Posts by Warm Braw

Re: A þorny problem, to be sure

Is that you, Eth?

There's a lot I don't like about IPv6 and I was at one time a contributor to one of the alternative proposals. However, it's not the technical details of IPv6 that prevented its adoption.

At the time IPv6 was being mooted, the Internet really didn't extend far beyond government and academia. There was already a problem with scaling, but that was largely related to the way IP addresses were divided into classes and to memory limitations in routers that were worsened by the need to have a routing table entry for every destination network.

There was a quick fix for the two pressing problems - classless addresses allocated in such a way that routing tables could practically include only prefixes for groups of networks that had either geographical or carrier affinity.

Then it came down to money. Was it worth vendors implementing IPv6 stacks if the immediate problem had been resolved? Would people buy routers that were going to be significantly more expensive owing to the cost of both processing and storing longer addresses? The answers to that turned out to be no and no. The routers did eventually get the grunt to handle IPv6, but that was largely a side effect of their having to deal with ever faster line speeds and ever more routes.

Subsequently, the Internet has grown much larger and much more quickly that anyone at the time could possibly have imagined without IPv6 ever becoming a dominant component. It will, eventually, but it's now more of a tidying-up exercise than a technical necessity so progress will remain slow.

Changing the bits on the wire might have created a technically better standard, but it would not have resulted in earlier migration by anyone*.

*Edit: in hindsight it would probably have been possible to make changes to IPv4 (rather than IPv6) that would have made it easier to operate hybrid networks, bringing more IPv6 services online earlier. In reality, it would have been impossible to get anyone to invest effort in this at the time as the focus was putting an end to IPv4 not extending its useful life. We are where we are.

Re: All-or-nothing deployments

just becase you don't have the definitions nailed down

That may be because in my advancing years I have seen the same things (at least to a first approximation) redefined many times and it is not always immediately clear what beyond the first approximation is the genuine advance...

Re: Hmm. Signalling?

much safer/commonsense to kill something dead

That's fine if you have some alternative to fall back on - and that alternative is better. I have yet to be convinced that smashing something to pieces and passing the buck to other people to build something better is as brilliant a universal policy as our new overlords seem to think. If it were, they should just release the nukes now.

Actually, given Dom now has access to an actual bunker and there's a potential viral pandemic, that might not be so fantastic: here's his opportunity to rebuild humanity from a carefully self-selected group of superior beings - in their own minds.

Re: Cheap!

Or the cost per mile of HS2.

I think its more common with elderly people who might not want to rush downstairs

Actually, it's also an issue already with elderly people who have telephone-linked emergency alarms. I've had to separate the extension wiring at the master socket and instead plug it into the "line out" of a parental alarm base station as leaving an internal phone off-hook (or the burglar alarm going faulty and doing the same thing) would prevent the alarm from being able to dial out.

The same solution would presumably apply to a VoIP router - and I imagine it's likely that the fibre will arrive at the premises in close proximity to the existing master socket.

Re: Government Guidance

I can't help thinking that putting a paper bag over your head and then lying is the guidance that has historically been given to all those government "anonymous sources".

Re: Stupid millennial pranks

If you ask your handy local digital assistant, it might offer an explanation. Or not. I can never get them to understand me speaking normally, so I might just give this ultrasonic thing a go.

Re: US Homeland Security

You were right the first time. The US does indeed have jurisdiction over the domain name registration.

I gave up trying to explain to clients that it was in their best interests to have their domain name registered in the jurisdiction where they traded and where they also held any relevant trademarks if they wanted to minimise the risks of foreign courts getting involved in any disputes. However, it seems that because people have heard of the ".com" boom but not of a ".uk" boom, there is something intrinsically inferior about ".uk" for the kind of people that worry about that kind of thing. It's about as futile as arguing with an anti-vaxxer.

Re: You're not supposed to kill the goose

it isn't just about the tax

It's mainly about the NI - the tax advantages are not what they were. I'm not sure what you mean by a "genuine" contractor, but, to be fair, neither does the government.

I don't have much sympathy for the whole PSC model with artificial, tax-friendly dividends, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't (and haven't) taken advantage of it when it's there. The big problem, as I see it, is that a lot of people working in the economy have no clear status or real legal rights. I'm more concerned in general about Uber and delivery drivers and people in "hospitality" on zero hours contracts than someone on a daily rate that approaches their monthly take-home, but adding more people to the pool of casual labour seems socially undesirable.

Re: Right to Privacy

More importantly, they'd have to accept some level of transparency and accountability in their own actions. Given that even their tame secret court finds against them whenever there is an inadvertent disclosure of their activities, I can't see them clamouring for greater access to their own messaging.

Re: Heretic!

If the car's so smart it should leave you at home sleeping and do your job for you.

Re: All the expensive cameras I installed at my property are useless

If you have a smart lock, getting into the house is not going to be much of a problem. But at least if the dog's starving, he might have a greater incentive to bite anyone who tries. If you have enough of this stuff, their disparate failures bring complementary benefits.

Re: Since when did a hedgerow need gigabit broadband?

It'll still be copper beech for the last mile.

Discrimination was not even trumped by the exigencies of war. As well as having a segregated army in WW II, the Pentagon, which was built during the war at great trouble and expense was nevertheless overprovisioned with toilets and canteens to permit the racial segregation required by the law of Virginia.

You would hope that organisations based on science and technology would have a better record, but it's unfortunately not the case.

As you progress along the dystopian scale, the difference between an egalitarian dystopia and a discriminatory one narrows to a nicety. Better to avoid the dystopia in the first place.

Re: Nice idea, not a chance

those of us unhappy with the taking ways...

... are unfortunately a small minority. Social networks, are, well, networks - they only work if they're connected. Since most people have no problem with having their votes influenced by the right wing, rich and Russians as long as a free service tells them they're popular with their friends, there's no incentive for Facebook et al to build the interfaces that would allow limited and un-monetizable data to integrate into their networks thereby devaluing them.

I'm pretty sure TBL knows this is a non-starter and is merely hoping that airing the concepts might at least undermine any potential argument that social media companies may make to regulators to the effect that privacy is intrinsically, technically impossible.

Re: Nobody tosses any in my direction

Given Mr. Dabbs' current residence and in tribute to the, er, masthead of this esteemed organ, I suppose the situation of M. Griveaux could be described as:

bite* in the hand that feeds it

*I assume the fact that the word is feminine is just Gallic wishful thinking. Or misdirection.

Re: @John Oates

Is there anything we can do right now?

I would have said a few months ago that the government would not be so stupid as to weaken data protection rules here in a way that put data exchange with the EU in jeopardy. Now I'm not nearly so sure. You presently have the right to ask for your data to be deleted (but no right to verify that), but the continued existence of that right is purely now a matter for the UK/British/English/London or whatever locus of independent government should emerge from the post-Brexit fragmentation.

You still have until the end of the year to establish residence in another EU country...

Re: So not nwolb.com then?

Barclays (try to) insist you submit the "know your customer" information via a third party form-filling website and refused to offer any other route when challenged. Apparently they can't offer me financial products if I fail to submit the data, so basically a win-win in their case.

Re: Clueless he is.

Cue the usual deluded defenders of the current idiot in chief

One even seems to have taken the trouble to vote down every post on this page that's critical of the Orangenius. But I suppose that could equally be the work of the Mechanical Turk: no point in having money if you can't make it work for you.

It's a step forward, but at least you could in any case diarise the contract end date and take action in advance.

I'm more exercised about the fact that you can sign up for a fixed price contract and have the price hiked during its currency. My broadband price was raised by 10% less than half way through its 18 month period, so clearly the provider never had any intention of sticking to the headline price. They did this in the month before Christmas when there are generally no decent offers from other providers pending the big price cuts in January. And of course Ofcom rules are that you only get 30 days to break your contract after which you're bound by the price increase for the remaining duration.

This is not just cynical, but it's asymmetric - you don't have the same rights as the party with whom you're contracting, so it ought to count as an unfair consumer contract, but Ofcom is apparently just fine with that.

Re: Developer fatigue

It's bad enough having apps that work on small screens and large screens, in portrait and landscape mode, and on Apple and Android. Now add to the mix support for two screens in various orientations, one of which is partially obscured and an additional operating system, Windowsish. Testing will be skimped a pain.

There will no doubt be some niche applications, but more platform fragmentation doesn't sound particularly welcome.

Re: Xp

Presumably if you adopt the same ordinal representation as "George lV", Windows XP is actually Windows F?

Re: " I don’t believe any “Geniuses” are contractors."

They're not even engineers.

Re: $1,380 and no 5G ?

5G is a solution looking for a problem

Good job you can't say the same about a slightly-creased display.

Re: Seasonal Work

A lot of industries have seasonal or short-term requirements for people. They typically fill those requirements by some combination of:

zero-hours employment contracts

permanent part-time employment contracts

short-term employment contracts

agency staff

Your typical IT contractor is taking no more risk that someone who works habitually in construction - considerably less if you included the potential for accidents. They're also generally significantly better remunerated, less regulated and perfectly capable of working under any of the above arrangements in most cases.

I have been a contractor, been a permanent employee and run a company with staff providing consulting services to a variety of clients simultaneously. The first two were very similar, the latter was very different. You're at risk as an employee too - look at the terms of unemployment insurance and you'll see just how big the risk actually is by what they won't insure - and in neither case are you potentially looking at meeting the salary costs of other staff if the work starts to dry up.

I don't think contractors are the special case they have convinced themselves they are and if they're worth the net pay they believe they are, they'll continue to get it.

Re: Nicky Morgan

I don't want to wear that out for Crace...

Re: Prior art

I am named on a few: my employer at the time clearly hoped that the claims were novel and patentable, but they seemed pretty mundane to me. Lawyers went away, wrote up the patents, found what they thought was prior art (without reference to the "inventors") and we were then told to "sign here". I think in the end only a couple were granted, but the company expired before the patents did.

It did seem to be an extraordinarily expensive form of futility.

Re: Sexism in an All-Remote Company

It seems to be remote in all senses of the word.

Perhaps it's an inevitable consequence of never talking to real people.

Why would you want any remote search engine involved in searching for local content on your own PC?