Posts by RegGuy1

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Re: Well, that's all a bit ...

Brexit did it for me. I always thought the BBC was fair to all sides, but basically it was a coward, refusing to call out the disaster that most people that had thought about it said it would be. No, no, we can't say that and alienate those who didn't think, just 'felt' brexit would be good. I remember somewhere Emily Maitlis saying, when she had left the BBC and could speak freely, that for 'balance', ie not showing 'bias' and certainly not pissing off their core, older, viewers, that they had 30 or whatever economists saying it would be stupid, and one, Patrick Minford, prophesying sunlit uplands.

Well the cowards bowed to the Tory vote and now we are in the shit we find ourselves. That was when the scales fell from my eyes. I no longer watch or read anything from them. No TV and the sky hasn't fallen in.

The more that simply refuse to pay the bigger the crisis. Now if the government shits a brick and forces all of us to pay, regardless of whether we use it, then that could be explosive. And you know that's the way it's going to go. Scum.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Re: From available evidence below...

The epicyclic 50p coin is a constant diameter shape

Yes, that's how it was constructed. Put the point of a compass on one of the seven points and draw an arc across the two opposite points -- do that seven times. And it became instantly clear why it has this property, because it is always rolling on a circle, it's just seven different circles of the same radius. So the diameter of the scape is the radius of these circles. Fascinating!

Re: From available evidence below...

when all those wheels are every geometric shape other than round

I always remember at school discovering from one of my maths teachers that the highest point on a (UK) 50p coin -- they were new in the 1970s -- when rolled on a flat surface stayed at the same height above the base. In other words it rolled just like a circle! And I've always remembered the name it was given: an epicyclic heptagon.

Wheels don't always have to be round!

PowerShell architect retires after decades at the prompt

Re: UK only reference

Shirley they think it's all Snover ...

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

Re: "Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west"

Yep, agree. Russia has forcibly moved the men from this area and sent them to their deaths in Ukraine (so there is no revolt in Moscow). Also this area has lots of natural gas that China needs. What would Russia do if China decided to invade? The great Russian Bear is bogged down in Ukraine -- it couldn't afford to open up another front. And China could simply stop buying Russia oil and gas for a time to put pressure on Putin.

China is in a much stronger position than Russia. And it makes much more strategic sense to go north. After all, Siberia has been a rather tenuous part of Russia but now with its natural resources if there is any serious competition there Russia will struggle. And Putin has staked his political future on Ukraine, as western Russia is more important to the Russian psyche than the east.

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

Re: Why don't they...

Or make retailers sell laptops with either Windows or Linux, but the latter is €200/£200 cheaper?[1] You can then choose. If you really, really are a Microsoft fanboy, then you can pay the extra.

[1] No one knows what markup Microsoft adds to the cost of a laptop. But this is the world of Trump, so just make up a number.

Supporting startups?

The EU are trying to think outside the box. The 28th Regime is one of these ideas. If this works for business it may become a lightning rod that helps push innovation. At least they are trying different ideas. But it's not without its critics, especially about labour standards:

One ‘single and simple’ set of EU-wide business laws: everything you need to know about Europe’s 28th regime

What is the 28th regime?

The 28th regime is a proposed, optional EU-wide company status that provides an alternative to the national company law models of the EU’s 27 member states.

ChatGPT Health wants your sensitive medical records so it can play doctor

Re: Not intended for diagnosis or treatment

Who needs AI when you have Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

Re: So Airbus Builds Out It's Own "Cloud" Provider In Europe......

Fuck me. You're saying the EU isn't a super state?

Who knew?

Pen testers accused of 'blackmail' after reporting Eurostar chatbot flaws

Re: Hmmm

Fuck off!

Do you know how much that costs?

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

No they won't. If you work from home for any of the large corporations you will use a VPN into their private network. If you work on a customer site you will use the same technology to do the same thing. They are ubiquitous. They are essential. They will never disappear. Just like encryption people can wish for what they want, but you crack encryption and all of a sudden e-business disappears. No one will bank online if encryption is not trusted.

Encryption and VPNs are core Internet technologies that we can't do without.

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Re: Good grief!

If you were to leave you would be in good company:

The number of British nationals who left the UK last year has risen from 77,000 to 257,000, according to revised immigration statistics.

news.sky.com 18 November 2025

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: Re Nadella needs a new Ferrari!

Sounds amazing!! From your link:

... only three of the seven made were sold; six still exist, with one wrecked in a crash. Unused engines were installed in newly constructed high-speed railcars for the French National Railway (SNCF).

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

Re: Other replies

http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/arkell.htm

Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI

Re: One thing about Firefox

You have to laugh that they put the customise toolbar on the next page, when you click on the settings hamburger at top right: you must first click on more tools.

The very first thing I always do with a new instance/profile is to get the bloody menu back. Which idiot thought that removing the menu was a good idea? Just coz those numpties at Google did it doesn't mean you have to copy them.

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: Deep UK expertise

With 'probably' doing a lot of heavy lifting. :-)

‘The money machine is misfiring’: City blames Brexit for UK’s £20bn productivity headache

The UK has been losing market share since 2016 to the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain and Italy. Government analysis shows Britain’s share of the global pie has slumped to 15%, down from 21% in 2010.

“You would have expected the UK – given the size of its finance sector – to have done at least as well, if not better, than other countries,” says John Springford, an associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform.

“But financial services output has been pretty weak since 2016. And there hasn’t been a great deal of investment in the sector either.”

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

... all of a sudden we have banking without regulation ...

Defo worth an up vote.

Wasn't that the point? You have all these drugs on the Silk Road and no one to sell them to. Then some clever 'Japanese' comes up with the idea of the block chain, and bingo! it all takes off.

The lack of regulation is what attracts so many ...

Re: So much hype

Or the canal mania half a century earlier.

Re: 'Mechanical Boris Johnsons'

No, taking coke is much more fun.

BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries

Click bait

See also: Starship has failed again, coz it blew up. (Ie they pushed the envelope to get data at the extremes and it blew up so we know tha's too far)

Or the perennial: Brexit is a success coz the economics don't matter (to me, I'm too ignorant of what it means, and too arrogant to improve my understanding, coz it's _obviously_ a corrupt, shit, communist/capitalist super power...)

Every person has a brain: it just seems not everyone wants to use their own and instead wants to gawp at their preferred media, to reinforce their world view.

Just stop and think: you need to challenge yourself!

Quite: Generative AI exists because of the transformer

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Too much in us-east-1

it does not sensibly seem to fall back to something "close" e.g. Ireland, or another European AWS zone

Did someone tell the AI code generator to create brexit friendly code?

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Re: Landers that fell over

Flight 1: Booster failure. Ship flight termination system proved inadequate.

Also it didn't separate, so they decided on the fly to try hot staging, something that had been done by the Russians. That meant a design change, adding the heavy staging ring to the build which made the first stage unstable -- hence why it has always been jettisoned. SpaceX are happy to change their plans based on the results they get from their test flights. Rather than spending ages tweaking a computer model they take the view of build it, launch it, see how it performs and fix the problems. That's why they can do what they do so quickly. Hardware rich. Someone up thread called it agile. Remember Musk got much of his money from Paypal.

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Re: Burns?

Where's the poetry?

It's been robbed.

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

Re: jesus! the fuckwittery....

AI is not intelligent, it is just search:

Generative AI exists because of the transformer

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

Re: Slack should ..

Fuck off TalkTalk: that is all.

Google unveils master plan for letting AI shop on your behalf

Re: The banks always say

Ah, the hoi poloi.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: What does Windows 11 normally weigh in at ?

This will speed it up:

format c:

Google kneecaps indie Android devs, forces them to register

Good news! Great! Thanks Google ...

I've said this so many times before. Why do you need apps?

FFS. They exist simply to track you, to get more data out of you. Just use a browser -- and preferably not Chrome, as that sucks data too.

Why do you think EVERY bloody website wants you to download their app? It's not about them offering a better service for you, it's about them collecting data on you. Every time you then use their app they KNOW it's you. You have no control.

Plus, web browsers have bookmarks. So you open that one program and find what you want there. With apps they pollute your desktop and, looking at my kids phones, you can't even find the thing.

Still, if you're happy with these scum taking all that free data, then enjoy ...

Microsoft wares may be UK public sector's only viable option

Multiple providers

I remember being involved in the national negotiations of the government license agreements with Capita, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft in the early 2000s, which secured much better value than individual organisations could have achieved on their own.

I didn't quite understand this. Was this one project that used all these providers? If so that could make sense. But only if there is a provider managing the whole project -- ie a single point of contact. Otherwise, at least in my experience, when you have problems you get nowhere.

* 'Whose fault is it?' Theirs;

* 'Who can sort it?', They can;

* 'Who do we go to to solve it?' Somebody else, not me.

But change the question and ask, 'I'll pay money to get this solved', and they will all to a man say 'I can solve that'.

You need a single point of contact, through whom you bill. Then they will negotiate with all the providers on your behalf and you should just get a solution.

UK secretly allows facial recognition scans of passport, immigration databases

tax the super-rich

You will only get real change when you tax everybody more. Why Denmark is the Happiest Country in the World. The 'paying tax is bad' and 'we can do it cheaper using businesses' are some of the biggest cons of the last 40 years or so. Why? Just look how divided our society has become. Does that suggest good governance?

Prohibition never works, but that didn't stop the UK's Online Safety Act

Paedo...

Around 25 years or so ago there was a BBC news story of a paediatrician getting harassed by some chavs in Portsmouth because someone had said he was a 'paedo'.

Re: Ignorant politicians

It's not just to the public sector. They also can't sell to Europe any more. SMEs are supposed to be the life-blood of our economy.

We're fucked.

NASA boss calls for nuclear reactor on the Moon

What for?

An AI datacentre, obviously.

Re: Space Race!

Which is ironic given that when Musk set it up no one from Nasa wanted to work there.

Re: Space Race!

... and second something needs to show it can survive lunar nights (not night). It's an extreme environment up there, and you want to put radioactive material there? Good luck with that.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Re: Depressing that this is even necessary.

Tamagotchi, isn't that a hat?

Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safety Act gets rolling

Re: Reform will get in and abolish this leakfest.

Well if you want to make brexit better the single biggest change you can do is for the UK to become a full member of Schengen. Remember Barnier's staircase chart? We've left the EU, which was the given question. Schengen would give us access to many projects and programmes that we are currently excluded from. We wouldn't be back in the EU -- so that would please all those dead voters. And we would be able to make large steps to improve the trading situation with our nearest and most important trading partner.

Re: Does it really matter?

More to the point the vast majority of the population want something done. Ah something's been done. Great. Time to move on. Nothing to see here.

Wasp nest at US nuclear site tests ten times over safe radiation limit

Re: Getting stung by a radioactive wasp...

Goldstinger, surely.

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: Private or Work?

Don't blame the government, blame those that put them in. We have too many different groups with different desires. The Tory group wants things to go back to 1950 when we were, allegedly, a world power still. Labour have never really known what they want; they were born out of the trades union movement but with de-industrialisation an the successful denigration of union power their traditional base is significantly eroded. Then the Lib Dems, who like to see themselves as moderate Tories or moderate Labour, but shape-shift where ever they are to garner votes.

Then there are the Greens. A rising power, especially among the young, but as their electoral base grows, their principles come into conflict with the desires of the electorate -- so they sometimes don't want pylons in their constituencies. And then we come to Reform. This is the very bottom of the barrel. They don't think. They hate foreigners, well unless they are white, oh and speak perfect English, oh and come from those English foreign lands (you know, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA even).

None of these groups actually want to pay for anything. They all want someone else to pay. We must keep our services going, but don't ask me for more Council Tax or more Income Tax or more Road Tax or ... Get the 1% to pay for everything.

So until you look at all the scum who are voting for someone else to take the pain to fix their lives, NOTHING will get better. And as long as there is -- hey look, a rabbit -- things will not get better.

Re: Private or Work?

Heir to what?

Or do you mean, Herr, oder vielleicht Heil?

Intel cutting cutting-edge node funds would mean no more Moore's Law

Re: The PRC will have a well defined goal...

My local pharmacy has a sign up that says they refuse to accept notes from the Bank of Scotland. Is that legal? That's one reason why I emphasised England over the UK. Of course I didn't mention that England has 85% of the UK's population. And that is not relevant to anything, no siree.

Edit to add: mind you I got some cash out recently -- the first time I've had to use cash in months. It looked wrong -- where's the queen gone?

Re: The PRC will have a well defined goal...

"National prestige and the "soft power" projected by culture and technology have delivered incalculable benefit to the US"

It was Bretton Woods what did it. They told that has-been, England[1] that they were the big boys now, and to step aside and let the dollar take the strain. No other currency was convertible to gold apart from the dollar (you could, of course, get dollars for your Marks, Francs, Pounds, but not gold). Then they could happily print dollars and the US allowed large imports and their economy bloomed.

They made a secret deal with Saudi Arabia that gave the Saudis military support on the back of only selling their huge amounts of oil in dollars. Opps. That put far too many dollars into the global economy, and after the US decided they wanted to bomb the shit out of Vietnam -- and printed yet more dollars to pay for it -- inflation took off.[2] This had the result that a certain Mr Nixon in 1971 took the US off the gold standard, meaning _no_ currency was backed by anything. And we have been living in that make-believe world ever since. All currencies are now fiat currencies -- just pretend money that we all agree not to call out.[3]

[1] Or is that the UK, is there any difference? Pounds are produced by the Bank of England.

[2] Note that the 'oil price shock' of the 1970s wasn't the cause of the high inflation and low productivity ('stagflation') of that decade, but the consequence of these oil-producing nations getting less and less for their oil. So they put up the price. What would you have done in their shoes, one wonders, if you have nothing else you can sell?

[3] So will crypto finally upset the apple cart? After all, who controls that?

Re: "a decent laptop doesn't need replaced for maybe 5 or 6 years now"

"Intel makes faster processors, Microsoft makes slower processes."

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

Take Back Control?

Wait! What are you saying? That we have no sovereignty? You mean all that shit about Take Back Control was for nothing?

Well shoot me in both feet with a double-barrelled shot gun.

Re: There have been so many things

Yeah, but RIPA says if you don't tell 'em any encryption key they can lock you up, until you do.

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

... plus I've got Win 10 in a KVM anyway if needs be ...

And do needs be?

I've not used Windows for decades (getting on for 30 years) and have never missed it.

Humongous parachute for European Mars landing mission tested successfully

In the video ...

... he says we take it up to 30km and then drop it in an area that is pretty much uninhabited.

I would hope it is totally uninhabited.

Ukrainian hackers claim to have destroyed major Russian drone maker's entire network

Putin doesn't give a shit about the Russian people ...

... so he throws them in the Ukraine meat grinder. Not quite: it is those who live in the east who are mainly being sent to Ukraine. He knows "public support" would crumble if the one million lives were all from the west of Russia.

He HAS to keep on fighting. If it stops and he loses the area he has taken in Ukraine he's out of power, and probably soon after executed -- defenestration seems to be the most popular means. The "mighty Russian Army" is no more, stopped by the brave response from the Ukrainians. That's rather amazing. He chose Ukraine because he thought it would be easy, like Crimea, but it's tied him up in knots.

Of course the orange prat in the White House is neither use nor ornament.