Posts by jp1000

Giant super-laser passes 500 TRILLION watts

Calculus...

Well POWER consumed in any period of time has no meaning. Energy consumed over a period of time does, it IS the power. Power at an instant is defined as the derivative of Energy with respect to time which means it possible to state the instanteous power consumption in the same way it is possible to state the instantaneous speed of a car, even though over zero time the car moves zero distance. So certainly the original poster is correct, the power being dissipated during the shot IS the sum of the laser and the normal consumption of the US, however it's not actually being drained from the grid, since it got stored up earlier over a longer period of time.

Enormous Apple market cap swells and swells ... like a bubble

Re: Apple are successful and that isn't going to change soon

Except that their P/E ratio (16.7) is not suggestive of a stock with growth priced in, unlike, say, amazon at 135...

Virgin Media broadband goes titsup for 3 hours

I don't second that at all

I've had repeated instances of glacial connection speeds, 8 SECOND ping times and so on - at two separate locations (albeit in the same town). The customer service is utterly useless - they've admitted to me that they don't even know the difference between bandwidth and latency and yet refuse to put me through to second line help. I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole, even Sky are better.

Punters even more dissatisfied by Virgin Media's package

Totally agree

Not only is their service rubbish but pretty much every single interaction I've ever had with them has been a disaster. This includes having to make more than 10 phone calls (20 minutes on hold each time) to get them to enable the correct TV channels after they moved our service from an old address to a new address, tech support who don't know the difference between bandwidth and latency, support people telling me they sent our new decoder card to our old address because "they have no record of the new address" despite the fact that they'd been billing us at the new adddress for more than 2 years, support people insisting our account has not been debited when it has, service which is unusable in the evening for weeks on end - I could go on and on. They're probably the worst company on the planet for customer support. I have also dealt with them in a business capacity and they are not much better in that section.

Earth orbit for £1,000? You must be joking

mass != weight

grams is a measure of mass. It doesn't change in orbit.

Virgin Media to demo 200Mb/s broadband tomorrow

The usenets groups are great, but they're being closed!

Indeed I just discovered virginmedia.support.broadband.cable and posted to it - amazingly one can post traceroute results and get immediately sensible technical input. So they're checking 'utlisation' on the circuit for me now apparently. However having an avenue of support that actually works clearly goes against Virgin Media's brand image, or core principles, or something - so they're closing the usenet support groups on 22nd March...

It will still be unusable

I've got a 4 Mb/s line from Virgin Media which is virtually unusable every evening due to ping times on the order of 1000 ms (occasionally up to 8000ms). The download speed is still OK at around 1 meg or so - VM 1st line tech support (who admitted to me they did not know the difference between latency and througput) tell me this is acceptable and such slowness is 'expected in the evenings' - and refuse to put me through to 2nd line support. So far as I can see claims of 200 Mb/s are worthless from a company that can't even provide a useable service at 4 Mb/s.