Posts by Tom 38

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Re: Pro bono? Bone headed!

I would have thought Legal would be first point of call; even if they are providing the services free of charge, the olympic organizing committee would have surely had some form of contract. I would doubt that contract has a break clause on getting fined for breaking the law.

Notice how he carefully doesn't say "sponsoring", which might make everyone realise that viewers would be seeing the name plastered everywhere, but instead uses "pro bono".

I was also going to rail against that - pro bono publica = for the public good. This is not pro bono - the olympics are paying, they're paying publicity instead of cash

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

If you can keep your head when all about you // Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, // But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, // Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, // And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise

Then you might be a good fit for AverageNonTechBigCompany! Contact our recruitment specialists, who can tell you more about the dreary, soul destroying, and (most importantly) high paid positions available here!

Humongous 52-inch Dell monitor will make you feel like king of the internet with four screens in one

My main monitor is a 42" iiyama, which cost £380 back in 2020 - its equivalent to 4 x 21" monitors. I don't see how this new one is £2000 more value, although the integrated thunderbolt is very good, I have that on my 32" Lenovo "secondary" monitor - one cable to connect everything to all my laptops is just great.

From Georgia to Essex, AI datacenters are testing public goodwill

Re: EIGHT HUNDRED AND THIRTY ONE ACRES?!

The Ikea in Edmonton closed down, and it is now an enormous nightclub, DrumSheds. Apparently its one of the largest in the world, 15k people capacity.

The real Edmonton - North London, not Canada.

UK plans right for flat owners to demand gigabit broadband

Re: @Doctor Syntax

1/

The original USO was for telephony. It was updated in 2020 to cover broadband. We are entitled to a "decent" connection - 10Mbps/1Mbps - and BT have to provide such a connection for £max(cost - 3400, 0).

Apart from that, everything else is a commercial decision of where to invest their money.

The USO has to be bearable by BT. I mean, fuck BT, but it also has to be bearable by them or they wouldn't accept. It becomes bearable by the Gov stuffing their pockets with cash - BT would definitely accept a 1Gbit USO if you stuffed their pockets with enough cash. So the Gov play is to have a weakened USO until there is more Gigabit, and then increase the USO when they don't have to stuff so much cash into BT's hands.

2/

City dwellers pay for rural infrastructure, so maybe wind back the woe is me rhetoric. This is not 2005, you can get mostly reliable cheap 10-20Mbps internet in fairly remote places in the UK, and if that isn't sufficient you can get Starlink and pay for the service you need, and if that is too expensive you can just sit and swivel for 7 years until there is Gbit (99%) everywhere. Its lovely living in the countryside, but that's the choice: you don't get the infrastructure improvements as fast as the rest of the UK.

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Re: Type checking and compatibility

Python is extremely strongly typed; it just doesn't validate any contracts around types at compile time (because there isn't one) or at run time (because its already slow enough). If you extensively annotate your code with type hints, you can then use type checkers to enforce the contracts. We have an absolute monolith of python code at work, some 12M lines, and we do not ever have runtime type errors.

Essentially, if you want well typed dynamic code, you replace compilation with static analysis.

Type hinting sounds painful and slow - why would I do all that extra work if I've chosen a dynamic language - but its actually a net benefit as it allows LSPs and LLMs* to reason about the code much more as you're developing, and the correctness that they introduce to your coding more than makes up for it in lost productivity debugging and fixing type mismatches that you would definitely get without them.

* I'm not a fan of LLM AIs for coding. They frequently produce gibberish. In the hands of a competent engineer though, they do seem to have some productivity benefits. Ask me again in two years.

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

You pay me eight hours a day, I do eight hours a day. That's a 48-hour week.

6 day week? No thanks :)

Molten salt nuclear reactors slated to power Google datacenters in 2030

Re: Renewable != Sustainable

Wind and solar are cute but they don't scale, and they won't scale, no matter how many flatulent unicorns you throw at them

That's such a daft claim. Wind lacks predictability - it might not be windy when you want power. Solar lacks round the clock generation, but is entirely predictable in generation.

They both scale perfectly, as is clearly evidenced by Gridwatch. The UK has been investing and scaling renewables, and we've gone from 2.1 GW of wind and solar in 2012, to 10.9 GW in 2024. Over the same period, gas and coal generation has dropped from 25 GW to 8.4 GW. Nuclear over the same period has gone from 7.5 GW to 4.4 GW. They have scaled because we've built more of them, and built storage to better utilise their generation. Classic horizontal scaling and caching.

The UK has spent ~£45bn investing in wind farms. In 2012, we started investing in Hinkley Point C, a 3,200 MWe nuclear plant. The estimated final completion cost for this project is £48bn, and they hope it will come on line in 2029. This year, Sizewell C finally got the green light, another 3,200 MWe reactor, estimated final cost £38bn. To just do nuclear generation, we'd need another 10 plants, which is unaffordable and would take another 30 years. Renewables are cheaper and easier to build, operate and decommission than any other form of energy generation, and don't require huge government investment and guarantees.

We need both nuclear and renewables. We don't need gas and coal. There is no argument to building "just renewables", and complaining about renewables when talking about nuclear is missing the point.

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

Re: There have been so many things

This has nothing to do with the mad orange king.

Unfortunately, it does. These deals were made when we thought we had a reliable partner on the other side of the deal, and now its clear we don't. If Trump's DoJ want information, do you still think the American judiciary is impartial these days?

Canonical dusts off TPM encryption for Ubuntu 25.10

Re: I don't fully understand encryption, but ...

LUKS can have multiple keys, so whilst the key in the old PC's TPM is not available, you can use one of your backup methods to decrypt after moving the disk, and then enroll the new PC's TPM into LUKS.

Elon Musk bragged this group had been 'deleted' when DOGE shut it down - now they're appealing

Re: Leftist policies

I'm quite glad the week will perish, its been dragging on a while

Microsoft boots 3% of staff in latest cull, middle managers first in line

Re: How can that happen? Software can't play golf!

My developers complain about the endless meetings they have to go to - approximately 6 hours a week. I think most of them would either have an aneurysm or quit if they had the number of meetings and planning sessions that I have to in order to ensure that their projects start and finish before the features are needed by clients.

Maybe I've just been fortunate, but in 25 years of software development I've never been managed by someone who had not at one point in their life been paid for writing software. Even now that I am middle management, my boss - a manager of middle managers - is also an ex developer.

Managers are easy to get rid of - teams of 6 become teams of 12, and you've cut half the direct managers, so you only need half as many middle managers. Problems don't come for ~1 year, and you can add managers more easily than developers, the ramp up is much quicker.

Figma bucks market trends, plunges into IPO waters after Adobe's failed buyout

I do see the benefit of online collaboration but that's like a 1% of the time problem.

I don't work with the coloured crayons, but isn't the online collab part the number one reason for using Figma?

Nvidia joins made-in-America party, hopes to flog $500B in homegrown AI supers by 2029

the Trump regime planned to pause controls that prevented the export of Nv's H20 GPUs to China, following an appearance by Huang at a $1-million-a-head dinner at the US President's Mar-a-Lago resort home.

I don't know why he just doesn't have them bring him briefcases full of cash if the bribery is going to be so blatant.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: *!$#&@ Bluetooth

Also, cue the historical "Keyboard error, press F1 to continue" message that always amused me!

Its amusing because most people who see it are deliberately trying to run without a keyboard, but it is assuming that you want a keyboard to keep going, so its waiting here so you can attach one and press F1 to confirm that a keyboard has been attached so it can continue. From that POV, the error message is entirely logical!

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

There needs to be a way to send electricity price down the lines in real time or close to it (15 minute intervals?).

Are you just not aware that this already exists?

A giant grid level battery removes the incentive to conserve and has a greater possibility of polluting the local area with toxic magic smoke as has happened too frequently in other places. I can see it boosting executive bonuses and as a way to get free government grant money. If that same grant money was divided up amongst private individuals, I think it would do more good.

Ah grand, so you don't know how any of this works. Brilliant.

There is no government grant money here, just good old fashioned commercial price arbitrage. Prices are expensive between 4-8pm, and cheaper at other times, especially over night. This company has built something so they can buy cheap electricity, store it, and sell it later when its more valuable. They aren't getting public funding to do this.

It has been built in Scotland, because they have a surplus of green energy, often very cheap green energy - its often windy overnight, when prices are low. If there is no demand in Scotland for energy, but there is in the rest of the UK, the grid pays the windfarm operators to not generate electricity. This project captures that energy, increasing the MWh of green energy produced, and reducing the MWh of gas burned to generate electricity.

The amount a supplier pays for a unit of electricity depends on 2 things - the unit rate, and the standing charge. The unit rate comes from the cost of providing all the energy needed in every 30 minute block of the day, and is set by auction, with every winning generator being paid the price of the highest winning bid for that 30 minute block - almost always a gas generator. If the amount of gas required at peak times is reduced, the winning price in this auction will be lower, and all electricity at the peak times will be cheaper.

The amount they pay for the standing charge/network costs depends on the amount of curtailment in the system - how much the grid pays wind farm operators to not generate electricity. As curtailment goes up, so does the standing charge. This plant will reduce curtailment by providing additional demand for energy in Scotland.

The demand curve for electricity in the UK is extremely variable. The evening peak of 4-8pm can cost 5-20x the unit rate of off peak electricity. Most customers use a fixed rate tariff rather than agile ones, but the cost of providing that peak is the same for all customers - its just priced in to the fixed rate tariffs, and the customers on fixed rates can't avoid it. Reducing the height of that peak is the number one way of reducing electricity costs.

The first cost saving is to dry your clothes instead of using a tumble dryer. Do washing machines catch fire if you're not using it as a tumble dryer?

This will have a big impact on bills, its built in Scotland to reduce curtailment.

When the wind farms in Scotland could run, but the Scottish portion of the grid doesn't need power, we're currently paying the wind farm operators the market rate for electricity, and paying gas CCGT operators in the rest of the UK for energy. This BESS will soak up a lot of that curtailment energy - lost generation - and feed it out at peak times, reducing the amount of gas generation we need. The amount of gas generation we need directly controls the unit rate of electricity, and the amount of curtailment directly affects the grid costs, which will reduce the standing charges required.

The BESS operator is going to make money, we're going to save money. The people who won't be overjoyed about this are the wind farm operators, who'll actually have to run instead of just building another wind farm where its windy but there's no demand for electricity, and the CCGT operators, who'll have less demand.

Microsoft: So what if it costs 4X as much to run Windows Server in AWS, Alibaba, and Google?

Would you be OK with Ford charging a huge list price for parts, and then discounting the cost of servicing at Ford garages?

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

As an EM, I apologise for lengthy standups - its very easy to let them run away and they go on and on. You have to train people that I don't want to know all the horrible details of what you did yesterday, I'm sure you worked hard. I just want to know three things - Are you blocked?, Do you know how long is left now you've worked on it a bit?, and Any concerns around the scope of the ticket?

We do 30 minutes standup each day, 15 for standup, 15 for any extra discussions, and we always finish early. If its not an in-office day, you can give your update on Slack..

The trick is redirecting people to discuss their lengthy things 1:1 after the standup.

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

Re: Classified ads

Influencers are a bigger drain on my household income than foreign aid, by fucking far.

Re: Going after federal government tech spending ...

So in the UK, we have the dreaded tax return, which ever increasing amounts of the population will have to complete as they're pushed into the tax bands that trigger it. They're posted out with the persons name and address on the envelope, but HMRC can't print that on the tax return forms. Then the person may have to copy & write data HMRC's already sent on P11 & P60 notes, do some calculations and for PAYE employees, send HMRC back the data they already have. Which is an expensive and generally pointless exercise vs sending tax payers the data HMRC has, and asking if there's any other income (or expenses) they'd like to declare.

Such hardship. How will you ever get back those 15 minutes of your life?

Re: Going after federal government tech spending ...

If you want to uncover state mis-spending, waste, and corruption, then the correct action is to spend more on OMB. You'd find a lot more revenue if you also spent more on the IRS. That's how governments work, they have bodies of civil servants doing things. They don't have chaos monkeys.

The chaos monkeys have cancelled USAID. I hear "woohoos!" from parts of the crowd - imagine all those savings. What savings? USAID spends money, and they do that by entering in to contracts with vendors. Those contracts aren't cancelled, and to cancel them will cost a bunch of money. By having chaos monkeys shut down USAID instead of OMB analyzing how to properly shut it down, you're now going to pay companies to not do things. That's not winning.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Re: an alleged Nazi salute

Isn't calling someone a Nazi just a general insult and not specifically saying that that person is a Nazi. You know, like calling a diving expert a paedophile because he doesn't rate your shitty submarine ideas.

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

I think you'll find the Colombian president folded like a cheap deckchair.

He won so hard that Trump supporters think he lost. Masterful negotiations when threatened by a big bully, get everything you want, nothing they want, and still make the bully feel like they got a deal.

OpenZFS 2.3 is here, with RAID expansion and faster dedup

Re: Steam?

Can it understand usability patterns and move more accessed stuff to faster media?

Sure, I have a large old ~20TB raidz (it hasn't been powered up in 2-3 years...), spinning disks are slow, so I have a bunch of memory dedicated to the ARC, and an SSD to serve as L2ARC. I was more read heavy than write heavy, but writes don't return until confirmed on all devs, so you can add a ZIL on a SLOG to speed that up.

Glossary:

ARC - Adaptive Read Cache - main memory devoted to caching frequently accessed blobs

L2ARC - Level 2 Adaptive Read Cache - an optional cache you can configure on a block device, eg an SSD

ZIL - ZFS intent log - all writes get confirmed in the ZIL first. The ZIL is usually part of your array unless...

SLOG - Separate log - a dedicated device for hosting the ZIL

This is how Elon's Department of Government Efficiency will work – overwriting the US Digital Service

Re: While I'm asking questions ... re; Awkward gesture

so is any casual use of Nazi as an insult for people whose politics we happen to disagree with

Agreed. Which one of Umberto Eco's 14 traits of fascism do you think are not accurate to describe Trump?

* Cult of tradition? ✓

* Rejection of modernism? ✓

* Action for actions sake? ✓

* Disagreement is treason? ✓

* Fear of difference? ✓

* Appeal to a frustrated middle class? ✓

* Enemies are both strong and weak? ✓

* Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy? ✓

* Contempt for the weak? ✓

* Cult of death? ✓

* Machismo? ✓

* Selective populism? ✓

* Newspeak? ✓

Spade is a fucking spade.

Trump hits undo on Biden AI safety order, EV mandate, emissions standards, and more

you can't cancel a Constitutional amendment with an EO

Trump is in charge of the Executive. Executive Orders change how the Federal government does things. He has stripped birthright citizenship away with this EO, if you are a child born to an undocumented migrant in America today, and apply for a passport, the Federal government will not issue you one - the order prevents them.

There are supposed to be checks and balances - the Legislate and Judiciary. The Legislate pass laws that the Executive must abide by, and the enforcement of that is through the Judiciary. If the Judiciary do not enforce the law, all that falls apart. This is the next part of the waiting, for the test cases that have been brought to be judged - only then will we know precisely how deep of a hole we are in.

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

El Reg doesn't just have comments on stories, there is a whole user forums section too

Mail-out madness as insurer offers refunds to customers in error

Re: I think I might have an idea about how it happened

It usually means a data pipeline that used to mean applying taxonomies to data from multiple sources to produce final production entities that have richer data than the original source data. Because its a pipeline, you can re-run and re-create your prod data from the sources any time you like. An example might be OCRing images to produce metadata that the image/related objects can be tagged with.

In the past that meant complex systems that carefully categorized data and applied rules to create the taxonomy, but today for sure there is AI data enrichment going on.

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

Re: predicted the price of laptops and tablets would rise 45 percent for American buyers

No, I support Ipswich Town Football Club

Re: predicted the price of laptops and tablets would rise 45 percent for American buyers

Cliff, if the US allows Russia to annex part or all of Ukraine, and if the US themselves have expansionist agendas, there will be no confusing ROC with PRC as there will only be PRC.

UK gives Openreach £289M for 4 rural broadband contracts in 'gigabit by 2030' push

Re: Fuck me how much !!

In 2 posts you've gone from complaining how much is being spent per customer to saying how little that covers - do you want to pick an argument and stick to it?

Australia moves to drop some cryptography by 2030 – before quantum carves it up

Re: already happening

No arguments against this change here guv, but migrations typically are not that difficult in the main, its the edges that are difficult. You could do 99% of devices, and still have millions of bricked hardware devices that are too expensive, too remote, too abandoned to update the software on. Completing migrations is core!

Google must face £7B UK class action over search engine dominance

Re: Ads?

Not seeing adverts is not the same as not paying for adverts.

You can avoid seeing ads, you cannot avoid buying things from people who purchase advertising.

Even if you are entirely self sufficient, you pay taxes, and the government pays for advertising with it (amongst many other things, obviously).

Re: fast forward 10 years

This right here. Class action seems to be a way for lawyers to get rich - at least 30-40% is going to the lawyers. If this action is valid, why is the state not bringing it.

Re: Ads?

I know which one I support.

Whether you see ads or don't see ads, you buy products that pay for advertising, ergo you pay for advertising. Lets say you only buy from local farmers who don't advertise, are completely off grid for energy, and are a nudist - you still pay taxes, and the government advertises.

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

Re: Firewall configuration

I leave the routers to the professionals, I'm just a bit flipper, but I recall being told a story about a particular (cisco?) router that for certain commands you needed to type multiple commands on the CLI, hit return and know that the first command will lock you out, and hopefully the final command will let you back in. It seemed terrifying!

Public developer spats put bcachefs at risk in Linux

The whole exchange was drearily predictable - Overstreet launches the f-bombs, its resolved off thread, but Overstreet won't apologise for his language and writes a 10k diatribe on why he's okay to behave like that..

Literally the whole spat would be over if he had posted "I'm sorry, I got emotional and overreacted"...

Pirate programmer walks the plank for role in massive TV streaming operation

Re: <shrug>

My guilty reality TV pleasure is Gold Rush - gold miners in Canada. Its very stupid.

This is filmed in Canada, and made in the UK by Raw TV, and aired by Discovery. I pay for all the relevant things from Discovery that I possibly could, I have a Sky subscription, I have a Discovery+ subscription, I have a TNT sports subscription. The latest season of Gold Rush has just started airing in the US, it airs on Friday nights at 9 ET, 3 AM GMT.

In the past, you could watch it at 3 AM if you wanted, or it was available on Discovery+ to catch up. This year, Discovery have decided to make this a weekday show in the UK, and are airing it at 9pm on Tuesdays. So, despite paying everything I possibly could, it airs in the US on Friday, and four days later in the UK. If one was to use bittorrent (I would never!), you can watch it ~1hr after it airs in the US.

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

Re: The real reason the UK government wants smart meters

The smart meters remote disconnect will allow the government to ensure that only the "non-important" people shiver in the cold while they and their friends are comfortable.

And the Democrats are going to take your guns, Elvis was taken by aliens, crop circles are real, and Qanon will soon start unveiling pedophiles. You think the government is cooking this up in some hare brained plan to oppress you? What would they get out of it? How does making "non-important" people cold benefit them? And the *government* are doing it? Not energy companies, you're specifically calling out government to go after you and make you cold...

Its far easier to just continue with dumb meters and charge poor people lots of money for energy - rich people don't worry about the electricity bill. Why disconnect people when you can either persuade them to voluntarily self-disconnect themselves to avoid huge bills, or get themselves in to big debts?

I applaud all these smart meter refusniks for their passion, but they haven't thought it through - they don't want a smart meter so they can't be overcharged or disconnected, but pretty soon tariffs will go from rewarding people who shift their usage with time of use tariffs, to penalising those who remain on non time of use tariffs.

I mean - that will happen regardless, the unit price for non time of use tariffs depends on the predicted usage of those customers, and the cost of obtaining it. If the only people left on non time of use tariffs are strident "I will use energy between 4-8pm as I goddamn please" people, that energy is going to be super expensive to obtain and non time of use tariffs will become correspondingly expensive. In essence, people on time of use tariffs will pay the fair cost for their energy, and people on the non time of use tariffs will pay for expensive energy for people who refuse to time shift.

More power to you, stick it to the man by paying over the odds for electricity.

EU charges Corning with antitrust violations over Gorilla Glass dominance

Re: Marketing

Which part of

Corning's OEM agreements included requirements that companies source their alkali-AS glass exclusively from Corning, for which they would receive rebates, and that OEMs report all competitive offers from rivals to Corning to give it a chance to match the price

is "solidifying their relationships with customers". New entrants are finding it difficult not because they are dealing with an entrenched product with satisfied customers, but because Corning controlled their customers to prevent them realistically using any other supplier. Anti-competitive behaviour is the problem, not an entrenched product.

AT&T settles claims it misappropriated subsidies, with partial admission of guilt

"The seven largest and most profitable companies in the world built their franchises on the internet and the infrastructure we provide," Stankey argued in June. "Why shouldn't they participate in ensuring affordable and equitable access to the services of today that are just as indispensable as the phone lines of yesteryear?"

This is like saying Ford should pay for road maintenance - nope, that's not quite right. The infrastructure AT&T provide allows their customers to access the internet. Companies providing content on the internet is what produces the customers that AT&T get their revenue from. Its like Disney paying for motorways because people want to drive to Disneyland.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: damn shame

The project is financed by EDF Energy and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN)

Which tells part of the story, the part where we choose not to finance the building of it, and instead the government has agreed a CFD with a strike price of £89.50/MWh. Current generation costs averaged at £68/MWh over the last year. The French and the Chinese are paying for it now, we're paying for it later.

Klarna for power stations effectively

If Trump gets elected, get your tech buying done asap

What tax take? Trump has said that tariffs would replace Income Tax.

The hunt is on for the scum who stole Britain's largest inflatable planetarium

Ifor Williams

Very definitely was stolen for the trailer, Ifor Williams are worth a bomb and easy to shift. We had one nicked too - don't lend anything to my aunt ever.

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

Re: power off

'Who Me?' stories are not necessarily current. A lot of the good ones only become "amusing tales I tell of the past" once they have gone past being "horrific trauma that still wakes me up occasionally"

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

Re: That's what Linus thinks of AI, but what does AI think of Linus?

There once was a young coder from Helsinki

Who thought comments should be managed more neatly

He pulled your PR, spat out his coffee

And told you "go fuck yourself, sweety"

Its not great :/

Re: I agree

Anecdotal, my sister was offered a free full body scan from Daniel Ek's new venture. The AI counted 1600 moles, of which 3 of them it thought were worth looking at by a dermatologist. One of those three, the dermatologist thought was probably melanoma, and so they removed all three and sent off for biopsy.

[Billionaires are so predictable, they get to 50 and suddenly realise they're going to die at some point, and start a healthcare company]