Re: These laser strikes...
On first reading I'd thought they were gastrointestinal laser strikes - i.e. a more advanced form of the regular gastrointestinal incidents.
2156 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2009
Surely it would be feasible to write a Greasmonkey script to filter out such stories from all news sites - although I admit the Daily Mail would probably then render as an empty page a lot of the time (thus reducing its value as a comic satire on modern life).
If it has been done, I expect someone to post a link to it in 3... 2....
It was once a phone manufacturer, and then the French company sold the brand to a Chinese company, who continue to manufacture both PSTN (typically office class phones) and mobile phones.
But now there's almost no such thing as ALU - all their staffers got a Nokia badge on day 1. Not sure which bits of ALU will be kept. Which is ironic for some in the UK, as they "escaped" Nokia-Siemens after Motorola wireless got bought by them.
According to a USAToday article, which does foam at the mouth a bit, I admit, the phone in question was owned by the county, and the county has given permission for the Fibbies to rummage in the digital innards of it. None of the other articles I've seen mention this, though (or I skimmed past them for TLDR reasons).
So, unless there are flaws in the "reasonable use" clauses within the contract between the county and the deceased, doesn't this boil down to the county asking (via the Fibbies and a court order) Apple for access to their phone? This, Apple has done before, according to various sources that don't cite references.
Equally, if it was here the prisoner would be straight in to the EU court of human rights, and would probably win.
Interestingly, all that's happened is a metal detector has gone "ping", so it may not be a phone (even if that's the most likely item of contraband to make the detector go "ping").
Aha - the Wall-E scenario where everyone turns into fat slobs who don't know how to do anything because it's all programmed into specialist/versatile robots of some description.
Being bored will do us in as a species, although I'd hope that the Worstallian viewpoint that people put out of work by robots will go on to be more economically productive will hold true. But if *everything* is done for us, and if there is no need to be productive because we're all "on welfare", will this happen?
>Since this firmware is baked in and you have no choice on how they control it, your only option is to short out the WiFi antennas, and use the ethernet cables to hook up to your own network, and use your own regular WiFi router, this one being entirely within your control.
I prefer the less effort approach of either (a) not even plugging in the supplied router (perhaps having to ring them up saying "your router has died, can you tell me the credentials/parameters needed for my plain white box to connect to my account", or (b) tinfoil + ethernet cable
Not there now for me (12:14 GMT), but still scoring an F (removed link as it doesn't seem to work inside html tag, but works fine in copying/pasting from a browser address bar)
Interesting that lots of banks don't score very well on this metric. Can we have more detail to the uninitiated as to the risk exposed by these?
Yup, who needs schools, hospitals and other cool stuff :)
I almost agree with you, though. The only problem is that nationally owned infrastructure is generally mismanaged by a committee. I've no idea why, as it should be able to operate as any other large business.
In theory, you could re-nationalise Openreach, apply the charges set by Ofcom for the supply of circuits etc to non-BT ISPs to BT, and just shovel the govmt subsidies into Openreach rather than BT, and BT can then die off as it's a rather poor service provider.
Openreach can then be given the remit to do stuff to get broadband available to everyone without having the conflict of interest tie-in to BT. No doubt some effort will have to be directed at working out what should drive a change to the infrastructure (e.g. coverage of houses, average achieved speed during peak hours, local demand).
Perhaps BT just don't want to have to talk to the Indian call-centre Openreach uses as they know nothing will get done...
> Now imagine you port three or four times (as I've done)... Call setup can take a couple of seconds. Why? When someone calls you, the caller's network has to handshake with each network in turn to reach the callee's current network.
I'd hope the s/w was written to first try the "last known good" operator, and not all of them each time. And it may fire them off in parallel.
Mostly, I'd expect the delays being caused by:
a) paging. If you're in spotty coverage, you may need to be paged multiple times for your phone to notice that you've got an incoming call. There are gaps of O(seconds) between the paging messages to give you time to respond on a potentially congested random access channel.
b) more paging (but less likely). If the network has lost track of you, it gradually expands its search within the network to find you - so the first time you're paged, it might only be on cells which aren't covering you
c) LTE, but not VOLTE. Here you have to get redirected down to a lower tech to establish your call. Not sure of the signalling flow, but would expect incremental delay here
d) network congestion (either end of the call). This may redirect the call setup to a different technology, too, which will incur delay in processing
Occasionally, you will also need to re-establish your ciphering/encryption keys to the network, which will incur further delays.
A lot of the delay is the air interface, which can take 10s-100s of milliseconds to transfer a small signalling packet. Once the data is on the wire, it whizzes along, and hardware processing/routing is in the micro/nano second scale (unless you're calling the moon).
I'm wondering how quickly it will dissolve into gibberish if, on translation, you repeat the translated phrase back at it.
Translation is hard, but it's good to see the real-time translation services spring up. It would be nice if it also transcribes both sides so that the speaker/listener can highlight to the other party when it goes awry (and even give feedback to the backend how well it's doing).
I'd be pleased if GC were showing the big boys how to do it, and offering something better, but I'd have expected them to have the same problem of funding expensive infrastructure as everybody else.
Perhaps when the BDUK funding dries up, they'll stop digging trenches in roads, but I'd hope that the pricing model covers their operating costs and so existing customers will continue to be served well if they have to stop rolling out new coverage. I'm now paying less than what I was with BT in a previous property, for a service that is nigh on 100 times faster.
At best, in the FTTC-enabled places, you'll still pay more for less with BT.
1) that the business case doesn't really scale, and the economics mean they're only able to infill a few marginal notspots. I also note that they are using BDUK funding - does it stack up without subsidies?
2) They make a go of it, but some Big Scumbag Corporation (name your choice) buy them out, and it all goes to pot.
3) The start to make a go of it, but then a Big Scumbag Corporation (only one name in here) start targeting rural roll out to intentionally nobble them, whilst Ofcom sit and do nothing.
My money's on number 3.
In the village I'm in, GC deployed FTTP just as OpenReach showed up to deploy FTTC - but the plans for the local exchange & cabinets had been known about for quite a while, so it's not news to GC that BT are upgrading cabinets in areas they are deploying into. BT will find it difficult to compete on bitrate, or even price. My money's on #2.
If they go the #1 route, then when the subsidy runs out either they raise prices significantly and customers leggit (although their T&Cs limit price increases to 2% above RPI), or they go to the wall, in which case #2 will happen.
I was rather impressed when they had an outage caused by their backbone supplier (Vodafone, IIRC), and they had the audacity to text me updates on progress before I'd even noticed. And then continued to give me updates, unsolicited, until it was fixed. The bare faced cheek of it all, I didn't even get the chance to take to Twitter to vent at them.
Happy Gigaclear customer here - BT were too incompetent to supply a line with 3 months notice, the good folks at GC did it the next day (admittedly, circumstances were rather fortuitous). Friendly and knowledgeable tech support located in the UK (Abingdon, IIRC).
Higher bitrate than BT, lower price. Hope they don't evolve into BT's level of (in)competence.
A good explanation of UK exceptions here:
http://www.inbrief.co.uk/intellectual-property/defences-to-patent-infringement.htm
"Private Use – If the infringing act is done in private and for non-commercial purposes there is no infringement."
So yes, it would seem some personal use is allowed in the UK.
> You can copy a patent for your personal use so long as you do not sell it.
Not sure that's entirely correct:
Making one unauthorized patented product for personal use could constitute patent infringement
http://ocpatentlawyer.com/3-basic-concepts-of-patent-infringement/
> Follow the rules to the letter and it should go smoothly.
Hmm - while I agree with the sentiment, in practice, and in France, things go differently. ALU itself tried to make redundancies in France within the last 5 years - basically the second you announce it the whole company (in France), excluding senior management, goes on strike, and that impacts business operations significantly. Net result is that ALU had to dramatically scale back the cuts, and then dragged some offshore jobs into France to partially offset this (and this included the closure of some UK facilities). It's difficult to see how this could go smoothly.
They've also done this before with the Wireless division of Motorola back in 2010-11. Lots of cost savings to be had in rationalising product lines, but a big one-off cost of ensuring interoperability for when they have to swap out boxes in live networks, and then "training up" the new support operations in the low cost centres before canning the old ones.
The main savings are probably going to be in the manufacturing area when they get around to combining all the duplicate product lines (if they can). It will be interesting to see which boxes they EOL and what impact that has on existing contracts.
The USA has a big install base of ALU LTE, so that's going to need to be supported & maintained for a few years
> Although I was assured that no-one ever actually sent them to HMRC. Presumably it's something they ask for if they choose to do an audit?
Having been thrust into the unfortunate position of having to fill in lots of the tax credit applications for numerous projects for a multinational, I know that the actual timesheets won't be sent to HMRC, but the beancounters will use the rolled up values of hours per project per department (or employee type), and do a glorious Excel SUMPRODUCT equation to come up with their submitted arbitrary number. The timesheet data from everyone involved will then be filed away for N years in the evidence drawer in case HMRC ever asks.
The negotiation phase with HMRC will involve managers harrumphing over what percentages to use in the final calculation of money rebated - in this instance it is helpful to have very precise data (such as from timesheets) as this gives the company better justification to be inflexible.
>Never once has there been any demonstrable value
Apparently there's a tax break against R&D spend on projects you can claim in the UK, but you have to demonstrate a reasonably robust method of measuring what that spend was, and timesheets can be used to demonstrate to HMRC a good faith calculation of actual spend on R&D elements of a project.
So that's shareholder value in engineers filling in timesheets.
Now the process of filling in timesheets is another matter. Same as the Dilbert link, I have been in the situation where the bean counters insisted on it being filled in on a Thursday and including a prediction for Friday, that we were expected to correct on the Monday if it was wrong. All that gave was a manglement readout on a weekly basis that finished on a Friday. No value there.
> Personally, the hours I spend flying are 'me' time.
An interesting point, as when flying for work technically the hours in the air are work time, so perhaps technically your employer could insist. But then perhaps coverage would be "spotty" in the little Faraday-cage bag you put your phone in...
As to this solution being putting a "network" in the plane, it's probably more like a few small cells connected to a router which satellite's back to a special small cell gateway which can cope with the massive round-trip ping times.
I hope they block handovers when the plane is taking off (assuming some oik will be on their phone at this time, irrespective of flight warnings, or assuming that the airlines have finally allowed electronic devices on take off)...
>That's a nice contrast with in-flight WiFi's requirement to log to and pay for a new service.
I'm sure an airline can handle that at the ticketing phase and even remove this requirement with sufficient technical nous - EAP-SIM authentication may be able to be abused into allowing it, so all you'd really need to do is give your phone number (and possibly network).
Either on WiFi or on 3G, latency is going to be a pig over satellite backhaul.
With regards to roaming - if I've got a phone supporting voice over wifi, and buy wifi access, I assume this will give calling within my allowance, rather than at roaming rates over an in-flight 3G service