Posts by hairydog 150 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2011
There are two approaches. You can build to web standards or you can cobble websites together and tweak them until the seem to work.
If you choose the latter, your wobbly pile of poo will only work on some browsers so ypu need to warn the others off.
If you codebit properly, it works. IE.2 is long gone.
I upgraded a laptop that was running XP to Zorin a year or two ago.
The non-technical user says it's fine once you get the hang of the apps having different names. Faster to boot, more responsive than XP had been, and the cooling far runs cooler. And updates are easier and less disruptive.
Right now I have five PCs running Win10 but they also have 0patch running so I'm not sure which will go to Zorin and which will stay on 10.
None will go to 11, that's for sure!
There may be better distributions than Zorin, but it seems to work just fine, and happily runs any peripherals plugged in, including an HP scanner that has been 'dead' since Windows 7.
The main problem with desktop Unix is all the choices and the nerds picking holes in one distribution or another in a very unhelpful way.
Zorin seems fine to me. There may be better, but it'll do.
I have never worked for BT, but I have worked at BT.
There I noticed an offer to employees of a service (may have been mobile or broadband, I forget) that was very good value, and was for life.
In the (very) small print, it said thst lifetime was defined as being as long as you worked for BT.
I'm not sure if that was corporate arrogance or a death threat. Quit or retire and your life is over.
With that company, either or both were possible.
It seems as if Windows devices only use the primary dns if it works. If it doesn't work, they switch to the secondary dns until that doesn't work. Stupid, but this is Windows.
I used to run two piholes, but now the primary is Adguard Home, backed by a pihole secondary. Not yet sure if that's better, though.
What, exactly, does Birmingham Council do that every other council in the country does mot do? I accept that Birmingham is bigger than other authorities, but they don't seem to have more responsibilities than smaller authorities.
So why can't they buy/lease/hire a clone of a working system, rather than reinvent the (square) wheel yet again?
None of my computers meet Microsoft's requirements for Windows 11, so even if I wanted the extra surveillance and intrusion. I couldn't have it.
When Windows 10 is no longer safe enough,they will all switch to Zorin or similar.
Not a single new Windows feature in the last decade has been of any interest or use to me.
Clearly I'm not their target demographic. I wonder who is.
This is a genuine question.
How is it hard to fork a project?
I thought you just do it. At first, you have a precise copy of the forked-from project. That's not hard.
OK, I accept that it would be difficult (OK, near impossible) to turn Wordpress code into good software, but the forking bit looks really easy.
What am I missing?
I really don't understand why Wordpress is so popular. It is slow, bloated, insecure, difficult to use well. And it's from a mini-Musk.
But it is definitely popular. I stopped hosting it on our servers because of its security holes (or its plugins' security holes) many years ago, and some clients have chosen to go elsewhere rather than use something else.
Seems to me that Boeing is like a lot of other businesses who have offices but are not too clear how much of the office space is needed. Monitoring occupancy makes sense, as long as it's monitoring desks, not users. I've worked in offices crammed to the doors with desks, but never enough chairs. I've worked in offices that had my team huddled in one clutch amongst vast swathes of empty desks. And that was long before the pandemic.
Im not sure where to find a secondhand thinkcentre for less than £20, but assuming you can, I can tell you what a Pi can do that a thinkcentre can't: be frugal on power.
I have an HP Microserver Gen8 downstairs, switched off because it uses too much power to be left running 24/7. You can run loads of Pis and still use less power (and make less noise).
Timber not really a long-lasting construction material?
Well, the wall behind me is timber framed. We know when the timber was felled, and can safely assume the wall was built that year or the next.
Less confident about whether the watle and daub infill is original or not, but it may be.
The timber was felled in 1531.
I don't think soc In the UK, our mobile phones have always connected to mobile base stations, each with one or more cells.
The system has always been referred as a cellular network, because it is.
The handsets have never been referred to as cellphones, because they are not.
To call a mobile phone a 'cellphone' displays a misunderstanding (or, more likely, a total obliviousness) of how it all works.
All AI seems to be is automated plaigiarism. Yes, there are issues about paying for the input, but it goes deeper than that.
Already any google search returns loads of web pages that are clearly AI summaries of someone else's work.
Soon the copied summaries will drive the original works into extinction, and so machines will almost entirely feed on the output of other machines.
It would be good if Google could identify AI content and provide a way to exclude it from search results.
The services are not charged for at the point of use, but they are not free.
We pay for them throigh advertiser overheads, but more importanlty we pay for them in social cost.
The damage to society of unaccountable, hidden manipulation of the information peope are presented with is incalculable, but huge.
Excess renewable power drives down the price.
Making and storing hydrogen is really inefficient, but that's not important if it is running on a cheap byproduct (excess energy).
So perhaps the answer is to have far more renewable sources, generate green hydrogen with the excess and use that to power datacentres, heat homes and be fuel for trucks as well as powering standby generation for times of grid shortfall
Excess renewable power drives down the price.
Making and storing hydrogen is really inefficient, but that's not important if it is running on a cheap byproduct (excess energy).
So perhaps the answer is to have far more renewble sources, generate green hydrogen and use that to power datacentres, heat homes and be fuel for trucks.
The issue isn't simple CO2 per mile driven. It's more matter of embedded carbon in making, running and disposing of the vehicle.
Even on that metric, a small EV is good, particularly in comparison to the ludicrous tanks Americans choose.
However there is also the environmental impact of the raw materials mining and the tyre dust emissions.
Comparison with ICE vehicles is a bit silly, though. Private cars are completely unsustainable, and we as a species urgently need to find an alternative we can accept - or we shall face extinction in one or two lifetimes.
The only usual way of taking action for cases of copyright theft is to prove that your content has been taken.
AI makes this proof almost impossible by anonimising what it steals.
For offences of theft of physical objects, there is the offence of "Go Equipped For Theft". So your gloves, jemmy and swag bag can get you arrested.
Why isn't the equivalent used for copyright theft?
After all, AI almost always depends on stealing other people's work.
Why isn't this prosecuted?
I find it hard to believe they care. There is fibre to the manhole 230 metres away from my house,
Unfortunately, the fibre does not do the final leap to the pole feeding our connection, even though poles in the opposite direction get fibre.
The pole after ours gets fibre from the other direction. Just our pole is without fibre.
How hard would it be to let us have fttp? Too hard for Openreach, it seems.
This ridiculous scenario is played out up and down the country. Councils are suckered into expensive, complex bespoke systems that probably won't work.
The reality is that Birmingham council may be bigger than the others, but their functions are the same as every other council.
Yes, Birmingham may have more dustbins, but the task of arranging to empty them is only different in scale.
What is needed is to find a LA with a working system and replicate that (with local data and scaled to suit). Not to reinvent the bespoke wheel at huge cost and risk
I keep reading about AI. It is supposed to stand for Artificial Intelligence. But that's intelligence in the 'espionage' meaning, not the 'thinking' meaning.
All AI seems to be good at is Automated Plagiarism. It steals other people's work and anonymoses it.
Without people to steal from AI will end up stealing from AI.
Having worked on two parts of npfit over several years, I could see not only that it was going badly, but why.
Basically the core "spine" and database part was terribly badly designed simply because it was based in a 'quick and dirty' demo setup that wasn't designed for scaling to production, but 'the authority' insisted in using that.
They also insisted on regular version releases so close together that there were two separate development streams leapfrogging each other. An utter and complete waste of resources.
The implimentation of the system at endpoints was mostly a matter of integrating it with one of a handful of existing systems.
The sensible approach would have been for a given contractor to integrate all instances of one system no matter what the location.
Instead it was done regionally, so each contractor had to cope with all the systems as well as accommodating varied (and contradictory) requirements for each trust - and sometimes for each hospital!
It could have been excellent. It should have worked, but it was crippled by inappropriate administrative restrictions.
Since then, technology has moved on, but political incompetence is still the same problem
I like Windows 10. It seems to be fairly dependable and fast, tolerably secure.
I'm sure there are people who love the idea of tabs in notepad, but I've used notepad++ for many years.
Most of the major features announced for Win10 seem to be about things like live tiles, which I disabled in the first five minutes after installation.
If MS wants to leave Windows 10 features unaltered and just have security updates, that seems perfect. Thank you, Microsoft
Their routers may well be pants. Certainly the firmware in thier mobile modem/routers is a bit clunky.
But my goodness thier RF stuff is way ahead of the competition. Huwaei phones work where other brands can't even connect to the network,
And my experience of ther laptops and tablets is that they are way better than anything else on the market.
I'm told (but have no evidence) that Huawei telecoms kit (such as FTTC cabinets) is far more reliable than the other brands.
Seems to me that Huawei have committed the sin of being successful but not being American.
Yes, the fibre passes my house. What a pity it isn't possible to be connected to that fibre. Seems that the fibre feed goes to poles in either direction, but not to the pole feeding the houses where I live. So it passes, like an express train. I'm not allowed to be a passenger.
Yes, they have rolled out 5G, though not to here.
Where I can get 5G on EE, it seems to be exactly the same speed as 4G in the same place. Where's the advantge?
Leaving aside the dangers from the rotors, the carbon cost, and the sheer silliness of this, it's pretty obvious that it will only be able to use "normal" roads that have no pedestrians and no other traffic.
Anyone who has cycled along as a vehicle has passed by closely knows the power of the slipstream. Roads are twisty, hilly, and pass shelted sections then sections where wind is funneled in. Vehicles' grip on the surface is an assumption inherent in the design of roads.
Basically, this is a big passenger-carrying drone, and drones are not happy travelling along the ground. It won't work. It will have to fly up higher.
Coffey has said that there is currently 16GW of solar capacity in the UK (I thought it was nearer 12GW) and that the government intends to increase this to 70GW.
Now I am not advocating belief in anything a Tory politician says, but that's a lot more than three times as much
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