Posts by Peter2

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Re: No surprizes here...

Funny how greybeards used to brag about having the latest and greatest. Still is, in some communities.

There was a point when an improvement in hardware led to an increase in performance. Roughly from the earliest days up until multi core processors came about.

When you had a single core, and something thrashed it then you really noticed. With even a 2 core processor then anything totally using a processor core doesn't actually stop you using any other program on the computer.

Re: No surprizes here...

outside of gaming even the incremental improvements have been largely unnecessary

I do play games, and the incremental improvements have been largely unnecessary. (mostly courtesy of most games being designed for every gaming platform, so they have to work on the worst console meaning that as long as you have greater performance than the worst mainstream console then your not going to run into performance problems)

Of course, most corporations (including my employer) are so deeply steeped in Microsoft Everything that they can't envision using anything else, even if it's cheaper, faster, and more secure.

I take it that you included the cost of replacing all of the document management systems used, as well as the case management system because they require office running on windows when you allowed for it being "cheaper"?

What I might run at home myself might not be suitable for my workplace.

Wind, solar power outstrip fossil fuel generation for EU

Re: Policy driven

Europe does not possess sufficient fossil or nuclear fuel for its energy requirements.

Which is a specific set of policy decisions, made to please the green crowd who promised the country that wind and solar could produce 100% of our energy without cost or security implications, and who dismissed nuclear, and then derided people who raised concerns about being dependant on overseas suppliers as xenophobic dinosaurs who didn't understand that suppliers like Russia had nothing but good and peaceful intentions and would never do anything nasty, like for instance invading Ukraine and then blackmailing countries by cutting off their energy supplies if they didn't passively acquiesce.

Hence despite the overwhelming majority of the countries heating and cooking being done with gas (and a large share of our electricity generation!) our gas extraction was decommissioned before replacements were in place in favour of buying gas in from abroad. As little as 10 years ago had we been faced with the current situation then we would have been exporting gas and making a massive profit on it, instead of destroying our economy by paying a massive premium in buying gas in from abroad.

This is a massive failure of the "Green" political movement, who have literally frozen the poor, old and vulnerable to death this winter while destroying our economy, and their failure kicks everybody hard in the pocket every month.

If we build nuclear on the terms that Hinkley point C was being constructed on (with no cost to the taxpayer) then we'd still be paying electricity bills of about a tenth of the current prices and we'd have enough juice to replace existing heating with storage heaters and fanheaters without raiding research labs for new technology that doesn't work. We'd also be able to use electric cookers, and have enough juice for electric cars; which we haven't at the moment. Nor will we ever have following the idiotic and brain dead policies that left us in this state.

Current "biomass" plants are burning rainforests which are cut down, shipped to America, turned into wood pellets and then shipped across the Atlantic to be burned here. How anybody can consider that "green" is beyond me; my view is that it's idiotic.

Intel cuts some workers’ pay to fund its future

If you look at the Intel & TSMC roadmaps then Intel are in trouble for the next 5 years at least.

Intel has been used to having a process advantage since forever. They've lost it, and can't retain it. By the time "Intel 3" which is supposed to counter TSMC's 3nm process is available in any quantity then TSMC is going to be rolling out their 2nm process. And Intel 3 is going to be equivalent to TSMC's 3nm; not 3nmE which will have then been in volume production for a year and a half at that point.

TSMC has a track record of making conservative guesses on their roadmap and delivering early for their customers; Intel has a track record of over promising and delivering late.

Here's a prediction; Intel will end up buying capacity from TSMC within the next and getting them to fab chip designs and will offload their older internal fabs. Logically that will eliminate the problem of using a previous generation fabbing technology and allow competing on an even playing field. However it'll introduce Intel to a new problem; that of having to compete on design merits; something which Intel has struggled to do against AMD since the AMD 386 turned out the same performance as the Intel 486 chip at a fraction of the price.

While terrible for Intel, it's very good for anybody buying computers (even if you only buy Intel) as your hardware will be faster, cheaper and consume less power than it would otherwise do.

China shops around US bans to power its nuclear weapons research program

Re: China is a Big Country

Quite. If by no other method than asking every Chinese student studying in the west to buy a PC with one in, and then ask them bring the PC back with them for Christmas every year and being handed a wad of cash at the airport to buy a replacement.

Or by paying people in <insert nation here> to buy a bunch in exchange for a wad of cash when they hand them over for onwards shipping. Or any number of other easy ways of getting around things. It's pretty easy to circumvent restrictions like this in a free society for what is effectively a commodity good. When you start getting into specialised gear that only has one supplier that sells a hundred machines a year then it's rather easier to stop, but your never going to stop the Chinese getting their hands on western commodity goods.

AI cannot be credited as authors in papers, top academic journals rule

Re: "all paper submissions must be the original work of authors"

The purpose of a research paper is to present research, the thinking behind research tests, as well as the methods used in the tests and the results.

"AI" in the form of the GPT library does not do research, or the thinking behind research. It doesn't do tests or think about results. All it does is spit out a bunch of text, on the basis of being given an answer first and trying to justify it. From a point of view of writing a research paper it's a bit worthless, isn't it?

The purpose of peer review is twofold; it attempts to pick up on failures in methods being made by scientists by their peers pointing out their errors and gives feedback to improve.

Now, if a "paper" is presented with a bunch of text which starts with an answer and then tries to justify it's position without research or thinking then it has zero value from a research point of view. Even a poorly written paper which is reviewed might have something useful in it; "AI" written versions will certainly not. There is also no point in giving feedback to a bunch of text outputted from an "AI" as it's incapable of understanding the criticism or learning from the experience, so any time so expended is completely wasted. This becomes more serious when the reviewer is an expert within their field, making their time more valuable because if they are flooded with crap then it's stealing their time from doing something productive, such as reviewing a humans paper who genuinely wants their feedback to improve their work and understanding.

Anybody should be able to grasp this without serious thought, and anybody submitting research papers should have figured this out for themselves before wasting the reviewers time.

Re: "Peer Review of Scientific Papers"

This would depend upon the journal. Particular subjects have serious issues with the peer reviewers not wanting criticism, largely because they are living in a pack of cards and are a bit concerned about the slightest touch bringing the whole edifice down around them.

Others don't. While not being a professional in a particular subject, I do have a lively interest in it, enough to be a member of the foremost professional body which comes with a paper copy of the internationally ranked (A1) journal quarterly. I have seen somebody attempt to roll over toes with a steamroller and overturn the boat. Their paper had a short response which succulently yet systematically pointed out the considerable errors in it.

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

Note; equal pay for equal work should mean "if two people have equal work output then they should both be paid the same". It shouldn't mean that if one person is doing overtime then they shouldn't get paid for it, or that the person not doing overtime should be paid more to make up for the fact that their colleague is getting overtime.

Equal pay for every worker simply creates a situation whereby somebody putting in a lot of extra time and effort and managing double the work output of their colleagues is incentivised to reduce their work output to match the least efficient worker.

"Quiet quitting" is a horrible term by a management consultant, describing an employee doing what they are contracted to do. Oh, the horror.

I've done overtime for employers, and have gone over and above my job description with the reasonable expectation that it'd be paid for either directly (via overtime pay) or indirectly (via promotion, pay rise etc).

If it is, then that's all very well and good. Under those circumstances an employer can reasonably expect people to keep doing things over and above the contracted requirements of your job description because doing so is in the self interest of the employee.

If an employer decides to deliberately not reward employees for doing anything above their minimum contracted requirements via not paying overtime, not handing out promotions for hard work etc (in the name of equal pay for every worker) then i'd like an explanation from said employer as to precisely why they think that any rational person would do anything over and above the contracted requirements.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: Cake

Do you think that the UK food watchdog is hoping that millions of people are going to book deliveries of cake to their office just to spite them?

AI may finally cure us of our data fetish

Re: "comply with a documentation requirement imposed by his organization's bureaucracy"

Many years ago, I helped write the documentation for (IIRC) an ISO9000 application which required that we document all of our processes in particular ways.

When I say "I helped", it appears I actually did almost all of the work. I say almost all, because there were some really odd bits where I had no idea if we had a procedure at all, and if we did then I had no idea what it was. I therefore did the usual ***placeholder; no idea what the procedure is on this so somebody who knows needs to fill it out. ***

I noted this quite clearly when handing the documentation over, and demonstrated how to find the place holders (ctrl-f + **placeholder). I then considered my part done, and the manual went through at least three different layers of approval by management and an several day long inspection by an external accreditation. When they were published, I was curious as to what the procedure was on some of the more obscure areas, so I pulled up those areas of the manual to have a look.

The procedure was officially agreed to be:-

***placeholder; no idea what the procedure is on this so somebody who knows needs to fill it out. ***

I maintain that i'm the only person to ever fully read our procedures manual.

Half of environmental claims about products are full of crap, says EU

Re: Stretching It A Bit, But.....

I firmly believe mining landfills for metals is going to become a big thing soon.

It couldn't possibly. All the electric waste going in landfill has the little symbol printed on them meaning that you have to pay an extortionate amount for equipment recycling via the WEEE directive rather than throwing it in landfill for free.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

Re: Back in the day ....

It would depend on the explosive. 250 grams of C4, or even just 190 grams is a LOT of explosive power: If it detonated in a room, you'd definitely lose the desk (and any windows) but anyone in the room would probably die from blast effects and unless you were in a building with concrete/rebar walls and floors, people in adjacent floors or rooms would be in great danger from flying debris.

Used correctly and scientifically (as a shaped charge, or to create an explosively formed projectile) then a small amount of explosives positioned correctly can do a *lot* of damage. As in, cracking steel bars and blowing holes through a steel plate etc as shown in the video. Used correctly with expert placement one could conceivably bring down a surprisingly large building with a a surprisingly small amount. If placed in precisely the right spot.

However that's used correctly and placed scientifically in precisely the right spot. As in, each of those sets of explosives in the videos are designed and shaped to produce a different effect and is placed just in the right place to produce that effect.

If it's arrived in an letter type envelope then it's going to be largely flat and so by definition *not* in a shaped charge, and so most of the effect is going to be wasted in inefficient ways and it'd suggest that it'd be likely to cause surprisingly little damage. Especially if the people putting it together didn't have access to military grade explosives.

Re: Back in the day ....

If a bomb is an a large envelope (say 250 grams weight) then in the real (non movie) world there is a limit to the amount of damage that amount of pure explosives could cause, and the battery and wiring for the detonator is going to reduce the amount of explosives that are possibly in it. Which is to say it could convert part of a desk to flying splinters, but it wouldn't exactly do any structural damage so people on floors above and below are quite safe. The idea with a letter bomb is that somebody is holding it in their hands when its set off, and if they aren't then it's hardly going to do much.

Now if you have a box delivered on a pallet that you think is a bomb, then that's rather more worth evacuating the building and neighbourhood over...

Government tech spending in England more than doubles in five years

Re: "the non-digital leader can't really understand"

The digital leader might also need to put their ego in a box and explain the issues in terms that professionals in other fields can understand.

Every other profession manages this reasonably well.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: Too expensive, too heavy, too range limited

... and hauls the weight of the electric motor *and* batteries for it. Gearbox is lighter than electric motor, you know?

If you have primary power generation provided by a generator then you don't need a battery capable of running on it's own for 300 miles. 30 would suffice quite happily, which would let you use the battery for peak loads (acceleration) and simply have the generator provide cruising load + a bit.

Hydrogen makes big BOOM. The hydrogen infrastructure is a domestic terrorist dream!

Then it's a good job we haven't had a gas infrastructure deployed for around two centuries which delivers Methane; ie CH4 to practically every building in the country. (which my dimly remembered high school science suggests is 1 carbon atom bound to 4 hydrogen atoms)

Re: The ICE will be with us for...

To be precise, 12 years in the EU, 7 years in the UK

Until you can't buy a new car with a petrol/diesel engine. After that, existing vehicles will be on the road for a very, very long time. The average age of a car on the road in the UK at the moment is already something like 12 years old and it's only going to go up.

At the moment if you have an old car and you get a potential repair bill of >£1000 then most people simply ditch it and buy another less old second hand car that costs less than that. Removing the source of new vehicles going to adversely affect the supply of older car and the price will go up, meaning that cars will likely be repaired until the point of outright economic impossibility.

I read an article in a newspaper on news years day that my father in law pointed out to me. The driver of a battery EV with a nominal 160 mile range had set off for a 120 mile trip to visit their parents at Christmas. Except that apparently you only get that 160mph range if doing about 40mph, so the actual range is about 100 miles on the motorway. Before you put the heater on, which they felt obliged to do since it was only a couple of degrees outside, which further reduced the range and before you use lights etc.

This required them to do a pitstop for a charge enroute, which had a multi hour que. Their EV stopped charging midway through when somebody else connected to the other side of the charger. They then had to get to the parents, and find another charger at that end because they didn't have enough range to make it back to the pitstop, let alone back home. Their trip there took them 4 hours, and the trip back took them 7 hours as some of the chargers at their pitstop had collapsed under the load. The article read with an air of less than complete enthusiasm for their EV, and included the views of another EV driver who having been on the road for something like 14 hours to do a few hundred miles was in tears of rage and determined to send their EV back the next day and buy a hybrid with what the writer described as manic glee.

In an ICE car 120 miles is two hours. I could have done the journey there and back on less than half a tank of fuel in the time it took them to get there.

However, i'd quite like an EV. I'd just like it to be done in a sane manner; which is that a hybrid with an electric motor and a petrol or LPG generator is a transitional step towards EV's and then a battery powered EV can exist after charging infrastructure exists and preferably after there is a third rail system down major motorways and A roads so a battery EV only needs to do short(ish) trips on the battery.

However, starting with battery powered EV's and deploying them where we don't have the charging equipment deployed and we don't have enough capacity on the national grid to charge them if we did deploy them at scale is not a prospect that anybody with any intelligence is likely to buy into. I'm certainly not going to.

No, AI can't tell if you've got COVID-19 by listening to your coughs

Peer review is what's done at the point of it still being a research paper by peers of the researchers testing the idea and checking it works. It's supposed to be done before you publish claiming that it worked. The idea is that objectively false things don't get published in reputable journals.

If peer review had of spotted the problem, then it wouldn't have been published. If it hadn't have been published then UK PLC wouldn't have blown a hundred grand trying to make something based on the results of the paper.

What it demonstrates is that the IEEE "rigorous peer review" is in fact not particularly rigorous, which makes the "journal" more akin to a magazine.

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

And why would you build SMR on proper nuclear sites when you can build properly sized nukes instead?

Because building one reactor costs £10-20 billion and takes 10 years to build a 3.2GW plant.

The Rolls Royce SMR generates 0.5GW and is expected to cost £1.8 billion each, and RR hopes to have 10 operational in 2035. That's ~5GW worth of generation for £18 billion which looks reasonably competitive against the overruns in a large plant. The best thing is that if something goes sideways on building a couple of them then the others are still going to be built and delivering power in the meantime.

Management of UK govt's £158b property estate held back by failed IT project

“The Cabinet Office told us that it considered commercially available systems in 2018 but believed off-the-shelf options, at the time, were not capable of receiving data from 160 different bodies across government,” the PAC report said.

Why does the number of data sources matter?

All you need to do is specify a standard that everybody will supply the data in, preferably something like CSV that's boring, reliable and universally understood and supported. Then you have one data format and 160 import jobs a month. If they get emailed in monthly then you want an email parser to save each attachment in a specified file system location, and then schedule run an import script to import from that location periodically.

Even if 160 different departments are providing the data via email in 160 different formats and you can't change the incoming formats then as so long as you know what's coming each month then switching it to a single format is merely tedious and time consuming to write the definitions, not technically challenging. Lets say that it takes one person one day to figure out what data is what and specifying put this in column1, this in column 2 etc, one day for programming it and one day testing it works and picking up on any faults afterwards then for 160 data sources that's 7 months work for 3 people; or 3.5 months work for 6 people.

How the hell do organisations manage to spend millions and multiple years doing these things? Even if you'd got one person doing the job it ought to be done in two years, even including holidays etc.

Microsoft patent eyes ads in streaming online games

Re: Race Car Liveries?

Advertising Standards is an advertising industry group doing "self management" to reduce the likelihood of external regulation being imposed on the advertising industry. They aren't actually a government regulatory body; they just like to imply that they are.

Therefore, they aren't going to give a toss about what their members do unless it risks bringing real external regulation on their industry.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

Re: Foresight is a wonderful thing

They are rarely included in the cheaper gear, but are still on the higher end hardware.

Re: Foresight is a wonderful thing

I can't think of any other area of digital technology where I can take a device made in 2022 and plug it into a device made in 1985 (with cables that are still widely available) and they will just work seamlessly.

This comment was typed on a model M keyboard made in the 1980's and plugged into a PS/2 interface on a PC at work bought about a year ago.

Adobe confirms UK looking into its $20b Figma deal, EU probe 'expected'

Re: That's a lot of money

The first thing that comes to mind is the destruction of a competitor to eliminate competition.

China reportedly bars export of homebrew Loongson chips to Russia – and everywhere else

Re: How about some arithmetic

The thing is, India is independent and not allied with China or Russia. They have border skirmishes with China that leave people dead on a not to irregular basis and so buy cheap yet supposedly effective military gear from Russia to have a military capable of standing up to China's and so they maintain a better relationship with one of their primary arms suppliers than we do. They are buying what gas Russia can ship to India; they aren't selling them weapons etc.

So you actually end up with China and India sitting separately both with about 1.4 billion populations who are moderately affluent, about a billion for the "west" ie US, EU + British commonwealth etc who are pretty well off, and then in your words the "axis of evil" of Russia, Iran and North Korea. which has around a quarter of a billion, many of whom in North Korea and Russia don't even have running water and have never seen indoor toilets and so are incredibly poverty stricken by the standards of Africa and China.

The "axis of evil" is therefore a poverty stricken and tiny market. China will send humanitarian aid to it as well as basic trade goods, but probably not dramatically more than that as it'd mean risking cutting their trade links with richer markets where they actually make most of their money.

The thing is, how powerful do chips for military applications actually need to be? The RN & USN were running computerised weapon control and radar displays with valve based technology and lest we forget precision guided munitions were deployed with BOLT-117 in 1967 using hardware vastly more pathetic than anything on the market today.

Given that even printers have 500+ MHz chips these days I'd have thought that anything sourced would be fairly task adequate for pretty much anything provided that it was designed sensibly and the code was written reasonably well.

FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried charged with fraud by just about everyone

Re: Perspective

We then have private pension schemes. Which we aren't forced to pay into.

Under the pensions act 2008 in the UK your employer is required to deduct money from your salary and put it into a private pension scheme. If you don't have a pension scheme they are required to enroll you in one.

You can say that your "not forced" to pay into it, but that's dancing on the head of a needle; your employer is required to deduct the cost from your wages so you don't have any way of opting out, at least in the UK.

SBF and friends made the traditional small trader error of putting their hands in the till. There's apparently a right and a wrong way to do it

Yes. You have a client account for client funds, and an company accounts for money that the company owns. If you have a billion quid deposited in your client account and you promise the client 1% interest but manage to make 2% by putting half a billion quid in a long term deposit scheme (with removal at short notice in case of emergency if you have a bank run) then you can give the client 1% extra in the client account and bank the other 1% in the company account.

You do not take money for ongoing operations, holidays and other personal expenses from the client account!

The IT decision-maker that really matters? Your pet

Some owners said they would reduce their spending on everything from necessities such as utilities (27 percent) and socializing with friends (40 percent) before cutting back their spend on their animal companions, the survey went on to say.

Yes, because pet related expenses come in three varieties.

1) Healthcare from the vets if they are ill. (which you can't cut back on)

2) Food. (which you can't cut back on, with the exception of treats etc which is such a small expense that it's not worth cutting back on)

3) Toys. (of which your pets tend to have their favourites and ignore most other things so the ongoing cost other than replacements is near zero)

So yes, most pet owners would put feeding and treating their pets at the vets above spending money socialising at the pub, and more than a quarter would happily turn down the heating by a few pips to manage if they were desperate. (Probably more than a quarter would do that, but don't need to.)

Quite how they got from there to "pet owners will go out and buy technological tat they neither need nor want" will no doubt make an interesting management case study when this product/division fails because the above does not mean that pet owners will go and increase spending on solutions in desperate search of a problem.

Signed, a pet owner.

US Air Force tests its first fully functional hypersonic missile

Re: Oh boy

Compare and contrast with the way cruise missile launches are perceived - whilst they *can* carry nuclear payloads, that wasn't their *sole* purpose for existing

Not quite. There had to be a specific cruise missile design that was armed with a nuclear warhead, and both the missiles and warheads were retired and have since been physically scrapped precisely so the non nuclear versions can be used without people on the receiving end worrying about the reaction.

Re: Oh boy

Yes. And this is why things like this weren't developed before, and shouldn't be deployed now as strategic weapons like that. We could already deploy multi ton conventional warheads in that timeframe by refitting ICBM's. Why hasn't that been done? Consider it a moment.

If you have fast moving weapons that can annihilate you within minutes then it encourages nuclear weapons in fixed land silos or in airbases to be kept on a hair trigger and launched on warning of an incoming attack, which is highly subject to system mistakes accidentally wiping out half the population on the planet if you launch on a mistaken warning and the opposition (who hadn't actually started nuking you) retaliates against an actual launch.

Actually tossing around nuclear capable delivery systems tends to make people on the receiving end VERY twitchy and that's generally agreed to be a Bad Thing when nuclear weapons are involved.

America's nuclear fusion 'breakthrough' is super-hot ... yet far from practical

Re: Laser ignition fusion

Aside from the engineering challenges, we're also running into a problem in that we're running out of tritium.

Tritium can be (and is) produced by stuffing a bunch of lithium in a nuclear reactor and letting them absorb neutrons.

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

Practically nobody, including myself when I added an extra bulb into a cupboard so I didn't need a torch to find things in it, and again myself when the bulb in my bathroom blew and Wickes didn't sell the somewhat odd bulbs, but did sell replacement LED light fittings and so the fitting ended up being replaced instead of the bulb.

And yet none of it has actually broken any rules. ;)

It's pretty obvious really; if you weren't allowed to do minor works then places like Wickes wouldn't sell you the stuff to do them unless you could produce a qualified electricians certificate in the same way as you can't buy certain other materials that are considered naughty by the authorities. (or they allow you to buy them, having taken sufficient details to ensure an later visit by said authorities to ask pointed and detailed questions about what you are doing with them)

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

Part P's not actually that bad.

2.7 Regulation 12(6A) sets out electrical installation work that is notifiable. All other electrical installation work is not notifiable – namely additions and alterations to existing installations outside special locations, and replacements, repairs and maintenance anywhere.

So you could put a new switch in, replace the light with an LED, add another ceiling rose, move the switch location by a meter, and still not be in scope of part P notifiable work; all of this work being additions, alterations, replacement or repairs to an existing installation. As long as you don't do anything notifiable below:-

(ie; don't replace the fusebox or add new circuits to it, or install stuff within arms reach of the bathtub/shower)

Notifiable work

2.5 Electrical installation work that is notifiable is set out in regulation 12(6A).

12.—(6A) A person intending to carry out building work in relation to which Part P of Schedule 1 imposes a requirement is required to give a building notice or deposit full plans where the work consists of—

(a) the installation of a new circuit;

(b) the replacement of a consumer unit; or

(c) any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location.

—(9) In this regulation “special location” means—

(a) within a room containing a bath or shower, the space surrounding a bath tap

or shower head, where the space extends—

(i) vertically from the finished floor level to—

(aa) a height of 2.25 metres; or

(bb) the position of the shower head where it is attached to a wall or

ceiling at a point higher than 2.25 metres from that level; and

(ii) horizontally—

(aa) where there is a bath tub or shower tray, from the edge of the bath

tub or shower tray to a distance of 0.6 metres; or

(bb) where there is no bath tub or shower tray, from the centre point

of the shower head where it is attached to the wall or ceiling to a

distance of 1.2 metres; or

(b) a room containing a swimming pool or sauna heater.

Re: Renovations

We have an office which was redecorated. I'm an amateur when it comes to these things, but before painting I Polyfilla in holes and cracks, sand down and then paint over the top. The cowboys who did the job simply painted over with zero prep work.

I've never seen a worse job in all my life, and I don't know how anybody could do such a bad job; I find it professionally offensive to look at.

UK lawmakers look to enforce blocking tools for legal but harmful content

Re: Grow a brain

Given the volume of complaints voiced about it before he left home, I'm reasonably certain that he didn't.

Mind you, he had a normal user account on his laptop and so couldn't change the DHCP settings.

Re: Grow a brain

whenever I used to get asked about software to monitor kids activities online I always used to say there isn't any that a savvy kid can't find a way to bypass.

OpenDNS configured to block content with those settings set on the router and provided by DHCP is quite effective, especially if the child doesn't have a user account that's able to change the IP settings to change the DNS. It also works on every device connected, without needing to install software.

This is the best pay offer you'll get without more strikes, union tells BT workers

This assumes that you can get paid more elseware. And if you can get paid 10% more at another job then i'm certainly interested.

US could save billions in health costs if it changed wind energy strategy

Re: Dubious claims, In My Bombastic Opinion

UK would have been buying our fossil fuels from abroad regardless of having renewables, because overseas suppliers were historically cheaper

Twenty years ago, we produced in excess of 100% of our gas requirements. Ten years ago, we produced 60% of our gas requirements. Today, we are producing 30% of our gas requirements.

I'm determined to point out that the rhetoric of "all our energy will come from renewables" is a dangerous fallacy. Lethal, in fact.

Even on a "good" day for renewables more than 50% of our electricity comes from gas, and 85% of the countries heating is gas based. Electricity requirements are projected to fall [why?] while we told that everybody ought to go out and buy electric heat pumps to replace gas central heating, and electric cars to replace the internal combustion engine. Spot the logical inconsistency?

People have been missold the idea that renewables are in anyway capable of producing anything even remotely like the sort of power required and the hubris, ignorance and incompetence of the people who have supported these policies is going to result in the elderly and venerable literally freezing to death this winter.

Re: Dubious claims, In My Bombastic Opinion

Competitive - that they can produce energy at a lower price than fossil fuels

Which is why relying on them has caused the highest ever energy prices to the customer.

Strategic - that they reduce ones dependence on oil and gas from foreign despots

Except that ceasing production of oil and gas ourselves at the behest of the green lobby has led to utter dependence on oil and gas from foreign despots because we now have literally zero alternatives.

Re: Dubious claims, In My Bombastic Opinion

Because the >25GW of wind turbines (which are currently delivering 6.4GW to the grid) and are the future of energy production and have allowed us to decommission the north sea gas fields and buy all of our fossil fuels from abroad.

Which has eliminated our ability to be energy independent, and so has sent our prices spiralling up out of control. And the wind turbine industry is allowed to sell their energy at this price of gas generation, and so having caused the problem they are making an absolute shedload of money from it.

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

Re: Market size

Win7 can be done manually via phone activation. The Microsoft operator took longer finding the activation tool on their end than time spent trying to talk me out of activating it.

I suspect that likewise, XP can be done via the same route as well if you have a valid licence key.

Gunfire at electrical grid kills power for 45,000 in North Carolina

Re: Fragile

I won't be surprised to see new regs coming along any day now that require 12-foot high solid walls instead of chain link around these facilities.

Which alters the attack requirement to a dozen large molotov cocktails, with a side of iron filings tossed over the top of the wall rather than shooting a .22 at it.

If you make it a high brick wall then you might be able to penetrate it with a couple of rounds of 7.62; if you make it thicker then you'll probably still shoot through it with a couple of .50 calibre rounds which appear to be legal in the US. If you make it thick enough to deal with that then you have to bear in mind that it's legal to own WW2 era anti tank guns in the US; so you probably need 16" worth of steel to take repeated impacts. And of course the attacker could just roll up with a ladder...

Or, our American cousins need to get a bit better at locking up people who think this is ok. Or restrict firearms ownership a bit; or put armed guards on every bit of power distribution infrastructure, or get used to life without electricity.

Tech contractor who uses an umbrella company? UK tax is coming after them

If a contractor is working through an umbrella they are an employee and DO NOT PAY VAT matter what their income.

Correct. However, as I suspect you well know many people have their own personal umbrella companies so they don't pay any taxes beyond the class whatever NI contributions which is something like £2 a week. If they are the director of their own little company and their income has exceeded the VAT threshold then they are required to pay 20% VAT to HMRC.

My guess is that HMRC have realised that a subset of umbrella companies registered with a sole employee are over the VAT threshold and therefore can be done for a failure to pay VAT, and the person being taken to court is the company director who's also the sole employee. That's what i'm not going to bother to look up; because I doubt the information is going to be available because HMRC can't say that, the tax evasion company that set it up won't want to advertise their incompetence lest it put off other customers, and the people dodging tax aren't going to want to advertise what they are doing.

I'm not going to bother looking it up, but i'd bet good money that HMRC are chasing the company director; which is probably also the sole employee.

Your VAT exempt up until a certain point (~£70k IIRC) after which you've got to pay VAT.

So if hypothetically somebody earning £100k has made themselves into a company to avoid the 50% tax rate and is only paying ~£2 a week class whatever NI contributions then HMRC have realised that they can go after them for 20% VAT and is probably doing so with considerable enthusiasm to fill in the gaping hole in the public coffers, a situation not improved by the rich deciding to opt out of paying tax.

‘Mother of Internet’ Radia Perlman argues for centralized infrastructure

Re: Perl is confusing

This is a nonsensical argument to use. If I hire a hitman with cash, and they don't do it, who could I complain to?

The police in most countries, or a court. Accepting the money in exchange for doing something does form a contract under english law, and failing to perform it is breach of the implied contract terms and all.

https://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/woman-gets-2000-after-hired-hitman-failed-to-kill-her-26404390.html

I can imagine the judge having trouble keeping a straight face dealing with that one, since the only defence possible against failing to perform the contract is to demonstrate that you did try and perform it, which amounts to a confession to conspiracy to commit murder on record in court, which can be used to prosecute you for that offence.

Blockchain needs a reason to exist, Boris Johnson tells roomful of blockchain pros

Re: Photo

Don't believe me? Broadcaster Jeremy Vine once told the story of how he happened to see Johnson deliver the same lecture twice.... complete with the exact same "funny" gaffes at the exact same points the second time round.

You appear in some way surprised.

When I was 16 and involved in running an event I was given a pack that contained a copy of the announcers script, including all of the scripted jokes. The same script was used both days of the event. Since then, i've come to realise that many people tend to reuse the same speeches etc to different audiences.

I'm surprised that anybody is surprised that scripts exist and that people giving reheased speeches tend to reuse them whereever they think that the audiences won't overlap.

US commerce bosses view EU rules as threat to its clouds

Re: US data colonialism on the rampage

Yes, it is their job. But for an American probusiness organisation to suggest that actually Johnny foreigner shouldn't do something to protect their businesses against overseas competition because an American global monopoly would be good for American business (whom absent of competition wouldn't screw their customers over in a heartbeat) is a remarkably tone deaf and counter productive argument to make.