* Posts by Phil O'Sophical

6698 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

An engineer almost certainly designed the product to be better than what was eventually offered for sale

Look at the PCB in cheap Chinese wall-wart supplies. You'll almost certainly find the holes & silkscreen markings for the interference-suppression components, but no such components fitted. After all, they don't affect normal operation and are 'only' required for the certification process, leaving them out for production saves a significant number of pennies (or fen I suppose) on each unit. Never mind that they can screw up radio for all the neighbours...

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

And you never forget the smell...

Legacy systems running UK's collector are taxing – in more ways than one

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

And many of those rules have been written to close loopholes.

That's the problem. Some bright spark of a chancellor invents a complex new tax rule, and the tax accountants soon find loopholes. Instead of fixing or simplifying the rule, the chancellor just adds new rules to close the loophole. Rinse & repeat, we get warts on warts on warts.

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Mushroom

dead monkey found

If a monkey came in contact with a transmission line I'd be very surprised if there was enough charred meat left to even identify what kind of animal it was, never mind a conveniently dead scapegoat (scapemonkey?).

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Time is of the essence

I'm sure that some Lego Technics and a raspberry pi would solve that. Start it when the alarm goes off, by the time you've finished the three S's (shower, shit & shave) the egg will be perfect.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Shrug

I'd go for the Peugeot 508 plugin hybrid. Friends have one, remarkably nice and competent car.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Heil Wankpanzer...?

pedestrian unfriendly front end

Goes with the pedestrian-unfriendly bell end who owns the company.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Hello .. I'm the manager

In the days before mobile phones I worked with a team that used a pager to summon the on-call techie. There was only an informal rota, and it became standard practice for them to check coat pockets before going home on Friday in case the pager had "fallen" into the pocket.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Pop ups

"work" may be over-egging it a bit...

Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

More people than ever before have learnt how to take part in video calls and other collab-at-a-distance tools since 2019. So the need has, logically, lessened.

Not necessarily. Maybe those new collab tools have just replaced pure phone meetings? They certainly did for my work, but didn't have much effect on our business travel.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Petty

It has a range of <1000nm

Er, you do realise that the plane which flew this week is a ⅓-scale test version? With one seat?

The actual production aircraft is designed to have 4500nm range and 60-80 seats.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: 80 passengers?

It has 4800 miles range, that's easily New York to London.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: went back to assembler

Fortran is 1956 technology.

I suspect that the people who develop the Fortran-2023 compilers would disagree.

The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Cat's out of the bag.

So, who wants to reply with "resign" from "potus@whitehouse.gov" ?

40 years ago, classified Shuttle mission foreshadowed Challenger's fatal flaw

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Most significant

three should have been the bare minimum

Adding additional seals would have either put them closer together, or increased the length of the joint. Both options would have changed the joint's characteristics and could have introduced new and different weaknesses or failure modes. There's no guarantee that the results would have been better.

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

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: It's a lack of understanding

I've come to believe that at a fundamental level a lot of the senior civil service or local government staff simply don't understand the field of computing.

Too many of the "senior" ones still come from a time where computing meant "data processing", so for them it is exactly the same as cleaning or maintenance. They probably still send their correspondance to a "typing pool" to have it written up. The junior ones are used to just grabbing an app from an online store. Neither of them have a clue of how it all actually works.

Apple plugs security hole in its iThings that's already been exploited in iOS

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Use-after-free is one of those programming errors that will be caught by most static analysis tools. There's really little excuse for not scanning all code with them, especially for a large business that can easily afford any software licensing costs.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Jail them

Oracle are just the supplier. Investigate the incompetence of the council, their tender process, and the consultants they pay to advise them.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: "How many "R"s are in the word strawberry?"

"the word strawberry" contains 4 'r's...

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: This sounds like wishful thinking

Good negotiation is about trying to fit two sides positions together in the most advantageous and least destructive ways possible. Unless you're Trump, in which case it's more about looking "strong" and shouting a lot, often achieving very little. But saying you're "a winner". I'd say there was quite a lot of that from the EU back in day too - and I still don't think there's been a huge amount of change.

Sadly very true. If the EU had been willing to just accept that the UK wanted to leave, even if they disagreed, and work to find the best deal for both the UK and the EU, we'd all be in a better place. Their determination to make sure that the UK regretted its decision to go blinkered them to the possibilities of a win-win, they had to portray the UK as the loser. Politicians are not diplomats.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: And

The epithets are only used when one or more parties show such idiocy / lack of critical thinking that they are oblivious to an obvious pack of lies.

True, but I'm sure you could understand the non-EU point of view if you put your mind to it. Actually, no. I'm not so sure.

If you voted for Brexit (or Trump, Reform, FN etc) then own it.

I was ineligible to vote in the Brexit referendum, because I was living in another EU country at the time. How does that fit with your worldview?

But the “boo hoo hoo, they called be nasty names” is snowflakery pure and simple. There there, mummy’s precious little unicorn.

Nice bit of whataboutery, but it won't wash. You can call me any names you like, it reflects more on your sensitivities than mine.

I was very much a supporter of the EEC and it's predecessors like the Common Market & the Coal and Steel Community. They were extremely valuable in helping European countries put aside the post-war tensions and build a successful trading economy. They weren't perfect, nothing like that is, but they really helped build a strong and peaceful Europe.

The conversion of that into the political and fiscal union of the EU in 1993 was an unmitigated disaster for Europe, for multiple reasons.

The many EU countries have very different views on fiscal and social principles; some like the free market and others prefer protectionism; some prioritize individual freedoms, others go more for paternalism and solidarity. As a result much EU legislation isn't based on what everyone agrees on, but on whatever offends them sufficiently little not to reject it. It's why so much EU legislation has tens of thousands of words, to give sufficient ambiguity that it can be sold to all the varied voters.

That only leads one way, to the lowest-common denominator, and the result is the stagnation and mediocrity that has characterised the EU for the past 30 years. It's been left far behind by fast-growing countries like China and the USA, even non-Euro EU members have done better than those in the Eurozone. If the convergence criteria for the euro had actually been taken seriously things might be better, for the few countries that could have met them, but the way the rules were fudged to make it possible for so many countries to be absorbed led directly to the Italian and Greek crises from which the euro still hasn't fully recovered.

At the time of the Maastricht agreement few countries were permitted referendums. One that was, France, has always been a strong europhile, yet even it only voted "yes" by 50.6%. Briitish opinion polls showed people 65% opposed, but we had no referendum.

One of the most serious consequences of that was a very large portion of the population of EU countries feeling ignored, and without any voice. All the mainstream parties push the "more Europe will fix everything" line, so who can those unhappy voters turn to? Unfortunately the answer to that is that many turned go the extreme left and right, whose only common position was a dislike of the EU. We see the rise of the LFI and RN in France, AfD in Germany, Freedom Party in Austria, Vlaams Belang in the Netherlands, 5-Star and Fratelli d'Italia, etc. That's a very, very dangerous situation. If the EU doesn't start to take this seriously it will look very different in 5 years, and not for the better.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: And

Cough. Yes, there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_citizenship

That's not any form of true internationally-recognised citizenship, it's just EU window dressing, means nothing outside the EU. You can't get an "EU passport", nor pay "EU taxes", and if you travel to another country they'll treat you as a national of your specific country. It's a bit like Manchester United declaring all it's supporters as "ManU Citizens", sounds fun but doesn't mean anything outside the club.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: And

Nothing worth having is easy, but if you want it and are prepared to work for it, it's not that hard. I worked on mainland Europe for many years, and had earned the right to become a citizen of an EU country if I wanted it.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: And

What happened to the sunlit uplands and majestic herds of wild unicorns we were promised, Hmmm?

Idiotic governments who were too busy fighting among themselves to actually take advantage of the new situation, of course. As usual.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: And

turned out to be as thick as mince and voted for Brexit

It's possible to have a sensible discussion about the EU, but not with someone who either willfully refuses to accept that reasonable people may have good reasons for voting as they did, or arrogantly assumes "they don't think like me, so they're stupid".

one whose citizenship has been stolen

Citizenship is country-based, there's no such thing as "EU citizenship", if that's what you mean. If you prefer to become a citizen of an EU-member country there's nothing stopping you, of course. I know many British citizens who made that choice.

And before you start with the obvious comeback, I didn't vote for Brexit. I didn't have a vote in that referendum.

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Compiling a list of assets

We once got a Fortran compiler on a CDROM. Didn't mount, some further checking revealed that, although correctly labelled, the CD had actually been pressed with a Bruce Springsteen album.

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

It would also be interesting to know what stopped it after 18 minutes. Did it just fizzle, or get too hot, or trip some safety device... ?

Sage Copilot grounded briefly to fix AI misbehavior

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: When a small number of your customers might mean ALL your customers

You're welcome. In fairness, I only learned about this recently from someone else.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: When a small number of your customers might mean ALL your customers

You need to keep scrolling until you find the relevant HMRC page

On the search return page, there's a line near the top with search options: "All News Images Videos Shopping Web Maps". Just click on "Web" instead of "All" and it should give you the AI-free results.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: SEP

Not mv2, but (axle load)4. That's why modern 48-tonne HGVs do so much damage. The road testing labs don't even bother to test with cars any more, it would take 4000 2-tonne cars to do as much damage as one 48-tonne 6-axle HGV.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Location

My guess is that someone suggested this as an idea to investigate, a manager said "Yeah, worth setting up a team to see if it's viable". Then someone told the PR team on a quiet day and the whole thing got out of hand.

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: The conclusion is obvious, but...

It wasn't just the app, it was the whole system including the test labs and the "free" tests themselves.. A waste of time and money, certainly, but not all thrown just at the app developers.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Yet another no doubt costly report from the Department for the Bleedin' Obvious.

Any chance of them coming up with a workable solution? Or will that have to wait until they've hired a few dozen more management consultants?

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Here we go again...

It's also likely that the more responsible, and tame, porn sites will be the ones which heed this, and so become less available to minors.

The more extreme sites will ignore the rules, or just pay lip service to them, and so will still be available. That's going to have exactly the opposite effect to the desired one, the kids will only be able to see the worst sort of content.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: Age verification

So it's the responsibility of their parents to monitor their use. Not the responsibility of the ISP, nor the website, and certainly not the government.

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Coming back to the UK after a stint in Europe, the sense of malaise and depression was palpable.

I think the French and the Germans know exactly how you feel as well. Spain and Italy, too.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

they ran up a MASSIVE debt and hid it from everyone.

The problem with that theory is that details of public finances are available to all of parliament, not just the government. If there is an alleged black hole, as Reeves claims, and they didn't notice it while they were in opposition, they're even more incompetent than they currently seem to be.

The reality is more likely to be the usual blame game, blame the "previous lot" for messing up so that the incomers can justify whatever unpopular economic dogma they espouse.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
FAIL

Yep but HS2 was a Tory idea to line the pockets or someone's mates.

HS2 was announced in January 2009, when Gordon Brown was prime minister.

UK floats ransomware payout ban for public sector

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

I know of many attacks but none that have paid.

I think you mean "none that has admitted having paid".

Tim cooking up the dough as his Apple pay rises 18% to $74.6M

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

He could buy 49,766 and a half MacBook Pros

Does that allow for staff discount?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

It's all down to perceived value to the company. Fire any one ordinary peon and neither the company or the stock price will notice. Fire the CEO and it should have more of sn impact.

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Putin will be pissing himself laughing

Are we to assume that "Ace2" is your real name, and allows us to know who you are?

Scammers exploit UK's digital landline switch to swipe cash

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: 'Safely Switched'

Plug the router, a phone charger and a lamp into it. Carry on with your life.

And most importantly, test them regularly. I have a couple of small 12v UPSes on my ONT & router (in addition to the big ones on desktop, server, TV etc.). When last tested a year ago they were OK, but in a recent power cut they both failed instantly. Just a month after the end of the warranty, too... Some research revealed that I was far from alone, and the problem was the simplistic Li-Ion battery charge circuit which didn't protect the cells from over- and under- charge, both cells in each UPS were dead. The seller didn't care because they were out of warranty, and the manufacturer, EATON, ignored all attempts to contact them. In the end I replaced the cells with ones that had built-in charge protection, we'll see what happens.

As for as long as the mobile base station's UPS, or the DSLAM at the local cabinet's UPS, though, that's an interesting saga in itself. If you read the Ofcom reports and requirements, you'll see that they recommend that "providers should [i.e. not must] have a solution available that enables access to emergency organisations for a minimum of 1 hour in the event of a power outage in the premises", i.e. that's what they should offer end users. For the street hardware Ofcom "would consider power backup of approximately four hours to be good practice for active fixed access equipment in cabinets at the point of installation", i.e. the usual toothless weasel words that have no legal standing, the providers can ignore them if providing adequate backup is too difficult.

In an older report from 2019 they have some interesting finds, such as: "Fixed broadband services varied from 99.67% to 99.9999%" availability, a far cry from the old days of >5-nines (99.999+%) being regarded as a universal minimum by telcos. For mobiles they note "The worst annual figure was 99.50%, [...]The best was 99.92%". There was also a huge variation between suppliers: "Most fibre broadband services using Openreach’s network also need power at street cabinets, and these all contain batteries designed to offer at least four hours of operation. For customers of KCOM’s network in Hull, the situation is similar, although around 10 % of its broadband cabinets do not have any back-up power. Virgin Media’s network uses a different technology [..] its equivalent to telephone exchange buildings [...] are all protected with between one and three days of back-up power, with some other sites required for its phone and broadband services having four hours and 90 minutes respectively. Its street cabinets do not have any power resilience" (my emphasis). Maybe it's changed recently? Something to think about when choosing a provider.

We did warn you – 2025 may be the year AI bots take over Meta's 'verse

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Anyone who advertises on metà is an Idiot

Fair enough, I knew the quote but couldn't remember the exact source.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Anyone who advertises on metà is an Idiot

Because, as the guy from Target (I think?) said "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half".

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: "that's where we see all of this going"

"recipient of world's first rat penis transplant".

No way, the penis would reject him.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: "Algol68 allows spaces in identifiers."

FORTRAN didn't just allow spaces in identifiers, it disregarded them completely after column 7.

That, plus the ability to create variables on the fly without prior declaration, is said to have caused problems for one element of the early space program. A fragment of code should have been something like:

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀DO 2O I = 1,1O

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀... stuff here ...

20⠀⠀⠀CONTINUE

which would have executed the code within the loop 10 times, incrementing variable "I" from 1 to 10. Unfortunately the code as actually written was:

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀DO 2O I = 1.1O

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ... stuff here ...

20⠀⠀⠀CONTINUE

(note the comma mistyped as a period). As a result, the compiler didn't complain, but created a REAL variable called DO20I, assigned it the value 1.1, and executed the code once, with "I" undefined, likely zero. Oops

Garmin Connect outage leaves folks unable to share their fitness virtue signaling

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: Means to an end

Error 501 Not Implemented

US watchdog sticks probe into 2.6M Teslas over so-called Smart Summon crash reports

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: It is an ASS...

Allegedly what we know know as the UK "Grampian" TV region had been planned as "Scottish Highlands & Islands Television" until the first ident slide was seen...

There's also GEC-Plessey Telecommunications, generally known as "GPT" which caused much amusement in a meeting in France where it sounds like "J'ai pété" ("I farted").

Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

I think you misunderstand my point.

As you note above there are many different window managers, and several different X servers. Everyone I know has similar feelings to you, offer them a choice of Window managers and you get some variant on "I detest both". Offer a choice of distros, you'll hear "Life is much too short for Debian"., etc.

There's really no such thing as "Linux on the desktop", there are hundreds of combinations of Linuxes on desktops. Everyone has their own favorite, which they then customize even further (I do). Every so often someone decides "This is wayyyy too complex, let's make a single, simple one that everyone can use", and what happens? "I want a bit more from my desktop computers than ChromeOS". The result is XKCD. Rinse and repeat.

I've been using X-window desktops for 40-odd years, on VMS, SunOS, Solaris and multiple Linuxes. All different, all continuously changing, largely for the old reason "because you can". We may all grumble about Windows, but the reason it is, and IMHO will remain, the most widely-used desktop is because it's largely consistent. You can go to pretty much any recent Windows system & make it work, without having to figure out which window button means what, or how to bring up a menu, or where the file manager is etc.

As you say yourself, most people don't care about a desktop "which is the way it should be. They shouldn't have to.". They might get that on one platform from a specific Linux desktop, like ChromeOS, but certainly not from any generalised "Oh, it just runs Linux" setup, because there isn't one.