Posts by AndrueC 5089 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
My season ticket holds up very well. It gets run through barriers twice a day (soon to be four times a day when Banbury finally enables its new barriers) and is otherwise kept in a neat leather wallet. The ticket that is showing the most problems is my parking ticket. It has it's own wallet on my windscreen but with the sun beating down it I'm wondering if the next one will last three months before the ink has faded.
Trains aren't that shit to be honest.
I agree although it might depend on the line you're using. I'm currently commuting between Banbury and Birmingham on Marylebone/B'ham route. For the most part services are punctual but I've noticed in the past that the return journeys heading south from New Street are often anything up to 15 minutes late. Presumably something happens to them 'Ooop North' :-/
Luckily my ticket lets me travel on any operator so coming back in the evening I travel from Snow Hill on Chiltern and that's a very punctual service.
I think I'd struggle to get to my office at 8am and home at 6pm that consistently by car. The morning drive should be fine coming up through Kings Heath but getting home from B'ham in the evening wouldn't be fun no matter how you did it. And cost..tbh I think if you take servicing and tyre wear into consideration I'd be hard pressed to do it cheaper by car either.
you mean where Caps Lock is now?
Yah. The WS command keys make more sense when you realise that you weren't supposed to have to contort your hand to keep the little finger down on the bottom left of the keyboard.
I used to have a TSR that swapped them for me. Gawd, that's going back a bit. A bit a of Ctrl+Q, R in fact :D
T
S
R
I bet half the programmers these days don't even know what that stands for. Lucky buggers :D
Works fine for me, showing a combination of walking, buses and trains depending on how long it takes
Same here. The only combination not supported seems to be car and train. But the directions I got from my house to Brindleyplace include a reasonable set of walking instructions. It only offers the shortest route though and a 'better' route is through Paradise Forum since it's almost entirely pedestrianised all the way.
What we really need is the A422 dualling between Brackley and Banbury. That would finally bypass Farthinghoe (aka. 'Pothole Central') and would probably alleviate some of the traffic problems on J10 of the M40. And if it helps garner support I'd suggest dualling it in the other direction to Milton Keynes as well.
Nokia Who?
Probably the same Nokia app that used to tell me the best route from North Wales to Dumfries and Galloway was via the Mersey Tunnel.
It also used to tell me that the shortest route was via a ferry to Northern Ireland. I suppose in terms of reducing fuel costs it was. I always thought it amusing though the way it said 'At the dock, follow the ferry...'
I also bet that public transport jaunt would cost significantly more than the 6 Quid's worth of diesel each way I spend now.
That at least doesn't seem to apply for me. It's slightly cheaper to drive from home to Birmingham but only if you look at the obvious costs (petrol and parking). Factor in wear and tear and the train is cheaper even though I'm paying to park at the station. Plus considerably less hassle especially the return journey and only 15 minutes longer(*) and I can read for an hour. Mind you if I couldn't walk from the station to my office it'd be another matter.
(*)And in the evening train is probably quicker. I've not yet tried driving back from B'ham but I doubt it's going to be smooth sailing. When co-workers tell you it's best to head north to the M6 you know it's not going to be good :(
..but it will it tell us the trains are still on running time despite not having them for 3 days the last heavy snowfall?
Or just a permanent note on Crosscountry trains arriving at New St from the north '(all times are approximate)'. I'm glad I switched to Chiltern to go back. It might be a bit late sometimes getting in but since it sits there for 10 minutes before 'turning round' it doesn't matter to me. It almost always leaves on time :)
..and it immediately shows up a flaw in our local bus services. Ask it to get me from Brackley to Brindleyplace in Birmingham for 8am and it says I have to leave at 20:10 the day before. The earliest it can get me here via public transport on the same day is 0930. This is because there's no early morning or late night bus service to Banbury after the council withdrew subsidies last year. Guess I'll have to stick to driving to the station :-/
Other than that I like the (perhaps pointless) way that it shows you the actual route you'll be taking (it even shows the train route, lol) but it'd be really nice if it gave the cost. Proper links to book tickets for the journeys might be good as well.
So thumbs up to Google. Thumbs down to my local bus services.
For that, the only solution may just be a new switching office, which raises location and rewiring specters of their own.
Ahem, FTTC. That's what is being rolled out across the UK at the moment. Admittedly there is a cost associated with it but it's better than building a new exchange as most of the cabling takes place in existing ducting. In the UK it's also being used as the stepping stone to FTTP with some areas (eventually all) being offered FTTPoD (FTTP on Demand - see bottom of that web article). If you're willing to pay BT will extend the fibre to your front door.
People like me, in their '50s can use smart phones. We will still be trying to use smart phones (or what comes after them) when we retire.
What's it like on the eyes? I'm in my late 40s and already suspect my eyes are struggling a bit - reading a web page is too much strain for more than a minute or two unless I zoom in but then I'm forever scrolling around the page. I tend to hardly ever browse using my phone (S3). I'm also not sure how easy it'll be to use the virtual keypad as I get older though hopefully it'll be at least ten years before it becomes a problem.
I've said many times - it's all very well inventing clever, miniaturised technology but everyone gets old eventually and few of us want to have to give up our cool toys just because we're into our second half century.
rare? I can't remember a single instance!
I think I had one back when the new EPG first appeared. A few of us started finding bits of programs mixed together I think. Given it was relatively few people I suspect a Planner rebuild fell foul of corruption. I know that historically their file system indexing/offset calculation has been a bit weird because the utility that copies Sky hard disks has to deal with it.
I can't find anything to confirm that but I did find this (R008.063.49.09P) when Sky withdrew an upgrade
But aside from their sometimes irritating changes to the GUI (I still wish I could hide the mini TV viewer when using the EPG, and I'm currently getting existing series recordings stacked with future recordings for some shows) it's been a reliable service.
I still put my money in a bank, rather than keep it all under the mattress. YMMV of course :)
Well - you give it to a bank. What they do with it after that is anyone's guess. The only real difference is that banks have guarantee systems in place (albeit usually with a limit on the payout) so they can nearly always give you some money back when you ask them to.
But the important point to never forget is that banks don't look after your money for you. You give them your money in exchange for a promise that they'll give you some back if/when you ask. That's an important difference ;)
Most countries have a "duopoly" of cable & DSL. They keep each other competitive.
And then there's the UK. We do have some cable but what keeps prices down and encourages choice is our regulator. Ofcom forced our incumbent to provide equal access through a wholesale service then forced the incumbent to provide LLU. It has even forced the incumbent to provide access to its local loop ducting but so far to little interest. Pricing for all these services is very carefully controlled.
In fact our incumbent is split into three main divisions. All are supposed to be separate and get no favours:
BT openreach - local loop and core networks.
BT Wholesale - provide wholesale services built on top of openreach kit.
BT Retail - ISP and telephony built using wholesale services.
Other ISPs and telcos compete with BT Retail. Some communication providers buy services of openreach and have even set up their own competing wholesale products.
The result is that pretty much everyone in the UK has a choice of a dozen or more ISPs if they go the DSL route and in slightly less than half the country they also have a choice of a single cable operator. It's also pretty cheap here although geography helps with that. For £30 ($45) a month you can get telephony and broadband with speeds up to 80Mb/s and unlimited usage.
The downside is slow investment. It's damn' hard for anyone to make money over here with that pricing so investment in faster networks tends to be slow. VDSL is has reached 75% of the UK and might reach 90% over the next few years. There's been no significant cable growth at all.
Choice doesn't really help with technological improvements here because the same company owns 99% of the local loop. Nearly half of us have a choice of cable or DSL but for most it's whatever flavour of DSL the incumbent has chosen to provide. Currently a mix of ADSL, ADSL2+ (the majority) and VDSL being rolled out.
Mr Dabbs, please write that article (unless you have and I missed it while travelling).
And if it's still to be written it might be worth contacting these folks. CJ in particular has definite views about publishing having been a writer for over half a century. Plus it's an excuse to read her work if you haven't already :)
My first data recovery was from a floppy disk. I remember it well. It was supposed to contain a thesis and I had to reconstruct it because some fool had quick formatted the disk. It was particularly memorable because it was a thesis on the effects of ballet dancing on the human body.
Not pleasant reading.
(cont'd due to editing time limit). Links can get oversubscribed but it's rare and usually dealt with very quickly by BTor. As a general rule it's fair to say that most of the time BTor always provides as much capacity as ISPs have paid for.
If a link is oversubscribed I'm not sure how BTor handle it until it gets upgraded. Possibly we just duke it out packet by packet. Maybe they have traffic management to limit the ISPs based on the proportion of traffic each is responsible for. Whatever happens it's going to be traffic agnostic. Ofcom would go nuclear on BT's ass (as would all the other ISPs) if it thought that one ISP could interfere with another's service the way you imply.
Don't be silly. They all use BT/Openreach's backhauls so when these get filled with TV traffic, bye bye performance.
There's no need to be rude, especially when you're wrong.
I suspect you don't fully understand the way broadband works in this country. In particular you seem to think that 'BT the ISP' is a special ISP that is selling capacity to other ISPs. That isn't how it works. 'BT the ISP' (the company that bought the sports rights) is no different from any other ISP. It buys capacity off BT openreach just like all the others do. Nothing it does with that capacity is going to affect any other ISP. Well..not as long as BTor aren't overselling and I think that's extremely unlikely.
In effect you can think of all ISPs as being like transport companies and BTor are providing the roads. BT Infinity trying to carry more goods than its vehicle fleet can handle is irrelevant to me as a Plusnet customer.
There is contention in backhauls and cores. But there will be mechanisms in place to ensure that one ISP cannot unfairly impact another one. If a link is oversubscribed it's a failure in BTors network.
Surely OFCOM should mandate that every newbuild housing estate should have a minimum of two comms suppliers?
If the housing estate is only supplied with a BT local loop it will have multiple comms suppliers. If the estate is only supplied by VM cable it will only have one supplier. That situation would change if Ofcom removed VM's 'protected status' but I don't see that happening any time soon. As I suggested in another post VM aren't big enough to warrant that and I sometimes wonder if they are deliberately staying small so they don't have to go through the pain BT does allowing other CPs to use their network.
Now if you mean new builds should be forced to have multiple local loops then I'd have to disagree. That's just wasteful. What is needed is a local loop that multiple CPs can use. I do think new builds should be forced to use fibre and whoever supplies that should be forced to provide wholesale services and other levels of access. I'm sure BT could oblige here - I wonder if VM would step up to that particular plate?
They need to expand their fibre network for one thing if they want to see a big jump in subscribers.
Ah but that might result in Ofcom requiring them to provide a wholesale service and open up their network the way BT is forced to. Right now VM doesn't even have market dominance in the areas where it has a network (which is sad from their POV) but get much bigger and Ofcom might start taking a closer interest.
For those interested in knowing more it's called the Access Network Frequency Plan
And is created by NICC.
if (false==one.checkSomething())
and I just think "why?!"
It helps prod my brain into thinking a bit harder about something most programmers would gloss over. I reverse the terms and check for true/false on predicates. Yes it looks odd and yes (the intent) is that it makes you look twice both when writing it and reading it.
I've found I make far fewer mistakes that way. It's one of a number of styling choices I make that help reduce careless mistakes. Always using {}s is another. Coding shouldn't be about minimalism unless you're working in an interpreted language.
I am still writing performance critical code for devices that use 64 MHz CPUs with 16 MB of RAM. In the embedded world, that is Maserati-style resources but still the additional memory overhead and performance reduction of C++ rules it out in favour of C
And yet Turbo C++ was initially released for MSDOS and could target 8086 processors. If I could write software in C++ when I barely had 500kB of RAM to use, less than 64kB of stack and pitiful 8086 how come you can't with all that hardware?
The problem is that C++ has a far more elegant and foolproof way of doing this. In this case you'd declare a class whose constructor allocated the buffers and whose destructor deallocated them.
Before someone points it out actually these days you'd use std::vector<>. Rolling your own RAII class isn't all that common and is usually for more complex resources like database or OS handles. The STL has mundane stuff covered off.
but mostly the problem of documenting it
But in the real world documentation frequently ends up out of date if it exists at all. The problem with documentation is that the compiler doesn't get to see it or in the case of comments doesn't act on it. Documentation in code or out can say what it wants but it means diddly-squat as far as the actual generated code.
Logic analysers are good but that's still catching the problem after the mistake was made.
Good coding style and use of proven idioms help avoid the mistake being created in the first place. So yes do all three things but don't dismiss good style as unimportant. It's the first place where mistakes can be addressed and the earlier you address a mistake the cheaper it is to fix. Good style has the potential to prevent mistakes in the first place ;)
to me the biggest crime in bug #1 was the lack of {} around the if statements.
Certainly the style doesn't help. I'd say most of C/C++ issues come from lazy short-hand coding. In fact it's a problem with other languages where people use copy/paste or don't break code blocks out into self contained 'widgets'.
It's the biggest drawback to both languages. You can write good, safe code in both but you need to be on the ball and prepared to put the effort in. Most programmers aren't (in the latter case often because of tight deadlines). I love C++ (although these days I'm entirely C#) but I wish C had withered and died by now. The overhead of C++ isn't that bad and surely it's a rare device these days that needs the raw minimalism of C.
The problem is that C++ has a far more elegant and foolproof way of doing this. In this case you'd declare a class whose constructor allocated the buffers and whose destructor deallocated them.
Then you just create an instance of that class on the stack at the start of the function. Job done. C++ guarantees that the destructor of the instantiated class will be called when it goes out of scope (at the terminating '}'). It removes the need for 'fail' block at the end, and means instead of 'goto fail;' you just have a return. Not only is it more elegant but it's also exception safe so unless the CPU fails or the compiler generated defective code you know that the resources will be freed.
If you're a VB or C# programmer you can think of it like a finally block except that the finally code is in a destructor right next to the constructor which I think is better than having it at the bottom away from where the buffers are allocated. In fact for C# developers it's basically IDisposable only less convoluted.
Unfortunately none of this wonderful stuff is available in C. Just a shame that language is still being used for modern development :(
Christ on a crutch. Are there still C++ programmers out there that don't know about RAII? Presumably they've not heard of smart pointers so either their code is leaky or they are spending too much time and effort running resource monitoring tools.
Always the highlight of the week. I applaud your cynicism, sarcasm and mercenary attitude(*).
I'll add a bit of humour from Mr. Adams.
(*)Any chance of a kickback?
No. SCO 'Unix' was not 'another .. of the trifecta'. Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO who eventually renamed it SCO OpenServer when they updated it to a later release of AT&T
Oh, didn't realise that. Perhaps we were just targeting two versions then? It was such a long, long time ago and I were only a wee nipper back then. First and last time I worked on xIX, next job was DOS and Win16 and that was that :)
Nah. The parody was Xenix. That was one of the xIX platforms I helped target back in the late 80s. The infamous SCO Unix was another and the last member of the trifecta was IBM AIX. Interesting to see that of the three only AIX is still going.
I'd like to say 'Ah, happy days'.
But I can't.
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