The epidemiological effects of uranium are because it's a chemically toxic heavy metal, not because it's radioactive.

Which is a very good reason NOT to use DU bullets to kill tanks.

The uranium vapourises and burns inside the tank, killing the occupants and covering everything with a fine dust, which usually spreads around as the ammunition explodes. When you visit old warzones and see kids playing around dead tanks, you realise this is a VERY BAD THING, when Tungsten would be equally effective and has no long-term health effects. (The reason the US military uses DU is because it's cheap - 75%+ of mined uranium is thrown away as depleted uranium after the enrichment process is done. Moving to Thorium fuel would eliminate the need to mine uranium and thorium reactors can burn DU/Plutonium and most other "high level waste" components of current conventional reactors.)

"Even operating normally, coal power plants kill far more people that nuclear power ever has due to accident."

You could factor in everyone who's ever died of anything remotely related to nuclear research, plus all the deaths related to handling weapons nuclear material, populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and STILL not even make a noticeable dent in the ratio of deaths per terawatt-hour vs coal.

"it only failed because they weren't prepared for a tsunami."

It was worse than that. Tepco management were told NOT to put the generators where they did, because of the flooding risk, but smiled, said yes - and promptly put them there anyway as soon as the site advisors left. When the disaster struck, it was Tepco management trying to cover up and pretend all was well (sound familiar?) that compounded things. Thankfully the chief engineer onsite grew a pair of gonads and in a most characteristically UNjapanese way told them to go fuck themselves - that point is where everything started to go better.

Fuckupshima really is an example of how badly you have to screw things up to have a nuclear disaster with a modern plant - even a 50 year old one that was over a decade past its planned shutdown date. There were over 20 other nuclear plants along that coastline and none of the others had any problems at all.

Bear in mind that conventional (water moderated) designs have become a whole lot safer since TMI - Fukushima predates that cockup. The improvements include passive safety systems like having control rods able to drop into place when the power goes off instead of being lifted into place, and water circulation systems which will operate using the passive thermosyphon effect in the worst case scenario of pumps failing.

Re: RE: Chernobyl wildlife

"The metal Nickel is supposed to have got its name from Old Nick, the Devil, because of the incidence of birth defects and other illnesses in the Harz Mountains, where leaching from nickel deposits contaminated water. "

Radioactive spots can be detected and cleaned up from a safe distance - and radioactivity dissipates over time.

Chemical poisons and mutagens are forever and tend to be difficult to detect.

"The radioactivity has greatly reduced in the last few decades to where it is now possible to do that soft of work, of course technology being much more advanced also helps so they can send in cheap remote-control vehicles "

One of the initial problems at both Fukushima and Chernobyl was that the radiation levels were so high they fried the robots sent in to explore and do cleanups - turning them into more obstacles for the real cleanups in future.

Which should be a reminder that the best thing to do when a meltdown happens is to secure the perimeter and wait 3 decades rather than trying to wade in and remove red hot pieces - they're better off where they are until they're a bit less radioactive.

Whilst chernobyl was an old design, the biggest danger for nuke plants was - and remains - the water. In order to run at suitable temperatures to drive steam turbines (4-600C), it needs to be pressurised - which means steam explosions if there's a leak. It's also slightly acidic, but water at those temperatures and pressures is corrosive anyway. The other problem is that fission reactions tend to stabilise (doppler effects) at about 1100-1200C(*), so if the cooling pumps fails, your water's going to get very hot, react with metals in the vessel and generate hydrogen - which is what happened at Fukushima.

(*) That's the approximate temperature in the middle of a fuel rod too. because the fuel is oxide pellets, it takes a long time for the heat energy in the middle to percolate to the outside of the rod and _that_ is why it takes so long to cool a reactor down after a SCRAM event.

Alvin Weinberger solved these problems 50 years ago: Surely it would be better to use something like a molten salt as your working fluid/coolant/fuel carrier. No pressure, can safely go to 1200C, hot enough to be thermodynamically efficient. Can't burn, doesn't need large bodies of water to carry off the excess heat. (and a bunch of nice knock on effects such as easy chemical reprocessing, virtually no waste on the input vs the 75% wastage now and 99% reduction of the waste output (which is currently about enough to fill an olympic pool over the lifespan of a 1200MW plant), most of which can simply be stored for a few months/years and sold on - Say hi to the helium economy, amongst other things.

If Nixon hadn't killed LFTR research in favour of fast breeder reactors (Molten sodium coolant - whoever decided that would be a good idea??) we might have _really_ safe nuclear power, but even the unsafe version is 300,000 times safer than coal.

Re: RE: Chernobyl wildlife

"the serious cancers associated with radiation?"

Citation needed.

Ionising radiation generally kills cells and high level exposure (temporarily) damages the immune system, making the victim susceptable to infection.

Most serious cancers are induced by chemical toxins (which are known as mutatgenic for a reason).

There's no evidence that organisms in the exclusion zone are living shorter lives on average. There are some hot-spots and some evidence of radiation damage but the majority of the evidence is pointing to the zone being both vastly larger than necessary and in any case not needing to be permanent.

Re: "A structure like this is not needed for Fukushima."

The amount of radiation actually leaking out at Fukushima is below normal background levels at many other places on the planet. Those contaminated tanks of water are slightly less radioactive than "an olypmic swimming pool with an old-style glow in the dark watch dropped in the middle".

If Japanese radiation level standards were applied in Europe, most of downtown Helsinki would be too hot to handle thanks to the granite there, along with the thermal pools at Bath - and in the US Denver Colorado would be a no-go area along with anything at the same altitude.

Re: Good luck to building the same for Fukushima.

"The Chernobyl reactor was destroyed to such a degree (and so radioactive) that the only option was to "bury" it and wait a few dozen years for things to cool off."

It already has done to a significant extent.

People forget that "highly radioactive" also means "won't be radioactive for very long"

We aren't placing desktops with spinners in them anymore.

SSDs are cheap enough that they've eaten the sub-1TB end of the market and they'll inexorably start closing in on the larger sizes.

Large, slow QLC SSDs will still be more reliable then spinners, which means 5+ year warranties vs 12 months on consumer drives. It doesn't take many warranty claims to eat a retailer's margins so they'll start putting these in as a self-defence measure.