Posts by Danny Roberts

Atlantis Hubble mission set for 12 May

Two Shuttle launches in 3 days! Count me in!

It's our anniversary on the 13th May, now to persuade SWMBO that we're going to Florida on holiday!

Virgin Media ads throttled by peak time bandwidth squeeze

Virgin Media have no excuse!

As far as I can see, Virgin should not be allowed to use any sort of qualifier in their advertising or contracts. Yes, ADSL providers have an 'up to' clause in their advertising as they do not know how far you live from the exchange and there is very little they can do about the quality of the line between the house and the exchange. This includes all the 'unbundled' lines.

Virgin, on the other hand, have complete control of their network, up to and including the line into the house. Cable speeds do not depend on distance from the cabinet.

As an aside, after complaining to Virgin about atrocious download speeds, they sent me two engineers to replace the modem, completely disregarding the fact that I could get 18Mbit/sec in the middle of the night. The third engineer turned up and admitted that the lousy speeds were purely due to oversubscription.

Vauxhall launches virtual backseat driver

@Solomon Grundy

--Does this mean that the thing will be warning me every time I change lanes as I am weaving in and out of D.C. traffic?--

Probably not if you are indicating ;-)

Having said that, I agree this is a daft idea. If it doesn't fly, I don't care!

New Microgeneration report - what it actually says

@Gary Myers

Yep, well said that man!

Don't forget in many places in the UK, the sea also flows into the rivers. When I was in Uni (about 1996!), I saw the proposal for the Severn Barrage. At the time it was predicted that it could generate 7% of the electrical power required for England & Wales. (Sorry Scotland.). I beleive that's dropped to around 5% now but that's still a big chunk of energy that is totally renewable.

Of course there is the problem that twice each day it stops generating power and that does have to be covered by stations that can start and stop fairly quickly, but we have those already.

Paris 'cos I haven't used her (icon) yet!

Three Gorges Dam an 'environmental catastrophe'

Centralised Power but no Centralised Knowledge.

****** Centralised Power but no Centralised Knowledge.******

Sounds like the problem with just about any UK Gov IT project!

What's 77.1 x 850? Don't ask Excel 2007

Common Sense?

******850 shares of BNP Paribas @ €77.10 = €100,000********

Not having a go at the poster above, but does demonstrate my point: I was always taught to at least have an 'idea' of what the result should be. The amount of times I have seen people tap numbers into a calculator, mistype one and believe the result implicitly! "The calculator says so, so it must be true!".

**********The first thing we were taught, and taught, and taught again and again - don't trust the software unless you know the logic.**********

Do you code all your software packages yourself, or only use Open Source and then go through all the code yourself? At some point, you have to believe what a software package tells you, but you also have to use your common sense.

Apple iPhone

WM6

I could not live without the two features that the iPhone is missing, A2DP and HSDPA.

I'll admit, WM5 is clunky but WM6 is a big improvement over WM5, internet connection sharing (using the phone as a modem) is a doddle, voice command now works properly through my stereo BT headset and because my phone isn't a nice shiny iPhone, I'm not that upset that after about a year of (not very careful) use, it's looking a bit worse for wear.

I updated my T-Mobile Vario II to a generic HTC WM6 image. Now I know I won't get any support from T-mobile now but at least they aren't actively attempting to destroy my phone!

See: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6371&tag=nl.e622

Spammers add a new dimension to junk mail

GMail

OK, not a corporate solution but all my email is routed through GMail. It seems by far and away the best filtering I've seen once it's had a bit of training from the user.

My parents wanted me to set them up a new email account due to the amount of spa they get. I only did it on the premise that they train the filter effectively. I receive about 200emails a day, maybe 12 or so that I want. and I only ever receive 12 or so in my POP3 inbox. What is Google doing right that many other systems (read, ISP's) can't