Posts by Alan Brown

BT slams ‘ludicrous’ Openreach report as Vodafone smirks

Re: dark fibre

"a monopolist is creating a 'shortage' where none actually exists."

Telcos used to dictate what you wanted and when you got it.

That changed in the mid-late 1990s, but incumbent telcos are like supertankers - not exactly manouvreable. and traditionally cushioned by lots of govt protection plus the ability to leverage existing monopolies.

The current situation is as if Ford built roads and the only non-Ford cars allowed on Ford Roads were required to do so by sitting on top of (expensive) Ford Interface Units which Ford supplied and soley existed to isolate the non-Ford car's tyres from the Ford road, even though the tires were identical to the ones used by Ford, the non-Ford cars complied with all the same standards the Ford Cars did and the interface units were not required on non-Ford Roads, whether the cars on the non-Ford roads were Fords or non-Fords.

Oh and by the way, if you have a non-Ford car on the Ford road, you can't report a pothole or a problem with the (unreliable) Ford Interface Unit until you have exhaustively checked down a 120-point faultfinding list on your car and you go to the back of the problem queue unless you pay extra fees to be treated with the same priority as the Ford cars.

Re: Of course Voda want direct dark fibre access

Here's a big argument in favour of dark fibre (and there are various flavours of that including multiplexed bandwidths)

The less "stuff" there is along the line, the more reliable it tends to be.

EVERY SINGLE FAILURE on our current circuits has been down to BT interface equipment, but thanks to the current multilayer supplier approach that's added _at least_ 6 hours to repair time, every time - BT monitor their circuits and have known full well they have a fault but won't lift a finger until the telco we contract with raises a fault with them and jumps through hoops to do so (BT won't tell them their kit is down, so a telco tech has to drive out to the site and verify the BT interface kit has died), with a minimum delay to get onsite and deal with it of 2 hours.

One particular BT optical interface in Reigate is repeatedly failing (wedges and needs power cycling) - but BT refuse to replace it "as it tests ok".

When BT were the end-to-end supplier they treated interface faults as an automatic callout and have been known to have people onsite in 20 mins. They replaced dead kit on the spot. Interestingly although they're the supplier of the tail circuit in any case, the figure they charged us for it was _lower_ than the what they charge the competing telco.

Anyone who actually believes there's a full separation of Openreach/BTwholesale/BTretail has forgotten that BT Head office can see over the walls and direct operations _and_ that there's clear customer experience that contradicts that assertion.

It was investigation into the BT/Openreach model which made New Zealand regulators realise that it's a sham and that the only way to achieve true separation and market fairness the divisions had to be completely separated into different companies with different financials, shareholding, CEO, Board and offices.

External Observers would agree with Vodafone

When the New Zealand looked at the options for dealing with Telecom NZ's anticompetitive behaviour, TNZ pushed the BT/Openreach model hard and even split itself up "voluntarily" internally to try and make it a done deal they only needed to rubberstamp. (Telecom became "Spark" and the lineside "Chorus")

After looking long and hard at the UK model and how it was working in real world terms, the NZ regulators decided that the best way forward was to force divestment of the lineside, which was done after a lot of squealing and claims that the lineside company would not be economic to run, etc etc.

This was done by making it a condition of getting funding to sort out rural broadband (which is hellaciously more expensive to run in NZ than in the UK because of the terrain and low population densities)

End result: After the handbrake effect of the incumbent dialtone provider was removed the NZ lines market has exploded. Chorus actively sells LLU (instead of making it as hard as possible to deal with) duct access _and dark fibre_ - something which Openreach flatly refuses to do(*)

Chorus is now highly profitable and extremely responsive, with a huge range of 3rd party telcos hanging off their lines. On the other hand Spark seems to be losing ground rapidly.

(*) As a result, our 60km 1Gb circuit goes via a BT ethernet device & BT tail for 15km, comes out as copper, gets turned back into fibre for 50km of Sky run and ends up in a rack on another campus where it comes out as copper on a Sky interface. A single 65km fibre run could trivially be plugged straight into our gear at both ends and upgraded to 10Gb/s / multifrequency without further telco interference, but in order to "upgrade" to 10Gb we have to fork out 100k and pay an extra 200k/year under the current environment.

Thanks Ofcom.

Chipzilla spawns 60-core, six-teraflop Xeon Phi MONSTER CHIP

Re: What socket?

Xeon Phis are (currently) a PCI expansion card. They do get "rather toasty" (personal experience).

The hardest part about dealing with them is finding programmers actually competent to write multithreaded code in the arenas we operate - they're as rare as rainbow unicorns.

Re: NICE!

Funny you should say that......

Tennessee sues FCC: Giving cities free rein to provide their own broadband is 'unlawful'

"Tennessee doesn't want its cities causing trouble for the likes of Comcast with working, affordable taxpayer-backed ISPs, in other words."

Except that they frequently don't work, aren't available and are overpriced thanks to state-stamped local loop monopolies.

"The lack of local loop broadband competition in the US is largely a function of the exclusive cable franchises cities granted many years in the past."

GIven a choice between between having 30 different companies stringing cable along poles and then going under, or one outfit doing it, that's a sensible decision for the most part, however those exclusive franchises haven't had adequate financial oversight.

As for 50Mb/s - "yeah right" - there are more complaints about the quality of "broadband" from cablecos than from ISPs - and bear in mind that it's the cablecos who started the "rent seeking" behaviour over the likes of Netflix when it starting impacting sales of their own video services.

The USA system is a royal clusterfuck based on who pays the regulators the largest backhanders.

Paul Allen hunts down sunken Japanese WWII super-battleship

Re: unappreciated prophets

"Japanese naval vessels were rumored to carry plundered gold and sometimes native currencies."

Such items are also entombed under various islands in the Philippines, according to various legends.

Dumaguete is the most popular site mentioned. To this day there are fortune hunters toiling through jungle both there and on Mindanao trying to find Yamashita's Treasure.

Hated biz smart meter rollout: UK.gov sticks chin out, shuts eyes

Re: A waste of money

"You could fix it with energy storage, but you then build in vast additional capital costs over and above the economically challenged renewable plant."

You'd also need to build to build more of the renewable plant - all current storage technology results in a minimum of 30% energy loss over the cycle.

Hopefully in 20 years we'll look back and shake our heads about how silly people were to put their faith in windmills for long-term reliable power supplies.

Re: A waste of money

"we could easily replace a coal or gas fired power station or two with the renewables we currently have connected to the grid. "

That's just the problem. We could replace _a_ power station (maybe 2), but you still need to have enough

The entire UK wind output peaked at 3/4 of the nuclear fleet average output late last year for a few days. Under normal circumstances the average is less than 1/3 and at other periods during the year output dropped to nearly zero.

Wind and solar combined could peak at about twice the current nuclear output.

That might sound good, but the UK nuclear fleet produces only a small fraction of total UK power demand and that's _peak_ output for renewables, not average.

Re: @Electron Shepherd I don't get it at all.

"If only they could calculate demand at the supply end"

They already do - and even if meters instantly updated that someone's switched a kettle on, the message will get to the supply side at least 5 seconds AFTER the generators already noticed it and cranked up supply (or let the mains frequency dip a little)

Short of being telepathic, "smartmeters" will have no effect on predicting demand and the enercos really aren't that keen on them.

If smartmeters were worthwhile then the powercos would be installing them for free

The _only_ way to maintain energy supplies and reduce CO2 is to go "more nuclear" - and once you have nuke technology which can cope with load peaks (LFTRs), the extra costs of running Solar PV/Wind, etc etc will simply serve to drive costs up.

Current "renewable" energy supplies are heavily subsided - both directly and via "must connect" laws which force grid operators to hook them up whilst not allowing them to charge for the operation of "backing generation" (mostly being inefficient open cycle gas plants)

Don't forget that in order to reduce carbon output, we have to go "more electric" - gas heating ends up deprecated and electric cars will increase demand too. Wind/Solar will _never_ produce enough to come close to satisfying current demands, let alone the spectre of requirements 4-8 times higher than they are now.

More than 260 suspects charged in UK child abuse crackdown

Re: @ Mine's a Guinness

There's some interesting speculation surfacing that the OSA is being invoked "on national security grounds" because the rings were connected to:

1: A royal close to the queen (unlikely to be one of her children as they're too young for the timelines)

2: Security services in Northern Ireland

3: Senior security staff (as in MI5/6) in the UK

Some names are being bandied about on the net. I wonder how long this kettle of fish can continue to be sat on before it explodes.

It's rather telling that parliament has voted not to exempt people from the OSA in order to allow them to give evidence to the enquiries, but I suspect the truth will surface eventually anyway.

Re: @ Mine's a Guinness

"from the reports on Dolphin Sq that seems to be historical."

Given that people who were investigating are being phoned up out of the blue and threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act if they blab to the enquiries (and that some of the persons alleged to be involved are still at Westminster), that "historical" might not be as long ago as you think.

HUGE Aussie asteroid impact sent TREMORS towards the EARTH'S CORE

Re: Devonian?

Most of the output of the Deccan Traps is under the Iridium layer, so comet causing the eruptions can be safely be ruled out.

Current hypothesis is that the Traps were erupting for quite some time before the Chicxulub strike, with fossil evidence supporting the idea - there was a dieoff underway for some period before the iridium layer appeared.

Under normal circumstances, Chicxulub should not have been a global extinction level event, even with the added input of the Deccan Traps. The final straw is that at the time it was a shallow sea with a _huge_ layer of limestone underneath and most of that got vaporised, putting an enormous CO2 pulse into the atmosphere along with billions of tons of water vapour.

This underscores that it's just as important where a rock hits as to the size of it (Modelling large ones shows that land strike = bad, open ocean strike = worse, shallow sea/continental shelf = even worse still)

For local extinction levels, there may not even be an observable crater. There at least one hypothesis that the younger dryas dieoff in north america was caused by a fragmenting comet skimming the atmosphere, generating a shitload of airbursts that effectively sterilised the surface - https://craterhunter.wordpress.com/ - I can't fault the idea and there does seem to be a fair bit of supporting evidence including melted rock formations in Mexico which appear to have been windblown into their current shapes whilst molten.

As others have said, the australian crater was known, but not the multiple large lumps. It's probably not large enough to have caused a global extinction level event though, especially given that life at the time was extremely simple.

The Deccan traps aren't the only ones associated with a dieoff - the much older Siberian traps are also about the same age as a dieback.

Personally I wouldn't be surprised if most of the larger craters caused by fragmented impacts rather than a single solid one - Shoemaker-Levi9 serves as a good observed example - but they're generally so badly eroded that it's impossible to tell.

From a human point of view, extinction level events aren't needed to wipe out civilisation. There are plenty of rocks whizzing around the inner solar system which are large enough to do the job and enough of them come worryingly close each decade that as a species, we really should be making plans to get off this planet.

Assange™ lawyers demand Swedish prosecution files or no London interview

uh yeah

"the UK courts get first dibs on a small account of breah of bail conditions."

The standard punishment for breach of bail conditions without violence is a small fine and a warning not to do it again.

One of the local nasties thought so little of it that he'd breach his bail twice a day to go to the local betting shop - for 3 months. The police were thoroughly frustrated by it, because every time they arrested him, the judges gave the same "punishment" (and in that case the guy had an exclusion order because he'd been intimidating witnesses whilst facing ABH charges, so showing up was a threat of violence all in itself)

A judge tossing St Julian Asshat in clink for a few months would face questions about acting far in excess of the norm, so whilst he's technically in trouble the reality is "not very much trouble"

Wind turbine blown away by control system vulnerability

Re: Oh Good Grief

"Do the commentards here really believe that an industry as mature as industrial electrical and control would not have processes in place which circumvented any possibility of remote access to a piece of kit presenting a hazard to the operators or maintenance guys ?"

Not only believe it, but have observed it in action.

AT&T, Verizon and telco pals file lawsuit to KILL net neutrality FOREVER

Re: Time For An Alternative

"Saying what the public think privately?"

If they actually did, they'd be more than just a fringe rightwing party.

" The Google-friendly regulations"

Uh, yeah, right. Try "anti-monopolistic regulations"

The bare fact is that supply of broadband services in the USA has degenerated into cozy duopoloes and monopolies frequently protected by state-level legislation.

Endusers are faced with "the Phone Company or the Phone Company" most of the time and in most areas where there's any choice, it's "the Phone Company or the Cable Company".

Both of the oligopolies have demonstrated that given the opportunity they will engage in rent-seeking behaviour.

In areas where there's real broadband supply competition, these same outfits don't engage in that behaviour.

AT&T has almost completed reassembling itself since the 1980s, with state-level regulator collusion(*) and without that pesky "Universal service to all" obligation imposed on it by 1930s antitrust lawsuits.

(*) CLECs and competitive access to local loop for DSL have both been outlawed by many state legislatures in exchange for promised upgrade works by incumbent telcos which subsequently never materialised (or in cases where they were begun, were quickly cancelled once the competition ceased to exist).

The USA currently has the best laws and politicians that money can buy and is set to become largely irrelevant in the overall world scheme as its internal infrastructure starts disintegrating. It's likely to resemble the mafiaocracy of Russia before too much longer.

Philae's either screening Rosetta's calls or isn't home

Re: if the comet melts as it gets closer to the Sun...

That might happen in another 100,000 years.

The comet only gets to about earth distance at perihelion. It's no sungrazer.

Complaints against ISPs and mobe firms are up by a fifth — reports

Plusnet are no better than they were. I've had to debug for some of our staff recently.

The best thing I can recommend to most is "change to a decent ISP", but people lock into 12 months contract from the cheapest bidder.

Most are blissfully unaware that PlusNet == BT Yorkshire. The usual comment is "I went with them to get away from BT and you're telling me that they're BT anyway?"

"Interesting that JL is 1st and Plusnet is 4th, when JL is just Plusnet with JL written on it."

Not overly interesting or suprprising.

At home, I'm with http://thephone.coop - who resell TalkTalk business. That extra 2 quid/month gives access to a helpdesk which actually has a clue and can solve problems - including making Openreach show up _immediately_ when they breach appointment times instead of forcing me to wait another week for a rebooking.

That kind of focus on customer service is what makes the difference between "Good when it works and 7 circles of hell when it doesn't" and "Good when it works and they get it working immediately when it doesn't"

JL and the smaller outfits understand customer service. The Telcos still work on the model of "We tell you what you want and we tell you when you'll get it"

Re: John Lewis? An ISP?

"All three BT divisions mentioned here operate independently. Ofcom insist that all CPs (Communication Providers) get equal treatment so BT Retail operates under the same rules as all the others."

In theory perhaps.

In practice, BT head office gets to see over the "Chinese Wall" and direct what BTOR does and doesn't do, as well as deliberately making it harder for external organisations to interact with BTOR than it is for other BT divisions.

New Zealand's regulators looked long and hard at how the BT/Openreach split works (Telecom New Zealand pulled the same stunt and was pushing for the same regulatory solution) before opting to force the lines company to be completely divested from the incumbent telco in exchange for broadband funding.

After 25+ years of monopoly abuse, the regulators were justifiably concerned at what they saw as continued market abuse by BT. It's easily arguable that in the UK, the single biggest impediment to free and fair market competition is BT (they engage in provable margin squeeze but Ofcom won't do anything about it)

The transformation of the New Zealand Telecommunications market in the last couple of years has been nothing short of astonishing, particularly for those who recall TNZ's anticompetitive activities during the 1990s (some of which are now starting to get to court, but they don't resurrect the companies which went out of business as a result). New Zealand has gone from a poster child of how NOT to privatise your telco to a good example of an operational competitive market with truly neutral LLU.

Hold the front page: Spain's anti-Google lobbyists lobby for Google News return

Re: Translation:

"Google own their index, the Spanish gov own Spain. It would be wrong for one to think they possess the other."

I can imagine the spanish govt trying to pass laws to force google to keep indexing, with the result that Google simply withdraws its entire operation from Spain.

It wouldn't be so much "brown envelope" time for the politicians so much as "brown trousers" and possibly a smattering of blood on the cobbles.

Re: Money

> "Has anyone *not* skipped the ads when watching a video on YouTube?"

> Well, there are the unskippable ones.

There are also browser plugins which skip them.

Re: ROFLMAO

" even if you are still waiting to be paid 2 years later (and by Madrid city council just to add insult to injury)."

Small claims court, bailiff with instructions to target and seize of the most critical piece of IT equipment in the building? (It works wonders against banks when the bailiff pulls out a branch data links...)

Firms will have to report OWN diverted profits under 'Google Tax' law

Re: Absolutely

"Personally I think tax auditors should be freelance and they should get a percentage of any extra revenue they extract from their targets. They would target the big fat estates and leave us little buggers mostly alone."

Counterpoint to that argument: Witchfinders.

There's a bloody good reason that auditors don't get a percentage of those they accuse.

Re: They just don't get it

"Why on earth does HMRC* think "

This isn't HMRC thinking. This is the brainchild of a committee of some career-civil servants in an ivory tower somewhere, promoted on seniority, not on abilities and who don't have the abilility to think things through.

Google can, has and _will_ walk out of countries if pushed hard enough.

Examples: China (entirely), Germany, Spain (media linking).

It's UK companies who would suffer economically as a result and politicians who'd be chopped in the long term.

Re: It is only a draft law

"Not sure even the most spiteful of firms would actually close their doors to a lucrative market just so they could cock a snoot at the tax authorities."

Wouldn't they? Google pulled out of China with far more at stake.

If Google was to close its doors in the UK and refuse to take on UK advertisers, you can rest assured that the German/Spanish Newspaper fiascos would seem like mere trifles in comparison.

Seriously: The loss of income to the companies which advertise (nobody advertises unless there's profit in doing so) would be sufficient that the govt of the day would probably find itself the loser of a confidence vote in Parliament. MPs on all sides would be facing brickbats in their constituency offices, no matter what their political affiliation.

Re: It is only a draft law

"In Google's case the issue is that their sales to UK firms are being dressed up as IE sales and taxed in IE at the lower rate."

VAT is now paid in the customer's country at the customer's VAT rate.

Taxing gross/net income is another kettle of fish and there are ways of dealing with them without killing the Golden Goose.

Re: It is only a draft law

if the UK eliminated the umpteen volumes of exceptions in tax law, they'd probably be able to get more in with a 12.5% tax rate than they do now - and probably net more because they could lay off 2/3 of HMRC staff.

This isn't pie in the sky handwaving. It's been done before. The important thing is to stamp out the plethora of exemptions and loopholes which can be exploited (including the varying rates of VAT, which are a fraudster's wet dream)

French minister: Hit Netflix, Google, Apple et al with bandwidth tax

Re: Hey French film industry.

"The French industry isn't trying to cater to the American Midwest"

It isn't trying to cater to the French market either.

MOVE IT! 10 top tips for shifting your data centre

"Indelible" labels tend to be anything but, long term. I've lost track of the number of such things I've run into in cabinets which have become totally illegible.

Laminating labels are great and portable labellers are cheap. Stay away from anything which uses thermal printing on paper as it _will_ fade out over time.

Some labels can contain a RFID chip. If you're setup to handle these, they're extremely useful (many have 200bytes or so of storage)

"Oh and that your new shiny servers actually fit in your new standard rack size and dont need ones the length of mars "

ALWAYS specify 1.2m deep racks - that way there's plenty of room behind for cable trays and suchlike without having to fart around dodging mounting kits.

900mm ones are for comms kit, not servers.

Re: eh?

"I'd also a cage nut insertion tool to the list of necessaries"

Seconded, but not the clamp ones - the simple "economy" stainless-steel loop works far better as they are attacked from the front (I find them 5-10 times faster than the clamps)

http://www.pgcomputercomponents.co.uk/economy-cage-nut-insertion-and-removal-tool-635-p.asp

The biggest problem with these ones is idiots who don't know what they're for and throw them out.

Re: eh?

"Any issues I've seen with cable ties comes with idiots using knives "

MOST issues I've seen with cable ties come down to twats pulling them far too tight and screwing up the geometry of the network cable, thus wrecking its impedance. This is hypercritical at 10Gb/s

Velcro has the significant advantage that it's virtually impossible to overtighten. (not to mention no sharp edges when you've got your hands in the back of a cabinet).

Re: Dont forget your Dentist's mirror

Also: A magnet on a gooseneck, plus a claw on a goosneck. Theyr'e seriously useful bits of garage mechanic kit that save a lot of faffing around when you drop a screw into inaccessable spots.

As far heavy kit such as goes: USE A LIFTER. The cost of one in a data centre vs the cost of claims if someone gets hurt make this a no-brainer (usually this is only thought about AFTER someone gets hurt and lodges an expensive claim) and the stability of the things makes installations a trivial one-person job.

Tawi and Serverlift are 2 vendors. A decent colo centre should have such devices on the floor.

NZ used XKEYSCORE to spy on World Trade Org election emails

NZ got caught (again)

The GCSB got caught acting illegally a couple of years back - spying on NZers and NZ residents. That came out of the Kim dot Com fiasco

The govt's reaction was to pass retrospective legislation making it all ok.

The Prime Minister claims ignorance on that one on the basis that he was out of the country, selling bits off it off to his foreign friends.

Our 4King benders are so ace we're going full OLED, says LG

Re: "retro" gear like valve radio sets

"Valve amplifiers at least look interesting, and good ones do sound quite reasonable"

The _only_ reason valve amplifiers "sound better" than solid state ones is that their distortion profile tends towards 3rd harmonics (soft rolloff clipping) on peaks rather than 5th or more on transistorised systems (hard clipping) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_sound

The problem is that even a 30W RMS system will clip on drumbeats, etc at reasonable listening volumes on uncompressed input, despite the average power for such volumes being less than 1W. I had a 600W/side mosfet system in the 80s which most listeners mistook for a valve system due to the lack of transient distortion at normal listening levels.

(Speakers impart their own distortion to audio. Having a 0.01% THD level at rated power isn't much use when the speakers are putting 5-10% into the system, but at least you know that where colouration is coming from.)

Short answer - if you're not driving into distortion characteristics, there's no difference whatever in the "sound" of valve vs transistor setups, save for high frequency rolloff (valves have this due to the necessity for an output transformer). Audiophiles may beg to differ but most of the golden eared mob can be proven to be responding to psychological effects ("I spent more money on this so it must sound better") than actual ones, when you subject them to ABA blind testing (or even more fun, lie to them about what they're listening to and watch the answers track what they believe, vs what they're actually hearing)

Re: I want mine on a large sheet of paper

"Seriously, projection screens are being sold as "HD ready", "HD compatible" and similar nonsense."

Projection screens are textured and these monikers indicate the fineness of the texture.

A lot of older screens are only suitable for VGA 640*480 and look like shit at 800*600 or higher res - and the HD ones look bad when low-res projectors are used because you can clearly see every pixel.

Re: I wonder if they've spent any money on the UI

"Since these buggers all have ethernet or wi-fi"

Some tablets/phablets also have Infrared (ahem, Note4) :)

Re: Is LG a good brand?

"Oh and guess what - they are trying to charge you as much for one of these quantum dot / SUHD TVs as you can buy a 4K OLED for."

That's because a backlight high density array of blue leds plus the quantum dots costs about the same as oled and is brighter.

Quantum dots won't colour-shift over time though. OLEDs might do (the longevity debate is still running)

Re: Is LG a good brand?

"A 4K TV without a HEVC decoder? No thanks, LG."

If it has an appropriate display connector I'd be happy to use it as a VDU :)

Re: Is LG a good brand?

When it comes to screens, that's LG-Philips.

As others have pointed out their panels are often used in other-brand kit.

What's _really_ been holding back OLED sales is price. As the article says "to see one is to want one"

Re: HDR?

On displays it's an attempt to say that the output is getting close to what you might see with your eyes.

(Ie, brighter brights and darker darks at the same time)

Typically the dynamic range of displays has been ~40dB lower than your eyes can see.

The storage is alive? Flash lives longer than expected – report

Big point missed

Other than the cheap drives, EVERY SINGLE one of the SSDs flagged that it was at end of design life a _long_ time before they actually failed.

This test was based around the question "How long can we run them before they actually fail HARD"

The SMART data on the drives was returning "Lifetime expired" well before this point (about a year in the case of the 840Pro) so you can't say they hadn't given adequate warning. It's arguable that the SMART data was too conservative.

WRT "Flash has limitations" - well duh - so does magnetic media as others have pointed out. So far in IO-heavy operation the Intel X25E flash drives used as spool cache on our backup server have outlasted 3 sets of rotating media on the same machine (they've written at least 3 times as much as the 840pros got and are reporting 96% left)

Phase change media and memristors and other Solid state tech exist. They may or may not eclipse Flash long-term (PCM and memristors are _much_ faster than flash) but in the meantime moving back to 40nm and going to 3D stacking has resulted in flash with greater lifespan and lower latency than the 840pro range (A 10 year warranty on the 85-pro is nothing to sneeze at)

You're a fool if you don't make regular backups and you're a fool if you run your drives past the point where they tell you they're "expired" without making provision for impending doom.

Russia's Putin IT spend in reverse gear, fast

Re: UK? £154 million? - won't someone think of the trees?

The wood being burned in UK power stations is almost entirely sourced from canadian old-growth forests (using oil), chipped in canada (using oil), transported across canada and the atlantic to drax (using oil).

The end result is that the supposedly "carbon neutral" woodburning at Drax is a spectacular greenwash event with virtually no reduction in overall CO2 generation.

Massive DDoS racks up $30,000-a-day Amazon bill for China activists

This proves a couple of things

1: "Cloud" is bizspeak for "someone else's shit" and as such you have little control over it.

2: Greatfire made political hay out of using Amazon Cloud services on the basis that the chinese wouldn't be able to firewall the IPs without impacting a large number of other websites (aka "Nya nya, can't get mee") - effectively painting a big "kick me" on top of the target they already had strapped to their backs.

I'm not entirely sure what they expected to happen. AWS don't have any DDoS protection and this kind of thing has happened before. I did wonder how long they'd stay up having issued the original press releases.

Dear departed Internet Explorer, how I will miss you ... NOT

Re: surely there was a reason that IE became so popular?

There's a reason:

It was bundled with the OS and labelled "The Internet" on desktops.

Without using any perjoratives, users simply assumed that WWW==Internet and IE==WWW

You'd be surprised at the number of calls that ISPs got complaining about "The Internet not working" where it would turn out that not only did the users not have an account, they didn't even have modems.

We're not sure what it is, but we like it: Lexus NX300h hybrid SUV

Re: Thirty-what MPG???

I was routinely getting 32mpg in a 1974 Chrysler Valiant 4 litre 6cyl - or about 18 if you planted boot (and it weighed nearly 2 tons) - I'm sure it's the car that the B52s sang about in Love Shack because it sure handled like a whale as well as being as large as one.

Contemporary engines are hamstrung by the legal prohibition on lean burning (due to NOX emissions on older setups) that was enacted in the USA instead of just limiting NOX output. Couple that with vehicles having gotten substantially heavier in the last 20 years AND engine outputs being ridiculously high it's no wonder milage hasn't improved much.

The reality is that whilst a lot of petrol engines have 100+kW output, most people seldom if ever require more than 30kW and a properly tuned hybrid with larger batteries would do the job better as the petrol engine wouldn't be running at 1-2% efficiency most of the time (Yes, most petrol engines really are about that level of efficiency in real-world driving cycles/conditions)

This may change if Toyota ever put their free-piston engines into production, as such a device would only need to activate as many pistons as necessary to do the job rather than dragging all that extra load around the crankcase when you only need 10kW. http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a6326/out-of-turn-toyota-engine/

Re: @Ivan Not sure what it is

"Actually, you only have to watch someone strap a toddler into a baby seat to see why some people prefer higher vehicles."

There are better(*) ways of achieving that than using a SUV/4WD to do so.

(*) Safer, more fuel efficient, less likely to end up on its side/roof in a crash

Re: Not a CVT

"It is not variable in any way."

The gearing inside the box may not be, however the way it's all hooked up allows the petrol engine speed to be completely independent of the road speed so in that sense it does qualify as a CVT - and remember with an Atkinson(*) cycle engine some form of CVT is an absolute essential(**)

The point about calling something a CVT is not _how_ it does it, but what the end result is. (There are around a half dozen types of CVT and some of the scarier ones will run as fast in reverse as forward.)

(*) Actually it's Miller cycle and that offers some interesting possibilities if you get rid of the camshaft and use other forms of valve timing.

(**) The interesting part about Toyota's CVT is that its the only practical result of the gas turbine project cars they worked on for decades.

38mpg on a 2 ton car is nothing to sneeze at, but why the heck is it 2 tons?!?