Posts by peter_dtm

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: South don't work in the North

easiest fix is to rotate the yoke through 180 degrees - this is NOT the same as turning the whole monitor/tv upside down as it is only the vertical field that has changed - the horizontal field is fine!

Had some 24" CRT from Honeywell for TDC2000 /TDC3000 (Process Control system) in South Africa; about 30% of Honeywell supplied monitors were N Hemisphere and useless - saved my client a fortune when I magically resurrected about 10 monitors that were "not working" but too expensive to throw out ... Oh the joys of doing a full gun re-alignment with 380V motor feeds running past/through the workshop

BOFH and the office security access upgrade

Re: So Simon once worked at one of my old employers!

Previous employer; around the early 2000's - dictate from on high - we were not to fill in time sheets during work hours on a customer site; but since that described 95% of the team's normal work pattern this meant we had to do it at some other time i.e. when at home.

Then another dictate - the 3 minute daily (mobile) phone calls allowed when away from home must be extracted from the company mobile phone bill and itemised in our expenses.

I managed to get both instructions written in an email as being part of our normal duties.

A couple of months later; my very good manager had to haul me over the coals for excessive Sunday overtime claims. He happily joined me in escalating this up 2 or 3 layers of management.

Why was I doing the mobile phone and time keeping on overtime ? Answer : because you have explicitly instructed us to fill the time sheets in weekly and we are not to do them on site. See this email trail. As a company imposed duty I am entitled to claim overtime.

Why am I always doing that on a Sunday ? Because since I have to do it on my own time I get to decide when it is convenient to do so.

HR (by now involved) started to speak; then stopped; thought it all through; the senior management person started to shout; HR stopped him; and suggested to management that they either put up with the overtime claims being done at the engineer's convenience; or allow us to do the timesheets during normal working hours; and as for the average £10 per month mobile bill just forget it; the cost of processing the paper work far exceeded any possible benefit especially as local management already had the costs under good control.

Unhappy senior manglement - happy engineers (well apart from losing a couple of hours Sunday overtime a month) - manager's manager couldn't hid his grin but did control his urge to laugh !

Sometimes HR can be sensible and a good manager is worth his weight in gold

Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'

Re: The rationale is "[fewer] chargers

And which connector did they initially push?

The rather abysmal micro or was it mini ? Midget? One of those non reversible funky shaped misbegotten mistakes. Good job they lost that time, as otherwise how would we be able to get to the USB C ? A perfect example of why no government has any business mandating things like connectors for portable devices.

I suppose at least the USB C is flexible.

But what is supposed to happen when the next better standard comes around?

There was nothing wrong in mandating an adaptor to fit between an EU spec cable from a charger and any manufacturer’s possibly superior offering that isn’t invented yet, and now never will be.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Offer up a comment

To offer a sub assembly up (to the location to which it will be attached) is correct (engineering) (right pondian) English.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Lousy web design

Mostly specious arguments as the main issue with the web browser experience is caused by abysmally bad design of the web pages.

Get the so called web designers educated in making decent web pages first, then it may be worth attacking the underlying engines.

Don’t forget a lot of Apple users buy into Apple BECAUSE of the walled garden. The small vocal minority that don’t should just buy some other ‘phone manufacturer’s output

Your snoozing iOS 15 iPhone may actually be sleeping with one antenna open

RTFM

They do

RTFM

Mobile networks really hate Apple's Private Relay: Some folks find iOS privacy feature blocked on their iPhones

Disabling private MAC address is a separate option, and has nothing to do with Private Relay. Although both are set from the same settings page,mand both are set per network and annoyingly default to ON. And frequently get reset to on by iOS upgrades

Re: "Apple doesn't know which ads I see"

Apple claim the egress proxy is 3rd party & out of their control. They may well know which egress server I’m talking to, but they don’t have (direct legal) access to any of the egress server logs.

So the cut out is valid, Apple only know to which egress server you are connected, so they don’t know where you’re browsing.

UK government opens vaccine floodgates to over-45s, NHS website predictably falls over

Re: NHS England <> "The UK's National Health Service"

But EVEL is voluntary & SNP MPs continue to interfere in English legislation, IIRC they voted on English council funding amongst many other English laws.

Sweetheart tax deal appeal: European Commission takes €13bn Apple state aid claim to the EU's highest court

EU tax law

Actually that is EU law, if you trade in more than one EU country, you get to chose which country your company is registered in, and that and only that country gets to tax your company on its EU earnings.

The EU wrote the EU tax laws, all international companies base their tax paying entity in the country they think benefits them most in terms of benefit to their shareholders in COMPLIANCE WITH EU TAX LAW.

Why is this basic EU tax law so rarely mentioned, it wouldn’t be because it makes those nasty horrible companies not look bad ?

Perhaps you personally don’t do as much as legally possible to minimise your tax, company CFO are supposed to do exactly that.

Actually that is EU law, if you trade in more than one EU country, you get to chose which country your company is registered in, and that and only that country gets to tax your company on its EU earnings.

The EU wrote the EU tax laws, all international companies base their tax paying entity in the country they think benefits them most in terms of benefit to their shareholders in COMPLIANCE WITH EU TAX LAW.

Why is this basic EU tax law so rarely mentioned, it wouldn’t be because it makes those nasty horrible companies not look bad ?

Perhaps you personally don’t do as much as legally possible to minimise your tax, company CFO are supposed to do exactly that.

As we stand on the precipice of science fiction into science fact, people say: Hell yeah, I want to augment my eyesight!

Re: any "organic residue" will become Soylent Green!

The book is way better than the movie

Hold on to your hats, Net Neutrality version 2 is on its way courtesy of Trump and the FCC's moves on Section 230

As i understood it at the time, 230 was put in place to ensure internet provides were treated as common carriers not publishers.

Common carriers do NOT look at what they are carrying (apart from legal constraints, and they better have a lot more than a mere suspicion of illegality). Common carriers carry & then deliver untouched, uninspected and unseen, that which they have undertaken to carry.

Publishers on the other hand, choose, inspect, edit and/or comment on what they carry.

Are Facebook et al acting as common carriers or as publishers?

Do they refuse, remove, delete or otherwise arbitrarily modify what they are given to ‘carry’ ? As far as I can see yes they do.

Therefore they are no longer common carriers and no longer deserve the protection that common carriers have to have in order to function. Therefore section 230 is no longer applicable and they should be treated like any other publisher & be liable for the content of what they choose to publish. Let them, like magazines & newspapers before them, publish and be damned!

Or revert to being common carriers.

Ask the post office to inspect letters for ‘hate crimes’ never mind any other illegal actions? How do you feel about having your letters opened & inspected because they might contain illegal content? There is quite a high bar on getting postal inspection warrants like there is (supposed to be) for getting wire taps etc.

Facebook et al gave up common carrier status when they first removed a post that was not illegal which they had not been legally instructed to remove.

Cheque out my mad metal frisbee skillz... oops. Lights out!

Re: Being honest always pays

a small MSP where everything was about being honest

So can’t have been any politician, especially Sturgeon

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

Re: Shouty men...

I have no wish to be rear ended. I have zero wish to waste my time because some dickhead doesn't drive safely and leave enough distance to stop/slow down.

The bit you seem determined to miss is my duty of care to me and mine ( and my car/ company's car).

I have stopped in the past, the big 40 foot attic behind the dickhead stopped skew to ensure no one tried to get past ( in other words knew what was happening). When the idiot behind started to get out I stayed safe by resuming the speed limit.

This repeated twice before idiot realised that he was expected to leave safe distance- truck driver helped by flashing when the idiot got too close to me & leaving a massive amount of room, so he could stop safely.

I'd have bought the trucky a beer if I could have!

Tail gaters should be made to clean up fates accidents.

Tech support discovers users who buy the 'sh*ttest PCs known to Man' struggle with basics

Re: It's 2018 @ Lilolefrostback

In spades !

Mellenials claim to be ‘net citizens’ - they most definitely are NOT. At the best they are a pile of ignorant tourists!

I deal with people (plant operator) who USE computers everyday, they look at a screen, click on things and the plant works. They have no need to know anything about how a computer works, other than clicking a mouse on a target on the display.

Even sales droids who may appear to know what they are doing can’t normally cope if the normal programs stop working.

Very few people know how computers work.

Most people know how to use a (very limited) sub-set of programs, and then a limited sub set of the programs themselves.

And this is exactly as it should be.

Oh, I wish it could be Black Friday every day-aayyy, when the wallets start jingling but it's still a week till we're paiii-iid

Re: You're doing it all wrong

No, no, no !

Canadians are North North Americans- the rebels south of the border are USA-ians

(Though it does sometimes take a while for a N N American to count to 2)

Analogue radio is the tech that just won't die

DAB no thanks

I stream Planet Rock via my phone into the car.

Apart from the variable time delay, the quality is outrageously better than the barely separated DAB “stereo”

Coverage is different, but about 50% of the time streaming doesn’t work, neither does DAB. But streaming works more places than DAB (round the East Midlands, up to Manchester, down to north coast Cornwell & lots of places in between)

Streaming gives me best audio by far, followed by FM. DAB works about as badly as AM stereo or ShortWave, in short for anything above talk it’s pretty poor.

As noted above, some idiots were allowed to impose the very worst DAB solution on the UK, just skip DAB and stream, DAB was wrong technology even when it was first implemented

Muslim American woman sues US border cops: Gimme back my seized iPhone's data!

Re: "[T]he Trump administration was cracking down on Muslim people traveling into the States."

What ?

Pardon ?

You do realise that that particular example was about keeping people IN a country before murdering. Similar to Cambodia (Pohl Pott); China (Culteral Revolution) assorted genocides in Russia/USSR.

So a country reserves the right to examine you at the border - most Arab states (Saudi of course reserves the right to examine every storage device; and no encryption is allowed); most African; a lot of American states (including the big one in the northern part) oh and most European states do exactly that.

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE HELL OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

However you may like to research what happened to the refuges from that period who were refused entry into all sorts of surprising countries; um; you could start with the Exodus - refugee ship.

You obviously failed to understand anything taught to you in history

Microsoft CEO wades into ICE outcry: Cool it, we only do legacy mail

What about the employees ?

If I were a shareholder I would be demanding some scalps. It is called bringing the company into disrepute; it may even qualify as moral turpitude- both tend to be instant dismal offences.

If you as an employee don’t like what your employer is doing you have a couple of options

1 tell your boss you will not work on certain contracts

2 resign and get a job with an employer with whose morals/ethics/politics you can live with

That’s it for a public company; same for a government department

Of course option 1 may lead to your early termination; but that wouldn’t worry you because how on earth could you work for such a revolting organisation?

Like so many other issues now days; it is all about virtue signaling - zero risk to self; as after all you couldn’t be expected to actually DO something could you ?

(And no; it is not whistle blowing either; as the contracts are a matter of public record)

Re: Avoidance

LeahroyNake

Whataboutism is strong in you

What the settlers did back then was legal at the time

Like Africans selling slaves to Arabs who then sold slaves to Europeans was legal then.

Nothing whatsoever to do with the application of the law (how ever harsh it may seem) that is current.

What would I do ? Try either obeying the law; or not bitching when caught breaking the law.

I see a satellite of a man ... Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, that's now 4 sats fit to go

So the EU agricultural tariffs don’t exist ?

If it was all about nostalgia why does it prosper ?

And the proposal is to work with the Commonwealth which inter alia would perhaps include trade agreements, beneficial to both parties, perhaps by reducing food tariffs, while extending the science & technical co-operation that is currently crippled by EU tariffs and rules explicitly designed to impose unfavourable trade conditions on our once favoured trading partners of the Commonwealth.

We did this before ( although we were promised that this would not happen), changed our trading focus, last time we swapped a global based market for a local continentally bound closed custom union which had/has the belief it should be a state. This time we can leave a customs union and rejoin a global market place, resolving the dichotomy caused by the wish of the EU governing (un-elected) bodies for ever closer union compared to the apparent wish of the British NOT to be part of a centrally governed super state

Growing markets ( because time hasn’t stood still)

We have a negative trade balance with a shrinking market.

And yes, when we left the Commonwealth trade block and joined a customs union it was indeed a moment of national madness, the lies told then were as bad as the lies told now.

India

Pakistan

Bangladesh

South Africa

Australia

New Zealand

Canada

Zambia

Caribbean nations

Pacific nations

Growing market unlike the shrinking EU.

How many people in the Space faring, aircraft carrier, nuclear nation that is India ?

With a growing market ?

Um, having GAINED independence the Commonwealth countries VOLUNTEERED to join the Commonwealth. It is so well thought of that non Empire countries ask (& are allowed) to join.

Perhaps not everyone is aware of what the Commonwealth is ? (& does)

Hmm, the down votes I presume are for pointing out that the Commonwealth is larger and more diverse (& tolerant & a far larger market & mostly lacking in ant-Democratic edicts and directives)

We should just take our toys now, get with the Commonwealth and create a decent Newton constellation- after all, the Commonwealth is global and very diverse, unlike some other local small minded wannabe super states

Brit ISPs get their marker pens out: Speed advertising's about to change

Re: I have Virgin Media 350mb and get .....

I have 200MB package

I have a fing box that cracks every 4 hours (+/~ 30 minutes)

Weeks average 216.4/12.7

5GHz WiFi to iThings >120Mb REGARDLESS of other users on the 5GHz network (4 phones 5 tablets).

Plus smart speakers/Doorbell/Hive/homebridge hub on an RPi and smartlights all running on 2.5GHz

Plus the wired Fing box & AppleTV

Damn system is as solid as a rock - apart from the Hive kit; just don’t get Hive, it is seriously crap & messes up the rest of the smart home kit.

I actually set up 5 TV streams on 5GHz plus the AppleTV & all ran smoothly - one of the phones used smart speakers for 2 speaker sound as well

Mind you, their hell desk is only marginally more useful than a politician. Absolutely the worst experience of my ‘call help desk’ life

When other providers offer comparable experience/speeds I will ditch VM solely because of their hell desk.

Supreme Court to dig into Google's very cosy $8.5m deal with lawyers over web search leak

Since when did the cost of disbursement ever worry a lawyer

The court shouldn’t care less how much it costs the loser to pay out the damages (note to USA-ians it is could not care less not your totally wrong headed could care less...).

In fact wouldn’t that be part of their punishment part of the findings.

I have NEVER found any legal person who wouldn’t chase 4c that was owed to them; even if it cost the debtor a million bucks to pay; they ALWAYS get their pound of flesh; and then some.

Sounds like all the class action ‘winners’ should take a class action against the courts and this corrupt practice

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

Obsolescence : free with chrome/Windows/Android

The Apple ones are predicable - to which the answer is "They don't have a usb port - or headphone socket".

To which the reply is

For the jack socket : Why do you want 19th century technology on your nice modern kit ?

As for the USB port, what do you need that for ? I actually have a USB to lightening memory stick. Can’t remember when I last needed it though, files, Dropbox, OneDrive. Airdrop. Email, iMessage etc etc etc all just work.

That’s telegraphese

Long before txt spk was invented we had telegraphese or telex (tlx) or morse or shorthand.

Nrmly done by drpng vowels

Important as tlgrms charged by the ltr & usng no vwls cud save a fortne

Nw fangld txt spk is less obvs & cn b v obscr

There was life before txt, complx rich & jst as bzar

Happy 100th birthday to the Royal Air Force

Re: sod the technology

@ledswinger properly understated rant old chap

do have a pint or 5

Google to 'forget me' man: Have you forgotten what you said earlier?

Re: "It was legal to kill Jews in WWII Germany. Does not make it right."

@LDS

All nations practiced slavery UNTIL the British Royal Navy attempted to stop slavery.

Yes, until the end of the 19th century when Britain made slavery illegal every tribe/group/nation engaged in slavery and slave trading.

The British through the Royal Navy’s Anti Slavey Patrol went against the entire rest of the world in the first ever attempt to stop the practice.

Unfortunately slaveyi s still practiced (and approved of) by some nations and some religions.

The African branch of the Arab Salve trade bought from willing African suppliers. The trade to the east coast (and on to the Persian Gulf and India) was far larger and far more brutal then that trade with the west coast of Africa that supplied the American trade.

What is it with this ignorance of history, any one would think it was discrimination the way ONLY the American slave trade is ever discussed and held up as an example of moral wrong doing. The ONLY good guys in the history of international slavery were the British Empire who were the first to try and stop it.

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

Re: ISO 8601

Well there’s the problem(s) straight away

www.loca.gov

goverment ! USAian gov at that.

The Radio people sorted this out back in the early part of the 20th centuary !

Day starts at 00:00:00 and ends at 23:59:59

Binary - two digits - 0 to 1 NOT 2; octal 0 to 7 NOT 8; deneray 10 digits 0 to 9 NOT 0 to 10; hex - well you should get thge point by now. How on earth can you have hour 24 a 24 hour system ?

Monday 23:59:58 tic Monday 23:59:59 tic TUESDAY 00:00:00 tic Tuesday 00:00:01...

There is no such time as 24:00 (or 24:00:00)

ANY attempt to go to 24:00:00 is patently barking mad

Re: Dates

@mike moyle

That very sensible convention was invented by WHO (the drs; as inb World Health Organisation; not The Dr.)

The concept was simple

Month - Roman

Day - one or two digits

Year - always 4 digits

12 VII 2018 or 2018 12 VII or VII 2018 12

It is ALWAYS un-ambiguous; never understood why it didn’t catch on

Re: Dates

oh Charles 9 you forgot about the time zone letter notation - where J would indicate Z+10 hours.

Which puts the nearest bit of the US at V and very sensibly does not allow for the barking mad concept of time zones on half hours; or the equally barking mad concept of DST - 12:00z mid day at Greenwich; so to try and claim 12:00 BST is mid day is demonstrably delusional I know it is hard to prove in the grey cloudy days that make up UK weather; but occasionally the sun shines on the centre of the known universe and it is then easy to show that the sun is overhead in Greenwich at 12:00Z not at 12:00A

Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

Re: Two way street

It is a mystery to me why Security people allow the normal corporate user to use google.com (.co.uk /.za etc). Meta data from what is being searched MUST give Google a massive clue as to what any specific (large) business is focusing on.

I am amazed that the otherwise sensibly paranoid security wonks let any un-anomanised search engine be used. I would have expected them to insist on using the likes of DuckDuckGo and to have blocked google and forbidden Chrome as being totally unacceptable risks to IP

It really is a glaring hole

Apple's top-secret iBoot firmware source code spills onto GitHub for some insane reason

Re: My device - I'll jail break it if I want to ...

Um; no.

Apple’s AppStore - Apple’s rules.

Nothing to stop you (or anyone else) writing Apple Hardware based Apps and offering them for sale/giveaway. Just Apple won’t let you do it through their Apple AppStore

Of course you may have non disclosure issues if you write for the real Apple AppStore; so you may have to make a decision to either play in APPLE’s AppStore under their T&C - or play in some one else’s AppStore. You may have problems getting any ‘Footfall’ though & you may find no one wants to play in your AppStore - especially if you can not/will not warrant your apps as malicious code free

Your device - jail break it; run it over; feed it to a great white shark - whatever floats your boat. But don’t claim Apple stops you - or prevents you from downloading any old piece of dodgy code if you leave their rather safer walled garden. You just won’t be allowed to use APPLE utilities/web sites/AppStores to do so. But then that is the point you appear to be missing - Apple OWN the infrastructure; you can play - or not - if you want to. See what happens if you get any piece of equipment modified by no approved ‘fixers’ if you then complain to the OEM that it is bust

Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report

Re: Raynet

Di dah dit Dah di dit Dah dah Di dah dit

Or yes - but being pushed to DMR and other non resilient solutions

The USN have re-introduced morse. But that’s about it; every thing else is just getting more and more whiz-bang. But then if we are reduced to morse & basic crystal receivers; then it probably won’t matter....

Re: Well timestamps at a µs level...

And the US Military reserve the right (and do) to reduce the accuracy of the GPS system; or even deform the signal - they exercise with this from time to time; and use it when their troops are ‘hot’ as they also have decode for the changes made; so your GPS will be 10s/100s of metres out; theirs will still be spot on (>>1 metre)

On time stamps we did of course used to have real time signals on BBC radio stations (better than mS accuracy anywhere in the world you could get a signal) plus Rugby Radio (MSF) which was one of 3 international standard frequency and Time Signal stations (WWV and WWVH being the other two). A bit of decent kit; a knowledge of propagation and uS accuracy was almost achievable.

MSF is of course deceased; some criminals shut it down as they didn’t understand it; or its use; ditto the BBC no longer bother to ensure the pips are correct. Ignorant bastards

Re: Didn't we have such a system?

Gee was nicked from the Germans (OBOE) and developed by the DECCA Company.

DECCA was developed & deployed worldwide (oh apart from part of N America; but they used the Canadian chain anyway - because it wasn’t invented there).

Accuracy a couple of metres to a few 10s of metres IFF you truly understood the system. You RENTED DECCA boxes; never sold.

Then there was HiFix DECCA - accurate to better than 1 metre.

Then someone copied DECCA onto a lower base frequency system and thus we got LORAN - if you were lucky you could get Kilometre level accuracy.

Then the idiots who wouldn’t allow DECCA in their country; made an even lower base frequency version called OMEGA (pronounced OH ME GAA) which was so crap; that sat in Portsmouth Polly with all the relevant updates and correction tables (5 or 7 BIG thick manulals plus addendums) and the very latest over the air updates (changed HOURLY) we still managed to get one fix in Scarpa Flo; one fix somewhere near Paris; and one on the Dogger Bank. The OMEGA readings were taken on 3 consecutive minutes. yup; ideal conditions and it was still crap.

Or there was your trusty chronometer (rated against MSF/WWV/WWVH/BBC0 and a sextant with some spherical trig tables and a star/plant/moon or Sun.

eLoran; well it was better than LORAN but no sane navigator relied on it with in 50 nautical miles of the coast.

That reference triggered a few memories - Hyperbolic Radio Navigation Aids; DECCA was amazing; Loran not so much; and OMIGA was/is just ridiculous- basic radio propagation theory suggested it would never work; quite correctly.

Julian Assange to UK court: Put an end to my unwarranted Ecuadorean couch-surf

The Venezuelan socialists are already working hard to ensure there’s no more oil, they’l probably succeed long before it gets out of the embassy, so the oil is a moot point.

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

Re: Can I just leave this thought with you?

@ Andy A

But the modern incompetent web page slingers-together (who claim to be web page designers) have never bothered themselves to set up tabs in the page, so when you tab you go to some pseudo random field, NEVER the next logical field.

Of course, this is just one of the many indicators of their total inability to design anything, or their testers to comprehend any one else’s expectations

Re: Reminds me of a story

@boltar

So, explain the utube video(s) showing a clueless youngster totally failing to use a rotary dial phone.

By your apparent judgemental standards, it just proves how thick youngsters are, totally incapable of using the most basic tech in existence

Wonder how you’d manage a Waldo for instance ?

Re: Reminds me of a story

@David Nash

actually you "tap'' of “Press” or “Long Press” or maybe “Force Touch” - another incorrect instruction to the user

Biker nerfed by robo Chevy in San Francisco now lobs sueball at GM

Re: I think the cyclist is at fault#2

If Bikers would only think - IF you can not see the drivers eyes in his mirror then he probably can not see you - get out of his blind spot

And if he is a dick & hasn’t adjusted his mirrors so you can’t find that sweet spot; then you know he never uses his mirror anyway - so now you know & can take suitable avoiding action.

Re: I think the cyclist is at fault.

Especially when you watch cars ahead manoeuvring to ‘close the gate’ - sometimes quite late & aggressively; so that the poor sod on the bike suddenly as nowhere to go..

On the other hand; why are there no ‘Bikers THINK Car’ (maybe the ‘Car’ is an overstatement). Don’t bloody well hide in my blind spot(s) - or tail gate me; etc etc - I suspect that the car drivers who ‘close the gate’ are just pee’d off with some of the more stupid bikers

Re: @kain preacher

In South Africa; if you didn’t move out of the way; you used to get done for ‘Depriving the State of Income’ and get hit for at least DOUBLE the speeding fine they thought they would have got if you hadn’t slowed the other car up !

Everything running smoothly at the plant? *Whips out mobile phone* Wait. Nooo...

Re: Industrial automation tends to be conservative --

Ah yes

DCS - life expectancy 15 to 20 YEARS

Yes; that is YEARS - not days or months.

Which is why there are plants still running on NT4

If IT can not provide sufficient stability to allow factories to have proper investment in decent kit you will get what we have now.

It should be trivial to maintain support for older kit; even mechanics can manage this with pre microprocessor controlled unrepairable cars; and most civil servants seem to survive doing things the same way as their great grandfathers did (badly; inefficiently; and with as much disruption to the tax payer as possible :-) )

So when you are spending a couple of million quid to build your infrastructure (factory) then if you don’t want the social justice idiots whinging about ‘excess’ profits; then you need to be able to write that investment off over a decently long period.