Posts by Geoff Eagles

Venezuela spits out Coke Zero

Probably a good idea

Have a look at this - a timeline for the legalisation of aspartame:

http://www.rense.com/general33/legal.htm

I would guess there could be some legitimate concerns ...

Another 15,000 jobs to go at BT

Oh Yes They Are!!

Regarding the discussion as to whether the taxpayer will have to bail out the BT Pension should BT go tits up. When BT was privatised the government gave a "crown guarantee'' to the existing workers - underwriting their index-linked, final salary based pensions. Here's an old link about it:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/3368069/BT-pension-deficit-soars-by-5bn.html

US Forces 'black' budget = 2nd biggest military on Earth

Dodgy Rankings

Your rankings of military spending seems to have missed Russia? Apparently they spend around $50bn

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20081016/117784473.html

and that figure for Chinese spending seems awfully low. wiki says it's $70.3bn.

Anyhow, I think I'll put the headphones back on for some more "Masters of war" by Bob Dylan....

EU funds Antipodes-in-90-mins rocketliner concept

URL for the UK effort - so much more professional!

The Skylon A2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_A2

BT waves goodbye to 10,000 temps and permies

Things get worse...

Things continue to get worse for BT's permies. Pension contributions are going up, retirement age will increase to 65 (from 60). Instead of being a final salary pension it's to be based on your career average salary. But of course all these changes are to be done in consultation with the workforce ... strange, the union have just advocated that staff just accept the new terms - I wonder who pays them?? If I were still in the union I'd leave in disgust! This kicks in next April.

UK.gov told not to subsidise superfast broadband

Should have been done years ago.....

Back in the 80's BT offered to run fibre to the premises for the whole country ... on the condition that it was allowed to provide broadcast services (TV). Thatcher's government said no. An opportunity to be a world leader sadly lost.

Back to now - I think a lot of you are missing how hard it is to run fibre to the cabinet. You run your fibre in existing ducts from the exchange to your cabinet but then you need a load of hardware to split out (de-multiplex) back to the individual lines. Perhaps another whole cabinet full of stuff. I'm not sure how they propose to power it - existing lines are powered from the exchange (50v backed up by batteries and generators), I imagine the new cabinet hardware will probably want mains? In which case when there's a power cut everything goes...

I could be wrong - I was replaced in BT by an Indian contractor many years ago.

BT shares plummet on margin pressure

A long way yet to fall...?

I fear BT has a long way to fall yet. The people who really understood BT's critical systems have been pressured into redundancy and replaced by overseas staff who generally feel no responsibility towards the company. It'll all go horribly wrong .....

Ofcom flashes cash guarantees at BT for fibre investment

Short memories

Actually BT did offer to run fibre to the premises for its customers way back in the 80's - On the condition that they were allowed to offer broadcast services. The Thatcher government turned down that opportunity.

I'm not sure BT's is in a position to do much anymore. It's research and development has mostly been outsourced to India and the infrastructure is crumbling as the last guys who knew how it hung together leave. Rather sad.

VBA-free Office for Mac debuts

What's the replacement?

What a pain - the existing Office runs poorly because it was written for the PowerPC platform rather than the new Intel Macs but I can't upgrade without my VB.

I understand that the new Excel will still run my existing VB function but just not allow me to view or edit them? - what a crap idea. If the underlying application can still cope with VB why can't we still program with it?

So, have I got this right? Microsoft are going to discontinue VBA even for PC's and they propose, in future, we write our functions using Visual Studio? But that costs another £400 odd doesn't it?

Don't shed any tears for Pandora

One alternative

LastFM provides a similar service - haven't heard any rumours of it being barred from 'broadcasting' to the UK

Sony ships 11in OLED TV in the US

But how long will it last??

I thought there were still significant problems with the lifetime of OLEDs - has that been sorted now??