* Posts by Tony Pomfret

12 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2012

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware storms live TV weather forecast

Tony Pomfret
FAIL

Developer working from home... not!

Windows 10 installed itself (no query) on my office PC while I was working at home, This update bust file sharing via Hamachi! The following day was then wasted on trying to get Hamachi working... my day ended in rolling back to Win7. Cheers MS! :(

TalkTalk confesses: Scammers have data about our engineers' visits to your home

Tony Pomfret
Mushroom

Dido - White Flag

The title says it all really.

Pale backside of lovely Luna flits past in imagery from 1 million miles out

Tony Pomfret

It's just you ;p

BT claims almost-gigabit connections over COPPER WIRE

Tony Pomfret

Re: I wish they would give me something anywhere near that...

Welcome to my world!

If you chase BT for cabinet / DSLAM rollout dates they will probably tell you your location is not economically viable as they did with me.

BBC: We're going to slip CODING into kids' TV

Tony Pomfret

If it moves kill it!

The answer to teaching code is to show why you need to do a certain thing with an object, in practical terms show why the ghosts in PacMan move in the way they do, or how the logic traces a bullet path to blow somebody's head off in an FPS!

That's how I learned and it still makes me happy to perform the same programming intensive logic today.

I suppose girls will need to learn how to shoot things first though.

Virgin Media boss AND ex-Murdoch man: BSkyB broadband is 'lousy'

Tony Pomfret
Coat

I'd love to have VM speeds...

However VM would have to lay a connection to my road and that just ain't gonna happen (VM never extended the original Ninex connection in my area)

This VM provisions failure doesn't however stop me getting flooded with VM advertising post asking me to switch, Grrr!

Oh well I suppose I'll have to wait for BT/Sky fibre then, could be a long wait though seeing as my DSLAM is according to BT "economically none viable."

No choice so stuck with Sky Broadband Pro's 6 MB/s for probably the rest of my bloody life.

BT demands end to Ofcom wholesale broadband subsidies for BSkyB, TalkTalk

Tony Pomfret

knee jerk reaction

Could it be a BT knee jerk reaction to this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26366893

I also agree that the price they paid for the football was bloody disgraceful, especially as they still need to rollout a ridiculous percentage of fibre customers by 2017... 95% no bloody chance!

Stuff the delays! PM chuffed to have BT's superfast broadband in his constituency

Tony Pomfret
WTF?

Are you commercially viable?

Fibre rollout for what percentage of Britain we ask? This was BT's response to my inquiry...

"Dear Sir

Thank you for your enquiry about fibre broadband at Atherton exchange cabinet LC/ATH 44. Our deployment is based on the commercial criteria for each cabinet and your cabinet fails to meet the commercial criteria. This is because the cabinet has too few premise connected to it, rendering it too small to provide a return on the investment based on the costs for the construction and on-going running costs of providing a new FTTC cabinet. When calculating the commercial viability of cabinet areas we take many factors into account. These include ensuring that we locate the cabinets in accordance with all national and local planning laws, ensuring that the cabinet does not obstruct pedestrians or provide a danger to all road-users. We must ensure that the DSLAM is located within 100m of its associated telephony connection cabinet and that there is adequate access to power and existing telephony infrastructure. To further enable the location of the DSLAM, we must accurately survey for underground structure and obstacles etc.

We do look at the demographic nature of the potential customers within a cabinets working area, however, we focus on the amount of connected lines at the time and not any potential expansion within a cabinet area as this is not guaranteed - this is the most efficient way to deploy fibre broadband whilst keeping within our finite budget. As such we look at the potential return for our investment over quite a number of years, with the prospective number of take up of the service being a large percentage of households."

So, I live in a commercially non viable part of the country! How many more towns fall into this category?

Cheers for nothing BT.

Thirty-five years ago today: Space Invaders conquer the Earth

Tony Pomfret
Happy

I met Tomohiro Nishikado while working at Software Creations (Manchester) in 1990... he was a polite, humble small gentleman but I still bowed to him as if he was a god!

Space Invaders was a game that set the stage for future gaming creations and Tomohiro was quite simply a genius of his time and in my heart and mind he still is.

Ray Harryhausen, king of stop motion, takes final voyage

Tony Pomfret
Thumb Up

Stop motion master!

RIP Ray, you will always live in my heart.

Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros

Tony Pomfret
Happy

Game programmer for life (nearly)

The memories come flooding back!

ISP Be admits crippling iPlayer demand burst its pipes

Tony Pomfret

Be is a great ISP especially if you like playing online games as it does have the lowest latency DSL speeds I've ever seen...

My problem is that from around 6pm to 8pm my router would lose sync with my exchange(LCATH), I can only guess that Be picked up on this problem and as a result have lowered my connection speed from > 7meg to 5!

I'd rather they' inform me before crippling my connection speed and look for the real reason for the de-sync (congestion).

I'm on the Pro service so It cost's a rather large amount of money for a now very slow service. Not happy!