Posts by AndrueC 5089 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
As a counter to that suggestion, let me point you to the success story that is the railways under national ownership.
Although I'd like to draw your attention to the curious correlation between passenger numbers and ownership ;)
The 15% figure was me and I think it may now be slightly out of date. The best update I can find is from this ISP Preview article which suggests that last summer it was running at about 20%.
"This brings the total number of homes and businesses connected to their FTTC/P network to around 4.6 million or 20% of those passed, which BT says “means we have now achieved our original fibre business case take-up assumption“."
Yeah I was in two minds about defending the report. Like others I question the real motivation behind it and suspect back-handers from the likes of Sky and/or simply political point scoring. I just felt that the the El Reg summation was compounding the report's inaccuracies a little too much. The number of UK properties that genuinely cannot have a usable fixed line internet connection must be pretty small.
My view of BT is that it's not done too badly overall. We seem to have ended up with a voice and data network that do most of what most people want for a fairly low price(*). I wonder how given BT's various faults and idiocies but somehow it's managed it.
(*)Although I do wonder where line rental is going these days but ironically that's the CPs not Openreach causing it.
5.7 million people still cannot access the internet
To be fair the report didn't actually say that 5.7 million had no internet. It said that 5.7 million don't have an internet connection that meets Ofcom's standards. So they are saying that 9% of the population can't get a connection of at least 10Mb/s. That's actually pretty good. I'm not sure how many other countries could claim to offer at least 10Mb/s to 91% of the population. Per capita we are still amongst the highest users of the internet in the world so something is going right :)
There's also the question of how many people actually want that speed. Last I heard FTTC take up was running at around 15% per cabinet. And of those most don't bother with the faster speeds if they are available.
I'm also generally of the opinion that if a business has a need for a high speed internet connection it ought to be able to come up with a case for it and corresponding budget. I'll concede though that if 'business' includes those that are being run out of a converted barn, village shop or garden shed the financials are not going to make sense.
As for getting the government to run things..no. F'gawd's sake no! I'm old enough to remember how the GPO ran things and that was infinitely worse. Let's not forget that BT was created because the government of the time realised just how badly run and underfunded the UK network was and decided to wash its hands of the whole thing.
As for splitting Openreach off I'm not yet convinced. I can see some advantages but for that to happen will take time, a radical restructuring and I'm sceptical that a separate Openreach could raise the money it needs.
I spent six months collating data at Sellafield Thorp during construction. At the time I was quite impressed with the Huskies they were using on site. I was less impressed with the Amstrad portable I was required to work on. I had a better screen on my CPC at home :-/
Fixing stuff at day's end is risky. I have a personal rule never to push source to the repository after 3pm unless it's to my own branch. Working for several years with Americans on the same team taught me that 'push and go home' was a bad idea. Now I always give myself a couple of hours to deal with issues.
CI servers help but they don't always catch everything. Especially if (as so often seems to be the case) you're working on a legacy project with minimal to no unit tests.
And of course with legacy apps you're nearly always working where there is poor unit test coverage. You wouldn't be working there if it was well covered :-/
usually just as you turn on to the motorway and 100 miles from the next service station, thereby driving you insane
Or as my iPod did once, crash just I merge onto the M40 when setting off for Scotland. Of course I keep it in the central console. Tucked nicely out of the way right at the front actually underneath the heater controls. I can just about reach it if I duck down and stretch out my arm...
so perhaps we shouldn't mess with a system that works
Not unless the changes can be proven to be better, certainly. Another difference between the two seems to be the nature of 'arrest'.
In the UK it seems to just be something the police do to avoid you leaving while they investigate. In some cases you can be de-arrested five minutes later and sent on your way without even seeing the inside of a police station. If you're not convicted it won't even show up on a standard background check so has little or no impact on most people.
In the US it seems to be considered a far bigger deal with nasty consequences.
"Generally, in order for evidence to be admissible it must be relevant, without being prejudicial, and reliable."
Well yes, but being obtained illegally doesn't necessarily violate any of those terms (although it ought to imply the last one). Anyway I see your supporting link and will raise it with another of mine.
'Is all evidence admissible?
In criminal proceedings, all relevant evidence presented by the parties is prima facie admissible as the UK courts have adopted an inclusionary approach towards evidence in order to favour the victim and ensure a fair trial. In a case in 1861 it was confirmed evidence is admissible even if it were stolen. The rationale for this approach is that the court considers the primary aim of the justice system to be the discovery of the truth and the unearthing of guilt. This is prioritised above the protection of the accused’s right to private life. Nevertheless the courts have discretion under s.78 Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to exclude evidence which lacks relevance and which might, by its admission, endanger trial fairness. This contrasts with the exclusionary approach of the courts of the USA to illegally obtained evidence, which prioritises the need to deter the police from unconstitutional behaviour. Although the UK courts do not wish to encourage illegally methods to obtaining evidence on the part of the police, discovering guilt is prioritised. '
And before we go too much further I'd like to point out that I am not a lawyer. I'm a computer programmer and I have a different set of more draconian and less flexible rules I have to follow :D
Lots of people appear to get confused about this, probably because of watching American crime drama programs.
I suspect some might be a bit disappointed if they rely on privileged communication as portrayed in US dramas as well. There ain't much of that around in the UK. I believe that only legal privilege exists and spousal communication is voluntary and not absolute.
where they have failed to adhere to PACE, can be deemed inadmissible in court
The operative word is 'can'. As I understand it the judge decides and it seems traditionally they normally let anything in. Also whilst a single item might be inadmissible I don't think the concept of 'fruit of the poison tree' is ever applied. So whilst you might not be able to present a document found without a warrant you can present evidence found from a search of a locker mentioned in said document. In the US I believe you'd have to be able to show that knowledge of the locker could have been obtained legally anyway.
Your argument is to lower that limit?
Who? Me?
No. By 'lower' I'm referring to the fact that's it's lower than the normal 70mph limit on a dual carriageway. What I'm saying is that the 50mph limit on that particular stretch is correct and that people should adhere to it. Short slip roads, most of which are unsighted until the last minute and a lot of local traffic popping onto the bypass just to get from one side of town to the other.
Absolutely it should have a reduced speed limit (as it does) and it's a shame so many people ignore that.
I often wonder about that while driving past Colwyn Bay on the Expressway. So many people ignore the 50mph limit and I doubt they are all ignorant tourists. Maybe the Police can't be bothered to cover their own backyard but I think it's a stretch of road that justifies a lower limit.
Yeah, that was the reason at one of my jobs. Although I was assured that no-one ever actually sent them to HMRC. Presumably it's something they ask for if they choose to do an audit?
At my last place it used to take a month or more to get a code created by HR. Every time we started a new project (even just a minor release) it had to have a new code. But by the time the code came through we'd have finished. So in the meantime we had to use 'software misc'. Naturally when the code finally came through (sometimes three or four at once) we had to go back and fix up the time sheets.
As to who used them..I really have no idea. The people who were supposed to use them were our managers for determining time scales but they never used them to my knowledge. Anyway six months after they rolled out the time sheets we switched to Scrum poker which to my mind rendered the whole idea moot.
Other gems: I used to make sure my hours added up to 7.5 a day since that's what I was contracted for. Then my manager's manager told me that looked suspicious. He suggested I add on a couple of hours here and there :-/
enter timesheet data
Now that you've reminded me...
I've had to enter time sheet data at various times in my 30 year career for several different companies. Never once has there been any demonstrable value. But to be fair there has never been any come back when I slack off and enter essentially made-up figures either.
My current job doesn't require time sheets which is nice :)
Its investigation into Vodafone...is ongoing
I'm not surprised. They are shambolic at pretty much every level. Their website is rife with dead links. Their documentation has not been updated (and often points you to dead links). Trying to contact them by voice is an exercise in patience and when you get through to them the person on the other end is generally useless.
I don't know if it's incompetence or deliberate obfuscation (could be both) but if it wasn't that I was reliant on their SureSignal for my home I'd have left them by now. I'm still trying to get them to stop spamming me with SMS messages. I've just sent off an email to their head office with a threat of reporting them to the ICO.
Isn't that in the account settings, "Manage identities?". If you have an alias set for an account there, TB will automatically use the matching reply-to when you respond.
I'll take a look. One thing that might be an issue though is that I'm not using configured aliases. My server has a wildcard redirect in place. TB would also have to understand aliases as I can't give it a list of addresses because there's effectively an infinite number of them. A quick look at the help suggests it ought to be possible.
The choice always seems to be Thunderbird or.... Nothing else.
I moved from TB to TheBat! a couple of years ago. Really that just means putting up with a different set of idiosyncrasies but the script language was powerful enough to let me do some things I wanted(*). I've known it crash with certain images and a ridiculously long CC line will also upset it (but then anything at all in a CC line upsets me). But otherwise it does the job.
(*)When replying I wanted to pull my address out of the original header and use it as the 'reply to' address in the new email. That's because all my contacts get their own address. At the time I couldn't see how to get TB to do that.
but latency, not observed, and no issues with voip
That's very puzzling.
A satellite signal has to at least go up to the satellite from your ISP's ground station then come back down (a round trip of around 70Mm). There is no way that can take less than 233ms. If you are uplinking from your premises then that doubles to become a total of 466ms. Some satellite systems rely on a ground connection for the uplink which would bring you back below 300ms but that's the absolute minimum that the laws of physics allows.
On top of that you have processing overheads (encryption and probably compression) plus whatever the typical latency is to/from your ISP's ground station to their head office, over their network then over the wider internet to the actual target of your connection.
There are ways to mitigate some of the latency but there is no way you can get around the fact that when the person at the other end of your VoIP connection speaks you're not going to hear it for at least a quarter of a second, probably half a second and on some systems over three quarters of a second.
Satellite and mobile are not an adequate solution to availability. Mobile is okay if you are actually mobile (assuming it works at all). Satellite is good if you're actually off the beaten track and/or need a high capacity link temporarily (eg; OB users). But for permanent residences it has to be a wired solution.
We can say with some certainty that developers like using Git as a repository manager.
Obligatory XKCD reference.
the rodents have being responsible for 505 such operations. Birds have reached 141, and raccoons 31
My budgie damaged two buttons on my original Harmony One remote ('ingress of bodily excretions') and pulled a key off my laptop keyboard ('sheer bloody mindedness').
I was able to replace the key but sadly it proved impossible to clean the Harmony One. The cheeky little chappy has been dead for over two years now but has left me having to put up with a late generation Harmony One which is not as good as the original version. So that's one more count of long-lasting damage to IT infrastructure.
I do still miss the little sod though :)
All pay TV channels ought to be Advert free. They are charging plenty.
Discovery is not charging anything - at least not on Sky's UK platform (I've no idea how VM work it but it's probably similar). Sky is charging the public for access to its platform and also charging Discovery Communications to be listed on the EPG. It's probably charging them a lot given that it's in the prime Documentary slot. Discovery Communications will be getting a discount due to their relative popularity and value to the Sky platform but overall they will be paying to have their content made available in UK homes.
Someone who appears to sell EPG slots giving some figures.
also here for some more pricing information:
Change to the way Sky charges BBC and ITV giving some figures.
There is no way that most channels on Sky's platform could survive without advertising under the current model. And producing advert free versions would be a nightmare. And I know I wouldn't want to be reliant on Sky to keep my company alive (which is what you and others are proposing here). Aside from the inherent risk it puts a huge amount of control on Sky's hands. You pretty much lose all control over your channel and might as well just hand everything over to Sky and give up.
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