Posts by io91

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Re: When the sh!t hits the fan...

I worked (in the UK) for an American company. I paid better than UK companies and you could get a senior manager’s salary for remaining an individual contributor solving engineering problems.

As some note, money has a lot to do with the solution as it usually does in capitalist economies. The way to address the shortage is to pay EEs at the level of other professions. Some headline starting salaries such as were advertised by a major law/consulting firm of £125K a few days ago would draw attention to the profession.

Within the UK I think we still suffer from the aftermath of the old cost plus contracts of 40 years ago where the business model was to pay tiny salaries, thus attract less capable graduates and drag contracts out to generate perpetual cash flow and thus ensure continuity of dividends.

We also suffer from the unwillingness to finance high return startups.

So I as much as the engineering community would like to encourage more in their own likeness, I think within the UK the solution lies with the Boardrooms of industry and in the policymakers in government.

'Non-commercial use only'? Oopsie. You can't get much more commercial than a huge digital billboard over Piccadilly

Re: Free for non-commercial use?

OH!!! that explains it!

I just wish that they would have a reasonable cost licence model for hobby use rather than this rediculous model that works fine for a while and then decides that you are commercial and attempts to up the fees to an extortionate price.

Also I guess that the detection system will work badly if a hobbyist buys a second hand business computer and then tries to use TV.

I use their s/w for operating my amateur radio station remotely when I am travelling on business, but I imagine that I will not have that to worry about for a while.

UK's new Snoopers' Charter just passed an encryption backdoor law by the backdoor

Re: Dad

To be fair, from the end of the war, through the darkest days of the cold war the UK government allowed people to communicate with anyone in the world (including the Soviet Block) through the amateur radio service. This was at a time when monitoring spectrum was orders of magnitude harder than it later became with the advent of SDR and wideband recording as we have it today.

The CB debate was really about whether people needed to be technically qualified, and given the complexity and reliability of radio equipment at the time that was a reasonable demand. The second aspect of the CB concern conformance with international radio regulations which did not recognize operation for that purpose on the frequencies that CBers were using.