Posts by Headley_Grange

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Scotland's recent legislation on domestic detectors requires a heat detector in kitchens.

I used to live in a house where the detector in the hall was too near the kitchen so it went off without much provocation. It was great for grilling meat. Put the bacon/chicken/chops under the grill, leave the door open and retire to the living room to watch telly. When the smoke alarm went off it was time to turn the meat over. The meat wasn't burnt - it was just right. I think it was fumes from the fat that set the detector off because it was always a bit late if the grill pan was clean.

I had to put a guy on a final warning because his desk was right below the fire alarm bell and he got fed up the weekly tests so one day he took the bell off on the morning of the test. He came within a gnat's chuff of being sacked.

3D printer purchases could require background checks under proposed law

I couldn't make gun parts in a machine shop (I did my EITB metal bashing course and I know how useless I am) but I could download a file and send it to a printer.

Atlassian users complain of cloud migration dead ends, especially in UK

Re: Only yesterday I wrote:

If the company's got a hard requirement for UK hosting then it should have ensured its hosting contract included guarantees and liquidated damages to cover the costs of moving if their host renaged. Atlassian would, I'm sure, have said "it's our standard contract - take it or leave it", at which point the company could have walked away.

Or - IT were ignored when they warned the directors that this could be a problem and running their own servers could be cheaper in the long run than moving to a new provider every few years.

If you're brave enough to move fully-laden datacenter racks, here's the robot for you

When I ditched my cassette deck and used the space to move my home IT (NAS, Router, Streaming, USB A/D converter, etc) to the HiFi rack I wish I'd had the foresight to put the rack on wheels. As it is, it's on those pointed feet that are meant to make everything sound better (I know...) so it's a two-man lift to move it. As a result, whenever I plumb in something new it I just push any new cables into the rats-nest tangle of mains, phono, UHF, VHF, and cat 5&6 cables that's lurking at the back and probably evolving into a new form of wiry life.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Reg Standard Units

I think that using a refrigerator as a unit of measure is ambiguous given that fridges in the US (or at least those I see on telly programmes) are massive compared to the ones we use in the UK.

Nvidia's accelerated cadence spells trouble for AMD and Intel's AI aspirations

Re: History

In the good old days there was a link below articles for reporting errors.

Judge tosses Sonos's $32.5M patent win over Google with savage slam down

Bricking It

It's a shame that Sonos didn't patent bricking their devices to make you buy new ones. If they had cornered the market on that then no one else would have been able to do it.

Microsoft drops official support for Python 3.7 in Visual Studio Code

Re: That is SO StackOverflow

It's getting embedded at university. A mate's son is doing a physics degree and, for some unfathomable reason, they have to submit their lab. assignments using Python.

Re: That is SO StackOverflow

I'd me more interested in a survey to find the most popular language that people think in before they end up using the language they work in.

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Re: Someone else's computer

If someone sells me an app-based service for a fixed price then they need to include the costs of security updates, OS rolls, bug fixing, etc. in that price, not come and hold me to ransom at a later date. If they can't do that, don't want to do that or don't know how to do that then they need to make it clear that I'm either buying an unsupported service that might not work in a couple of weeks time or they should sell it with a subscription from the start. If they don't understand that software support and maintenance can be as expensive as development, moreso if it's multi-platform, multi-OS and they don't know how to cost it then they shouldn't be selling it.

I wouldn't buy a toaster or fridge that was cobbled together by a hobbyist and I don't want to buy software-dependent services from one either.

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

A good argument for smart meters is demand pricing and only recently some power companies have been offering cheap or even free electricity to consumers to get them out of the peak demand times and run their washing machines and tumble dryers overnight.

A good argument for not getting a smart meter is demand pricing with the likelihood that in the absence of a powerful regulator the power companies will find way to raise electricity prices dramatically just when people have little choice but to turn the heating on.

Which of the arguments you prefer depends how much of a cynic you are.

I haven't got a smart meter, and I've no intention of ever getting one.

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

True - but check your NAS's specs before you head off to buy cameras. Most have limitations on the number of cameras you can attach before having to pay them more money. For baby monitoring this probably wouldn't be a problem cos one or two cameras would suffice - but the basic software that comes with the NAS sometimes has limitations on where the videos can be shown and how long they can be saved for and other annoyanceware. Unlocking these limitations will require the purchase of additional "plans".

Big Brother is coming to a workplace near you, and the privacy regulator wants a word

%Utilization

"...as long as you get what you need that's all you need to know..."

You're thinking like an engineer, not a manager (a compliment).

They also want to know that you took the amount of time that they costed in because if you did it with less hands-on time (but still delivered and booked the planned time) then it means you've got more capacity and could be doing something else productive and the company could be more profitable. That's the main reason why they don't like WFH - the terrifying thought that they could be making more profit by sweating people who they think could be working harder.

Re: Dumb companies equate activity with productivity

A company I worked for was about to make a bunch of people redundant. I was in a meeting with some other managers and all the directors discussing the the (UK) process and the criteria we would use to decide who should go. The subject of productivity came up and as we discussed it it became clear that many of the people in the room were talking about utilization, not productivity. One of my peers got a bit fed up of this and pointed out that how occupied or busy someone was is not a good proxy for their productivity. When the HR director started arguing the manager pointed out of the window at the cars in the front car park - where all the directors parked their company cars - and said something like "those cars are probably used for about two hours a day on average - about 10% utilization - so I assume they'll be going before we get rid of any staff.

Apple blames iOS 17 bug for overheating iPhone 15 woes

Pegasus mail in the 90s.

Scandium-based nuclear clocks promise punctuality for next 300 billion years

My mechanical watch runs about 3 secs per day fast. I set it 30 seconds slow on the first of the month and re-set it at the end of the month when it's running 1 minute fast. That's over a month between settings and if I need to know the time more precisely it's easy to calculate to within a few seconds based on the date. I can't think of the last time I needed to know the time with such accuracy - nothing else happens in my life that starts or finishes on time to this precision. If I were in charge of this scandiuum clock it would run for almost 900,000 years before it needed adjusting.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: Self-reinforcing

Same here. I'm defaulting to Safari more often just to get sites to work properly. I get the login loop on one of my banks and a couple of sites I use simply don't work - either don't load fully or stuff is missing. Tried troubleshoot mode and they don't work. The most worrying is one bank where the login seems to have failed, I get presented with the login screen again but if I do nothing and wait a few secs then it logs me in. I don't know much about web design and security, but it feels like there's a few seconds where a token or something is lost and wandering and could be a security issue. The bank says "use Chrome".

It's a shame. I know it's not FF's fault other than they're not popular enough for sites to test with them.

Search for phone signal caused oil spill, say Japanese investigators

The "Who, Me" at the start of the article is missing!

You shouldn't be able to buy devices that tamper with diesel truck emissions on eBay, says DoJ

I understand that, and legally I'm sure you're correct (in the UK) , but no one says "....yeah, I bought it from seller0985123", do they? Whatever the legal position, people "buy stuff from ebay" and if it walks like a duck........

The concept that eBay (and other sites) is just a marketplace and no different from the newsagent's noticeboard or the farmer who rents his field for Sunday morning boot sales might have been OK when they first started as an any-old-tat auction site, but they've moved on a bit since those days and, as others have posted here, maybe it's time that the law caught up with the changes.

In the UK my credit card payments go to "EBAY COMMERCE UK LTD*EB LONDON", so I'd say I was buying from eBay.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: I want to know the equipment...

I've started looking at VOIP providers, but only half-heartedly - I don't want the hassle at the moment. I don't really use the landline and I might drop it when my contract comes up, but I'll be buying a new router before that so I'll get one with a phone socket which will let me me transfer to a VOIP provider or - when the pigs are on final approach - use Digital Voice when BT release the SIP settings for their service.

Re: Absolute chaos

Much as I agree about OfCom caring more about pressure from Telcos than customers, it is customer's demand for higher and higher data rates that's driving this. On this forum I've seen recent posts wihngeing that 50Mb/s can't be considered high speed.

On a more positive side there are a couple of things that OfCom could do. It could force roaming in the UK; if there's no Vodafone signal then let me use O2 at no extra cost. The other thing it could do is manage 5G roll-out licensing so that the Telco's have to install it areas with no coverage first. Want those lucrative central-London cells? Not before you've provided good coverage in the Lake District, Scotland and Shenfield railway station.

Re: It is contacting customers at least four weeks ahead of the switch

A friend's dad has some sort of man-down system that relies on BT. The good news is that they did contact him in advance. The expected news is that it's an ongoing pain in the arse for my friend to get his dad set up with the right system and battery backup. He's playing a lot of phone ping-pong.

Re: I want to know the equipment...

My understanding is that you have to use a BT router for BT Digital Voice. From the Draytek website (which has other useful information about this)

"The BT Digital Home Phone service does not work with other routers, other provider's devices or ISPs other than BT"

The same is true of the wireless extension sockets that BT will sell you - they will only connect to a BT router.

I don't know if it will be locked down this way for ever or whether eventually BT will open it up, just like they did with their routers. I can live without my landline but don't want to ditch it yet.

It's on my todo list to try to set up my BT router just as a modem with DHCP and firewall being handled by my Draytek and then see if I can plug my phone into the BT router and make the service work. I'm putting it off partly because there's a rat nest of mains, cat 6 and audio cables behind the hifi/IT rack that I've got to do battle with but mainly because I don't think it will work. If BT have tied VOIP to its router working as a router then I suspect I won't be able to configure the setup I've just described.

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

Resulting in an anticlimax?

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

In know what the law says about not driving faster than you can see/react, but I wonder how many of us would have met the same fate.

Poor fucker. RIP.

Menacing marketeers fined by ICO for 1.9M cold calls

Assuming that the ICO ever collects then if average return per call is more than 30p then they've done OK, haven't they. With fines of this size it's just another cost of doing business. The fines should be ten times higher or they will never discourage it.

Singapore may split liability for phishing losses between banks and victims

Re: who is responsible?

"If a bank has reason to believe that they're giving money to the right person, and they're not, is it their fault"

If I woke up one morning to find my fence knocked over and then just after breakfast a fencing contractor knocked on the door and said "I'm in the area and noticed you need a new fence." then I'd be a tad suspiscious.

If I were a bank and noticed that someone wanted to transfer a shedload of money to an account that had been created the day before with almost the right account name then I'd be suspiscious.

I think the banks could do more, even, as you point out, if it meant inconveniencing customers, but they do seem to make it easy for some of the scammers.

Re: Who is responsible for rampant payment and transfer scams?

If someone phones my mum to con her out of her money and says they are from her bank and my mum's phone confirms it's the bank's number then the phone company should be responsible either for collusion, an accessory before the fact or some other criminal offence that sees their directors in jail.

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Re: Elderly and Vulnerable?

From a UI - both screen and physical - I loved my BB Classic and if they brought out an iPhone with the same keyboard and PDA management I'd buy two. I could have written a novel with that keyboard whereas I struggle to type "Red Lion, 8pm" on the iPhone and phone in anything longer than that. Message organization was fantastic. I loved the idea of it - and the heft of it.

The things that made me bin it (literally - I couldn't give it away) were no way to synch anything between it and anything else without it being a right pain in the arse. All the BB/RIM native desktop synch tools for Mac didn't do anything - I never got them working and got no help from BB/RIM. Synching contacts and calendar was a pain (mainly Apple's fault, but the net result was the same) and there was no way to synch ToDos with any Mac apps.

And then useful stuff stopped being supported. I was travelling all over the place then and there was a BB app that found all travel data from mails and texts, collected it together as trips in a dedicated app and added it to the calendar. Fantastic - till it stopped.

Re: Three

In theory that's the ideal scenario for a bunch of 5g cells. In practice it also requires the backhaul to support it.

Re: Elderly and Vulnerable?

"Blackberries still work fine".

Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word 'fine' that I wasn't previously aware of.

NOP

C4 in my assembler days, and given it's just about the only one I remember you can draw your own conclusions about my coding skills.

Re: I thought they already had.

I wouldn't make any assumptions about 5G. It's relatively short range, with small cell sizes and much more line-of-sight than 4g. It will be will be rolled out in areas with fairly high population density first and other areas possibly never.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: Moving House

True - but DVDs will disappear soon. Many of the streamers don't put their stuff out on DVD. CDs will go that way too; I've got friends who have consigned their CD collection to the charity shop cos they can get it all on Spotify. There's a generation coming throught that won't set any store by owning stuff. The memory of the carrier bag with the LP banging awkwardly against your legs as you rushed home from school to get it on the music centre before your mum settled down to her soaps is dying out.

HP reveals bonkers $5k foldable tablet/laptop/desktop

For folding PCs it would be a Brompton.

I'd like to register a formal objection to the Starbucks grande latte become a Reg SI unit of mass, weight or, indeed, anything.

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

It would have been much better if instead of wheels they'd given it hundreds of tiny legs.

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Re: Sure, it's possible, but why would you want it?

I'm sure all the support people who read the Reg are looking forward to callouts where they are constantly pestered by a semi-informed user armed with a LLM asking a barrage of pointless questions.

However, I too would be disappointed with any doctor who prescribed indigestion.

I read the article twice, but I'm still stuck. Once my phone's got this PLLM thing on it, constantly running, sucking battery power and reducing available memory, what will it actually do for me? Like most of my friends (we're old) I use the phone to listen to my music (stuff on shelves in my house), text and mail people, find out when the next train is, find out where the next pub is and make the odd foray onto the web to answer questions - usually about 70s and 80s rock music. All I see in my future is a life blighted by annoying pop-ups recommending stuff that I'm not interested in. There'd better be an off switch.

X marks the spot where free speech clashes with Californian transparency

Misunderstanding?

I've only read the article, so I might be missing something, but there seems to be a misunderstanding on both sides.

The law seems to say that all Twitter has to do is provide the state with its the moderation procedures and some stats, not - as the lawyers are implying - that the the state has the right to define them.

The state seems to think that the act of having to admit publicly that its moderation policies are non-existient, discriminatory, whimsical, narcissistic, or whatever will shame Twitter into changing them.

The only people that have a chance of of changing Twitter's policies are advertisers but, apart from silently voting with their feet, I don't think that the big spenders are going to go public with opinions on Twitter's moderation.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: I I be a-goin there, I be-n't start from here

Some bench supplies can operate either in constant voltage or constant current mode. In CV you set the voltage and the load will pull whatever current it requires (I=V/R). In CC you set the current and the PSU will push that current through the load and the PSU voltage will adjust to whatever is required by the load (V=IR). CC mode is rarely used - I only used it once in my career for biasing some weird microwave diodes. Most bench supplies have a current-limit setting that prevents the sort of problem seen by today's protagonist. It's good practice to set the current limit to a bit above what you expect the system to draw, especially if you're dicking about with it.

In this example the PSU was in CV mode and the supply was set at 5V but the display was showing the current drawn by the system, not the voltage applied. When the voltage was increased the current drawn by the system increased (I=V/R), so it looked like the voltage was being turned up. Until the kit blew up.

22 million Brits suffer broadband outage blues and are paying a premium for it

Re: We have bigger things to worry about

Cheers

Re: We have bigger things to worry about

Thankss - I'll do a bit more research.

Re: We have bigger things to worry about

I lose POTS next month. I don't really use the landline, so it's not a big problem for me, but I'd like to keep the landline just in case. Problem is that I hadn't realized that it's not a standard plug-n-play VOIP. If you're on BT then you have to plug your phone into a BT router. I assume it's the same for other ISPs. I don't use the BT router and I was going to upgrade my Draytek to one with VOIP, but it seems that it won't work. I've never used VOIP and I don't really understand it, so this might be very obvious to Reg readers- and if I'm mistaken then I'm sure someone here will let me know for which a beer icon will follow.

Meanwhile a friend is having a terrible time with BT because his dad has some sort of man-down alarm that works automatically with his BT line. He's being shunted from pillar to post to get it sorted out and each pillar and post seems to want to install kit and charge an extra tenner a month for the service.

Age and Apathy

The frequent drop-outs in my street are mostly due to the cables laid over 50-years ago in the soft right next to the gas pipes and water pipes, which have both been replaced in the last decade or so. Before FTTC at the end of the street there werer Openreach contractors digging most months to fix a dodgy line or a cable broken by another utility and taped together with gaffa tape - as mine was. FTTC has made it better because it's got enough grunt to get over some of the losses or a break in just one cable without people really noticing unless they are very heavy bandwidth users (I'm not). I'm on BT and they're fine in terms of the day-to-day service and have been good on the 2 or 3 times I've called them out since I got t'internet about 20 years ago. I don't know if BT are expensive or not - the service works, support is OK and I'm a lazy bugger so why change?

Apart from apathy and long contracts, ISP email addresses are probably a big reason for people not changing more often. My cousin's partner signed up with Virgin when their contract was due cos it was cheaper than BT, only to have to pay BT to keep the family's BT email addresses alive long enough to sort out all the important services that used them and overall it's probably cost them more in £££ than staying with BT would have and certainly taken a lot of time to sort out. They're still paying for their BT emails and I they'll go back to BT when Virgin's up. I did consider letting wider family have emails on my personal domain (I don't host it), but after a few seconds' thought I came to my senses.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Not sure I understand this.

I read about this yesterday and didn't see it such a positive light. My reading is that the scanning doesn't have to be of the encrypted message, just the message before it's encrypted and sent - similar to the system Apple proposed a couple of years ago. If I'm right the gov. can pass this law, then write scanning code, licence it as an approved technology then mandate it's incorporation into the messaging apps. If (somehow, maybe by using some of those stocks of unobtanium they have) they can do this without sending any elements of the pre-encrypted message online for processing, then the encryption argument goes away, debatably. Find a way to vault dodgy looking messages on the device so they can't be deleted and send the cops round to check them (which could become a sport in its own right).

Or maybe I've just not understood.