Posts by David_H

"movement strategy"

Hopefully it involves the use of a toilet!

You can get fibre in the country ...

... just the same as you can in the town or city; if you can sign up enough people to get a commercial company interested. The only problem is that it's bloody hard work! It took me over 2 years to get 1/3rd of the population signed up in my Parish and 2 other adjacent ones. But that meant that a commercial company could see the benefit and installed 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-premises to the 5 villages. And we get charged around the same, £45, for 100Mb (traffic shaped from full stream) as we did for <1Mbps with BT. (The full 1Gbps comes in at around £75pcm). Most of us have transferred out landline numbers to VOIP so that we can ditch BT completely!

So how to use that bandwidth. From my experience... Browsing is still limited by the far end ability to serve content, downloading is very fast, multi-player gaming is very responsive, Skype etc. (for talking to children at Uni) is limited by their terrible speeds, catch-up TV works as expected, remote access to my work PC over VPN is exactly the same as sitting at my work desk. I originally had 200Mbps, but I've moved down to 100Mbps and I've not noticed any difference (except with very large downloads).

Now I'm trying to get mobile phone coverage for our patch of (not very) rural Northamptonshire! (Without everyone having to buy a £70 Femtocell.)

"Our dodgy translation tech quotes"

Don't rely on it! Is that what kid did?

Old IOT systems

@Chris G

18 years ago I worked for a very small company; CPSL, Leicestershire, UK and we had our offices linked up with every bit of IOT we could think of at the time.

I could use a button keyfob to unlock the door. I would get a personalised verbal greeting, the lights (if required) would turn on up to my office and the voice system would tell me of any calendar items I had for that day (using the speakers along my route). By the time I reached my office, my PC would have booted up (usually!), and if required my curtains would have opened.

Remote control via SMS was clunky, but we could receive photo's from the camera's in the rooms if we used a PC. Heating, coffee machine, etc. were all controlled via PC and the light fittings would report their efficiency. We even had a system for dimming the lights via voice control (very Star Trek).

Could we sell it to anyone? Not a chance! It was way to early in the curve, and I'm sure that the current equipment is still not mature enough (especially when it comes to security).

The only systems I can remember selling were 'walking' lights in the skirting boards of hotel corridors to show the routes appropriate emergency exits, wireless connected fluorescent lights in underground carparks that would tell the maintenance people when a light was about to fail, and a system for automatically monitoring the well being of cats and dogs via fresh urine chemistry (think shower trays, not catheters).

Out

The Common Market was a good idea. In general just about everything else from the EU and predecessors is bad for the UK. Political Correctness is stopping us from having a proper debate.

My local MP was an MEP for 10 years, so he should know it inside out. http://www.heatonharris.com/news/10-brexit-myths-debunked

A (long) article on how and why the EU is broken

http://hurryupharry.org/2016/06/20/why-i-am-voting-leave-by-professor-alan-johnson

and from that:

"As Jan Zielonka, Professor of European Politics at the University of Oxford puts it – in the essential book Is the EU Doomed? – ‘the EU has turned into an embarrassment … a symbol of austerity and conflict’ and despite ‘obtaining ever more powers at the expense of national parliaments and governments’ when the 2008 crash hit ‘proved unable to cope’."

Early adopter

I was an early enough adopter to meet Matthew at our planning stage and he seemed as sound as a pound.

As with many companies with 'stratospheric' growth, there have been 'growing pains'.

In our case, our 5 village installation is over a year late in completion, whereas other recent villages have been finished within 6 weeks.

Although they are a little more pricey that BT or other traditional suppliers for the broadband, the service has been second to none (I'm taking a 200Mbps slice of the 1Gbps offering). When I add on the saving from getting rid of BT line rental and going to IP phone, I think that it is value for money.

Happy customer (worth the wait)

Do it yourself....

BT twice refused to update us under the Northants CC funding scheme despite 3 years of campaigning (including talking to the BT Area Manager on multiple occasions) by myself on behalf of the local cluster of villages.

In the end we had to get 30% of the premises in the 4 villages to sign up to secure the services of a commercial company and now have a symmetrical 1000Mbps service from Gigaclear.

Most people take the (bandwidth limited to 55Mbps, but otherwise unfettered) symmetrical '50Mbps' service + IP telephone and pay about the same as before with BT.

It was a lot of hard work - mostly talking to people to allay fears over change and educate them on the options - over a year or so. But boy, has it been worth it!

If a commercial company can install the entire FTTP infrastructure from scratch, why can’t BT with government funding even achieve FTTC?

Pop charts

Long ago I looked after the terminals used to gather the UK record charts (while they were still independently compiled). The barcode wands were regularly returned dented from being used as drum sticks, the integrated keyboards (Epson PX4's) often smelt of spilt Coca-Cola and dope, but the worst was one that "had just stopped working."

Brown a sticky, with an ooze of semi-liquid coming from the air vents. For some reason (!) I was suspicious and rang the shop. The answer machine message said "closed due to the flood from the sewer!"

It has to happen...

... because they (all sides I believe) are planning to turn off the TETRA network used by the emergency services and go over to 4G coverage.

I can just image the talk in the den of the educated criminals. "There's no mobile coverage in this village, so we can do as much damage as we like and hide when the Rozzers eventually turn up. They won't be able to talk to each other as there's no phone coverage, so they won't be able to search properly, or talk to base to get the helicopter, and we'll be able to slip away undiscovered. Perhaps we can light a few fires as well and injure a few people with impunity. All we have to do is cut the dangly telephone wire out of the village."

Deactivated

When you're facing down the barrel are you going to ask if it's deactivated?

It's just as potent deactivated as not!

However, don't shoot the messenger, t'internet isn't the problem here, it's the crims!

Errr... Just discovered?

It has been the detector of choice for hydrologists studying the flows of cave water for years. We drop the optical brighteners in a stream in a cave and have tampons at all the possible outlets. We replace the 'sensors' at regular periods to find out which is the outflow and how long it took for the water to flow through (an indication of how much of the route has air spaces). - so many puns!

100 hours?

I charge my Samsung Galaxy 3S every second Friday, when it gets down to about 15% life left. 14 days rather than 4!

How? I use it as a phone and SMS device, and turn off all the other power hungry crud.

OK - I'm an atypical user for someone who frequents this site, but how much of the other stuff do you really need?

And the other way round

In a couple of months our local villages will be getting 1Gbps optical broadband (sub limited to provide differentiated packages). The shaping works at 55Mbps shaped for the 50Mbps service, 110Mbps shaped for the 100Mbps service, etc.

As it's all optical and the shaping is at quoted service + 10% levels we should always get more than what we are paying for. The small company (Gigaclear) supplying it was recently made to change all it's advertising material to say "up to" as OFCOM can't understand the technology at all and argued that the company might not be able to supply what it claims.

Commercial viability

I know from current personal experience that in my rural (and aged) area about 60% of households have computers and of them less than 40% will pay a reasonable amount (£43 for unlimited 50Mbps including telephone) for a reliable service. (The local academy places homework on their servers. It often takes some children 20-30 minutes to download Powerpoint format questions and then 2 hours to upload the answers. Try doing that with 3 or 4 pieces of homework and get up for school the next day!)

A company is willing to provide us with FTTP if we can get 30% of premises to sign up to 12 month contracts, but we languish at 24%. (The take up rate of households with children in education is almost 100%!)

It's very frustrating for the 1/4 of the village getting less than 500Kbps, but the economics don't stack up without more subscriptions.

Fine

Shouldn't it be paid to the victims rather than to the government?

Not all can opt out

As a Parish Councillor my details have to appear on the Open Register, and I guess that it's the same for anyone else in public office. Up until now, I've not been bothered with too much junk mail (I am signed up to both the Mail Preference Service and the Royal Mail door-to-door opt out), but this has me slightly concerned that I'll suddenly be inundated. If there's too much junk mail as a result of this, I'll just stop being a public minded individual and stop being a Parish Councillor so that I can come off the Open Register.

Nothing new - move on

Most parts of the world have in the past, or still are, using "cow cakes" for cooking. It's certainly not uncommon for them to be 'cut' with other sorts of 'cake'.

Yet another case of more money than sense.

Sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge to use the "eat this" icon!

We are the only people that care because ...

The readers of The Register are the only people who can actually understand how the Bombe works.

The management just walk in an say "Ah, that looks pretty!"

Innovation?

We had an automated office, with everything from voice controlled flourescent lighting, to DECT based control, to local radio networks linking lights, heating, curtains, music, video cameras, etc. all in the mid 1990's. Although in those days remote access was via IP or text messages on your phone. If you can find it on a way-back machine the company was CPSL (Creative Products and Systems Ltd, in Lutterworth UK) and the product range DSS (Distributed Smart System). The graphical user interface had all the knobs, LED's etc. that you would expect and was based on the earlier Signal Centre product (a fore runner of Lab View)

Who can claim any of this is new and patentable?

Hmm...

There seems to be an element of bull in this .....

Also worth mentioning that they are designed to swim a lot further than the human variety.

My coat's the one with a Young Farmers Mag in the pocket!