* Posts by Chz

280 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2010

Page:

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Chz

I've a consumer-grade Seagate 250GB from 2006 sitting in my PC. As my personal desktop, it's had to endure tens of thousands of power cycles over its life which I'm sure makes for a harsher environment than running 24/7. It's still perfectly adequate as a MAME repository, so it will sit there until it dies. There's an old WD Green 750GB sitting next to it in the case, from 2009 or so. That just holds backups of useful data from the NAS. I'd say aside from some tranches of disks that clearly have some sort of manufacturing defect, the consumer kit is almost/just as reliable. (FWIW, the 2006 era 7200rpm Seagate is much, *much* faster than the Green. On the order of twice as fast. Those Greens are dog slow.)

Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi adds electric vehicle to its mobility offerings

Chz

Re: If Xiaomi want to be taken seriously

I'd have thought as a sedan and not a crossover SUV it was fairly unique for a new model these days.

American Express admits card data exposed and blames third party

Chz

Re: Or just ask for a new card

Despite the name, that's very much the case in the USA as well. Most Amex users will be used to this and have another card in their wallet. Albeit one that likely generates less cash-back, which is the primary reason I have one in the first place.

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

Chz

Re: Air Canada must really be terrible

Air Canada has been called Mapleflot by those in the know for decades. That should tell you all you need to know.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Chz

Re: Query: the timing of ads

> stoner-level dross.

*puff*

Yup, that's what makes it great. Beavis and Butthead was like that, too.

Chz

Re: They'll reap what they sow

My rationale kind of works like this:

I pay to subscribe to Netflix, Prime, and Cinema Paradiso's DVD rental service. If it's not available on one those... well, Hollywood, I tried. I honestly made an effort to give you money to watch what I want to watch. If that doesn't work, off to 1337x it is.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

Chz

Re: Hard Work

People can threaten to move from Zen, but in the Good Old Days Zen offered what was basically a business service to consumers at... well, slightly elevated prices for consumer service but quite a lot less than business services. If you move to anyone else and expect the same goodies, you're paying for a business account. I think Zen knows this and their reaction to a lot of the criticism has been along the lines of "suck it up, buttercup" because they know you'll just pay more for the same elsewhere and it will stop most people from leaving once they have a look around. Count yourselves lucky that Zen has enough of their own IPs that CGNAT isn't being forced down your throats.

Will be happy to be proven wrong on that, as it will give me something to look at for myself!

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Chz

Horizon was very much developed in the ICL years. And to be honest, the reason why Fujitsu kept getting government contracts is because it was ICL with a new letterhead. Same customer reps, same salesdroids, the departments just kept going to who they were comfortable with, competence or no.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Chz

Re: No Justice

She can keep her CBE, for all I care. It's not like there is some shortage of truly awful human beings who have one. But she should have to serve jail time for every single person the Post Office wrongly imprisoned.

Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairability

Chz

Re: Nice! Too bad about the price.

A Pixel 8 is regularly on sale for cheaper than this thing. Much, much more powerful. Much, much better camera. Waterproof. And support for 7 years, only one less.

Yes, you can't repair it as easily but I've never had a phone that I've needed to repair beyond replacing a battery. You give up a LOT to get that repairability. Whether or not that's worth it to someone is really up to the user to determine.

Alternatively, you can get a Redmi Note for 1/3 the price with the same performance and get a performance upgrade every three years by buying a new one. (should you want to) Wasteful, yes, but on pure value to the consumer seems a lot better bet, and you can always opt to keep it for a bit longer.

I like the concept of the Fairphone, but they need to find some ways to cut corners while keeping it repairable. For the most of us, it is simply too expensive for what you get.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Chz

That's just life with ink jets. Once colour lasers got cheap enough, I waved goodbye to them forever. The only thing they were ever better at was printing photos, and you can do that on the web with next-day delivery now. I've never found myself needing a high-quality printed photo *right now*. The laser is Good Enough for most photo usage (read: the kids' school reports) anyhow.

And yes, Brother.

Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion

Chz

Re: COVID changed the world

I think it's a common theme for senior techies. Most of us have been promoted as far as we can go in a technical role and have zero urge to join management. No promotion is a bonus, not a threat. I have an old colleague who was railroaded into taking on a management, and then senior management role and now longs to get back to working projects and tickets instead of endless meetings. The pay increase was meagre for the increase in workload and responsibility.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Chz

Re: Capacity

High output gas boilers are almost (except in very large houses) always combis that need the heat output for instant hot water at the tap. 16kW is plenty to heat a 3-bedroom home.

How to get hot water out of the tap becomes an issue though. The obvious solution is tanks, but many/most flats have ripped them out for combis and used the space for other things in the meantime. Not everyone is going to have a spare closet to hide a hot water tank in.

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

Chz

Re: There's nothing particularly wrong with it except for its hardware requirements.

Given the likely security flaws out of the box, I'd think it wanting an internet connection at setup was a good thing. One of the first things it does is patch itself.

Chz

Re: Maybe it's the installer

The only thing that truly got my goat was hiding half the right-click menu behind yet another click. But like most of 11's annoyances it's fixed easily enough and doesn't even require much Clue to do.

Car industry pleads for delay to post-Brexit tariffs on EVs

Chz

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

I'm not normally a Cite Everything sort of post here. It's not a Serious scientific forum. But I'd like to see where that particular datum comes from.

AIUI, a BEV has an 80% higher carbon cost in manufacture vs. an ICEV, but manufacture only counts for something like 15% of the lifetime emissions of an ICEV.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Chz

Grass is greener

Speaking as someone who occasionally has to support SITS, an IT system based on your particular sector's needs can easily be just as horrible as some eldritch creation produced by SAP. I believe a few Universities have tried to move away from SITS, but they're all running it somewhere in some form.

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Chz
Gimp

No touchscreens

FWIW, Mazda still make their cars without any touchscreens whatsoever.

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Chz

Taylor make loads of soft serve machines, some of which are even reliable. The McDonalds one has a pasteuriser in it to not waste the day's leftover mix that other, similar machines do not have. I'm not sure that anyone else thinks the maintenance vs. product loss costs are worth it to use such a machine. But McD's part-owns Taylor and are well known for squeezing franchisees as much as possible, so it's not surprising from their persepctive.

I'll also point out that franchisees *are* allowed to buy a machine from another manufacturer. Some Italian company I forget the name of. They're much, much more reliable, but of course the initial cost is much, much more.

Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges

Chz

Re: Maybe this will sound harsh...

I think the ColecoVision is probably the most primitive thing I can imagine enjoying. It very much bridged the gap from 2600 to NES. My parents managed to return the Vectrex when the company discontinued it shortly after Christmas and replaced it with a used Coleco instead. I think I was happier for it overall, even if the Vectrex would have had better nostalgia value.

(In the end I got a C64 and forgot about consoles entirely for a decade)

I know what you did next summer: Microsoft to kill off Xbox 360 Store

Chz
Gimp

Still have one...

We keep the 360 alive in the sitting room for one (well, two) reasons - Rock Band Beatles and Rock Band 3. None of the instruments work on later Xboxen and only RB4 is on the compatibility list for the newer consoles. Beatles really is a beautiful game, crafted with a lot of care to the details. It will be a pity when our 360 finally bites it, though I admit we only dig the instruments out a couple of times a year now.

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

Chz

Re: But why tho...

It's worth noting that it's not the 3rd or 5th most common cancer though. It's just incredibly deadly because of how exceedingly rare it is to pick it up before it's too late.

"In 2014, an estimated 46,000 people in the US are expected to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and 40,000 to die of it.[2] Although it accounts for only 2.5% of new cases, pancreatic cancer is responsible for 6% of cancer deaths each year."

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Chz

Re: Jerry-riggedness?

Not just the loads on the carbon fibre, but someone I know who's dealt with (remote) deep diving vehicles told me that at that pressure even titanium will slowly "rot". They never got more than 2 years or 5 dives out of their drones before needing replacement. Didn't say how long a dive was for the them, so it's hard to extrapolate to the Titan.

Chz

Re: Lots of things are possible

It would be impossible to have a journey of any length in a sealed tube that size, with 5 people in it, without scrubbers.

One of the many videos of the vessel going around shows the atmosphere package as being a bunch of rebreathers. So yes, they can scrub CO2. I'd say the big question is whether they run out of O2 or scrubbing capacity first. Dying of lack of O2 is one of the more pleasant fatal scenarios - you just go light headed and pass out and die. Whereas too much CO2 has you panicking and gasping like a fish out of water until you die a horrible death.

Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio

Chz

Re: Bob?

Comic Sans is a perfectly cromulent typeface. Its problem is being used far, far too often when the text writer wants to give a "whimsical" feeling to something. Which is all the time. Fire drill instructions in Comic Sans, hazardous chemicals disposal instructions in Comic Sans, I once saw a funeral notice in Comic Sans.

This is not the fault of the typeface. As usual around these parts, it's user error.

UK warned not to bother racing US, EU on EV subsidies

Chz

Re: Hmm

"We want to move to EV's but want to punish travel with 15 minute cities."

The purpose being to reduce our emissions, I don't see how these ideas are incompatible. Ideally, we wouldn't move to EVs. We'd move to no private vehicles at all. But seeing as how that's very unlikely in the short term, EVs are the bridge to reducing emissions in the meantime.

Chz

It may very well take 70% more CO2 to produce an electric car (the data on that is very hand-wavey and I don't have a lot of confidence in it), but no-one ever seems to mention that the production of an ICE vehicle only accounts for 10% of its lifetime emissions.

AMD scours parts bin for old CPUs, GPUs to put in Chromebooks

Chz

Zen 2 is still a massive improvement over the Celerons that most low-end Chromebooks ship with. As ever, pricing will determine whether these are great or underwhelming.

AI to detect heart attacks tested in the land of the deep-fried Mars bar

Chz

Re: Too much to know

There are at least half a dozen things that can manifest as chest pain with light-headedness and even heart palpitations. In my case, it was a raging h.pylori infection. Having finished off my stomach with inflammation, it moved on to the nervous system where it can even cause dementia if left alone for too long. It's really quite a relief to go in and get hooked up and told "Well, there's clearly something wrong with you but your heart is fine" Though it did take another month and a battery of tests to figure out exactly what the cause was. It normally just causes stomach upset and ulcers, I was just lucky to have it progress onto the CNS.

Intel to rebrand client chips once Meteor Lake splashes down

Chz

Re: Need to get away from these names

Unless it's first generation i3/5/7. Identified by a 3 digit moniker instead of 4 (and now 5). My i5-750 lasted quite a long time.

CEO sorry after telling staff to 'leave pity city' over bonuses

Chz

We call it a fauxpology. Rolls off the tongue a bit better.

UK watchdog still not ruled on Openreach wholesale fiber discounts

Chz

Re: Fiber? Where did that come from?

I've just found it's easier to use "fiber" as short for fibre-optics and "fibre" for every other use of the word. While it's nice that technical fields have adopted English as their lingua franca, we have to admit that it's American English that they use. I put up with a lot of Americanisms in technical stuff that I would certainly blow a fuse over in a different field.

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

Chz

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

Exactly this. The EU ROMs need to follow a certain minimum in terms of data protection. They're still slurping data, but not more than any other Android phone. It's the Chinese (and probably other Asia) market ROMs you don't want to be on. ISTR there was an article a while back about someone in Latvia coming to much the same conclusions about Chinese vs. EU ROMs.

BT keeps the faith in 'like fury' fiber broadband buildout as revenues dip

Chz

Re: Moving to FTTH

There seems to be two things going on that push back FTTH for a lot of people.

One, based on the very informative map posted above, OpenReach are skipping areas that have heavy Vermin infiltration. This feeds directly into the second reason, which is that they have a mandate from the government to push out full fibre to as much of the country as possible. Which means that they don't really get credit for competing with Vermin when they're already offering a fibre-equivalent service there. And it also means that highly profitable areas in the SouthEast need to be pushed back to get other areas of the country up and running first. The end result being that Community Fibre got to my area first and I'm not seeing a reason why I wouldn't stick with them even when OR get around to this densely populated bit of Outer London. And I say that as someone who was very happy with my BT FTTC offering for a decade straight.

Chromebook SH1MMER exploit promises admin jailbreak

Chz

I'm not familiar with all the ways of locking down a Chromebook (I bought one for the lad on the basis that I didn't have to waste much time managing it), but in our case it was perfectly allowable for him to have a school login with all the limitations thereof and a personal login free of the shackles. Or at least limited to the shackles I had put on it. The logins were completely different environments on the Chromebook. The school eventually bought CBs for each child, but we kept on using our own since it was (naturally) better than the school's spec. So I don't know if their own machines were somehow tied down even further.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

Chz

Re: Harmony by disharmony

Emergency services don't use the white noise, but quite a number of the newer lorries out there use it in their reversing alarm. Usually with a voice that has a really dissonant sing-song timbre to it "THIS vehicle is REVERSING".

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Chz

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

I think you'll find it was a pound of sterling silver. Even with 240 pennies to the pound, a penny's worth of gold would be far too valuable.

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

Chz

Re: Windows 10 is not a problem

I think the other thing not mentioned about Windows 10 is that the 2025 support deadline is clearly total garbage. MS have extended XP and then 7 several times, and by 2025 there will still be perfectly good hardware that won't run 11. 2030 is a more likely date. It probably won't be my primary system by then, but an i5-6600k @ 4.5GHz will still have perfectly decent *oomph* to perform most tasks. It will probably just take over from the Ivy Bridge that's the current secondary desktop.

AMD follows Intel's lead with alphanumeric soup of new Ryzens

Chz

It takes some working to be less clear than Intel's consumer CPU nomenclature. At least there's a rough correlation of "bigger is better" that's not always true of the Ryzen scheme, even if there's some recycling of Alder Lake parts in Gen.13.

But at the same time, it's still far, far clearer than Intel's server CPU names. I challenge anyone who doesn't have to work with it daily to figure out what in god's name a particular Xeon is.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Chz

Futurists' dreams of a hydrogen energy ecosystem were always founded on the basis of cheap, plentiful power from fusion. So long as we have to burn hydrocarbons to produce the electricity needed to create the hydrogen, it makes absolutely zero sense. It's a tremendously inefficient way to deliver power to a motor, and will never be a desirable outcome until we have a large excess of green energy.

Nvidia revives canceled RTX 4080 as 'new' 12GB RTX 4070 TI

Chz

Re: 12GB

I've seen tests run when this was something that worried people about the 8GB RTX 3070. In testing, they could only find less than a half dozen things that needed more than 8GB, and that was only when running at 4k resolutions. Likely more due to poor programming than actual need. 12GB should be good for several more years. I plan on keeping my QHD monitor for at least a few more years and am only looking at picking up a used 8GB card. Absolutely nothing (bar computational stuff, but that can use every MB you throw at it) needs more than 8GB at QHD.

Pine64 takes another shot at an open tablet after chip shortages killed first PineTab

Chz

Re: RK3399

It's a pity, as it may have been marginally useful with a pair of A72s onboard. As it is, this is out-specced by a Fire 10 that you can regularly pick up for under £100 (or the Pi4 if you prefer to tinker and don't need the tablet part). Never mind who in their right minds would pair 8GB of RAM with a quad A55. I understand that it's the *ethos* of the machine that's the main selling point, but producing actually useful hardware would go a long way.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Chz

Re: You get what you order

I'd generally agree with not buying any insurance you're not required to, except in the case of travel insurance. It's one of those edge cases where you're extraordinarily unlikely to need it, but if you do you'll be really, *really* glad you went for it and it's rarely even that expensive. Says someone who rang up medical expenses in the United States.

Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables

Chz

Nvidia are trying to be standards compliant with Intel's ATX 3.0. The card itself is only rated at 450W, so if it's burning out power cables there's either a problem with the cards themselves, or Intel's got it horribly wrong somehow.

The new GPU world order is beginning to take shape

Chz

Half the performance of a 3060 in DX9 is not a step up from a 1080!

Intel's 13th-gen CPUs are hot, hungry, loaded with cores

Chz

Re: Seems an odd choice for 2022

We won't know until Intel lets these out for testing, but on the AMD side plenty of reviews also showed the results of putting the CPUs into 65W mode. The spoiler there is that the 6 and 8 core CPUs gave up almost nothing in performance, but ran considerably cooler. The 12 and 16 core CPUs did leave some performance on the table for it, but it really wasn't a *lot* in the grand scheme of things. And they expect 65W mode to be available on most BIOSes for home users to play with. And potentially Dell et.al. might use it.

BOFH: You want presentation layer, but we're physical layer

Chz

Re: Mac Problems are easily dealt with

It's the Apple Store bit that I don't like about them. For about £35/year I can upgrade the support I get from Dell to next day on-site. Well worth it, and not something that you can get without Enterprise Support from Apple. (The last time that I checked, at least)

US accident investigators want alcohol breathalyzers in all new vehicles

Chz

Re: Not again...

The self-buckling belts were a sop to the car manufacturers. They didn't want the expense of fitting an airbag to every model of car, so the NHTSA gave them the option of self-buckling seatbelts *or* airbags, on the basis that a large %age of Americans didn't even bother with safety belts and this would increase their safety just as much.

So GM, Ford and Chrysler duly fitted their cheaper models of car with these things. And people HATED them. Passionately. And that's why every model of car in the States has airbags now.

Backblaze thinks SSDs are more reliable than hard drives

Chz

Re: SSD Failure

It's my personal suspicion - based entirely on anecdotal data, I should add - that SSD failures are lower than HDD for the main part of their lifetimes, but the far edge of the bathtub curve looks different. Long-running HDDs do indeed keep going. I have one that's 15 years old. No essential data, I use it as temp space. I have a suspicion that the 15 year survival rate for SSDs will be lower than for spinning rust. Pure gut instinct on that though, as Enterprise flash is at most 10 years old and I don't think they ever sold enough of the consumer drives before then to make a decent data point.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Chz

Caveat: You can only swap it for an "automatic" license (because I don't believe it's recorded in any of the provinces which way you did the test - a pass is a pass). I had to do the full test instead of swapping my .ca license in.

Page: