Posts by Tanuki 366 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2006
Dear 'Ministry of Justice' . Get your fiends in the Home Office to abandon ID-cards. That''ll save you a few billion.
[For providing this wonderfully swift and efficaceous consultancy-mediated solution I hereby expect to be paid 5% of the savings. If Jacqui Smith is reading this she can contact me offline for details of the Swiss bank-account into which she should transfer my payment]
£170 for a 'single drive unit' - sorry - *mono* as the rest-of-the-world-calls-it radio?
Pull the other one please.
Channel-4 have in the last week pulled out of the whole DAB game.
DAB audio quality sucks; it's significantly worse than FM.
Why would anyone sane blow significant money on any mono DAB-thing when they can get a proper stereo FM radio for under a tenner at the local car-boot-sale/street-market?
Round here you need to stick up a 40-foot mast with at least an 88-element antenna on it - and also an inline signal-booster - just to receive a grainy ghost-ridden analog-TV picture.
Perhaps if Elgato were to partner with the altogether much more successful Sky - and include a 'free' 90cm dish with your purchase - they might win some business?
Herding cats is generally acknowledged to be a futile act. Same goes, it seems, for herding prima-donna programmer/documentation-writer types.
My rule for business-grade projects is the old 80/20 rule: 80% of the effort goes into designing and documenting, 20% into coding. The 'user guides' largely get written before anyone cuts code.
Think like a property-developer: your architect initially produce the spiffy fluffy-edged idealised renders that show the world what the building/bridge is going to look like. Then you get a horde of people to spend time sweating over AutoCAD to produce the plans. Then you recruit East German bricklayers, Chinese roofers, Polish plumbers and Moroccan plasterers to put it all together. And a few Home Counties wide-boys to sell the results.
The open-source community is fundamentally lacking the architects, the AutoCADders and the Home Counties estate-agents. Polish plumbers and Chinese roofers we've got. But we don't let them *plan* shopping-centres.
The majority of the people trying to 'defend' the existing white space are themselves FCC Part-15 unlicensed users of the channels (old-style analog wireless microphones etc).
They have access to the frequencies on the basis that they must tolerate interference from other users. They have no unique right to occupy the channels. Perhaps if they feel so uptight about this they should put their money where their mouth is and bid against the Googles/Microsofts in a spectrum-auction?
Coat? The one with the spread-spectrum transmitter in the pocket.
Reminds me of a network glitch I investigated 20-odd years back.
Freakishness on a cross-site link between 08:30 and 08:40 wednesdays/fridays. UARTs locked-up in utter confusion; X.25 protocol errors for 10/15-second bursts.
Much time was spent hunched over a Hewlwtt-Packard 4951A "electric handbag" protocol analyser.
Turned out that the site had one employee who only worked wednesdays-fridays.
Her partner was a taxi-driver.
He'd drop her at work - stopping right outside the data-centre - then use his radio to call the taxi-despatch for the first job of his day.
1980s-era synchronous datacomms often had poor RF-immunity!
As someone who is unconcerned about watching any broadcast TV stuff as-it-happens, and since none of the satellite/terrestrial/cable TV services offer anything worthwhile in the way of Japanese series, I think I'll stick to getting my HD content as fansubs via BitTorrent or other such sources.
There is a theory which states that the 'static' you hear when a broadcast TV station or FM radio station shuts-down or when tuning between channels is not just random white-noise; it's actually covert programming radiated by a global network of KGB-funded mind-control satellites implanting subliminal messages [linked to specially-encoded trigger-sounds] deep in your cerebral cortex.
Coat? No thanks. Hat? Sure - the foil-lined one with the Faraday-shield veil.
The various Government bodies need to start making examples of civil-serpents who permit or encourage such follies.
I'd suggest reinstating the twice-monthly public hangings of offenders at Tyburn, 'pour encourager les autres'.
[And if this is introduced, they should auction the pay-per-view TV rights on a per-event basis to recover costs. I'm happy to act as intermediary between interested parties. For a cut of course.]
From where I'm standing there wasn't any publicity-buzz around Radiohead's last online nocturnal-emission: there was more like a resounding and pervasively noncommittal shrug.
One-hit-wonders who try to manipulate the new generation of fickle, promiscuous music-purchasers for publicity are doomed to failure.
Face facts: Radiohead are not the Stones or Pink Floyd.
Biggest problem would be getting any such creation past the horribly-conservative regulatory authorities - hell, we've been trying for the last decade to get them to approve ordinary GM food.
Me? I'll pluck tasty poultry-products from my vast orchards of MeatFruit(tm) trees just as soon as I can work out a way to stop the foxies and buzzards getting there first.
My conjecture: "Mobile TV" will only become a success when the handset-vendors offer displays with a deliberately-restricted viewability angle. Think about it: You don't want the person sitting beside you on the bus casually shoulder-surfing and discovering your personal preference in porn.
Paris: because she's not viewable at any angle.
I'd really like a chunk of my licence-fee to be put towards funding the rollout of true high-speed broadband across the UK.
Let's face it: the Beeb have to pay to run their broadcast transmitters; why should they expect to piggy-back on ISPs for free?
In the absence of licence-fee-derived funding perhaps ISPs could offer two levels of service.
One, a standard service which doesn't let you access the Beeb's questionable emissions.
Another - at extra cost - which gives you everything-plus-the-Beeb.
Then let the market decide.
I don't give a flying fsck whether government uses open source, Microsoft, or a set of incantations transcribed from the walls of a Peruvian cave. To me the answer is obvious - rather than trying to do better, government [of whatever persuasion] should just promise to do *less*.
Less regulation. Less taxation. Less 'initiatives'. Less 'innovation'. Less "strategies" and less "policies".
Just get out of the way, government - and let ordinary people get on with living their lives.
This shows just how out of touch government types are. 999 is so utterly last-millennium and Dixon-of-Dock-Green era - it's the emergency-services equivalent of standing in the street blowing a police-whistle or looking for a TARDIS-style box with a blue light on top.
Apart from the impossibility of requiring social networking services based outside the UK to carry such ads, surely if you *could* engineer this you'd be far better to advertise 112 [the Europe-wide emergency services number which also works on all mobile phones].
If it helps get rid of the clueless (C)rap/Urban/ethnic-music pirates who wind their transmitter's 'deviation' pot up to 11 and subject everyone across a 2.5MHz chunk of spectrum to the splatter from their 'thumpin phat beats' then I can only say about time too.
Round here we had one such bastard who as well as transmitting on 101.mumble MHz was radiating significant noise-power on half his intended frequency - which made the 50MHz ham band unusable. Ofcom seemed to get to him before the hams-with-nailguns did.
TBH it doesn't impress: my experience is that unless you're doing something darned stupid your routing-table should never include 4.5million routes!
And only 3 ports in the second test? C'mon! What's that?A primary path, a fallback, and a link to a firewall. Hardly the sort of thing most people would be speccing a 720x router for...
Let's see them stuff their IBM PC with a fistful of GigabitE cards and run them *all* full-speed... and stick some access-lists and policy-based routing on it too - *that* would be a proper comparison to a 720x
Just remember: as far as Phorm/ISPs are concerned - just as with commercial TV - you are not a customer.
The customer is the advertiser. Your eye-time is the "product" and the ISP/TV-station's only interest is to deliver losts of product to customers.
Paris: because she's 'product'.
TBH I'm an apathetic agnostic when it comes to the whole 'green computing' debate. I'm not here to 'save the planet', I'm here to make sure your data goes away when you flush, and to stop the cracker-rats or botheerder-slime crawling up your pipes into your toilet-bowl.
As far as I'm concerned the biggest issue around the 'global warming' stuff is to get the climate-scientists to tell me what grapes iIshould plant on my south-facing slopes. Perhaps they could fund a research project to investigate this pressing question?
Seems overpriced... but I can see the point.
[I'm currently running a number of "Foxboard" Linux-based servers, each of which has as its local storage a pair of 4Gb USB memory-sticks. At a *peak* power consumption of a mere _five_ watts, they make brilliant local syslog-servers]
This has always been a fundamental wobbliness with mesh networks. So long as everyone plays nice they work, but the 'hidden station' [you-can-hear-me-but-I-can't-hear-you] and "alligator" [I'll ramp-up my power and become selectively-deaf to get better throughput by denying you your slot] issues are still unsolved.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
