Posts by juice

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: The best keyboard...

> There speaks someone who didn't start with a ZX Spectrum.

Actually... I started with a +2 :) But yeah - there was a reason I said generally!

I mean, don't get me wrong: as the article notes, there's something fabulous about touch-typing at speed on a mechanical keyboard; it's like firing a gatling gun!

But at the same time, a decent membrane keyboard is good enough and doesn't lead to people hammering on your bedroom door at 4am when you've been struck by the coding muse.

Certainly, they're better than the modern low-profile keyboards which are all the vogue these days, especially when it comes to Apple hardware.

The best keyboard...

... is generally the one you grew up with.

I've never been too fussed about what style of keyboard I use; the main thing is the /angle/ of the keyboard; I know it goes against RSI principles, but I'm far more comfortable (and RSI free, after thirty-ish years of tapping away) with having a ~10 degree angle. So much so, that I've been known to superglue risers onto the back of modern "flat" keyboards!

With that said, there was something nice about the older "clackity" keyboards; back when I was working for a big telecomms company, there was a point where they were doing a major purge of obsolete PC technology, which included large swatches of Model-M style keyboards from Dell and the like.

I half regret not picking some of them up, though equally: these all dated from Ancient Times, so used the massive DIN plugs rather than PS2, and lacked the various meta-keys which have been tacked on since by Microsoft et al. Though I suspect some people would consider this to be a bonus ;)

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

Re: Really?

> At the speed the AI industry is moving right now that might as well have been a report from the stone age.

The last I checked, LLM models are still stuck in a dilemma: they're too unreliable for high value work which requires accuracy, and too expensive to use for low-value tasks which don't require accuracy.

I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Re: Promises promises

> Initially, there were some fears that a popular rising star of Musk would draw the ire of the head narcissist which would lead to his downfall

Nah.

I've no doubt that many in the US government - including Trump - are at least looking askance at Musk. But at the same time, he's an incredibly convenient tool to help distract everyone while Trump's issuing a massive flurry of executive orders. 130 and counting, so far...

After all, he's a non-american billionaire with a massive ego, a love of publicity and a huge amount of hubris. He's a perfect scapegoat - and better yet, he's got all manner of flaws (e.g. how many children out of wedlock?) which can be used when Trump sorrowfully finds that it's time to disown him.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Re: Dementia

I seem to recall that in his first term, there was a load of witches who attempted to bind Trump to prevent him from doing harm.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39090334

That worked well.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Like it as much as you want...

> I really like the idea of poisoning as much of so called "AI" as possible

... because it ain't gonna happen.

In the first instance, unless these poisoning tools are built into your production tools, few if any people are going to use them.

Secondly, what we'll end up with is an arms race, similar to that with spam and zero-day CPU exploits like banhammer. I mean, if we can virtually unroll charred papyrus which has been sat under volcanic ash for a few centuries, scan all the writing on it and produce a valid translation, then I'm sure someone can build a tool to unpick "poison noise" from a media file. Hell, it'll probably even be AI powered.

Thirdly, as the arms race escalates, what you'll end up with is a degradation of your media, as you're forced to apply ever stronger "poison" to your creations.

Fourthly, if your creations can't be "AI" parsed, then that means that they can't be curated. Which in turn affects your ability to publicise and monetise them.

Fifthly, "poisoning" only works in certain scenarios; it's (currently) zero-impact for audio and video, but what about text?

And so on.

tl;dr: it ain't happening.

Re: Copyright is not IP

> If Dorsey and his equally defective fellow travellers wish to ditch Intellectual Property, why stop there?

In the first instance, they don't want to ditch all IP. They want to ditch everyone else's IP, and use that to create new IP which they'll own. It's the classic "trickle-down" theory which is much loved by billionaires: give us everything you have, and we promise to give some of it back, honest.

Beyond that, it can be argued that some of the greatest socio-economic uplifts came from people breaking trade embargos and IP laws. Such as when tea and silkworms were smuggled out of China, or when the USA "stole" British steam-engine technology, or the more recent way in which China quite happily turned a blind eye to wilful IP infringements.

You could maybe even point to the massive technology transfer which was sent by the British to the USA during WW2 as part of the Tizard Mission, and the equally massive "transfer" of German IP to the USA and Russia at the end of WW2, and how all that came together to drive technological developments during the Cold War.

It's a tried and true mechanism; however, for some strange reason, those who profit from getting "free" access to IP generally then turn around and demand protection for their own IP!

White House confirms 245% tariff on some Chinese imports not a typo

Re: What would you do?

> What's YOUR solution?

In the first instance: you tax the rich.

The current effective tax rate for the top 1% of taxpayers in the USA is currently 25.9%; between 1940 and 1970, their tax rate generally hovered around 40% [1]

Currently, the USA gets around $1 trillion in annual tax from them [2]; raising their effective rate to 40% would give the US government an extra $0.4 trillion. or around 6% of the annual federal budget of $6.75 billion.

You could even bump that value up to over $1 trillion, if you extended it to the top 5% of taxpayers!

And that's money you could pump into education, research/manufacturing tax breaks, and so on. Which then allows you to restructure the economy without causing major disruption.

Conversely, if you raised the tax on the top 1% to around 27%, you could completely remove taxes on the bottom 50% of taxpayers, since the US government only gets around $0.05 trillion in taxes from them.

Not only would this give them more money to spend within the US economy, but this would also free up resources within the IRS department, thereby enabling them to focus on recovering the $700 billion of annual unpaid taxes [3]. Everybody wins - arguably even the rich, since that extra 5% in taxes will be counterbalanced by the "trickle up" effects of that additional spending by the bottom 50%.

Unfortunately, the current US government has opted to implement tariffs (a regressive tax which disproportionately impacts the bottom 50%) and is even trying to kill the CHIPS and Science act which would subsidise the return of high-value industries - and jobs - back to the USA.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/

[2] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/

[3] https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/revenue-and-distributional-effects-irs-funding

[4] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/03/05/trump-chips-act-semiconductor/81671969007/

Re: What would you do?

> US Pharma corporates have been fleecing US consumers without remit for years

In fact, it's US Pharma companies - and one particular family-owned company in particular - which is directly responsible for causing the US's opiate crisis.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/opioid-settlement-toppled-as-scotus-rejects-sacklers-immunity-in-5-4-ruling/

Still, the Sackler family made around $11 billion in the process, so they're happy.

Re: Today I bought cheese from the supermarket for $10

> Winning!

What's actually happening, is that you're still giving the supermarket $10, but you're now also taking $24.50, sticking it in an envelope and posting it back to your house. And then your landlord picks up said letter and sticks it in his safe.

You don't benefit and neither does the supermarket. But your landlord's quite happy with the entire affair.

Fear of tariffs made the PC market great again in Q1 as vendors emptied factories to dodge price future hikes

Re: What about Q2/3

> Stocking up in Q1 means less during the rest of the year.

Worse yet, you get the "oscillating" effect we saw during Covid.

Let's say everyone uses Widget X, which is normally produced at a nice steady rate by a factory. And then something causes everyone to panic.

As a result, everyone rushes out and tries to buy all available stock of Widget X.

This then causes an issue for the factory; with everyone having a huge stash of Widget X, no-one's buying what they're producing. At which point, they can either reduce production - which means job losses - or they can pivot to something else. Fortunately, there's some new customers who want Widget Y, so they pivot over to making that instead.

Meanwhile, this also causes a problem for the logistics company who used to deliver Widget X to the old customers. As with the factory, they therefore have to either scale down their delivery network, or pivot to other routes. Such as delivering Widget Y to the factory's new customers...

Still, after a while, the old customers finally work through their stockpiles and send a request to the factory for more boxes of Widget X.

However, the factory politely states that this isn't possible, since all their resources are now geared to producing Widget Y. And while they do still have some crates of Widget X in the warehouse, there's no way to deliver them, as the logistics company is too busy with delivering Widget Y.

And so we get another scramble to procure Widget X, and we keep going around this loop until things finally stabilise.

The above is a bit simplified (it ignores things like the cost and availablility of warehouses, the possibility that Widget Y is perishable, and the fact that not everyone will be able to stock up on Widget X, so some companies will find themselves losing contracts right from the very start).

But that's pretty much what happened during Covid with things like the microchips which are used in vehicles. And I'd be surprised if we don't see similar happening across multiple industries, given how much yoyo'ing is going on around US tariffs.

EU may target US tech giants in tariff response

Re: Hmm

> Just because they cut themselves off does not mean its a good idea to copy them

I think we (and pretty much all economists) agree that tariffs do more harm than good, at least when imposed in the way that the US government is currently doing.

However, you still haven't actually said what you propose as an alternative to imposing counter-tariffs on the USA, other than maybe to suggest targetted tariffs. Which are still tariffs.

It's also worth bearing in mind that it's currently unclear as to whether these tariffs are part of a long-term plan, or just a crude bargaining tool [*]. Either's bad in its own way, but at least people could start making moves to mitigate the impact if things were definitely going down one of these two paths.

From a political perspective, if it's a long-term plan, then you need to make sure that your own export industries are weened off the USA. And if it's a short-term bargaining tool, then you need to be able to bring something to the table as part of the negotiation.

[*] I'm tending towards the former; there does seem to be some indications that this is part of an effort to devalue the US dollar and shift taxation away from income tax over to tariffs. As ever, whether that's a good idea or not is up for debate!

Re: Hmm

> Then there are those considering retaliatory tariffs because tariffs are bad (takes a few more mental gymnastics)

I'm curious: what would you propose?

The USA raising tariffs means that both the volume and value of your exports to them will drop. In addition, while it's arguably a form of cannibalisation, the US government will be able to take the revenue from the tariffs and use it to both subsidise their export industries and spin up domestic production[*].

Countering by raising tariffs on US exports re-levels the playing ground to some degree; everyone's still worse off as a result, but at least the US government isn't getting to both have it's cake and eat it.

[*] Admittedly, whether the current US government would actually do this is up for debate...

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Trump is easy to model

> There was FAR more to the 50s and 60s than a high tax rate for a teeny tiny % of high earners

True to a degree; however as I posted earlier, the effective tax rate was significantly higher for high earners (42% vs the current 26%), and they owned less of the USA's overall wealth (10% rather than 25%). I'd argue the latter in particular was a significant factor; not only was wealth better distributed, but they had less political/economic leverage.

Then too, let's look at here and now, with some figures from the US IRS:

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/

If the USA decided to raise the effective tax rate (i.e. after all creative accountancy has been done) on the top 1% of tax payers back to what it was in the 1960s, the US government would receive an extra $0.6 trillion per year. Which is a lot more than I've ever found down the back of my sofa; it's nearly 10% of the USA's annual government budget!

And you could do a lot with that, such as paying off government debt, or even reducing taxes on the bottom 50% of taxpayers.

Now that'd be one hell of a "trickle-down" effect!

Re: Trump is easy to model

> That works for one cycle.

Not really.

In the first instance, the Vimes Theory of Economic Unfairness applies; unless you're Elton John, once you get past a certain point, the amount you spend rarely increases at the same rate as your wealth.

To use some arbitrary numbers:

Someone earning 40k a year probably spends 80% of their income on maintaining their lifestyle.

Someone earning 80k will spend 60%.

Someone earning 500k will spend 30%

Someone with 200 million in assets will spend maybe 2%

And so on.

Which means that for the super-rich, maintaining a "living" loan is easy; you can always find some other asset to maintain the status quo, and for an added bonus, a good accountant will find ways to use any asset deprecation to reduce what minimal taxes you're paying...

Re: Trump is easy to model

> My house being worth 25% more money than when I bought it doesn't mean I have 25% more money in my pocket

But that does mean you can go to your bank and ask for a new mortgage which is 25% higher, thereby giving yourself a large wodge of cash.

And that's essentially what the super rich do: they take out loans against their assets and thereby avoid paying taxes.

https://youtu.be/b2M4QTHSKDU

There can be a bit of risk involved, since your assets have to appreciate in value quickly enough to cover the interest on the loan.

But the superrich can generally find someone to offer them very reasonable terms, and after all: when you owe the bank a tenner, it's your problem. But when you owe the bank a million bucks, it's the bank's problem...

Re: Trump is easy to model

> So no, I do not believe the US was doing well due to taxing the rich.

That's a fair comment; a bit more digging indicates that the rich generally paid around 42% in tax, though this has since declined to around 25%

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/

https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rates-have-fallen-top-one-percent-world-war-ii-0

Still, that 17% drop is pretty significant. Looking at US tax income from 2024, bumping the tax rate back up to 42% for just the top 1% would give the US government an extra 0.6 trillion dollars per year.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/

Or they could extend this rate to the top 5% (minimum income: $0.5 million/year) and get an extra $1.2 trillion, or around 20% of the US's annual government expenditure.

Equally, I just came across this article, while conversing elsewhere:

https://slate.com/business/2014/12/best-graph-of-2014-the-rise-and-rise-of-top-0-1.html

In simple terms, at the start of the 20th century, the richest 0.1% in the US owned about 25% of all household wealth; this was then dragged down a bit by the Great Depression in the 1930s, and then crashed down to "just" 10% by WW2 taxes.

And it stayed at just 10% until the 1970s; after a bit of a further bump down due to the oil crisis in the mid-1970s, it's since steadily crept back up to 25%; given that the graph only goes up to 2012, I wouldn't be surprised if it's now even higher, given the recent enthusiasm for "trickle down" economics.

Fundamentally though, the great American Golden age happened at a time when taxes were higher, and the super-rich controlled a relatively small amount of the national wealth.

I doubt this is a coincidence.

Re: Trump is easy to model

> "Boomers" did rather well economically in many other countries. Not just the USA.

The period after WW2 was pretty unique. The USA had massively retooled its industrial capacities and many major industrial countries - including most of Europe - were undertaking a massive rebuild of everything which had been destroyed during the war, aided in part by loans from the USA. And the Cold War with the USSR was still driving innovations and technological uplifts.

So, the USA was constantly improving it's productivity, there was massive demand for their exports, and full employment in most other top-tier industrialised countries, especially in Western Europe. It was a golden age, both powered by and greatly benefitting the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_economic_expansion

One key point in this, was that top marginal tax rates were much higher then. In the USA, between 1945 and 1963, the top tax rate was 94%; it then dropped to "just" 70% all the way up to 1981, after which it's generally hovered around 38%.

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/whole-ball-of-tax-historical-income-tax-rates

I.e. the golden age was funded in part by taxing the rich.

Oddly, the extremely affluent people who are trying to take us back to what they consider the good old days generally aren't offering to pay extra tax. Nor are they taking into account just how different the world's situation is now, as compared to the period after WW2.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Re: Pointless

> Which the average mobile user either doesn't want, or doesn't want to pay for.

This.

Realistically, what does 5G give us, that is measurably better than 4G, from an end-user perspective?

Sally watching TikTok videos on the bus doesn't need gigabytes of bandwidth. Neither does Charlie as he delivers packages; his GPS tracking system generally just needs a few kilobytes at most as he moves around the city.

Ditto for ultra-low latency, unless you're remote-piloting a drone or somesuch.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: Stolen Elections

> But I think we have to recognise that the latest US polls still indicate that the Orange Felon has 50% approval ratings at home

As ever, things aren't quite that simple: his approval ratings are definitely starting to trend downwards, particularly around the economy, foreign affairs and tariffs. Which perhaps isn't too surprising, given how tightly they're all intertwined at present.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/12/politics/cnn-poll-trump-economy/index.html

As markets slide and investors worry in response to Trump’s trade policies, a 56% majority of the public disapproves of his handling of the economy

Realistically, it's going to take weeks - if not months - before Trump's economic policies really start to take effect; as with Brexit, many companies have built up stockpiles in preparation, and at least some will do their best to absorb the extra costs.

On the other hand, the main way to reduce costs is to fire people. And even that's probably not enough to absorb a 25% (or more) increase in costs, so prices are still going to rise. Inflation and unemployment; best buddies for life!

Plus, and especially for companies which rely on Just In Time deliveries of equipment and components, the stockpiles will run out at some point. And it's highly unlikely that "local" suppliers will be ready; it generally takes years to build new factories, train staff and get production quality up to an acceptable level.

So they'll have to go back to their original suppliers. Assuming these haven't switched to other customers and products, as happened during Covid with the car industry and things like low-end CPU manufacturing.

All in all, and barring some sort of miracle which none of the economic experts believe in, things are likely to look very different - and a lot more expensive - in a few months time. And the polls will reflect that.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

> I don't expect that these tariffs will last for long - when he or his cronies notice they are destroying the economy, there will look for a quick exit

The new tariffs could be cancelled tomorrow, but the knock-on effects will take months, if not years to settle. Look at how long it took for the disruption from Coronavirus to settle; arguably, things are still settling, some four years later.

Then too, the american businesses which these tariffs are meant to be helping are pretty much screwed every which way.

In the short term, they're going to have significantly higher production costs. Which means that their revenue and/or profit margins are going to drop.

So, they're going to have to cut costs (aka: fire employees) while deciding what to do next.

If they think that the tariffs are going to be short-term, they can maybe try to hang on as-is. But that'll leave them exposed to the risk that some other company may be able to spin up local infrastructure and undercut their prices.

On the other hand, if they think the tariffs are going to be around for a long time, they can invest in their own local infrastructure. However, this generally carries a significant upfront cost, and takes time to get up to speed; Tesla's gigafactories allegedly take around 18 months to build, plus another 15 months to reach full production capacity.

(Equally, from a wider economic perspective: any new infrastructure will generally attempt to minimise costs through automation, so there's not going to be any significant boom in employment; a company may hire just one person to do the job that (pre-offshoring) ten people previously did. And that's assuming you can find skilled staff without also investing heavily in training and education![*])

Worse, even if you do manage to secure funding, build your infrastructure and find people to staff it, your production costs are probably still going to be higher than those of your offshore rivals. So you'll struggle to export your product, especially if the countries you're trying to sell to have imposed equivalent tariffs to those currently being applied by the USA.

And if the US tariffs are dropped at some point in the future, you'll be completely shafted: your products will be too expensive to export, while you're also simultaneously being undercut by imports.

Any which way you look at things, it's likely to be a bumpy ride!

[*] To quote https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/2019ReinvestmentReport.pdf:

[For Carey Manufacturing] The costs of reshoring, particularly the costs associated with new capital equipment, were high [and] may require five to six years to see a return on investment.

...

Edgewell [...] created an estimated 160 jobs in Dover (fewer than the number of jobs in [the offshore factory] due to efficiencies gained)

...

Edgewell continues to have difficulty finding mechanics and machine operators in the United States. At the Dover facility, Edgewell only hired one engineer from the local area, and several jobs remain unfilled after three and a half years.

...

QED noted that it has had difficulty finding workers with the appropriate level of technical training as well as soft skills. The company has noticed this labor challenge in the overall U.S. labor market as well.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

> She said why don’t politicians understand this?

If I was feeling cynical, I'd suggest that they do. But:

1) It's something that makes for good headlines (E.g. "Won't someone think of the children?")

2) It's something that's effectively zero-cost to the government; once the laws are changed, it's the private sector which has to cover the cost of implementation

3) There'll no doubt be a special exemption for politicians

Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

Re: state-of-the-art silicon (6502 then...)

> cheap enough to play with, and slow enough to work on breadboard

It does seem like a strange comparison.

When even the CPU in a toothbrush is powerful enough to play Doom, the problem doesn't lay in finding cheap hardware to experiment with.

I mean, look at how many products have spawned from the Raspberry Pi and/or Arduino; the former in particular offers a (fairly) cheap general purpose computer which is powerful enough to run a full OS and which can easily be hooked up to physical hardware via the GPIO pins.

If anything (and without wanting to sound like I'm paraphrasing the "640k is enough for anyone" quote), hardware has arguably peaked; while there's still plenty of need for number-crunching supercomputers, there's arguably very few mass-market problems which can only be solved by throwing more powerful computers at them.

Instead, it's all about software these days.

Ignorance really is bliss when you’re drowning in information

Re: Big problem requiring serveral partial solutions

> I've been taking the (wildly optimistic?) view that the OP meant to say teaching how to SPOT and unravel lies, deception and fraud. And call out the perpetrators.

Anecdotally, I was talking to someone recently about the subject of detecting falsehoods, and they were adamant that they were far better than most people detecting falsehoods.

While I did very strongly think "Dunning Kruger in full effect", I instead politely guided them towards the Traitors, which I think should be mandatory watching for anyone who has to deal with potential falsehoods for a living.

Because (and with the caveat that I haven't seen the most recent series), I've yet to see a single person on that show accurately detect which of their fellow players is a Traitor.

In fact - albeit the article is behind a paywall, so I haven't read it - there's at least one article which indicates that the Faithful's success rate is pretty much "statistically indistinguishable from chance".

And there's been all sorts of people on that show - police, lawyers, street magicians, actors, etc - whose careers are at least partly based on their alleged abilities to detect falsehoods.

I've got a vague hope that when next this topic comes around, they'll perhaps be a bit less likely to take things at face value, based on their instincts.

Admittedly, it's perhaps more of a forlorn hope, but hey.

Meta's plan to erase 5% of workforce starts today

Re: "Meta confirmed it was expunging fact checking in the USA"

Anecdotally, a number of friends have been sharing their blue sky details; a few have dropped off Facebook altogether.

Personally, since the election - and despite not being in the USA - I've seen a large uptick in the amount of right-wing political posts. Mostly from the USA (and mainly involving people crowing about how the democrats have been "owned"), but there's also been a lot of Reform and even Tory posts.

There's also been a lot of crap AI generated stuff - "I'm 130 years old, and I baked a cake for the first time", or "This couple has been married for 5 zillion years", being posted by multiple accounts. Quite what the point of these is, I don't know; I'd guess it's like-gathering so that these accounts can be used for phishing scams/political propaganda, further down the line?

Either way, my block-hammer has been in overdrive, and things are slowly starting to settle. But it does genuinely make me worried about how much junk is being crammed down people's throats, and it's definitely pushed me closer towards switching Facebook off.

Only 4 percent of jobs rely heavily on AI, with peak use in mid-wage roles

Re: What a surprise

> LLM based systems can take a lot of this boring work off service agents, allowing them to lower waiting time for customers who actually require their assistance.

... which is great, until your LLM hallucinates a legally binding answer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Re: "get away with a bit of Netflix"

> That's easy when WFM - just use another device!

Yeah. I have to admit, I was slightly baffled by this bit of the article:

Simple examples include tracking the websites workers visit and the apps they use – more than a third engaged in this

There's two things here.

If you're using a company-provided device (e.g. a laptop), then it should really only be used for work and (certainly from a security perspective if nothing else) only have work-related applications on it. Especially during working hours.

Equally, if you're using the company VPN to access the internet, then it's in the company's interests to make sure that you're not misusing it by chewing up bandwidth and/or visiting "questionable" content.

The former can carry a financial cost, and can impact other employees - our VPN used to slow to a crawl when Apple released the latest Mac/iOS multi-gigabyte upgrades.

And the latter can cause reputational issues, as well as creating yet another set of security risks.

Frankly, I'd expect the same monitoring on both, as if I was working in an office. And if a company's not performing at least some due diligence on both points, then they're setting themselves up for a future issue!

Admittedly, things have gotten a bit more blurred these days, as people often use their own devices, and/or use the public internet to access work-related resources. And again, those both carry significant security risks...

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

> [HMRC] handed Accenture an additional £35.2 million ($44 million) without competition on a £70.4 million ($88 million) contract that was never tendered.

If my maths is correct, that means Accenture got £105 million for this contract. And I'm increasingly asking myself: where's all that money actually going?

The "average" profit margin for software contracts is somewhere around 20-30%. Which means that in theory, Accenture spent (or charged, which is not /quite/ the same thing) around £70 million for their services.

And while things are rarely that simple (and sometimes deliberately so), if the average Accenture employee costs £100k per year, that means that they've used somewhere in the order of 700 years worth of effort.

My slightly cynical take on this, is that everything's been sub-contracted and outsourced, and that at every sub-stage, there's someone looking to apply their own profit margins...

Samsung Galaxy S25 is so smart it wears Crocs, allegedly resists quantum decryption

Re: no mid contract rises now

It's probably a bit late to respond to this, but that's not quite right

In new deals from Friday, before somebody agrees to a contract, providers must tell them "in pounds and pence" about any price rises, as well as when they will occur.

...

But Citizens Advice said the move falls short of a full ban on prices rising mid-contract.

To be fair, knowing how much extra money they're going to wring out of you is an improvement. It'll be interesting to see if they do only start to apply price rises to the "contract" element of the bill, rather than to both the contract and the handset!

Re: Is there a reason I would change?

> If there is I am not seeing it

Yups.

Starting with the S7 Edge[*], I've generally been going for a bi-annual upgrade - S8+, S10+, S21U, S23U.

Partly because I tend to opt for 2-year contracts, but also because skipping every other generation gave a bit more of a measurable improvement.

This time, I'm not feeling it. I don't need more RAM or storage, the CPU is more than fast enough, and most of the camera lenses are the same, barring the change from a 10x lens to 5x, which I'm not entirely convinced is an upgrade.

Plus a load of "AI" junk, little of which is of any real use to me, and most of which is likely to be backported.

(And I'm still annoyed at Vodafone for the fact that they applied the annual "inflation" price uplift to the entire contract, despite the fact that 90% of said contract was for the already-delivered-and-paid-for phone...)

All in all, given the choice of being locked back into an expensive monthly contract for the next two years, or simply swapping out the SIM card to a rolling PAYG contract for £7 a month, I'm definitely leaning towards the latter.

[*] The S7 was replaced early; turned out I was a bit too trusting of the claims about how tough the gorilla glass was!

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

Re: @wolfetone

> If businesses would make more money for their investors by cutting them out and not having them

The problem with that theory, is that pretty much everyone involved in deciding executive pay levels has at least some degree of self interest. Look at the various kerfluffles at Tesla for instance:

https://fortune.com/2025/01/09/tesla-board-elon-musk-compensation-chair-robyn-denholm/

It’s official: Tesla’s board collectively enriched themselves at shareholder expense to the tune of nearly $1 billion

...

The settlement requires numerous past and present members of Tesla’s board to return roughly $277 million in cash and $459 million in stock options, and forgo further promised compensation worth $184 million

...

The carmaker’s board has repeatedly found itself at the center of controversy. It includes multiple business partners and personal friends of CEO Elon Musk. His own younger brother is a director, for instance.

...

The Tesla CEO revealed in court testimony he negotiated not at arm’s length with his directors but with himself. He was allowed to draft the conditions of his package as he saw fit, and the board put it to a shareholder vote, while failing to acknowledge that they were beholden to him.

Equally, there's plenty of fun charts which show how the wage ratio has drastically increased over the last few decades: in the USA, it's gone from around 20:1 in the 1965, to around 400:1 today [*].

https://truthout.org/articles/ceo-pay-has-grown-by-1460-percent-since-1978-as-workers-wages-stagnate/

If you're willing to believe that a modern CEO is somehow producing 20 times more value than their 1965 equivalent, then I have a nice bridge to sell to you.

The above article also highlights another interesting fact:

According to research released by EPI on Tuesday, CEO pay has skyrocketed by a staggering 1,460 percent since 1978. This has far outpaced the growth of the economy and even the pay of the top 0.1 percent, EPI finds, with the S&P stock market growing by 1,063 percent in the same time and the earnings of the top 0.1 percent growing 385 percent between 1978 and 2020.

Admittedly, while this is all based on averages, I'd be interested to hear an explanation for why CEO renumeration packages are growing faster than the revenues of the companies they're working for!

[*] Things are somewhat better in the UK; the ratio is "only" around 120:1!

Re: @wolfetone

> You get paid based on the value you produce

Interesting thought. So when do we start culling the CEOs?

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Excel can also be unhelpfully helpful...

The default import rules for spreadsheet software are often "helpful", in that they'll try to auto-convert anything which looks vaguely like a date or number.

Which can cause issues when dealing with telephone numbers, as they'll trim the leading zero off.

And can cause even more issues for bank details, since things like sort codes (11-22-33) can often look like a British formatted date.

This can be partially mitigated by putting a tab character at the start of the value, since this forces the spreadsheet to treat the value as a string and leave it be. And spreadsheet developers do seem to have gotten a bit better when it comes to offering an "just import it as is" option when loading a CSV or similar.

But I've still spent a lot of time patiently explaining to customers that it's not us, it's your spreadsheet software...

Re: Suspicious translations

> With enough practice they could possibly omit google translate and use their novel dialect directly.

Cor blimey guv'nor, yer having a giraffe!

(Said no cockney, ever)

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Re: 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

> It may have been the last hurrah for the manufacturers being able to sell them in vast quantities, but the machines that were sold had a long life of being used, and software continued to be produced and sold in vast quantities for years afterwards

Agreed - for me, 1984 was arguably the beginning of the end, rather than an actual last hurrah. For instance, the revamped Amstrad Spectrum range (i.e. the +2, +2A and +3) wasn't released until 1986, and sold somewhere around 3 million units.

Instead, 1984 is perhaps best viewed as a winnowing; with so many incompatible machines on the market, it was inevitable that the weaker ones would fail to reach a sustainable userbase.

Arguably, that actually led to something of a golden age; with just two main ecosystems[*] and Moore's Law driving down prices, people started to delve deeper into what the hardware could actually do.

In fact, I'd say that 1988 was arguably the last hurrah. To give an example: in 1984, Jet Set Willy on the ZX Spectrum was viewed as state-of-the-art, with it's 60 static "flip" screens. However, by 1986, we had fully 3d-wireframe games such as Starglider, and by 1988, Where Time Stood Still gave us a massive scrolling isometric adventure. WIth dinosaurs.

On the other hand, while video games measurably improved, the same can't really be said about productivity software; the only real way to improve these was to switch to 16-bit hardware. There's perhaps a case to be made that being able to address extra RAM was the main driver, as this let you use higher resolutions, use more colours and edit larger documents.

And when the 16-bit machines ran out of steam, the IBM PC was ready to take over; the architecture may have been slow and crude, but the economies of scale were literally unbeatable!

[*] The Commodore and Spectrum, natch. Three if you include the Amstrad CPC, four if you want to extend things to include the BBC...

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Apple II

> The report queried a mix of big and small tables. I turned on the query explanation mechanism to get the query plan and found that it had chosen to do the initial selection out of a small table and then join it to a big table on an un-indexed column.

Indexes for the win!

We recently had a server which was running hot and building up a backlog. Investigation took us to a query which was using an index... but the explain plan indicated that it was matching around 8 million records. Cue a new composite index, and now the system is only matching 4 records.

Which is a slight difference...

Re: The Power of Fear!

> We never had a clue WTF that was all about, but hey, if putting the fear of Christ into hardware is enough to get a fix, I'm good!

Back in the day, I was providing 4th line OOH support for a system which occasionally needed a bit of a kick. And there was something of a running joke about a particular (and occasionally cantankerous) system: it would only restart if I was involved.

It got to the point where 3rd line support had tried several times to get it restarted without any success. So they rang me, and tried again while I was getting my laptop booted.

And it restarted flawlessly. Because it knew I was watching ;)

Aside from the interrupted sleep, I was quite happy to claim the overtime, and to bask in the worship of the slightly bemused third line team...

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

Was it derided?

We had one, and I don't remember any particular commentary about it, though we did get it quite late in the Amiga's life, and people were starting to move onto x86 PCs.

From my teenage perspective, it played pretty much every game that I borrowed (and/or occasionally *ahem* copied) from my friend who had an A500. And the fact that it was smaller and lighter was a major bonus, since it often had to be picked up and moved to another room when the "family" TV was in demand :)

You're so bad at recycling, this biz built an AI to handle it for you

Re: Hmmm

> 100% of the people I know in the UK recycle because everyone has excellent recycling facilities at home

I'm not sure where you live, but my experiences have been somewhat more varied.

I used to live in a house, which had three bins - general, cardboard, and mixed glass/plastic/metal. And as far as I'm aware, the people on that street generally put things in the right bins.

I then moved to a flat in a large complex. And that had rubbish-chutes for general rubbish, and then larger communal bins, again for general, cardboard and mixed recycling.

Things were a bit more complicated there. Generally, I didn't find the chutes too useful; they're only just big enough for a small carrier bag's worth of rubbish, necessitating many small trips back and forth. And even then, the odds were good that they'd gotten clogged up by someone trying to ram something too large down them!

As a result, I generally defaulted to carrying stuff over to the large communal bins. But even then, while the general bins were emptied daily, the "recyclable" bin schedule seemed to be random, so these were often filled to overflowing. At which point, stuff got dumped into the general bins.

Equally, while people generally respected the rules for cardboard, all too often people would dump unrecyclable junk into the mixed bin; most commonly, they'd dump a binbag full of recyclables into the bin, rather than emptying said bag into the bin. Which then meant that the recycling was potentially too contaminated for recycling.

Now, I've moved to a flat in a complex with a fairly odd layout; there's essentially a single thin path between the buildings which is too narrow for vehicles.

Which means that I'm back to having a single "general" bin, which is collected weekly. As is everyone around me!

I am still separating out recyclable stuff, but even then; according to the council website, aside from the main recycling centres (which are generally very busy; it can take over an hour to queue up and unload), there's just two public recycling points in the city centre which take mixed recycling, both of which are tiny and likely to be overfilled. And they're both far enough that I have to drive to them...

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

Maybe...

They used AI to summarise the study's results!

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: 8.5 seconds...

> He told me his laptop was broken and the keyboard just sent nonsense to the screen

I've had someone come to me with a laptop which couldn't connect to the wifi. Which turned out to be because this particular laptop had assigned one of the F keys as "toggle wifi". And if I remember correctly, this setting persisted between reboots...

Definitely not the most user-friendly system I've seen!

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

> Apparently, we are supposed to ignore the lessons of history, which teach us that any new technology often proves highly effective to start with, until suitable technical and operational counters can be developed for it, and instead believe that this new technology is the inevitable future, and this time, the tank really is dead. Honest.

Aye. The Russians troops have already started to hack together anti-drone shielding on their tanks, by welding a thin steel cage/corrugated iron onto their tanks. Makes them heavier and affects their ability to fight, but it keeps the drones at arms length and stops their explosives from getting close enough to the armour.

(From the videos I've seen, they also mostly seem to be using their obsolete tanks as troop carriers rather than tanks, which is why they're not too bothered about the reduction in fighting capabilities)

In the meantime, the rest of the world is actively watching and taking notes, and anti drone technologies and doctrine is continuing to evolve. Hell, the British already have a solution which is more elegant - and lighter - than welding a turtle-shell onto a tank; for Afghanistan, we developed a "stiffened fabric" sheet which can be mounted onto vehicles, which is just stiff/heavy enough to cause the shaped charge in an anti-tank shell to prematurely detonate.

And that'd work just as well for drones.

Equally, drones by their nature are not well armoured, and generate a lot of noise across the spectrum - heat, audio, radio, etc. So I wouldn't be surprised to see automated flak cannons appearing on tanks, hooked up to a variety of passive and active sensors. Maybe even anti-drone drones, scout drones, monitor drones, and so on.

In fact, this is something touched on by one of my favorite pulp-military-scifi series, Bolo, which was created by Keith Laumer. He recognised back in the 1960s that NBC warfare was rapidly pushing humans out of the equation and came up with the concept of massive AI-controlled tanks, equipped with both heavy cannon and lighter "infinite repeater" guns designed to take down smaller threats such as drones or infantry.

The series was revived in the 90s by Baen, and the Bolo concept somewhat modernised. One fairly interesting example - despite some overly polemic right-wing politicking between the tanky stuff - is the Road to Damascus, in which an obsolete Bolo is forced to try and deal with an inner-city "terrorist" insurrection, in which the fighters deploy all manner of IEDs and improvised drones in an effort to take out the Bolo.

> The war in Ukraine shows me (on YouTube) tanks being taken out by several types of UAVs. Some commentators attach price tags (and so does this article): one tank seems to equal one thousand simple UAVs in purchasing price.

A bicycle is several thousand times cheaper than an SUV, but then, they're for very different use cases. A drone can't hold territory, provide support to infantry, carry supplies, and so on.

> By the way, the tanks that the West has sent to Ukraine hardly feature in those videos. I'm sure that they do matter, but I don't get that shown to me.

The general impression I get is that Ukraine has generally used western tanks for defensive purposes; there's simply not enough of them and too many issues around logistics to throw them into assaults. E.g. the British Challenger tanks may be great, but they use different ammunition to NATO and even the UK is struggling to scrape up spare parts for them.

If you don't mind his slightly rambling drunken-scottish ways, Lazerpig on Youtube has a lot of interesting - and occasionally insightful - videos about what's going on with tanks and drones in Ukraine.

> That is a topic where Artificial Intelligence may really matter: the "swarming" capability of drones. It would raise drone pilots to drone squad commanders.

We're probably several generations of AI away from having drones which could intelligently swarm and work together. And even then, there's going to be countermeasures. And above and beyond all of that, there's the ethical and strategic concerns about letting AI decide on who and what to kill.

Green recycling goals? Pending EU directive could hammer used mobile market

Re: That’s not the point

> Hi, being a slow reader, could you explain the differences between a convertible laptop, a tablet and a phone

It's the same difference as per a car, a truck and an container ship; they all nominally[*] use diesel engines, but have vastly different power requirements.

[*] Ok, so large ships have traditionally used the absolute dregs of what the oil industry produces. But it's diesel-like.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: Recurrence

> Part of that is the people in those countries take some pride in their surroundings

I think it's more that there's a greater emphasis on recycling in those countries.

To take my personal anecdotal examples: I've been to a few German music festivals, and they're a complete revelation as compared to British ones: clean and tidy. But there's a very strong emphasis on deposits (aka pfand): when shopping, pretty much any item in a recyclable container carries a 25c deposit, which can be redeemed by feeding said container into a machine which will scan the barcode(s) and spit out a receipt which can be used at a shop. Similarly, all drinks containers at the festivals tend to carry a 2-5 euro deposit.

Result: everywhere is clean and tidy. And especially during festival season, poorer locals can earn a bit of extra cash by either scouring bins for pfand-carrying containers, or by simply loitering near to where queues of people build up; I've seen people taking away bags containing hundreds if not thousands of items!

Conversely, I went to a music festival in Austria. Which doesn't have the pfand scheme[*], though they do have deposits on drink containers. As a result, while it was still measurably nicer than a British festival (e.g. Download), there was considerably more littering and general mess as compared to the German festivals!

Get people into the right mindset - i.e. recyclable items have value, and shouldn't just be thrown away - and things improve.

[*] Yet. Looks like they're introducing it next year!

https://www.recycling-magazine.com/2024/01/23/austria-is-preparing-for-deposit-return-system/

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Liam...You Forgot About......

> I like to look at it more as choosing the wrong priorities and/or directions, but only (mostly) in hindsight.

For me, the thing about the 8-bit era is that since it was the "wild west" era, things were mostly driven by Personalities - e.g. Steve Jobs, Tramiel and Bushnell in the USA, and then Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar in the UK.

And for better or worse, hubris played a huge part in their business decisions. There were times when this worked really well - the skunkwork project which Jobs used to create the Mac, after the Lisa proved to be a disaster - and times when it didn't work as well.

For Sinclair, I can't help but think that Sir Clive was perhaps too set in his ways, having spent all of his time since the 1960s churning out creatively repurposed hardware pushed to it's absolute limits. It's a great approach when there's limited competition and huge demand from a generally tech-savvy, fault tolerant audience, but by the 1980s, things were becoming commoditised, so that approach was very much obsolete.

Equally, while Sinclair's price points were definitely eye-catching - pay £399 for an American computer, or just £99 for a British computer with nearly all the same features - by refusing to budge on them, he forced constraints onto the hardware which could have been avoided. Who knows quite how successful the QL could have been, if the design team had an extra £100 to play with? It'd have still been barely a third of the cost of Apple's Macintosh!

Re: Liam...You Forgot About......

The Osbourne effect is well known, but it's been argued that it's not actually true (or at least: the chilling effects of advertising a new machine was only one of several factors):

As Robert Cringley noted in a (now deleted) article, a rival company had launched a similar portable which was also CP/M compatible and had a larger screen.

And as noted here on El Reg several decades ago[*], there was also some bad money decisions at Osbourne which drained the company coffers at a time when they were already financially strained.

https://www.theregister.com/2005/06/20/no_osborne_effect_at_osborne/

Arguably, similar applies to Commodore and Sinclair.

A big problem for Commodore lay in the fact that Tramiel held a major grudge against Texas Instruments. And once Commodore had achieved full vertical integration (they made the CPU, memory, sound chip etc for the C64), he launched a major price war against TI. Which in turn had a lot of knock-on effects: it drove a lot of their rivals out of the market, but also upset retailers, hammered their profits and made it much harder to launch any new 8-bit hardware.

This also caused the Sinclair/Timex collaboration to die on the vine; with the price of "real" computers dropping like an IBM mainframe in Jupiter's gravity well, budget computers like the TS2068 didn't have a chance.

Meanwhile, Sinclair had it's own self inflicted issues. First and foremost was Sinclair's obsession with low prices; this led to some clever technical innovations and cost savings, but also caused major issues with the reliability of earlier models of the ZX Spectrum. Similar also applied to the much delayed Sinclair QL, which was so hamstrung by it's low price point that it lurched out of the gates several years too late, with some serious hardware bottlenecks (e.g. a 16-bit CPU hooked up to an 8-bit databus) and half the OS hanging out of the back of the machine in a little ROM dongle...

(Plus, there's also the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn, similar to that of Commodore and TI. And Sinclair was an electronics company rather than a computer company, so the "computing" side of the business was never really properly prioritised. And so on and so forth...)

[*] Sheesh. Having read that the first time around, I'm definitely feeling old today!

Report: Tech misconceptions plague the IT world

Say what?

> Compounding the problem is the age range of the users surveyed – you'd expect this cohort would be more tech-savvy

Why?

In the first instance, I'm guessing the vast majority of people quizzed aren't in the IT sector. If someone asked me how to check a boiler's safety mechanism, or how to write a legally binding mortgage contract, I'd shrug. Because neither of those are in my areas of expertise.

Beyond that, and without wanting to go too far down the "get off my lawn" path, I'd argue that even in the IT sector, people are generally becoming less tech-savvy, not more. Because, to put it simply, there's too many layers of abstraction between the hardware and the UI, and educational courses generally don't drill down more than a couple of layers deep.

Conversely, people born in the 70s and 80s learned bottom-up: we started with crude hardware, ROM-based OSs and BASIC programming languages. And then we got OSs which could be loaded from disk, fancier programming languages, and then networking. And then web browsers. And so on and so forth...

CrowdStrike fiasco highlights growing Sino-Russian tech independence

Re: Actual problem

Does China and/or Russia actually open source the code for it's "home grown" linux variants? Who's actually performing security audits on these platforms?

Without wanting to sound too paranoid: given how authoritarian both governments are, I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that as time goes by, they become increasingly riddled with government-approved backdoors, in much the same way as the USA wanted to do with the clipper chip.

And one thing you can guarantee, is that once a back door exists, someone'll be standing there with a crowbar, ready and waiting to pry it open.

Breaking the rules is in Big Tech's blood – now it's time to break the habit

Re: killing music...

>> We should note that the successive waves of piracy and streaming have indeed pretty much killed music.

> I keep seeing people saying this, but it's simply untrue.

It depends on the context.

It has become far easier to produce and distribute music. However, this has resulted in a great increase in the volume of music being produced - a quick glance indicates that there's roughly 120,000 new songs released to streaming platforms every day.

And sadly, that means it's much harder to get people to actually listen to your music. Which in turn means that it's much harder to monetise your music, and thereby makes it more difficult to fund production of new music.

There's always going to be exceptions to this - some people will be in the right place at the right time, and will ride the zeitgeist to fame and fortune. But there'll be tens of thousands of others left behind. And with people now starting to use AI to produce music, the signal/noise ratio is going to get even worse!