Posts by Andrew McLachlan

Ex-BT tech chief quits Phorm

Friends and Family Stock anyone?

Great gig. Get the technology deployed into the company you work for and then leave to work at that same start-up.....

Anyone see a problem with this?

Justice....

SpinVox: The Inside Story

Might be bye bye Spinvox for me

Giving it a couple of days to see if it is all true..... and if it is just another dissapointing 2.0 app company....

UltraDNS back online after DDoS assault

Yep totally down for entire DDOS period

All back now, I would like to see the exact details of vuln that took them down. But still if I had secondary dns I would not have had a problem.

My bad....

Nintendo Wii to get video channel in 2009

SD card for storage of media?

There is no technical reason why with a bit of DRM and a big old SD cardthey can't either start their own or partner with an existing video service.

Hulu anyone?

;)

EU threatens vendors with smartphone tax

Awesome more tax.....ummm why did I move to the US?

I think the fiscal answer is clear.....

Breathing tax is on it's way. "Welcome to England can I have some money now please"

Is filming someone in the street a breach of privacy?

Forget about Birthday/Holiday pics

You're gonna need a waiver from your friends soon for social pics.

Holiday snaps? Nope people in them also.

Crowd scenes in TV/Movies? Nope

CCTV - Yes of course. Government can take pics, keep them, not let you see them etc...

What a lunatic world this is....

BitTorrent net meltdown delayed

Panic over - users see sense.... will torrent?

Users will not really enjoy the UDP torrent experience.

Why?

Cos without the TCP model, which is working well today as a protocol, end users might well experience problems with their existing UDP applications, even if they do use QoS on their own DSL routers etc. Users can only control the outbound QoS effectively, having some limited backoff ability,like WRED etc, on TCP as they can affect things like TCP Window size by dropping packets inbound - however that has limited control over the results.

But the combination of TCP and the torrent app creates a well behaved app/protocol where shaping works about as well as you can get, considering you only control a single end point.

The ISP issue of throttling traffic is another problem - and lets not confuse the 2 things right now.

TCP torrent is a very well behaved and well tried approach for sharing - I'm not getting drawn into the rights or wrongs as that is not my point in this comment.

uTorrent - guys what are you thinking!!

I'm just pointing out that changing to UDP might make a good experience worse, and annoy dedicated users as result.

Road Pricing 2.0 is two years away

But I already paid for the fecking Roads with my Taxes!!!

This government needs to be ousted - and I'm talking by any means we the people feel is required.

They work for us - not the other way around - when the hell did we all forget this.

I will never have one of these in my car, arrest me if you want.

Time has come people for us all to start "doing" as well as complaining. Just like the fine people last week that blocked their dustbin men in and refused to let them out until they collected the rubbish from the strikes 2 weeks previous.

Apple is Fisher-Price of sound quality, says Neil Young

Yep his right, but....

Compression is horrid, we all know it. Even though I used to work in the Audio business I took the easy road and did all my CD's at 128kbps...

It was all good for a while.

Then I upgraded the sound system in my SUV from a stock one to something much better.

Boy do I care again - it sounds bloody awful!

Re-did a few CD using EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and Lame, minimal compression and some other tweaks...huge difference.

However, it's till easier to buy of iTunes and just hit the road and that is still 128 unless you get iTunes Plus.

Convenience or quality...

You can however see it from the Musicians point of view, they spend all this time crafting their sound and we don't really get to hear it as they intended.

If anyone has been lucky enough to be in a studio and hear the master recordings, it's pretty damn amazing!

Virgin Media mops up CEO's 'boll*cks' outburst

Doh!! This is not how peering is supposed to work!

Peering is supposed to be a bi-directional model. Peering is about reciprocal relationship between providers to allow them to "exchange" similar amounts of traffic without having to have a directly commercial relationship. Both parties work together and share the cost of the peering - in a perfect world....

However....if the relationship changes to one of a more uni-directional nature, then the commercials are looked at again, and often this is re-negotiated back to a transit/DIA type of link.

I'm not personally aware of the type of relationship that the BBC and VM have between each other, but if it is a true peering relationship and the traffic patterns are now no longer that of a peering type of relationship, then why does VM not just negotiate them back to a paid link...

It's gets done all the time by the major ISP's, I know I have worked for 2 of the largest in the world :)

True VM can't really cut them off, as then VM would have to pay more to Level 3 for transit.

What we need is a different type of peering point for media traffic, where we establish different commercial models for this type of traffic.

Equifax asks customer to email debit card photocopies

Imprint of house keys too?

Yet more proof that nobody has any clue what they are doing anymore.

I would love to hear the excuses from them when all this information ends up on a laptop, on a train, with auto login enabled, and all data in plain text, as this seems to be the norm now.

Doh!!

MoD laptop losses expose government data indifference

Third, which should be the first, would be to strong encrypt the stuff!

I know plenty of people in the Home Office - nope it not encrypted most of the time when they move data around, and neither do the other companies mentioned in the press over the last year.

How about WE, the people, start to prosecute THEM, the Government, for their incompetence. After all they actually work for us, not the other way around, which seems to have been completely forgotten.

Cops seek 179mph net vid biker

I love it when America's are so befuddled

But then look at their leader!!!

Bush once said during a meeting of international business people "the French don't even have a word for entrepreneur"

Oh and to answer Darryl Ashton, yep I have met one. It was at immigration in Denver. He wanted to know why I did not have dollars in my wallet when entering the US, and did not believe me that I could not get then out of an ATM machine in London Heathrow!! We had to get his supervisor!

Microsoft re-assures partners on Vista compatibility

Oh that did make me laugh!!!

I can't find one person in my office that does not want to, or has not already removed Vista from either their home machine or their corporate laptop/desktop.

It really is a terrible, resource hungry load of crap.

Oh and before the flaming starts for my previous statement, we just finished the power requirements budget for our office, which if we run Vista on the same laptops/desktops that we had XP on, just went up 14% in cost. Yes it really does cost more to run the damn thing, as well as buy it.

And yes, I looked at Vista for ages, tested it, beta'd it etc, and most of the devices including one of my Windows Smartphones from last year is still not supported.

Funny thing is, they all work, even the Smartphone, on my Mac - lol

Killer Wi-Fi panics London's chattering classes

So they will be getting rid of the TV then? Crystal Palace is 4 million Joules

Wow these people are so uninformed!!!!