Posts by SImon Hobson

Exciting MIT droplet discovery could turbocharge power plants, airships and more

Re: Nothing will make airships viable.

>> Nothing will make airships viable

Depends on what you want to use it for. Logically, a cruise ship shouldn't be viable - after all there are cheaper and faster ways to travel !

I wouldn't suggest airships will ever replace a large amount of other transport capacity, they do have certain advantages which (should practicalities be overcome) guarantee them a niche. If shifting large loads, fixed wing aircraft generally need very large (and strong) runways to operate from, while heavy lift helicopters are still quite constrained in lifting capacity while being very expensive and noisy to run. In flight, fixed wing aircraft have minimum speeds and are quite noisy, while helicopters also have minimum speeds (or efficiency drops) and are even noisier.

Where I see niches appearing would be things like :

Large lifts in/out of inhospitable/remote areas. The sort of movements that currently require the building of (often temporary) roads and/or the breaking up of equipment into small part.

Leisure activities where the slow speed may actually be an advantage - long distance cruises and game watching (as currently done from hot air balloons) come to mind.

I'm sure there are others.

>> Hydrogen airships died fiery deaths: helium ones were torn apart by turbulence.

In films yes. You should remember that the Hindenburg, the poster ship of the "IT BURNS" camp, wasn't destroyed by a hydrogen fire - the hydrogen only went up AFTER the rocket fuel coated outer canvas cover set on fire and the fire then burned through the gas bags.

Parallels pledges roll-back fix after silent 'trojan' freebie install triggers punter outrage

Re: What I really don't understand...

> Is why do Mac users still pay for Parallels Desktop when VirtualBox is free?

Why buy cheese when chalk is free (dig it out of the ground) ?

Yes, at the basic level they do the same job, but they do it differently. Parallels has some features that, at a quick glance, VirtualBox does not.

For example ... To a certain extent (it's not perfect), Parallels can make your Windows programs appear very much like part of the Mac - ie instead of having a window with the virtual PC running in it, each Windows program has it's own windows intermingled with the Mac ones as if they were Mac programs.

I also note that VirtualBox has "experimental support for MacOS guests. Parallels 8 had full and supported support for MacOS guests* which was very useful for me when I upgraded my OS and had to keep a copy of my old system running for the handful of (old) applications that don't run on Mac OS 10.7 or later.

* Some caveats apply :(

Plus, when you've been using it for as long as some of us have (looooooong before VirtualBox and other upstarts were around) then there's a certain amount of inertia - it's a lot easier to upgrade than to start again with a different package. It's not that expensive either for what it is - the upgrade (they come every couple of years in general) has just cost me less that £40. So something like £20/yr or less - which isn't a lot of money (I can spend more than that on a single round of drinks). If it cost significantly more then I'd have seriously considered switching by now - but as it is, it's not worth the cash saving and I've more pressing demands on my time.

Sometimes "free" isn't the be all and end all. Parallels is "just a tool" for me - one of a long list which includes both free and paid for options. And it's one I've been using for around a decade - before that I used Connectix Virtual PC, until Microsoft bought it and stopped development of the Mac version.

Re: I'm not entirely sure...

I believe it would be as well - except that being a US company they would be outside the reach of UK police and so it's not worth reporting. However, it seems my purchase is with Parallels GMBH - ie a German company - which does change things a bit.

On the other hand, it's all completely OK. I logged a security issue and got this response. So that's OK then !

>> From the e-mail I understand that when you installed the Parallels Desktop along with

>> it the Parallels Access was installed and connected to the server automatic without

>> any permission and because of this you think this software as a Trojan.But for

>> your information Parallels Access is free software provided with Parallels Desktop 9

>> with 6 months of free subscription for remotely accessing your computer from you

>> iPad and the credentials that has been used is fully confidential and will not be shared

>> with anyone.

My response to that was "somewhat brusque".

I'm now off to raise another ticket, querying why my Parallels forum posts still haven't been posted after 2 days. I won't put that down to malice or censorship - just perhaps not actually having a moderator who's awake.

Fingers crossed! Half a trillion quid in public cash entrusted to ageing gov IT

Doesn't sound that bad to me

The figures given suggest less than 0.5% of turnover is spent on running the system. IMO that sounds like a pretty good figure. And there's that old argument that if it isn't broken, we should be fixing ... err, modernising ... it until it is.

See, it is possible to have "well managed and … stable platforms" in government IT. On the other hand, these are old systems that would have been built back in the day when people cared about such things.

For PITY'S SAKE, DON'T BUY an iPHONE 5S, begs FSF

Re: One thing the FSF seems to be overlooking...

More to the point, with Apple's (or anyone else's) closed system : NSA come along and say "We want a back door into it - or someone is going to disappear". Apple say "What style of doorknob ?"

With open source project it's a lot harder. Who are they going to go to since few projects have only one person involved. Yes, they can apply pressure to one person, but then he has to explain what the code is that he's submitting - and all the others in the project can look at that code.

So in practice, they'd need to coerce a number of people - some of whom won't be under their jurisdiction. Even then, that doesn't prevent someone on the sidelines seeing something fishy in the code.

So it is correct to say that being open source can't prevent such things - but it makes it a darned sight harder to pull off without being caught.

LOHAN slowly strips lens caps off hi-def imaging arsenal

Not considered a drying rig ?

Other than putting silica gel inside the case, have you considered creating something that will dry everything out before launch ?

Not my field, so I don't know if a sealed box with dry silica gel would do the trick. Or perhaps a box with some dry ice in the bottom (to create cold and trap any moisture as ice, with a heated section above to keep the cameras warm ? I'm sure between all us commentards we have enough boffinery skills to come up with something.

The gauntlet is thus propelled on a downward trajectory ...

No signal in Seascale? Countryside Alliance wants to hook you up

Yeah, we don't need headlights up here.

That is a joke BTW.

Green German gov battles to keep fossil powerplants running

Re: Where Germany goes

>> the biggest elephant-in-the-room of which is the long-term disposal problem

Which is mostly political and largely the making of the anti-nuclear lobby !

Take some of the current/recent/upcoming reactor decommissioning. When these were built (and I'm thinking about the Magnox stations) there was a plan to deal with the "quite radioactive core" and related material. Once you've taken the fuel out, the core that's left is active - but one thing that the anti-lobby forget is that you can have highly active and short half life, or long half life and not very active. Unfortunately, the public has been hoodwinked into believing the tosh that it's both highly active and long lived. SO the plan *was* simple - turn off the reactor, let it cool, take the fuel out - and just keep cooling it for a while. Before long, it's so active that you can remove all the ancillary equipment and you're left with a block the size of an average house - which you wrap in a bit of concrete.

You guard it - but really that's for show and to avoid graffiti which is about all that's going to happen.

Then after a century or so, all the highly active stuff has decayed, and it so radioactive that it's safe to walk in and pick up the blocks of graphite.

So that *was* the plan. Unfortunately, the anti-lobby has outright lied about all this, and the sheeple believe that's not acceptable. So instead of doing the simple, safe, cheap thing - we spend huge amounts of money to deal with the highly active stuff now. All that money could be spent on far more useful thing that would benefit our children, grandchildren, and so on far more than by removing a house sized non-dangerous object now !

The other problem is that people are unable to differentiate between costs that are really due to "current" production, and those that are due to poor choices made decades ago when priorities were to get nuclear up and running quickly so as to have our weapons. In hindsight some of these choices were poor - but priorities were different back then.

Anything built today is designed with decommissioning in mind - ie before anything is built, there is already a plan for how to take it apart again. This was not the case back in the 40s and 50s when the current problems were being laid down.

As to the German problem, perhaps the owners off all the fossil fuel plants should decide to switch off at the same time - just when the wind is poor and the sun has gone down. I think that might just persuade the population that renewables aren't going to keep them warm.

Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic

Re: I know what must have happened. And it's not like we weren't warned.

Nah, not that one, try this one instead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTBsm0LzSP0

Boffins, Tunnel Tigers and Scotland's world-first power mountain

Re: Restarting the grid

>> as to whether the line about restarting the National Grid really has much truth in it.

...

>> If the grid was in such dire circumstances that it needed a restart, would the pumped storage systems be full or already drained?

Well before my time, but my father spent his life in power engineering so knew many of the details ...

We have had a near complete blackout in this country, as have others (the USA has a particularly famous one that started with a relay tripping at Niagra Falls). Interestingly, when I looked them up a while ago, I found out that they are more common than I'd thought !

Anyway, back to this country.

At the time, most of the infrastructure had been designed on the assumption that "that can't possibly happen can it ?", with the result that there was little black start capability. After that, there was a massive retrofit programme to add gas turbines to many power stations specifically for black starting. These also had the useful extra feature of being useful rapid start devices for lopping peak demands a bit.

ICANN puts Whois on end-of-life list

It's all very well ...

OK, so The Reg have tipped us off about this, but cane I find an address to email ? Well not in the limited spare bit of lunchtime I have available.

I'm with the above, Whois may have its faults, but IMO the proposed centralised system is more broken, and their assumptions & conclusions are faulty.

Firstly, providing Whois is simply a cost of running a registry. If the argument is that this cost is unreasonable, then what else shouldn't they have to provide ? And I really can't see any way that running something that's "just like whois but newer" plus "fund a share of some central body to duplicate the data" is going to significantly reduce operating costs - the registrar still has to collect the data, validate it (they are best placed as they are the only ones with customer contact), store it, and disseminate it.

If the complaint is that the data is rubbish, then that's "simply" a matter of enforcing existing policies/agreements. For those registrars who hold rubbish, give them some time to clean up and terminate anyone that doesn't. If they know there's a lot of rubbish, then they probably have a good idea who the guilty registrars are.

As for functions like "find out what domains I 'own", well wow - perhaps all the bookshops should get together to form a central registry so I can remember what I've bought ! If the end user is too stupid to keep basic records, then why should world+dog hold his hand for him ? There might be some argument for having such a feature available to law enforcement, but is that really sufficient reason to rip out a system and install la costly, bureaucratic, and fragile central system that won't serve end user's needs ?

IMO, the distributed system is best, for much the same reasons that we consider a distributed DNS system to be good. And besides, who wants to hand ALL registration data en-masse to the USA (well at least without tham having to do some snooping effort !) I guess that has to be part of the reason - to give the USA the power of veto over all domains, not just those held with US based registrars.

Apple's screw-up leaves tethered iPhones easily crackable

Re: @gordon10...Smart people don't keep the default password for their hotspots.

>>... hiding the SSID ...

You should unhide it for security.

If it is hidden (ie the access point doesn't broadcast beacon packets saying "I'm here") then the devices with a stored association with it will constantly broadcast "Are you there ?" packets looking for it - all the time they aren't connected to it. This happens because the only way for them to find your AP is to ask if it's there - rather than just silently listening for it's broadcasts.

Thus, by hiding the SSID, you change the target from "broadcasts information while the AP (your MiFi) is turned on" to "all your devices with stored connections to it broadcast the information all the time they are turned on".

As a side effect, it also means your devices are more active (sending these "are you there ?" packets) which impacts on battery life and also clogs up the available bandwidth.

EFF files objections with W3C decrying addition of DRM to HTML5

> ... to continue to use non-standards compliant front ends. We'll be stuck with Flash/Air/Silverlight/Java forever - great plan EFF!

Instead, if the proposal goes ahead, we'll still be stuck with non-standards front ends, and we'll still be stuck with Flash/Air/Silverlight/Java forever. The only difference is that the Flash/Air/Silverlight/Java will be wrapped in a standard compliant package.

It'll be no less closed. It'll be no more widely available - wrapping it in a wrapper won't suddenly make it work on Linux when it's Windows only. It won't make it any less of a hassle to keep up to date. It won't make it run any more efficiently. In short, it will provide no benefits for the user.

**ALL** it will do is allow the closed vendors to ship the same closed products, for the same limited uses/platforms, but they'll be able to say "but look, it's standards compliant" - which will only be true at a superficial level. So same old s**t, but now officially sanctioned by the standards.

Builder-in-a-hole outrage sparks Special Projects Bureau safety probe

Re: It's all good fun until somebody dies

Indeed, and I've witnessed plenty of things over the years where you have to wonder what the people involved were thinking.

The problem is that Rui has probably been down lots of holes like that, and so have his mates, and they've all come up alive - ergo, no problem. But as you point out, just occasionally it goes wrong and then it's too late. The reason we (in the UK, dunno what the situation is in Spain) have bodies like the HSE is to deal with people who really ought to know better. In many cases they do know better but it's either inconvenient or too expensive.

The biggest problem we have is that there are some extremes and some stupid stuff done in the name of "elf n safety". "Elf n safety" does **NOT** prohibit anything (well hardly anything). It certainly doesn't prohibit school kids playing conkers. And it certainly doesn't mandate "hi vis everywhere".

However, lots of stuff is done (or banned) in the name of elf-n-safety because those responsible don't know (and often don't want to know) how to manage any potential risks. So instead of applying sensible rules, they just do stupid things - imposing "hi vis everywhere" rules, banning stuff, and so on.

But that is not what health and safety is about.

It's about simply looking at the risks inherent in an activity - and working out how to minimise/mitigate/manage them. It might be that the ground conditions are such that Lester's hole was highly unlikely to collapse - but I suspect the risks aren't as low as Lester or Rui think. But the risks are fairly easily mitigated - the techniques for doing so are well known and not hard - but they probably do come under the category of "inconvenient" or "too costly". And besides, elf-n-safety is just a bunch of busybodies out to stop all activity right ?

I'll leave with this thought ...

Have a look for the poem "I Chose to Look The Other Way". Try to imagine how you might feel if, at some point, you find yourself in such a position.

Think you know what it feels like knowing that by inaction you could have contributed to someone's death ? Knowing that had you taken a different course, then someone might still be alive today ? Really think you know how it feels ?

Now find someone who is in that position. I really really don't think they'll describe it how you think. All I'll say is that I strongly recommend you stay on the side of wondering what it feels like. It's a one way street and there's no coming back - there have been people who have committed suicide because they couldn't live with it.

Debian 7 debuts

As an indication of stability ...

Yes, Debian tends to be "a bit slow" on updates, but that is often an advantage. Some time ago I started pulling a handful of packages from Testing (aka Wheezy at the time) when I needed newer versions. As some point I decided to try a full upgrade, and many of my servers have been running Wheezy for a long time - at least a year for some. I've had very few problems.

I did have a look down the list of RC bugs first, but didn't spot any that were relevant, so just went for it.

Since late last year, the only things I've not got on Wheezy are things I don't want to (or can't) upgrade at all (for now).

TIP: When setting up systems, explicitly specify the distro you want (Squeeze, Wheezy, etc). It avoids that WTF! moment if you use "stable" and didn't see the news.

ISPs: Get ready to slurp streams from Murdoch's fat pipe

Re: So the Anti Murdoch brigade

> Sky Broadband and phones are actually BT service re-sold

Phones yes, broadband probably not - they are an LLU operator in my local exchanges.

Personally I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole, though colleagues at work are happy with them. Apart from the ethical consideration that I wouldn't want to give a penny to anything touched by News International, there's the minor detail that I won't consider and ISP that charges extra for a static IP (like BT), let along one that doesn't have the option (like Sky).

Internet freedom groups urge W3C to keep DRM out of HTML

Re: I don't always support software organisations

>> And in this case I don't.

Let me complete that sentence : And in this case I don't get it.

This proposed standard will change absolutely nothing - everyone will still use different DRM "solutions, and compatibility will be no better than it is now. All it means is that instead of just coding in that the stream uses (say) Silverlight, there'll be an HTML standard tag to say it's "Silverlight wrapped in a different standards sounding name". The stream will still need Silverlight, it'll still only play on platforms supported by Silverlight, you'll still need to install a Silverlight plugin (or something called a different name but is really just Silverlight packaged slightly differently).

Replace Silverlight with any other DRM scheme and the story is just the same.

So the **ONLY** change is that the DRM vendors will have a veneer of standardisation given to them. So they can claim to be standards compliant - but in reality there will be absolutely no improvement for the user, none at all.

Re: DRM - bane of the law abiding......

>> recently my father's blu-ray refused to play a disc. Needed a firmware update - nope. Software update - yep but the software that came with the drive is no-longer supported. Latest version is a $100 "upgrade"

If I had any BR stuff (which I don't and don't plan to any time soon) then I'd just take the disk back as unplayable. It's sold as "Blueray", my player is "Blueray", therefore if the disk doesn't play in the drive which has played other titled fine so far then the disk isn't compatible and therefore (under UK law) is not fit for the purpose for which it was sold. The shop has to take it back, and then they'll have a disk that's been opened as so can't be stuck back on the shelf. By the time it's gone back through the supply chain, it'll have cost everyone more than the disk is worth.

If everyone, or at least a significant proportion stoof up like this, then the retailers would simply refuse to stock disks from the worst offenders and they in turn be forced to stop breaking stuff.

Of course, if it does turn out that the player is "faulty", then also under UK law the retailer that sold it is liable. If it's sold as capable of playing Blueray disks, and the Blueray standard allows for things the drive can't do, then the drive is not fit for purpose. The only limit is 6 years as civil cases cannot be started after that. If retailers find they are getting drives returned after 2, 3 or so years because the manufacturer has stopped providing upgrades, then they'll think twice about selling drives from those manufacturers.

If you don't have consumer protection laws in your country, then start lobbying your elected politicians. And if you do know anyone in these situations, find out what laws can be used - the more people that make this rubbish painful (=expensive) for the manufacturers, distributors, and retailers who support it, the better.

Again, find out what laws can be used, and USE THEM. Make such failings cost the manufacturers and vendors - it's the only language they understand.

US Senate vote to add internet sales tax this week

For the "I'm all right jack" people

It's OK saying, where's the problem, it'll only affect a few really bus players ?

But that's only for starters. It's how most unpopular things get put into place - find <some group> that the majority don't care about (or even better, hate) and bring out something that only affects "those greedy b***ards". Most people will like you for it and it'll get established and accepted.

Then year on year, you lower the threshold or even just keep it static while inflation does the work for you. Before anyone realises what's happened, it applies not just to "those greedy b***ards" but to the average middle income people.

Look over in the UK for how it works.

Inheritance tax for example - used to only apply to people with big estates, but with years and years of static thresholds, rising property values brought more and more "middle earners" into the net. And while this goes on, those with big enough estates can afford tax experts to avoid paying the tax anyway.

Then there was the London Congestion Charge, and the plan for "big gas guzzlers" to pay punitive amounts. All being sold as hitting those "Chelsea tractors", and not many realised that it was also going to include a lot of modest family sized cars.

So don't support this because it won't affect anyone but the big players. It might not be next year, or the year after that, but you can be quite certain that sooner or later it will apply to the smaller guys as well. Once that wedge is in, it just needs a little tap every now and then for it to have a bigger and bigger effect.

Re: I'm confused

>> Don't be ridiculous. There may be 9,600 separate tax entities in the US in total, but any one company will only need to deal with those relevant to its district.

But the whole point of this act is to make the online seller deal with all the taxes relevant to where the **customer** lives. That means being able to identify the taxes applicable to any (potentially all) of those 9600 tax entities, collect the taxes, account for them, and hand them over.

The alternative is that the seller identifies and collects the taxes, but then goes through some clearing house to get them to the right entities. Perhaps someone will step in and set this up - Amazon or eBay would probably be happy to do it as a bureaux service ... for a modest fee plus getting to know who is selling what to who.

Are you being robbed of sleep by badly designed servers?

Circadian rhythm

Look up circadian rhythm.

If left without external clues/influences, I believe humans will generally fall out of sync by running at a period of a little over 24 hours. Normally, clues like that big fusion reactor coming into view each morning reset the clock each day so we stay synchronised to the rotations of our lump of rock.

Obviously, not everyone is wired up the same, so it does vary a bit.

BT boss barks at TalkTalk for being 'copper Luddites'

Re: Why is line rental so much?

> It's about time someone offered fast broadband without having to pay BT £15pcm, which for me would be unused for making phone calls.

Find an ISP that offers Metallic Path Facility (MPF) circuits - not many do, but you can have ADSL without the POTS. I don't know how many offer such circuits, but I happen to know Gradwell do them (we have dealings with them at work) though they aren't exactly targeting consumers with their pricing (they're a business oriented ISP).

Freeview telly test suggests 4G interference may not be a big deal

Re: It really isn't a big deal.

> notch filters are cheap

Correct, the filters are pretty cheap.

Now add in the time to pay "a man who does" to go to someone's house, diagnose whether their reception problems are in fact due to 4G, and if they are ...

Get his ladders out (if the aerial is reachable by ladders), go up with a filter, open up the masthead amp, find it's knackered inside (so he can't just undo the cable), come back down, get a new amp from the van, go back up, attempt to install the new amp, find the coaxes are knackered as well, so start running new coaxes ... and several hours later get the end user back to an operating state.

So yeah, filters are dirt cheap - no problem at all.

Review: Jabra Revo Wireless headphones

Eh ?

>> It also lifts the mid-range and higher frequencies so they’re not muffled by the accentuated bass

So it turns up the bass, mid range, and higher frequencies, which means ... it's turned up the volume ?

But I agree with earlier comments. Sounds nice, I like the idea of Bluetooth + USB + analogue, but I don't like "on ear" headphones, and I don't have £200 spare :(

You know how your energy bills are so much worse than they were?

Re: P.Lee @ 29 March 07:00 z

>> On the nuclear, where rae you going to store the waste

Well if the anti-nuclear campaigners would tone down their attitude, waste is not actually a big problem. A **HUGE** proportion of our "waste problem" is actually artificial - a lot of the waste is actually fuel (but people don't want it processed into fuel), and most of the rest can actually be consumed in some types of reactor (but again people are even more against those than they are against uranium fission).

As an analogy, suppose the oil industry simply took out the petrol from the crude and stockpiled the rest as "waste" ? There'd be an outcry, and more than a little outcry as proposals for a long term "waste dump". But pretty well all of this "waste" is processed into stuff that people want - and in the same way, most of what people think of as waste is processable into "stuff we want" (ie fuel for reactors).

There is a legacy though. And that is mostly down to historic decisions - which in hindsight no-one thinks were sensible by todays standards. But then was then (and bear in mind, the primary consideration was making weapons material before our "enemies"). New reactors actually have "how do we take it apart in 40 years" as part of the design criteria - but 50 years ago, that wasn't considered in the dash to get them built.

SO yes there's a legacy problem - but new builds needn't add to that, unless you take the view (which I've heard expressed many times by anti-nuclear campaigners) that it's impossible for knowledge or designs to have progressed in the last 60 years of nuclear power !

>> also the cost of the electricity from them does not take inot account the decommissioning of the said plants.

Actually, if done properly it needn't be that expensive. But once again, anti-nuclear campaigners have forced actions that actually increase the "problem". For example, consider two options for (say) a graphite moderated reactor :

1) When you shut it down, you let it cool, defuel it, and remove all the ancillary equipment and buildings. You then have the core and containment building - about the size of a house - that you can leave for a century to "cool off". By this time, pretty well anything that's "highly active" will have decayed, and so all you need is a bit of PPE and people can walk in and carry out the graphite blocks which are no more active than the rocks in some parts of the country.

2) When you shut it down, you let it cool, defuel it, and then dismantle it immediately - while the moderator and other materials are still active. So you need expensive handling methods, and create a large pile of active material that you need to store for a few decades (say a century) while most of the highly active stuff decays.

So option 1 isn't really a problem, option 2 is what the anti-nuclear lobby demand - while then complaining about the waste problem.

Spanish Linux group files antitrust complaint against Microsoft

Re: The reason UEFI can be disabled for WIndows 8 and not for RT

> And why should the big hardware manufactures follow them?

Simple, money !

If you think MS aren't doing some nice deals on licensing based on the manufacturer bending to their will, think again. Of course, they'll be covert about it - but there will be some form of financial incentive. AT one time they simple were up front about it - "buy a cheap licence for *EVERY* computer you sell or buy them at a much higher price". Then there will be "sales and promotional" incentives. And of course, all the deals struck are private, so no-one knows how much the others are paying for their licences, but will have to negotiate their deal with Redmond. If you think that some "unofficial" and not written down terms aren't involved, then you don't know anything about big business.

Mobile location data identifies individuals

Just an FYI ...

>> The mobile phone companies have access to much better quality data from their tower records, especially the local signal strength maps around those towers and so can triangulate your position with greater accuracy.

In general, signal strength is a poor measure to use. For GSM networks, there is a *very* accurate distance measure available. The way GSM networks operate, the cell tower keeps telling the mobile device to adjust it's timing so that it's signal arrives at the cell tower within the timeslot allocated to that device. By keeping track of the timing instructions, the cell tower can have a quite accurate measure of distance from the tower.

Together with this, and the segment you are using, it can place you on a fairly narrow line marking part of a circumference of a circle round the tower.

Add in another tower and it can do the same from that, and place you in one of two positions (where the lines intersect). Since one of those positions probably wouldn't result in you using the segment you are on, then that can be ruled out and your position is left.

Much the same technique is used for aircraft navigation. The airborne station sends a request signal to the ground station, which sends a reply back. the round trip time allows the airborne unit to work out the distance. Some units can do this simultaneously with two ground stations and work out your position from that - and it's generally the most accurate radio navigation technique (apart from GPS).

New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083

Re: Even if it works

>> Very probably. From a UK perspective, this is what the near future holds for those responsible for UK energy policy:

Brilliant, and what I've been trying to tell (without having all the numbers to hand) people for years. There is just one thing left out ..

At each stage of crisis, the treehuggers will wave their hands in the air dismissively, and point out that a) wind is reliable because it's always windy somewhere, and b) when we get smart meters, we'll **just** adjust our lecky usage to suit. Of course, anyone who actually has any idea how things actually works knows that both those arguments are male bovine manure.

The idiots in Westminster will just keep believing this idealogical rubbish, and keep repeating it in response to any criticism or suggestion of impending doom.

Meanwhile, anyone who cares about living a normal life is starting to look at putting their own small diesel genny in (if they are ina position to) - with heat recovery to make it (probably) cheaper than mains lecky for at least some of the time !

Written as one of those of us who remember the power cuts in the 70's, and how nuclear saved out bacon back then.

Architect pitches builder-bothering 'Print your own house' plan

Re: Building Houses

>> Also there are the complications that electricity and gas installations need to be signed off by a suitably qualified person.

> In the UK it would illegal to build the electrical or gas bits without being a qualified electrician and/or gas engineer

Actually, that is **NOT** the case.

It is absolutely legal for you to do all your own electrical work provided you have enough competence to do so. Part P of the building regs states that "Reasonable provision shall be made in the design and installation of electrical installations in order to protect persons operating, maintaining or altering the installation from fire or injury."

That is the entirety of Part P !

However, the main building regs state that all work is notifiable unless exempted by Schedule 4 which lists those works for which notification is required, or unless the work is done by someone who is a member of an appropriate approved scheme through which they can self notify.

So you can do all your own electrical work, as long as you have enough competence to comply with Part P (not that onerous) AND you notify your Local Authority Building Control (LABC) department. Since you'll need to notify LABC for building your house, the electrical works can be covered under that. If you are able to supply all the required test results, then LABC will probably accept those if they think you are competent to have done the tests and inspections properly. Otherwise they will get a qualified electrician in to do some tests.

For major works such as this (wiring a new build house), it's worth just lumping in the electrics with the main build and it'll cost you very little extra to notify. For minor works, the LABC fee structure is designed such that it's often more expensive than employing a member of an approved organisation to do the work !

BTW - Schedule 4 changes very significantly on 6th April. At present there are quite a lot of things that aren't exempt - from 6th April most of these become exempt and from memory the list of notifiable electrical works effectively comes down to : work within the zoned area of a bathroom, provision of a consumer unit, addition of an extra circuit (ie extra way in the fuse board or CU).

Much the same applies to gas work - it is a myth (that the industry is happy to keep alive) that no-one can work on a gas system without being a member of Gas Safe. The Gas Safety Regulations effectively say that you cannot work on gas "by way of trade" without being registered. If you are working on your own property then that's not a trade and the regs don't require you to be registered. The same applies if you do some work for a friend without their being any form of payment (either cash or kind) involved. But if your friend pays you, then it comes under the rags.

But, for both gas and electrical works - there are significant safety risks if you don't know what you are doing. So it really really does make sense to leave it to professionals if there is any doubt.

Raspberry Pi-powered Tardis blasts off from 'Blighty's Baikonur'

But ...

>> has little to no effect on existing mono receivers ... there was no need for the new system to be compatible with existing sets anyway!

But, when 625 line and colour on UHF came along, there were still mono sets, and would be for many years. So while there may have been no requirement for backwards compatibility with existing 405 line VHF sets, there was a requirement for compatibility with new mono sets.

Besides all that, I struggle to see how an RGB system could have been easily implemented at the time - in analogue, and without all that much by way of available chippery. Of course it's a different matter now with all this digital malarky, but looking back, colour was like the proverbial dancing bear - the wonder is no that it was so good considering the limitations of the technology available at the time, but that it did it at all.

Drilling into a half-decent gigabit small-biz switch... from D-Link

One think not mentioned ...

Is how long the stacking port will be compatible with currently available units.

I've been stung in the past where I've bought a stackable device (fairly sure it was D-Link, but it was a few years ago), then 12 months later wanted to add another unit to the stack. Guess what, the unit that was a new model 12 months ago is obsolete and no longer available, and the newer models use a completely different and incompatible stacking port. As does the new range 12 months after that, and ... you get the picture. They weren't even "very cheap" units at the time.

Lets just say, I has some "quite blunt" words with the manufacturer over that and said I'd not use them again. Manufacturers beware, when you p**s people off, they can have long memories.

That's one of the differences between "enterprise" vendors who understand that we don't always appreciate binning kit every year or two because the manufacturer has changed their mind, and lesser manufacturers who see nothing wrong with obsoleting stuff on a whim. You don't want to start building out your server room, only to find that when you come to add another rack - the switches you'd standardised on have disappeared without warning.

I don't get to play with Cisco kit much, but one of the things you get for your money is security and stability. They'll tell you when a product is going EOL - and along with that, when it stops being sold, when it stops being supported. Same with HP I believe.

The cheap 3D craft pen that scribbles over 3D printing hype

Re: Printer to pen ratio?

I kept having to reclaim my pen at work. Then I was in ${local_superstore} and they had packs of BICS on sale so I bought several packs and gave them to my colleagues. That helped for a while (they've gone now).

So I now have one of those electric pens on the desk. It works as a real pen if you know to twist the end and not press the button - but of course when people just pick it up and press the button, well lets just say there's been some colourful language :D

Best of all, we have one id^H^Hjunior dev here who knew what it was, but still couldn't overcome his urge to fiddle with anything and everything. I never thought I get someone twice with it, let alone the third time when I "jabbed" him for a third strike.

Satanic Renault takes hapless French bloke on 200km/h joyride

Re: No brakes? - Range Rover

>> ..as the handbrake acts on a separate disk on the back of the gearbox...

> The seperate transmission brake on Land Rover vehicles is actually a drum brake.

Actually, I believe most (all ?) of the new models no longer have this. DIscovery 3/4 have parking brakes which are a set of shoes that work inside a drum which is part of the disk hub - and applied electrically. My mate tells me they change a lot of the actuator assemblies when they seize up.

And in any case, if you do have a transmission brake, then you really do not want to be trying to use it at speed. I know people that have ripped the backplate off the gearbox, and if that doesn't happen, there's still the propshaft, diff, and driveshafts to let go. The transmission brake is usually not very smooth either - so you'd be applying not just the braking effort, but a lot of cyclic variation (ie vibration and shock) to the rear axle etc.

As to the "you can always turn it off" brigade. In theory you can, but if there's a computer/electronics fault then there is never any guarantee that "press and hold the start button" will actually turn off the engine. The only (almost) guaranteed method is to have a physical switch that will physically remove power to some required service (fuel supply or ignition).

Also, as pointed out, we don't know the extent of the driver's disability, and whether he would have been capable of taking a hand of the controls to press and hold a button for long enough to kill the engine.

As an aside, when the 'first' 'new' Range Rover (P38) came out, there were a couple of reports of people careering down hills, in neutral, with no brakes. Nothing wrong could ever be found, and there was never any proof either way - Land Rover never accepted any problem existed. It is thought the process went like :

Attempting steep/slippery hill. Fail with wheels spinning. Apply brakes and attempt to engage reverse. Car rolls backwards at speed.

The theory was that the spinning wheels confused the ABS into thinking it was skidding and so it took the brakes off to correct the skid - allowing the car to roll back down the hill. Meanwhile, the "fly by wire" gearbox refuses to engage reverse while the vehicle is moving. So no brakes, in neutral, on a hill steep enough that you failed to get up it.

I've seen how fast a vehicle can pick up speed on such hills. "Exciting" probably doesn't do justice to the experience !

Any storm in a port

Re: Also, Ethernet sockets & USB ports...

>> USB has not ever been the 'one-port-to-rule-them-all' -- actually Firewire was/is.

>> with 5w of power,

>> you can daisy chain devices, I forget the length but I think it was 16 devices.

Beat me to it, far superior - not just in transfer rate, but in internal architecture as well. Even Firewire 400 outperforms USB 2, and Firewire 800 leaves it standing. USB 3 is now coming along and finally allows USB to pass where Firewire was over a decade ago !

Yes you get bus power - any device could add power to the bus and that would power the repeater/hub in multiport devices. The power was actually more normally 12W - the official spec was for up to 1A (instead of 1/2A for USB), and devices typically supplied 12V (the spec says up to 30-something I think, instead of 5V for USB).

It's not for nothing that manufacturers have implemented their own non-standard, bastardised, "more than a trickle" power support for their devices to charge through USB - many of which just get to where Firewire has always been !

Daisy chain/branch in any arrangement you want as long as there aren't any loops, with cables that are the same both ends so none of this finding you've got the wrong end of the cable - the article didn't touch on that !.

I believe what killed it was Apple being greedy and wanting too much in licence fees - so the rest of the industry told them to sod off. Pity. The difference between Firewire 800 and USB 2 on my laptop is like the difference between night and day. Problem is that Firewire devices are "less common" and "rather more expensive" than USB :(

Don't get 2e2'd: How to survive when your IT supplier goes titsup

It can be the simple things ...

Some years ago I managed to wangle a place on a Business Continuity course, and very enlightening it was too. The guy doing the course wasn't a trainer by trade, he actually did "BC stuff" for a living - and as a result had some wonderful tales.

One he told us was how a number of businesses were locked out of their premises for a week after a lorry caught a phone line and pulled it down. How, one might ask, did that happen ? Well who hasn't heard "The Gasman Cometh" by Flanders and Swann ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyeMFSzPgGc

Well after the lorry pulled down the overhead cable, BT decided it would be better underground - so started digging. When they hit the water main, the water people were called to deal with it. As the water people dug a hole to access the water main, they hit the gas main.

Everyone was evacuated, and by the time it was all sorted, they'd been out of their premises for a week !

And in response to the comments about resilient routing, he mentioned that as well. It's of particular interest to people responsible for emergency call centres - and apparently even they can struggle to find out what's really happening. In one example he cited, a new centre was built, with diverse routing to two separate exchanges - only it turned out that neither exchange was actually an exchange as we'd imagine it, both were in fact just satellites off one big exchange, and so a single point of failure.

About to outsource your IT? Read this first

Err, no

>> You don't see an inherent contradiction between those two statements at all then?

No, there isn't an inherent contradiction.

There is only a contradiction if the customer needs to have retained a level of knowledge/skill about the process - it's all about the context.

<struggles to find analogy><ahh, found it>

Take something mundane - providing fresh, clean, wholesome drinking water to staff - along with a means of washing their hands, flushing the loo etc.

It's a fairly critical process that pretty well all businesses rely on - yet they all outsource it without a second thought (mostly). If you are having a new building, you get the water company to put a nice blue plastic pipe in, if it's an existing building you're moving into then someone else will have had that done. After that, you turn on the tap and water comes out - and you don't know (or in most cases) care how that happens, how many people were needed to make it happens, and so on. You just pay your supplier's bill and get your water supply outsourced.

Same thing with electricity, gas, and waste water.

So back to IT. Some outsourcing will be (nearly) as mundane as that. Lets face it, there are "quite a few" outfits of all sized that will support a "common" Microsoft centric desktop and server estate.

Where it does matter is if your systems and processes are not common.

Back to our analogy. For a lot of waste, just flushing it down the pipe is all it needs - no problem. But if you have some manufacturing process that creates some noxious waste then you might need to be outsourcing to a specialist who will tanker away your waste to a disposal/processing site. In this case, if your chosen outsourcer goes tits up, then you need to find another one.

One of the suggestions in the article is to effectively know where the waste is going (ie who your supplier's supplier is). If your outsourcer goes tits-up, you go direct to his supplier and negotiate a contract direct with them - but you may also need to find another middle-man (ie someone with a tanker) which the supplier's supplier might well be able to help you with.

So it all comes down to what the process is. If it's something common then not knowing how it's done needn't be a problem. If it's something critical (like someone making a component that only you use, and only this one supplier makes (and knows how to make)) then it doesn't make sense to lose visibility of that process. Note that the article said "There is nothing inherently wrong with this", it didn't there "There is nothing wrong with this".

'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues'

Don't include me in that !

>> But shirley, as the people of Cumbria have just decided, the disposal of the nuclear left overs is a major problem, its fine saying we need a number of new nuclear plants to meet energy requirements for the next 50 years, but after that, where does the crap go?

Actually it wasn't "the people of Cumbria", it was the County Council. I didn't ask them to vote that way, in fact I'm for the repository (sort off, read on). Quite frankly, listening to the locals on the news last night, I found myself what scheme they'd been looking at because they seemed to be objecting to a lot of stuff that's not being proposed.

All this crap about "it'll ruin the landscape in the Lake District" is complete and utter tosh. Complete rubbish put forward by pressure groups who (being polite) seem intent on not understanding anything lest it interfere with their fear of it. Not all are like that, but some are (I've met some of them), and some eco people are not capable of having a rational discussion with anyone who doesn't 101% support their position (and I have to wonder even then).

The actual effect would be something akin to a large factory site, on the West Coast, outside the Lake District, and not actually visible from most of it. I can't see traffic being any worse than it is now - Sellafield creates a fair bit of traffic as a lot of people work there.

And one thing a lot of these "it'll ruin trade" people fail to realise is just how much the local economy gets from Nuclear. I suspect losing it would hurt trade a lot more.

Now, I'll come to why I'm only "sort of" for the repository. If that's what we're going to do with "the material" then I see no problem with the repository - for one thing I think the design should allow it to be removed later when we decide we can use it. However, the issue is with what we call waste - ie a large quantity of what would, in better times, be described as fuel. The technology exists to turn this so called waste into fuel, and run it through a different type of reactor - both releasing energy (it's not creating it, just releasing it) and reducing the quantity, drastically reducing the quantity. I believe it also reduces the "nastiness" as well. So we could take a lot of this waste, use it as fuel, and up with a much smaller quantity of less problematic waste.

Unfortunately, the anti-nuclear lobby have stymied that as well - if just saying "nuclear" is enough to get a lot of people into a lather, mentioning "plutonium" will well froth things up. The fact that the plutonium produced is itself fuel for further use is by the by - it's verboten by the anti-nuclear brigade and so far the politicians seem unable to see the long term view.

And before i leave that bit, the anti-nuclear lobby are also responsible for creating some of the waste in the first place. Take a Magnox station and turn it off - for a while it's "quite hot" and highly active. Now, what the majority seem unable to grasp (unwilling I suspect) is that if something is highly active then it has a short decay time, if it has a long decay time then that means it isn't that active. AIUI, the plan was to shut down a station, cool it for a few months while the worst of the highly active stuff burns out, defuel it, and then leave it - take away all the support stuff (cooling systems, machinery houses etc, and just leave the core and containment. Wrap that in concrete, post a few guards to protect it from graffiti (about the biggest risk it faces), and leave it for 100 years - so something about the size of a large house. After a century, the most active materials will have decayed and it can be dismantled by people walking in and picking up the graphite blocks from the core. Littel by way of a disposal problem.

Instead, by insisting on "get rid of it **NOW**" it has to be handled while active, thus actually creating a problem (at great expense) where there was none before.

>> "...one nuclear power station provides as much power as 3,200 industrial wind turbines, without the environmental damage..."

>> Mind you, the ex-residents of Pripyat and Fukushima Prefecture may have a different opinion...

Actually, I believe a lot of people from the Chernobyl area were really happy - they got evacuated from run down slums and housed in brand new houses. The old towns aren't deserted because they are dangerous, they are deserted because they were run down slums that no-one wants to move back to.

And for both places you mention, if you imposed the same exposure limits over here, then large parts of the UK would be evacuated because of the background radiation. And don't get me started on the amount of uranium spread around by burning coal because we didn't build new nuclear power stations to replace the coal fired ones.

NB - before anyone accuses me of being a nuclear industry shill ... I don't work in the industry (though I would object to doing so). Also, there is no element of NIMBY here - as the crow flies I have an active nuclear power station now far away in one direction, and Sellafield not far away in the other (and also the nuclear submarines aren't that far away either when they are under construction - no I don't work there either).

Help us out here: What's the POINT of Microsoft Office 2013?

Let me correct that for you

> ... Office Open XML was eventually standardised by ISO, a process that was opposed by advocates of OpenDocument, an alternative XML standard used by OpenOffice.

Open XML was opposed by all sorts of people :

People who value standard and interoperability rather than locked down walled gardens.

People who put a value of quality - seriously, have people looked at what's in Open XML ?

And by no means least, those that value a proper standard setting process vs a process that demonstrated it's available to be bought by anyone with enough money. Seriously, the whole debacle really, really devalued the standards bodies involved to the extent that standards bodies (and the standards they set) are now less respected.

UPnP scan shows 50 million network devices open to packet attack

That's not enough

The whole point of uPNP is that $random_device can just ask the router to open a hole and redirect traffic. So you "think" you have your firewall locked down, then some device comes along, asks to bypass it, and your router obliges with no questions asked. So there you are, smug in the knowledge that it's all locked down, but you have potentially multiple open ports you never even guessed might be there.

In most cases, the user may never have even guessed that the device is doing it - see the earlier Reg article on DVRs that a) expose themselves on your internet connection, b) have flaws which means any logins can be bypassed, and c) are probably installed by people who don't know much about networks.

The only secure option is to disable uPNP - and hope the device manufacturer actually bothered to honour that.

Still, when the local $law_enforcement come knocking on the door, it's yet another defence.

Nuisance calls DOUBLE, Ofcom vows to hunt down offenders

What they did to Radio Caroline was ...

... make it illegal for UK companies to have business dealings (ie buy advertising) with them. Thus the UK advertising dried up and they ran out of money.

Now, if people are getting calls for <some UK company> where said UK company is getting round the rules by employing some Indian/Philippines/wherever contractor to do the ringing round - then fine the UK company. I can't imagine many outfits keeping up the marketing if the customer can't pay them for it.

That in effect is how the USA gets round the extra-territorial reach problem. They just make it so that anyone in the US is responsible for their overseas subsidiaries or contractors. At my last place we came under Sarbanes-Oxley because of this - and it was a right PITA.

The other thing that could be done would be to clamp down on telcos passing on unreliable CLI. If the foreign telco is shown to be supplying dodgy CLI then disable it altogether - there is a flag in the data stream for this. Better still, just cut off the foreign telco until they come into line. Harsh, but it doesn't seem that anything else will work.

Build a BONKERS test lab: Everything you need before you deploy

Re: iSCSI not so hard on Linux.

>> I could point you at several Windows sysadmins that do run in to trouble with it. *shrug* There is no good GUI; it holds a lot of folks back. Enough that I would worry about junior admins raised on nothing but Microsoft being able to reliably use the thing.

Hmm, needs GUI to be able to use it, then not what I'd call a sysadmin. I guess in this context that "Windows sysadmin" is something different to a "real" sysadmin that does Windows.

I don't do Windows stuff myself, but I observe enough to know that you don't need to go too far before you need a decent CLI. I've also observed enough "admins" who's approach is like the "infinite number of monkeys" - try all the tick boxes in the GUI and see what happens !

BT ordered to pay £95m to rivals it overcharged for FIVE years

h3 must be a youngster then ...

>> We should have kept BT & The Post Office publicly owned.

Are the innocence of youth, not having experienced the joy of having a phone installed by the Post Office.

An aunt (Polish) told me a joke years ago ...

In Poland, a guy goes into his local car dealership to order a new car. Having chosen from the 2 models available, and chosen his shade of grey, he sits down with the salesman to do the paperwork. The salesman informs him that there's a 10 year waiting list, to which the customer asks "Will it be delivered in the morning or afternoon ?"

The salesman is quite surprised by this question. "You're waiting ten years and you want to know if it's being delivered in the morning or afternoon !" he said in a quite puzzled manner.

"Yes", said the customer, "they're installing the phone in the morning".

My aunt did say that while it was an exaggeration, it was (like all good comedy) based on real world experience.

Well the old PO wasn't much better. You could order a phone line and have to wait months - that's if they'll even install one. If there's a shortage of cable pairs into the village, then they'll either refuse to install a line (pulling in more cable would cost money), or they'll install a "party line" - how many readers here have ever had one of those ?

You get a line that's shared with a neighbour. So you want to make a call, you lift the handset and listen. If you don't hear your neighbours chatting, then you press a button (earth loop recall) to get dial tone, and then you can dial - slowly. Dial a digit and wait dur-dur-dur-dur-dur while the dial rotates back, dial a digit and wait dur-dur-dur-dur-dur.

And when it was your turn to get connected, they told you when they were coming. None of this "when is it convenient ?" malarky.

Not happy with the PO phone - two styles, desk or wall mounted, in a fetching shade of black (not sure when they offered a selection of colours) ? Tough - no (or very few) third party phones (legally) available, and no socket to plug them into. No competition meant your choice was to take it or leave it - the PO could be as slow and expensive as they wanted, safe in the knowledge that if you wanted a phone then you had to come to them.

It\s much like the railways. I sometimes hear people complaining about the state of our trains and railways, and suggesting they should be re-nationalised. Invariably they are young enough not to remember what it was like in the days of BR - and it's sandwiches that (only half joking) could double up as hammers to break a window in the event of an emergency.

So in both cases, what we have is far from perfect, but it's better than the alternative we used to have.

Quadriplegic woman demos advanced mind-control of robot arm

Re: Am I a bad person...?

Dunno, but I was thinking of an episode of The Big Bang Theory - where Howard has, cough, problems with a robotic hand.

Want to run your own Apple shop? Start with £70k of German chairs

Re: Planning restrictions

>> The local apple store is barely a cupboard - I bet they don't meet their own standards!

Probably not. And wouldn't be the first time.

A couple of decades ago I used to part own a small dealership in a small market town in NW England. Back then there were two grades of dealer - "normal" and "Apple Centre". AppleCentre was something similar to the current Apple Stores - Apple only, defined branding, etc, etc. Just like the story, everything was defined, down to minimum sizes, computers in the mandatory training area, floor covering, wallpaper, furniture, and so the list goes on. In return for this, they got an extra 2% margin (we paid 32% off list, they paid 34% off list) and marketing kickbacks.

Even as a "standard" dealer, we still had to meet a long list of requirements - one of which was to produce a 2 year business plan with **detailed** breakdown of what we planned to sell. Anyone else see the nonsense in that when working with a company that won't tell you what it's product range will be in 2 weeks time, let alone 2 years !

But in both cases, these rules were flexibly applied according to Apple's requirements. Ie, if it suited them to ignore something, then they would. One story I recall involved a then large retail group who were having cashflow issues - and were known to have "extended credit terms" with Apple. Some other AppleCentres demanded the same terms and were turned down. Next thing, several of them invited their Apple sales manager to visit - by which time there were strategically placed stacks of IBM boxes shouting "we're prepared to dump Apple".

The next day, the large dealer chain went into administration.

But better still, a friend tells me a good tale from the local Land Rover dealership. They have a very nice showroom with a lovely slate floor. Land Rover standards required carpets - apparently the conversation went along the lines of :

Land Rover - "we want you to carpet the floor"

Dealer - We''ll carpet the floor when you make vehicles that don't leak oil"

Land Rover - silence

They still have a slate floor !

Freeview to be nudged down to clear 5G bands in 2018

Re: Why???

>> just slap a satellite dish on everyone's roof

Not everyone can get a line of sight to the satellites - in fact quite a lot of people can't. Actually, UHF is generally better in a lot of respects - easier to install and align the antenna, cabling is less sensitive to length (lower losses at the lower wavelengths), tuners are cheaper, and a real biggie - you can split the signal from a UHF TV aerial to multiple tuners, you cannot do that with the signal from a satellite dish*.

And to those saying it's no big deal if they move the muxes, sorry but I disagree. On the basis that our muxes are up around channel 60, and we were told that they are staying there, we bought a group C/D aerial when it was due for change. I'll be more than slightly annoyed if I have to get back up to it and replace it with a group A (or worse, a wideband) because they are p***ing around with the muxes yet again. Being on Winter Hill, we got more than our fair share of retuning during the switchover - some of you in other areas can be thankful that you've been spared probably a couple of retunes as some of the reshuffling happened before your switchover.

Of course, when the band starts filling up with other signals, the very last thing you want is a wideband TV aerial so it will pick up lots of these interfering signals and kill your TV reception by swamping/desensitising your TV tuner input.

And as for the complete and utter numpties who think that IP can sensibly replace broadcast TV, words fail me. Just think of the effective data rate available from one main transmitter. Eg, WInter Hill broadcasts to millions of people, and suppose they watch one SD mux each at an average of around 2Mbps. 1 million people switching to IP would require 2 Tbps, so the catchment area of Winter Hill would need tens of Tbps - and that's before we consider HD, and only for one main transmitter.

* You need a separate cable from the LNB to each tuner - so you end up with a lot of cables in a large house. For large numbers it's possible to use a Quatro LNB and a multiswitch - but that adds considerably to the system/installation costs.

Credit insurance: The hidden data-driven force which killed Comet

Re: 2k -> 10k credit card

>> Sure, you probably can't survive as a business without taking "credit" somewhere, whether from a bank or suppliers, but basing your business on some random-but-vital third-party not pulling the rug out from under you seems more than a little dumb, especially if you're making millions of pounds each year.

Well the reality is, that for most businesses they cannot work without offering credit lines. Unless you really are the only outfit in the area/county/country/world selling a particular type of widget - then you have to offer an overall deal that's better than others selling the same widget. Everything else being equal, your business customers will buy from your competitor instead of you if you don't offer credit and your competitor does.

Even if you don't give credit, there is normally still gap between buying and getting paid. Eg, you buy some hardware (maybe from different suppliers, and possibly one small part is delayed), you put it all together, install software, configure stuff, etc, etc. In other businesses, you may be buying raw materials and putting them through a lengthy manufacturing process. Or you may need to buy some stuff in for stock so as to be able to respond to requests at short notice. Eventually you are ready to deliver to the customer - and even if the customer hands over the money on delivery, you have still had stuff in your possession for a period of time.

Now, you cold buy in your materials and pay cash - but that means you have to pay out some time before you get paid yourself. This can work, if you have enough cash. But the more business you do, the more cash you'll need to cover this gap - hence you may hear of companies needing cash to expand (you can't sell more because you don't have the cash to buy stock/materials, you can't make that cash without selling more).

Now if you can buy in your raw materials/stock on a credit line - then with luck you can get paid before you need to pay your suppliers. That means you can afford to do a lot more business.

Lets put that in perspective by adding some numbers to a very simplistic scenario. You are a medium size business turning over (say) £1M/month. For simplicity, we'll ignore profit margins, overheads etc ... And we'll assume that on average, stuff goes out the door one week after it comes in.

a) You buy cash, and sell cash. You need enough spare cash to pay for about 1/4 of a month's worth of inputs before you get paid for it. So that's £250k needed - permanently tied up.

b) You buy on 30days, and sell cash. Now you get paid 3 weeks before having to pay your suppliers - so that changes from needing £250k of spare cash to tie up, to having £750k in the bank.

c) You are in the unfortunate position where your customers demand 3 days credit, but your suppliers won't give you any. You now need 5 weeks worth of capital - so you need £1.25M to spare !

Put another way - for every day you can get your cash in sooner, you'll have around £50k more in the bank (assuming 20 working days/month). Similarly, for every day you can hold off paying your suppliers, that's another £50k in your bank.

Obviously the figures change once you consider overheads and profit margins, but is should give some idea of the issue that businesses face.

Most businesses fail due to cashflow problems - often with healthy order books. Without either good credit lines from their suppliers, or loans (typically working capital facilities from the bank) then they simply don't have the cash to buy the inputs needed to meet their sales/orders. This constrains what they can sell, hence the profit they can make, and so they can get into a spiral of restricted sales -> reduced profits -> reduced cash available -> further restricted sales -> ...

Liberator: the untold story of the first British laptop part 3

Fascinating article

Great series - good read right through to the denouement.

I suspect the people slagging them off haven't tried taking a product to market, and have little idea what's involved. It's great to sit here, with decades of hindsight to benefit from - but as others have said, this was largely uncharted territory. No-one knew where the personal computer market was going, and I doubt anyone (or at least very few) would have guessed just how technology was going to take off and electronics really take off down the better, faster, cheaper rollercoaster.

For those of us old enough to remember, this was all "unaffordable magic" to many of us, and the idea of being able to buy computers from two manufacturers and have anything in common was unheard of - in fact, even buying two computers from one manufacturer didn't automatically buy you commonality. What won and what lost was in part a big game of chance - you throw the dice and see what comes up.

As a side note - and here's an idea for someone at TheReg to follow up on in their history series - I don't believe IBM actually invented the PC. Back then there were multiple competing systems - all incompatible. The major names I recall had to some extent settled down to Apple II, Tandy TRS 80, and the Commodore PET in business - though there were still plenty of others around. As someone commented (I think) to an earlier instalment, PETs were really popular in technical environments because they used the IEE488 bus for I/O - it was pricey, but you could link multiple devices (printers, disk drives, plotters, scientific instruments, ...) to the one port.

Apple was pulling ahead in business because of Visicalc. Visicorp needed to pick a system to write their Visicalc spreadsheet for - and they chose the Apple II (I believe because it had up to 48K RAM as standard). Suddenly, department managers could mangle numbers on their own desktop on their own terms - and buy the kit from the departmental budget. On that, I was friends with an Apple dealer back then, so got to hear about some of the tricks used to get round buying restrictions - yes I saw the wad of computer printout he got for a network of Apple II machines all broken down to separate orders that were within the manager's sign-off limit !

At the time I worked in a large manufacturing business, the typical stronghold of IBM. In computing terms, *NOTHING* happened without the say-so of the Systems Department. If you wanted to crunch numbers, you had to apply for a terminal, apply for access, and pay for the resources you used. In our outfit, you could easily wait over a year for a terminal, if you got one at all.

But the Apple II in particular (and the others to a lesser extent) gave IBM and these Systems Departments nightmares - department managers could bypass them altogether. Another tale from my friend was that he had a stock quote he'd do for managers at this business - and he'd tell them that they'd have their terminal installed within a fortnight. The managers asking for quotes on Apple II machines didn't believe him, but without exception, the terminal they'd been waiting for (sometimes over a year) would appear very quickly once there was a risk of something not approved by IBM going in.

So this situation was desperate for IBM. They risked losing their stranglehold on business computing and they weren't capable of designing/building a "low cost" desktop product - all their expertise was in building big stuff, and productivity was measured in how much code you could write, not how small you could make it. The story as it's been told to me is that some small outfit built a desktop computer system - essentially by implementing an Intel design note which gave an example of how you could put together an 8088 system. IBM bought the company, stuck an IBM badge on the computer, got Bill Gates to provide them with some software - and the rest is history. Apple were virtually frozen out of large businesses because now the Systems Departments had something to fight back with - if you wanted something on your desk, IBM had a product to do it.

So when these guys were designing the Liberator, I really, really doubt that anyone (regardless of what they might say after the fact and with the benefit of hindsight) had any inkling of what IBM (with Microsoft) was going to do to the desktop (and eventually, the portable) computer market.

EU proposed emergency alert system won't work on iPhone

Re: No better "expert" available??

I agree, they seem to keep finding experts with an interest in squashing it.

>> Mandate that all handsets must support it, and even the idiot USians will push out a firmware update within six months.

Exactly, make it mandatory and all new phones will come with it - no manufacturer (not even Apple) will be prepared to pull out of Europe. And any manufacturer that cares will push it to older devices with an update - though I expect Apple (and a handful of others) will see it as an opportunity to sell you a newer bit of bling.

Telefonica fails in bid to claw back 'flip-flop' 2010 termination charges

Re: Who Pays

>> And long may the networks continue to charge each other the termination rate

I don't think there has been any suggestion that there should be no termination charge - just one that's set at a level that doesn't distort competition. What was happening a few years ago was that network A would charge a stupid rate to it's competitors that was way above what it actually cost. So if you were with A and called another user on A, you might pay (say) 10p/minute. But if a user on network B, you might find it cost (say) 50p/minute to cal the same recipient.

Of course, network B did the same, so a user on A would also be fleeced calling a user on B.

Thus there was a huge price penalty calling someone on a different network.

Up to a point this could be just put aside as a matter of competition. But it started getting really problematic when number portability came in. Take the same two users as in the first example, user 1 calls user 2, and expects to pay (say) 10p/minute as his number says he's on the same network (A). But user 2 have ported his number to network B - so user 1 gets a shock when his bill arrives.

It's even worse when there are inclusive call allowances. The user may expect the call to be "free" as it's within his inclusive minutes bundle - but in fact it's not so it's not a case of getting a bill for 5x what he expected, it's a case of getting a large bill where nothing at all was expected.

Thus OfCon insisted on a cap on termination rates to level things out a bit. The networks don't really lose form it as they end up paying less out as well as getting less in. However, they don't like it as it removes their excuse for fleecing customers calling other networks - and so they get less revenue from their own users. It also removes the incentive for their users to persuade their friends to all join the one network so as to get the lower intra-network rates.

Boeing zaps PCs using CHAMP missile microwave attacks

Re: Not new...

It's not so much the current the carbon filament passes, but the track of conductive carbon particles it creates as it disintegrates. Thus you create optimum conditions for the system to "flash over", with the resulting arc creating a plasma path that will keep the arc going until <something> gives in - that something usually being the upstream protection.

Once you've tripped all the circuits, you give the network operators "something of a headache" sorting out what's tripped for what reason and how to turn it all back on.

The claimed theory is that it'll trip everything but not cause any damage - so once you've kicked out the nasty guy that's not selling you oil cheaply enough, it can all be switched back on. However, I've heard reports that the process coats the insulators with a fine layer of carbon deposits which then cause flashovers - thus meaning you have to replace all the insulators before the system can be brought back online, ie not the "non-damaging" weapon it's claimed to be.

For some fun, take a look at the Arcs n Sparks page here :

http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm

In particular, scroll down to "480 volt 3-phase Arc Flash Demonstration" to see how once initiated (in that case with a strand of thin copper wire), an arc can be maintained with a fairly low voltage if there is enough energy behind it.