Re: Remember the auctions?
> I am a little confused though ... I thought for a while there smart meters were running on 2G. Are they now all being upgraded to 4G+ ?
Smart meters will just become dumb meters having you phone in the readings.
Posts by DuncanLarge
948 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2017
BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year
Tuesday 19th September 2023 14:57 GMT 
Re: Elderly and Vulnerable?
Exactly!
I'm hapily an Android user but I use older handsets. I wont have 5G for a long while yet, I have so many spare 4G handsets to use up.
I also have 3G only spares, now consiged to the bin. What a waste.
I'd love a physical keyboard, Blackberries are great for that. Many times I've found a touchscreen just too limiting. I'm a bit fed up of the constant upgrade cycle we are all forced into whether it be mobile handsets or network standards. So many 3G/2G embedded devices are out there doing "smart" things that we expect in out connected world. Now they will be disconnected, mothballed, adding costs to replace them if they ever are replaced.
2G reaches almost everywhere. 3G more so than 4G. 4G fails to deliver bytes when an area is congested and as I found recently when driving across the UK 4G barely exists along the main roads!
Take a train from Bedford to London. A large part between Luton and London is almost a total not spot even for 2G. These network upgrades are peddled as the best thing since sliced bread, in the same way as the previous network generation was, yet it simply doesnt work. People laugh at me when I talk about payphones and land lines, heck even CB radio, but on a simple train trip or a drive from Bedford to Bristol I feel vindicated.
Perhaps we should mandate that 5G is the LAST netowrk upgrade for, say 20 years and it must have 100% UK coverage, every household and every B road? Then maybe we will enter the world of mobiles. Till then I'll keep my landline and CB radio. The CB gets use from hobbists mostly but they are there. Unlkine the mobile networks.
Version 5 of systemd-free Debian remix Devuan is here
Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies
Thursday 17th August 2023 10:22 GMT
Re: and the booby prize is ...
> However, that doesn't make them illegal.
True but it does make them imoral, unjust. Such laws may as well be treated as if if they are illegal so that a precedent can be set against them.
Anglo Saxon common law allows this, laws are created by the people and the courts and juries help to maintain that and deal out justice. Part of that maintenance is setting a precendet, where old or outdated laws or immoral laws are essentially mothballed even though they strictly are still in force. The UK has loads of such laws, that although we all break many of them every day, they will never be enforced. Some laws can also be repealed in this system, such as the laws against homosexuality in the UK.
As an example, nobody, no individual, in the UK who made a copy of a cassette tape or CD for a mate will ever find themselves hauled into court and convicted of taht crime. The court would simply not bother and crucially the police wont bother. This created a precedent that although you shouldt do it, the spirit of the law said that it didnt matter if you did as long as you were not clearly abusing it, such as making hundreds of copies and selling them in a car park.
But if a little 7 year old girl shares a single mp3, as happened in the US, well they come down on her and her grandmother like a ton of bricks and demand MILLIONS in damages. You really are on their side?
They said "home taping is killing music": We continued to tape as and when we liked, they couldnt touch us but in some places they could tax us.
They tried to kill the VCR: We won there too.
They make colour laser printers embed codes into the print so they can prove you copied something.
They will never change, they dont get it and they should reform or go on there merry way and die as a business.
Thursday 17th August 2023 10:04 GMT
> Yes, that is limited
It's not limited when you can just extend it by 20 years every 20 years.
Have you not been following the forever copyright we are no in?
What about the stuff that enters the public domain, only to be re-copyrighted a couple of years later and extracted from the public domain?
Everything published should be freely shared after a limted time that expires within the lifetimes of the people alive when it was published. Well the majority of them. Thus copyright should be 10 years from the DATE of publication, with a possible extension granted by a court for a further 10 years if a business case can be presented showing the work is still in heavy use. After that it enters the public domain.
Many authors will probably think even 10 years is too long. I know of one that wanted nothing more than 5 years. Why? Because it ISNT THE AUTHORS WHO OWN THE COPYRIGHT. Turns out that the publishers actually have the copyright, not the author, thus the author loses all control and that particular author was struggling in court to try and get his work back after it was no longer profitable because he wanted to let everyone share it freely as a self promotion attempt!
Some musicians in a similar position managed to create an album totally independantly from the record label who, again, holds the copyrights. They self promoted it and offered it to the public, their fans, relying on word of mouth. You could download it for FREE or at a price you think is fair. They found they were swimming in profit, money that they had NEVER seen when signed with a label. Most payed the suggested price some more and that was with plenty of free downloads having happened.
There are other record labels like Magnatune who also give 50% of all proceeds to the artists while allowing the public to choose the amount they want to pay. There is zero DRM and you are free to re-encode, burn CD's and they wont care if you let your mates listen, in fact they say that you can give the donload link to a mate or two! If you wish to use the work in your youtube videos etc you merely just buy a commercial use license which grants you all rights to use the works in your videos, the cost of the license is certgainly not cheap and it certainly ait expensive either! It also lasts FOREVER.
But our copyright system is manipulated and controlled by a bunch of plutocrats addicted to profit over everything, they care nothing about the rights of the little people, which copyright was supposed to protect by constantly feeding the public domain. They even train us as kids to "not be a pirate" etc, basically undiong the natural insticnt to be a nice person who shares with others, undoing the training we all got to be just like that when we were 2 years old and our parents told us we must learn to share. The public domain is FOR US. The commons is FOR US. Copyright protects the health of the commons but the holders have twisted the whole thing against us so that WE OURSELVES even think that it is a terrible shame something enters the public domain.
Authors etc are supposed to work to better the commons, copyright grants a limited monopoly on the work entering the commons. AUthors are supposed to keep producing new works, FOR US and the commons because they can not sit in a chair and ride the profits from merely a handful of works. While the rest of society must work till retirement, it's only fair authors and artists should do so as well, but they want to write a few books, and then sit in a chair getting fat while we labour constantly. Their descendants can sit in a chair and never get a job (ever seen About a Boy, the main character never worked in his life). It is certainly nice to think your kids can enjoy some of the profits of your work after you die suddenly, but I think that should just give them a boost, like savings for college etc, not an income for life, they should learn to work themselves!
So life + 50/70/90 years depending on country is an abomination. An insult against decency and the public good. The public domain is aneamic and practically dead and we have been trained to not step in with the defib machine. We are prevented from sharing using todays technology using DRM, which I bet will not self destruct itself upon the copyright of the "protected" work expiring, am I right? We are taught first to share, then we are taught that sharing is piracy, ooh aaah shiver me timbers. They confuse different laws into one simple "law" so that nob ody can talk about it properly, they call it IP law. A brilliant weapon, now it's possible to conflate copyright and patents and trademarks in the same sentence!
If we cant regain control and reform copyright we may as well break it.
Thursday 17th August 2023 09:27 GMT
Re: And term of life+ cannot achieve the aim of promoting arts and sciences
Exactly!
Koowledge is lost, certainly when considering the sciences. If nobody publishes or uses the work after the authors death then you may have up to 80 years before anyone can see it, by which time it is a coin toss that someone will come across it, in a readable form.
Archives are highly important and the Internet Archive relies on submissions from the general public and funding from the general public and it's hard do do that if the general public can not see what you have and have little chance to use it.
The IA have barely scratched the surface, scanning books for example (I will conceded that it should be out of print books, anything currently in priont is probably safe for the time being) is very important, as well as keeping the printed copies in circulation in a second hand market as well as in libraries such as the British Library, but there is way too much out there never digitised or put online. People like me collect and hoard such stuff and thats great, but if I dont provide access to it...
Copyright was bolstered into the terrible thing it is today because of a greedy company extending it beyond anything sane, by not having a "if you dont publish it you lose it clause", and by a few rich Authors who actually do make money off their works. The UK copyright system was due for a MASSIVE overhaul, we would have gotten a whole new debate on it which would include the idea that we have computers and networks now so NEED to be able to share more freely amongst ourselves. But a few famous Authors, like Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) reacted to the chance of fairer copyright by campaining against it in favor of keeping stuff out of the publics hand:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/19/government-pauses-plans-to-rewrite-uk-copyright-laws-after-authors-protest
All because they wanted to earn royalties after they are long dead. I say that you should have copyright expire after 50 years, or shorter, with one extension granted if you can prove that you are publishing a new edition in the country that the copyright applies.
Wednesday 16th August 2023 15:30 GMT
Re: Quite sad that the internet has been corrupted.
The natural state of human culture is to share. Who doesnt drill into their toddlers the idea of sharing toys or sweets?
Along come a few so wish to hoard the riches of the many.
And we keep letting them...
Many of us even sympathise with them. I had fruitles discussions with collegues 20 years ago about the onset of DRM and they simply couldnt get why it wasnt a good thing that they were prevented from moving a track or selling something secondhand. They thought that they should be milked for money and shackled year after year.
It was like they would teach their future kids to share their toys whilst fitting the shackles to them for the publishing companies.
It was then I realised I'm rich having a public domain and free sharing of information. RMS was right, I was listening to everything he said. Aaron Schwartz and others saying similar things. I learned what kind of person I am in society and I live in a dystopian world, like a dystopian scifi come true.
Wednesday 16th August 2023 15:23 GMT
Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc
> The fact of IP law
There is no such law. IP: Itelectual Property, is a made up term designed to create confusion across many disparate and entirely differnet laws.
They bare no relation to each other. Copyright is to Patents as a Car is to a Cloud. The only simularity is they are both laws, and in the case of my example, both exist on this planet. In all other regards they are dissimilar.
The very same publishers that are killing the public domain and attacking the IA created the idea of IP, so that we would confuse everything. Dont use their language and correct anyone who does.
Otherwise tell people they need to change the tires on their cloud for winter.
Wednesday 16th August 2023 15:04 GMT
What the f did I just read?
"Defendants attempt to defend their wholesale theft of generations of music under the guise of 'preservation and research,' but this is a smokescreen: their activities far exceed those limited purposes," the complaint contends. "Internet Archive unabashedly seeks to provide free and unlimited access to music for everyone, regardless of copyright."
Did I read that correctly?
My god they dont even try to hide their greed and corruption. These are 78's, many are in the public domain and those that are not probabbly should be. These megacorps try to say that they own the stuff forever and dont even hide it?
Are they re-releasing all this music then? On 78's? On CD? How many teens are likley to stream much of that stuff?
They will never stop, they are all for perpetual copyright and the killing of the Public Domain. They train us since childhood to be good little consumers, twisting the reality of the original intent that was copyright; that of providing new works into PUBLIC ownership in exchange for a limited monopoly for a time.
I hope the IA wind this one, we need to start re-defining the whole industry. These copyright dinosaurs should adapt to our new system, which we will create, or retire on their already fatly lined pockets. The artitst barely get a penny while the publishers own the work, many artists want copyright reform, some want it tgo be less than 10 years since publication and nothing regarding since their death.
Resist, download the lot from the IA and copy it far and wide. Lets see how they deal with that.
Yes, turns out RMS was right!
More people should read "Snow Crash".
Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup
Friday 4th August 2023 14:54 GMT
Re: Of course, hibernation predates systemd (been around a long time in Linux)
> In today's SSD flash (don't write needlessly) world
Todays SSD's have lifetimes and wearlevelling abilities that make that detail a thing of the past. It is very unlikely you will ever wear out an SSD, like lightning you never write to the same place twice (well you eventually will).
Thus re-ebable swap! The computer architecture we use is based on virtual memory, swap is part of the design. Yes you can turn it off technically but its not really a goot idea.
Friday 4th August 2023 13:53 GMT
> I shut my desktop down daily when I've finished using it, then reboot it the next day. Saves on the electricity when I'm not using it.
You seem confused about the difference between a shutdown and a reboot.
Shutdown = the system powers everything off, all processes teminated. Note EVERYTING POWERS OFF
Reboot = The system remains powered ON but terminates all processes, signals to hardware to rest itself and reloads the OS from scratch.
You dont shutdown then reboot, such a thing is impossible. You have to be booted and running first before you can reboot, and when you do reboot nothing is powered off.
This systemd change makes that process a tiny bit faster for some reason.
> but why leave your desktop powered up if it's not doing anything
Who says it is powered up? It may be in a sleep state or hibernated.
Friday 4th August 2023 13:15 GMT
In all my years using GNU/Linux (since around 1998) I have never edited an init script.
I have at times created my own, which worked quite well.
I have manually renamed them to adjust the boot process, again no issues there and an interface I like.
I've never had to edit them although I have read a couple to assist with debugging some software issues.
Friday 4th August 2023 13:05 GMT
I've put it off way too long.
Time to finally jump ship. No SYSV init support? unit files in strange places like /usr/lib?? Soft reboots? Off I go.
Regarding Fast Startup, this is not a "fast reboot" but a non-shutdown. It stops windows from shutting down fully, shutdown no longer exists, but a reboot in windows is still a full reboot. Its what we (as in my many IT positions and companies over the years) switch off. We noticed that updates were not getting installed all of a sudden only to discover this stupid feature in windows where a shutdown is no longer anything like a shutdown.
We suddenly found that no windows updates were installing, for weeks. Why? Well two reasons. There was the usual users who never shitdown and just sleep the laptops all the time, they we have to remind manually to reboot. And then there was the rest, who dutifully would shutdown the laptop or pc at the end of the day as IT tell them to.
Only the ones who rebooted got any updates. Fast Startup kills shutdown, it is more of a hibernate, in fact I was confused why it was there in the first place as hibernate is basically the same. In a Fast Startup enabled shutdown some parts of windows is shutdown, others are hibernated, particually the elements oif windows that typically take ages to boot when you boot. It actually makes a massive difference when booting off HDD, which is a nasty thing to do these days with windows 10 so bloated and inefficient. But it also prevents most windows updates installing.
Thus users were weeks out of date. Instead of re-educating users to reboot THEN shutdown, we simply used GPO to turn off Fast Startup. Of course MS turned it back on again after certain updates!
This soft reboot feature is something different, it affects reboots and not shutdowns. I can see it having some use, butreally its pedantic to try and shave off a few milliseconds of full boot time just because you updated a few things apart from the kernel. But tahts why systemD was created, because some laptop user wanted to have his laptop boot faster.
I'm off to Devuan anyway, or maybe Debian with another init. Binary logfiles were the last straw and now Debian has got rid of text logfiles, well I just cant see why they are so insane. Lol they claimed "it would stop writing to the filesystem twice", as the binary logs are written followed by the text ones. Thing is for years the binary logs have been stored in a ramdisk...
Yes I know I can turn them back on. What I want is sensible defaults, not an OS that I have to add loads of fixes to and config to just to get it working the sane way.
Social media is too much for most of us to handle
North Korean satellite had no military utility for spying, says South Korea
Tesla plots entry to Britain's stagnant energy market
Thursday 13th July 2023 10:27 GMT
> The ecosystem of this planet as we know it is coming to an end
That is a provable lie. We are in an inter-glacial period, the warm bit of it and this interglacial period is much cooler than the previous ones. The Romans were much warmer than us!
The truth is the IPCC has no idea how to model the climate so dont (cant) even include the main feedback mechanisms, like the clouds. It took them ages to even think the oceans were somehow involved!! Now they find they can’t model the huge feedback effects the clouds have, so they dont bother.
The models are bad, the data is fiddled with (nobody shall forget climategate). There is too much money made on a lie.
Nobody intelligent believes this claptrap anymore. One prediction after another, all false. Greta herself said we would all be dead in five years, five years ago. Then she got caught deleting the tweet because it would be awkward, well sorry Greta but plenty of people scrape Twitter.
CO2 is dangerously low compared to the past. It's a miracle plant life managed to cling on, luckily it’s been going up. Much of that comes from the oceans, the thing the IPCC ignored, because the inconvenient little warm period happened warming the oceans which took several hundred years to have an effect of... releasing some CO2. We are looking at the result of an event that happened a few hundred years back, but it's worth a lot of money to spin it as an immediate effect and to punish the poor and third world for wanting to use energy.
If we were really in a mess, were really against the wall, we should just turn it all off? Go and blow up any country that refuses to switch off all power generation! But noooo, the climate alarmists teens want their tiktoks, want their mod-cons, want their polluting fashionable mobile phones. Not even they are willing to "do what’s required". Even Greta managed to give it an attempt a least but most are just whining hypocrites.
In 3000 years this will all happen again, that’s what the real data says. Let’s hope they keep good enough records to realise that we got it so wrong. Otherwise they will be as ignorant as ourselves. God knows what they will think before that, when it gets a lot colder.
We should be focusing on the local environment and sea pollution. Forget CO2, let that natural cyclic process do its thing. Concentrate on water quality, sea pollution, habitat regeneration. Reduce particulates in the air. If we look at the real issues we wouldn’t even be using Solar Panels as they are the next eco disaster we all will see paraded across our screens in 20 or 30 years! Wind turbines too. Both can’t be recycled, at all, and in the case of solar panels they are extremely hazardous to the environment. So in 20-30 years when the ones we have installed all fail, what will happen to them?
Well I predict we will either landfill them like they secretly (well try to) do with turbines, or we will lock them in a sealed bunker (now where have I seen that solution before) or we will dump them on a poor country like we do today with our plastic waste. Let’s wait for the Channel 4 expose or the Panorama episode in 20 years time which reveals the eco disaster that we created for no good reason other than to line the pockets of eco warriors and control freaks.
Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on
Wednesday 5th July 2023 14:45 GMT
Re: Licence
> can we expect a license change to the Linux kernel along with the multitude of other upstream components Red Hat uses forcing them to make their source code freely available if they want to make use of any future release
RH source code is already forced to be avaliable to anyone with the binary (although not for free, a distribution cost can be charged) so I dont see what your point is.
Wednesday 5th July 2023 13:04 GMT
Re: To free or not to free
> ignoring the whole GPL technicalities for a moment
Technicalities? Dont you mean the legally binding text of the license. Do you think I can ignore the "technicalities" of copyright and try and justify why I'm able to copy and sell the latest blockbuster?
Thing is if I do that it is merely a thought experiment. It all comes crashing down when the "technicalities" are re-established when you re-enter real life.
Wednesday 5th July 2023 12:37 GMT
Re: To free or not to free
> By your own statements Red Hat should be willing to share its added value built on someone else’s Libre hard work, regardless of if it is Gratis or not
If their "added value" is under the GPL, the MUST share it when requested by those who have binaries distributed by RH or by anyone further down.
That is the whole point of the GPL. The end user is king, you cant stop them being free.
Wednesday 5th July 2023 11:26 GMT
Re: To free or not to free
> I doubt RH will find it too difficult to close off these work-arounds. They’re not stupid
All they can do is make it difficult, they cant close anything off.
They could for example charge a distribution fee for the source code and post it to the requester on cd-r. More difficult yes, but to be legal they would need to do that minimum. The GPL states the source must be distributed in machine readable form, with everything needed to compile a working binary, and on a medium typically used for software interchange.
Oh and before anyone says "but computers dont have optical drives", there is thing called USB and cheap USB drives everywhere. Also my new GPU arrived with a dvd-rom containing their NVIDIA drivers and manuals. Not the most common media today but not uncommon either so RH could simply make the source distribution slow and annoying, but the cant avoid it.
Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari
Monday 3rd July 2023 12:38 GMT
Re: "right click on image in browser"
> but damn that's awkward
Right click->Open With
> and most people certainly wouldn't think of it.
Only those who lack decades worth of basic computer skills in regards to opening a file in another program or even changing the default program to open a file.
I doubt such people will even know how to change a font in a wordprocessor, so by your logic averything should be in Roboto?
Starlink's rocket speeds hit a 50 megabit wall for large downloads
Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge
Thursday 29th June 2023 14:50 GMT
The thing you need to keep in mind is:
THERE IS NOTHING PREVENTING THE CUSTMER OF REDHAT DOING ANYTHING THE GPL GRANTS THEM.
The restriction is on the contract with RH itself. Essentially you can have a support contract with RH is you dont do X Y or Z. If you do X Y or Z then the contract ends.
The only thing preventing redistribution of BINARIES is the custimer of RH themselves who must decide to do so or not.
Note I capitalised binaries. The GPL allows distribution of binaries, not source code. You have a right to the source after the fact of you getting a binary, not before. When you get the binary you should ask the AUTHORS for the source. The RH customers, unless they modify the program, are not the authors. In fact RH may not even have to give you the source to stuff they havnt modified as they could simply point you to the original source.
Thursday 29th June 2023 13:48 GMT
Re: Dangers of speed reading before I had to dash out
No, its more like "you promise not to engage in those freedoms while we maintain a contract".
You allways have those freedoms, you can use them at any time, but RH may decide to cancel the contract.
Thus you have a choice, which is more important to you as a business right now, the support contract or the freedoms?
Here is another example. You have the freedom to drive a car, anywhere at any speed, for any length of time. BUT you agree to give up or accept limits on those freedoms when on the public highway, where you are NOT permitted to drive anywhere at all times (roads can be closed and traffic diverted) and you are NOT premitted to drive at any speed on any particular roads.
If you break those rules you can lose your driving license, but you can drive all you like, at any speed unlicensed on private land.
Thursday 29th June 2023 13:15 GMT
Re: Ignoring the big issue
> Relicensing existing projects isn't easy. It means all the original contributors or their heirs need to be traced and agreement obtained. It's one reason the Linux kernel is still GPL2.
That is incorrect, or at least partially. Anyone using a GPL'ed program can use it, at their option, under the tersm of any later version.
The kernel modified the GPL license to remove that option as Linus didnt like GPL v3 and it would be causing problems for other less free code.
Thursday 29th June 2023 11:28 GMT
Re: Ignoring the big issue
> agree not to redistribute GPL source code
Nobody has the right to redistribute source under the GPL. More "permissive" licenses are not copyleft thus its a non-issue, RH can do what it likes with those and everyone else can too. Only the GPL uses copyright in the form of "copyleft" to provide source code.
BUT, you only have the right to source code if you have the corresponding binary. Never the other way around. The GPL makes sure that you can get the source for the binaries you have.
The GPL protects your rights to distribute binaries, and anyone getting it from you also get those rights.
Thus RH gives the customer binaries, as they paid for access to said binaries they have source code access. If they leave the support agrement, the GPL states they still have rights to the source from RH, but ONLY for that binary, thus not a future version. If they want a new version, they must re-subscribe.
A customer of RH has rights under the GPL to distribute binaries, but RH can terminate the support contract should they do so, they may not bother to do so, its up to them. The former customer still has the binaries and still can get source for those versions, but no support contract. They may be former customers but RH cant stop them running GPL'd binaries they already have. Like I said for the non-copyleft licenses, RH could stop them running those, and the customer has no right to source code for BSD code etc anyway.
Anyone getting the binary from the customer, should the RH customer distribute it, also gets the right to the source code for THAT VERSION from RH. Now, RH will want to muck about and play silly buggers with granting source access to former and non-customers but they have done so before and that would be a GPL violation. But remember, you only have the right to the source for THAT BINARY YOU HAVE.
There is no provision in the GPL for redistributing source code. It concerns itself with distribution of binaries and giving access to the source code. Thus RH are well able to tell the customer NOT to distribute the sources, even if the customer distributes the binaries it is RH that must give access to the source.
The GPL allows access to the source because it allows you to modify and study the code. Should the custmer modify a RH binary, then distribute it, THATS when they are responsible to grant access to the modified source when REQUESTED.
Baiscally its this:
1. You get the GPL binaries from RH.
2. You only get that with a paid for contract.
3. You get the sorces for that and future versions easily.
4. You want to leave the contract? OK, no future versions or updates for you. Good luck. You want the source? Well you have that right and we might play silly buggers etc.
5. Or you want to distribute the GPL binaries? Go ahead, but we RESERVE the right to cancel the contract should we decide to do so, thus see point 4. You are not being stopped, just asked to decide to follow the rules of the contract or not.
6. Anything not GPL'ed may or may not be, now or in the future, legal for you to run or distribute, such is the freedom we (RH) are given by these permissivle licenses, sorry about that.
If anything this shows that there are great ways to make money off Free Software, gone will be the days of people crying out that it cant work, well here we are. And also it shows just how horrible persissive licenses are as the GPL protects you and your rights even when you are out of contract with RH.
UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete
Thursday 15th June 2023 15:45 GMT
> Manually reading a meter and entering the readings is really not something that belongs in this day and age
Quite the opposite. We need more of that sort of thing!
By reading your own meter, you will be aware of issues before they become serious. It is nothing more than a 5 minjob anyway, again why the rush?
If you "just let it do it" are you also not chedcking your bank statements? Do you keep tally of the amount of money you spend at the sandwich van every day at work so you can train yourself to stop spending so much for so little or do you just wave the contactless card and "let it just do it".
When was the last time you check the bank statements, or do you just let stuff come out? Checked the pension is being paid into? Checked the firealarm or do you think that too should be automatic. Maybe you have a smart one.. do you kow it works?
Do you check all appliances are off before leaving the house? Especially those with liion batteries that might be charging? When I leave the house, alsmost everything is off at the wall or unplugged, especially stuff that charges (well not my NiMH cherger, those batteries are safe and need a full uninterrupted charge).
So you will happily let the smart meter read and bill you without any checking. Months, years go by and the letter comes through the post (you still have a letterbox dont you?) demanding you pay for the GIGAWATTS you used last month. You phone the power company, knowing that they will laugh with you at how silly the system has been, only they tell you tgo pay up. You cant believe it, you tell them how riduculous a notion it is that your household could have used gigawatts in a few months, totally crazy. They continue to tell you to pay up, the lights are turned off as they disconnect you remotely. Bailifs arrive, court date agreed for non-payment trial. Without power you have to borrow the neighbours PC and printer to try and print of statemenst and unsage information you never bothered to check on, you have lost the login details as you just "let it do it" and after 5 years of never signing up fully the system has gotten in a twist. Support lets you on eventually, and you start printing.
To your horrow you see that the meter was fine till it slowy started reading higher and higher, only nobody caught it as no sod was checking it. The information sent to the little display somehow was out of step with the billing information, the display showed your current usage but the meter was billing more and more actual usage. After several months of not checking it the meter started reading insane usage figures, clearly to you its developed a major fault. But its up to you to convince them, the power company that the moneis owed are not real. YOU are the one at fault, a scrounger, a theif. YOU must go to court and prove it.
It's getting cold outside and winter is coming, the kids are compalining of damp on the walls. No power, no lights, nothing till you get cleared of a dept that you know you shouldnt have.
Sound familiar?
Should do, that actually happened to some people after getting a smart meter. They are not proven, they are made cheap, they were (the SMETS2 ones) a national security risk BY DESIGN till MI5 stepped in and fixed them. Woking in IT, that gives me the heebie jeebies. I used to be a software tester and when MI5 step in to save the national grid from attack, I take note. Maybe I''l have one when SMETS3 comes out, till them I'll use the PROVEN and FUNCTIONAL dumb meter I still have, it is an asset and so many peopel believ athat which is why only 57% have moved over.
I know what my meter says, I read it every month.
But in this day and age, youd like to be oblivious.
Thursday 15th June 2023 15:25 GMT
> With 4 of us in the house having a shower each daily
You are showering too frequently. Its bad for your health. Shower once every couple of days if you have not sweated and during summer when you probably do shower every day do so only for 4-6 mins. 4 mins is a bit fast for me, 6 manageable, but I find if I'm not on the ball I end up taking 15 mins!
Barracuda tells its ESG owners to 'immediately' junk buggy kit
Get your cheap memory while growing stockpiles push prices low
Friday 2nd June 2023 14:23 GMT
Here we go again
Why do we let them get away with it?
It's bad enough that big oil work together to keep prices high, introducing artificial scarcity without others joinging in.
It'll be the farmers next, burning potatoes to increase the price.
I work in IT, perhaps I should configure most PC's to be unbootable unless I am paid the overtime to re-ebable them every few weeks.
India official fined after draining reservoir to recover phone
Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail
Tuesday 30th May 2023 15:40 GMT
Re: About that local-storage advantage...
> I'm curious about the hate for IMAP that always comes up in these discussions
I still use it and I'm considering returning to POP3. The only reason IMAP became a thing was because PC's had small drives and ISP's had big drives back in the 90's, so you got to keep your mail on the ISP servers and when Google Mail came about they offered an insane amount of space (1GB I think), for FREE.
IMAP also makes it easy to have multiple devices get the same emails. So I can have my phone get them when I'm not at home.
IMAP itself isnt an issue, but leavng the email on the server is. Why?
Well several years ago most of my email was on ukfsn.org. I used IMAP to sync between my phone and my tablet. I DID NOT USE EMAIL ON MY PC.
I used K9 mail, and had it keep all emails on my devices. I mostly used the phone and let the tablet be a "backup copy", in case the phone broke etc.
Unfortunatley I had a couple of issues happen. The first was K9 mail started slowing down greatly on my mobile and was beginning to not work well at all with hangs and crashes. It needed a good old re-install, then it can re-download al the messages. That was the plan. But I was trying to be clever, I thought "Why download K9 while I can just delete the local data?". Well, deleting the app cache did nothing, so I deleted the app data. I should have uninstalled and reinstalled really becase what happened was K9 mail, now lobotomised and not stable at the time, procedded to see the wiped app database as an indication that the messages had been deleted. It then SYNCED this new version of the truth when it polled the server!
My tablet happily then wiped itself of all emails.
IMAP was only the problem because I was keeping the emails only on the server, even when the emails were downloaded to the device, they were only a reflection of the CURRENT state of the server.
Luckily I had thought ahead, being a software tester I wonderred what I would do if I had accidentally wiped all emails on one device, thus wiping all others. So I had just connected Thunderbird to the ukfsn.org IMAP server and downloaded all the emails. "Ah but TB was also syncing wasnt it?" you say, well no, I had closed it. My only record of my emails was thus on my PC. They were stored in mbox format, so I copied them off somewhere else, opened Thunderbird, watched it wipe itself clean, then I IMPORTED ALL THE EMAILS BACK INTO THUNDERBIRD!! Whoo, TB now had an offline copy as a second local only account. I then recreated my mails on the IMAP server by simply dragging between accounts on TB.
Problem sorted.
Thus I now use TB to download every account and I include the folder structure in my home directory snapshots. The issue could happen again, but I have snapshots so can recover almost every email, maybe not the most recent.
Then I started thinking ukfsn.org had its day and I should move. Why? Well I feel like I'm one of the last few surviving users. The mailserver is run by a single guy who is too busy to remember to update the SSL cert when it expires... It can take weeks! Also I'm getting more annoying spam. TB to the rescue, I just created a set of offline folders and dragged everything to those, then I logged in everywhere and changed primary emails and recovery email addresses to gmail.
But I still have this background worry that IMAP syncs back AND forth, that it can wipe me out again. Also, TB and other clients sometimes only update a folder when you open it. The Inbox is always updated but I find many simply need a nudge, I find that annoyong. POP3 wouldnt have that issue, ALL emails are downloaded and the client then sorts them. I like that better, but there wont be any syncing unless I manage deletion times. IMAP can do what POP3 does, there is no need for a client to keep messages on the server, but my other clients may not support that feature.
I'm likely sticking with IMAP but I'm making sure I have those snapshots offline. I said I will consider POP3 but I think I will want the multi-device syning.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
