Posts by Jon Press 302 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2007
Seems to me what we need is more 3G bandwidth. HSDPA is more than fast enough for most reasonable mobile requirements and you can at least also make voice calls (http://www.reghardware.com/2012/10/02/feature_wtf_is_voice_over_lte_4g/) over 3G.
And without some major new backhaul, exactly what difference is it going to make end-to-end?
Surely this can't simply be the desire to make the "4G" symbol light up on shiny new iPhones?
Unfortunately, the Freeview LCNs ("logical" channel numbers) are a UK-only feature, so manufacturers have very little incentive to do more than the bare minimum to support them. Unforunately, too, a large number of people with digital TVs seem incapable of using the EPG and rely on being able to key in the numbers from Radio Times. So (a) we're stuck with it and (b) it's never going to work very well.
"taxes are paid on profits, not income, quite rightly".
No, not rightly, just traditionally. Given the complexity of trans-national tax arrangements, there is no such thing as "true profits", profit is essentially the inflexion point on the graph at which spending on accountants outstrips the reduction in tax.
Peronsal income tax used to have a "profit" element by providing a range of allowances for expenses such as mortgages and dependent relatives but, at least in the UK, these have pretty well all gone, largely because of the opportunities they provided to avoid tax. The same is going to have to be true of corporate taxation - tax income received within the country and leave it to the managers to decide how best to ensure the remainder leaves them with a return. This is the only way corporations cannot pit nations against each other in supplication for their favours.
Actually, if you simply treat a public IPv4 address as an endpoint identifier in a linear 32-bit space and on the ISP side you look it up in a different table to get the actual network addresss (which might be an IPv6 address or other longer address that can be used for meaningful routing with prefixes for aggregation, etc) you'd have 4 billion addresses available for public-facing services, which is probably enough for quite a while.
These alternative solutions, and there are several that seem quite technically workable, all have one or more apparently-insuperable problems:
a) Everyone has to agree to implement them
b) Existing address assigments may be invalidated and require renumbering
c) The perceived monetary value in existing address assignments is destroyed
d) Someone has to be funded to work on the spec
Since everyone has been told the solution is IPv6 (and a sizeable community believe it), you're not going to get even rough consensus on another solution. People who've staked their claim to IPv4 address space aren't going to give it up (either "just in case" or because they hope to make real money out of it). Most of the IETF crowd who work in this space are funded by outfits who've put an awful lot of money into products supporting IPv6, so don't expect them to be keen on revisiting it.
Well, if nearly all wireless routers you'd handed out to your 4,000,000+ customers can't do IPv6 and never will, and the margins you earn from those customers are relatively thin, it's not entirely surprising that ISPs are looking at other solutions.
My suspicion is it's probably too late for IPv6 or any carrier-originated "Plan B". Your potential service provider who can't get an IPv4 address is probably going to have to host his service with a cloud provider who has plenty of them and can put multiple services behind each one using http host header names and similar tricks. I suspect this is just going to entrench Google/Amazon/... in the position of being "The Internet".
" it wasn't them who made the rules up"
I wonder who did, then.
According to Save the Children, "UK total spending on early years more than trebled in real terms between
1997/98 and 2007/08 – from around £2 billion to just over £7 billion in today’s prices, making it probably the fastest-growing major area of public spending". And, "there has been a marked increase in the proportion of 3- and 4-year-olds in receipt of early years education across the UK, rising from 63% in 1997 to 92% in 2008". And as far as overall education expenditure is concerned it grew across the board: "under-5s (88% real-terms growth up to2005/06), followed by primary education (71% up to 2006/07), secondary education (54%), and last, further and higher education (31%)".
There is a net transfer to households with children of around £9500pa for the poorest households, but even the most affluent average a receipt of £2000pa.
The net effect has been a significant and mostly-recent transfer of resources towards parents. Now, this has had the economic effect of increasing GDP as more women (in particular) go back to work and there are more jobs in childcare and education. But increased GDP in Britain simply translates into increased housing costs. Net effect on child poverty - it's as bad as it has ever been and getting worse. Net effect on household financial security - people who rely on tax credits are constantly having to worry about ensuring their fluctuating incomes don't suddenly result in large bills for overpaid credits.
Net effect on politics - groupthink: everything is viewed through the lens of "think of the children". Or to put it another way, to simply question the amount parents receive from the rest of society or their disporportionate influence upon it is "completely out of order".
You have pretty much excluded yourself from being consulted, then. The consultation is primarily aimed at parents and ISPs and you are requested to identify yourself when replying as "father", "mother", "grandparent", "industry representative" or "other". I'm afraid as a non-parent, you don't count as a "hard-working family"; you're just a drone whose job is to support the (self-) important people in society who've gone to the trouble of making themselves dependent on your income.
C++ was so much of an afterthought in VS2010 that they shipped it without C++ Intellisense support. Now it's suddenly front and cetnre.
Setup and Deployment projects declared dead in VS2012- presumably in favour of building for the App Store.
It would be nice for once to be able to install a new version of Visual Studio and have it actually provide the same level of support for an existing code base as the previous version.
Indeed. Though I don't live in North Tyneside, I live close enough by to know people that work for the local authority and people who get services from them.
I realise that it tends to be the exceptional events that get talked about the most, but the number of stories I've heard about employees taking out grievances against other employees or being on long-term sickness because of colleagie-induced stress (and thereby causing more work for other colleagues who then go sick in turn) gives the impression that the organisation (and I use the word loosely as it seems to be in a permanent state of upheval) is functioning more as a nursery than a service provider. All the "strategic" talk I hear is of which manager is in favour and taking over responsibility for more staff and which is being disfavoured and having responsibility removed - office politics rather than any concern with office function.
In short, it seems they're too absorbed with their own internal squabbling to focus on the job they're supposed to be doing. And of course budget cuts and a rolling programme of redundancies only makes that worse.
Realistically, authorities like North Tyneside are really just too small either for economies of scale or to really attract people to work there who want anything more than a quiet life with a pension at the end of it. But that was a political choice to stifle the power of the Metropolitan Authorities - divide and rule.
Not quite sure how Balfour Beatty's contract is supposed to take into account future political changes in North Tyneside - I suspect this kind of deal will tie the hands of future councillors and further undermine local democratic accountability. But that, too, has been central government policy for a long time.
Until that changes, get used to BigBrother plc being the convenient piggy in the middle - absolving both central and local government from any responsbility for the quality of local services in return for a slice of the pie.
It's largely irrelevant. Profit, for international companies at least, is pretty much what you decide it to be. You ship your expenditure and revenues around the international tax system until you magically realise a small profit in the country with the lowest rate of corporation tax.
The answer is to tax turnover (in the UK) - it's much harder to hide or divert offshore. We already have business taxes that are not based on profit - employers' so-called NIC and business rates for example. Roll it all into one, simplify the administration and compliance. If you then want to give companies a tax break, you can do it against investment in equipment, R&D, training or whatever positive activities you like. Anything else just results in the system being gamed.
What's wrong with IMAP in this case is that it's a client server protocol and you'd need to have a session open from your client (desktop) to each possible source of notifications.
To make this work efficiently across lots of web apps, you need some sort of push protocol and possibly aggregation of notifications from different sources by an intermediary (like Canonical). And indeed if that's what they were planning to do, it might be worthy of a bit of puff.
However, as far as I can tell, all it is is a JavaScript API that can be called from within a web application to add notifications to the Messaging Menu in the Unity UI. How that particular application gets to run and where it gets it's information from does not seem to be part of the big announcement. So it might just be using IMAP after all...
the number of police (allegedly) on the take from journalists, private investigators and like; the number of climate protestors sent down because of improper actions of undercover police officers; the bizarre way in which a policeman was able to resign to avoid serious disciplinary proceedings and join the Met a few days later; police being found selling confiscated guns; the rather high number of deaths in police custody - to name but a few disturbing events - I'm not sure that G4S would necessarily be any worse.
The TGV network is generally very good.
The regional rail networks in France have been devolved to local government with a legacy of under-investment but no funding to remedy it. If you think UK regional rail services are poor, you should experience the assortment of elderly carriages crawling once or twice a day along poorly-maintained track in rural France. Or more likely the replacement bus service picking up and dropping off the poor and elderly outside the dilapidated stations.
Total EU budget is around 140 bn Euro pretty much all of which, except the administrative cost and overseas aid (of which there is relatively little), is spent within member countries and via national governments. There may well be reasons to dislike the EU, but imaginary statistics don't figure amongst them.
Assuming by "them" you mean the European Commission, its operating budget is around 3.3 billion (EUR). Divide that by 27 members and it becomes quite hard to support the claim that every country is spending billions on EU bureaucracy.
The proposal for an EU law (as opposed to a directive) would also mean that EU bureaucrats wouldn't have to be monitoring member states to make sure the laws they passed were compliant with the directive - it would be the same law everywhere - and it would be enforced in national courts not in Brussels. So I'm not quite sure how that would involve extra taxation heading down the Karel de Grotelaan.
Perhaps the best way for banks to escape tighter regulation is to propose the EU should do it* and then they can sneak away under cover of the ensuing hysteria.
*They will anyway, but that's a different story...
We're all criminals:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/14/web_super_snoop_draft_bill_released_by_home_office/
So we should be grateful for subscribers to this service who are no doubt disproportionately going to occupy the time of the authorities - who think the same way you do - and therefore divert attention away from the rest of us.
Actually, it's worse than that. My HD TV and blu-ray player both support MPEG-2 and H.264 for their primary function; both have DLNA clients. Do both support MPEG-2 and H.264 via DLNA? No. Do they support the same codecs from USB storage as they accept via DLNA? No.
Consumer Electronics have thin margins and short shelf lives - the more functionality you add the less time and money there is to design and test. So stuff gets cobbled together sufficiently to tick off the feature lists, regardless of whether it works usefully in practice.
... they're having to cut back on daytime TV and kids' TV is shown in the, er, daytime, why don't they simply drop (say) BBC2 before 7pm and replace it with Cbeebies and get rid of BBC3 or BBC4 at night? There's a complete 24 hour programme stream they'd no longer have to fill (and could presumably rent out or use to increase bit rates on the remaining channels or give to Jeremy Hunt for local TV without the cost of another MUX).
Don't suppose the lack of ongoing "support" will make much difference, it's not been particularly visible over the intervening years. Even the things that could have been easily fixed (such as the clock display being too bright at night) were left to hackers whose efforts were then erased in the rare event of a firmware update - which would result in a noisy interruption in the middle of the night. The digital radio lagged minutes behind the live stream and would periodically skip entire sentences as it struggled to synch up. The DLNA client (bizarrely not an app but hidden amongst the "tools" menu) rarely managed to scale content up to a full screen. The box would often reboot itself as an alarm approached - or lock up altogether. And it was prone to brick itself.
A little more attention to detail and it could have been a very useful little device - but that goes for so many transient gadgets. I don't see how O2 ever imagined it would generate revenue for them, though.
You missed the bit, as far as I have understood it, about YouView using native apps which are inevitably tied to the architecture of the box.
Not HTML, not Java, not Flash, not MHEG, not MHP, not HbbTV.
Compiled code (delivered via MHEG extenstions) admittedly written against a standard Linux API set (starting with DirectFB and working upwards), which each participant will presumably develop separately for their own part of the service and which potentially need to be compiled and tested for each of the many and varied* hardware platforms implementing the YouView standard.
*Raucous laughter is permitted at this point.
Write books, write music, paint pictures and you're very unlikely ever to make a living. It's possible, granted, but only for a small minority. And where money is made from the creative process, it typically goes to the record company, the movie studio and the various intermediaries rather than to the original creator.
Writing apps isn't a business in the same way that writing books isn't a business: publishers, literary agents, printers and bookshops are businesses (for the duration of their business model), authors are just their raw material.
It's also stretching the meaning of "research" beyond its elastic limit to suggest that the average App, to the extent is is at all commercial, is the result of some profound academic insight.
Freeview TV uses MHEG and will continue to do so, so TV suppliers are going to have to continue to deliver that to the UK, YouView or no YouView. Freesat has alread indicated that the second generation "G2" specification for Freesat receivers will use HbbTV - so it's not a case of the UK being isolated - so TV suppliers are also going to have to provide HbbTV to the UK market. And of course the countries that have deployed MHP aren't going to get rid of it immediately That looks pretty much like a platform will cover Europe (and Australasia) provided it supports MHEG, MHP and HbbTV in different combinations for different countries.
YouView (the platform) is a particular implementation of an IPTV content delivery platform and in addition to MHEG will have to support HbbTV if it ever comes in a satellite version. It's not that YouView won't support common technical standards, it's that it layers another set of standards on top of them to deliver what are effectively "apps" that can only be written by approved vendors.
That's where YouView's ambitions fall down, as far as I can see - there simply won't be the market share to deliver the apps that would make the further layer of complexity worthwhile.
So the UK definitiely *is* getting HbbTV in the next generation of Freesat. Whether it ever gets YouView - and if so, for how long before the technology disappears and it's just a brandname for catch-up TV delivered by other means - remains to be seen.
There was provision in DECnet Phase V for Phase IV nodes to continue to exist but the issue of "prolonged coexistence" is essentially the same for IPv4: once you have addresses that cannot be represented in 16/32-bits then you have a partitioned network.
The argument that IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist for many years was a viable one 20 years ago when IPv6 was being designed and address-space exhaustion was a relatively long way off. It's only viable now assuming either:
a) Ways are found to extend the life of the IPv4 address space untl a transition is complete
b) Ways are found to work around the partitioning outside the network layer
And, of course, that the rest of the network behind the router can be made IPv6 compliant in good time.
The problem is that the longer you extend the life of the IPv4 address space, the less is the incentive to make any active change. If you're confident it'll hold up until there are so few Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows 2000 machines left - and sufficient IPv4-only personal firewalls, wireless adapters and TVs, Internet radios, CCTV systems et al have expired - that ISP's customer support lines can cope with the residual calls, then fine. I just think that point might be further away than is currently envisaged.
"Just deploy IPv6. This will be cheaper and simpler."
The cheapest and simplest option for me is to do nothing, that's the fundamental problem. It's also the cheapest and simplest option for everyone else who already has an IPv4 address. Especially if they're still running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 or have (as the majority of people seem to do) a router than doesn't actually support IPv6 at all.
Even if ISPs send out IPv6 routers to every end user, they'll go in cupboards or end up on eBay and even if they didn't, they wouldn't ensure 100% of customers were 100% connected.
The Internet is no longer a bunch of research organisations with large capital budgets, network support departments and allocated cisco salesmen. It's mostly homes and small businesses with little or no networking expertise, largely unidentified equipment and paying small numbers of pounds per month for service.
You might wish that for the greater good that customers would accept or even understand that IPv6 was their problem, but they won't. That's just the way things are, whatever the greater good. This is not ultimately a technical problem at all, it's a problem of human behaviour and the humans in this process are not going to "just deploy IPv6" however hard you try to persuade them and the ISPs don't have the money to deal with the individual problems that will arise if they tried.
Suppose your SatNav only accepts 7-character postcodes. Then in the future, Royal Mail decides that postcodes have to have 10 characters to improve address locality.
WA143Q1C02 may be "just" the postcode of the address of a front door, but you can no longer enter it into your SatNav. The address may exist, but you cannot represent it and therefore cannot find a route to it.
I'm afraid you're largely right. If there were any real merit in IPv6 it would have been deployed by now and noone would have noticed. It was pretty clear even 20 years ago that using the same protocol end-to-end suited small robust military networks - in which every route was valid and throughput was not the primary goal - but wasn't really the obvious solution for a heterogeneous global backbone where policy and payment became critical in routing decisions and quality of service and billing would be significant issues for the end-user interface. Unfortunately, the fact that CCITT had realised this too and hopelessly over-engineered their solution has made even discussing the basis of the TCP/IP "standard model" taboo within the IETF and blighted anything tainted by ISO, as you say. Ironically, of course, the whole reason that the connectionless model of networking was being pushed in ISO was to effectively fix the bugs in TCP/IP and have an international standard alternative to X.25.
IPv4 will remain the main access protocol for the foreseeable future with a few larger outfits using IPv6. The backbone(s) will increasingly run different things, including but not limited to IPv6 and at some point there will be other access protocols. The time for IPv6 to be a ubiquitous protocol has long since passed.
I'm not quite as sanguine that "v4 space ... can last forever with a modest market in address blocks" but if it doesn't the problem can largely be solved by hybrid hacks involving v4/v6 NAT and DNS. And the hacks will emerge when they're needed.
... both in the DECnet Phase V debacle and in the early days of IPv6 (and we're talking around 20 years that this has been in gestation), the failure to acknowledge the painful nature of transitions of this kind has a long history.
DECnet Phase V (essentially based on ISO CLNS) was supposed to "fix" the 16-bit limitation of DECnet IV addresses in much the same way as IPv6 is supposed to "fix" IPv4. In theory, Digital should have had an easier time of it being a single vendor, but it didn't work out like that. Two of the many problems were finding people to take ownership of transition in a large organisation and finding money to spend on major changes that brought no immediate benefit. People inside Digital were deaf to the warnings because they saw no alternative except losing out to TCP/IP. And when the same warnings were sounded about IPv6, people in the IETF were deaf because TCP/IP had beaten DECnet and that's all they wanted to hear.
In many ways, IPv6 is less complex (Phase V was more than a network-layer change), but the problem of co-ordination and proof of benefit is much bigger because the Internet is now so large and the existing user base doesn't see the problem. How do you get individual end users to replace their IPv4 routers? If you're a new business and you can't get an IPv4 address because they've run out, that's your problem as far as your clients are concerned - they can get to everyone else and they're not going to spend money just to solve your problem. Expecting incumbents to pay up to make way for new entrants is just not a workable strategy.
Most end users, whether they be individuals or small businesses or bigger businesses, are going to do nothing. And, unless the ISPs want to deal with the support calls when the result of doing nothing is that stuff breaks, a solution will have to be found in which the result of most people doing nothing is that everything continues to work. However many layer violations are required...
Indeed. A lot of the local news consists of repeating the main content of the national news with the words "in our region" repeated ad nauseam and the national statistics replaced with local ones. The content of "local" broadcasting also appears to be largely dictated centrally with the major themes co-ordinated nationally and the rustics left to their own initiative only to report on house fires and sick children.
The main apparent purpose of the island sites is to report on sport and the local weather, neither of which a community broadcaster is likely to be able to afford to cover - unless they have a window overlooking the local football ground and with sight of the sky.
That's not to say that interesting local TV is impossible, but expecting it to make money (or even be able to pay staff) by aping already-subsidised and better-resourced models of broadcasting seems an unsustainable fantasy.
As far as I understand it, the majority of recent productions are "buy outs" in which the creators (or the majority of them) don't get any residuals. Much like those shows that go into "syndication" in the US and produce no further return to the original artists. I'm not sure exactly what the position is with the endlessly-repeated shows (like Dad's Army), but I suspect their constant appearance is a result of the rights having been secured in perpetuity by one means or another.
What that means is the money isn't going to the artist, it's going to the production company. Which, in most cases is the BBC or has been bankrolled (or partly bankrolled) by the BBC. If we, the licence/taxpayer has essentially taken the risk to finance the production in the first place and guaranteed it a certain level of return, I don't quite see that offering an unending source of income to the production company has the clout as a moral argument that "creators should be paid" implies.
Ironically, it is of course the opportunity created by digital media to constantly re-broadcast and re-sell content that led to the idea of a buy-out: too complicated to track all those potential royalties from individual downloads and micropayments and all that potential free money is just too tempting. For corporations, public and private.
It would suit me fine - I pay way more in tax than I receive in services, a lot of which goes on the health care, education and benefits that subsidise the sprogs even of the wealthiest in the land. I'm alright, Jack.
I suspect that the same people who bemoan having to pay the TV licence would be amongst the first to complain if their free education, hospital services, child tax credit or child benefit were withdrawn because poorer people were contributing to them.
The TV licence is a tax. The only thing different about it is that it is entirely hypothecated which means that everyone who doesn't want to pay it can call it out as a separate line item in their budget. The solution is to stop pretending it's a licence fee.
As a representative of a communal freehold, I have recently received a letter from TV Licensing asking for a pass key to our block of flats so that they can harrass potential defaulters even when they've been told to go away via the door intercom. Collecting via the Inland Revenue would also put an end to that kind of attempted abuse of authority.
I get the impression that GiffGaff has a higher proportion of IT- and business-savvy users than other networks but assumes its much-vaunted user-community is just there to help it with marketing and grunt-level technical support. Perhaps it should invite some voluntary participation in its business continuity planning instead of exchanging points for duplicate and potentially misleading forum entries.
They can, but under the Sale of Goods Act the responsibility is on the consumer to prove the "non conformity" after 6 months of ownership in the event of the retailer not cooperating. A two year "no questions" warrant is more than just "likely" to be more convenient than paying an independent expert to prove the fault and then attempting to recoup that from the retailer.
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