* Posts by Mi Tasol

49 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2014

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Mi Tasol

Re: Gobsmacked!

Like Boeing, Airbus has a history of pretending that problems do not exist and then taking action at a snails pace. The inadequate pitot heaters that dropped the Air France A340 in the Atlantic were well known as was the same problem on earlier models right back to the A300. A modification to fix the problem had been designed but was low priority. In the case of the A300s many operators were told no-one else has this problem for a number of years until someone asked at an operators conference where the Regulators were present and many had the same problem. Regulator action followed within days and a fix very soon after.

Mi Tasol

I will not drink it for breakfast either.

I sip it and savour it

World recoils in horror as smartphone maker accused of helping government snoops read encrypted texts, track device whereabouts

Mi Tasol

Every 60 seconds someone in Africa is hacked by Huawei and everyone in the world is hacked by the US Homeland Security and Australian Department of Home Affairs.

Mi Tasol

Re: Nope I'm lost

According to the big oranges lawyer (Rudy) the truth is not the truth.

He is secretly in deep poo with all lawyers for exposing the lawyers creed to the public

Remember lawyer is the olde englishe spelling of liar

Hours before Congress backs robocall blocking law, guess what the FCC boss suddenly decides?

Mi Tasol

And, like Australia, scum (sorry I meant to type po-liar-tic-ians and po-liar-tic-al parties) will be exempt all the restrictions.

Remember politics is a portmanteau word - one made by joining abbreviations of other words.

In this case

Po - slang for sh*thouse

Liar - self expanitory

Tics - blood sucking parasites

Also remember the only person to go into parliament with honest intentions was Guy Fawkes - and you know what they did to him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes

What's in a name? Quite a bit when it's the most hated abbreviation of 2018 (GDPR, of course)

Mi Tasol

Re: Funny

Make America GRATE again - or as one cartoonist makes it while dressing Trump as a thumb sucking 8 year old

Make America 8 again.

Man drives 6,000 miles to prove Uncle Sam's cellphone coverage maps are wrong – and, boy, did he manage it

Mi Tasol

Unless that carrier is the one which is an acronym for Tells Extreme Lies, Screws Totally Rural Australians.

Case in point - they advertise getting a land line connected to a premises which has changed owners and had an existing working connection is $x

Then send a bill for $5X and refuse to acknowledge registered letter of complaint.

Contact Telecom Ombudsman and ten minutes later TELSTRA are on line promising to correct the problem by issuing a credit (they CLAIM they cannot correct the error, only issue a credit).

Four weeks later the new bill arrives with half the promised credit.

Contact Ombudsman again and again ten minutes later TELSTRA are on line promising to correct the problem by issuing a second credit and again they CLAIM they cannot correct the error, only issue a credit).

Four weeks later a new bill with a whole lot of charges that the local TELSTRA office cannot decode

And ON and ON and ON until I changed to an honest network.

Trainee techie ran away and hid after screwing up a job, literally

Mi Tasol

Not uncommon unfortunately.

My sparky says that builders installing lining after the wiring has been installed often use long screws that go straight through the wiring and last week my neighbour who is having a new house built turned on the water for the first time only to discover an hour later lots of water flowing through the plaster board on two sides of a common wall because the builder had put two screws through one pipe in the bathroom.

Military techie mangled minicomputer under nose of scary sergeant

Mi Tasol

Getting a copy of the relevant Standard and dumping it on the electricians desk and saying "show me the paragraph that says why that is impossible" often works.

About thirty years ago (way back when you could not get electricity installed in Victoria, Australia, without an SEC inspector checking out the installation) we had an inspector refuse to approve the installation because the meter box was too high off the ground. We bitched to the sparky who did the job and he gave me a photocopy of the latest standard - two years old - that gave where he had set the meter box as being the minimum height. Rang the SEC and asked for a re-inspection by another inspector but they said he was the only one for that suburb so we went over his head to his manager who passed it sight unseen.

Still not on Windows 10? Fine, sighs Microsoft, here are its antivirus tools for Windows 7, 8.1

Mi Tasol

Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

Got it in one.

I recently got a Win10 laptop very cheap and virtually never used because the owners had bought it to replace a lower spec Win7 box. Because it was so woefully slow they quickly went back to the old win7 box and offered the win10 for sale. I got it to run a laser engraver out in the shed and it was so slow at everything that I soon got so p155ed off that I formatted it and installed Win7. It is a good little computer now, quick and usable

nbn™ scoreboard: our new way to look at Australia's national broadband network

Mi Tasol

What customer experience improvements? What fault detection.

"The company also said customer experience improvements have seen it make "improvements to home and business installations, new fault detection and resolution processes, "

Examples.

Just before xmas our part of the Wide Bay and Burnett had a total failure of the NBN network on Wednesday night and was not fixed until 5am Monday. All the troubleshooting and repairs were carried out by a competitor (think Tells Extreme Lies....). They took 26 hours from when they say the outage started (8am Thursday) to identify the source of the problem and then did not have the spare part. I work in Papua New Guinea where the local ISPs have built in test equipment. PNG may be 100 years behind socially but it is way in front of Australia in internet tech because if an ISP had a four day outage they would wake up finding they had no customers. Competition keeps them on their toes. A public service monopoly has no competition and no incentive to perform.

Below is an actual nbn email from 2018-01-05 18:42 PM. Before you read it imagine that you are a business that depends on the nbn for your phones,eftpos and/or orders. This outage is the first day after a long weekend when everyone has come in to town to restock and you are effectively closed. They could have scheduled this for a weekend or outside business hours to minimise disruptions but being a public service monopoly nbn do not.

nbn = no bloody nous or nothing but nitwits, or to quote channel 9, nightmare bloody network

"Dear Customer,

nbn co has advised us that it will be carrying out a Planned Change Activity on its network during the change window shown below. Your service and others on the nbn network are expected to be interrupted during the change window.

CHANGE ACTIVITY

Reference: CRQ000001655332

Type: Normal

CHANGE WINDOW

Start: Tue 30 Jan 2018, 07:00 am AEDT AEST/ADST

End: Fri 02 Feb 2018, 08:00 pm AEDT AEST/ADST

Duration: 3 days 13 hours

EXPECTED SERVICE INTERRUPTIONS

Interruption 1: 600 min

Interruption 2: 0 min

Interruption 3: 0 min

Interruption 4: 0 min

Interruption 5: 0 min

nbn co has advised us that this is important network maintenance and it apologises for any inconvenience this may cause you.

"

Mi Tasol

Re: NBN cabinet installed in next street to us!

Take some strong sedatives.

The wireless tower 700m from me was put up late October one year and activated 11 1/2 months later.

Used iPhone Safari in 2011-12? You might qualify for Google bucks

Mi Tasol

Re: Nobody caring that iOS didn't enforce this setting?

In other words Google did a Volkswagen. They knew it was wrong but did it anyway. So much for their famous motto "do no evil". Obviously to Google anything that makes them money is good and morals, conscience, etc are evil.

Just like today's story about how they are going to over-ride windows antivirus tools.

Another reason I am glad that I went back to Firefox and use Duck Duck Go for searches.

MH370 final report: Aussies still don’t know where it crashed or why

Mi Tasol

Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

Cynic 999

"There is perhaps a case to be made for fitting a very tough buoyant locator transmitter to the exterior of aircraft in such a way that it will break away in the event of a crash."

No, there is no viable case for an external breakaway ELT and the currents would move it off site very quickly. The maintenance costs and reliability issues would eliminate that.

Only active satellite tracking like Spidertracks and its competitors can be made foolproof. It has been working for over ten years and, unlike ELTs has a zero false negative failure rate due to its design.

The ELT works by being activated by an inertia switch then transmitting a signal on two frequencies. It will not work under water, if the inertia switch fails or if the antenna or cabling is damaged. Search aircraft then need to home in on the signal, if there is one, or search a massive area if there is no signal.

Spidertracks sends a signal to a satellite every two minutes (it can be set shorter). The signal includes location, altitude, speed and heading. It can be set so it can only be turned off by shutting down all the engines.

If a signal fails to reach the satellite the system automatically generates emails and text messages that contain all the relevant data so search aircraft can be sent to the very small search area as soon as crewed and fueled.

Mi Tasol

Re: Conspiracy theories

AndyS

Fitting real time tracking that cannot be disabled will eliminate the inability to locate the wreckage and the ability of crew to disable the tracking. Both will save millions of dollars in search costs and more importantly, if there are survivors locate them before they die of exposure or injury

See the item on Spidertracks above

Mi Tasol

Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

Dr Syntax

It is only one EX colony that cannot spell and cannot tell if a meter is a measuring device or a measurement.

Most other EX colonies can spell correctly though in Aus the correct spelling of labour is used by everyone except a union based political party who consider spelling irrelevant.

Mi Tasol

SMART operators like the one I work for use a real time satellite based aircraft locator system like Spidertracks - http://www.spidertracks.com/. There are several other similar real time systems, Spider is what we use.

Radar as tracking is actually extremely limited as radar is line of sight only - so any hills or mountains between the radar and the aircraft makes the aircraft invisible. Also almost any aircraft not transmitting on its transponder is invisible to radar unless close to the radar.

Spider adds as little as US$2 an hour to the operating costs of each aircraft but sends multiple emails and text messages the moment an aircraft ceases to transmit to the satellite at the programmed interval. The emails and text messages contain the aircraft location, speed, altitude and heading at the time of the last transmission. In an emergency the priorities are Aviate first (keep the aircraft flying), Navigate second (head for an airport) and Communicate third. Operators can reduce the ping interval if they wish though that does increase the cost. Many operators in hostile search environments, such as mountainous terrain with tall timber, significantly reduce the ping time as that massively increases the chances of reaching the scene while injured people are alive.

Zero time and money wasted in searching large areas as, at worst, the crash location is within a small radius of the last transmission. At best it is a short distance in a straight line from last transmission. Spider can also transmit several pre-programmed messages just by pushing one button on its control panel. The pilots cannot afford to take time to make radio calls during an emergency but they can take the time to push a button.

The big airlines do not want this because it adds two dollars an hour to the operating cost and all search costs are borne by countries, not the operators.

Instead they prefer the existing ELTs that do not operate under water and which fail in 40% of all land accidents due to broken antennas or wiring and airlines strongly lobby governments to oppose ICAO mandating real time tracking.

Because Spider costs far less than fitting an ELT, fitting Spider or similar to new aircraft instead of the pre-GPS (and pre-satellite communications technology) ELTs would give operators about 15,000 hours of free tracking.

Blame Canada? $5.7m IBM IT deal balloons to $185m thanks to 'an open bag of money'

Mi Tasol

Re: Could have been worse.

Ho Hum - a re-run of Australia's Queensland Health debacle where big blue did the payroll.

And yes the next revelation in Canada will be thousands got overpaid as well, just like in Queensland.

Given the percentage of "blues" (foul ups) made by big blue I am surprised that any corporation or government gives them any work.

Snopes lawsuit latest: Judge orders disputed cash can flow to fact-checking site

Mi Tasol

Re: Snopes is a Damaged Brand....

Of course Snopes is politically biased. Here are two perfect examples

http://www.snopes.com/donald-trumps-mother-illegal-immigrant/ asks if Mary Anne MacLeod, President Donald Trump’s mother, illegally immigrate to the United States in 1929. The answer is that there is no evidence to support this story and the summary is UNLIKELY.

http://www.snopes.com/cnn-justine-damond/ asks "Did CNN Bury the Justine Damond Story Because She Was a White Woman Killed By a 'Black Islamic Immigrant From Somalia'?", a common claim from Trump supporters. The answer is NO - as anyone with the brains to check the CNN site can find for themselves, but Trump and his supporters will not do that because they refuse to face the truth.

Yep, definitely biased -- towards telling the truth. Something Trump, the inventor of fake news, "Obama not a US citizen", "I was Time man of the year in 1990" etc, hates

Another day, another British Airways systems screwup causes chaos

Mi Tasol

Re: I feel sorry

You were obviously not flying Qantas.

I was on a flight that was diverted by bad weather in the mid afternoon several years ago.

About an hour after the curfew at the original destination Skippy advised via a PA announcement that all passengers from our flight would be provided accommodation and to wait for your name to called.

At about 12:30am they started shutting down the "service" desk and were stunned when five other passengers and I walked up and said "and what about us". About 1am the co-worker passenger I was traveling with noticed an old lady, probably in her late 80s, sitting off to one side looking very confused and went and asked her if she was on our flight. She was.

Mi Tasol

Please stop insulting showers of shite.

They improve everything that benefits from fertilizer.

"BA management are a penny pinching, outsourcing, offshoring, miserly, disorganised pack of massively overpaid mental cripples" would be a more accurate statement.

Google and Facebook pledge to stop their ads reaching fake news websites

Mi Tasol

Re: Bit late now

More like 8 years ago when the inventor of fake news started peddling

- his crap about Obama was not a US citizen and

- was putting up phoney Time Magazine covers in his hotels, restaraunts and golf courses with his ugly smug mug on the covers.

- was mismanaging companies into bankruptcy and blaming everyone but himself (and pocketing millions from the bankruptcy)

Etc

Etc

Etc

Donald Trumped: Comey says Prez is a liar – and admits he's a leaker

Mi Tasol

My late father in law (a senior legal official) often said Lawyer is the olde Englishe spelling of liar.

Trump's lawyers interpretation of Comey's testimony shows the Donalds lawyer is the epitome of liars

Faking incontinence and other ways to scare off tech support scammers

Mi Tasol

Re: Quick solution

I agree if I am in a good mood.

But if they interupt me at the wrong time I tell them " bullshit ar***le because I don't have a computer you lying !@#$%^".

It is surprising how slow some are at hanging up at that.

Microsoft half-bricks Asus Windows 7 PCs with UEFI boot glitch

Mi Tasol

Re: Secure boot

The answer is simple - be like that California woman (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/27/woman_microsoft_windows_10_upgrades/) and take them to the small claims tribunal where they are prohibited from sending along a lawyer (but make sure their representative has no legal training because you can be fairly sure that they will try that trick if they think they can get away with it).

You are then on equal footing with one of their sales droid and in front of an judge who only has to decide on whether the "patch" was fit for purpose

PM resigns as Britain votes to leave EU

Mi Tasol

Re: We all know what happened

What it has come to is that a large percentage of the country are not necessarily racists, but complete idiots who bought the lies that the STAY campaigners unashamedly spun.

These were the same lies the anti EU campaigners told when Britain first joined the EU (or common market as it was then). They were lies then and they are lies now.

Did Lloyd's go to Europe? NO

Did any English banks or businesses move their head offices to Europe? NO

Etc Etc

Does the EU prohibit the making of old style English sausages, bananas over a certain size, etc, etc, from now being made or imported into the UK. YES

Staying in the EU will not address any of the challenges facing the UK in the 21st century.

BUT it will make it FAR easier in tackling them because the dead hands in Brussels will no longer be trying to balance 20 nations differing agendas. This means that decisions that now take years will only take months.

Those funny accented people that you up market Londoners never see, so cannot understand are the source of a percentage of our woes like a shortage of medical and educational facilities because the population has far outstripped the taxpayer base? They're not going back to where they came from, and no-one expects them to BUT others are not going keep flooding in.

This reduction will SLOWLY cause those here to assimilate more and cause many of the younger ones to adopt British ideals and, as the taxpayer base expands as a percentage of the population, allow for better education and medicine to again be provided.

So if that is what you voted against, you've been a mug.

Yes, many have got jobs and are a part of the economy that this vote has done its best to revive. No-one is going to require them to leave, any more than the millions of UK citizens in Europe are going to be forced back home.

And if you the EU has set up a fair society with progressive regulations you're an even bigger mug.

Mi Tasol

And so far no more than when Britain joined the EU

All the financial (self proclaimed) genius of that time also predicted that all those London banks and businesses would run off to Frankfurt and other places, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

Mi Tasol

Yep

Just like certain people refuse to admit that the current government in London was very deliberately elected by the majority of voters in the majority of electorates those with inflated opinions on their intelligence and personal value will not accept that the same applies to this referendum.

Its called democracy and if you hypocrites don't like it then stiff.

Mi Tasol

<<"Put Britain First" is not a terrorist cry.>>

Many Christians object to Muslims saying "god is great" but are quite happy to say hallelujah which effectively means the same thing (and even refers to the exact same God).

Just because one nutter says "Put Britain First" does not automatically make everyone who wants to put Britain first a nutter any more that Trump saying "America first" makes all Americans nutters

Wasps force two passenger jets into emergency landings

Mi Tasol

Re: Cunning Plan

Pratchett had a better name for the capital tooo.

Didyabringabeeralong is a far friendlier name than Cantberra (politicians leave out the t to fool the electorate into thinking that they are allowed to do some things.)

Mi Tasol

Re: Nutters

If you read the ATSB summary or report you will find the second take-off by Etihad was after the aircraft had reached V1.

Over simplifying, at that point the aircraft MUST lift off as the combination of weight and runway remaining makes that the only safe option. It is much much safer, even in this case, than a maximum energy abort that could end up off the end of the runway with brake temperatures well over 1500C.

The ATSB report is at http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2013/aair/ao-2013-212/.

Air France 447 was caused because Airbus have installed inadequate pitot heating on many of their products starting with the A310 and then, in at least one model, ignore feedback from multiple customers until the regulators find out and force them to act.

Clucking hell! Farcical free-range egg standard pecked apart by app

Mi Tasol

Re: Simple App

"It only needs to detect movement of the mouth" OR fingers/thumbs on a keyboard or screen

Aircraft now so automated pilots have forgotten how to fly

Mi Tasol

Re: Pilots will soon only be needed for taxiing

The technology for automated taxiing to the runway and back exists.

Likewise TCAS/ACAS (traffic collision avoidance system) has been around for over 30 years now and that prevents mid air collisions even if only one aircraft is fitted with it SO LONG AS THE PILOT DOES NOT OVER-RIDE/IGNORE IT (as has happened - The Überlingen mid-air collision, between a Boeing 757 and a Tupolev Tu-154 in 2002 as an example).

Do not forget that airliners in cruise have a closing speed of over 30km/20miles per minute so no human can see the approaching aircraft until seconds from impact. Without TCAS the accident rate would be much higher.

The USA mandated TCAS in 1993, many other countries in 2000 and some as late as 2014. Some countries call it ACAS because they like to be different, like Australia who will not even use the same definitions of Aerodrome/Airport or Aeroplane/Airplane (and other items) as the rest of the world!!

That said the excellent 20yr old FAA report on "The Interfaces Between Flightcrews and Modern Flight Deck Systems" raised many issues on automation and a review of the automation accidents up to that time showed that at that time Airbus had far too many accidents related to technology.

I am sure there are more modern reports from FAA on the same subject but I have not needed to see them (the joys of retirement).

Despite all this aircraft accidents kill less than 1000 people per year - compare that with your countries vehicle or medical error and smoking deaths

Uber Australia is broke: 'We don't pay tax because we don't generate revenue'

Mi Tasol

Re: It beggars belief...

I love your typical Australian Office of Legal Drafting (OLD) "definition" of Enterprise.

The OLD "definition" for Enterprise can best be thought of using the probable OLD "definition" of CAT - a cat is an animal that looks like a cat, moves like a cat, feeds like a cat and makes noises like a cat. A totally meaningless definition unless first you know what a cat is.

Quite simply Uber are claiming that they do not understand what a "cat" is on the grounds that the "definition" is whatever you decide to "think" it to be at any point in time.

Note that Definition is in quotes above because the OLD says that the Macquarie dictionary definition of definition is not the same as the rest of the worlds definition of definition which is why in the rest of the world Part 1 of the Civil Aviation Regulations/Rules is Definitions but in Australia it was Interpretations until the minister intervened - and even then OLD refused to use Definitions and settled for Dictionary - even though they were instructed by parliament to harmonize with the US FARs where part 1 is Definitions. This clearly indicates why the Australian aviation legislation is so totally out of step with the American and European legislation.

In the rest of the world "harmonized" regulations leads to the USA, Europe and almost every country except Australia using exactly the same single definition of Aerodrome/Airport. Last time I looked Australia had six definitions for Aerodrome and not one of those harmonized with, or were as clear as, the rest of the worlds standard.

Then again, in their opinion, the OLD's crowning glory was the 144 page (English language only - not multilingual) document detailing how to fill in the two page GST statement form.

Telstra offers six explanations for its dud Netflix rating

Mi Tasol

Re: Give'm a break

I was on Telstra for four months. EVERY account was wrong. The first by $240, second by $90, third was so complex with no opening balance, previous charges, amount paid, new fees, charges, credits and reimbursements that only the threat to send it to the Telecom ombudsman got it sorted. Cant remember error in fourth bill but paying $300 to get out of the !@#$%s contract was more than worth the time I would have wasted if I had stayed with them.

IBM tries to dodge $1bn sueball for deal won with 'ethical transgressions'

Mi Tasol

Moved to a higher pay scale no doubt

PALE, MALE AND STALE: Apple reveals it has just ONE black exec

Mi Tasol

Their results say they only hire the best, regardless of sex, race, color or creed.

Lets face it, if we are honest each race and sex has its strengths and weaknesses.

Who are the best running athletes - 90+% black

Who are the best fantasy writers - 90% women

etc

etc

etc

Australia's marriage equality vote should take place online

Mi Tasol

Re: Tell 'em they're dreaming

Please do not insult utter f**king morons.

These are 'australian public "service" monopoly morons' (hence the lower case a in australia).

Far less intelligent than 'utter f**king morons' but highly trained in Parkinsons Law and ultra skilled in the waste of public funds as well as being the worlds experts on time wasting (or, to use the dictionary word - "w*nking").

Every mygov and other aus-ps it-moron dreams of becoming an 'nbnco public "service" monopoly moron' because, to them, that is considered the peak of their "craft".

The nbnco spend millions of dollars advertising how fast they are and in sending emails to those who are trying to get a connection saying "To make the most of superfast NBN speeds, make sure your modem is NBN-ready" but CAN NOT say when they will actually be able to provide this "service".

I live over 350 km from any town with 100,000 or more residents. The local nbnco wireless internet tower is less than a km away and in sight of my house.

It was installed on 22 October 2014.

Almost ten months later it is still not working - just what you would expect from an australian public service monopoly, AND nbnco are STILL unable to say if and when it will become operational. A real world company would sack any management staff who willfully rejected/destroyed/lost 10 months revenue like that. No doubt once this tower is operational there will be absolutely no publicity because then nbnco may actually be forced to keep it going and collect income from it.

In Papua New Guinea the company I worked for occasionally flew (helicoptered) tele-comms towers into remote areas for TelikomPNG and Digicel PNG.

The PNG towers were kitset (not pre-built and pre-wired like the nbnco tower which went past my door on the back of a truck with two cranes in loose convoy) and they were assembled on site from small parts using nothing but manpower.

The hut containing the electronics and batteries, along with the solar power system etc, were also assembled on site from kitsets.

The typical time from dropping the crew and the kit-sets off to having a fully operational tower was TWO DAYS. The final test there was to use the tower to call for the helicopter to come pick them up and I never heard of a team having to go back and fix a tower unless it was damaged by storms, fires or anything except poor workmanship. See http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/03/04/nbn_connection_botched_good_luck_ombudsman_says/ for nbnco's performance.

(Yes - I do know that the antennas and electronics are different for wireless telephones and wireless internet but if everything is properly tested before it leaves the factory it will work as soon as it is assembled and aligned. The aviation and other industries have been using out of the box electronics in far tougher operational environments for over 75 years so this is not a recent development to anyone who is not an australian public "service" monopoly moron)

PS - do you know the real reason why they changed their name from NBN Co to nbnco?

Answer - Their top management could not remember how to find the shift key on their keyboards.

Australia Post goes a little bit grey with parcel forwarding service

Mi Tasol

Re: How much?

Let me put it this way

Land Rover headlight guards - 28 pounds to buy plus 15 pounds to ship versus AU$268 plus AU$30 to sip to Qld fi bought in Melbourne. Worse still these are made in Aus.

OR

LR Hand brake drum UK 17 pounds plus 25 pounds freight versus AU$155 plus $AU$35 to ship 300km.

OR

Polishing kit from China US$6.50 including postage or AUD29 plus $AU9.00 freight from Melbourne

Remote Queensland fibre hookup hopes dashed, for now

Mi Tasol

NBNCo is the worlds least competent telco

The local NBN Wireless internet tower is in sight of my house and was installed on 22 October 2014.

The prewired tower passed my house about 8 am and was up before midday.

Nine months plus later and it is still not working - just what you would expect from a public service monopoly.

The approved service suppliers all advise "Unfortunately we have no way of knowing when the tower construction will be finish as NBN do not provide or publicize any Defined ETA or timeframes for any of their NBN installations." or words to the same effect

In Papua New Guinea the company I worked for occasionally helicoptered comms towers to remote areas for TelikomPNG and Digicel PNG.

The towers were kitset (not prebuilt and prewired) and were assembled on site using nothing but manpower.

The hut containing the electronics and batteries, along with the solar power system etc were also assembled on site from kitsets.

Typical time from dropping the crew and kit off to having a fully operational tower was TWO DAYS. The final test was to call for the helicopter to come pick them up

NBNCo - the world most inefficient telecom (as you would expect of a public service monopoly)

How much of one year's Californian energy use would wipe out the drought?

Mi Tasol

Re: Not going to happen

Penn and Teller went to an "environmental" talkfest and managed to get the head of a major green organisation to sign a petition against Di-Hydrogen Oxide which is, you guessed it, water. Track down their season one episode "Environmental-Hysteria" and see for yourself. It is track 3 on CD 3 if you can get that.

When I lived in CA in the early 70s there was a proposal to use heat exchangers in the cooling systems of offshore nuclear powerplants to create massive quantities of fresh water for cities and agriculture but that was until the loonies said no.

How a Cali court ruling could force a complete rethink of search results

Mi Tasol

Re: Irritating

You got it in one.

I now use Yahoo Advanced Web Search. Takes a few seconds longer to fill in but does not respond with 50 pages of irrelevant crap so much much faster in the long run

Second choice is DuckDuckGo

Last two choices are Bing and Google

We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror

Mi Tasol
Facepalm

Re: Is it possible that in going from 8 to 10 they've skipped the decent release?

The reason for not having a Windows NEIN is obvious.

Think of all the fun the comedians could have had with Colonel Klink and Schultz saying NEIN, NEIN, NEIN Microsoft.

New nbnTM roadmap reveals HFC tests to start in Q4

Mi Tasol

Re: Here we go again...

That makes you only slightly worse off than I am.

My Queensland house is in an area that was theoretically going to get NBN wireless two months ago. We currently have NBN Satellite that on a cloudy day provides a snails pace 0.026Mbps download and 0.012Mbps upload according to my ScanmySpeed.com screenshot. That is less than half the speed of an ancient 56k modem for downloads and less than a quarter for uploads. "Good on ya NBN"

On September 28 last year we watched the new NBN wireless tower and three cranes go past our front door TWICE over about a one hour period.

On the second time for each vehicle, as they backed up to a place they could turn around, we went out to ask where they were headed (see below for reason) and then we gave them directions on how to get to the site they needed on Herbeners Road (about 800 metres away as the crow flies).

Soon after midday the tower was up and visible from my place.

Because NBN refused to say when it would be operational and their web site showed that Service Providers had not been contracted I eventually wrote to the minister in January.

According to his reply all would be finished in May.

We are now in July and the Service Providers have been announced but even they cannot say when the service will be operational.

To put this in perspective I work (fly in fly out) in Papua New Guinea and the company I work for has occasionally transported communication towers and facilities into extremely remote areas for TelekomPNG and Digicell. The installation staff for both organisations are nationals, mainly with only a year 8 education and they must do a complete solar power installation as well as the communications installation.

THE PAPUA NEW GUINEANS NORMALLY HAVE THEIR TOWERS OPERATIONAL WITHIN 48 HOURS OF THE TOWER AND STAFF BEING HELICOPTERED IN. That is because skilled staff with skilled management can do things efficiently.

NBN with its "better educated" staff have so far taken over NINE MONTHS, probably a world record for time wasting and incompetence.

The INITIAL reason all the trucks came past our place is because they were using GPS maps provided by Telstra subsidiary Sensis. Because we are more than 100km from the state capital CBD Sensis do not give a **** about providing accurate maps.

According to their maps our road connects directly into Herbeners Rd when in fact it stops at the creek 200 metres past us.

The reason that the second third and fourth vehicles came past our place is that not only is NBNCo not intelligent enough to provide the contractors with accurate maps but its contractors are not smart enough to use their CB radios to call, or cell phones to text, the other drivers on the job with the correct information.

The maps are so bad locally that Wagonwheel Court still does not even show. It is only 11 years old so I guess that we are being over critical of Telstra and its subsidiaries.

Therefore it does not matter if your place is on the roadmap because the roadmap is just a PR exercise put out by a pack of liars for use by poLIARticians (and probably with poliarticians telling them what to put on the roadmap).

Botched NBN installs leave folks with no internet, or recourse

Mi Tasol

Re: I've dealt with the TIO before.

I have dealt with TIO five times regarding the one Telstra install -

it was a month late,

Telstra tried to charge $300 for a connection their own web site said would cost $60,

after they promised to give me a $240 credit it was only $150,

they totally balls up the next bill so that not even the TIO could decipher it

when I changed provider because of their dishonesty they wanted to charge me a $300 cancellation fee.

In every case within half an hour of talking to TIO Telstra were on the phone grovelling.

TELSTRA = Tell Everyone Lies & Screw Totally Resident Australians

Users should PAY for their piracy says Turnbull

Mi Tasol

Re: Turnbull needs to pay ME...

LPL may describe them however their abbreviation is short for the Asinine Liberal Party.

If you pronounce ALP it sums up what the electorate need when either is in power - (H)ALP

Unfortunately the Green(about the gill)s, the PUPpys and other options stink just as bad.

I wish Aus had India's law that requires ballot papers to have "None of the Above" as an option so I could show my disgust better than just putting the siamese twins last.

Surprise! Government mega-infrastructure project cocked up

Mi Tasol

"No clear operating instructions? is not correct

To say there were "No clear operating instructions? is not correct.

To say there were "No PUBLICLY REVEALED clear operating instructions" would be correct.

The Labor governments secret instructions were to create a modern version of the late 60s Telecom. A massively overstaffed MONOPOLY organization with no concept of service or inclination to actually achieve anything on time or on budget, featherbedding on a grand scale, etc. and no need to be efficient. The perfect place for people who could not get a job in the real world.

In Telecom days you usually had to wait at least 6 weeks for a "new" connection (in the city), it cost a fortune to install a new phone and before Optus arrived every local phone call cost you 30 cents.

Ten years later Telecom had shed over 75,000 staff, completely new connections could be done within 48 hours and the cost of a local call had dropped to 18 cents. Now it is even cheaper.

Like Telecom, NBN is a monopoly that takes weeks to make a connection and months to answer a simple question like " approximately when will the new wireless tower currently being built 2 km away be operational" (one reply that avoids the question but no answer since April). A recent newspaper report shows that a ludicrous percentage of connections are substandard (over 25%) and that rectification is woefully slow - two other Telecon "standards".

I am currently on the NBN satellite "service" and that even times out fairly regularly on gmails "slow connection" option.

Indian climate boffins: Himalayan glaciers are OK, thanks

Mi Tasol

Re: Gravy train

In October 1997 the headlines in my local News Ltd newspaper were that the world would run out of oil by 1997.

Now the same sort of fear mongering "scientists" are saying that glaciers and ice caps melting now will cause the sea to rise at some distant time in the future, but can not say where all this water will hide in the mean time.

They also conveniently forget that when ice melts it shrinks and ignore the fact that during the Northern winter there is snow and ice on the ground that can be similar in volume to the Antarctic ice yet the sea level changes not one mm.

Similar "scientists" are now claiming that during the massive Australian floods of 2010 the sea level went down. Those of us who live in coastal Australia know there were actually record peak tides.

Man definitely causes local warming as shown so graphically by landsat heat photos but global warming is a farce.

Recently Sydney broke a 150 year old hgh temperature record. Alarmists say proof of global warming. Realists say heat island effect is proven to locally increase temperatures up to 6 degrees and having Sydney's thermometer close to the exhaust from an underground carpark makes the readings unreliable anyway.