Posts by Thought About IT

Backblaze starts tracking hot drives as world preps for rising global temperatures

Nothing to worry about

Surely this is just another of those things, like mass migration as lands becoming uninhabitable due to the global heating hoax, that we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about?

Want a clean energy transition? Better start putting cash into electrical grid

Re: Serious question

"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!

Re: Serious question

"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.

Re: Serious question

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.

Apple's iPhone 12 woes spread as Belgium, Germany, Netherlands weigh in

Re: Someone wants a recall.

Does this apply to the 12 mini as well? (Asking for a friend.)

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: How much lower...

Watch the eponymous News channel!

Microsoft dabbles in self-repair with Surface devices now DIY-friendlier

EOL of Windows 10

"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.

On the bright side, solar investment finally set to surpass oil spending

So, what is the solution?

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?

Offshore wind power redesign key to adoption, says Irish firm

Re: Jam tomorrow

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!

ChatGPT creates mostly insecure code, but won't tell you unless you ask

Re: This is totally expected - it doesn't know what you're trying to do

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.

Elon Musk actually sits down and talks to 'government-funded media' the BBC

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.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Not just the popular press

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.

Self-driving car computers may be 'as bad' for emissions as datacenters

Re: Rare earth minerals extraction (cost, environment)

"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!

UK's Guardian newspaper breaks news of ransomware attack on itself

Re: Bar-Stewards

"Unaffiliated reporting? Like any other news shit pipe?"

At least they're not constantly creating new enemies to rage against, like the Telegraph and DM, with their wars on "woke" to deflect attention from the riches accruing to their non-dom proprietors.

Bill Gates' green investments to shift from tackling climate change to mitigating impacts

Re: Inconvenient?

By "pollution issue", I assume you mean the byproducts from burning oil and gas? ie. greenhouse gases.

Re: Yep

A free market goes for whatever's cheapest

That's why it needs to be properly regulated.

Climate change prevention plans 'way off track', says UN

Re: So?

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!.

California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

Re: Har Har

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?

Re: Har Har

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.

Perl Steering Council lays out a backwards compatible future for Perl 7

Write-only

As far as I'm concerned, Perl is a write-only language so they'll have to make drastic changes to fix that fundamental deficiency.

Apple to bin apps that go three years without updates

Re: So you wrote it, and it works

I wonder if Apple are doing this to make sure that all apps conform to their latest privacy requirements? If so, I wholeheartedly approve.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

SPL

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++.

But why that VPN? How WireGuard made it into Linux

Re: Painless

It's good to go on a Pi 3 as well. I haven't had the chance to try it from outside the UK, to check if it is detectable by iPlayer etc.

Galileo satnav system gets two new somewhat confusing satellites

Re: No they havent.

"I agree that the EU acted disgracefully over Galileo"

Why was it disgraceful to require the UK to sign up to the same rules and arbitration as every other partiicipating country?

Re: No they havent.

@Justthefacts, I don't know where you're getting your facts from but both Newcastle and Glasgow Prestwick had working implementations of EGNOS approaches, and others were in the pipeline for Blackpool, Gloucester and Shoreham, among others. Commercial aircraft are already equipped for those approaches, as are new light aircraft from Cessna, Cirrus and Diamond.

As of Occtober last year, work was in progress to implement EGNOS approaches at 95 airports in Europe, while we had to abandon ours as a consequence of the extreme form of exit from the EU chosen by the Brexit headbangers.

Well, one thing that's happened to BrexitNav is that our airfields have had to abandon plans to switch to or implement much cheaper satnav precision approaches. The price of sovereignty!

Measuring your carbon footprint? There's no app for that

Re: Wake me up once China gets onboard

If you're awake, you can help cut China's CO2 emissions yourself: simply stop buying stuff that's made there. Our emissions look good in comparison, because we offshored our manufacturing there.

India makes a play to source rare earths – systematic scrapping of its old cars

Re: They need to learn from "cash for clunkers" in the US

And that was before Trump started trashing environmental regulations. In many ways, to an outsider, the US looks no different from a corrupt a 3rd world country.

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

File ownership

I've never considered any file that's created by my actions on an iPhone to be mine, because I can't go to its filesystem and copy it to anywhere else. That's one of the features I really miss from my Windows phone.

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

Obsoleting hardware

What is it about these new UI tweaks that render my Surface Book (and many other Windows computers) obsolete? And yes, it does have TPM 2.0.

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

Re: Windows 11 also requires the presence of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) – version 2.0

Well, Windows PC Health Check is very clear that Windows 11 will not run on my Microsoft Surface Book, so I wonder where you bought your nothing-burger?

Advert for coronavirus 'destroying' air 'purifier' exterminated by UK watchdog

Facebook

Should I be surprised that Facebook still have a page for this scam, with a link to the new website promoting it?

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

Re: Stop fiddling with my browser!

After updating to 89.0, FireFox asked me if I wanted to switch to the new UI. I said no, and nothing has changed.

Recovery time objective missed by four weeks, but Parler is back online

Disqus's turn next

On social networks, the only way to judge someone is by their posting history, which is why it's time to start criticising Disqus for allowing its users to hide theirs, and for allowing the sort of language that got Parler into trouble. They also have a sleazy feature to let moderators block posters who they disagree with, such that their comments seems to have been posted, but only the poster can see them. Then of course, the Trump supporting web sites that take advantage of that feature make a big deal about cancel culture! Unsurprisingly, Disqus provides no way to contact them about this.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

Re: “We are proud of our 2020 election coverage ..."

I'm alarmed that the government has greenlighted Murdoch to set up a Fox News here in the UK. Having seen how successful an election tactic it was to divide the nation over Brexit, more division seems to be what they intend to encourage.

Marmite of scripting languages PHP emits version 8.0, complete with named arguments and other goodies

I found the Laravel framework good for recoding my web site in PHP.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Re: No need to panic

The algorithm on page 14 of that document reminds me of that oh-so-successful one for allocating A-level results!

Thought the FBI were the only ones able to unlock encrypted phones? Pretty much every US cop can get the job done

Thoughts and prayers for the dead, but now is not the time to discuss gun control - or ever!

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

60% of them voted to leave!

Here's some words we never expected to write: Oracle said to offer $10bn cash, $10bn shares for TikTok US – plus profit share promise

Value added

I hadn't heard of TikTok until I saw this sketch by Sarah Cooper mouthing Trump's inanities about Covid 19. It adds value, but $20 billion!

Microsoft confirms pursuit of TikTok after Satya Nadella chats to Donald Trump

Re: Looks like Donnie the Don

Nadella probably had to promise that he'd ban Sarah Cooper, before Trump would allow him to buy TikTok.

Networking boffins detect wide abuse of IPv4 addresses bought on secondary market

Doesn't v6 give an infinitely greater possibility for bots to avoid being blacklisted?

In Hancock's half-hour, Dido Harding offers hollow laughs: Cake distracts test-and-trace boss at UK COVID-19 briefing

Typhoid Dido

John Crace, the political sketch writer in the Guardian, put it nicely when he wrote "it’s going to take Typhoid Dido quite a while until the number of people she’s prevented from getting the coronavirus outweighs the number she’s helped to infect." ... by letting the Cheltenham festival go ahead.

Stiff upper lip time, Brits: After bullying France to drop its digital tax on Silicon Valley, Trump's coming for you next

Re: But, but, but ...

Being good neighbours and following the rules of the club, which we were intimately involved in writing, is hardly "abandoning our democracy"!

But, but, but ...

We were promised we'd get our sovereignty back after Brexit, so would stop being rule takers. Surely Johnson didn't lie to us?

WTF? Apple iPhones shrank by more than $22bn in fiscal '19

Re: The Thrill Is Gone

My Nokia Lumia 925 Windows phone is still giving sterling service for phone calls, texting and GPS, but I know I'll have to replace it eventually. The problem is, while Android phones are cheaper than iPhones, the hidden cost is the data they slurp, so I'll probably end up with the latter. I just hope Apple realise they are pricing themselves out of business before I need to do that.

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

Re: doesn't matter who hates it...

I've always thought of Perl as a write-only language. It's all very well encouraging people to be expressive, but only if they have to maintain their own code in perpetuity.

Humans may be able to live on Mars within halls of aerogel – a wonder material that can trap heat and block radiation

Solar wind

Mars does not have a magnetic field to deflect the solar wind, so it'll need something more than aerogel to protect people from bombardment by beta radiation.

Deepfake 3.0 (beta), the bad news: This AI can turn ONE photo of you into a talking head. Good news: There is none

Re: digital signatures

Would you believe anything that was digitally signed by Fox News? Likewise, would any of their viewers believe anything that was digitally signed by Channel 4 News?

Boeing admits 737 Max sims didn't accurately reproduce what flying without MCAS was like

Most people buy a ticket, having no idea which plane they'll be flying in. A bit like those who vote for a party with no manifesto, policies, or members, because they think it'll get them to their destination.