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User: dotwaffle

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  1. Re:BT on UK Delays National Broadband For Three Years · · Score: 1

    Call connection charges are going up to 10.9p, and the daytime rate is going up to quite a large amount too. Pretty much cements the idea that for personal calls you should use a mobile phone, and for business you should use VoIP.

    That is, until the mobile networks realise what is happening and get greedy, lowering the data caps on all the price plans to something silly like 1GB. Oh wait, already happened!

  2. Re:Farce on UK Delays National Broadband For Three Years · · Score: 1

    You mean DACS, right? I believe BT are in no way obligated to remove them as you correctly surmise, but I don't think they're fitted any more. Theoretically, if you cancelled your service, then re-ordered, they'd fit a new cable - and to supply a premises with a new service there is a cap to the charges they can assign.

    Still expensive, though, I agree.

  3. Re:Farce on UK Delays National Broadband For Three Years · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So, rather than laying fiber, which is relatively cheap to buy/install and incredibly cheap to operate, you want to replace all the phone lines with one of the most expensive metals around (copper) just so that you say "fiber is a waste".

    The benefits of fiber are huge - you can use passive optical splitters that use no power and require almost no land, and it'll serve 30-300 end points using GPON. Over this single fiber, you can serve on-demand TV, internet, phone and security alerting, with efficient use of multicasting for the live TV and unicast for everything else. What's more, you don't have to supply voltage down the cable, wasting lots of energy to the environment, it doesn't corrode or degrade (to a large extent) and at the head-end you can fit literally tens of thousands of endpoints into a cable no fatter than a single twisted pair connection.

    The benefits of copper are: You don't need to power it at the home, so if the power goes out and your battery backup unit has failed, you can still make an emergency call. That, and the line is already present.

    Pretty simple choice, really. If the UK Government were really committed to investing in the future of broadband in the UK, they'd lay fiber to every street cabinet *now* and prepare to get the local councils digging up the capillary roads to lay a fiber alongside Virgin Media's cable, starting within 5 years for eventual turn-on by 2020.

    The biggest bottleneck in broadband speeds in the UK is the copper. It's nothing to do with the low upload speeds, which are only present because it makes a lot more sense to divide the spectrum on the line weighted to the download speed rather than the upload, which is very rarely saturated - unlike the download.

    The second bottleneck is that when the signal terminates at the exchange, it's backhauled over to an LNC in London inside a PPP/L2TP header and (usually ATM) cell-switched, rather than IP(v6 eventually) routed. That would kill the broadband market, however - essentially making broadband a public utility rather than an a private ISP service. Knowing how bad BT run things at the moment (especially when it comes to 21CN etc) that can only be a "bad thing" without clueful ISPs bashing them all the time to fix problems.

  4. Re:I nearly wrote a serious answer to you... on UK Gov't Launches 'Your Freedom' Website To Seek Laws Worth Repealing · · Score: 1

    Wow, that's arrogant. You're an egotistical self-centered bigot that enjoys bullying others based on stereotypes and name-calling.

    I'm happy living in a place where I don't have to worry about being secure in my home; that if someone does threaten me, the worst thing they are likely to have is a short-range weapon like a knife that can't "accidentally" go off with minimal effort, and that in all likelihood they are going to be caught and rehabilitated rather than punished. I like that guns are not the norm in my country, and I think that those that have weaponry are deluding themselves. If confronted, you give them what they want, then alert someone trained to pursue them like the police - rather than risk life and limb confronting them.

    In the nicest possible way, I haven't anything else to say to you than "fuck off". You've given me no reason to sympathise with you, you're a nasty person, and I hope you someday see my point of view that we have better things to think of than defence.

  5. Re:Everyone on Internet Sales Tax Gets a New Champion · · Score: 1

    By volume, yes, the US gives the most foreign aid. The US has 300 million people - per capita, the US isn't even in the top 10.

    I'm not being anti-US-people, I quite like many Americans. I'm saying that the US government (incl. military) are a bunch of thugs who go and fuck things up for the rest of the world, and that Americans are so bombarded with propaganda and enforced patriotism that you excuse yourselves with very weak arguments.

    If the US left any of the war-zones with the country in a better state than how they found them, I doubt we'd even be having this conversation. The fact is that the US didn't agree with the USSR (and to be fair, for good reason) but basically just fought "the red menace" on a battleground in a country most Americans couldn't even find on a map then left the country in ruins without helping afterwards. They left the innocent people affected by the conflict to fix the damage by themselves, and those people grew up resentful of the USA. Just look at South America and East Africa - look at Mogadishu!

    We have the UN now. It exists to make sure diplomacy happens first. When the UN said that there wasn't a case for war in Iraq, the US just brushed them aside, and invaded it anyway. A great lesson to all of us - I think not.

  6. Re:I nearly wrote a serious answer to you... on UK Gov't Launches 'Your Freedom' Website To Seek Laws Worth Repealing · · Score: 1

    I didn't say that at all. I said that Switzerland doesn't have that much gun control, it's the ammunition that they strictly control.

    As that point has been firmly debunked, I can't be arsed to further the line of questioning. I'm very anti-gun (indeed, anti-weaponry outside of armed response - though I'm ok with them in video games etc) and as I grew up in the UK where you genuinely can go through you entire life without seeing a gun, hearing people nonchalantly discuss them when talking about "self-defence" scared the crap out of me.

  7. Re:I nearly wrote a serious answer to you... on UK Gov't Launches 'Your Freedom' Website To Seek Laws Worth Repealing · · Score: 1

    Wow, I see why you're called "JockTroll" now. You might not be a US citizen, but you certainly have the attitude (and weaponry knowledge) to fit right into certain places in the Mid-West.

  8. Re:I nearly wrote a serious answer to you... on UK Gov't Launches 'Your Freedom' Website To Seek Laws Worth Repealing · · Score: 0

    I'd like to see some evidence there, please!

    You see, the correlation between gun ownership and violent crime is present - at 10% gun ownership, violent crime is at half the levels of gun ownership in the 70-80% region. It makes sense, it's a lot easier to escalate things when there are guns involved.

    The murder rate in gun-friendly countries is higher by a few percent (largely insignificant) except in the US where it is literally thousands of percent higher. Switzerland has relatively low gun crime because while the vast majority have guns, they don't have access to ammunition - it's strictly controlled, and the guns/ammunition that is doled out to reservists is regularly inspected and counted to make sure it hasn't been used.

    You keep attacking the UK for things, you're obviously just trolling because every single time I read an anti-UK statement in your post, I just think "yeah, but the US does worse" on every single thing you've criticised us for doing.

  9. Re:Everyone on Internet Sales Tax Gets a New Champion · · Score: 1, Insightful

    That's probably the most arrogant thing I've ever heard from an American. May I remind you that in the past 50 years, the USA has not been attacked at home by a foreign state once. You fight because you have interests elsewhere you want to protect. Stop making the world a shittier place for the rest of us.

    Arguably, the world would be a better place if the USA did not unilaterally screw around with other countries. From Somalia to Venezuela. From Vietnam to Afghanistan. You don't do it out of humanitarian kindness, you do it because you have a vested interest.

    We have the UN for a reason. Realise that, and stick by the treaties you've signed rather than weaselling out of them on legal technicalities.

  10. Re:I'd say not so much on Stop the Math Press's Presses — Knuth Announces iTex · · Score: 1

    Computer users who have come up using GUIs are wanting WYSIWYG programs like Word.

    The GUI word processor (with WYSIWYG rendering) has been around for about 20 years in the home market, and 30 or more in the professional market.

    TeX might be smaller than Word, but if you compare the number of people who use "Styles" such as "Heading 1" etc in MSWord versus TeX users, I imagine the numbers will be roughly comparable.

  11. Re:Linux can handle it just fine on Seagate Confirms 3TB Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    EFI... Or LVM. LVM gives you additional benefits you may want to consider.

  12. Re:That's too bad then on Inventor Demonstrates Infinitely Variable Transmission · · Score: 1

    > If you look at demographics on manual transmissions over the last 5 years though, you'll see a big trend away from them in general and the average driver using a manual is an enthusiast.

    I've met possibly 5 people in my life in Europe that have driven automatic transmissions - manual transmissions are by far the most common over here.

  13. Re:WTFBT on BT Gets Exclusive Rights To OnLive In the UK · · Score: 1

    I'm in Nottinghamshire, my mum is out rural and gets 5.5Mb/s with Be - and consistently 5.5Mb/s too. If you can, I'd swap to them in a heartbeat.

    If you don't mind paying a *little* extra, Andrews and Arnold do a fantastic service too, and will run your service down a Be line instead of BT.

  14. Re:tl;dr on Ogg Format Accusations Refuted · · Score: 1

    And indeed, the OSI model isn't even used in modern networking. It can be loosely applied to IP networking, but it was meant for the CLNP networking infrastructure.

  15. Meraki on Best WAP For Dense Crowds? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Seriously, try Meraki. Their software is pretty neat, and it'll auto configure to give you the best situation.

    A case study: http://meraki.com/general/2009/12/09/does-it-scale-absolutely-blazing-fast-meraki-wireless-at-leweb-conference-in-paris/

  16. Re:Huh? on A "Never Reboot" Service For Linux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No, they're not.

    You see, one radar installation can feed multiple stations, and it's quite common for modern ATCOs to sit at a screen that has feeds from multiple radar sources.

    In fact, in the UK we recently pulled out all the old PDPs out of West Drayton and transferred radar control down to Swanwick running on relatively new equipment. I believe this was not done by "clearing the skies" first, they just handed over control to the new guys.

    I've heard things about US traffic control being old and antiquated, but I'd hazard a guess to say the vast majority aren't using vacuum tubes, CRTs or the like. I imagine many have converted to electronic paper strip bays for the flight plans too.

  17. Re:Europe? on Europe's LHC To Run At Half-Energy Through 2011 · · Score: 1

    That blurb genuinely does annoy me - it's almost like it's being made out to be a Europe vs USA thing. It's not - the labs do different experiments for the most part, and it's pretty sad to see science turned into a "who gets there first" style gameshow. Makes me sad :(

  18. Re:No evidence, huh? on UK Gov't Says "No Evidence" IE Is Less Secure · · Score: 1

    I think you ought to do some research first. Lord Avebury asked the question, he did not make up the response.

    Also, Lord Avebury is one of the few peers you *want* in the House of Lords, he's a genuinely honest and trustworthy man, who also does a lot of work defending Human Rights in places like Turkey.

  19. Re:Will they permit NATs? on Comcast Plans IPv6 Trials In 2010 · · Score: 1

    Let's say your ISP has a /32. The ISP uses a /64 for every point-to-point link between their router and your home router, and you have a /64 within your own home. Additionally, you have a second /64 reserved for you to make VoIP easier. Then, your ISP can clearly only have 1.1 billion customers.

    I realise the above is a bit silly, but seriously, there are enough /64s for everyone. There is no need for a /128, no need for a /126, no need for anything but a /64.

    Even if the ISP was "wasteful" and allocated each residential customer a /56 to do whatever they want with, their /32 will be able to support 16.7 million customers. If you've got more than 16.7 million customers, you just get another /32, in 2000/3 there are 500 million /32s.

    I'm waffling. /64 is fine.

  20. Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing on Why You Should Use OpenGL and Not DirectX · · Score: 1

    Historically, OpenGL has always been *easier* to code for, faster code execution, and generally able to compete based on the fact it's a graphics library and *NOT* a 3D Gaming API. That's not what it's for at all, it's a Graphics Library.

    DirectX, on the other hand, has been more interested in providing a one-size-fits-all solution, doing user-input, networking, sound etc, all of which is rapidly becoming deprecated in the eyes of Microsoft.

    As a 30,000 foot view of the two projects would imply, OpenGL defines a series of methods of doing things, with common physical/mathematical operations being specified as functions to make it both easier and faster to do things, while DirectX focuses on defining a new specification and forcing the hardware manufacturers to "keep up".

    DirectX is the monopoly, beating manufacturers with a stick and screaming at customers going "I'm better!" while OpenGL has just got on with the job. The fact is, these days, there isn't much between them, and it comes down to what your use case is. If you want something that is going to be used in a gaming environment, you tend to lean towards DirectX. If you want something that is going to be used for a simulation environment, you tend to lean towards OpenGL. YMMV.

  21. Re:Good luck on that one on Constitutionality of RIAA Damages Challenged · · Score: 2, Funny

    They obviously need to read RFC2119 then...

  22. Re:TomTom on Appeal For Commuter GPS Logs To Aid Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    It's probably a lot more sensible to use the data over at OpenStreetMap, actually...

  23. Re:Go peer with google instead on Peering Disputes Migrate To IPv6 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Right, so you peer with Google, who have a fairly open peering policy. How does that solve you getting access to Cogent's customers? You expect Google to leak Cogent's routes to it's peers free of charge?

  24. IP *does* this already. on Lockheed Snags $31 Million To Reinvent the Internet, Microsoft To Help · · Score: 2, Interesting

    'improved security,'

    Like IPSec? Don't fix the network layer, that's pointless. Fix the application layer - run it through TLS or similar if you must.

    'dynamic bandwidth allocation,'

    Like RSVP on an MPLS circuit? Or like DiffServ?

    'policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level.'"

    Like CoS?

    Seriously, all this has been thought of before - and we ended up with CLNA, IS-IS and networks so complicated it never took off - instead, IP took off because it was easy to use and easy to route.

    If we're going to change IPv4 for anything, it should be IPv6 - it's easy to understand, easy to read, easy to process and best of all - ready to use *now*. Many ISPs already have it, and there's a crapload of Usenet traffic/BitTorrent that already goes via v6.

  25. Re:Bandwidth? on SA's Largest Telecomms Provider vs. a Pigeon · · Score: 1

    "The truck driver is unionized" - anyone else read this thinking "why would you deionize a truck driver?" =)