Posts by cyberdemon 3478 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
I find that KDE is extremely good these days.
It went through a rough patch with KDE 4, but those days are long gone. If you haven't tried it since ~2017 then you really must give it another go.
No more faffing about with CUPS, they have the printer configuration down to a tee now. My VPN 'just works' and even my Bluetooth mouse 'just works'. And it's just as powerful and configurable as it was in the KDE 3.5 days.
Yeah exactly.
I also mean things like where the stately pile + manor is actually owned by the Crown Estates, and the Lord and Lady of the manor, due to their favour with the Crown, pay only a 'Peppercorn' ground-rent for the place on a 999-year lease, and may or may not be able to sub-lease portions of it to other people for money or political favour.
Who then, apart from the home secretary, actually runs the Home Office? Who is this Big Brother character that seems to inhabit 2 Marsham Street?
Possible names from Wikipedia include: Mark Lowcock, Matthew Rycroft, Sir Phllip Rutnam (all "Knight Commanders" of some Order... Sounds very 'Deus Ex' ..)
Hmm. As you may have guessed, I tend to vote for the Lib Dems.
Are you going to pillory me as a transcendental crackpot, "possibly racist", etc etc?
The biggest problem with politics these days is that everything is presented as a binary choice i.e. a (false) dichotomy. All sense of nuance is lost in the endless battle for your attention.
TBH you could extend your argument to say that all parties are just versions of the same thing and might as well all be the same party anyway.. And George Orwell would very much agree with you.
Sorry, what?
Are you trying to say that the likes of Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Suella Braverman are trying to resist some plot by the civil servants to turn the UK into 1984 / Stasi East Germany ?
It's very much the other way round: Anyone in the civil service who disagrees with the plan to ditch all human rights or still clings on to "European thinking" gets purged. We saw that when Bojo came to power.
It's unclear to me who is pulling the ministers strings, but the idea that the ministers themselves are innocent, benevolent parties is utter nonsense.
Maybe because anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together wouldn't touch "front-line politics" with a barge pole.
The media/social-media circus has turned the entire profession into a toxic cess-pit.
If Ken Clarke were in politics today, he'd be "cancelled" for something or other. All that cancel-culture can easily be whipped up by local or foreign self-interests. The social media companies will pull the levers of AI mass-manipulation all the way to the "dial-a-riot" setting for anyone with enough cash to spend.
> Yes, they do pay [...] Cost me about £100K.
Then have an upvote and a (sadly virtual) beer from me, your anonymous Reg-reading Lordship. :)
However I fear that many of your less honest "peers" will have avoided their duties with offshore companies and suchlike. Otherwise surely there would be more transparency from them. It would be interesting if you could shed any light on the redacted sections of the aforementioned tax manual.
p.s. If you were otherwise going to spoil your vote, why not put one in for one of the minor parties that you may actually believe in? The Lib Dems, for example, are currently damned by the self-fulfilling prophecy that they will never win an election. Yet I think if the people who agreed with them actually voted for them, they may be in with a decent chance this time around.
Oof. While steganography may be detectable "to one degree or another", It's pretty damned hard to prove. And worse: it's damn near impossible to prove that your inane stream of silly cat videos isn't hiding some encrypted information in the high-coeffcients of your MPEG stream.
Is it a low-quality video up-encoded into 4K HD? Or is it steganography?
Right. So it was "our idea" then. That seems to be the case for a lot of the "red tape", etc. that the Brexit types blame the EU for... If you look into it, it was the UK which was the source of the red tape in the first place..
BTW, what a blast from the past! Fancy the BBC posting an article from one Andrew Orlowski. That's a name I haven't heard in far too long..
Of course, but sadly you can't use logic against populism.
Populist politicians don't actually care a jot if what they are saying is true or false, or if what they are proposing is possible or impossible. Or even if the laws they are making are implementable/enforceable. It's all just a psychological play to their supporters. See also: Brexit
Bad laws allow corruption to thrive. Exactly what this particular bunch of politicians seem to want.
All encryption is banned!! (But don't worry, we will never enforce that on our friends and benefactors..)
Indeed. And it's not just our home office. It's Australia, Canada, US, pretty much the whole English-speaking world. The Chinese and Russians are already living in 1984. Europe are a little way behind but already sliding down the authoritarian/nationalist slope.
That's one of the things that has led me to believe for the last 20 years that the world is hurtling towards a third world war. The first casualty is the Truth, etc.
Nuke: At least it's quick.
Correct. This madness started with Blair, Jack Straw, Jacqui Smith, ID Cards and RIPA. (although arguably it goes all the way back to Michael Howard..) The Tories are continuing the madness because it suits them. It's helping them push through plain-nasty policies that nobody in their right mind would vote for.
The Lib-Dems are slightly more pro-freedom and less power-obsessed than the rest, but then again they have never had any power recently. Except that once, when they allowed themselves and the country to be utterly shafted by the Tories. In hindsight obviously, they should have let it be a hung parliament.
I'm not sure about the part blaming the EU for it though. Citation on that, please.
Of course this law won't be applied to the tory party themselves - there will be exemptions for national security matters, policing, official secrets, yadda yadda.. But it will be used against everyone else, especially pesky journalists..
Some ex-footballer with an unusually high-functioning brain for the profession decides to criticise the government off-air, this should not have been news (the criticism was well-deserved, if poorly delivered). The news was that he was shut down for it.. Yet the government-appointed Director General (whom is himself subject to criticism for facilitating an £800k loan to Boris Johnson before his appointment...) refuses to comment on whether Lineker would have received the same treatment if he had praised the government... Of course he wouldn't. As the 'i' paper points out this morning, Tory Peer Karen Brady doesn't get told off by the Beeb for having her Sun column while starring on The Apprentice.. The Beeb is supposed to be impartial, yet the government expects it to act as its state broadcaster. You won't find the real reason for ditching the European Court of Human Rights explained on the BBC under their current directorship.
And yeah, the 'i' article also explains how this farce is being used by the knuckle-dragging right. So that particular incident (leaning on the BBC to shut down a commentator) could have been a deliberate attempt to distract the public away from its plans to restrict their freedoms, whilst at the same time doing further damage to the BBC. Two birds with one stone.
Just as Mr Orwell foresaw, there are different rules for the Party, the Inner Party and the Proles. We criticise China for their freedom-crushing authoritarianism, yet we are implementing the same policies here. The state will control what passes for truth or misinformation.. Denying people a free life based on race is absolutely nothing like what was being discussed in pre-ww2 Germany, and intercepting all communications and outlawing encryption is absolutely nothing like the 1960s Stasi.. right?
It really is nothing to do with Thinking of the Children, it's all about cementing power by controlling truth and cracking down on dissent. Keeping those rich and powerful in power and riches. That's pretty much big-C Conservatism in a nutshell, right? Fiefdom for us, serfdom for you.
I am reminded of when I was trying to look up whether hereditary lords and barons pay any inheritance tax on their "substantial landed estates". (the rest of us pay about 50% and I can't imagine Lord Muck paying that much on his stately pile...) so I first went to this page and eventually ended up here, only to be told "(This content has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000)". WTF? Even the tax manual has sections redacted for the landed gentry, it seems?
I would love to see a Zephyr port for it actually.
If you're not familiar with Zephyr, it's kind of a halfway point between FreeRTOS and Linux. It's a fully real-time OS with bare-metal interrupt support, but it has a Linux-style device driver model, with DeviceTree and Kconfig.
RiscV is a supported architecture but the Tinker board is not on the list yet. It shouldn't be too much work to add it, though!
The closest board on there is the BeagleV StarLight JH7100
True to a point. But for embedded applications like robot control, having CAN is a very nice feature, and we don't need the display port.
The price for a CAN 'hat' for a Raspberry Pi is shocking, and it's only an i2c/SPI-connected MCP25xx with very poor performance compared to a native CAN interface on the SoC.
Dual gigabit Ethernet ports is also a game changer. Then you can swap CAN for EtherCAT for -serious- robot control. Dedicated EtherCAT controllers cost thousands..
For some reason I read that as "highly efficient". I guess I owe myself a new keyboard..
But yes, exactly! WTF are all these 87,000 employees doing??
Although I do know that some of them are contributors to, or occasionally the maintainers of, several important open-source projects, and that is the one thing that does make me shiver when Zuck and his tech-bros reach for their hatchets.
Even when you are just sharing photos privately amongst friends, the real use of Facebook is to allow Facebook to learn more about You and your Friends, so that it can sell you to the highest bidder, via its advanced social manipulation algorithms. It can tweak the probability of what you will buy next in the shops, and It can tweak the probability of the way you might vote at the next election by controlling what you see on your news feed.
Yeah it's true that there are some decent YouTube videos. (although I wouldn't go near a VBA tutorial.. That would be a bit like the "how to poke your eye out with a fork" videos that must surely exist on the platform)
I guess my point really is that the recommendation algorithm always goes for the click-baity narcissistic self-important knobs like Linus Tech Tips, "Veritaseum" et al. (Especially if you browse it without cookies.. i.e. that's the default starting point of the algorithm)
I would also put Twitch Streamers and other social-media "influencers" into Room 101.
Er, if I wrote a book about bricklaying or ancient philosophy then I would struggle to get it published. It certainly wouldn't find its way into a library. I certainly wouldn't be allowed into a school to teach kids about it.
Whereas on YouTube all you need to know is how to game the recommendation algorithm, and you can make up any old bullshit about any subject and get it into classrooms around the country.
You could say the same about TikTok, right?
But the people who post "educational videos" on YouTube and TikTok have absolutely no teaching qualifications, nor do they necessarily have any in the subject they are talking about. All they have is a great deal of narcissistic self-importance and this rubs off on the kids, who all want to be "influencers" and "YouTubers" these days. All you need to be a successful YouTuber is an excess of self-confidence and the ability to stick a gormless face and some click-baity text on each of your video thumbnails.
There used to be these things called "Libraries" and later, "The Internet", where you could learn about pretty much anything for free, provided you knew how to read.. But these days you don't have to read, you just get endless shite fed from a "recommendation, engagement-optimisation and advertising" algorithm. Aka "auto play next". I'd go as far as saying that YouTube and TikTok are likely reducing the literacy rates amongst population, at the same time as increasing their tendency to distrust qualified teachers and academics, preferring to believe whatever YouTube has learned that they are most likely to believe, whether it is true or fake.
The "YouTuber" is one thing I would put into Room 101.
You might as well have kids taught by ChatGPT.. Actually, come GPT-4 where it has perfected the art of making clickbaity mesmerising YouTube videos full of believable bullshit, It probably will start to replace the YouTuber.
The real tragedy here is the tens of thousands (!!) of mugs who were duped into working for these arseholes and their "silly con valley" company in the first place, when they could have spent their lives doing something else. They were enlisted to make the world an even worse place, where the people are psychologically manipulated "at scale" to the will of whoever has cash to spend.
I really wish that Facebook, Google (especially YouTube), Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, TikTok et al will follow Twitter into a bottomless void of Hell. We would be so much better off without them. In fact the whole of California might as well sink into the pacific as far as I care. It would be a net benefit to the world, like cutting out a tumour.
However, what Meta and the other technocrats are doing by sacking all these people is trying to ensure that the cultists at the centre survive. But they can't do that if nobody wants to work for them anymore.
For posting on the Reg ---> Thanks for an interesting and informative first post. ----->
But in all seriousness, who thought it was a good idea to put end-users (ordinary bobbies) in charge of collating engineering requirements? :P
To an engineer, it is elementary that the necessary radio transmit power goes up with the square of distance i.e. to go twice as far you need four times the power (and with multiple units broadcasting, available bandwidth goes down with direct area coverage, no matter the power..) so a handheld radio that could talk from Skye directly to the mainland was always going to be very expensive and not-very extensible. It might have been better to base the technology on the existing cellular network. Although it's true that reliability/coverage could have been less. How did the reliability of PRSCP/Airwave compare to the mobile phone network in the end?
> We voted brexit
Is that the `Royal "We"`? Cos I bloody well didn't, and the country as a whole could hardly have been more undecided on that "non-binding referendum" if it had tried. And if it were 48/52 the other way round, i'm sure you'd be crying for another referendum, rather than calling it undemocratic to demand a sizeable majority to close the matter.
Had the referendum been a legally binding one, then it's very likely that many of the leave campaign would have gone to jail for all the lies and dirty tricks, such as those by Dominic Cummings, Alex Lebedev and Cambridge Analytica..
The only beneficiaries of Brexit are Russia, China and a few rich Tories with their snouts in the UKCA trough.
That's assuming you still have the option to turn it off.
It's becoming increasingly common that there is no way of turning off microsoft's anti-features. Except by deleting Windows entirely and installing Linux.
However, Microsoft seems to be in the pockets of the hardware vendors and seems to be making that more and more difficult to run Linux natively with each iteration of Secure Boot. (for example On my recent Asus motherboard there is no way to disable Secure Boot entirely. Even if you delete the PKs, it puts itself into "setup mode" and resets its own configuration every 30 days.)
(and with WSL2, why would anyone ever -need- to run Linux natively, right? Unless they have something to hide from Microsoft's ever-encroaching surveillance, in which case they must be a paedo/terrorist and the relevant three-letter agency ought to bee told..)
Data residency policy: All your data are belong to us. Your teams call transcripts, your video and audio, your chatlogs, your documents, your GitHub "contributions", your LinkedIn interactions, your health records, your Edge browser history, the contents of your OneDrive, and the contents of your hard drive.
Training an AI model on every piece of data that passes through their systems is not the same as "storing" that data, and you can't prove your data is in the model. So Microsoft's lawyers will say.
Microsoft have seen Google quietly drop the "Don't" from their corporate charter and start being evil. They have seen Amazon and Meta slurp up lots of power and money by being evil. And they must have thought: "Google are being evil. Apple are being evil. All the tech companies are doing evil now. But we are Microsoft! We were evil before it was cool. We are the OG of Evil-corp. It's time to out-evil the competition"
George Orwell proposed that the only stable system of government would be one of totalitarian control, where the population is kept in a constant state of fear and anger at an invisible enemy, while being surveilled at all times in a "digital panopticon" (my words there, not his, obviously since "digital" wasn't a thing in 1949) via their telescreens.
How on earth he could have predicted the panopticon of telescreens, I can't fathom. What seems more likely is that the world governments simply read his book and agreed with him that this is the only stable system of government and that they should strive for this to keep themselves in power in perpetuity.
Who is "deliberately making the grid unsuitable for renewables"?
The entire project that TFA describes is about trying to make the grid more suitable for renewables. It's so that we can have battery powered virtual inertia. But it's a hard problem and it risks reducing resiliency in other areas such as "cyber".
Unfortunately it's simply not possible for batteries to store anything more than an hour's worth of power. (and that's an optimistic estimate with all of the batteries we have in the UK, EVs included) To power the UK for a week of low wind would require more batteries than the world's annual production of them. And the natural resources are getting scarce.
See here for a rather optimistic and now (post Britishvolt collapse) outdated plan for the expansion of battery storage in the UK.
And "green hydrogen" requires a large amount of very expensive catalyst material for the electrodes. The only feasible material so far, is Platinum.
What was the lead time for Calder Hall? The UK built that in three years..
Not quite up to modern safety standards though..
The big mistake that the UK made in the 50s and 60s was to concentrate all their nuclear efforts into acquiring the bomb, and to conflate power generation with weapons production. They should have kept the two entirely separate. It was the weapons production which turned the public against nuclear power. What then happened is the CND took jobs in nuclear regulation and safety, and that's what gave us the utterly barmy regulations we have today.
For example, there is "no safe limit" for radiation - it must be kept "As Low As Reasonably Practicable" which enrages both nuclear engineers and anti-nuclear campaigners alike. We end up doubling the cost to reduce radioactive emissions when they were already well below background, and orders of magnitude below the radioactive emissions that come from burning coal (due to trace amounts of Radon in coal).
I have a friend who used to work at AWE, and they would for example restrict access to ordinary X-ray machines when the machines were off, in case of "residual X-rays".. He says it was a running joke there that 1 in every 3 workers is a CND fifth-columnist.
Sure, that would fix the problem.
Ideally, what we need is more nuclear power, so that we can have stable power without the CO2.
But thanks to a regulator being run by people fundamentally opposed to and terrified of nuclear-anything, nuclear is horribly slow and expensive to build.
If only UKAEA could have spent the last 50 years on researching better fission designs instead of all that fusion, I do believe we'd be in a much better place. But then we closed Dounreay.. And how the oil companies must have celebrated that, i'm sure..
BTW for the link to work in my earlier post you have to remove the HTTPS. Apparently the Reg sticks that on all links
Having worked at UKAEA Culham 2013-18, I know these guys have the best control engineers in the business, and if anyone can develop a system to stabilise our worryingly wobbly power system, they can.
Whenever I look at the UK grid frequency, it often looks rather "bi-modal". That's the "buttocks distribution" visible in the histogram on the bottom right. This means it's continually oscillating around its 50Hz control point and rarely staying very close to it. It's a classic problem in control of non-linear systems, and it's the sort of thing those UKAEA boffins ought to be able to sort out. (The EU grid doesn't have this problem, apparently. It stays pretty much bang-on 50Hz, but it's a much bigger grid with a much higher "minimum inertia")
If the grid ever goes too high or too low frequency for too long, or changes frequency too quickly, it can cause parts of the system to trip offline, leading to a cascade failure and a large-scale blackout. This problem is made worse when there's a lot of wind and solar energy on the grid, because there is no grid-synchronous spinning turbine to provide inertia (wind turbines are not usually grid-synchronous - they run at variable speed for max efficiency). Just like an engine without a flywheel, it can stall or spin out of control very easily.
We can use batteries for frequency response instead of flywheel stored energy - but if the power electronics and control systems are too slow to respond, they can make the situation worse, rather than better. Hopefully this advanced control system can fix that. (i'm in an optimistic mood today, must be something the coffee..)
However, I'm sure they know that the best control systems in the world won't compensate for the fundamental transmission-line bottleneck between Scotland and England.. Or the enormous problem of oversubscribed local low-voltage distribution networks. Resistive losses "P_r = I^2 R" is after all, basic physics. It doesn't take a Plasma Physicist to know that you can only shove so many electrons per second down a given cable before it starts to heat up, waste energy, and fail. There's no way we're all moving to Heat Pumps and EVs without a LOT more pylons, substations and local under-the-road cables, even if we had the generating capacity.
So I'm all for this, so long as it doesn't detract any investment in physical infrastructure, i.e. we need more pylons, more substations, and ideally, HV-to-the-kerbside.
Short-term "investors" aka speculators, are quite happy when the value plummets (especially if they can predict it) as they can go short on the stock and make even more of a fortune from scandalous collapses than long-term investors can make from a well-managed company.
However, if when the government fined a company, it actually confiscated 1% of that company's shares, then even the short-sellers would lose out, because the stock price hasn't gone down, there is just less of it available.
And then for repeat offenders, such as water companies, the government would end up as a controlling shareholder and could forcibly clean up the company's act.
It's time we started fining the Investors.
Then business might take note.
Even if a CEO goes to jail, a big enough company can just get a new CEO. A threat of jail just means they get more danger-money. But if, in extreme cases such as those water utilities flushing raw sewage into rivers, if the investors were fined a small percentage of their shareholding for each breach of the law, then mis-behaving companies would eventually be taken into public ownership. That ought to give the board of directors reason to clean up their companies' acts.
