Posts by Major N 167 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Nov 2008
Thank you for the reading, always like to be better informed on this stuff. I knew there was a name i could not remember, Laffer Curve. I do find this deep analytical stuff fascinating...
There was a guy who used to write about this economics stuff here on The Reg. he was a Brexiteer, and I did not agree with a lot of his politics, but his analysis and insight into Economics was both interesting and enlightening. Can anyone remember his name?
Now it has been shown that you can raise taxes by lowering taxes...
I believe the theory is that although the take from any individual person/corporation may be lower, having that lower rate means that other individuals/corporations, who would otherwise reside elsewhere for tax purposes, may choose instead to reside in your country, thus meaning the number of individuals paying the taxes increases, thus increasing take.
Similarly, lowering corporation tax rates reduces the take you get from those, but you get more through income taxes on workers who are now paid more, or are more numerous, as corporations can afford pay rises or to take on additional staff, and sales tax from increased consumer spending, and increased corporate profits meaning an increase in total corporation tax take... In practice, usually you probably just get a bigger shareholder dividend, but those are also taxable (eventually).
All of this is theoretical, and used to sell tax cuts to the wealthy through trickle down economics. I am not a economist. I do not contend that these results have ever happened in reality. But these are the arguments I have seen. Ultimately, it ends up to the rich getting richer, whichever way you look at it. The question is, whether it benefits society or just the Broligarchs.
Something similar happened to my first place of work.. except slightly less value was lost.
I was a callow youth of 16 or so, working a Saturday shop in a high street bakery. I came in one morning to get changed for my shift, and upon entering the rear of the shop, found a man staring at me through a hole in the wall into the adjacent property, which was a travel agents.
Turned out some thieves had broken into the office upstairs, come down, smashed through the partition wall into the bakery, chiseled through the wall into the travel agents, and proceeded to fail to break into their foreign currency safe. They then failed to break into the floor safe of the bakery, which only held a hundred pounds or so in change and float anyway, and proceeded to leave only with the already ancient and unused, valueless, 486-era PC which was gathering dust in the office upstairs.
First time building a pc.
Fitting an ATX P1 mobo into an old AT case; not all of the holes and riser lined up of course, so I used lego to insulate.
Finish plugging everything in, or so i thought, and turned it on, happy to see the bios flash up.
Then - ERROR: no FDD detected
Realise I missed the power plug on the FDD, and rush to plug it in, forgetting to power off first. Managed to misalign the holes and start to slide it in one pin over where it should have been (somehow the slots and notches didn't prevent this). BZZT-CRACK! Flash! PC power dies. Strange whine.
In shame, turn off, unplug. Align and insert correctly. Expecting nothing, I turned it back on. Whirr, Beep! All is fine!
That's when I learned this PSU had a circuit breaker instead of a fuse (or worse, soldered in fuse; blew a few of those with the 115v switch in the wrong place in my time).
Lesson learned; Measure twice, cut once. And they don't make 'em like they used to.
I don't get the argument that it will cause older chargers to be discarded. Surely that's what happens now anyway, since every new device comes with a new Ultra/Mega/Super/FasterWeSwear-2.0(TM) charge standard that wasn't available to the previous generation...
I have a drawer of the damn things as it is, and whenever i pull out an older piece of technology I spend ten minutes trying to find whatever proprietary mini-USB they decided to use to power it. A common standard won't cause the old chargers to become landfill overnight, but will mean that in the future there will be less waste over each new generations lifecycle. Admittedly the myriad variations-on-a-theme-but-not-interoperable methods of throwing more electrons down the same type of wire will continue to happen, but it will mean less, especially since if you just want an overnight charge you'll be fine with last year's plug.
The bigger impact on consumers will be the inevitability of chargers not being included, the unit price not dropping to compensate, and then Apple, Samsung et al charging you an extra £50 for a shiny new plug that claims to charge your device 50ns faster than the previous one you already own...
I switched to magnetic tip chargers for my phones, to reduce the mechanical stress on the charge port of repeated entry/disengagement. Used to have to replace MicroUSB sockets every 6 months or so on my phone, and that was before they started gluing the damn things together. USB-C seems to be stronger than Micro-USB (which was seemingly made of spider silk and wishes) but I'm not taking the risk these days... might not be able to do data and as such negotiate the faster speeds from some chargers, but a lot easier than hairdryering a device open every couple of fortmonths....
yeah I was so excited for XP and its claims of reliability. I started Uni at the time XP came out, so bought my very own computer for Uni (instead of relying on the family machine). It came with the gold disk prerelease OEM version of XP Home (I took receipt of it with XPH preinstalled 2 weeks before the official release date). It bluescreened three times on the first day! As soon as I moved to Pro, they disappeared. Still not sure if it was the V1.0 (I consider it V0.99 since it was before release, I expect WU had several fixes that day) or just that home was gash...
I also remember owning a disk labelled Windows 96 at some point... think it was a W95 SP ultimately....
In my memory, W95 was amazing compared to DOS and 3.1. Though it was flaky, and as several have said here regular reinstalls were a must. W98 I found much more stable, especially once SP2(?) was out. I'm old enough to have fond memories of the old DOS days and tweaking autoexec and config.sys to make my latest game run, that was the golden age for me, taking my first steps into the world of computers, and even getting games to run was a victory to savour. Kids these days don't know they're born :P
Bought a Honda CBF6, first big bike. Went out for a ride over the pennines with a friend on his shiny new CBF6. Got to a roundabout, engine stopped. Wouldnt start again. Distraught I'd bought a faulty bike I wheeled it over 2 lanes of traffic to the side of the road. Friend, who has been riding bikes forever, wanders over, flicks the killswitch and hits the starter. Mortified isnt the word.
In my defence, my previous bike didnt have a killswiotch, so I wasn't used to em, and didnt think to check if i'd accidentally knocked it
Back when I was still learning things, my school had an old Novell/DOS network, that included a messaging program that would send a message to any user or terminal ID, which would dutifully pop up to that user/terminal with the sender's userID and terminal prepended. Of course, it wasn't long before someone had a hacked version of said messaging exe that didnt attach the sender details, and it made the rounds. I of course named the exe the same as the original and set the execution paths so that it would use this version, but look like it was using the original...
One kid was amazed at the messages I was securely sending, and asked how I did it, so I showed him, neglecting to mention that I was using an anonymous one. He promptly sent a message out, and I did not see who to.... until 30 seconds later, when the head of IT marched in, grabbed him literally by the ear, and frogmarched him out of the computer suite. Seems he'd decided to test it by sending a message to the head of it proclaiming he 'smelled like cow pats' or something like that, and the original program had dutifully prepended his actual username and terminal ID. He was banned from the computer suite for the rest of the school year....
I've been thinking about this and two things crossed my mind.
1) You can claim a tax subsidy (in the UK) for your heating/electric etc for enforced WFH, its not a lot but it adds up over the year
2) You save money on commuting costs, as well as the time. For me, the cost of commuting is greater than the additional energy consumption, so I'm in a net gain situation. For those who use human power to commute, less so.
Whilst at Uni, someone discovered Net Send and started sending messages to random machine names (as each of the rooms had a naming theme, it wasn't difficulty, IIRC the room I was in had each machine names as an Element). Anyway, he sent some dumb message to the machine I was on. I politely replied, asking him to kindly refrain from messaging people in general, and my elf in particular. He decided to refuse, and started repeatedly sending my computer messages. After ignoring another request to refrain, I knocked together a quick loop script which sent him 20k messages. Each of which required clicking through, and would steal focus.
He didn't net send again. I guess you could say he got the message(s).
The B737-MAX has 2 AOA sensors. one goes into Flight Computer 1, one goes into Flight Computer 2. MCAS uses one FC, alternating each flight (to the best of my knowledge). There is also no display of the AOA data from EITHER sensor, or an AOA-Sensor-Disagree light, UNLESS YOU PAY EXTRA FOR THEM.
Lion Air did not pay extra. Therefore the pilots could not know that the AOA was wrong, even if they had known about the MCAS system and what it did/would do in those circumstances. Which they did not, as they had not been trained, and MCAS is not mentioned in the MAX manuals apparently (well, it wasn't before the incident, probably is now)
I do not know at this stage whether Ethiopian did.
I used to run a site using Server Side includes to look up template files to keep the look across the site (circa 2002 or so). My host had default 404 etc error pages which were write-locked but for some reason I could save over them in place, so I added SSI Includees to make the error pages match those of the rest of the site.
Later on, I rewrote the site in PHP, and since the SSI error pages wouldn't use PHP, and I had learned more in those days, I used a .htaccess page to point the server at new, PHP error pages, retired the old SSI based templates, and never looked back.
Unfortunately, one day, my host deleted the .htaccess file, so the server failed back on the old error pages, which still had SSI include links to template files that no longer existed. They also had the server set up so that on a 404 page not found during an SSI Include request, it would instead include the 404 page.
So we had a 404 page that would try to include a template file, which because it didn't exist, would instead include the 404 page in line, and so on... 404s all the way down, until the server ran out of resources and fell over. For all paying users on the node.
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