Mains failure

[Owain Lastname]

Bloody hell that's a mess.

Ingenious, but a mess.Especially when the exchange building gets to be demolished.

Owain

[Theo]

They can do either. If the line length is long then FTTP is the better option as the speed might not be good enough for VDSL. It's more likely in rural areas where the cable is poled rather than buried.

Theo

[Andrew]

Only between exchanges and green cabinets. From then on estates or groups of houses rely on multi-core cables direct buried under the verges or footpaths. This was the standard way of doing it in the 60's and 70's.

[Scott]

I know of another major organisation conducting an estates review to see if they can use the lessons of remote working during the pandemic to cut costs. I am sure BT will be looking at its footprint. Is there provision to terminate the lease before 2031 if operational needs change?

[Andrew]

And the replacement needs a large entrance where a green cabinet is :-)

[Jethro_uk]

Disastrous news for anyone who had banked on escalating office costs and continued expenditure on commuting to fund their future. Which is one reason why TPTB will try every trick in the book to resist it.

Once it's realised people don't need to be in the office to work, the question that comes screaming in behind, is why do they need to be in the UK either ?

[S Viemeister]

Ugly, too. I haven't been there for a while, so hadn't seen this.

[Andrew]

when I worked for Cable & Wireless, the UK developers did their work and then there was a contractor working from home in Oz who tested all the new work during his next day.

[Andrew]

In Chichester the 'new' Telephone exchange building is sometimes referred to as the 'other cathedral' (and its just down a side street from the real cathedral).

[williamwright]

Whey do you enjoy apportioning blame? Have you got issues? Were you a tell tale tit at school?

Bill

[williamwright]

There's an estate near here where the cables are so shallowly buried that in places they are on the surface, running across lawns etc.

BIll

[NY]

My wife bought a new iPad the other day to replace her old one which is getting slower and slower, and has too little memory to allow multiple apps to be open at the same time. I was interested to see that its USB socket was USB-C rather than Lightning as on the older iPad.

Lightning may well be the better connector. Apple may in general use better designs. But (for better or worse) they are not the standard that everyone else uses. I'm surprised really that Apple actually use TCP/IP, WiFi 802.11 and USB, and haven't invented new equivalents to lock you into using Apple equipment for your all your phone, tablet, laptop and desktop PCs. It must be nice to be such a well-loved brand that you can say "stuff your industry standard" - and people will *still* buy your product instead of Android, Windows etc.

[charles]

and, its bi- directional/

[charles]

depends on how long for

[Chris J Dixon]

That is certainly the case for Virgin connections round here.

Chris

[Max Demian]

I thought that was just Virgin.

[charles]

Daughter 1 needed a new Vigin feed to thenhouse; the cable was just thrown over the hedge - until SiL got going.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Was off for an hour today while they repaired her cable. First power cut I can remember in years.

Generator off and she's back on mains. Was very worried they'd condemn the installation.

[Roger Hayter]

Interestingly, Apple seem to be in the process of abandoning their own file sharing protocol in favour of SMB. The latter allows for lots of new, unpredicted incompatibilities to add interest to life.

[NY]

I worked on porting SMB-for-UNIX code from i386 (little-endian) to SPARC (big-endian) back in the 1990s which involved putting in a lot of #ifdef statements to reverse an assumed byte order. That was back in the days when SMB (LAN Manager for UNIX - LM/X) was a product that we charged for. The bottom dropped out of our market when some UNIX server suppliers started to give it away with the OS. Nowadays Samba (phonetic representation of SMB) is a standard package that can be installed on any UNIX device.

My experience of SMB on non-Windows computers is that it is easy-peasy to share a folder on the non-UNIX "server" computer and access it from a "client" Windows computer. The converse is where the "fun" starts - getting a UNIX client to access a Windows "server". Hell, even getting Windows 7 client to access a share on a Windows 10 server is not intuitive: the setting to access the Public share as a guest (no username/password set on server or required to be specified on client) is turned *off* in Windows 10 by default, as I discovered when I was setting up my new Win 10 laptop and I wanted to access a shared directory on it from a Windows 7 PC.

(I'm using "server" to denote any PC, not necessarily Windows 10 Server Edition, which shares part of its disk or a printer; and "client" to denote any computer which accesses that share as if it were another drive {Windows] or another mounted directory in the filesystem [UNIX]. One computer can perform both roles: sharing some folders and accessing ones on another computer.)

The one thing that can cause real problems is files on a UNIX computer whose names don't comply with Windows file-and-folder-name rules - eg including ":". I use a Rasp Pi for recording TV programmes and I share the folder where the recordings are saved. Somehow two recordings were created with very similar names which Windows saw as the same file, and I was getting unpredictable results because the "same" file had different contents on successive reads. Fortunately that was a "can't happen in normal circumstances" error on my part (I think I renamed a file in UNIX) so it was outside the normal "Only use Windows-compatible characters in file and folder names" option of the TV recording software.