Posts by Steve 366 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2007
Bad enough that I have a 1hour connection in LHR T5 on Sunday, if these guys think that I'm going to give up my only chance to avoid 10 hours in a middle seat by not checking in online on Saturday they can think again. I've already done my bit for Canada, I put maple syrup on my porridge this morning. What more do they want?
The reason many people shout into their mobiles is because *they* can't hear the caller (external noise, or low volume from the caller) and so they assume (subconsciously) that their caller can't hear them. Perhaps the solution is to ensure that the audio level from the on-board picocell and controller is several dB louder than standard? That way when people hear a loud voice in their ear, they'll not feel the need to shout back?
Oh yes, and bill the calls at $10/minute send and receive, but with SMS free. That will be fine for emergencies, but will stop the 30-minute yakkers, or at least confine them to First class with the others who can afford to pay that for a phone call. Works for the seatback phones.
According to NASA: "Changing the amount of energy Apophis absorbs by half a percent as late as 2018 - for example by covering a 40 x 40 meter (130 x 130 foot) patch with lightweight reflective materials (an 8 kg payload) - can change its position in 2036 by a minimum of one Earth radius."
2036 is two sunspot cycles away. Are they really sure that the natural variation of the Sun over that time is less than the effect of a 1600m² shiny patch?
The Mitsubishi Galant is a US-made car, not on sale in Europe.
As always it is important to compare more than just name versus price. I've rented mid-range cars, i.e. Fords in the US, and they do not compare to their similarly-named EU models, being much more cheaply finished with hard plastics and far less in the way of equipment. Often the same name is used for a totally different car, OEMed from a totally different manufacturer!
"If you buy stuff from Amazon in the EU, they charge you the VAT rate of the country it is shipped too, not where you bought it."
Depends.
If a company has a trading presence in the destination country then it charges at the rate of VAT for that country, else it charges at the rate in the supplying country.
This means that someone in France ordering a book from Amazon UK will pay 5.5% VAT (French rate for books) instead of 0% (UK rate), because Amazon.fr exists. If that person were to order from, say, Maplin Electronics, which does not operate in France, they would be charged at UK VAT rate (17.5% for electronics) instead of the French 19.6%.
There are similarities with the NY situation. A few years ago such retailers were not required to charge VAT if they shipped abroad, and it was the duty of the recipient to declare the purchase and pay local taxes. No-one did, of course, hence the change to require the supplier to collect at either source or destination rates, so the VAT is always paid.
"If you were a longbowman and the French captured you, they would kill you. Horribly. There was no percentage in merely mutilating you and then releasing you into the wild."
I'm not so sure. Kill a hundred archers and you have a pile of stinking corpses to get rid of. Keep them prisoner and you have to feed them. Mutilating them so they're ineffective troops and then releasing them dumps the problem on your enemy, who has to feed useless mouths and deal with the resulting morale issues in the surviving ranks as well.
I've absolutely no idea if the story is true, but in terms of psychological warfare it makes some sense.
From: http://www.etsi.org/WebSite/document/Technologies/ETSI-WP4_GSM_onboard.pdf
---
"The purpose of the NCU is to stop terminals onboard from connecting to ground networks. To ensure this, it raises the RF noise floor inside the cabin to a level that effectively covers the signals from the ground base stations. The signal generated by the NCU is a band-limited white noise and, in the European configuration, it will blanket the following bands:
• GSM- and WCDMA/UMTS-900 downlink (921 – 960 MHz)
• GSM- and WCDMA/UMTS-1800 downlink (1805 – 1880 MHz)
• UMTS UTRA-FDD 2GHz downlink (2110 – 2170 MHz)
• CDMA-450/FLASH-OFDM downlink (460 – 470 MHz)
The unit will not transmit below 3000m. The power level of its emissions will depend on the frequency band and on the altitude (increased altitude means decreased signal strength received in the aircraft from terrestrial networks).
---
i.e. it will essentially jam all ground-based signals so the phone only sees the arm-and-a-leg priced onboard network.
We can only hope that a combination of extortionate rates and air-rage threats will kill this at birth.
Out to the West, another small department was running for years on a proprietary UU1.0 platform dating from the 1950s. Uncoordinated attempts to introduce a free open-source model there resulted in a major system crash, and ultimately the client-server approach was replaced by a centralized processing unit, running Lab71 and directly controlling several remote peripheral devices.
That allowed the system to be brought back up, but coredumps were frequent, especially when isolated open source applications attempted to use resources not assigned to them. Centralized maintenance costs were also high, and outsourcing was proposed on several occasions.
Upgrades over the years to Con79 and NuLab97 changed little, but a move to hypervisor-based virtualization in the late 90s showed promise, permitting multiple applications to run on a single system within older proprietary environments. This dramatically reduced the incidence of coredumps and greatly increased overall system stability. Concerns over the security of interprocess communications, and the possible expansion of virtual environments into the kernel, resulted in users downgrading one virtual enviroment from experimental Beta UU2.0 software back to a stable but limited and less functional version of DUP1.1. Another environment running Open/IRA3.0 is still suspected of containing proprietary elements, although users are reported as being fairly happy with current performance levels.
The system today is reasonably stable, and maintenance costs have been slashed substantially. It is clear that, for the majority of users, a stable and familiar platform with low support costs is more important than religious adoption of proprietary or opensource models. Many users have little or no interest in the overall operating system, being concerned primarily with questions of local resources, but whether this view survives the next five-yearly upgrade cycle, only time will tell.
A quick check on Amazon shows both Sony and Blaupunkt DAB car radios. My wife's Opel has a connector for the official DAB adaptor.
Bummer that here in France DAB was short-range L-band, limited to a couple of pockets around Paris and Lyon and so never took off. If I were back in the UK I'd not buy a car radio without it.
...in Shell who aren't IT-staffers. but who know something about how the systems work. Now every time something goes wrong (printer won't print, network glitch) they'll have the choice between logging a support call and twiddling their thumbs while some prat takes 4 hours to call them and then tells them to reboot their system and see if it helps, or just fixing it themselves.
Pretty soon everyone around them will know that "it's much quicker just to ask Fred". Meanwhile the metrics for the outsourcing folks look great, because the number of support calls goes down, so management give themselves a pat on the back, and send out memos reminding people not to "interfere" with the systems themselves, because they have great outsourced IT staff to do that.
Eventually Fred gets a smack on the head because his productivity is down, since he's spending half of every week fixing all the IT problems. Either he stops, and his co-workers get irritated at his lack of helpfulness, or he quits due to overwork.
In the past he would have been hired by the outsource outfit at twice the salary, but since by now they've offshored everything to Timbuctoo that won't work. By the time the management realize their mistake, usually just as they start an upgrade cycle, it's too late to repair the system or the relationship with whatever staff are left...
> why did everything have to be all go from day one? why could they not
> start with a small number of flights and slowly ramp up over time?
Heathrow is a hub. Just putting a few flights in T5 would have meant that all the connecting passengers to/from other flights would have had to be bussed between T5 and T1/2/3/4. That wouldn't have improved things...
What worries me is that T5 is supposed to have enough future capacity for years to come, and if it falls over when it isn't even at 100% of today's capacity what hope is there for 2010 and beyond?
The real pity is that for economy transatlantic flight, BA still offers better service than alternatives like UA/LH/AF, but if Heathrobinson Airport can't cope then that won't matter. maybe the "open skies" agreement will mean that BA can fly from Amsterdam instead?
...before they start bussing people back to T4.
It could be worse. Remember the Denver airport baggage fiasco? At least T5 hasn't eaten anyone. Yet.
Denver works OK now, even if it does take half an hour to get from the freeway exit to the terminal, and that's only because they built the whole place in the middle of nowhere.
Even with micro-power picocells on board, I still want to know how they plan on stopping people using the "Select Network" option of their phone to bypass that and connect directly to a ground-based cell, at much higher power outputs from the handset, to avoid the undoubtedly extortionate inflight roaming change that will be levied.
Anyone?
Shouldn't surprise you. NASA's record on using these new-fangled metric units with spacecraft isn't exactly stellar...
It is an agency from the country where far too many supposedly educated engineers think that GMT always means "the time in London", and hence miss
many meetings during the summer...
Handheld TVs have been around since the days of Clive Sinclair, and Casio LCD ones are as cheap as MP3 players.
Do any of you know anyone who has one?
No, nor do I. Apart from an apparent desire to watch Sky News presenters getting overexcited over the increasing bodycount next time some tw@t jumps a red signal, what makes the phone companies think this will be a success? It's just another case of the technology driving the product, and it will be just as expensive a flop as usually happens in such cases.
Before getting heated about zero-watt standby, perhaps the EU would like to consider the energy cost of their monthly travelling circus, moving the entire parliament (300MEPs, thousands of trunks of papers) from Brussels to Strasbourg and back 12 times a year.
Of course that's *politically* sensitive, and so *much* more important than saving the planet.
May I suggest people add themselves to the 1.25m who have signed the One Seat petition, at http://www.oneseat.eu/
I have my desk phone diverted to my mobile. My colleagues and friends in various time zones know that if I can't take their call, I won't. Anyone who calls and doesn't leave a message is ignored. I have a special arangement with my wife for urgent calls. That's about as KISS as I can make it.
If I understand this, Phorm and the ISP claim they they aren't compromising personal data because they don't keep it. Instead they store it in a cookie on your browser, so you're keeping it.
So what's to stop some less scrupulous websites from tracking your IP address, etc. and the contents of your Phorm cookie, and using the data Phorm collect to build up a profile of you that *does* identify you?
I like the post office analogy. This is just like employing someone in the sorting office to open every letter, read the contents to see what you're talking about, and pop in a couple of advertising flyers that 'might be of interest' before reasealing the envelope and sending it on. Personal data may only reside in memory and never be stored, but how many people would tolerate it anyway? Doesn't interfering with the Royal Mail still carry a length jail sentence? What a pity BT aren't still "part of the Post Office'...
One of the biggest gripes I have with DAB is that only the UK signed up for the sensible band, Band III, which makes it usable with small aerials, and in a car. It flopped in France because they chose L-band, and the trials around Paris and Lyon failed due in part to to lack of coverage.
With few countries using it, the problems of economies of scale will always come up.
Maybe the digital AM route is the way to go, leaving Band II for decent quality FM? Now if only I could still get Radio 4 while driving across Europe...
Aren't there some 555 numbers which are 'real', directory enquiries or somesuch?
The UK equivalents can be found on the OfCom website at
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/ioi/numbers/num_drama "Telephone Numbers for drama purposes". Interesting list, looks like all dramatic phone calls in N. Ireland are made to Belfast :)
How were they dishonest? Did they claim they were only waiting for a bus? Or did the householder complain they they had refused to pay when asked?
I've just realised that I've been dishonestly enjoying the view of the flowers in my neighbour's garden. I even absorbed reflected coloured visual radiation from them for hours, without ever asking permission. Will I have to go to jail now?
in Paying for content you offer three spurious and unworkable options:
(1) Content could be supported entirely by advertising or product placement.
No, it couldn't, that's exactly the spurious theory that burst the first internet bubble. Advertising money doesn't grow on trees, it is finite and comes from the selling price of the advertised product. If Coca Cola increase their advertising spend to support sales of some content they will eventually reach a situation where people buy Pepsi instead because it's cheaper, and/or people install advert blockers to get the content without the ads, which is equally disastrous in commercial terms.
(2) Content could get very cheap to produce.
So cheap, in fact, that no artists can make a living out of it, and end up flipping burgers in MacD. Result: no more content.
(3) We could levy a statutory fee on broadband connections,
So people like me, who have zero interest in downloading music or films have to pay for the costs of other people's entertainment? No thanks.
If *you* want content, *you* pay for it. You don't pay for it, you don't get it, or you go to jail. Simple.
Aren't nicknamed "coffins on wheels" for nothing... The only thing more frightening than seeing one of those rolling down a main road flat out at 90kph is knowing that the only reason the driver is driving one is that (s)he hasn't got a licence for a real car!
As to prices, Renault's Romanian subsidiary Dacia sells the Logan for €8000 in France, which is about £5000, so £3000 for a compressed-air toycar isn't impossible. More of an issue is how many extra kilos the mandatory safety features will add.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
