Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Researchers peer into crystal ball to see future where everyone's ID is tied to their smartphone

Re: "mobile versions will be easy to scale quickly"

about the same to be spent on the purchase of a crystal ball and some chicken entrails

Just use Facebook, it's free & equally accurate. Less messy, too.

Science and engineering hit worst as Euroboffins do a little Brexit of their own from British universities

Re: ICL..?

why does a degree in philosophy from a Russell group Uni give you more of a leg up in a software career than a comp sci degree from elsewhere.

Exam boards for GCSEs can create a level playing field because most pupils sit the same exam, but I doubt very much if the experience and finals exam after 4 years at an Oxford college or MIT or Stanford is comparable to that from an ex-Poly. It might be, but it couldn't be assumed, any more than you could assume that the CEO from a local family business is as competent as the CEO from a Fortune 500 company, even if they have the same title & years of service.

Re: Brexit bollocks

why the leavers fear a second referendum

It's not fear of one that would be a problem to me, but that it wouldn't help.

If there were some chance of a 60-70% clear majority for any option it might be useful, but opinion polling shows the same level of uncertainty as there was in 2016, so the result is likely to be another tiny difference. If the turnout is less than the first one then everyone will argue that it's invalid. If it's, say, 51% leave, it's pointless. If it's 51% remain then the leavers will demand a third one in another couple of years, and we'll have another 3 years of stalling and arguing while the EU sits back and laughs. All I can see coming out of another referendum is a boost for the LibDems and Brexit as people move to the extremes, at the expense of the other parties. Do you really think that something like a 51% remain vote followed by a Tory/Brexit Party coalition after an election would solve anything?

Re: Brexit bollocks

Given the demographics of which age groups voted to stay or leave, it's highly likely that the voting population of the UK today would skew a different way.

No, it's not. If that were true we'd be solidly 90% remain by now, but if anything the anti-EU sentiment has been growing over the past 25 years.

Young people are idealistic and inexperienced in the ways of the world, older people are realists. Somewhere in the middle young people become older, and change their minds. It's always been the case.

Re: So...

But we in UK have been doing our own thing instead of learning from Europe and this is why our Unis are in relative decline.

That must explain why the UK has 4 universities in the world top 10, and the nearest other EU uni is at #50

Re: Brexit bollocks

in a country you can have 'agree', 'disagree and get on with it anyway', or 'disagree and try to change it'.

Of course, but "disagree, gloat, and do fuck all to make it work" isn't a constructive option.

Re: Brexit bollocks

"roughly half of the population who voted the other way."

Please don't fall into the same statistical trap so many leave voters do: 17.4m is not HALF the country.

And you even quoted the part where the poster clearly said "half the population who voted", and NOT "half the country". If you don't vote, your opinion won't be counted.

Canonical adds ZFS on root as experimental install option in Ubuntu

Re: I smell profit

Did they ever explain just WHY none of the other licenses suited them?

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9624

Re: Wow

Snapshots are not backups, not by a long stretch.

Not until you send them offsite, which ZFS makes easy to do with no service interruptions.

All roads in US cable biz GTT's Brit network seem to lead to Menwith Hill

They all seem to lead to Blackpool as well. Is this some secret plan to influence ERNIE and control who wins the Premium Bonds? Or are they stealing our random numbers for some other nefarious purpose?

There's also a very suspicious connection to Brussels as well. Who's listening to whom?

That's bang out of order: Threesome hookup app 3Fun leaked lovers' data, locations, pix – report

Mind bleach

not to mention 10 Downing Street

Theresa May in a threesome? Please, please, pleeaase don't mention it. Ever again.

Cambridge Analytica didn't perform work for Leave.EU? Uh, not so fast, says whistleblower

Re: So what?

Yet that kind of centralisation is totally alien to most of our European neighbours. It would never occur to a German or Italian that so much power over his/her region be concentrated in Berlin or Rome

The UK has roughly equal numbers of public empoyees working in central and local government. Germany has relatively few at Federal level, but regional and municipal numbers are similar to UK central and local goivernment. France has far more in central government than local government.

France, in fact, really takes the biscuit in some areas. The UK has around 400k civil servants, France has 1.3m!

That said, you're confusing the people who make the rules with those tasked to implement them. Most civil servants, regional or central, are there to push around the papers which implement the rules made by central government. Decentralizing that power simply adds additional layers, it does not grant any more freedoms.

There are hard Brexiteers like Rees-Mogg and the ERG who want out with no deal and soft Brexiteers who want a proper deal.

That mischaracterizes the situation. Everyone wants a proper deal, the whole reason for leaving is to have the freedom to make our own deals with all our trading partners, including those in the EU. The difference is simply that some of us are prepared to leave without a deal, and build a deal later, rather than let the EU force a bad deal on us as the price for allowing us to leave.

Re: So what?

Then you haven't been looking.

Oh I have, I assure you, and not just from within the UK so I have a better view than many of the commentards here.

Europe is more prosperous, more peaceful, more effective (at controlling megacorporations) than ever before.

Really? That would explain the rise of the far right and left, the ever-increasing demands from nationalists in Scotland, Catalonia etc.? And the screwed-up tax codes that let Facebook et al. continue to grow despite the ineffective fines? And the economic omnishambles in Greece, Spain, and others?

That wasn't an accident - that's what the Treaty of Rome was designed to do.

The Treaty of Rome was signed 62 years ago, and it did indeed do a lot of good at the start. Sadly it was corrupted over the past 25 years (as I said) by the subsequent treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon which turned a successful co-operative of nations into a fledgling empire controlled by people who pay less and less attention to what their citizens want, and concentrate ever more power into the hands of an arrogant elite.

Re: So what?

(leaving aside the fact that it's nowhere near £350m)

Closer to £200m/week.

for the good of European society.

For what some politicians tell us is the good of European society (whatever that actually is), i.e. good in that they get to be in charge of it. From what I've seen of "European society" these past 25 years those politicians have done more harm than good, we certainly don't seem to be moving towards a big happy family all financially secure and in agreement over what's best, quite the opposite. The more people try and centralize control under themselves, the more resistance there will be.

We need a Europe of good neighbours, co-operating together. for what we agree is the common good. Not a dysfunctional family with Daddy telling us what's good for us.

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

Re: You put the urine in the wrong place...

"Peeing on the fox" has a wonderfully euphemistic sound to it.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Re: 6 days ! WTF ?

The VNX is not Symmetrix, it is their midrange product. The VNX is to the Symmetrix what an ATR regional jet is to the A350.

I know, I have a lot of experience with Symmetrix boxes and they are great kit, but it doesn't change the principle. Three weeks untroubled testing for something that is expected to run continuously for years, whether VNX or DMX, doesn't really have any relation to the kind of testing an ATR or an A350 would have.

Re: 6 days ! WTF ?

remember EMC was not shipping Symmetrix (significantly cheaper than an airliner) without 3 weeks running flawlessly,

I'd expect disk drives to run flawlessly for years without a reboot, so three weeks testing isn't much. It wouldn't have found this EMC problem https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/vnx2_reboot_issue/ for which the solution was, yes you guessed:

1. Reboot SPA

2. Wait 30 min

3. Reboot SPB

before 80 days had passed.

How many airliners never actually get powered down completely sometime in every 6 days?

UK digital network Openreach takes 15 electric vans for a spin

When you say the designers haven't caught on - Tesla have demonstrated a swappable pack - that can swap two vehicles packs in less time than it takes to fill a 'current fashion'* car with fuel.

So you need a warehouse full of packs on charge ready for a swap. How many packs per day would it have to be able to process (i.e. how many cars does a regular petrol station fill each day)? What's the power feed required to supply that level of charge? What about the air-conditioning needed to remove the charging heat? What's the fire risk of that many Li-Ion cells all in one place (they're much harder to extinguish than a burning petrol or diesel tank)?

Lots of bright ideas, but most of them are unworkable for anything except the current niche market.

we have plenty of street lights on our streets...powered by leccy - so why not convert them to have sockets at their bases and some internal electronics to monitor the charge supplied to each vehicle

Sodium street lights draw around 400W, LED ones closer to 40W. Even a basic home EV charger is in the 3kW - 7kW range. There's no way the street light power feed could cope with charging a streetful of EVs overnight. This is the big problem, when people hear "charge up" they think of tiny gadgets that they use for their phone. Most people have no idea of the amount of energy stored in a car's fuel tank (until it goes bang) and no idea of just how much power is required to charge an EV fleet. Do the maths first.

Re: apples for apples

Motorway service stations already have pretty hefty electrical connections

Nowhere near comparable to what they'll need for 8-10 supercharger++ connections, running 12 hours a day. Do the maths.

and upgrading those will be in their business interest

Upgrading the sevice stations is only part of the problem. If you calculate the amount of energy used by UK road transport today, even if you then halve it because electric cars are more efficient, and add it to the current national grid draw, you get a figure that requires every power station in the country to be running flat out, 24/7/365. That isn't possible. It's been suggested that if we move totally to EV transport we'd need 10 more Sizewell Bs.

None of the electric vehicle drivers I know have ever had an issue plugging in to charge on a long journey...

Of course not, it's a tiny niche market today. 220,000 cars and 24,000 charge points. There are 38 million ICE cars registered in the UK, supplied by 8500 petrol stations. That indicates the scale of the problem. If all 38 million cars were EVs, you'd need 4 million charging points for the same supply/demand ratio.

Re: apples for apples

surely it's better to say, own an EV for 90% of your journeys and then rent a longer-range vehicle for the few trips a year that need one, rather than just winge and stick to petrol/diesel for everything.

But at the point where 90% of journeys can be made by EVs, who's going to make other vehicles? What incentive is there to maintain a fuel distribution network for them? A big problem is that they will not be required by anyone for much of the time, but every bank holiday weekend demand will be huge. Where will they be kept during quiet periods, and how can any rental business work financially if most of their expensive assets are laid up 90% of the time?

There's also the haulage issue. There's no sign of electrtical replacements for long-distance haulage, trains can help in some cases but that meets massive union opposition. We'll still need a diesel fuel network for those vehicles.

Alcohol or bio-diesel is a far easier change to implement and manage, and there are technologies in preliminary development that can create alcohol from water & atmospheric CO2, plus energy. That's an excellent way to use intermittent renewables like wind and solar, which can be used any time they are available to make liquid fuel that is easy to store. The result can work for private transport, haulage, air, and sea.

In order to increase charge stored and decrease charging time you need a considerable increase of charging rate, to the point where it becomes quite dangerous for untrained users. Everyone assumes that EV problems can be solved by new technology. Once you actually do the maths for the supply network and charging equipment it becomes much less obvious.

A solution that uses renewable liquid fuels which fit into the existing infrastructure would be much less disruptive, and there are some interesting technologies under development.

Re: apples for apples

You dont have a petrol station in your garage.

Don't need to leave my car all night in a petrol station just to fill up.

Screw MSPAC, man: Not in our name, Microsoft staff tell firm's political donation vehicle

I'm just a bit puzzled about why any employee below VP level would contribute to a PAC without having any control over where their money goes beyond "politics for the company's benefit".

Just add water: Efficient Energy’s HFC-free chillers arrive in the UK

Re: Strange units

They're grains of barley, which are remarkably consistent.

So much so that shoe sizes in the UK & US are still measured in barleycorns. Each step, say from 8 to 9, is one barleycorn (⅓ inch).

Re: Strange units

Knots, because why count sea speed the same as land speed?

1 knot along a meridian is one minute of latitude in one hour.

UK mile == US mile

The English mile is, but the Irish mile is 1.25 English miles, and that was the case even when all of Ireland was in the UK.

Re: Strange units

14 pounds to a stone (which is only used to weigh persons),

And potatoes!

That's really why there was such resistance to the change. The metric system is clearly better for calculations, scale drawings, etc. but in other cases it wasn't the units that mattered, but what they meant. My Grandmother would have known exactly how many people she could feed with "half a stone" of potatoes, but "3kg" would have been meaningless to her in that context. Likewise for distance, tell someone that something is "15 miles" away and they don't think of the linear distance, they automatically think "a short drive" or "too far to walk". When you're used to that mental image, "24km" doesn't bring the same instant comprehension. It takes time to readjust.

no obvious link between liquid and fluid ounces.

1 fl.oz of water weighs 1 oz

Different sizes of gallons depending on geography.

Because of the difference in underlying pint sizes. USAnians get shortchanged on their beer.

Re: Brexit FUD

it still wouldn't be worth the effort of having separate design and manufacturing lines.

Precisely, which is why the "sky might be falling after Brexit" attitude is just more tiresome, glass-half-empty, FUD. FFS guys, don't you have any ambition to do better than the minimum?

Re: Brexit FUD

Surprise, surprise but that goes for many other EU countries too.

Why should that be a surprise? It simply demonstrates that in order to keep 28 countries on-board the EU has to aim for the lowest common denominator. Most countries indeed can do better than its rules & red tape when left to their own devices.

Re: Brexit FUD

that brexiters have been loudly proclaiming their right to scrap EU rules

Correct.

including environmental protections

Citation, please.

In practice the most likely victims are rules affecting farming and land use.

The ones requiring farmers to set-aside land to keep prices high, you mean?

By and large the UK tends to have better (and admittedly often excessively gold-plated) consumer protection law than UE minima. Nothing so far suggests that Brexit will change that.

Re: Brexit FUD

the UK is expected to leave the EU, possibly as soon as October 31, and those nasty refrigerant gasses could be about to stage a comeback.

or not.

'New UK ODS and F gas regulations transfer most of the requirements of the EU regulations into UK law.'

BTU

I thought cooling was measured using BTU

Technically it's measured in BTU/hour, which is dimensionally the same as Watts. 1 BTU is 1055J (or 252 calories if you prefer), so 1 kW is 3412 BTU/hour.

The reg standards convertor seems to lack units for energy and power, so the best real unit I can come up with is that 1 BTU/hour is .02 NorrisLinguini/second

(Mines the one with a very old "Data and Formulae for Engineering Students" in the pocket.)

It's Prime Minister Boris Johnson: Tech industry speaks its brains on Brexit-monger's victory

Re: TL; DR

He has one talent

So, better than the Westminster average, then?

Re: Disaster

simply because he himself thinks he's entitled to it?

Whether you like the outcome or not, that is a bizarre interpretation of the situation. How does a vote by MPs, a vote by party members, and ultimately a request from the Queen equate to "he thinks he's entitled to it"?

The stupidest person in UK Politics

Oh, I think there's plenty of better contenders for that title.

Re: TL; DR

his policy on Brexit is "f*** business".

ITYF that was his policy on letting business decide the political direction of the country. Given that Amazon, Google etc. care about little but their own profits, and love the EUs twisted tax codes because they can abuse them, I can't say he was wrong.

Revealed: Milky Way's shocking cannibalistic dark past – it gobbled a whole dwarf eons ago

Re: Why are there 3 dimensions?

Maybe it only seems magical to us because we're 3 dimensional?

Brussels changes its mind AGAIN on .EU domains: Euro citizens in post-Brexit Britain can keep them after all

Re: Do you want a second referendum?

only 52% of those WHO COULD BE BOTHERED TURNING UP voted Leave.

only 48% of those WHO COULD BE BOTHERED TURNING UP voted Remain. 48 is still less than 52.

Re: Do you want a second referendum?

the electorate has changed. In the 3 years since the referendum about 3 million new voters have arrived, and polls suggest they are in favour of remain by about 80% to 90%.

We've been in the EU for 27 years, if it was really that simple then the whole population would be 90% remain, and it clearly isn't. If anything it's becoming more anti-EU as time passes.

What your flawed analysis ignores is that people change. We all know that young people tend to be idealistic, and often left-leaning, yet the UK as a whole is pretty solidly conservative. Why? Because as those young people grow up and gain experience of the world, their views change and often become less idealistic and naive, and more conservative. Maybe lots of new voters are Remain, and lots of older ones are Leave, but lots of middle aged ones obviously switch from Remain to Leave as they gain experience of the world. The polls today show pretty much exactly the same numbers as they did three years ago; too close to call.

Re: What about .europe ?

The UK is more corrupt and undemocratic than anywhere in the EU

To echo your own request "Post your proof about your claim.". You might want to check with Transparency International before wasting too much time on it, though. You'll find that the UK is the 11th least corrupt country in the world, well ahead of most EU countries.

Re: Remember: The EU will categorically,

McCulloch knew exactly what he was doing

The phrase has nothing to do with McCulloch's purchase of London Bridge. It's a reference to con-man George Parker's habit of repeatedly selling the Brooklyn Bridge to gullible investors.

Pair programming? That's so 2017. Try out this deep-learning AI bot that autocompletes lines of source code for you

Re: Can I get one trained on homework assignments?

Would this be plagiarism?

I can see our legal team having a field day:

"Does this product contain any 3rd-party code?"

"Umm, well, maybe."

Re: An interesting proposition

I had no idea that AI had got so good!

Literally braking news: Two people hurt as not one but two self-driving space-age buses go awry

Re: Bus v Pedestrian or Pedestrian v Bus

so what is the driver or AI meant to do??

To truly mimic realistic human behaviour it should roll down the window and shout "watch where you're fskcing going, d*ckhead".

Re: Physics will still be applied

Use rear-facing seats.

UK government buys off Serco lawsuit with £10m bung. Whew. Now Capita can start running fire and rescue

Crapita is the only company I know who managed to destroy three very profitable companies by meddling with them and not allowing them to continue as they had been for many a year.

HP seems good at that as well.

Boris Johnson's promise of full fibre in the UK by 2025 is pie in the sky

Re: unusable water cannon for the police, later sold for scrap at a £300,000 loss.

unusable water cannon for the police,

Only "unusable" because Toxic Theresa banned them to spite Boris, preferring to leave the police with only Tasers and CS gas, neither of which is great in crowded city centre situations.

Experts: No need to worry about Europe's navigation sats going dark for days. Also: What the hell is going on with those satellites?!

Re: Seems to me that adoption of eLoRaN would be a better post brexit solution for the UK...

They were then implanted into recipient female mices and miraculously baby mice came out the other end after 19 or so days.

The other end??

Re: Definitely Russian or Chinese hacking

Has anyone checked to see if it's only giving accurate position for UK locations?