Posts by Mark Fenton 92 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2007
My whole town and surrounding area are all covered by both OpenReach FTTP as well as BRSK FTTP.
Well, I say my whole town, my whole town APART FROM MY STREET.
My street of 10 houses is surrounded by woodlands - and even though we have both BT and BRSK fibre poles at the end of our street - neither of them seem willing to actually serve our street.
Quite frustrating - and not sure what we will do if they switch of the old network. Currently got G-Fast with 150mbps down and 16mbps up - which isn't bad but nowhere near as good as the 2gbps up and down that are available on next street across.
I agree completely. The 5 I have at the moment is pretty much the max size that I want from a phone - for anything else I'll use a tablet or a PC. I could afford an iPhone 6 - budget isn't the issue. Size is. The 6 and all the new Android phones (of any decent spec) are all too big. Decent spec != big.
Give us lots of memory, decent CPU and battery in a smaller screen. I'd buy a 4S sized one if I could.
Being stretched out depends on the gravitational gradient - however for a given event horizon diameter the gradient could be pretty much any value.
A very dense mass being a small sphere at the centre of the event horizon would have a much steeper gradient than a less dense mass that was just very big.
Also - many people forget that escape velocity (and hence escaping from a black hole) only applies to projectiles.
You don't need to reach escape velocity to get to the moon - you could walk there if there was a staircase long enough - in that case you are under power. The reason why our rockets go so quickly has little to do with escape velocity and more to do with energy density.
You could drive a car to the moon (250,000 miles). But you need fuel. So you pull a fuel tanker. And your fuel consumption goes up. So you need more fuel...and so on.
So you get a kind of fuel that is more energy dense - until the payload to the moon isn't quite such a tiny percentage of the mass of the fuel/payload combination.
Trouble is, with the fuels that we currently use that are energy dense enough - they are hard to control - and go off, well, like a rocket.
Got off track there a bit I think.
Why all the re-hashed science free/lite stuff from the conversation?
El Reg of old would have discussed things like the recent innovations and discoveries with regards impulse engines - giving us constant acceleration (ok, low acceleration - but still, it adds up pretty quickly) drives without a reaction mass.
Lets have some proper hard science in the science section of El Reg rather than a piece saying, essentially "wouldn't it be nice to go to another world".
I find that I have little need or desire to listen to music on the bike and also I don't want to be disturbed mid-corner by a telephone call. What I want from bike intercoms is the ability to easily talk to others in the group.
20yrs ago I had a radio intercom system - easy to use and the 2xAA batteries would last forever. It was vox activated and you could easily set it up - range was good for a mile line-of-sight and may be 1/2 mile in built up areas. Great for "which way at the next turning" and "watch out for the idiot in the blue car" and so on.
Recently looked to buy a new set of intercoms and I couldn't find any VOX activated and the Bluetooth ones (whilst giving me functionality that I didn't want) only had a minimal range.
Went down the line of buying some radio walky-talkies and a pair of vox headsets which allowed me Velcro the mic and speakers inside my lid no problems. No connections to a PTT button. Total cost for the pair about £150 and a range of 5miles line-of-sight.
Why don't manufacturers make things we want instead of giving us inferior range and gadgets we don't need?
I guess that's like the smartphone debate though - lots of great gadgets - less good for using as a phone for any length of time. Thing is, on a motorbike you don't want distracting gadgets....
Surely no-one puts a device directly onto the internet?
Put everything behind a firewall, open only the ports that *need* to be opened.
In the case of these cams - I think that I have a few of them, but they are secure behind my firewall and allow *no* ports to the outside world. I can access them via a .aspx page that in turn collates snapshots from the private network and turns that into a stream.
Yes, if someone gets access to my private network then all bets are off - but that is pretty much the case with everything.
Played over the Christmas period - as guests and children and dogs would allow. Didn't notice any issues.
Having a great time with it.
Re the solo mode - it requires such low bandwidth that you can play it with your mobile phone (3G) as a WiFi hotspot on a train...
I think most of the +tive players will be just playing, and all the -tive ones will be whining about it.
...(I know I shouldn't say that...I slap testers for saying that...)....but still...I bought my iPhone 4s because it is the only modern device that works with my in car bluetooth. I'd rather be having a....that is a different story.
Anyways - upgraded through all the various OS incarnations through to 6.1 - and all is still well. WiFi can be switched on/off no problems. In fact I'd never even heard of this issue before.
That said, if it had happened to me - I'd be right royally ticked off. And yes - Apple are supposed to be about standard hardware/firmware - so this shouldn't ever happen!
Getting my coat for saying "it works on my machine"
Not only don't Amazon care about folks rooting their Kindles - they don't de-root them when they issue an upgrade. I had installed a screensaver hack on my Kindle - then the s/w updated itself and I was all prepared to have to sort out the screensaver again - but no - the update preserved the original hack for me.
Very different from "other" suppliers.
...more likely to be an IEC power lead - a kettle lead has a slightly different connector on the end.
And, I imagine the Russ Andrews would be charging £2k for one of those - due to its high power handling in extreme environments!
Mines the one with the bag full of snake oil in the pocket.
You said <<Android tries to sidestep the problem by providing a tick box to switch off the security mechanisms that prevent rogue applications being installed, but what proportion of users have ticked it we don't know.>>
At least on my HTC Desire, you have to find the check box and select before you can install non signed apps. The default is to not allow it.
...but no. I don't want a toy phone. I want to be able to mount as USB drive on any computer I go to, I want to sync with Exchange and I don't have a Facebook account. I don't want a "social phone" I want a smartphone that I can use to do the tasks that I want it to...
I had high hopes for Mobile 7, but this really blows.
...I have internet radios all through my house. I listen to stations from all over the world, usually at 96Kbs - and this gives fine quality. However, why is BBC Radio 4 256Kbs?! It is only talking, and doesn't need the huge bandwidth required.
My neighbour has an internet radio similar to mine - where if you cycle the power it automatically starts playing the last station (Radio 4) - and there was a power cut when they were on holiday. 2 weeks later, they had used all their internet download allowance...
...they wanted to have a contract such that MacMillan couldn't charge less (through any other distributor) than whatever Amazon wanted to charge - and MacMillan would have no say over what Amazon charged - so they could effectively give the books away
...seem to be bitching cos Derby saved £250,000 - surely we should be complaining when councils waste £250,000 rather than just assuming that the saving wasn't a good deal?
That kind of thinking leaves us with a government that spends money and spends and spends and any suggestion of money saving is all about cutting services...
Oh, wait.,...
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