Posts by alain williams 2651 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
I would much rather that BoE (or any organ of state) paid for services within our shores:
• generate employment here - which will be taxable
• use skills of people here which will:
•• encourage more Brits to become skilled up
•• enable us to better compete for such projects internationally
• keep sensitive data within the UK
Unfortunately: this requires joined up thinking - which is in short supply.
(some of who I have worked in) who depend on Open Source components and then complain about bugs or missing features. I have suggested that they pay for the bug fix or enhancement to be met with derision "who do I think they are - to pay for something that could benefit their competitors ?", or similar sentiments.
Sometimes I fave fixed a bug while being paid for them and with their approval. "Now let me send in a patch" to be told "not on our time" - so I do it when I get home.
They just do not understand that we can all move forward faster if we cooperate, payment of trivial sums (compared to what they waste elsewhere) is an anathema to some of them.
So it is 'opt out' not 'opt in'. So is this not a form of Unsolicited Goods and illegal under the Inertia Selling rules ?
I do understand that if you have something that works it might be thought preferable to bleed a little rather than face death if a migration goes wrong - especially for systems where downtime is very costly.
But if a something new is being developed breakages are not so important, indeed expected, before it goes live. So escape from VMware should be much easier -- reskilling being a major cost, maybe also different hardware.
I wonder how many new projects are being built on top of VMware just because of fear of the unknown ?
I've used Mint Cinnamon for over a decade
Let me put in a plug for Mint with the Mate desktop; Mate is, essentially, GNOME 2 as the GNOME project went off the rails with GNOME 3.
Mint is what I run on my laptop, at home my desktop runs Debian with the Mate desktop. Mint gets much of its packages from Debian - not that an end user needs to worry about that.
I have never had a FB/... account and do not use their services. However they have a "shadow account" that contains my personal information, they store this outside of the UK & EU, I have not agreed to them having my information, them taking it outside the UK, they have not told me what they are using it for.
Either:
• Meta should seek consent before they use my information -- clearly documented in the GDPR, or:
• Meta can pay me £1,000 per year to keep this shadow information. To be paid into my bank a/c not as credit to some service that I do not use.
without it organisations will do the minimum, especially if the cost of failure is borne by others - especially if those others are too small to be able to fight back.
Regulation has a cost but it also has benefits.
Too much regulation is bad, too little is bad. There is a balance, but finding it is hard and might only be obvious in retrospect.
Trump and Musk. Let them take risks rather than letting others do so on their behalf.
Them leaving would also make this planet a much safer place for the rest of us. It is a shame that we will need to wait until the end of next year for the launch window.
According to DVLA there were 32,888,476 cars in the UK in Q2 2024 (warning: spreadsheet) so 300,000 charge-points is about 1%, assuming that they are all working and near to where EVs need to be charged.
(40,448,909 vehicles in total, including buses & lorries)
Like anyone would give their true ID to a porn site that could then track all their "views" !That's ripe for hackers and blackmailers.
They appear to be doing it already - only yesterday I received an email from someone who claimed that they had control of my Windows PC and had seen the porn sites that I was visiting. They would inform my wife, etc, unless I paid them 10 bitcoin.
I thought that I had better pay up until I remembered that my PC runs Debian and that I am not married!
In 2023 there were stories of Twitter not paying rent and being sued. How was this resolved, did Musk get away with non payment ?
Is this the sort of person who we want in the government of the USA ? Oh, look at the new president - he will fit right in!
I am on the local community group committee. We report pot holes to the Hertfordshire county councillor who just tells us that it is policy to not fill/repair them until they are big enough:
"Overall for HCC potholes it’s 5cm in depth and 30cm in width – at the higher end as per the article sent through, and of footways for trip hazards its 2cm."
So: how is AI going to improve that ?
Will the debris be less damaging/polluting than when a metal framed satellite it hit - thus reducing impact of Kessler syndrome ?
I suppose that the contents will still contain much metal, so the box/contents ratio might be important.
So: the experts have been proven right -- what a surprise. But I doubt that the politicians will learn and start listening to experts in other fields. One set of experts that I would like them to listen to are the climate scientists, some do, most pretend to.
The USA is about to get a dictator who will shut own and ignore all experts that say inconvenient things.
Not living in the USA I am more worried about what happens at home (UK) than in the other side of the pond.
The USA is a large economy and provides a lot of tech and buys a lot of our goods -- but not all of them by a long way.
Trump will try to tie other countries up with individual trade deals, do not do what he says and he will yank the trade deal away.
If the rest of the world unites we can force Trump to behave to everyone's benefit rather than what Trump thinks is best for him personally (and the USA secondly).
Nice in theory but getting countries to act together is very hard. A few will be seduced by Trump offering trinkets - this will seem good in the short term until Trump changes it when escaping his clutches will be hard. Forward thinking is needed - something that our politician are not known for
what did the US do to be saddled with the likes of Trump, Musk and co?
It is what they did not do: not listen to the what Trump was saying and think it through; not understand that Trump's low morals, lying, made up facts are not what is needed for a good president; not look at the reprobates that Trump surrounded himself with; ...
Do ? Listening to Fox news is a good start.
Look at the data collection policies of a lot of sites and they include the right to 'fingerprint' you and track you 'across various devices'
My point is that they should only be able to follow those policies once a user has agreed to them, just viewing a web page is not enough.
It is my opinion that a website should never require javascript to work and also should never require any third party scripts to work.
I very much agree. Without javascript some fancy features might not work, but basic viewing, form filling, etc, do not need javascript.
I will accept that a small number of web pages need javascript, eg estate agents that let you "walk" through a house.
You want some energy units for small amounts of energy. One that you might want to use is the energy stored in a molecule of ATP -- used by biological systems. This is between 20.5 and 45.6 kilojoules per mole. Dividing by 6.02x 1023 means one molecule produces between 3.4×10-20 and 7.6×10-20 joules. Pick the average: 5.5×10-20 joules.
But that is too boring for the discerning El-Reg reader. An bacterium flagellum uses some 6.6 × 104 ATPs per second or 36×10-17 joules per second.
An AI PC is one that is compliant with the current marketing bullshit.
For most people their current PC is plenty powerful enough to do what they want, so why go to the bother and cost of replacing it. That is good for users but bad for vendors hence the marketing nonsense. This is nothing new.
The world could be a nicer place to live in for everyone if we used our, supposedly, intelligent big brains for mutual benefit. But instead the sociopaths, a minority who only care about themselves, act to disrupt others to persue aims to get themselves more than they need - even to give themselves a luxurious lifestyle.
The really harmful ones are those that get into top political positions. I could name them but some one my list would upset some people.
So now the worry's about Chrome taking over the internet.
And it will serve its makers best interests, eg by crippling the APIs that allow ad-blockers to work.
I just hope that we do not get many web sites that only work properly with a chromium engine -- which might happen if chromium achieves dominance & lazy web developers only test chrome/edge/... Fortunately we will prolly be saved from that as Apple's Safari uses webkit.
Probably the Wright Brothers Medal would be more appropriate.
All programmers need supervision and all programmers need to supervise.
Supervisors or rather managers are part of the problem that is all too often forgotten. Many were never programmers and so do not understand what makes a good environment to program; or of they do their own managers will not let them do the right thing.
A large part of the problem is budgets and timescales. Managers want programs produced in as short a time as possible and as cheaply as possible. The result is that proper design and documentation is not done, testing is skimped.
Some of that is understandable in a competitive environment: if Microsoft had ensured that its products were properly tested someone else would have beaten them to market and they would not be where they are today.
it is still uploaded to Strava's servers. This will make them a target for $EvilEntity to crack and slurp data. Yes this will require effort but if you are the sort of organisation that is seriously after presidents then you will do it.
The other obvious target is the mobile 'phone comms company - this has to track where the 'phone is so that it can route calls.
How safe do you want to be ?
Did not Boris promise that we could fund the NHS £350 million extra a week when we leave the EU ?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
