Re: Cynical? Me?
I think the key word here is "potential", as in if we fritter away £999,999,999 on pointless consultants, then stick that last quid on a horse with odds of 3.5 billion to 1, it could potentially win us £3.5B
1852 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jul 2014
"costs £3.4 billion but it helps unlock £35 billion"
It's a large-scale, government funded project, so will obviously end up costing 10x the original budget, so that leaves you with a modest saving...probably enough to cover the costs of the Public Accounts Committee enquiry into why it went 10x over budget and to issue a statement about lessons learned, yadda yadda yadda...
Older, still working, kit such as netbooks etc,
Indeed. I've got an old WinXP netbook kicking around, which I think I need to finally admit is at the end of its useful life, so may be a candidate for installing DSL on. I'm not convinced that I'll have a valid use case for it once it's installed, so would largely be doing it for the heck of it, but sometimes that's sufficient justification.
You jest, but a few years ago there was a leisure centre somewhere in the UK that was using waste heat from a neighbouring crematorium to heat the swimming pool. I think the scheme stopped after some public outrage (personally I thought it was an OK idea, but the way people reacted you'd think they'd proposed using ashes from the crem to top up the kids' sandpit)
Indeed...'absolutely no downtime' and 'nothing can be switched off' do not work together. If your goal is zero downtime, then you need to have redundancy to allow for unplanned failure, which means you do have the option to switch things off or restart them as and when required.
I think at this point, every aircraft that came out of Boeing in the last few years needs to be completely disassembled and put back together with proper inspections this time.
Given Boeing's track record, I think it'd be a case of disassembling all aircraft , putting all aircraft put back together, and then selling all of the spare bits they have left over at the end.
The aviation industry works on a principle whereby incidents are investigated and causes identified so that similar incidents can be avoided in future. If the cause of this incident is down to use of incorrect size bolts then this is worrying because I'm sure there was an incident many years ago where a window (cockpit windscreen?) parted company with the aircraft mid-flight due to being "fixed" in place with incorrect size bolts. Whatever procedures were put in place as a result of that incident don't seem to have been observed here.
It would seem logical to install a heavy equipment as low as possible
Indeed, but the minion was "told to put the UPS in the lowest free space in rack number one of seven". They may have taken "lowest" as meaning lowest number with slot numbering going top-to-bottom rather than lowest meaning nearest to the ground.
I know from experience of dealing with people who are 'on the spectrum' that they can tend to interpret instructions in a way which is technically correct but not what others would intuit.
target of having six or more rapid or ultra-rapid electric vehicle chargers at every motorway service area in England.
Considering how long it takes to charge an EV, compared against how many fossil-fuelled cars go through the pumps at a service area within that same timeframe, a minimum target of 6 chargers feels ridiculously low
The worst example of non-componentisation (is that a word? it should be) that I've seen was the electric fire that was fitted in my Dad's house. After a few years the LED do-dah that provided a warm orange glow decided to stop working. The landlord ended up replacing the whole fire as the LED do-dah was an integral unit and couldn't be replaced. Unbelievable...back in the day it was simply a case of changing a bulb.
I'd question the cigarette butt analogy. Cigarette buts are pure waste and really only fit for the bin, but as you point out the so-called disposable vapes still have a perfectly re-usable rechargeable battery and heating element.
Big Clive has made a number of videos about scavenging disposable vapes from the gutter and harvesting the batteries for use in other projects.
They're just crying out for recycling rather than discarding to landfill.
HRMC said the total baseline whole-life costs of the project would be £214 million. The tender notice put the maximum value of the procurement at £500 million
So before even starting, they're saying that the procurement value will be double the expected whole life costs? Have government departments learned nothing from previous large-scale procurements?
Obviously it'll go over budget by way more than just two times.
Earlier this year, the prime minister launched the UK government's plan to cement the nations place as "a science and technology superpower by 2030."
Earlier this year the prime minister remembered that he had friends who own science & technology companies, and so would benefit from being given some government-funded work.
'Influencer' and 'content creator' are not synonyms. The so-called influencers are creators of content, but they are a subset of the overall pool of content creators and (IMHO) tend to give content creators as a whole a bit of a bad reputation.
Much of the content creators out there on YouTube are just people who are passionate about a subject and want to share with viewers. As an example off the top of my head....Big Clive. He likes making videos teaching about electronics, and I've learned a ton from watching him. I don't begrudge him a penny of his ad revenue.
Characters like Pewdeepie, Mr Beast, et al....it's a big "meh" from me.
I have a monetised YT and allow some ads to be placed on my videos, as I use YT as an income stream.
Until now I've tried to balance the placement of ads against user experience - happy to have a small banner ad at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds at the start of a video, less happy to have anything more intrusive like full-frame ads which interrupt the video.
Unfortunately YT are removing the option for creators to select ad types to use, and are pushing for more ads on videos, so I expect that more of my content will be interrupted with skippable and non-skippable ads, potentially in the middle of videos. I don't think that non-creators realise that YT are doing this, and worry that viewers of my channel will hold it against me personally that my content is now more ad heavy.
I've seen stories before about how in-theatre bases were easily identifiable from apps like Strava, Map My Run, etc. - military personnel with GPS trackers take their daily exercise by running laps of the compound, and upload a graphic description of the boundary to the various fitness apps for all to see.
I've always been of the opinion that anything that can't be accomplished with Excel's built-in conditional formatting and formulas should not be handled in Excel.
Indeed, even things which *can* be accomplished with those basic features should not be handled in Excel. I have memories of a customer who used to use Excel as a word processor.
I think that discontinuance of VBA could be a bad move.
For better or worse, Excel is very pervasive, and I expect that pretty much every commercial and non-commercial organistion has at least one critical process underpinned by a shonky spreadsheet with some super-shonky VBA in there, which nobody really understands any longer, but it works.
If an Office/Excel or Windows update suddenly stopped them from working overnight, then I fear the collapse of western civilisation.
Memories of a colleague back in the day, when we used 3.5" floppies quite extensively. He was muttering and grumbling and someone asked him what the problem was. He said that all he was trying to do was format a floppy disk so he could re-use it, but his computer had started asking loads of "are you sure?" type questions. Unfortunately he made the final confirmation a split-second before someone asked "are you sure you didn't type 'format c:' ?"
When I was talking about the mess they made of the software in my Golf, and I hadn't even got as far as thinking about the privacy angle...I was thinking about the fact that it exhibited at least two bugs on every single trip (the entire dashboard spontaneously rebooting mid-journey, radio, etc. completely failing to work, display locking up....like I said, an absolute s**tshow
BT network off and cell towers down? As I mentioned in a comment of my own a bit further up the page, I've experienced that on a number of occasions when a power cut has hit the village (and surrounding area) where I live.
The outcome of the real world experiment? Isolation for days, if not weeks, on end. Unable to communicate, with impact up to and including people having domestic accidents or succumbing to the cold (these things tend to happen more when you don't have the luxury of light and heat) and being unable to contact emergency services.