I have BT infinity option 2 (Fibre to Cabinet): - Unlimited bandwidth - No throttling - 80mbit download / 40mbit up, 24/7
Even BT at their most optimistic don't pretend to offer that. BT Infinity 2 offers up to 76 Mb/s downstream and up to 20 Mb/s upstream. I think you're confusing your upload speed with the download speed of BT Infinity 1.
BT has more precise data, but history tells us that idiots ruin it for everyone.
[snip rant]
You're using an argument technique known as "putting up a straw man". We're discussing the tendency of BT to upgrade exchanges long before they do the corresponding cabinets (which they do), so you raise an imagined case of one person behaving unreasonably because, although his local cabinets have been upgraded, he can't get service.
Imagine the work which would have been involved if what you are saying was true. They'd have had to dig underground ducting in to everybody's garden. How did they do it without us noticing?
You are right in saying that the bulk wiring - the connections which feed the telegraph poles - are now pretty much all underground. There aren't the masses of overhead wires which there were when I was a boy. The final connection to the houses though for the most part remain unchanged. Yes, new builds are all done using underground connections, but most houses are not new builds.
It would be phenomenally expensive to go around replacing all the final connections with underground ones. They haven't done it, and they aren't going to unless there's a separate reason to do it. Indeed, the poles in our road were all replaced recently, in quite an impressive operation. They carry both power and telephone connections to the houses. To replace a pole they had to disconnect everything at the top, temporarily support all the connections with a crane/platform thing, remove the old pole, fit a new pole, and then re-attach everything to the new pole. Now why would they do that if the connections were no longer in use, or even if they had any plans ever to put them underground?
they generally don't bother properly disposing of the telegraph poles: they just let them fall down.
ROFL. Can you imagine the trouble they'd get into if they did that? The ambulance chasers would have a field day.
Try this - go to Google Maps, pick a residential location at random and then drop in to Streetview. Unless you've picked a very recent housing estate, you will find you can see lots and lots of telegraph poles.
It might be true to say that new developments don't now have telegraph poles, but the vast majority of the UK still does.
My local telephone exchange has been enabled for fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) for a year and a half
The street cabinet my line connects to has not been upgraded.
This seems to be a common problem. It was nearly three years from when they upgraded our exchange to when they did the cabinets. For the interim period you're in the weird position where querying the rollout information tells you that your exchange is in a state of "AO" (Accepting Orders), but if you try to order it you're told you can't have it. You can't get any projected date when it will be available, because if you go to the "When will FTTC be available?" pages you're told your exchange is already enabled.
I suspect it's a marketing thing - they do the exchange so they can claim that they've got a certain percentage of the country covered, then do the cabinets much later.
That said, having now got FTTC (not from BT obviously) it is very nice. Solid 40 Mb/s (which you won't get if you go with one of these ISPs who advertise stupidly cheap service) is suitably nippy. 80 Mb/s is an option, but probably not worth it unless you have some very unusual requirements.
I am reminded of an article I read a few years ago about some anniversary of the invention of the ATM. The American credited with inventing it, explaining how he did it, said he'd seen one in London, and so came home and invented it.
You could take care of some of the daytime failures with solar (and evening if you get some batteries).
Be aware that for a solar installation feeding power into the grid, you are generally required to have a control system which immediately shuts down your solar generation if the power grid fails. This is for safety reasons (chaps working on the line don't want to find there are still unexpected volts there after they've shut off the supply) and because your system will start to go blue in the face very quickly if it tries to power your entire neighbourhood.
You could have a more sophisticated control system which merely disconnected you from the grid and powered your local devices, but that would of course require some storage of power as well because your load would practically never match your generation. The vast majority of small solar installations do not do this.
I found a while back that GMail started flagging e-mails from my server as spam, even for a business customer who had explicitly white-listed my server in their configuration. Setting up DKIM message signing cured that.
Yahoo on the other hand are complete fuck-wits when it comes to spam detection. I've tried in the past to follow up random spam flagging, and they just give you the runaround. I filled in a complicated form with full details of the erroneous spam flagging, and they responded with a request to send all the same information again to an e-mail address, and then when I did the notification bounced because the e-mail address didn't exist.
The only thing you can do with people who use Yahoo for e-mail is teach them how to look in their spam folders. When they do they'll find lots of other non-spam there too. That's the moment to suggest they move to a proper e-mail provider.
Because most people sit WAY too far away from their TVs - even 720p is "retina" resolution - increasing resolution does absolutely zip because they can't even resolve the added resolution.
A rough guide is about 1:1 screen size for 1080p
Way too far away from their TVs for what? If your criterion for deciding the correct sitting distance is whether or not you can tell 720p from 1080p then perhaps you have a point, but if the object of the exercise is to watch television in comfort then 1:1 is just silly.
Thats how the internet is paid for. The sending provider pays the receiving provider for the bandwidth, and this is the only rational way it can be.
Really? I'm only an end user, but my experience is that the charging is the other way round. Traffic to me is metered (and I pay for) whilst traffic which I originate is un-metered.
Well, you could click on it for yourself (you don't have to place an order - just click the relevant radio button and then hit submit) but for those who want a short cut, the form then fails field validation with the following message.
"Sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP. Our services are all unfiltered."
Why do people keep saying this? It's simply untrue.
Microsoft do still support XP. The real change that has happened is that Microsoft have gone from providing free support to charging a lot of money for the same support. That's all.
They have low-tech means of circumventing the filter, mostly involving spending an hour going through page after page on google until they find a site not blocked.
Hardly low tech!
I too work in a school, which also implements all sorts of paranoid filtering on the school LAN. (Don't know about root CA certificates, I've never looked.)
Increasingly however, what the school does is utterly irrelevant. Almost all the students have their own completely independent access to the big bad 'net. They have phones with full Internet access, dongles for their laptops, and even laptops with SIMs built in.
It'll be a while before school authorities recognise that they're standing with their fingers in the tiny remains of a dyke, the rest of which has long since been washed away by the incoming tide. Until then, we'll still find ourselves unable to access all sorts of random and silly things in the classroom. I was refused access to the text of Rudyard Kipling's "If" the other day.
It was still an odd decision to design their own CPU for the successor to the BBC Micro. A more obvious and less risky move would have been to use a 68000 series CPU as a successor to the 6502.
IIRC, they experimented with a chip called the 32016 (or 16032) as a possible successor to the 6502, before deciding to start again from scratch and design their own.
All the 2nd processors for the Beeb - Z80, 6502, 32016 or ARM looked exactly the same from the outside, although when you opened them up the Z80 and 6502 were mostly air, whilst the ARM prototype was stuffed to the gunwales. It didn't even have go-faster stripes or a front air dam.
The odd thing was, early ARMs seemed to manage to produce much more bang for your MHz than x86 chips. An 8 MHz ARM2 ran rings around a 25 MHz 80386. What let them down then was the lack of a floating point co-processor. Later on the relationship seemed to reverse.
Slashdot Mirror
I have BT infinity option 2 (Fibre to Cabinet):
- Unlimited bandwidth
- No throttling
- 80mbit download / 40mbit up, 24/7
Even BT at their most optimistic don't pretend to offer that. BT Infinity 2 offers up to 76 Mb/s downstream and up to 20 Mb/s upstream. I think you're confusing your upload speed with the download speed of BT Infinity 1.
BT has more precise data, but history tells us that idiots ruin it for everyone.
[snip rant]
You're using an argument technique known as "putting up a straw man". We're discussing the tendency of BT to upgrade exchanges long before they do the corresponding cabinets (which they do), so you raise an imagined case of one person behaving unreasonably because, although his local cabinets have been upgraded, he can't get service.
No wonder you posted as an AC.
Imagine the work which would have been involved if what you are saying was true. They'd have had to dig underground ducting in to everybody's garden. How did they do it without us noticing?
You are right in saying that the bulk wiring - the connections which feed the telegraph poles - are now pretty much all underground. There aren't the masses of overhead wires which there were when I was a boy. The final connection to the houses though for the most part remain unchanged. Yes, new builds are all done using underground connections, but most houses are not new builds.
It would be phenomenally expensive to go around replacing all the final connections with underground ones. They haven't done it, and they aren't going to unless there's a separate reason to do it. Indeed, the poles in our road were all replaced recently, in quite an impressive operation. They carry both power and telephone connections to the houses. To replace a pole they had to disconnect everything at the top, temporarily support all the connections with a crane/platform thing, remove the old pole, fit a new pole, and then re-attach everything to the new pole. Now why would they do that if the connections were no longer in use, or even if they had any plans ever to put them underground?
they generally don't bother properly disposing of the telegraph poles: they just let them fall down.
ROFL. Can you imagine the trouble they'd get into if they did that? The ambulance chasers would have a field day.
Complete nonsense!
Try this - go to Google Maps, pick a residential location at random and then drop in to Streetview. Unless you've picked a very recent housing estate, you will find you can see lots and lots of telegraph poles.
It might be true to say that new developments don't now have telegraph poles, but the vast majority of the UK still does.
My local telephone exchange has been enabled for fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) for a year and a half
The street cabinet my line connects to has not been upgraded.
This seems to be a common problem. It was nearly three years from when they upgraded our exchange to when they did the cabinets. For the interim period you're in the weird position where querying the rollout information tells you that your exchange is in a state of "AO" (Accepting Orders), but if you try to order it you're told you can't have it. You can't get any projected date when it will be available, because if you go to the "When will FTTC be available?" pages you're told your exchange is already enabled.
I suspect it's a marketing thing - they do the exchange so they can claim that they've got a certain percentage of the country covered, then do the cabinets much later.
That said, having now got FTTC (not from BT obviously) it is very nice. Solid 40 Mb/s (which you won't get if you go with one of these ISPs who advertise stupidly cheap service) is suitably nippy. 80 Mb/s is an option, but probably not worth it unless you have some very unusual requirements.
Did you actually read the article which you cite? It exactly contradicts your claims.
In other words, you're full of shit.
Such a devastating riposte, worthy of Oscar Wilde at his best.
I am reminded of an article I read a few years ago about some anniversary of the invention of the ATM. The American credited with inventing it, explaining how he did it, said he'd seen one in London, and so came home and invented it.
The latest reports indicate that the hackers worked from a hotel in Thailand.
I hope they weren't being charged by the gigabyte for using the hotel's WiFi.
But I'm fairly sure they don't continue running after the test.
when we loved in separate cities during the week, and together at weekends
Sounds like fun!
You could take care of some of the daytime failures with solar (and evening if you get some batteries).
Be aware that for a solar installation feeding power into the grid, you are generally required to have a control system which immediately shuts down your solar generation if the power grid fails. This is for safety reasons (chaps working on the line don't want to find there are still unexpected volts there after they've shut off the supply) and because your system will start to go blue in the face very quickly if it tries to power your entire neighbourhood.
You could have a more sophisticated control system which merely disconnected you from the grid and powered your local devices, but that would of course require some storage of power as well because your load would practically never match your generation. The vast majority of small solar installations do not do this.
I found a while back that GMail started flagging e-mails from my server as spam, even for a business customer who had explicitly white-listed my server in their configuration. Setting up DKIM message signing cured that.
Yahoo on the other hand are complete fuck-wits when it comes to spam detection. I've tried in the past to follow up random spam flagging, and they just give you the runaround. I filled in a complicated form with full details of the erroneous spam flagging, and they responded with a request to send all the same information again to an e-mail address, and then when I did the notification bounced because the e-mail address didn't exist.
The only thing you can do with people who use Yahoo for e-mail is teach them how to look in their spam folders. When they do they'll find lots of other non-spam there too. That's the moment to suggest they move to a proper e-mail provider.
Having checked a number of on-line news sites, the best real-time coverage seems to be on XKCD
I love the way the pages come with adverts for people selling CCTV cameras for the home!
And then everyone who visits Spain comments on how late they eat their evening meals.
In reality they don't - they have their evening meals at the same time as everyone else, it's just that their clocks are two hours fast.
If they were socialists, they wouldn't be paying themselves exorbitant salaries, they'd be spreading the money around.
You obviously haven't experienced how socialism works in practice.
Because most people sit WAY too far away from their TVs - even 720p is "retina" resolution - increasing resolution does absolutely zip because they can't even resolve the added resolution.
A rough guide is about 1:1 screen size for 1080p
Way too far away from their TVs for what? If your criterion for deciding the correct sitting distance is whether or not you can tell 720p from 1080p then perhaps you have a point, but if the object of the exercise is to watch television in comfort then 1:1 is just silly.
Thats how the internet is paid for. The sending provider pays the receiving provider for the bandwidth, and this is the only rational way it can be.
Really? I'm only an end user, but my experience is that the charging is the other way round. Traffic to me is metered (and I pay for) whilst traffic which I originate is un-metered.
Well, you could click on it for yourself (you don't have to place an order - just click the relevant radio button and then hit submit) but for those who want a short cut, the form then fails field validation with the following message.
"Sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP. Our services are all unfiltered."
Try placing an order for broadband with this ISP:
https://order.aa.net.uk/h1orde...
and choose the "I want a censored connection" option.
Inappropriate title - I've lived in a lot of countries around the world and AFAICR they all had exactly the same system.
Microsoft no longer supports XP
Why do people keep saying this? It's simply untrue.
Microsoft do still support XP. The real change that has happened is that Microsoft have gone from providing free support to charging a lot of money for the same support. That's all.
They have low-tech means of circumventing the filter, mostly involving spending an hour going through page after page on google until they find a site not blocked.
Hardly low tech!
I too work in a school, which also implements all sorts of paranoid filtering on the school LAN. (Don't know about root CA certificates, I've never looked.)
Increasingly however, what the school does is utterly irrelevant. Almost all the students have their own completely independent access to the big bad 'net. They have phones with full Internet access, dongles for their laptops, and even laptops with SIMs built in.
It'll be a while before school authorities recognise that they're standing with their fingers in the tiny remains of a dyke, the rest of which has long since been washed away by the incoming tide. Until then, we'll still find ourselves unable to access all sorts of random and silly things in the classroom. I was refused access to the text of Rudyard Kipling's "If" the other day.
which was the reason ARM was founded.
Hardly - the ARM had gone through several generations and been used in a number of other products before the Newton came along.
It was still an odd decision to design their own CPU for the successor to the BBC Micro. A more obvious and less risky move would have been to use a 68000 series CPU as a successor to the 6502.
IIRC, they experimented with a chip called the 32016 (or 16032) as a possible successor to the 6502, before deciding to start again from scratch and design their own.
All the 2nd processors for the Beeb - Z80, 6502, 32016 or ARM looked exactly the same from the outside, although when you opened them up the Z80 and 6502 were mostly air, whilst the ARM prototype was stuffed to the gunwales. It didn't even have go-faster stripes or a front air dam.
The odd thing was, early ARMs seemed to manage to produce much more bang for your MHz than x86 chips. An 8 MHz ARM2 ran rings around a 25 MHz 80386. What let them down then was the lack of a floating point co-processor. Later on the relationship seemed to reverse.