* Posts by John Murgatroyd

166 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2007

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Home Sec in anti-terror plan to control entire web

John Murgatroyd

I'm impressed

"and anything they do try will end up inconveniencing the vast majority, while the terrorist remains unaffected"

Who says they want to do anything about terrorism ?

Stopping people using the net for other subversive things, like P2P use, may be more important than preventing a few nutters blowing themselves up.

After all, when was the last time you heard a polo saying what they meant ?

Atlantis to blast off on 7 Feb

John Murgatroyd

A bit harder than ....

It looks a lot harder than just soldering the pins and plugs together...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts122/solderingteam.html

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/122488main_ECO_sensors.jpg

Might need a lot of spanners, and a big ladder...

Why there will never be another GSM

John Murgatroyd

So. What's new ?

Meanwhile, other users have to tolerate the interference from a multitude of high-strength-low-quality transmissions from "industry" users managing the spectrum for profit. Ofcom was never about spectrum management but always about spectrum retail development. It always will be. Not that the EU is any better.

Large broadcasters = better

Small broadcasters = no money = goodbye.

Man uses mobe as modem, rings up £27k phone bill

John Murgatroyd

The future's bright....

In a moment of madness, I enlisted to the orange tv contract. With a fair-use of 1gb per month for a £10.00 fee, per month. The first month was £256.00. I vigorously contested this, and the next month was over £500.00 (first month + second month). It took them over two months to find out that they were charging me for data use and not for orange tv. I cancelled the tv contract. Their data fees are outrageous.

UK gov superfast broadband summit decides... erm... nothing

John Murgatroyd

Why ?

I can really see bt bothering to upgrade ad-infinitum, just to be told that they have to let everyone else use the system at cost.

As for needing to install more capacity....there are (at last count) 4 separate cable runs going through this village....none from BT...and none TO this village. Let them eat cake !

Why is the iPlayer a multi million pound disaster?

John Murgatroyd

Where is it ?

Been using it for a while now. You may select delete, but it still seems to be stored on the hd. Added to that, the P2P still uploads even when no is selected. Finding the files on the drive is hard work. It doesn't get-on with the firewall, which seems to hate it a lot....uninstall is threatening.

Firm pledges first 400Mb/s powerline product early '08

John Murgatroyd

Wot about the transformer

I don't think so. When the idea was first tried the biggest problem was that every substation transformer has to be bypassed at the frequency used. A transformer that's good at 50 hz is not good at several megahertz.. There are a lot of transformers about, meanwhile the fibre-optic network is continuing to spread, along with cable.

Home snoop CCTV more popular than Big Brother

John Murgatroyd

Arm-Chair voyeurs

It just goes to prove that if it's available on the "telly", then people will watch it. I wonder how many wanted to warn about anti-social and criminal behaviour, and how many just wanted to watch same ?

IEEE powerline networking group selects HomePlug AV

John Murgatroyd

Huh

After they've decided which they are going to use, they'll then have to install the equipment in every substation in the country.

Meanwhile, BT continues to install and improve broadband.

Whteher or not it will interfere with my amateur radio installation is another thing, and vice-versa...since I run over 100 watts of RF from 1.8 to 29.7 Mhz, and 50 watts from 144 to over 1200 mhz.

California teen offers GPS challenge to speeding rap

John Murgatroyd

GPS speed reading

GPS Speed:

How accurate is it? How fast can I go? How HIGH can I go?

GPS receivers display speed and calculate the speed using algorithms in the Kalman filter. Most receivers compute speed by a combination of movement per unit time and computing the doppler shift in the pseudo range signals from the satellites. The speed is smoothed and not instantaneous speed.

HOW ACCURATE IS THE SPEED READING?

From the NAVSTAR GPS User Equipment Introduction document Section 3.7:

GPS receivers typically calculate velocity by measuring the frequency shift (Doppler shift) of the GPS D-band carrier(s). Velocity accuracy can be scenario dependent, (multipath, obstructed sky view from the dash of a car, mountains, city canyons, bad DOP) but 0.2 m/sec per axis (95%) is achievable for PPS and SPS velocity accuracy is the same as PPS when SA is off.

Velocity measured by a GPS is inherently 3 dimension, but consumer GPS receivers only report 2D (horizontal) speed on their readout. Garmin's specifications quote 0.1mph accuracy but due to signal degredation problems noted above, perhaps 0.5mph accuracy in typical automobile applications would be what you can count on.

http://gpsinformation.net/main/gpsspeed.htm

Mobiles give you brain cancer?

John Murgatroyd

Cordless phones ?

I decided to wade through the file (http://oem.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/64/9/626)

The risk seems significantly insignificant.

In one stated case the risk factor for digital phones was smaller than for cordless phones.

How much more of this do we have to pay for ?

International media firm pays $3.5m over pirate software

John Murgatroyd

Why police ?

Why the police ?

Software theft is a crime.

Or: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,2126185,00.htm

Broadband over power turns on both sides of the Atlantic

John Murgatroyd

PLT

This has been around for ages...at least 10 years.

The problems encountered are interference to radio reception. Not the FM band but the lower HF frequencies.

Plus, of course, the fact that every transformer would need its own "modem", since the winding of same are good at coupling 50 hz but crap at doing the same to the 1-30 mhz frequencies.

The laws of the land do not allow for any system to cause any interference to radio, it being illegal. So if it is adopted (and it probably won't be) it will make life a bit impossible for GCHQ...and so many segments will have to be programmed out of the coverage that it would be reduced anyway. There are some fairly major legal challenges being mounted in the USA to the system....And then there are the problems caused by high strength signals near the powerline....which tend to be rather blocking....there are a lot of amateur radio stations out there....all capable of running over 200 watts of power...

Vodafone forced to recognise Connect

John Murgatroyd

Not unions, greed and cheap labour

It certainly wasn't the unions that drove car manufacturing out of the country, nor the unions that moved other manufacturing out of the country. It was cheap labour in other countries along with weak employment laws.

But why should you care that your tv is made in china by people working 60+ hours a week for less money than you earn in a day (if that).

Then you have a domestic cleaner manufacturer who moves his base abroad because it is too expensive to make them here....and still sells them here at the same price even though it costs 60% less to make there.

BMW helps nail 105mph V-sign biker

John Murgatroyd

Title

The R1100 can quite comfortably hold 105 all day, and with the fairing there is no arm-strain !

Operation Ore: evidence of massive credit card fraud

John Murgatroyd

And, what's new ?

Guilty until proven innocent is the usual thing in sex cases anyway. More so now. How about this.....

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news/expanding-sex-register

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