* Posts by DJO

1847 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2011

Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech

DJO Silver badge

Yes, it's called infrastructure and every planner is (or should be) fully aware of the need for integrated planning when building housing in quantity. Functional, affordable and reliable public transport is also an important part of that but is overlooked far too often.

DJO Silver badge

The same problem is everywhere, housing costs are out of control. Massive housebuilding programs are needed but politicians can't allow that to happen because while houses should be cheaper, the ones owned by their voters which must continue to inflate.

Ludicrous property prices are entrenched and many peoples entire worth is locked in property so if there was a (much needed) revaluation downwards of all property these people would have a lower book wealth, it probably wouldn't actually affect them much but they would think it did because the bottom line figures would be smaller.

DJO Silver badge

You are of course conflating two completely different things to object to one of them, a classic straw man.

Firstly the "state aid" you decry, well yes to a degree, if a company can pay below subsistence and have the state pick up the balance they will. There are circumstances where this is necessary but it should never be by design. If a company can pay a dividend, if a company can pay outrageous amounts to the C suite then they can meet the wage bill and any state aid given to underpaid staff should be clawed back from the company once they are profitable. The government should never subsidise badly or maliciously run companies and they should definitely prosecute if such schemes are exploited.

This is mainly a US problem, in most countries workers have rights and enforceable minimum wages and things like tips are extras not an undefined part of the wages.

As for coverage, that's dumb argument. With people working 40 hour weeks companies manage 24/7 or 9 to 5 for 5 to 7 days with out any problems so reducing the individual hours should present no problems whatsoever.

Singtel loses $260 million tax case in Australia

DJO Silver badge

Steaming

Beijing limits minors to three hours a week of gaming

So how many kids create multiple accounts to get around that? And would it distort the language distribution ratio?

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

DJO Silver badge

Re: Most commenters have missed the point

Common misunderstanding. Big Iron is not about processing speed, many mainframes are not that well endowed in that department but what they can do is I/O, lots of simultaneous I/O, very fast I/O.

Most mainframe tasks involving moving data around and not do a lot of processing on the data.

Consider a Telco, they'll have millions, maybe billions of transactions (calls made) a day and they need to record the details of each one and make sure the right person gets billed for each. Not much processing but a huge data volume to move around.

Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7

DJO Silver badge

If they were 100GB+ then yes but these were just 4.3GB around 20 years old that had not been spun up for 10 years.

To be used someone would need a working ultra wide SCSI card that fits a current motherboard which if new would cost a fortune, if old would probably need some capacitors replacing.

Then what would you have? If they used 5 drives then about 21GB and an annual power consumption that would be greater than just buying a USB stick of higher capacity. Unless the starts can be staggered it'd need a really beefy PSU to cope with 5 drives starting up together, more unnecessary expense just to use drives that are long past their use by date.

OK there might be one person out there with some archaic kit that just has to have a ultra wide SCSI 4.3GB disc but really I doubt it.

These have no viable use that can't achieved easier and cheaper with less old surplus kit. Also after sitting unspun for 10 years it's probable that some if not all wouldn't work and I was not going to waste my time trying to get an ancient SCSI card to work just to test drives prior to disposal.

DJO Silver badge

After having them sit in a cupboard for xx years, last week along with other ancient crap I finally threw away a stack of 4.3GB SCSI drives - I dread think what the purchase costs were for what I dumped that weekend.

Plummer talks to us about spending Microsoft's money on a red Corvette

DJO Silver badge

Re: I've been using 7-zip for ages now

Zip will live on under other guises for ever. A huge number of proprietary file formats are just zips with the name changed. Lots of them like the MS office docx, xlsx etc are just zipped up XML.

Also Dave Plummer was only involved with this specific implementation of zip, it was Phil Katz who came up with the format.

Capita says 2023 cyberattack costs a factor as it reports staggering £100M+ loss

DJO Silver badge

Really

...goodwill impairment charge...

Impairing something that's already a negative value seems a bit quixotic.

Does anybody who's not a financial beneficiary of Crapita hold them in anything other then contempt?

The Who’s Who of AI just chipped in to fund humanoid robot startup Figure

DJO Silver badge

Re: Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

In most "warehouse situations" a humaniform robot offers no advantages over an autonomous fork lift or ceiling track for grabby robots to whizz around on.

Better to design the process so a machine can do it than to design a machine to do a job in the most inefficient way possible.

DJO Silver badge

Re: Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

"Tethered"

This is not for control or safety, it's for power. With current or projected foreseeable battery technology it will be impossible to build a self contained humaniform robot that'll be able to run for more than an hour or so between recharges, (unless you decide to go nuclear).

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

DJO Silver badge

Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

The rationalisation was to allow school kids to have daylight when going to school in the mornings.

DJO Silver badge

Unless we alter the Earths orbit we are stuck with having to make periodic adjustments to keep the year aligned. No amount of changes to the calendar or the measurement of time will change that.

I suppose we could alter the rotation rate and make the days a bit longer and chop 1.25 of them off the year. Technically doable but it would mean bleeding off a lot of angular momentum.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

DJO Silver badge

Re: Fact or Fiction?

I use AI/ML for simple, repetitive tasks in my coding, usually having to correct the generated code

Is the time you spend checking the generated code greater or lesser than the time it would take you to write the same from scratch?

I suspect in most cases it takes longer to check than to write it yourself and anybody who uses generated code without checking it thoroughly is going to have unpredictable and crashy programs. I'm sure AI/ML will get better but for programming critical software from design to publish, it's unlikely to ever be better than a meatsack.

DJO Silver badge

Not in my lifetime

I use Visual Studio 2022 with the super-duper souped up intellisence or copilot (or whatever they call it) and while it does make some helpful suggestions it also make really stupid ones. I've yet to decide if the time saved by the good ones exceeds the time spent undoing the stupid ones. Most of the helpful ones were what I was going to enter anyway so all it saves is half a line of typing.

AI can do the simple stuff but is there really a demand for a million different "Hello World" applications? As soon as you start doing something really complicated the AI is worse than useless.

Also it's kind of important not to allow a skills vacuum to form when the current programmers start to die off.

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

DJO Silver badge

Re: Mmmmmm

I doubt if many people are interested in your 5 (or whatever) year old knackered phones.

Most of the second hand market are from early adopters (aka idiots) who replace their phones as soon as a new shiny hits the market, expired contract jobs, over-purchases and end of line inventory clearance.

I've got a recon Sammy S10+ which looks new and has (so far) exhibited no issues.

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

DJO Silver badge

Re: Follow the loss

There are plenty of ultra short haul routes around, mainly serving islands where electric aircraft would make sense.

What they get here is experience of operating loads of cheap little 4 seater jobs instead of going straight to the expensive 25 seater ones. Electric aviation is still young, any knowledge gained is valuable.

DJO Silver badge

Please maintain the approximate number of significant digits when converting to avoid introducing false accuracy. (just like every bloody (non-tech) journalist ever)

The figures in freedom units won't be accurate to the inch so:

750m to 1250m (or 1km ±250m), range up to 145km and an airspeed between 200 and 225 km/h

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

DJO Silver badge

£275m sounds a bit cheap

It cost £2.5m to build which allowing for inflation is around £70m so not a bad deal. The issue is land prices have gone from silly to absolutely insane, having said that, it's tall and thin, it does not occupy a lot of ground area.

Realistically it's going to be a liability over time, maintaining a listed building is always expensive and one as unique as this will have unique and expensive problems.

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

DJO Silver badge

Re: Refrigeration

Brilliant, as soon as you take your chilled toy out, condensation will form inside it and you are back to square one.

More good advice: Concentrated sulphuric acid is an excellent desiccant but to be picky there are slight contraindications when immersing a phone in it.

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

DJO Silver badge

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

an ever-increasing house value

And in a few words you have the reason for a fucked up and unbalanced economy.

When I was but a sprog an average house would cost 3 to 4 times the average annual wage which was affordable by most people in full time employment. Wage rises and house price (and rent) increases were roughly in step.

Then came Thatcher who deregulated housing, sold off almost all the state owned housing and forbade local councils from building replacement housing, a magic combination guaranteed to send housing costs through the roof to the point now that it is impossible for one person on a reasonable wage to buy a house.

Back then housing would account for at most 25% of one persons income, now for many people it's over 50% each for a couple. This is not a sustainable economic model, either they step up house building to post-war levels or there will be a market crash when nobody can afford the ludicrously inflated prices any more.

Government schemes to make housing more affordable are all doomed to fail and end up with the opposite effect - for example - if the government give people a grant or allowance to help with a first buy, all that happens is the vendors increase the prices by the same amount but when the scheme ends they do not lower prices so all such schemes manage is to ratchet prices ever higher.

DJO Silver badge

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

Their pension is fully paid by current taxpayers

And for the 40 or so years they were "current" taxpayers they were financing the "current" pensioners out of their tax. As pTerry was oft to remark, "What goes around, comes around".

Just because successive governments are too short sighted to provide long term financing for pensions is no reason for screwing around with pensions. They've already increased the retirement age and will continue to do so, the current crop of people new to work will probably have to work until they are over 70 before they can retire.

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

DJO Silver badge

Re: Question is...

ad-blockers are on less than 3%

If that's so one must wonder why they exert any effort at all to circumvent the blocks.

DJO Silver badge

Re: Question is...

In theory perhaps but in the real world a lot of people are advert antagonistic and will actively avoid products that are forcefully advertised. Flinging ads at that sector is not just a waste of money but counter productive.

Also some ad flingers fight against the blocks - Do they really think if someone sees an advert through a vector they thought was blocked and will think "Gosh, that's clever, I'll buy that product now" instead of the far more probable: "Curse <company> to hell, they'll never get a penny from me".

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

DJO Silver badge

Re: Simple solution?

I think it would be that Amazon are acting as an intermediary agent for the seller and as the point of contact with the customer it's up to them rectify any issues and then take action against the seller,

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

DJO Silver badge

Re: Why Go to all that trouble?

Why bother, just nick the unencrypted back up discs which should be locked in a safe but seldom are.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

DJO Silver badge

Re: Priorities

Perhaps that's the answer, come up with a spurious but vaguely possible way high energy physics has a defence use and watch all the funding problems just disappear.

The FCC wants to criminalize AI robocall spam

DJO Silver badge

So just block them. It's not like that wouldnt be hard to automate either.

What? And lose the revenue from each call made - now you are just being silly.

As an "innocent" party the telcos probably make more profit from the robo-calls than the people actually making the calls as they will have a tiny success rate but the telcos profit from every call.

If you want to stop robo-calls you need it to affect the telcos bottom line otherwise there is no incentive for them to throw away revenue.

Dems and Repubs agree on something – a law to tackle unauthorized NSFW deepfakes

DJO Silver badge

Re: Americans are braindead

This has been an issue for years

Longer - as soon as somebody saw the possibilities offered with paper photographs, scissors and glue this was an issue. Probably about 20 minutes after the first photograph was developed.

As for painting, well there's always been a degree of "artistic licence" when producing an idealized image for a paying customer. Not everybody wanted "warts and all".

China puts homegrown GPUs and other AI infrastucture on its national to-do list

DJO Silver badge

Re: 'homegrown'

Yes. It's their turn - 150 years ago America was stealing intellectual property from Europe wholesale, 75 years ago it was Japan and in a few years it'll be somebody else stealing from China.

White goods giant fires legal threats to unplug open source plugin

DJO Silver badge

Re: Service with a smile

Oh you naive thing.

More likely:

"Serial # 123456 here, my reciprocating dolly posser is very slightly worn - Send a salesman round to sell a new machine to these suckers."

DJO Silver badge

Re: So the washing machine connects to AWS

...For roughly 9,900s a week, it's sitting in my kitchen, switched off...

Given that there are 604,800 seconds in a week, you must do a hell of a lot of washing.

[I think I know where you went wrong, there are 10,080 minutes in a week]

ICO fines spam slinging financial services biz

DJO Silver badge

Actually that's comparatively high. For 31,000 text messages that comes to well over £1 per infringement while most previous fines worked out to just a few pence per message.

Of course the odds of them actually paying the fine are not particularly good.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

DJO Silver badge

Re: Curious 6000kva?

Cognac? Are you saying even the Spanish won't drink Spanish brandy? :-)

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

DJO Silver badge

Re: 7kW

The easiest solution from an administrative perspective is a mileage tax, the cars are stuffed with all sorts of smarts and know exactly how far you've driven and will have no qualms about ratting you out to the taxman if asked nicely.

The cars also know exactly how much electricity is pumped into them so they could tax the power that way and it would be fairer as drivers of heavier cars would pay more so as it would mean the rich paying more than the poor, there's no chance of it being done that way.

DJO Silver badge

Re: "comes from renewable energy, we're told"

Yeah right - of course there won't be small print in the supply contract stating something along the lines of "we will provide power exclusively from green sources when it is available, at other times power will be from the general grid" - no that would never happen.

DJO Silver badge

Re: "comes from renewable energy, we're told"

...from renewable energy...

Not denigrating renewable energy, far from it - we need as much as possible.

But - an electron from coal and an electron from wind are the same and once on the grid it's impossible to tell them apart. By claiming one thing uses "just" renewable sourced power is (unless they have their own generation on site) just greenwashing as it means another power consumer will have to use fossil sourced power and the overall ratio of green to ungreen remains the same.

Swarms of laser-flown bots visiting a planet light years away – and more NASA-funded projects revealed

DJO Silver badge

Re: A couple of issues to be sorted?

Where do these tiny bots get the power to beam messages back?

Proxima Centauri.

One tiny bot can't push message 4+ light years but it can push one say a quarter of a LY to a trailing probe which in turn repeats the signal to another probe behind it and so on. Perhaps "swarm" is the wrong description, "column" or "line" might be better but does not sound so dramatic.

You'd need at least 3 types of mini-craft, the ones at the front would be advance observers which would send messages back to the second wave which would be the actual science probes telling them what to look at and the third set would be a long trail behind of message repeaters that have no other function but to enable communications.

How do they slow down?

They don't.

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

DJO Silver badge

It's also a handy lightweight rtf editor. Admittedly the rtf it generates is a bit idiosyncratic (= completely non-standard) but it worked and for quick & dirty edit you could do the job in less time than it takes the latest incarnation of Word to load.

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

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Re: Honestly

It's "Microsoft being helpful" and that is always a pain.

To speed up and widen the search they stuff everything into a database and search that instead of the disc. Updating the database is not rapid so it's not done every day so the stupid search will often miss things that a simple recursive search would find in a second but it will find stuff on the net you are not interested in - Is it too hard for them to understand the difference between a local search and a WWW search, apparently it is.

Microsoft being helpful is the bane of my programming life. The way long numbers are helpfully converted to scientific notation or dashes (ASCII 45) magically become em-dashes (ASCII 8211) in one app and (ASCII 150) in another. The latest joy is Visual Studio 2022 truncates strings in the immediate pane so you have to extract long strings (like SQL queries) in substring chunks and rejoin them.

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

DJO Silver badge

Re: it's 1030 and we have to open the bar

Venues vary. When I joined the company I work for there were just a couple of dozen employees so the Christmas do was a coach trip to a really good restaurant with an open bar. When the company grew to about 50 that was scrapped and we used the large meeting room for a catered buffet with good quality booze including champagne. Now with well over a 100 that's not possible so it's off to function halls somewhere for some bulk catered food and 2 or 3 free drinks including a glass of crappy Prosecco.

I suppose this is inevitable, when a company is small everybody knows everybody else so nobody is going to make a total tit of themselves but in a large company when most people are just anonymous faces to most other people the opportunities for a few people to screw up increase greatly.

DJO Silver badge

Re: I guess the truth hurts.

Something like the old desk top publishing programs which seem to have bloated themselves out of existence.

Seems a common thread, something really useful gets more and more functions added until it's too cumbersome to use and then it either dies or gets bought out and merged into a suite and after a few years is never seen again.

Tesla to remote patch 2M vehicles after damning Autopilot safety probe

DJO Silver badge

Re: "recall"

Not at all, I've seen ICE fires that were easy to extinguish and once a few damaged parts were replaced and perhaps a respray of the bonnet the was as good as it was before the fire. I'm sue we've all seen cars with strange rust patterns on the bonnet, they are generally the result of an minor engine fire.

Equally a cabin fire (dropped ciggy on the upholstery) in either sort of car will probably not be a write off - there are fires and fires and they are all different.

DJO Silver badge

Re: "recall"

While the EV fire rate is lower many ICE fire are easily contained and dealt with and the car may be economically repairable. With an EV fire all you can do is stock up on marshmallows (and very long sticks) and wait for it to burn itself out.

So while there are more ICE fires it would be interesting to know what proportion of them result in a write off to make a more meaningful comparison.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

DJO Silver badge

Re: Petunias

Oh no, not again.

DJO Silver badge

Re: Have they tried

Turning it off and on again

How 1990's/IT Crowd.

We "power cycle" equipment, "turn off and on" indeed (shakes head sorrowfully). Actually "power cycle" has been around for while, does anyone have an exciting new 2020's term?

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

DJO Silver badge

Yay, well done, you have described the most regressive tax system possible. The poor will pay most of their income in tax while the rich will pay the tiniest proportion possible. All you will do is drive millions into poverty and make the rich even richer. The exact opposite of what a fair and progressive tax system is supposed to do.

World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan

DJO Silver badge

Other than cost and intermittency. Burning banana peels for electricity also has no downsides

Are you really that dumb or just pretending for the lols?

Wind is by far the cheapest power available in quantity. Intermittency does not matter, there is always wind blowing somewhere, especially offshore. This fantasy you have of all windmills idly sitting there while everybody suffers power cuts is just that, a ridiculous fantasy. Once again - wind is not the only source but part of an integrated energy policy, yes if someone was so stupid to rely on wind alone then there would be issues but nobody is that stupid it's just an absurd strawman argument.

Burning ANYTHING releases CO₂ which is a pretty major downside unless you unilaterally decide CO₂ is not a greenhouse gas. Yes burning crop waste is not too much of an issue as it's not fossil CO₂ but reducing emitted CO₂ also has no downsides.

I don't understand why you are so vehement in this - ever heard of the "precautionary principle"? If we cut CO₂ and it turns out you were right then no harm done. If we don't cut CO₂ and you are wrong then there is huge damage so from a basic logical position we should do everything to reduce CO₂ emissions. And considering every single piece of evidence suggests you are completely wrong then CO₂ reduction would seem the most prudent approach.

Steam replace wind and water so industry could be sited where people lived instead of where resources were available. Where natural power was available near to residential it was continued to used because it's cheaper than steam, there's still windmills grinding flour and watermills are still to be found.

DJO Silver badge

And the scientists who work for oil companies are somehow more honest than academic scientists many of whom have tenure so they get paid regardless of their opinions.

Look at it this way - all the scientists who say climate change is a real and present danger work for universities or other independent bodies who are not financed by vested interests. All the scientists with opposing views work for or are financed by polluting industries such as oil or coal. Which group is more likely to give an unbiased view?

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

DJO Silver badge

Re: A strikingly important article

Good luck - I put loads of stuff onto DVD-R and put the discs in a proper folder and kept the folder somewhere without wild fluctuations of temperature or humidity.

Maybe 25% of them are readable.

Oddly the few rewritable DVDs I had were all perfectly readable which is the opposite of what I would have expected.