Posts by Paul Hargreaves

CEO of UK's National Grid warns of datacenters' thirst for power

Re: Easy fix for datacenters

And heat pumps. And kettles.

Re: off peak power

Not everything AI is LLM. Take breast cancer image diagnosis as an example. I'd argue that has a positive value to society.

Re: off peak power

Properly useful large model training takes weeks, not hours with 10's of thousands of GPUs.

You really don't want to add time to that process.

Also what do you do with all that expensive hardware during the time it's not training?

Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT

I have a hammer, everything is nails

Blah blah blockchain blah blah.

Can't see any advantage over just having a back end database of users who can authorise, and log.

Fortunately consumer Wi-Fi sharing is brand new, and so there isn't any examples of companies in various countries already doing this for many years.

Aw, look. The UK is still trying really hard to be the 'safest place to be online in the world'

Re: Inevitable

> the better off will just continue to consume electric or gas as and when they want, regardless.

I sort of agree your point, but some of us with electric cars are actively using dynamic pricing to reduce our cost per mile with an added benefit of helping balance the grid and offset some CO2.

Money isn't necessarily the only motivator to those who can afford to make decisions.

Fujitsu warns HMRC Projects team that 30% of them could be out of a job come April

Re: Get burned?

> Do you begrudge the fees for driving licences or passports?

Yes.

Apple's credit card caper probed over sexism claims – after women screwed over on limits

Re: Sex as a cheap substitute

> Also, why do millionaires need another credit card?

Because they're no different to the rest of us (other than the millionaire part).

Maybe they want them so they can use a different banking app that is more convenient than the one they currently mostly use?

Maybe they're wanting to spend more via one particular bank because they prefer the policies of that bank?

Maybe they're transitioning away from a bank they don't like?

Maybe they like opening their wallet in front of people and musing 'should I use this platinum card, or this centurion card, or this <insert whatever card implies status when buying tat>.

Linux 5.3 kernel bundles new, cuddlier, swear-free Torvalds with AMD Radeon Navi graphics support

Re: People relying on the previous behavior?

Bug is /dev/random hanging when it'll never get any new entropy, which can happen at boot time and is what the ext4 patch managed to trigger.

Link to the revert

Just for those who were interested: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=72dbcf72156641fde4d8ea401e977341bfd35a05

Metropolitan Police's facial recognition tech not only crap, but also of dubious legality – report

Re: Get burned?

> 30 seconds out of your day to provide ID and carry on.

Just to note, assuming you're carrying ID. What if you're not?

Blockchain is a lot like teen sex: Everybody talks about it, no one has a clue how to do it

Re: Get burned?

If it's invisible but still tangible, I suspect most of the world will be ;-)

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

No Xcode == not a real computer.

Looking for super speed from Optane? It's doable but quite difficult

Re: Confused...

Obligatory Mythbusters polishing episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

Oh snap: AWS has only gone and brought out its own Backup

Re: Get burned?

Is AWS a monopoly? Are there viable alternatives that have market presence? If so, it won't be an issue.

Domain name 'admin' role eyed up as latest victim of Whois system's GDPRmeggdon

They haven't stolen your domain name. You don't own it, you've just purchased rights to use it.

You need to go back to the person you paid money to and ask them to sort it out since you have a contract with them which now they are in breach of.

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

Re: Home security problem

I assume you've got something that keeps your internet traffic running in roughly the same cycles when you're away as well?

Plus you leave your mobiles at home when you go on hols so that the local towers still log where you are?

Reanimated Violin returns to scene with flashy XVS 8 array, and, er, AR app

Really?

> ... scan... QR code on the array's front

Boss: "Dave? What's the current utilisation of the array?"

Dave: "I'll grab my coat and be back in 10. Into the dark, noisy, chilly DC I go.. if I can get a signal in there."

Well, it's certainly a differentiator. Gap in the market and all that...

Milton Keynes: Come for roundabouts, stay for near-gigabit broadband

Non-optional https hijacking via Vodafone

"www.imgur.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for contentcontrol.vodafone.co.uk. Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN"

You can call them, you can complain, but even with it disabled in the Vodafone web interface and with support telling you that they don't block unless you ask them, it's still attempting to subvert various websites.

You just activated my battlecard: How IBM sales droids plan to whack flash array rivals

What a wonderful time to be alive, as demonstrated by the best competitive knockoffs being so meaningless that not only won't the sales person understand them, but neither will the buyer.

HPE primes storage networking pipes for NVMe-oF data deluge

Re: Get burned?

I thought the wholesale bloodbath had already happened.

FC feels a bit like mainframe or tape, won't go away for the reasons you state, but isn't a growing market with new entrants looking to displace McData/Brocade/Qlogic etc.

Cisco snags potential customer-sniffing biz for an undisclosed sum

Re: Disgusting2: Have humans ever lived in a time where industry was this disconnected from users?

"control their hotel experience with the sound of their voice"

Me: "Hey Room, Please stop the slamming doors in the corridor and the noisy traffic through the window, and the screaming drunks at 3am."

Room: ""

Me: "<sob>"

National ID cards might not mean much when up against incompetence of the UK Home Office

NIv6

> the NI number. We'd just need to issue it at birth, not at 16

Sounds like we're going to need NIv6...

Oddly enough, when a Tesla accelerates at a barrier, someone dies: Autopilot report lands

There are a lot of non-Tesla drivers in these comments.

Anyone who actually owns one, having spent a few minutes getting to know Autopilot, quickly learns it's limitations. It's pretty damn good on motorways, but you know as soon as you come to junctions you have to actively tell the car what to do.

Any one who is stupid enough to just let the car drive, without paying any attention at all, would probably be the sort of person who would have done the same thing in a car without the feature.

Whois privacy shambles becomes last-minute mad data scramble

Re: Irresistible force vs immovable object?

> How is the EU going to prosecute the USA based registrar for correctly following USA law?

Assuming the registrar has any legal entity in the country (i.e. either a subsidiary, or people employed) then they'll be the ones being taken to court as the representatives. This is what's been happening with Uber in London, for example.

A court could go after the money; to Visa, Mastercard etc and tell them to stop accepting payments in the countries where the law is being broken.

The courts could tell the ISPs in the country to block any requests to the particular domains owned by the extra-territorial entities, similar to how they block the fake rolex and torrent sites.

etc.

Re: Get burned?

There is no conflict here. If a company wants to do business in a particular country, it needs to follow the laws of that country.

If it doesn't want to (or, decides it can't) then it stops doing business in that country.

Just because the internet now exists doesn't change how that works.

Virtual desktops won’t save cash in clouds or on-prem. So why care?

> Even the likes of Skype for Business can’t be assumed to enjoy life on a desktop.

Fixed that for you.

Tech bribes: What's the WORST one you've ever been offered?

> Best? A night at Cirque de Soleil in a box with a bartender.

That's some freaky stuff right there...

Super Cali health inspectors: Tesla blood awoke us

Super Cali health inspectors: Tesla blood awoke us

When trying to oh buy a car, it's frankly quite absurd,

Nisson leaf through trade guides to find stats that you've heard,

A little lot of battery pack will keep your driveway clean,

You'll go 0-60 much faster than you mean...

British government to ink deal for yet another immigration database

> a £209m Immigration Platform Technologies programme was replacing ICW using an “agile approach, focusing on incremental improvements“

BINGO!

Great Western Railway warns of great Western password reuse: Brits told to reset logins

Re: Spam email or not?

I'm not sure it would help TBH, the average person struggles with basic IT.

e.g.

'I turned it off' - no, you turned the monitor off, you need to turn off all the electrical sockets if you really want to be sure.

'It's been doing that for ages' - the box that pops up to ask them to install a critical fix, closed.

'The internet isn't working' - actually it's working fine, turn airplane mode on/off and your phone will reconnect

'Please stop replying to all, please remove me, me too!' - users on any large corporate mailing lists.

'I CAN'T LOG IN' - turn off capslock and try entering your password again

etc etc etc.

I suspect the bells at any 'major' public site are continually ringing then...

Re: We need a court action

Another aside: Geo monitoring won't help much either. On my laptop I'm appearing to be in various different countries depending on how my employers VPN decides to connect. This morning it's Ireland.

Re: We need a court action

Re-use should be expected.

My password manager shows ~802 passwords currently stored, with various sites having various rules about length, formation etc so horse-battery-staple won't work nor do I (nor most people) have photographic memories.

Problem is, the average person can't (won't) cope with password managers and the like, especially on mobile devices where they're a pain to use.

Even in my household, where they're trained to not use the same password, and I've given them the easiest tools I can find, they still insist on re-using a password. Excuse is 'not an important site to worry about faffing with copy/paste of 15 characters'.

The old mantra was 'some you have, and something you know' but passwords no longer fit into that category... and I've no idea what the replacement is.

Microsoft reinvents Massive Arrays of Idle Disks for Azure, 'cos IBM tape ain't enough

Re: Get burned?

> How many times can you spin up a hard drive before it fails

Depends on the drive. Modern drives can cope quite well - e.g. 600,000 on/offs: https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-5e8DS1954-2-1712GB-en_GB.pdf

> how many times can you write to flash before it wears out

Depends on the drive but wear levelling and the 'archive' nature of the workloads means that I'd be surprised if many fail. If placed into RAID sets of a reasonable number of drives you can multiply up the write endurance by all the drives (again, assuming a reasonable filesystem above) and you'll then not be able to sustain enough writes before your system is out of warranty since the controller will bottleneck.

Most IT contractors want employment benefits if clobbered with IR35

Re: Get burned?

> VAT (permies dont pay this)

Neither, really, do contractors. You're just acting as a tax collector for the government. You calculate your rate and then, if you're registered for VAT, add the appropriate VAT rate onto the top.

New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory

Re: I told you years ago ...

TCP/IP is not designed for the web either.

I'm not sure I understand your point.

Yes, your old iPhone is slowing down: iOS hits brakes on CPUs as batteries wear out

Re: Battery shape?

In EVs you don't replace the main battery pack every 3-4 years and those batteries are under even worse loads. Obviously different battery tech, but also the whole battery management & heating pieces make me wonder if the same could also be applied to 'normal' cars for the 'normal' battery?

Car tax evasion has soared since paper discs scrapped

Yes we do... though it's called a supplement and we only pay it for 5 years.

80-year-old cyclist killed in prang with Tesla Model S

Re: Are we hearing about every single accident involving a Tesla?

> I am inclined to think though that Autopilot is too much of a compromise between driverless and driver assisted that is likely to result in the meatbag manual pilot being rather too slow to intervene in the event of something unexpected, particularly if that unexpected thing is related to another meatbag.

Not with the current level of autopilot. On a non-motorway when you engage it you definitely keep your hand(s) on the wheel since the car will react like a learner driver and, for example, over-steer or slam the brakes on thinking that a car in opposite lane is about to do something. By having your hand on the wheel as the car attempts to do something that you weren't expecting then it'll turn itself off automatically.

It's still a much better experience than driving without, but once you've spent more than 10 minutes you quickly learn the limitations and how to correctly handle it. On the motorway it's fantastic, similarly on large A-roads it's amazing, but on smaller A roads, or normal side streets, autopilot isn't perfect. Nor is it sold as such.

Dell forgot to renew PC data recovery domain, so a squatter bought it

> Why

Credit card? 20 seconds. Filling in online request forms to IT, then back-and-forward with managers/directors to get permission? Much longer.

And this is how shadow IT was born. Because of these sorts of tensions. You'll have one business team who go 'I just need x' and an IT team who have to try to keep everything stable and working...

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

Re: The interesting bit...

> first time a hardware neural network has been put into a consumer product.

My Tesla would like to say Hi.

Five-eyes nations want comms providers to bust crypto for them

So they could go back to the good old days and say 'nothing over 56 bit' or some random number above that.

Except - AWS. In ye olde days it would be troublesome to decrypt something unless you had lots of computers, something governments have but the unwashed didn't.

Cores are so cheap to rent now by the thousand. Weak crypto won't work.

Really they can play wack-a-mole and ask / tell each, and, every, single, developer, and, tech, company to give them the private keys.

Excluding China/Russia (oops), that'll work for big companies (in western countries) that provide SSL keys, and large app vendors such as Google, Microsoft etc.

Those pesky criminals, however, will use something else... since 'crypto' worked well before computers. Mine's a copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye'.

Hot news! Combustible Galaxy Note 7 to return as 'Galaxy Note FE'

Re: Facile Emanations

Not sure what analysis you were hoping for. I'll have a crack...

*** Analysis ***

Samsung have a lot of these units, which contain last years hardware and will likely only get 1 year of updates*. Technically a large proportion of the units will be refurbished so, at least in countries like the UK, wouldn't be able to be sold as 'new'. Which is one reason they won't be sold here, at least by Samsung.

The price of them is high when you consider the stock of units was already produced, so the only cost was for refurbishment (new, smaller battery). In all likelihood Samsung are trying to 'pull a fast one' and recoup a significant portion of the revenue lost from the original sale.

* Based on the experience of older Samsung devices like the S6, which got 2 years.

== End of Analysis

Side note: As an ex-Note 7 owner who was stiffed by Samsung through this debacle, my boycott of all things Samsung is still going strong. Well, all things apart from posts of course ;-)

FBI boss: 'Memories are not absolutely private in America'

> (Instagram) He said he likes that privacy, but would open up the account if compelled to do so under the law.

Except, what would happen is that Instagram would get the secret order demanding access, he'd (as a citizen) wouldn't know because Instagram would be compelled to not tell him.

OTOH, if the court did actually compel *him* to provide access, well that seems reasonable.

And, not forgetting that all the TLA/FLA agencies around the world already have access via their dragnets.

Explained: Apple iCloud kept 'deleted' browser histories for over a year

Re: Vacuum

That sucks.

Google gets smooth early Android releases. OEMs are struggling

Re: Awww.... come on !

I agree.

Samsung tried stock for a while with the Google Play Edition, but even when they weren't adding TouchWiz they still took forever to release updates. Example: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s4_google_play_edition_finally_receives_android_51-news-13959.php

S7 only got recently updated because there isn't a newer flagship; I had the Note7 (RIP), and I suspect the second the S8 ships the S7 will start to get the same treatment the S6 gets currently.

Samsung are crazy; not only do they have TouchWiz, they also have Good Lock, which is actually more useful IMO than TouchWiz but... wow... they must really have nothing better to do than maintain (or not) all these different versions of stuff, an entire Store. Oh, and the Game Launcher stuff, GearVR, etc. etc. etc.

Unfortunately, you've not got many choices.

iOS. Where software guys have to program specifically for the background API: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/BackgroundExecution/BackgroundExecution.html

Fail to do it and your app gets paused (and killed, to free RAM)

Android: As per the link you posted, follow the process properly or your app gets paused (eventually) and killed (to free RAM)

Microsoft: Err...

BlackBerry: Now Android

Simbian: ?

Any other contenders?

Re: Odd...

And yet, I click on the assistant button on the Pixel and have this conversation:

me> what are you

pixel< I'm your Google Assistant

me> what can you do

pixel< Here are some things you can ask for:

[stuff]

For non-Pixel phones you can *also* get it. All you have to do is install a copy of Google Allo from the Play store.

I launch that on my S6 Edge, click on 'Google Assistant', and...

me> what is the point

s6 edge< i think the point is to leave the world better than you found it

So, you *can* get it on any modern phone that runs Android (and has the Play store) though it's not directly linked to a button like, for example the trash that S-Voice.

Re: Awww.... come on !

You mean, unlike the customers who are stranded on old versions?

My S6 Edge says 'Android 6.0.1', 'Android security patch level 1 October 2016'.

What happened to 7.0? LG managed to ship that back in August.

Or even, just more security updates since Google keep providing Samsung (and everyone) with patches.

Funnily enough, my (HTC) Pixel says '7.1.1', and is currently updating to the February 2017 patches.

The whole point is that Google are showing that it's entirely possible to bring updates out, consistently, and frequently. That's probably because they don't distract themselves by releasing 1000 variants yearly (SM-G920 / SM-G925 / SM-G928, in F and I variants - and that's just the S6 brand), or some of the recent junk such as the Galaxy J1 mini prime, J3 Emerge, C7 Pro, etc....