Posts by Loyal Commenter

Government by Gmail catches up with UK minister... who is reappointed anyway

Re: why do we accept it?

You are Michael Gove AICMFP

Enough of this "so called experts" bollocks, please. It was deeply disingenuous when it was used to dupe people with brexit lies, and it’s no better now.

Re: why do we accept it?

Anyone who lived through the 1970s and 1990s knows from personal experience how economically catastrophic a Labour government will always be.

Well, they certainly know how much blame Labour got for Tory policies that caused the economy to suffer. When Labour got back in, at the end of the '90s, the economy picked back up after 18 years of Tory mismanagement. Remind me again, whose watch was "Black Monday" on?

Now, of course, I'm not going to claim that Labour's economic policies have always been right (Gordon Brown selling off the gold reserves when the price of gold was low springs to mind), but it is pure bullshit to try to play the "Tories are good with the economy" card. You only have to look up any graph of GDP vs national debt to see that debt goes up during Tory administrations, and, on the whole, the only sustained periods of debt reduction in our lifetimes have been under Labour. Thatcher managed to get an economic bounce by "selling off the family silver," and getting big returns from privatising everything she could (plus a handy windfall from North Sea oil and gas revenues). The problem is that now, we don't have those things to privatise any more, and in many cases, we are stuck paying more for them, because, as private entities, they cost the same to produce, but profit is extracted. Mortgaging your children's futures isn't exactly economically competent, or forward thinking

Oh silly me, I didn't realise that our country was being run into the ground by refugees. There was me thinking we'd had a Tory government for the last twelve years.

Gather round, folks and take a look, see! Our very own captive sucker! See how they've swallowed the "divide and conquer" rhetoric hook line, and sinker!

Re: why do we accept it?

The "troubling" word there (pun very much intended), is "Troubles". A hell of a lot of hard work, from a lot of people, including hard compromises, went into making the Good Friday Agreement, and the mad brexiters literally don't give a shit about it. They don't care if the killings start again in Northern Ireland (and the Republic), because they don't live there, they don;t give a shit about Irish history, and probably know very little about it, and what they do know is probably very, very one-sided. They probably all think the Black-and-Tans were great blokes because their idol Churchill was responsible for them.

Re: For everyone trying to live through the 2020s ......

I'm deeply scared, amanfromMars is making sense. I think I may have slipped through a wormhole or something.

Well, very briefly, "woke," which isn't really a term anyone uses for themselves anyway, roughly means to be aware of social issues that may put other people at a disadvantage, and to be generally respectful and compassionate towards them, and just in general a decent human being. So, "anti-woke", very roughly, translates as "disrespectful and discompassionate." Or "not a decent human being". That's certainly not a label that I’d choose to apply to myself, but it seems to some, being what we'd more colloquially describe as "a cunt" is a badge of honour.

Is that clear? Good.

Re: Plus ca change

"Handsomely," in this case, translates roughly to making promises he had no intention of keeping, and otherwise being pretty dishonest, which most people who voted for him seem to have cottoned on to, as his approval rating over time shows, from being largely positive, to very negative at the point he was forced to resign over an accumulation of various scandals and dodgy dealings.

All this shows, is that if you promise people lots of good things, they'll vote for you, whether or not you have any intention of delivering them. This just demonstrates that a lot of people are terrible at spotting an obvious charlatan.

As it happens, in my constituency, the incumbent Labour MP (Thangam Debbonaire) increased her already considerable majority, so that wasn't so "handsome" for the Tories, was it? Incidentally, she's also of Indian descent, but far from the "pull-the-ladder-up" attitude of the home secretary (and her predecessor under Johnson), she is very strong on refugee rights, amongst other things. It just goes to show you should judge someone on their merits, rather than their skin colour, or geographical origin. It may be confirmation bias, but I'd tip her as a future leader of the Labour party. She's a very good speaker, and handles the media rounds very well, and it's about time (and to it's shame that it hasn't yet happened) that Labour had a woman leader.

Indeed. I saw a talking head on a programme on the TV last night (can't remember whom or what programme I'm afraid, so this is anecdotal), who made the pertinent point that the UK is actually one of the least racist countries in the world. This doesn't mean there's no racism here, far from it, but he highlighted the fact that a lot of European countries have a far worse problem with it.

This apples across the world. My wife experienced racism as a white woman working in Japan, which is every bit as pernicious as anti-black racism from white people, or anti-Asian racism from black people, or any "anti-X from Y" you can think of.

Sadly, tribal racism is baked into our evolutionary past, and this probably stems from the fact that when we were pre-human apes, we lived in small tribal units of a few hundred, and tribalism was a survival trait. "Protect the tribe from outsiders". Clearly, in today's world, we don't live in tribes, and we're not under constant threat from other groups trying to kill us, and steal our food and females. Evolution takes a long time to change though, especially when what was a survival trait goes to being simply a trait that confers no advantage. In today's world, it's arguable that it conveys mild disadvantage to be racist, but as I said, evolution works slowly...

What we can do, as thinking beings, is recognise that the tools evolution has given us aren't all ones we need to use. We (well most people) don't go around raping and murdering because we have the occasional impulse to do so, for example. I put racism, and other forms of xenophobia in the same category. Others may choose to embrace them, but I think maybe that's not for the best...

Those costs are largely there because there are no legal routes, and policing the "illegal" ones* that spring up is reactive and expensive.

If legal and accessible routes for asylum claimants were provided, how many genuine refugees would choose to stow away in lorries, or cross the channel in dinghies? Here's a clue: it would be a round number.

In a swoop, this would remove the entire refugee market from the people-smuggling gangs. They would be left with those people who, for some reason, are so desperate to reach the UK, they'll accept a high risk of death to do so, The odds are that those people are not going to be doing so willingly (would you?), and these are vulnerable people being exploited by criminals (modern slavery). The criminals here are very clearly the "people smugglers", not their victims.

Nobody is going to claim that this sort of organised crime isn't a huge problem, but the current government's approach to tackling it actually exacerbates the problem, because by preventing refugees from having a legal route to get here, we are directly feeding their "business model".

*It's not illegal to cross the channel in a small boat, by the way, in case you were wondering. It's the entering the country without going through border control bit that is questionable.

Her parents came as legal hard-working immigrants

Yes, they came here to find work, legally under the rules at the time, and fair play to them, did well out of it. That's pretty much the definition of an economic migrant. We had "legal" routes for it to happen back then, and the right-wing (the likes of Enoch Powell) really didn't like it at all.

These days, people of Indian heritage living in Kenya (Which IIRC is her lineage) would not get to come to the UK and become British citizens. If they wanted to do so, they'd have to risk their lives in a small boat, or hidden in the back of a lorry.

We've always been a nation of immigrants, right back to Roman times and beyond. The main difference these days is that in the modern world, people can travel further, and some people don't like it that some of them don't have white skin.

So we have gone from Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" to the daughter of the people he was probably talking about ranting about an "invasion" apparently with no sense of irony whatsoever. A reminder, if one were needed, that nasty hate speech can come from anyone's mouth.

Re: Noise really.....

Well yes, technically speaking, residency and citizenship aren't the same thing, and a great number of benefits are simply not available to non-citizens, despite all the incoherent rage on the subject you might be able to find on the Internet.

Re: Noise really.....

...needless to say, asylum claimants don't get NHS treatment, free housing, Universal credit et al. They essentially get imprisoned (at great expense), and then, if the current lot have anything to say about it, deported to Rwanda.

Successful asylum seekers become citizens, and, all metric indicate, end up contributing more in taxes to the exchequer than the average natively-born Brit.

Try explaining that to your average thick-as-pigshit Daily Heil or Ex-cess reader though, and you'll wear out their poor little brain-cell.

Re: Noise really.....

More! Exclamation!! Marks!!! Please!!!!

AND SOME RANDOM BLOCK CAPITALS TOO!!!11!!11eleventyone!

Re: MPs love their own personal phones

At the very least, he would be given what is charmingly referred to as "words of advice".

Re: Plus ca change

So we threw out Boris and his gang...

Except we didn't, did we? We've still got "his gang", who, on the large part, were hand-picked for their loyalty to him, and to brexit, in order to become candidates at the last election.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

Re: Phones?

You probably missed the news a few days ago, that Truss's official phone was compromised by Russian spyware whilst she was foreign minister...

The only "crisis" is the one that refugees, amongst them women and young children, are being forced to sleep on the ground, in marquees, in November, because of a government which chooses to pursue the rhetoric that anyone crossing the channel in a small boat is a criminal, rather than doing the two things that would help the situation; providing "official" routes for refugees, and going after the actual criminals, by cooperating with trans-European efforts to stamp out people smuggling (and by association, the modern slavery and other criminal activity that goes with it).

That doesn't suit those who engage in dog-whistle politics, though.

edit - oh, and number three, employing enough case-workers to process the asylum cases, rather than "having to" put people up in hotels at great expense, wholly in order to drum up more anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Re: why do we accept it?

Spot on. In which case, if I chose to stand for election, in my constituency, I would be standing against a very good Labour MP who has an unassailable absolute majority amongst all registered voters, not just those who voted. Why the fuck would I do that? And if I chose to stand as a candidate in Braverman's constituency of (checks notes) Fareham in East Hampshire, I'd at the very least have to uproot my job and family to move to the area and live there for several years to stand a decent chance of representing the locality.

And in any case, she's predicted to lose her seat if an election was called today anyway.

Re: why do we accept it?

Stop electing 'these people'. And stand for parliament against them. Simples! :)

Well, that's deeply disingenuous of you, because the first step towards seeing such people voted out of office is to call them out on what they are doing, rather than loudly proclaiming "so what" like you have done.

Also, you know, we need to have an election to get rid. Current polling shows that, if we held one tomorrow, her party would win 450 fewer seats than the opposition.

The subtlety here is that, as well as this, she sent information about policymaking, which was supposed to only be discussed by those involved, to a back-bencher who, as well as not being part of the government, and therefore not privy to such information, also has a political identity that is self-described as "anti-woke", which, in plain English, means "anti-decent-human-being". The same self-appointed moniker also applies to Braverman herself, which, to be honest, is the bigger problem with her.

Big brands urged to pause Twitter ads until Elon's learned how this all works

Re: Good.

No need to call him scum. Just use his full name and title, Lord Patriarch Elongated Muskrat, Chief Twat.

...Musk said he believed that "advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform..."

Well I guess I must never have seen any advertising done right then, because it rarely informs, unless you consider "brand awareness" as information, isn't often entertaining, instead sitting somewhere on the spectrum of irritating to intrusive, and if he thinks anyone is ever delighted to see an advert, I'd like some of those happy pills his doctor is prescribing him, please.

Google kills forthcoming JPEG XL image format in Chromium

Re: Just as an aside,

Yup, the "invasion" rhetoric is a definite far-right dog-whistle. Yes, it's arguable that it goes well beyond the meaning of that phrase, but unfortunately, the right-wing press has been normalising it for the last, well, forever... (I was going to say last decade, then thought, well, maybe two decades, then thought, well, actually, think back to the '70s and "rivers of blood", and then further... Oh dear, we never learn.)

Re: "services"

Spyware

Re: This is bad.

Chromium != Chrome.

Chromium, the free, open-source project, which is a fork of other free open-source projects, is not under the control of Google.

Chrome, Google's own web-browser, which is based on Chromium, but with a whole load of proprietary google spyware functionality in it, is built on top of that, in the same way that Microsoft's Edge is.

It's wholly appropriate that the open-source base project here (Chromium) should not have dependencies on patented or closed-source technology unless entirely unavoidable.

As an aside, I avoid using either Chrome or Edge as a matter of principle, because I trust neither Google nor Microsoft. If anything, though, I trust google less. Firefox is pretty good these days, and much more privacy-focused.

Terabytes out of exabytes. If you want to look at web site efficiency, my first port-of-call (aside from the full-page autoplaying videos on the landing page) would be to look at the habit for web developers to pull in whole JavaScript dependency chains in order to use one or two functions from them, and do some serious rationalising of that. Of course, you might find that my time is more expensive than the cost savings you'd get back, unless the code was particularly egregious.

Donald Knuth wasn't wrong when he said, in 1968, that "The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”

I can't claim to have read the whole of the book that quote is from (Bill Gates would give me a job if I had), but I do own a copy of the first three volumes somewhere...

Re: Just as an aside,

I feel compelled to point out that no matter how much we dislike someone we shouldn't be judging them for looking like a Skeksi, they can't help the way they were born. We can justifiably hate them for their dog-whistle far-right political rhetoric instead.

Massive savings for web providers

Massive savings? 20% on static images? The last time I checked, half the web has lots of pointless auto-playing videos that use hundreds of times as much bandwidth and storage than static images. This is quite clearly not a video codec we're talking about.

Re: This is bad.

How is it a conspiracy theory? Did you just read the same article the rest of us did?

The decision follows long-running legal maneuvering [sic]. In February 2022, Microsoft received a patent over a core technology used in JPEG XL, over a year and a half since its previous rejection and despite protests from industry specialists.

So, it has been killed because Microsoft have been granted a patent on part of the compression algorithm it uses, meaning it can't be freely open-sourced.

Can gamers teach us anything about datacenter cooling? Lenovo seems to think so

Isn't it statingthe obvious that liquid cooling is more effective than air cooling?

Simply from the observation that the heat capacity of water (the liquid usually used for this, plus detergents, anti-mould agents and such) is much, much higher than that of air, and it's a lot easier to get a laminar flow through a pipe than it is blowing air through a case.

How is it only now that data centres are considering moving heat about effectively, rather than blowing air about, and then using secondary heat-pumps, in the form of air-conditioners, to cool the room down?

Rather than being behind the curve in terms of what gaming rigs manage, why aren't they looking at hooking those refrigerant circuits directly into the racks, and onto the components that need direct cooling? Because one thing that is more effective than pumping water about is pumping a refrigerant that changes phase when it is heated, and releases that heat when it is re-condensed, usually outside the building.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

It makes me sad to realize that almost none of the good tech sites or podcasts originate in the US.

You should give "sounds like a cult" a try...

Re: Limey

Made properly, kimchi doesn't contain much salt, because although you use a LOT of it in the salting process, this is only used to draw the water out and break the cell walls. The second process of washing and wringing the leaves should remove most of the salt.

YMMV, because one batch I made did turn out to be very salty.

The same goes for sauerkraut, although the recipe I followed the last time I made any had very little salt to start with, which may be why it didn't ferment so well.

I had a very similar issue with Talk-Talk (one of the many reasons I am no longer with them).

An ADSL connection that was supposed to be "up to" 8 Mbps would frequently drop out, or fall back to very low speeds (double-digit kbps). An "engineer" was booked, didn't turn up on the day, a second "engineer" was sent round a couple of weeks later...

The first thing they do is to pull out the phone extension that I had (properly) crimped into the master socket using Cat-6e, despite being told, and shown, that their shitty modem did the same thing if plugged directly into the master socket, and that the fault occurred every time there was heavy rain (obviously some sort of problem in a junction box in the street somewhere getting flooded).

Cue an actual engineer, some weeks later, actually visiting the said junction box, and the issue going away. Probably someone from Openretch, since the copper is maintained by them.

Then a bill for £50 for the "engineer" they sent round, who I hadn't asked for but had been told was a necessary visit before they'd investigate anything outside the premises, and who had managed to do nothing except damage.

It took me about 40 minutes of arguing with someone in an Indian call centre before they finally agreed to cancel that bill and refund me the £50 they'd taken from me on Direct Debit.

Just think, if Cromwell hadn't turned out to be such a killjoy, we'd still be a republic.

Only if you are "a septic". See, we can make silly xenophobic comments too. BTW, the origin of "limey" refers to the British Navy's habit of not letting their sailors get scurvy, so by using it as a pejorative, all you are doing is indicating that you would like to be diseased.

It's probably worth pointing out, at this juncture, that All Hallows Eve has been commemorated in the British Isles (and I use that term, because it includes Ireland) since before the US existed as a country, so Halloween is very much not a uniquely US thing. It's also not a holiday in any country I know of, although it would be nice to get a day off work...

As for "Thankgiving" [sic], nope, that's not just something "us limeys" don't celebrate, but a uniquely American custom. Based, as far as I can tell, on commemorating colonialism. Yay, colonialism! What a thing to celebrate!

Genuine holidays around this time include Christmas, and if you are a Hindu, Diwali. Maybe also some other religious observances around the world, which doesn't actually revolve around North America, in case you needed reminding.

The boss worked in a fishbowl, so office tricks were a treat

Re: Does this count?

All I see here are two "utter cockwombles" treating a woman like a piece of meat.

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

How long before...

Apple finds a way for its phones to use USB-C charges and cables, but mysteriously have its phones only charge with cables and chargers supplied by Apple. Possibly with some sort of encrypted handshake in the data channel...

I have a Belkin thunderbolt/USB-C dock, supplied by my work, for my work laptop. The thing cost so much money, I had to go through a different procurement process to get it, and it gets so hot, it's uncomfortable to hold your hand against.

I've seen ads for other similar docks, not made by Belkin, for about a quarter of the price. If I'd bought the thing myself, I'd certainly not have chosen that one...

Re: Contact life span

I once managed to pull the plastic casing for two SATA data sockets off a motherboard, leaving just the bare "sprung" pins sticking out of the MOBO. No, don't ask me how I managed it either. I'd assume those things would be at least glued on, if not soldered.

I managed to thread the pins back through for one of the sockets, which was the one I needed to have working, but the other one was then screwed. Thankfully, the motherboard also had four others as far as I can recall.

It's 2023, let's check in with the metaverse... Nope, still doesn't exist

GDPR in this regard, and just basic data hygiene and security principles, are like a load of sea-wall defences around each of your "puddles", because nobody is going to want to "share" whatever it is that makes their "puddle" special with anyone else, and you have to have a damn good reason to go around collecting that information for anything that isn't line-of-business use.

Just because it's the "metaverse" doesn't make it any different to the Meatverse™. For example, different companies in adjacent offices don't share their corporate Wi-Fi and network architecture. Adding virtual flying willies to it doesn't change the fact that nobody in their right mind is going to do the same virtually.

Martian microbes could survive up to 280 million years buried underground

Re: The chances of anything coming from earth are a trillion to one, they said...

It would have to involve organisms that can not only survive but thrive and multiply in interstellar space, and also survive atmospheric entry where applicable, and impact.

If something gets knocked off the Earth in any direction roughly towards the sun, with enough velocity to escape Earth's gravity well, it's going to end up in a highly eccentric orbit, which at aphelion is going to be well outside Earth's orbit. At the right angle, this would easily cross Mars' orbit.

tl;dr; - the orbit of these would be elliptical and go beyond Earth's orbit. The more elliptical, the further.

Re: beat me to it :)

I think the only one we can agree on is "Oooooooooooh laaaaaaaa"

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

Re: There's a problem with using parallel wires to spread the current

See also: floating voltages in control systems because someone forgot to "pull-up" or "pull-down" the voltage on a pin with a resistor...

Re: Not surprised

Nice selective quote there, cutting off the pertinent bit of the sentence (as I read it), the cores of all graphics cards.

Yes, a consumer-grade RTX 4090 might not be rated to run continuously for 24 hours a day at max TDP, but the only difference between the chips in that, and those in a card found in a render-farm is going to be, at most, a slight difference in the number of CUDA cores, and memory bandwidth. There might also be some production tolerances there, where the chips that benchmark the best in a wafer might get diverted to high-end cards, but I don't know if the manufacturer (Nvidia) would even bother with that. The difference between a gaming card and a professional card is everything else that goes onto the board, from the quality and tolerance of the caps to the type and reliability of the cooling system. Those vary wildly. One would hope that professional cards also have better power connectors.

If you look at the prices of those high-end cards, it's pretty obvious that they are not going to be destined for a Joe-average desktop gaming PC. The non-gaming cards are likely to have 5-figure prices.

Re: Can I just say

"Rapid thermal auto-disassembly"

That's a one-bar electric fire, overclocked by 20%

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Re: When you’re the only candidate, I guess you’re the best candidate

So, down-voter, do you disagree with the statistics, with the assertion that Sunak is rich, a multimillionaire, and out of touch, or with my assessment that stoking culture wars is a bad thing? Please, let us hear your opinions, rather than just angrily stabbing at the down-vote button...

Re: Close, but …

Googling the subject indicates that the good Citizens of Canada, don't put much truck in FPTP either, eh?

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

Re: Web3 + metaverse

I reckon it's currently being sexually harassed by 43 year-old perverts pretending to be 13 year-old girls.