Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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").
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.
if you could actually get an entire OS running in megabytes of memory it would make everything so much more efficient.
You mean like we did until Windows came along? It makes me both sad and annoyed to see "it runs in only 184MB" vaunted as something positive. Make it run in 4MB and I might offer some plaudits.
[Citation needed]
Regulation (EU) 2019/2144 of the European Parliament and of the Council:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=PI_COM:Ares(2021)2243084
See specifically Article 4.
Not for the benefit of the car owner, I suspect.
Indeed not.
Quite apart from VW's own use of this for advertising, for the latest EU-mandated feature of the speed limiter manufacturers are now required to report back to the EU, every 6 months, about how often this "driver aid" is triggered and/or switched off by the user. We soon won't need speed cameras, your car will report you by itself.
in typical BT fashion they'd broken its leg by specifying some modification for some particular purpose which made it unsuitable for anything else.
Ah, like the Newbury labs terminals which were all fitted with special ROMs that had non-standard cursor control sequences so would only work with BT-ized software packages...
No idea who Weiland was.
2nd person hired at MS, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Weiland
This, combined with successive governments' heedless rush towards electric everything, without proper infrastructure planning, is likely to create a situation where energy consumers have no choice but to install their own generation equipment. The result is that 20 years from now we'll have a dirtier and less environmentally-friendly energy infrastructure than we have today.
Of course, that won't stop the government from claiming that we have a world-beating clean energy network, by looking only at the public grid and ignoring the vast private systems which will have become necessary.
If it's an unfamiliar area it's also worth looking for some local walking or wardens groups. They frequently organise walks of varying difficulty, and know what's likely to be passable in current weather. We recently joined a "no mud" walk, where the guide kept us on lanes and tracks, ideal for the saturated conditions.
So a goal of 2030 seems like a good target - gives enough time to make it happen,
Except that, as with a lot of climate change efforts, politicians never actually commit the resources to make it happen. They simply ban something they think is bad, and assume that a good replacement will then appear by magic in the required timeframe. When it doesn't, it's the fault of everybody else except those politicians, of course.
government(s) want to build much faster trains that serve fewer people on a very specific route. I'd don't see the flow chart that starts with "how do we get more people out of cars and onto public transportation" down to "spend billions on HSR".
Running express trains on the same tracks as stopping, local, trains messes up both of them because there are few places where the expresses can pass. As a result you either have to run fewer local trains, leading to the problems you describe, or fewer expresses so that people give up and drive/fly instead, removing the income needed to run the service.
HSR gets the expresses out of the way onto dedicated tracks, so you can run more expresses and more local trains.
The bigger question is why it costs 8x as much to build HSR in the UK than it does in France. It's not all down to environmental fanatics and their £100m bat tunnels.
Back in the 80s we received a delivery of DEC VT220 terminals, fitted with a UK keyboard by default because we hadn't specified anything in particular.
They not only had a £ symbols, but { and } were replaced by ½ and ¼. Not so great for C programmers...
It must have been a common issue, DEC supplied a conversion kit consisting of bags of replacement keycaps.
IIRC it was BT/GPO usage. When DTMF keypads were introduced and phones acquired additional "star services" like short codes and voicemail they didn't want to follow US usage of "pound" since it clearly wasn't a £, and the official "octothorpe" was just too much of a mouthful.
Computers weren't common enough for people to know "hash", and someone decided that it looked like a gate.
You mean when they added the DIFFERENCES command, and DI no longer meant DIRECTORY? That was annoying until you got used to it again. IIRC it did just generate an "ambiguous command" error, though.
I also remember that options were negated by prefixing them with NO, so the "on ... do" error handling was enabled by SET ON, and disabled by SET NOON rather than SET OFF. Logical, but always seemed vaguely strange.
