Categories
Engineer fun stuff internet

TalkTalk break records for downloads with 557GB per sec on New Year’s Day

Trefor DaviesTalkTalk is a highly successful provider of communications services – broadband, phone lines etc. I noted an entry in the Twitter stream this morning that showed they had seen record traffic levels on New Year’s Day – people upgrading firmware on new gadgets, using the gadgets etc.

We know this because TalkTalk CTO Clive Dorsman blogged about their network peaking at 557GB per second of traffic – that’s around 4.45Terabits per second which is impressively massive and three times to peak usage seen on the LINX network. I can only dream of having that amount of capacity at Timico.

Clive goes on to sell TalkTalk broadband services in his post. That’s OK. I occasionally chuck in a reference to a Timico service (great value & service etc – check it out here). “TalkTalk Superfast Fibre Broadband … costs £10 per month for up to 38MB or £15 for up to 76MB, allowing downloads up to eight times faster than the UK average.”

The only tiny element of doubt I have about all this is that I don’t believe that FTTC speeds of 76 Megabytes are available. In fact the TalkTalk product pages correctly quote speeds of 76 Megabits per second.

I suspect that Clive’s post was written by a PR person new to the tech game. I guess these things happen. I’m sure we are all guilty of the occasional cock up.

Btw this is only a bit of fun but I attach a screenshot of the post here for reference in anticipation of the corrections to the TalkTalk blog and the pursuant challenge for me to provide evidence. Also if the real number is 4.45Terabits per second – as I said that is massively impressive.

Categories
agricultural End User

Tractors, tractors, tractors and tractors – a world record attempt for the rural readers but the city boys might like it too

action from the World Ploughing Championships held in Lincoln in October 2010The idea for this post was crowd sourced (all 2 of us) The STX 440 Quadtracon Twitter when I mentioned I was going to the Lincolnshire Show. The subject is tractors. Well one tractor in particular. I’m talking about the Steiger STX-440 Quadtrac. You know the beast. It’s manufactured by CaseIH. Also because I know you like this sort of thing I’ve included some photos of tractors down the ages.

Tractors these days are boys toys like no other. I got to sit in the cab although I daren’t touch anything. Partly because itme in the cab of the STX 440 Quadtrack was £200k’s worth of kit pulling another £60k of trailer. I could have been devastating. Mr Bean would have filled a whole series with the ensuing chaos.

In one sense the romance has disappeared from the tractor world. One man cocooned in his climate controlled (not air-conditioned as I was told more than once) cab, his hydraulic seat smoothing out the bumps so as not to distract him from watching his favourite episode of Emmerdale, can plant 100 – 150 acres of rape seed in one day, depending on the soil type. STX 440 Quadtrac trailerHis GPS system, accurate to 2 mm, ensures he covers every inch of field (mixing units here I know) with his ploughing, harrowing, planting weed killing or furtiloizing.

The tractor shown in the photo is one of two used to service the 3,500 acres of Westhall Farm Welton Cliff. Gone is the image of the lone ploughman following behind his horse struggling to plough an acre a day. The STX-440 with a 12/4 plough will do 10 acres an hour. It’s still a one man job mind you and I daresay the ploughman still likes his crust of breadSteiger STX-440 front view and cheese with a pickled onion, and no doubt a pint or two of his favourite local ale in the Royal Oak, or Rose and Crown, or Frog and Parrott or whatever it’s called these days.

Comms on board are limited to the GPS, a two way radio and a mobile phone. This surprised me. I thought it would be sending back real time data on progress. Instead the system inputs data onto an SD card (I think – I didn’t see it and Neil the tractor driver called it a microchip) which, when “full”, is then plugged into the farm computer for record keeping. Helen Rainthorpe of Westhall Farm has complete data on what has been done to every field on her farm going back 4 generations. Has the EC been going that long?

One of the fields, note, is 190 acres. It’s dimensions are all programmed into the system and all the driver does is turn the machine around when it gets to the end of the field (he must byhorse plough - the way it used to be now have seen absolutely every episode of Emmerdale since the year dot). The speed of progress is programmable and normally determined by what the Quadtrack is towing. If the field has a curve then the STX-440 will naturally follow the curve. There is more, If the field spans two counties which than mean two different lots of paperwork the system recognises this when compiling the data.

I don’t know how much diesel it can take but it needs a hugeThen in 1905 along came the Big Mac - eat yer heart out McDonalds :) tank. No miles per gallon here. It’s gallons per mile more like as its Drawbar power (max) is 371.35 hp (276.9kW) consumes 21.8 gallons (82.5l) per hour. Note the 8hp of the Titan steam tractor (photo inset).

If you’re interested the tractor is busy all year round – July until the end of Oct is prime time for wheat for next season. End of Jan to March/April is the time for planting for spring wheat and barley.

The Titan, with 8bhp came along in 1915 - looking more like a tractor

In finishing you should note the John Rainthorpe Quadtrac World Record attempt (I have an affinity with world record attempts) – “Most Quadtracs Cultivating In One Field” is taking place at WestHall Farm on 28th July. The event is in aid of Cancer Research – gates open at 11am – record attempt at 1pm. Give them your support – oo arr.

David Brown brings us into the modern era

Categories
charitable Cloud datacentre End User social networking surveillance & privacy

The social media summary of the world record attempt

UK trending for @tref & #comment24 on twitter The world record attempt started at 6am on Thursday 5th Feb and ended at 6am the following day. There are three stories to tell here. The first is the charity fundraising aspect that was covered on Friday.

Second is the social media story. This was an event largely promoted using the #comment24 hashtag on twitter but the story was also posted on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. The effort also caught the imagination of a good number of friendly journalists as the list of names in the table of top referrers for 5th Jan illustrates.

referring site

# visits

pages/visit

time on site

1

t.co (Twitter)

2,012

2.73

00:04:08

2

facebook.com

903

4.44

00:04:56

3

gizmodo.co.uk

310

2.38

00:02:19

4

thinkbroadband.com

291

4.38

00:04:36

5

forums.moneysavingexpert.com

265

3.24

00:02:58

6

m.facebook.com

240

2.2

00:01:53

7

guardian.co.uk

233

3.07

00:03:50

8

thenextweb.com

221

2.83

00:02:47

9

telegraph.co.uk

207

3.6

00:04:47

10

hootsuite.com

67

2.88

00:04:10

11

community.plus.net

63

2.84

00:02:43

12

plus.url.google.com

59

4.05

00:05:45

13

linkedin.com

57

4.84

00:07:03

14

thelincolnite.co.uk

51

2.25

00:02:07

15

celticquicknews.co.uk

50

1.36

00:00:23

 

In all according to Google Analytics there were 162 referring sites over the 5th and 6th January. A Google search for

Categories
charitable Cloud End User

promo interview with BBC for Thursday 5th Jan world record attempt #comment24

More world record stuff. Keep the sponsorship coming in by the way. It’s starting to build momentum.

Categories
charitable Cloud End User social networking

World record attempt – Most comments on an online news story in 24 hours #comment24

To get 2012 off to a racing start we will be having a bit of fun on trefor.net and aiming for a world record for “Most comments on an online news story in 24 hours”

This is a genuine Guinness World Records category in which the current record stands at 100,000. That’s just over one comment a second. Should be easy huh? 🙂

The attempt begins at 6am GMT on Thursday 5th January 2012 and ends 24 hours later. It would be nice to think that we could smash the existing record by a country mile. Someone mentioned 1million comments – why not?

Between now and then the blog is moving to a high availability, high performance platform, details of which will be made available in a blog post on Tuesday 3rd January.

In the meantime there is much spreading of the word to do to make this a great success.  You will be kept up to speed with any relevant news regarding the world record either on the blog, Twitter (#comment24), Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn (actually all of the above).

We will also be letting you know in advance the type of content that will be in the post for the record attempt so that you can get your thinking hats on in advance for your own comment.

It would be great if you could spread the word on this by “liking”,” Linking”, “sharing” “tweeting” or just telling your friends by good old fashioned “word of mouth”.

Trefor.net also has a page on Facebook where you can find out more and a Facebook event here.

Hope you can help  🙂

Tref