Posts by Andrew Gordon

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

Alternatives?

The one thing missing from this article is a comparison with the alternatives. While building nuclear reactors in an earthquake zone obviously has its difficulties, short of shutting up shop and going to live somewhere else, the electricity has to be generated somehow.

Hydroelectric? One significant dam burst in this event destroying hundreds of homes. There's been little detailed reporting of this, but on the face of it much more human and environmental impact than the nuclear problems.

Oil? Several refineries have been on fire (including some outside the tsunami zone). Oil handling facilities are inevitably on the coast and some must have leaked into the sea when struck by the tsunami; likewise there must have been injuries in the refinery explosions, but noone has bothered to report them separately from the general destruction (unlike the nuclear reporting). Still, nuclear again seems the winner.

Coal? Japan has limited domestic coal, and you would have thought that mining in an earthquake zone would also be hazardous. However, coal does in general seem to be less sensitive to earthquake events, especially if you import it. Shame that coal is

out of favour due to CO2. Also, coal tends to have its human cost spread over countless minor incidents rather than big disasters - big, heavy and awkward stuff to handle.

Spamhaus debuts whitelist service

Sounds OK

If you read the description of the whitelist, ISPs and other operations that provide mail service to others are not elligible - only people operating their own servers for non-spam purposes. So MessageLabs etc are excluded.

Remains to be seen how well they manage to police it, but at least it claims to be doing the right thing...

Google goes cycling

No need to wait for the UK

No need to wait for Google to get round to covering the UK for cycling - some guys from the Cambridge Cycling Campaign already have a route planner covering most of the UK (using OpenStreetMap for the underlying maps).

http://www.cyclestreets.net/

ISP blows the whistle on router chip 'fault'

Not just Zen (& not just long lines)

I have the same problem with Demon (unsurprising, since Zen and Demon both use the same underlying BT product).

In my case, I have two AR7-based modems (AVM Fritz!Box Fon Wlan), and two

ADSL lines (one Demon, one Be).

Both the modems had been working reliably for more than a year in other locations

before I moved in here (one of them on a Demon line in the same exchange area).

Either modem will work fine on the Be line (giving about 12Mbit, stays up for days on

end), but if connected to the Demon line will disconnect and retrain every few minutes during the night (but OK during the day). When the Demon line is up, it gets very close to 8Mbit (never less than 7.5).

I'm not right next door to the exchange, (maybe 1km away as the crow flies), but hardly a long or marginal line.

I'm guessing it's a firmware incompatibility between BT's DSLAMs and the AR7 when handling particular kinds of noise - not clear whether my Be line works because Be are using different DSLAMs, or if I that line happens to pick up less noise - both lines are in the same house, but then my line at the old house gave no trouble despite being same

modem, same ISP and approx same distance from the same exchange (and giving

the same almost-8M data rate)

I'd be much happier if BT turned down the data rate to give some more margin and

so a more reliable connection - but they won't do this, just insisting that my modem

is faulty!