Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Cable taps.

"All undersea cables have an amplifier attached to them at some point."

Just to clarify this: Not all, not even most these days. Just the really long ones. Anything shorter than 450km doesn't need repeaters and some systems can go 1500km without repeaters (there's a speed/distance tradeoff involved)

Optical amplifiers are simple affairs owing more to old-fashioned travelling wave tube amplifiers than anything else (TWTs are still the most common form of repeater used on geostationary satellites). They don't regenerate the signal and in general regenerators aren't needed on underwater links.

Re: Who does the law protect?

"At least in the US, no one. Spammers operate with near total impunity"

CAN-SPAM was drafted and passed amazingly quickly, in order to defang California's restrictive antispam legislation which was about to pass into effect.

It's known in the spamfighter circles as "You CAN-SPAM" - it's still possible to breach it (forgery, spamming from an ISP with an antispam AUP, etc), but the only entities which can take action are ISPs/ESPs, or the FTC.

Re: "you've got that $1.25 a day at US prices to play with...

"Or, as we might say, what in buggery is wrong with charity?"

In principle, nothing.

In practice, a hell of a lot - many charities are simply scams setup to maximise income for those who run the charity (I'm looking at you, speed camera partnerships), whilst performing the minimum necessary work to retain charitable status.

Charity generally falls down once it becomes organised and hauls in a "business manager" - eventually one of the sociopaths previously mentioned charms his/her way in and rearranges things to suit his own best interests, not those the charity is supposed to be helping.

Deliberately congested interconnects

"Major ISPs ordered their intermediary to not upgrade these connections, though said intermediary was going crazy trying to get them to do so. "

This particular point has been missed by a significant number of "reporters" and "commentards" alike.

There are about a dozen transit/peering points which have remained overloaded for more than a couple of months.

All of them are in North America

All of them are with major ISPs who have effective monopolies in their service areas

All those ISPs operate their own content delivery services.

NONE of the interconnects belonging to those ISPs at peering points outside North America are congested.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140718/06533327927/level3-proves-that-verizon-is-absolutely-to-blame-netflix-congestion-using-verizons-own-data.shtml

Re: ...and then you show them

It's not just that. As another poster has pointed out, frame rate matters too.

Re: re: mouse organ

The other 14 are driving the wheel, seeing as hamsters aren't space-rated.

Black holes are messy eaters

Only about 3% of the material in an accretion disk goes over the event horizon. the rest is blasted off as jets.

Re: serious tax implications

"If sales tax goes down they're going to come after the residents to make up the gap."

In other parts of the world, there's no municipal sales tax.

Re: bit skeptical

Avoidance is a 3d issue. 2 devices can be at the same X,Y coordinates at time T, as long as coordinate Z is different.

The aircraft standard is that different levels are (supposed to be) used for different flight directions, normally at 500 foot levels. This means you only have to look for stuff crossing your path, instead of closing at high speed.

There are also more prosaic rules, like giving way to the right and conventions about going down/up if paths are crossing, dependent on which direction one is travelling in.

Humans are bad at dealing with more than 3-4 objects moving around at once, as anyone playing Galaxians will attest. Machines should be able to do much better, more quickly, because they don't get distracted and because they should be able to chatter amongst themselves both to agree on directions and warn of uncontrolled objects (such as those pesky birds)

Re: and that other German brand who's name escapes me

Brushes?

Stepper motors don't _have_ brushes - and large enough ones can direct-drive so there's no belt to worry about either.

Electronic commutation is the way to go.

"Virus scanners detect the first bytes of a file and, when this contains MZ (amongst others, MZ means executable), will block the attachment ... regardless of the extension."

Which is why many malware payloads are .zips - and because zips are now widely scanned they've recently resorted to ARJ archives (presumably they'll move to other ancient compression formats later)

Re: [It] would likely destroy the US electrical grid

"The solution is to ensure that no long distance loops are connected for the duration of the particle shower."

Which more or less means "shut the grid down"

Slightly different transformer layouts are immune to this effect but cost more to implement. Sadly, noone's even started working on mitigation measures for a X10 direct hit and likely won't unless ordered by govts in the interests of national security.

Re: FTC can't find its fanny in a phone booth

Caller ID can be spoofed easily.

Spoofing the ANI (or equivalent) is a _lot_ harder.

The data is there, if there's a will to collect it (having a number like 1571 to report "the last call was scam/nusiance" and collating the data from those would be relatively cheap to implement and provide enough data to nail these outfits quickly)

Cost

"£215 over 5 years to pay for them?"

That's 5 for the meter, 50 for the installer and 165 "internal administration charges"

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/DD862-Type-single-phase-active-watt_1465261195.html

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/DDS5558-electric-smart-meter_1535421756.html

Re: Been There Done That.

"Is lacking voice and video but could easily encompass it."

US MURS rules specifically prohibit use for phone calls.

The whole steaming pile of global frequency allocations is becoming more and more a house of cards, with devices freely roaming into different regulatory domains. I'd suggest better international cooperation but with all the vested interests, established uses and political agendas involved it would be easier to herd cats.

Re: About time, too...

"Given that memristor is apparently faster than SDRAM I wonder if anyone will stick them on DDR4 modules?"

Hopefully. The latency of DRAM hasn't changed significantly for 15 years (it's gone from 70ns down to ~50 at best) and substantially altering that would effectively turbocharge most computing applications.

Re: There's going to be a lot of landfill

"made from corn starch so both compostible and sustainable"

If you've seen how much USA farming subsidy (and oil) goes into growing corn you might rethink the latter part of that statement.

"If anyone asks you if you intend to vote Conservative in the next General election, tell them Yes."

If you get asked if you'll vote for xyz other party, say yes too.

This is a fun way to screw with pollsters statstics.

Re: Whither Nexus 8@ FartingHippo

A bigger problem with the mk1 is its insistence on only charging at 500ma (net charge rate 50mA) when used with anything other than its own specific charger.

Re: Tesla - a government funded subsidy machine

"In the US, each Tesla is subsidized $50,000, in Norway its $130,000 subsidy!"

Governments are subsidising electric cars to encourage people to use them. Once the market hits criticality the subsidies will stop.

Shell we discuss the hidden subsidies for road transport in most countries? (HGVs cost their operators a lot less to run than the damage they cause to roads). The electric car subsidy is paid once. HGV subsidies are ongoing.

Re: Wonder why Japan first

Simple. Japanese love gadgets.

Re: Integration is banned

"The integration of 3D graphics processing functions, something which used to take a large circuit board, into a single chip was something that was going to happen, whether NVidia or some other company."

Indeed, the integration of XYZ functions into a single chip has much provable prior art, dating back to 1980s microcomputers and beyond.

Re: Next up: flying in circles

"Roughly speaking, the further forward the CofG, the more stable it will be (like a dart) and vice versa."

Part of training is to fly circuits in a tail-heavy plane. It's BLOODY HARD WORK - when I was practising in a cessna 172 I initially didn't have enough physical strength to keep the stick pushed forward and was considering using a foot. It's still the single most scary experience I've had whilst in the front seat.