On 21/01/2013 08:15, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 16:46:51
on Sun, 20 Jan 2013, remarked:

As I keep saying it's high time the evil nonsense of the BAA (or
whatever it's called this week) monopoly was brought to an end. It
should
be incorporated into the London public transport network

Given that BAA paid for it to be built, are you prepared to buy it
off them at cost (or some other larger figure)?

Like the PFI companies and Croydon Tramlink?

Was Croydon Tramlink built to be a separate privately-operated line?

It was horribly complicated. It was a 99-year PFI concession awarded in
1996, with the Tramtrack Croydon Ltd consortium which won the concession
then awarding assorted subcontracts for things like the actual day to
day operation.

It opened in 2000 but soon got bogged down in legal and contractual
arguments which made it difficult to get anything done and had perverse
outcomes: a retail developer was required to fund an extra tram stop,
but the tram company couldn't stop trams there without breaching
contractual performance requirements; there was a long-running argument
about who had to fill in some holes in a road; there was a messy court
case about who pays what if fare policy is changed (such as pensioners
getting free rides on bus services, and thus abstracting traffic from
paid tram to free bus).

In 2008 TfL bought TCL, which gave TfL full control and ended payments
TfL had to make because of the ticketing issues. The consortium members
were happy because they got their money immediately rather than over
decades.

/AIUI BICBW

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

is cheaper (6.60 v 7.40) than Ealing to LHR.

And paper travelcards are quite expensive if you're only making one journey.
Would be cheaper to get a paper single, if you can get a Z1-3 single at LHR
(and the gates don't complain that it's never been previously seen)

Any better ideas?

Sigh. If only Heathrow Connect was 'zone 99' or something, would make life
a lot easier.

Theo

BAA did consider accepting PAYG, but decided not to proceed.

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/reques...ncoming-243086

In message , at
23:41:45 on Mon, 21 Jan 2013, Arthur Figgis
remarked:

Does Brussels have some kind of airport-weighting on the fares on the
new line?

I haven't used the train from the airport for several years. However,
Wikipedia says:

A direct train link with Leuven was opened on 12 December 2005.
A direct link with Antwerp and Mechelen via the so-called
Diabolo line was opened for public service on 10 June 2012. The
Diabolo project is a public private partnership. It has been
decided that all rail passengers to the Brussels National
Airport railway station station pay a "Diabolo supplement" to
finance the ongoing and planned work."
--
Roland Perry

Matthew Dickinson wrote:
BAA did consider accepting PAYG, but decided not to proceed.

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/reques...ncoming-243086

Hmm, looks like the issues are more complex than I thought:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/reques...vices.pdf.html

Oyster supporting a maximum of 15 fare zones looks like a bit short-sighted.
I think we're up to 12 already (according to another thread here or in
uk.r).

Theo

In message , at 11:24:32 on Tue,
22 Jan 2013, Theo Markettos
remarked:
Oyster supporting a maximum of 15 fare zones looks like a bit short-sighted.
I think we're up to 12 already (according to another thread here or in
uk.r).

Something to add to the list of:

"There will never be more than 256 networks on the Internet"

etc.
--
Roland Perry

Roland Perry wrote:

Something to add to the list of:

"There will never be more than 256 networks on the Internet"

and "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

In article c80uf8l09l11obigasfro8oj622tlfu9od@None,
(Robert Neville) wrote:

Roland Perry wrote:

Something to add to the list of:

"There will never be more than 256 networks on the Internet"

and "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

more than enough, even!

--
Colin Rosenstiel

In message c80uf8l09l11obigasfro8oj622tlfu9od@None, at 14:14:20 on
Tue, 22 Jan 2013, Robert Neville remarked:
Something to add to the list of:

"There will never be more than 256 networks on the Internet"

and "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

I almost wrote that, but it's not quite the same.

The 1MB limit on the PC as a whole was because of addressing issues in
the processor, so is really Intel saying "no-one will ever need more
than 1MB".

After that, IBM decided on an architecture that split the 1MB up into
the motherboard and peripherals (where in this case the BIOS, whose
primary job was controlling peripherals, broadly counts as peripheral
memory). That split was 640k/384k [5+3 blocks of 128k], with video RAM
nailed in from 640K upwards and main BIOS from 928k upwards.

After many years, when it became clear that 640k of motherboard RAM
wasn't going to be enough it is alleged that Bill Gates gave the quote
above (but actual cites are thin on the ground), but the reason was
because he didn't (yet) have an OS that would usefully exploit either
the holes between 640k and 1MB, nor the 64k above 1MB that some bright
spark discovered was accessible due to an unforeseen quirk of the
processor chip.
--
Roland Perry

On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:45:25 +0000
Roland Perry wrote:
After that, IBM decided on an architecture that split the 1MB up into
the motherboard and peripherals (where in this case the BIOS, whose
primary job was controlling peripherals, broadly counts as peripheral

Ah the beauty of a von neuman architecture. Not. If we'd used the harvard
layout life would have been a lot simpler plus malware would be a lot harder
to write and a lot easier to spot.

But it might have cost a few pence more to build the CPUs so obviously it
couldn't be used.

*sigh*

B2003

In message , at 14:20:48 on Wed, 23 Jan
2013, d remarked:
After that, IBM decided on an architecture that split the 1MB up into
the motherboard and peripherals (where in this case the BIOS, whose
primary job was controlling peripherals, broadly counts as peripheral

Ah the beauty of a von neuman architecture. Not. If we'd used the harvard
layout life would have been a lot simpler plus malware would be a lot harder
to write and a lot easier to spot.

But it might have cost a few pence more to build the CPUs so obviously it
couldn't be used.

The chips Intel designed, and which were used by IBM for their first
PCs, were not really intended to be building blocks for what I called at
the time "mini-computer emulators". They were much more for embedded use
as logic replacements. Not even the 286 (used in the IBM-AT). The first
one which properly addressed that market was the 386.
--
Roland Perry