Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Totally Sardonic Bank: Well, it must be, to have a TITSUP* the same week as THAT report

TITSUP

TSB IT Spoils User Paydays?

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Re: Speed of light

They're easier to carve as well.

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Re: Assume the worst

Good work on putting in the check,

Maybe not, since "I threw in code that wrote the variable to two locations" is clearly NOT atomic, so it's entirely possible that his atomic operation was still fine, and it was his non-atomic check that broke things.

Mysterious IT snafu at British Airways causes bunch of inbound flight delays and cancellations

Re: BA = Bloody Awful

I'd put Lufthansa well above BA and AF in that category, especially if having your luggage arriving with you is important.

Video-editing upstart bares users' raunchy flicks to world+dog via leaky AWS bucket

Re: If something is free...

The Pope poos in the woods.

Well, he should stop! Doesn't he know that today is World Toilet Day?

Satellite operators' shares plummet as FCC plumps for public 5G spectrum auctions

Re: There goes international roaming

Each band generally needs its own filtering, amplifier and antenna,

Most of that is defined in software these days, so supporting new bands is usually just a case of a new firmware load. There's no real reason why a phone couldn't look at the providers it can see & reconfigure itself to support the bands they use in that area.

Re: A side-effect

Instead of trying to compare dozens of different plans from different providers they can be assured that their Brand X phone supplied by Provider X will only work with Provider X's network.

Stops them roaming to other places as well, since there's no guarantee that their phone will be able to roam onto a network that has an agreement with their provider.

Who loves Brexit? Irish distributors ... after their sales jump by a third

Re: "the country has an advantageous business and digital tax environment"

You cherry picked data, and therefore have lost all credibility on this issue.

You're the person who said "can you give me three examples of goods with high tariffs?", if that isn't a request for cherry-picking, what is?!

Interpol: Strong encryption helps online predators. Build backdoors

Well, they are quite correct.

No, they aren't, for two very obvious reasons.

If standard ISP encryption is backdoored, criminals will simply use their own homebrewed encryption apps that don't have backdoors. Sure, that might be illegal, but you think a terrorist or paedophile will care?

In the meantime, the honest folks who are forced to use backdoored encryption for their banking and shopping will suffer at the hands of fraudsters who've found the backdoors and are abusing them.

Mandatory backdoors do absolutely nothing to stop criminals, they just inconvenience honest people.

Pack your bags, you're going to America, Lord Chief Justice tells accused Brit hacker

Re: Odd thought

Wikipedia has some figures:

US->UK

From January 2004 to the end of December 2011, 7 known US citizens were extradited from the US to the UK. No US citizen was extradited for an alleged crime while the person was based in the US. The U.S. embassy in London reports that, as of April 2013, 38 individuals have been extradited from the US to the UK.

UK->US

From January 2004 to the end of December 2011, 33 known UK citizens (including 6 with dual nationality) were extradited from the UK to the US. The U.S. embassy in London reports that, as of April 2013, 77 individuals have been extradited from the UK to the US. The U.S. has argued that this is not disproportionate, due to the US population being about five times larger than the UK population.

Make of them what you will.

Edit: Corrected second heading.

Email! HUH! Yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...

Re: What a string of cockups

Raise a ticket for each failed test

And watch each ticket being put into a "no resources to address this at the moment" state.

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: @JIm84

Johnson has casually promised to reinstate all the lines closed by the Beeching cuts.

I haven't seen any suggestion that he said all of them, just the ones that are viable.

Given that Beeching's report was based on outdated figures for trains hauled by steam locomotives, without considering diesel traction, and was implemented by a transport minister with known connections to the companies building the new motorways, the cuts are generally considered to have been excessive. Restoring some more lines is long overdue.

Re: @steelpillow and ImAlrightJack

this GPON shite you mentioned - not heard of this before but from what i've just read it's actually a fibre connection that is spliced and shared between users.

That's the standard way to provide fibre broadband, everywhere. Point to point would be impractical in terms of cost and cable size. Even copper broadband and phone is only p2p as far as the exchange, after that it's all multiplexed together in one cable or fibre.

Whether your faster service comes at a premium or not is arguable, but I guess what you're paying now will have at least £30 knocked off.

And £60 added to your taxes to pay for it, of which maybe £5 will actually make it to the broadband company.

Re: "Labor is pro-remain, right?"

you need a decisive majority for a change that fundamental, say something like 2:1

If only they'd applied that rule to the creation of the EU as well.

Re: Welcome to Cloud Cuckoo Land

Hardly the same as schools. They benefit everyone, there's no better investment a country can make than educating the next generation.

Fast broadband, on the other hand, is more like a motorway. Great if you have a car, but if you're fine with getting around by bike why should you have to pay for fancy roads for those that can afford to buy a Mercedes?

Re: Well I personally think it is a good idea....

Infrastructure should be at least partially state owned and state directed if not state run and this includes roads and rail as well as internet backbone.

State-owned means "paid for out of taxes", i.e. we pay for it but have no control over how it's run. At least with a private company we can decide it's shite & take our business elsewhere (which needn't mean broadband, it could be 4/5G, satellite, etc).

I'm also curious how you reconcile your socialist view on this with the French model, France being a far more socialist country than the UK. In the UK the motorway network is state-run, open to all drivers, and was built by upgrading A-roads at taxpayer expense. In France the autoroute network is privately managed under 30-year concessions, and charges heavy tolls. It's an overlay network, the original main roads are still there, creating a not-very-socialist model where those who have the money can pay to use very good 130km/h roads, and those who can't pay get stuck on single carriageways with 80km/h limits. Not very egalitarian.

It took Openreach 5 1/2 MONTHS to install a phone line for us when we moved about 300 yards down the road.

That's poor, but still twice as fast as it used to take when BT was state-run. If you could get a line at all, that is. We had a party line for years because there wasn't any infrastructure investment.

Perhaps if the masses spent as much time considering other human beings as they did watching sports they might just become socialists,

Hey, there's an idea. Nationalise the premier league and have the results decided by committee. No need to waste TV coverage on it at all, then.

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

I took some convincing before taking the smart lock plunge

Who was doing the convincing, and have you made them regret it yet?

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

Re: When your stomach sinks to your shoes

I never knew the AC was so loud!

It's the way that my footsteps echoed so loudly off the floor tiles as I walked back to the door that used to get me.

Any promises to extend rights of self-employed might win an election, hint Brit freelancer orgs

Re: Waste of time

> We've been fed the same shit election after election for at least 40 years, and nothing has changed....Which is why I'm not voting in the next election.

Well, that will help, I'm sure. Bet it won't stop you complaining that "somebody" should do "something" about it, though. Not you, of course, it's always somebody else's fault.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: User ignore email

Or maybe that getting banned by the Union means no more cheap beer in the Union bar. Much worse than a slap on the wrist from IT.

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Re: Seems fine to me

I have a very interesting book

Not a Newnes "Everything Within" by any chance? I still have my Grandfather's copy.

Re: Seems fine to me

So how many studs does your mother have?

And are they male or female sockets?

Re: Now You've Done It

I knew there was a reason I installed a 400 Amp electrical service in mine

That's the great thing about ring mains, as many sockets as you like within 100 sq m, and one 30A breaker per ring.

The .amazon argy-bargy is STILL going on – and Uncle Sam has had enough with ICANN

I'd have thought the wrestling would have more claim on a .commercial site than the animals, who'd be more logically be behind a .org.

The locals would probably prefer .beinnnibheis

Boffins hand in their homework on Voyager 2's first readings from beyond Solar System

Would collisions with interstellar atoms erode the probe

Maybe knock the "oya" off?

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

Re: The future is hydrogen.

expecting new technologies to match this level of efficiency in 10 years is unrealistic.

10 years? The hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell has been around since the 1930s, they were used in the Apollo spacecraft in the 60s.

Re: Motorway charging

One subject often mentioned is that EV is far cheaper per mile than ICE

Largely because the price of oil-based fuels (in Europe) is ~60% tax and duty, which governments are not going to give up. If EV charging stations were taxed to make up the same income the cost difference would be a lot smaller.

Re: Filling station power requirement

Having a big tank of Petrol/Diesel is a dangerous thing.

I'm not sure having dozens of untrained people manipulating 400kW charging connections would be any safer. Have you seen what happens when a high-power electricity line ruptures? It's a lot more explosive than a tank of diesel.

Re: Filling station power requirement

look at Norway where 10% of cars on the road are plug-in electric and 60% of new sales.

Because the purchaser doesn't pay tax on an electric car, so the tax burden is spread out across all taxpayers, including those who don't own a car at all. Once everyone is buying electric it's a zero-sum game.

Re: Power required

decades ago.

i.e. before fast changing Li-Ion batteries was a thing.

There are two separate issues, grid capacity and generating capacity.

Just do the maths. EV batteries today hold 40-80kWh of energy. let's take 60 as a midpoint, such a battery will deliver 60kW for one hour, and charging isn't 100% efficient (i.e. it takes more than 60kWh to put 60kWh charge in) so to charge it in 10 minutes would require around 400kW.

A normal filling station has from 4 to 10 pumps, so if each were replaced by a charger that would be a power requirement of 1.6 to 4MW per station. That's 200-400A at 11kV to every filling station, essentially a dedicated 11kV line per station. Also note that I can fill my diesel once, and get 5-600 miles on a tankful, but a range of 200 miles would mean I'd be filling 3x as often, so we would need more charging points.

Then you have the total energy that needs to be supplied.The UK car fleet consumes about 140TWh petrol, 130TWh diesel (calculated as Tonnes of Oil Equivalent (TOE)), so a total of 270TWh per year. Let's be generous and halve that for electrical transport, since electric motors tend to be ~2x as efficient as ICE ones. That's still 140TWh/year. UK annual electricity consumption is 360TWh, so you're looking at a 40% increase in required generating capacity even without adding in haulage fuel requirements (150TWh) which makes it worse.

Battery capacity & charge rate just isn't the problem, the infrastructure needs to be there to support it.

Power required

There's a big difference between the power required to fast-charge one cell, and that required to fill a 60-70 kWh battery in 10 minutes. The latter will require massive investment in power stations and grid infrastructure. How fast can we build 10 or 20 more Sizewell Bs? Not in 10 years, that's for sure.

Radio nerd who sipped NHS pager messages then streamed them via webcam may have committed a crime

Re: Ham?

Amateurs were building and operating TNCs for packet since the mid 80s.

I still have one in a dusty cupboard somewhere, complete with KA9Q software burnt into an EPROM. Fun to work on AX.25 at the same time I was doing X.25 professionally.

Ham?

I don't see anything in this or the original article to say why you assume it's a radio ham (i.e. a qualified, licensed user), and not just someone listening on a scanner. Without the user's callsign, if (s)he has one, the RSGB certainly isn't going to be able to comment.

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Re: OT

after the forthcoming ... election we are to become Rudderless.

See, Brexit isn't all bad.

having climate protestors glued to the side of their buildings.

Stops them blocking the roads & airports, I suppose, but wouldn't it count as "cruel and unusual punishment"?

UK Ministry of Justice brags about new digital forensics unit to thwart tech-savvy jailbirds

Re: smartphones?

Appropriate branding, as well.

The eagle has handed.... scientists a serious text message bill after flying through Iran, Pakistan

Re: No EU roaming charges

I'm sure the Mobile Operators will be chomping at the bit to hike their roaming charges back to pre EU levels if not higher the day after we finally decide to leave the EU.

So far they've all said they won't, why do some people get so much pleasure from looking on the black side of everything? Seriously, if you found a silver lining you'd go looking for a cloud to put it in.

Aviation's been Boeing through a rough patch: Software tweaks blamed for Airbus A220 failures

This almost certainly involves burning extra fuel,

Not necessarily. If you burn fuel at lower than stiochiometric ratio you get hotter combustion, it's a problem in lean-burn car engines because it increases NOx output.

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

ISO standard orange juice?

Re: Been there...

in vi it inserts \xc2\xa3.

That sounds like a unicode/UTF8 mixup, maybe check the various LC_ variables?

Re: Tobacco smoke

The Computer History Museum in Mountainview has one of the old SAGE early-warning consoles. Built into the operator's panel, beside the keyboard, is an ashtray.

Re: It was something we used to do in the 80s

I wonder what state the lungs of the user were in!

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Re: Steps for working with electricity in the home

Remember the old Trade Test film: SIDE

Switch off

Isolate

Discharge

Earth

That last step was good for detecting when the first two hadn't worked as you expected...

Tor blimey, Auntie! BBC launches dedicated dark web mirror site

> always use a condiment.

salt your hashes?

Plan to strip post-Brexit Brits of .EU domains now on hold: Registry waves white flag amid political madness

Put the blame where it belongs

Pointless economic damage and legions of angry punters? It can only be Brexit civil servants.

FTFY

One of Blighty's most-loved charities hands £46m to one of Blighty's least-loved outsourcers

Re: How much?

It's a 5-year contract, that also handles all the holiday bookings, and things like the film companies that use NT properties. It's not just email & membership cards.

Re: Time to review my membership of the NT

I'm not sure anyone else would be much better, nor is it really something the NT could easily do in-house. In fairness to Crapita, they have handled membership queries for us very quickly and effectively.

I see your blue passport and raise you a green number plate: UK mulls rewards scheme for zero-emission vehicles

they can't illuminate the path as there's no utility lighting down there, only individual metered residential connections.

I bought some solar-powered lights for exactly that purpose. Solar panel on the edge of the roof, LED light giving nice bright light on the patio when someone steps outside. Less than 30 quid, IIRC.