Posts by Andy The Hat 1842 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2010
Who said fixed price?
"The UK government has promised to pay EDF a fixed fee, subject to annual increases, of £92.50 (in 2012 prices) per megawatt-hour for 35 years."
In other words they're guaranteed double what we're currently paying *plus* an unspecified annual increase. At what seems like an average increase of 5% that's about £150 after ten years ...
The investors must be crying all the way to the bank ...
Is it just me or does this look delightfully similar to the Speccy reborn fiasco (that's all gone quiet ... what's happened to it ...?)
I can't believe how people can complain when they freely give money to someone they don't know, to build something which is not even designed, for delivery at some point in the future ...
Simple way out of this conundrum : don't pay up front for something that doesn't exist unless you are happy and willing to own snake oil.
Chinese kit : those pesky Chinese will might hack us ... possibly ... despite there being no evidence of state backed 'holes'.
USA backed kit : easily hacked with hardcoded back doors and shown to be used by the USA state surveillance system.
Do you trust Mr Orange or Winnie the Pooh? Make your choice.
"Raspberry Pi, preferably running an AI to detect the fox ..."
Got this image of a book of police fox mug-shots with pages being turned in front of a Pi camera to teach the AI system what Bad Mr Fox looks like ... followed by a loud whirring and clicking as something out of Robocop initialises its weapons into Anti-Fox active mode ...
I can find nothing about the workings of this specific super efficient product online. Not even a block schematic on the web site.
Does this mean it's just a couple of heat exchanger systems with one mother of a cooling water supply, or perhaps a huge radiator with a fan? Or perhaps it's a block of peltiers stapled to a water cooler block and a radiator loop which would probably work well but be as electrically inefficient as hell ... I'd like more info ...
"Were were subject to malware on our system and breached GDPR" (BA with massive turnover) ICO Result: massive cashcow fine.
"We willingly gave data from our system and breached our own policies and GDPR" (KCL) ICO Result ...?
Will be interesting to see what happens with the ICO investigation ... consistency should and would be expected ...
So a company that has documented history of security violations and failure to comply with federal directives gets told to sort itself out (again). Yet a company that doesn't have such a history gets pulled from the US on the basis of "whispers and suspicion" ... welcome to the proof that the China trade spat is nothing to do with security.
"You've been caught and fined loads of money for blatant fraud so obviously we'll put you on our 'undesirable' list."
"There's a directorship, several board positions and the requirement for many highly paid 'consultants' about to be announced ..."
"Now, since you put it so eloquently, which highly profitable Government contract do you want next?"
Snout/trough interfacing is far to obvious in higher Government circles ...
My only comment would be that the odds should be displayed clearly on each machine.
That way you can play for fun, to keep the kids quiet while the thirteenth rain cloud passes over or because you're a total muppet and think you'll win. At least there is no excuse as you have the data required to work out how much you're likely to lose.
On the other hand, anyone who has watched "Tipping Point" on the tv(*) should be well aware how uncoordinated and, quite frankly, stupid some of these game players' decision making capabilities can be ...
(*) The author vehemently denies the deliberate watching of the aforementioned 'entertainment' product but the tv may have been left on by another person resulting in short term intellectual contamination of the audio-visual environment.
Giving a department a B- rather than an A+ simply because their reporting structure is slightly different to the one the politicians want seems a 'fingers in pies' approach to oversight.
There is no question or answer as to whether the existing reporting method works, is efficient or is effective just that it's not what the overseers wanted to see, which in itself may a be poor, inefficient and ineffective management solution. That is straight micro management.
>USE HAMMER
*using hammer*
>STOP HAMMER
*requesting that the hammer be stopped*
>USE SPANNER
*I'm quite busy at present - did you say something?*
>I MEANT USE SPANNER
*sorry, still finishing beating the crap out of something. Please wait*
>USER OVERRIDE
*look, I've told you already ...*
>USE SPANNER
*naughty user. Instigating 'ignore user' until use hammer function complete*
>USER OVERRIDE
*Press away on those buttons user*
*oh, hammer function complete*
*what did you want to use the spanner on?*
*the spanner does not fit flat metal*
I would suggest that Youtube and iPlayer differ in the key respect of editorial control. The BBC produce, publish and control the content of iPlayer. Facebook/Youtube certainly don't produce, theoretically don't control and they would probably argue that they don't publish (in the 'taking any sort of responsibility' sense) what's delivered through their site.
Call that mind blown?
My university project was a 'throw-away' compiler to enable compilation of BASIC source larger than physical memory on a micro ... based on about three lines of description by one writer in the back of a text book.
At that time you loaded your program and typed RUN. As this was mostly cassette based systems and the relatively early days of floppies being availability, so no simple hard disk swapping allowed!
Those were the days when we had to be efficient programmers to squeeze into the space available ...
And in 1980/81 the 380z running CP/M had a couple or versions of BASIC. BASIC-G had graphic extensions to drive the "high res" graphics card and green screen monitor at about 400x200. I remember bashing out code to simulate the motion of a charged particle in magnetic, electric or both fields ... Come on, I was a geeky teenager and needed something to do between Colossal Cave sessions!
Strangely, I'm currently sitting 100yards from where that machine lived! :-)
First stage in viewer tracking and censorship I tell you. Next perhaps politically 'extreme' sites like RT or China Daily, then sites that don't promote "British values", then religious sites then ...?
Nothing to do with child protection (the various ISP filter systems are there for that purpose and could be strongly implemented under the control of the BBFC for instance) or censorship of unlawful material (which by definition should be blocked/removed) but everything to do with another step of creeping state control.
I'm surprised Her May-jesty hasn't yet recommended an obvious solution to potential id theft - a special card issued by the Government to provide easy age verification and access to all services - we could call it something like an "id" card ...
The whole thing fell apart in a year so wasn't one of those popular 'we promise it will be done at a bit more cost" five year money pits. The main contractor was Noridian who stumped up $45m (presumably for failing to deliver) yet the sub contractor - presumably appointed by the main contractor - is in direct dispute with the buyer not the main contractor ... like me suing the builder's sub-contracting day-rate digger driver for digging the foundations wrong on a house ...
"Alexa: Order Sidewinder Missiles"
"People ordering Sidewinder Missiles for F35s also ordered Ray-Ban sunglasses, Berlin singles, stealth paint touch-up sticks and a plastic wok ... Do you wish to log into Amazon-for-Warplanes with your Facebook profile and use your 'hidden airfield in Afghanistan' delivery address?"
I don't quite understand why the people who post this material aren't implicated in any way.
Whilst I don't like the Zuks etc of this world, if you are treating social media platforms as communication conduits rather than publishers, then the burden of blame for fake material falls onto the original posters.
Personally I'd rather be in the situation where fake/copyright infringing/defamatory/politically sensitive stuff is able to be posted *but* the perpetrator of that post takes the full rap of the law for infringing copyright/defaming an individual/calling Trump names or whatever is illegal at the time. At the moment it appears that I can post defamatory material on the web and Google takes the rap for indexing it, not me for posting it. Whilst the whole Google monopoly is distasteful, that doesn't seem reasonable or correct.
Lost socks:
1) If you look you can never see them
2) many socks appear to emit dangerous radiation (can be detected nasaly and quantum entanglement means you smell them the instant a trainer is removed from any distance ...)
3) most teenagers socks are so bad they'd glow if heated ...
Yep ... that's the formation and composition of a black hole and its accretion disk sorted then! When do I get the certificate for my PhD (proper hole darning)?
But the difference here appears to be that the issue is not necessarily an accidental programming error but an upgrade of software that knowingly breaks existing functionality which is not regarded as a bug but a new functional structure that will continue into the future. "That's what it does now."
This is the basic problem with 'rental' software - you get what they deliver, not what you want.
"This is Meast Feast stuffed crust ... but my regular order is Lactose free Vegan Veg Mania with hand polished pea-shoots and magic pixie dust on gluten free sea weed base!"
"What do I care? We sell pizza, it's a pizza ..."
I think it's more like an accountant looking down a hole "tut tut, looks like at least £8000. If you wish to pay us £4600 we'll gladly connect you up."
Basically all this amounts to is a decent government subsidy for BT (or KCOM but that's unlikely) to connect a rural service. Is Ofcom's director related to "Pai" by any chance?
I use it regularly but my biggest LO gripe was trying to do a basic mail merge with an image on the master page (company logo or whatever). About five years ago a bug appeared which broke formatting if there were more that about 20 images in a document - LO generates a mail merge output document so 30 recipients with a single logo on each page would do the job for instance. This was on the bug list and was fixed then immediately broken in the next update ... last time I looked it was still an outstanding bug.
"Short" exposures may be 15 minutes of one filter, there may be three filters so that's perhaps 45 minutes per colour exposure and for the dimmest objects you may need 100 full colour frames. That's 4500 minutes of exposure ... Bear in mind that in the UK you've already got to contend with clouds, planes, birds, meteors, dew, bad seeing and light pollution and you will realise that it's much more difficult than just "using 999 out of 1000" ...
So, the obvious questions. Given 12000 objects, how many extra 'streaks' will be on an exposure of that 4500 minutes over say a 5 degree field of view? Will it depend on latitude of the observer and location being viewed or will the net be more or less pole to pole? What will visibility of the satellites be like in final orbit and for how long before/after sunset? So many questions ...
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