Posts by elaar 359 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2011
Hardly surprising though is it. Who would have thought that newer technology, electrically far more complex, would be more unreliable to begin with than a combustion engine that's had a century to be perfected/refined reliablility wise?
My 25year old gas boiler far outlived my brother's condensing boiler than had a corroded heat-exchanger after just 3 years. Far more reliable, but an awful 65% efficiency. We need the technological progress, and the reliability will catch up.
"and our local parliament would make the rules about (though not necessarily stop) immigration"
How would making "rules" stop immigration when you pee off the French and we're no longer able to use Dublin Regulation? All we've accomplished is less skilled immigration (which we desperately need in certain sectors) and more asylum seekers crossing.
Besides, the laws our parliament create still have to be ratified by our great House of Lords which is packed full of unelected cronies, isn't our democracy fab!?
"What could be easier?" - a metric system....
"We Brits still call the standard building timber a "two-by-four". So much easier than "hand me a couple of one-hundred-by-two-hundreds, there's a good chap"." - You don't base a measurement system on which one's easiest to say. You can still call it a 2x4, as it's pretty close, I'm sure the person passing it to you won't get confused if you're a few mm out with your description.
I don't think we'd suffer any major issues if a pint of beer was 13% smaller, the US version is under half a litre, and that's the point really... a system where values differ between common countries has no place in a modern society. The only people that argue against this are those that grew up with said archaic system.
You could just completely block a smart-TV in your firewall, that's what I do. I might unblock it once a year to check for updates and that's it. It's a shame to miss out on some of the best Panels just because you're put off by the "smart" rubbish.
In my early years, we had a small team that worked alone in a DC we had a large presence in. Support, hands and eyes, installations, basically anything and everything required to keep the services going.
It was then decided by the Office Manager of the local London office (a few miles away) that we could carry out general office maintenance tasks for them, because after all if you have IT training you must also be a qualified electrician and plumber...
One day we had a request from her to repair one of their toilets. I told her politely to ring a plumber, which compelled her to write an email to my manager and hers about how "unhelpful" I was. I never went over there again.
We've advertised 8 different job positions in the last 6 months (all in IT, 2nd/3rd line and managerial positions etc.) and from memory we've had ~50 male candidates apply. We have 1 female in the whole of our support department of ~30 odd people. The company would literally do anything to employ more females, to the point where their skillset doesn't even matter (which is an awful thing to admit).
We just don't have enough interest in the industry.
If only those "stupid" people did the simple task of setting up a unique random email address for every single bloody website/company they ever contacted, and spent their lives monitoring all addresses incase there's an order update or similar. They would then miss all those emails that you have to click "unsubscribe" on, and the one ever BK blank order receipt, the fools!
I'm not sure how the EU stopped the UK from having fabs, I can't find any information to suggest that. But I do know that the EU (UK) is at the forefront of Medical Research, Fusion projects, CERN to name just a few. So to suggest the EU is behind on "high tech" because it doesn't have sophisticated FABS is laughable.
The issue with that is a lot of people want easy access to their DC (even though visits tend to be pretty rare), so that would cross off using it for co-lo etc. The other issue might be a lack of skilled staff in those areas. But yeah apart from that it would make a lot more sense.
If everyone had on-site equipment rather than off-site, then a LOT more power would be used overall in the UK (more seperate air-con units, single servers rather than large virtual servers/vhosting, and all power consumption would be in the UK rather than some in foreign DCs).
Considering we're going to go through a massive energy crisis before 2025 (when the last remaining coal stations and the last of 8 reactors go offline), then it's probably a good idea we used UK datacentres (and a vast amount shipped off to DCs in other countries).
I'm bemused that people are buying these high-power expensive GPUs that require 1000w supplies, whilst at the same time I'm on a mission to change everything in my house that uses more power than is necessary considering electricity prices are going to hit 40p/kwh.
I'm obviously very boring and middle-aged.
Surely we've reached the point where companies should require a license to capture ANY customer personal data, whereby if they're hacked they lose that license?
It seems companies often get away with this sort of thing, only for the victims to potentially be defrauded 0.5/1/10/100 years later based on some of that data.
Well, firstly they're hobbyists chips, so they're aimed at different markets such as (supposedly) education. So it's hard to moan about a MUCH smaller amount of chips destined for that market.
Secondly, I used a lot of STM chips, but show me one that's $6, has Wifi and has education/newbie resources.
I'm assuming by your confidence that you know the average power consumption of this new chip, and how it compares to the STM line? Or are you evaluating purely on the number of I/Os/pin specs?
Why on god's earth would these chips have the PIO abilities that you talk about?
"Nice but more limited in terms of IO, memory and processing power" - Correct, but you've ignored the most important point which is power consumption, you can get what you mention out of a million ICs currently available.
Assuming you're using these types of things for home automation/wearables/any other battery project it needs a different evaluation. The Zero 2 W is great, but has to be used as the gateway due to lack of deep sleep and power consumption. It's perfect as a gw.
As far as I can tell, the normal pico uses about 1mA in sleep, whilst the ESP manages about 0.3mA, which is a world of difference when it comes to battery sensors.
I'll need to wait for the release to see the actual measurements of course.
I've got a cisco 12port gig switch here, with a cisco 927 router and combined they average 32w (that also includes my monitor on standby), so this Cisco kit isn't too far off of yours.
Firstly, none of us have any idea what the actual average power consumption is (only the maximum), and personally I'm not aware if there's any extra power consumption from ICs that can do 10G, so everyone's just making assumptions at this point.
Rust isn't a cool language. It has a cool pre/compiler, and a lot of great ideas, but some of the semantics/syntax ideas are unnecessarily complicated and bewildering.
My opinion is they decided to tackle all of the most complicated parts of C by making them even more abstruse in Rust.
We hear about a lot of Cisco bugs/security flaws, but there is good reason for this.
Cisco have always been very open about bugs, with a good system to report them and track progress, and if you actually bother to look at the dates they're usually rectified within a week.
Compare that to other companies that keep security flaws quiet, and some never bother to fix them, it doesn't make them more secure just because you don't hear about their vulns.
You're always going to have flaws in software, the key is to deal with them transparently and fix them quickly.
To compare, Fortinet have slightly less than half of the CVEs than Cisco for 2022, but Cisco have 20x more product lines.
"3 year old core infrastructure".
You're over-egging it a bit there. It's hardware that's 10 years old now, was linksys like quality and cheap even then, and it's no more core infrastructure than my home router is.
For an office you need a SOHO router like the old 800 or newer 900series as a minimum.
Exactly. How do you define an "insult" exactly? Is it anything that results in someone feeling insulted or offended?
If I claim a person's comment is ill-informed, or their knowledge lacking, is that an insult? Would inferring someone's an idiot put me in jail, or would I have to directly call them an idiot, which is all just semantics.
There's a whole world of difference between continued insults with the direct aim to cause harm to someone, and stating that someone is crap at dancing in a TikTok video.
I'm using it now on my dev laptop. Apart from MS deciding to move the icons (because after 30 years of aligning them to the left, I guess they thought people wanted a change), and making the start menu even more annoying, I don't immediately notice any difference.
Oh, actually, every time I look in a directory in windows explorer, it takes 12 seconds to actually list the contents, with a "working on it" message to entertain me. State of the art SSD and OS (?) and 12 seconds to see the files in my downloads folder. Great stuff MS.
" I believe in not trying to avoid doing my bit for how the whole web ecosystem works"
But by blocking scripts, which prevents a lot of the tracking from taking place, then those adverts are less likely to be for things you'd be interested in. This means you're less likely to click and you're not doing your bit for the ecosystem....
Our support department had a number of Python scripts that did Network wide scanning/scraping and automation of 1000s of CPEs. The logs showed the server was often hitting 6GB RAM usage.
We re-wrote them in C and max usage came down to 112MB.
To be fair, it wasn't just Python's fault. The people that coded the original scripts were the type that think they can code in Python because they've skimmed through a few chapters of "Learning Python".
To be fair, Google gave Apple $15billion last year so that it was the default search method on Apple devices. So that payment helps Google collect data from Apple's users.
Besides, you're comparing companies that derive most of their turnover from private data with one that doesn't, which seems rather pointless. Samsung isn't in the top 7 either.
It will likely never happen though.
Remember, the Tories are still hell-bent on banning end-to-end encryption, ensuring government agencies can spy on us without court orders. Our police force can demand our passwords with barely any evidence of a crime, so it's not like we'll suffer any less from this Orwellian crap being out of the EU.
"At least in the UK we've got the opportunity to boot out any politicians that decide to impose laws which violate our privacy."
If by "boot out" you mean to not vote for again (up to) 5 years later.. And realistically, there's little chance of that happening because most voters don't seem to comprehend assaults on privacy. Generally I would have a lot more faith in the EU protecting our privacy than the Tories.
Saying Nuclear Fission isn't safe because of Chernobyl is a bit like saying driving is dangerous because someone crashed whilst driving blind on 30 year old tyres and having no brakes.
Fortunately modern day reactors aren't built on flawed cold-war designs.
I'm not a big fan of Fission (or pro-nuclear as you like to call it), but weighing the odds, I think it's a better way to meet our energy needs than 8.7million people dying worldwide each year from fossil fuels.
There was a chap on Radio 5 today, the writer of some Bitcoin-is-great book touting that Bitcoin mining largely uses renewable energy, and energy sources which would otherwise be unrealised. And yet here we see that the vast majority of mining takes place in countries that come top of the leaderboard for coal power stations....
There was also another stat that I found interesting, which was that the energy it takes just to do a single transaction in Bitcoin could power an average sized home for 2 weeks (no idea how accurate that actually is). Scary stuff.
In a nutshell, Python is (largely) quick and easy to learn/code, which is the main reason why it has gained so much traction, but that comes with a cost.. It's just so damn slow and inefficient (comparatively), hopefully these upcoming changes will help with that.
I consider it more of a scripting language like PHP. A language where anyone can cobble something together.
My car automatically slows down when a slower vehicle is in front (and matches), or if it knows a junction/roundabout is approaching, or if it detects the speed limit has reduced. But I believe this is more to do with making the most of regenerative breaking and convenience rather than a safety/assist feature, and hence it never brakes enough to stop the car entirely (like the Subura/Hyundai)
"but if one's app is something nobody would ever pay for, probably the app is useless."
That's a bizarre statement, that apps "probably" have no worth unless they're monetised.
Most of the apps on my phone are free and useful, whether it's BBC Sound podcasts, MET office, parking apps, controlling features on my car, banking, booking/managing hotels/holidays/flights..... the list is endless.
I'd only ever considering buying an app if the cost is the initial purchase, and never for in-app purchases or loaded with ads. My daughter gets by on the google play-pass for a fixed monthly fee.
I think you're missing the context here.
People mostly bought the ZX Spectrum for things like gaming. The 3 you listed would have been doorstops for that.
The 6502 may have worked in the arcade for VERY early games, but couldn't compete with the Z80.
The 6502 was on it's last legs by the time the ZX came out.
"I will give it a break on that one though, it was a good starting point for many people."
You've missed the point entirely.
"without running gobs of wiring everywhere"
Why would common Wifi/Zigbee/RF devices require gobs of wiring everywhere?
Besides, it's not their technology that's under fire, it's the cowardliness of their upper management and shameful communication with their customers.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
