Posts by AndrueC 5415 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
Interesting. I'm happy to pay bills by Direct Debit and I don't think many people in the UK are concerned about it either.
I remember that with credit cards the bank is on the hook for the loss instead of the customer
That's why I'd never use a Debit card online, and rarely use one anywhere other than for very occasional ATM usage. Yes you can claim a refund if your DC is abused but that takes time. Meanwhile bills might be bouncing and you're stressing over it.
With a CC you're never out of pocket as long as you check your statement when it's published and get the errant transactions struck off.
Unless that bike is caught going 31mph in a 30mph zone,
Speed limits don't apply to bicycles in the UK because they aren't motorised vehicles. However there are other laws which could apply depending on the circumstances.
Exactly how fast you have to be riding in a 30mph zone to be guilty of 'wanton and furious cycling' is unclear ;)
4G will give 100 MBs in many places, which is often faster than you can get on landlines
4G is never, ever going to get you 100MB/s. It might occasionally get you 100Mb/s though.
But in the UK at least most landlines(*) can now offer considerably more than that - over 2Gb/s (250MB/s) depending who you sign up with. In theory 5G can beat even that but the difference is that the 2Gb/s limit on FTTP is a marketing choice not a technical limitation and there are some providers offering 5Gb/s already to residential properties.
(*)Over 85% of UK properties now have access to an FTTP network.
starlink users are experiencing every kind of anomaly with geoip
I have experienced a fair few over the years. Depending on the site I'm either located at my home town in Northants (rare), London (guess that's the default for UK), Hitchin (my ISP's offices) and on one weird occasion somewhere up in the wilds of Scotland - and I do mean the wilds.
It is a similar story with Unix, there are better editors than ed and vi, however…
And even if you find yourself on a dumb terminal for which the OS doesn't or can't have cursor control at least you still have the ex command set available from within vi.
Now they're talking about turning off copper
Where is this? BT will not be turning off copper until all the lines on a given exchange have been replaced with fibre. Whilst there have been a couple of exchanges where this has happened they were basically test exchanges. BT does not currently have a formal program for the wide-spread removal of copper lines.
Or are you yet another person confusing the switch off of PSTN services in this article with the switch off of copper (something different).
Anyone who has experience of IT knows the costs associated with maintaining old and obsolete hardware. PSTN is old and obsolete. The number of companies willing and able to repair or sell new hardware for PSTN equipment is dwindling fast. Those that are still in that business will be charging correspondingly high amounts for the privilege.
I cannot believe Openreach will meet their deadline.
They have met their deadline where your property is concerned. Like all telecommunications providers their claim is 'number of properties passed' by which they mean 'number of properties that can place an order to be connected'. The project is big and expensive enough as it is without potentially wasting resources wiring up properties whose owners might never choose to take up the service.
What all CPs do is roll out street-level fibre and prepare it so that connections can be made as and when property owners ask for it. If owners don't ask or if some aspect of the property prevents that connection being made then its irrelevant to the plan.
I would also question your use of the word 'ineffectual'. In almost all cases the problem lies with the property owner. BT are constrained to operate within the law and if they don't get a satisfactory response (or as often happens they get no response at all) their hands are tied. As I pointed out in another post the government is currently trying to modify the legislation to help BT get past these issues but for now your attempt to blame BT is most likely unfair.
That post sounds like you are confused (as so many are).
Evidently we have "full fibre" and (allegedly) a slight increase in speed over the previous copper based system
That's a strange comment. A full fibre solution will offer speeds way in excess of anything you are going to get over copper. Speeds in excess of 2Gb/s are available from some providers and that's just the starting point.
but the last 20m of cable to our router connection is still copper and hasn't been replaced!
Well then that's not a 'full fibre' connection.
We have been given a new router (from EE) into which we have had to plug our landline.
Ah perhaps that's the cause of your confusion. As several of us have now pointed out that has nothing to do with your cable type. As far as this article is concerned you are now 'done all that'.
SWMBO works with older people many of whom prefer to use landlines for phone communication hence retaining our landline phone.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to retain a landline just because you communicate with other people who rely on one. Mobile phones can make and receive calls to/from landlines just fine. In any case you have successfully retained your 'landline' by plugging your phone into your router. Job's a good un'.
We still have no date for getting our proper "full fibre" connection.
Yeah that can be annoying. Unfortunately companies have learnt that if you give out dates people get annoyed when the schedule inevitably slips due to the complexity of what they are trying to do. So given that they get about the same amount of flack whether they give out dates or not they made the sensible choice of not giving out dates because at least that saves them some work.
I imagine it will be long after quantum entanglement instant galactic communications are standard that they will finally get around to collecting the last of the copper wires out there.
He he, quite possibly. Around here the cables are in ducts in the ground, even up to the property. Yet when Openreach completed my connection they left the cables in the duct. I have read of some cases where they are removed, on one occasion the enterprising(?) engineer used the copper cable to pull the fibre cable back through to the chamber from the property. But if they can't even be bothered to pull five metres of copper wiring out of a duct when they are being paid for the job it suggests copper retrieval is not particularly lucrative.
Which is a little surprising. At first thought it does beg the question 'ah, but how do they remove the insulation?' but sometime last year I was watching a program about a scrap metal firm and they'd bought a machine that chopped cables up leaving them with a pile of small copper pellets and separated insulation. No significant manual labour required - just shovel the wiring into a feeder and catch the pellets at the end.
(1) If I do as they want, ie end my POTS/ADSL service, they will charge me a "cease" fee, as if I were the one in breach of contract. If I don't do it, they will breach the contact.
If you choose to terminate your POTS/ADSL service early then you will have to pay a cease fee. It's not a breach of contract but it is your choice not to continue for the full term and your provider has a right to compensation.
But who is wanting to end your POTS/ADSL service? BT don't. BT will continue to provide whatever services they can over whatever cabling is available to your property. This article is talking only about the voice service and BT (or whoever your current provider is) will just help you move over to a VoIP solution. This will work fine over ADSL.
What is OpenReach doing to replace these ancient cables?
They are replacing them with fibre. Currently 85% of the country is covered, more is being added at rapid pace. However that process is not what this article is about.
Why can't I continue having my Internet service over the copper wire that is perfectly good enough?
You can. At least for now, likely for several more years, even if/when you have fibre available. There will eventually come a time when BT will force you to switch to fibre (at no cost to you) but for now they have only vague plans as to how that will happen and it depends on the fibre availability at your exchange.
The bottom line here is that you should stop panicking. You don't have to do anything other than work with your Communication Provider to get your voice service switched over to VoIP. It won't cost you a penny.
Thank you for that. I came here to comment on the misleading statement in the article:
BT Group's infrastructure arm is switching to an all-digital, IP-based service over fiber.
That sentence should not mention fibre (not even if spelt correctly). El Reg ought to know better. That kind of careless reporting can cause people to worry unnecessarily. We can already see people posting moans about how they don't yet have fibre.
This warning of BT has nothing to do with fibre. It's going to be a long time yet before a widespread switch off of copper services and it won't happen until all customers have been moved over to a fibre alternative.
Whoah! Really? They are finally going to concentrate on reliability of VS?
I'd like to say I'll believe it when I see it but the horrible unreliability of VS was one of the main driving forces behind me retiring over two years ago so I won't ever get to see it. Users might (rightfully) think that Windows is unreliable but you ain't experienced how shite MS software can be until you've tried driving VS for a while.
People are audited by the police and judicial system, and if neither of those, journalists and media.
Humans make mistakes. So human auditors will make mistakes. As an attempt to suggest humans are superior to AI this particular one fails. It amounts to "Humans are perfect because humans say so".
Much like 'We are conscious because we say we are".
I always shout back at my sat nav if I'm using it on a journey when I get close to home:
"It's called PAVILLONS Way you moron!"
After it has happily told me to turn on to Pavilions Way. I don't expect it to use the French pronunciation but despite several (yes I'm that sad) complaints to Google their T2S engine keeps trying to 'correct' it.
Yeah, MVNOs that are just the cheap version of a parent company are weird. I'm with such an MVNO and it undercuts its parent company by 50%.
I've sometimes wondered about that. Am I a case of "At least his money comes to us, rather than a competitor." or do they look at their primary company customers and laugh at them for overpaying?
According to a few people I've spoken with it's a bit on the high side but only what you'd consider a 'premium' price. When I mentioned that I was paying £6 a month for a sim-only deal with several GB of data included they were astonished.
From what I remember it's always been like this. Telecoms costs in the UK have always been considerably lower than they are in the US. I imagine it's because of our higher population density and small geographical area. Like, back in the day they had free local calls when we didn't. Okay. Sounds good. But our local area included nearby towns and cities, not just our suburb. They were paying more to call people in the next town along.
We also usually get a better service on average. They might have had faster internet in the cities (and still have a higher average thanks to those outliers) but outside of the cities they were (and still are) worse off than us.
Of course POP3 understands which mails *this specific device* has downloaded before. A decent POP3 client, like Thunderbird, associates each message with a unique ID which is also on the server, so it only fetches the ones *that device* doesn't yet have. I run POP3 on multiple clients and it works like a charm. The server doesn't even care if it has been downloaded before; that's a client function.
All the problems with POP on multiple devices relate to message management. If you always delete emails once you've read them and have a good memory it's fine but a lot of people like to store emails for future reference. POP just doesn't handle that well between multiple devices.
* Deleting an email from one device doesn't delete it from the others.
* Folders are not shared between devices so you have to move a message to the required folder on every device you use and if you get it wrong you've got a mess.
* Sent messages aren't normally visible on any client other than the one that the message was created on (TBird does have a workaround for this however).
There are workarounds to some of these issues for some email clients but there is one solution to these problems on all email clients. It's called IMAP.
One or both of us is confused here.
I thought the anonymous poster was referring to the once fairly common practice of open relay email servers. Back in the days before the internet went bad emails could indeed pass through third party servers. Ones that neither the sender or the recipient had any control over. It was probably quite useful when the internet was more fragmented. That practice rapidly died out under a deluge of spam and now (excluding load balancing and similar) the sender's email server will connect directly to the recipient's. At least I'd assume that to be true in 99% of cases. No-one likes an open relay these days.
If you're saying that you send out emails without using your own email server then, yes, that is very possible. Heck - it's not difficult to send an email using Telnet. You'd still need an email server to handle incoming mail in that situation though.
I've been running my mail server for nearly 20 years now and I've never had a problem with blacklisting. I don't believe that anyone is blacklisting servers on the basis that they aren't one of the big players.
I used TheBat! for quite a while but switched to TBird several years ago for some reason. Don't remember why.
My only gripe is that my favourite add-on - Virtual Identity - is no longer supported. There is another add-on that can auto-select TBird identities but you have to create the TBird identity first. This isn't so convenient for my DEA system. Currently one of my laptops is using an old TBird with that add-on, the other is an up to date TBird that I'm trying to accept.
Luckily I don't use email anywhere as much as I used to and create or even reply to only a few people so the newer add-on does seem adequate.
I use AquaMail on my phone. Does a good enough job for notifications and reading.
For my email server I use the quietly excellent VPop3 running on a Windows (w10, lol) box.
Good point, but almost every piece of advice on t'interweb about IMAP vs POP denigrates POP and says use IMAP.
Well they will. It's a newer and better protocol. There are still some advantages to POP or at least some corner cases where its primitive behaviour actually helps (your use case of local only storage is one) but not many and for most use cases those are outweighed by the disadvantages.
IMAP was designed to provide a better way to access email. Particularly one that supports access from multiple devices. If I read an email on my laptop then the email will be marked as read immediately on my phone - something that POP cannot do. Similarly if I send an email on my phone it will appear in the Sent folder of my laptop again immediately - POP3 can't do that. Lastly to get immediate notifications with POP your device has to keep going to the server and requesting a refresh. That takes time and uses bandwidth/CPU so most systems only check perhaps once or twice an hour. With IMAP your device is sat idle. Consuming almost no bandwidth (a few dozen bytes every half an hour) and an equally insignificant and infrequent amount of CPU but will be able to notify you within milliseconds of a new email or any other status change as mentioned above.
But..none of this has anything to do with Google. Both protocols were designed before Google even existed. IMAP was invented in 1986 and POP back in 1984!
One of the ironies of life is that after a bit of a battle my phone now always alerts me to a new message on my server (the wonders of IMAP) quite reliably. That's always bit of a struggle with Android because of its battery saving strategies. The ironic aspect is that GMail often doesn't notify until/unless the phone moves to wake it up.
The only other mail server it's likely to pass through is the sender's.
The days of emails passing through multiple mail servers are long gone. Emails will of course, like all traffic, pass through multiple routers but you'd have to be very paranoid to worry about someone intercepting that traffic. And anyway encrypted SMTP is a thing although not necessarily implemented properly or completely depending on the servers involved.
Same here. It also allows me to operate a DEA scheme filtering messages by the RCPT TO command which unlike header fields can't be faked.
I do have a GMail account though which I use as a backup. Currently it forwards to my own mail server and I only have to use it if I want to reply to something sent to GMail.
I've been toying with the idea of enabling IMAP on the GMail account but haven't bothered yet.
As it turned out, our reader reported that it took a mere 10 minutes to whizz through the border at Birmingham – very speedy when compared to certain other ports of entry.
That's why I prefer Birmingham Airport. Less crowded than the London ones and faster processing. You can park within five minutes walk of the terminal for a week for a reasonable fee. You can disembark the plane and be on the M42 in less than half an hour.
I've always preferred RAII. It doesn't work for all use cases but it works for most things. I reckon the vast majority of software processes are hierarchical in nature.
Toward the end of my time using C++ I hardly ever used new or delete. Just stick everything on the stack or as a member of an object either directly or via some kind of smart pointer. Stack unwinding and destructor execution handles the clean up automatically and deterministically.
Battlefield Earth probably makes its film adaptation look good in comparison: despite the negative reviews it's hard to fathom a movie possibly being worse than that 1000+ page turd.
I think the film is probably better because it cuts out the interminable bits such as designing something so that it can't be reverse engineered and how to build a financial system based on gold. But the book as I remember it from my youth (bought, amusingly with a voucher awarded to me for 100% school attendance) was okay. Sure it was a bit long but my memory tells me I enjoyed most of it.
But I liked the film as well. I've seen it twice (the last time being fairly recently) and it's fun. I think the problem with it is that reviewers and a lot of people who watch it try and take it too seriously. It should be viewed as more along the lines of a comic than as serious science fiction. I'd class it as pure escapism with a dose of weird camera angles.
I feel that happens with a lot of films that get slammed. Unless it's an adaptation of a comic people seem to expect something cerebral and get annoyed when they are presented with something that doesn't take itself seriously.
So neither are great works of art but the film at least is good for a laugh and takes you out of your normal headspace for a while and at least when you've finished the book you can pat yourself on the back for your staying power.
If having to occasionally deal with a string of hexidecimal digits is what's putting people off then I have just lost some of the admiration I tend to have for network engineers. As a (now retired) computer programmer I've often had to deal with long strings of hexadecimal - many dozens of digits at a time when viewing memory dumps - and they never caused me any problems.
Exactly. Who gives a toss about IP addresses other than network admins? And even they only care about addresses on their chosen segment(s) so don't have to remember or write more than 8 digits. I have a static IPv4 address and all I can ever remember is that it starts 91 and that the second number possibly starts with 5. I had to tell my domain provider what it was once (along with the IPv6 address I use for my mail server) but no-one else has given a damn about it in the nearly a dozen years since I switched to my current ISP.
There are some aspects of IPv6 that are more complicated than IPv4 and that can quite frankly 'do yer 'ead in' but the length of the address is not one of them.
many large constellations, such as SpaceX's Starlink, use optical links for satellite-to-satellite communication, which don't cause the same issues.
I'm running Chrome on Windows and I don't have any of that stuff either. I switched to DuckDuckGo when it became apparent that Google was trying to make it difficult to avoid AI searching (with DDG it's just an option and they honour it). Don't know why one poster thought that DDG results were poor. They seem to fine to me.
Such linkers still exist. And in fact compilers are also now much better at code folding and de-duplicating. Code that programmer A writes will be improved by the compiler and linker. Maybe not as well as code written by a highly skilled and detail oriented programmer but a lot of 'Joe Average programmer's' coding laziness will be mitigated.
The problem is that in order to save time and reduce mental load programmers have to rely on libraries. And most libraries ship with 'everything anyone might want' out of the box. Now we could split a large library into several smaller ones with a public 'shim' for access that loads only the needed bits as when and indeed .NET does this. Unfortunately this has security and performance implications and a lot of modern code just inherently has a lot of interdependence. The result is that it's just too much hassle and incurs too much of an expense to do.
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