Posts by Thought About IT 434 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Feb 2008
China is already suffering badly from climate change so it's in their interest to stick with the programme, regardless of what Trump does. While they are investing to dominate in technologies of the future which they are selling to the rest of the world, the US is doing the opposite. When the US finally wakes up, it will be too late to catch up. I just hope they don't then lash out, as is their wont, and blame everybody but themselves.
I've had to automate a way to replace all pages on my forum with a short message when AI bots hit the site, to reduce the bandwidth costs and keep the server response acceptable for everything else. This happens several times a day, sometimes going on for hours. Even though the bots are getting a plain text response with no links, they won't take no for an answer. I wish there was one!
What's a scrollbar for? Oh yes, it's to let you know that you're only seeing a part of what's available. So, why do we have to scrabble about with the mouse pointer to find out if there is one? I want a setting in Windows that apps can check to find out if I prefer to have a scrollbar do its job by making itself always visible when appropriate. I don't mind if Microsoft spy on any changes to that setting, because I'm sure they'll quickly discover that only UI designers want to hide the bloody things!
Anybody who has any doubts about Trump's thirst for vengeance should read this:
If you bothered to read this article and the one you linked to, you'd realise that they are referring to different parts of the atmosphere. However, even that wouldn't change your mind about the cause of global heating because, once you go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, there's no getting back out.
@Jellied Eel
Make up your mind. Is it that you're in denial that our greenhouse gas emissions are behaving according to the laws of physics, or that you don't like any of these new-fangled renewable energy devices because they hit the profits of the fossil fuel industries?
"So not so long ago, we had 'The Pause' where temperatures pretty much flatlined, despite the inexorable rise of CO2. "
That was because of a record El Niño in 1996-1997 and the GWPF dined out on it as the global temperature slowly climbed back up to the peak in those years, until they could no longer deny the trend so quietly removed the graph from their website.
"are we in any natural increase of averages as part of a cycle?"
Short answer, no. Long answer from NASA:
Jellied Eel wrote: "unsourced figures about 'deniers' being funded by 'big oil'"
Big oil spent $445m in last election cycle to influence Trump and Congress
"These investments are “likely to pay dividends”, the report says, with Republicans holding control of the White House, House and Senate – as well as some key states. Trump unleashed dozens of pro-fossil fuel executive actions on his first day in office"
Dear Mr Blartfast, no need to get your knickers in a twist. Along with bringing about peace in Ukraine and Gaza, President Trump is fixing climate change by sacking the scientists who monitor it and banning any mention of it in government documents. Just ignore any reports of evidence to the contrary, like this. /s
I'm not too happy that Microsoft arbitrarily decided that my first generation Surface Book laptop cannot run Windows 11 (which I dislike) and are soon going to abandon Windows 10. I chose it because I needed a touch screen and high resolution for software testing. It survived a replacement battery and is still good for developing software with Visual Studio. However I needed to build and test software for ARM64 processors so bought a Surface 7 laptop. It is much lighter, very fast and has good battery life. It has run all the x86 programs that I've needed without incident, so mustn't grumble - so far.
While Parakhin's at it, I hope he fixes their stupid implementation of scrollbars. The whole point of them is to indicate that there's more to see than is currently visible. Having to scrabble about with the mouse pointer to see if there's a hidden scrollbar completely defeats that point.
"Why would some no nothing administrator (even if it was some friggin genius) know what people need in a 15 minute radius?"
How much of a genius would you have to be to work out that you need shops, access to public transport, schools, play areas, pubs, doctors and dentists? And no, there is no secret plan to stop you from travelling further for anything more exotic!
"Why should people be fined for leaving their administrators fantasy boundary?"
That's only ever been suggested by conspiracists. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of not having to travel far to the shops and doctors and dentists - except in the minds of conspiracists.
This is the nub of the problem. People in government know that the climate is changing and accept that it's caused by our CO2 emissions, but the fossil fuel industries have made it politically impossible to take the requisite actions. So effective have their propagandists been that they can confidently agree in public that their products are destabilising the climate, while doing everything they can behind the scenes to undermine every attempt to reduce CO2 emissions.
Hence, the idea of having access to basic services within a 15 minute walk or bike ride has become the conspiracy that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops and that they ration who uses the roads and when, and police it all with CCTV. Wind turbines slaughter birds. Solar panels are a blight on the countryside. Etc.
What they don't talk about is that global heating will lead to a huge influx of refugees from countries that become uninhabitable. Choose carefully who you want to believe.
"If Microsoft is really serious about right to repair, they should extend the lifetime of its Windows operating system: their plans to discontinue Windows 10 in 2025 could leave millions of computers behind"
This is going to generate a huge pile of waste if it goes ahead. In my small business, I'll have to junk 5 PCs and 2 laptops, simply because of the arbitrary decision to prevent them from running Windows 11. I hope the EU gets on MIcrosoft's back about this, before it's too late.
First, the fossil fuel corporations denied there was a problem, even though their scientists had warned them of it. Now, as the problem has become too visible to deny, their propagandists have changed tack and attempt to discredit all renewable sources of energy and electric cars. The effectiveness of this approach is seen in the number of commenters parroting their lines whenever these issues are discussed. OK, given the short timescale we have to start reducing the cause of the problem, and solar panels and wind turbines aren't part of the solution, what is?
Firstly, you haven't included decommissioning costs for nuclear power stations and the cost of safe storage of their high-level waste products for hundreds of thousands of years Understandable, because we haven't even started on that yet. Secondly, they're not yet vulnerable to offshore storms, but wait until the sea level rises!
I asked it to show how to implememt B-tree locking in C++. It started well enough by describing the necessary steps, including using RAII to release the locks. Then it produced some code which didn't do that, and I told it so. It responded by saying sorry and produced some more code using RAII. However, this took no account of the locks required when splitting nodes, and I told it so. This resulted in another apology and some more code which would have resulted in deadly embraces, so I gave up. My conclusion is that it has no real insight into what it's doing, so can't be trusted to produce anything other than simple code.
Musk does have a point, to be fair. The government decides who the DG and chairman are and how big the license fee is. They then threaten to cut it further into the bone whenever the BBC broadcast anything unfavourable to them, while getting their pals at the DM and Telegraph to denounce the BBC as lefties. An alien observer could easily be forgiven for concluding that it's government controlled.
It's not just the popular press using the term "boffin", unless this organ considers itself in that category. The problem with using it is that it conjures up an image of people who are not normal "like us", and is dismissive of "them". This is not the ideal way to encourage youngsters to become scientists, nor to discourage the current anti-science phenomenon. Anti-vaxers and climate change deniers spring to mind.
"If you are a realist like me, put in the account sheet the cost of rare earth minerals extraction into this, and you will see EV are WORST than fuel-based cars."
Leaving aside your grammatical error (difficult when you shout it), worse in what way? They succeed in their purpose of reducing CO2 emissions compared with internal combustion engines. Reducing them poses an existential threat to the fossil fuel industries while business as usual poses an existential threat to life on the planet. Choose your priority!
I've no idea what you've "said about CO2 (with science)", anomymous person on the internet, but when even the producers of the products causing CO2 levels to rise have admitted that they have caused global heating, I'd say that it's up to you to prove otherwise. However, anyone who goes down the rabbit hole of climate change denial will struggle to get themselves out of it, so I'm sure you'll carry on being a useful idiot for the fossil fuel corporations, even as a third of Pakistan is flooded!.
In 1982, Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted the global warming that continuous burning of their products would cause, to within a margin of 20%, and those predictions were consistent with those made by mainstream climate scientists. So, what were you saying about un-testable models where the code and inputs are kept secret?
For many years, under previous management, this site was a mouthpiece for anthropogenic climate change deniers. I kept pointing out to them that their anti-science stance discredited everything else they wrote about, and my posts have been premoderated ever since. Hence I'm not surprised at the drift of this piece, but the overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing, as predicted by the increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, has sensibly led them to keep their politics off the page.
The MPE operating system of HP3000 minicomputers was written in SPL. This was a perfect match to the stack based architecture so it was easy to write compact, fast code commensurate with the limited RAM available in those days. Hewlett-Packard also made the HP1000 which on paper was faster hardware, but running theiir version of Unix (HPUX) and programmed in C, was a dog compared to the HP3000. My language of choice is now C++.
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