Posts by rg287

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Re: Dunno

The problem with the complaint is that we're entirely correct that Excel has a lot of problems when used as a database but, from the perspective of most users, there isn't anything else for them to use. Following the same design advice from that post, we haven't considered what the people who don't have experience with databases need and therefore haven't built something that solves their problems. If we tried, we'd likely end up with something that looked a lot like a spreadsheet but just didn't do as many of the spreadsheet things. It's likely not very hard for us to write an SQL table schema to describe the data we're going to store and some input validation restrictions, either running at the SQL level or slightly above it.

Yeah, as you say, it's a "good enough" solution for a lot of things. I help with a small sports org. 70 members. Yes, I store the membership details in a spreadsheet. That's how it was provided to me, that's how I've kept it.

Could I write an app over SQLite? Eh, probably. I'm not really a software developer by trade - through I could undoubtedly create the db and have some python scripts to perform functions. Good luck handing that off to my successor though!

MS Office used to (maybe still does?) come with Access, which was also a long way from perfect but did at least try to offer users the ability to graphically build a bit of a low-code application as you could build views and forms on top of the database layer. But it was always a poor cousin and people weren't going to take the time to learn it when they could just make a list in Excel.

LibreOffice has Base but I struggled to get into it the last time I looked (some years ago!) and I haven't tried again since. Looks like it still needs Java as well since it's based on HSQL if you're running standalone and not connecting to a MySQL/PostGres server. Which is a shame because a portable, intuitive, non-technical front end for SQLite would be amazing for that no-code group.

For what it's worth, I know an organisation maintaining a couple of Windows 95 laptops to keep a DataEase application going that they use once a year... Kind of insane, but they've never found the time or resource to port to anything newer... (also nothing I have anything to do with nor the time to unfortunately, as much as I'd like to!).

Do they need Excel or just a spreadsheet.

Some need plugins or add-ons are Excel specific and difficult to replace.

It also depends what heathenry has been committed in the past. A friend worked at an amusement park as a summer job years ago. Their boss had this insane spreadsheet that did some sort of rota/scheduling process. Huge document, multiple sheets. Apparently when they changed an input value you could watch the ripple of locked cells updating. The thing was so ginormous that the update wasn't "instantaneous" (to a casual observer).

I have this strong suspicion that if you opened it in LibreOffice, it would break in all sorts of interesting ways. Although hopefully it's been replaced by something sensible by now (lol, yeah right).

Of course, that's a wild abuse of Excel and there are better ways of doing rotas and time tracking. But it's also a pretty hard blocker if you said "right, you lot only actually use email and productivity, so you're going onto Ubuntu and LibreOffice next month in the IT refresh". Cautious handraise of "will my undocumented business-critical spreadsheet work in this LibreOffice you speak of?".

Really Simple Licensing spec lets web publishers demand their due from AI scrapers

Re: Like placing a sign in your shop window

"Burglars, please don't rob us - but if you do, please leave some money on the counter."

Not quite. It's more like a car park saying "2 hours free parking. £80 fine. By parking you agree to these conditions".

And that's legally enforceable.

If your policy is "block" then yeah, they're going to ignore you. If your policy is licensed content, it then becomes moderately straightforward to say "At 08:17 the RSL was served to this bot. Between 08:18 and 09:20 the bot requested and was served 2000 pages. Per the license agreement which the scraper was served and implicitly agreed to, each page is licensed at £1000".

Not of course if they're dicking around like Perplexity and using residential IPs and generic user agents. But at least for the legit Googlebot type agents, they can be billed.

And actually, for the likes of Perplexity, if you set a trap like various outlets have where you create a brand new page with a no-AI policy, ask Perplexity about it, see it bounce off the robots.txt and then see a different IP connect and scrape the page anyway, then you can actually move to a complaint of criminal fraud since they are attempting to obtain goods or services by deception. I mean, they're doing that now - but if you serve them a license agreement with a currency amount attached and can then show that they've attempted to bypass that agreement without payment (i.e. causing monetary loss in the process) then they're bang to rights.

The problem is enforcing any of that outside the US. Google have subsidiaries around the world who can be served against, but Perplexity or OpenAI don't necessarily.

Re: And then...

Practically, it might have to be limited by, or focussed on, one's own country.

I've thought for a while that Google's "index everything and then sort out it's relevance via PageRank/<algorithm>" has hit a natural scaling problem, which was present before but has been exacerbated by the proliferation of AI-slop sites which are plausible enough to pass muster to a search ranking algo, but are actually garbage.

Google already do some curation, with sites already tagged internally as "Government" or "COVID Authority", which means they can surface the original, authoritative primary source for important topics or public authorities, but anything not directly tied to an authorative source is hopeless. Finding a product review by a human? You'll end up on an AI site somehow offering "reviews" for TVs, beauty products and lawnmowers, listing the same exact advantages and disadvantages for each of the "x vs. y" reviews. About the only thing you can do is append site:reddit.com. SEO types have played cat and mouse for decades to reverse engineer Google's algorithms, but now you just have a tsunami of spam, and trying to say "stuff which is highly backlinked must be valuable" simply doesn't work when it's borderline trivial to spin up a network of a thousand sites that all reference one another and create their own web of trust.

My approach for - say - a UK-oriented search engine would be assume Garbage-in-Garbage-Out and start with an allow-list or crawl-seed of high-reliability sites and second-level domains like gov.uk and nhs.uk and regulated T/SLDs like ac.uk, .int or .sport which are not open regstration and can be up-front preferred. Also, known legit brand sites (bmw.com, etc). The tier 1 gov.uk type domains get a multiplier in their ranking calculation on the assumption nhs.uk is more relevant (and reliable) than webMD. Nudge .uk domains up as well. Also put in other government websites - info.gouv.fr, etc.

Social media posts/pages would not be indexed. Sure, if you search "facebook" then you'll get a result for the facebook.com homepage, but searching for <actor> would not show all their posts in the index. It'd go for their personal site and wikipedia article, and show up an infobox based on wikidata/knowledge graph data. Wikipedia is useful at least as an indicator of notability - whilst articles can be subject to vandalism, the New Page Patrol does a decent job of making sure that pages only exist for genuine topics and they delete the joke articles about how someone's mate has massive genitalia. Their external links and wikidata are a very good signal for things like official websites.

News would be in a separate index and although it wouldn't be politically biased, domains ranked by a synthesis of fact-checking sites as "factually poor" or "low credibility" would be excluded. Those low-cred sites would also be excluded from the general search index.

This would be a semi-curated, opinionated search engine. Not purely allow-list based - it'd crawl and discover sites, but low-credibility sites and known AI slop would be block-listed (or rather, referred into a separate spider to identify what they link to and flag other dodgy or sister domains). The dreadful "partner story" links at the bottom of local news websites would be used as a key to suppress anything in that ecosystem of drivel and block-list those domains.

Anything .uk would probably get indexed. You could maybe have a cut-off if a domain has no inbound links more than n-degrees of separation from a "high reliability" tier-1 domain.

I do feel like you need to start with a high-reliability seed and not try to index everything or "organise the world's information" because most of what's out there isn't information. It's slop.

US Navy pledges $448 million to test if Palantir is seaworthy

submarine schedule planning was reduced from 160 manual hours to under 10 minutes.

Sounds like someone - literally anyone - needed to give it a once over and have a bash in Excel. I also wonder how many scheduling changes are made subsequently because this tool hasn't been able to account for some awkward process that would have been hashed out in one of those interminable meetings but now becomes an "unexpected delay".

I have a friend who worked in airport ground services for a little bit out of uni - as recently as mid-2000s. The unpopular job was that a spod would spend 3 hours each morning doing a bunch of planning and some load calculations for the afternoon's flights (unless there were problems and a lot of angry travellers, in which case everyone fought to go sit in a quiet office and not deal with the abuse!).

Said friend was inducted onto the job, did it for a morning, spent the evening writing an excel sheet, ran it in parallel the next day and (on getting all the same numbers coming out) showed it to their boss who was shocked that you could basically just key in the numbers and get the results out the bottom without spending 3 hours on a desk calculator.

Now, to be clear, I'm not in favour of using Excel as a database, or shadow IT generating undocumented processes. In this specific case, there was a sequence of rote calculations which were done by hand and which - in volume - took 3-4 hours. But you could drop them into a spreadsheet and just have a couple of cells for input which would throw the results out the end. Relatively simple, easy to inspect, less prone to typing/calculator errors and you could process an afternoon of flights whilst the kettle was boiling for your first brew of the day. The ouput had to be approved by a boss and the flight's Captain had to accept it as well, so several layers of cheese.

I suspect that scheduling for a submarine build is rather more complex. But my point here is, if they've gone from 160 hours to 10minutes, it sounds like pretty much anyone could have substantially cut that using literally any tooling - from an excel sheet, to some python scripts or a bodged-together low-code tool from the 1990s. I wonder how much Palantir are charging for their super swanky "AI" tooling when something bodged together by a summer intern would have got them down to 10 hours as a start.

UK finally vows to look at 35-year-old Computer Misuse Act

Using your analogy, who appointed the researchers Guardians of the Public Security?

In the days when we still had policemen on the beat, they (in some jurisdictions) might have been expected to check whether shops or warehouses were locked at night and to notify the proprietors if they were not. This was considered part of their job as Public Safety Officers. The researchers have no such public (or private) sanction.

Not so long ago, my wife was walking down our street when a dog ran out of a door towards her. No biggie, she sort of recognised it as one we've seen at the park (we also have a dog). She walked it back and called into the house to let them know their front door was ajar.

Did anyone appoint her a Guardian of Public Security? Well yes actually, Robert Peel did when he stated:

“The police are the public and the public are the police. The police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence”

And y'know, it's the civic thing to do - they'd probably be really upset if their dog got hit by a car. Yes, it would be their fault for leaving their door ajar. But it would take a sociopath to not say "I'll just shout through the door".

Anyway, how is that relevant? Well, firstly it demonstrates a general principle that in a civil society people (should) try to look out for one another. After all, the Police are an inherently reactive group, who rely on members of the public calling 999 when something happens. To wash your hands of any social responsibility ("that's the Police's job") and tell others to do likewise is at best thoughtless, and at worst downright ignorant.

You called 999?! Who appointed you a guardian of the public safety?! If the person getting stabbed need Police help, they're perfectly capable of calling themselves. They've got a phone haven't they?! /s

Moreover, in the UK (and we are discussing UK law here) no offence is actually committed by pushing an ajar door open - you haven't committed "breaking and entering" because entry was not forced. There might be a case for (civil) trespass, but there's a clear legitimate interest defence in your presence, no different to a postie delivering mail. Other offences such as burglary, theft or robbery would require you to actually steal stuff or otherwise cause harm.

But the CMA considers the equivalent action to be an absolute offence.

Now, security researchers are slightly different from that since they're actively looking for improperly ajar doors on a professional basis, but there's no real ethical difference, and it is extremely strange that the offence is considered absolute and a court has no latitude to hear a defence.

When Marcus Hutchins registered the trap domain and stopped WannaCry in it's tracks, he didn't have to touch any of the attacker's C2 infra. But what if he'd realised - in decompiling the malware - that a specially crafted command or string sent to a C2 server would propagate a shutdown command? Given that WannaCry was crippling the NHS and public infrastructure, he'd have a clear public duty to send that command and stop the spread. But under the CMA, this could be considered unauthorised access to a computer, and he would not be entitled to submit a defence in mitigation. Bizarre, no?

The entire reason we have courts is because politicians can't envisage every possible corner case - and neither can you or I. So we have laws which allow the court to exercise some latitude in saying "well yes, technically you've done a thing, but it's clearly not a crime".

It's why homicide is not a crime - because homicide committed in (legitimate and demonstrable) self-defence is considered reasonable. The crime is murder (or possibly manslaughter) and the court can weigh up all the circumstances before convicting and sentencing.

If the world was as black and white as you make out, then we wouldn't need courts at all. We could just skip to Judge Dredd - police, jury and executioner all in one.

Galactic Brain space datacenter coming in 2027, pledges startup Aetherflux

Re: WHY????

Servicing isn't a problem if it's treated as a sealed, disposable module.

Power and cooling... AI shills are calling for up to 400kW per rack. The ISS solar panels were rated for 90kW at launch to run the entire f-ing station. This is actually double what the ISS needs because it spends 45minutes of each 90min orbit in darkness and runs off batteries, so your actual power budget is <45kW. To run a 42U equivalent AI satellite, you need maybe 800kW of solar at LEO, or a mere 400kW if you go to a (higher/more expensive) always-sunny orbit. That's an incredible amount of solar capacity to launch just to run a single rack equivalent of cutting-edge, 2nm compute, whose longevity in space conditions is unknown, but probably not good.

The panels themselves will last more than 3 years, so you could have a "power satellite" with a docking/mating mechanism to which you launch a rack of compute, and 3 years later you launch a new compute module that you plug in and deorbit the old one (full of obsolete and/or failed chips). Maybe get 3-4 generations of compute per solar array.

But then you need a hell of a cooling package, which various space engineers have raised eyebrows at.

The whole thing is just unnecessary. A way of separating fools from their money. I can see a way to an architecture, but I don't see it being cost-effective, even if there was sufficient demand for AI to make it profitable. Which it isn't. If you can't make money on the ground, you won't in space.

Datacenters planned for Scotland could end up draining a loch of power

Re: Energy generation mix

As for discounts to bit barn builders and operators for energy... Em, why?

Yes, talk about putting the cart before the horse. If you want to incentivise bit barns to go somewhere other than Slough, then levy a surcharge on bitbarns south of Birmingham to cover the extra costs of transmitting power and water to the south east. Throwing them a taxpayer subsidy to go north is completely arse-backwards.

I was shocked to find myself in agreement with US Conservatives this week... this is a multi-Trillion-dollar industry. It is absurd to suggest the hyperscalers need taxpayer handouts. NVDA is valued at ~$4.6Tn, which is more than the GDP of every nation on earth apart from the USA ($30Tn), China ($19Tn) and possibly Germany (~4.5-5Tn). Whether nVidia is considered more valuable (financially) than Germany depends on which markets are open and the time of day. Which rather highlights the insanity of the current bubble. When you add up all the outputs of the German economy - engineering, manufatcured goods, agricultural output, cultural and artistic works... the idea those are of equal or lesser value to the world than nvidia's AI chips is laughable.

Re: Energy generation mix

I was right with you until this point. The grid is maintained and worked well. Then the new religion took over demanding windfarms and solar that do not work the way we are used to generating energy. We used to generate the energy we needed, where it was needed and reliably.

We'll just carry on burning coal and Russian gas then. Sure. Fine. No problem. Gas and oil are famously cheap and Russia/OPEC have never cut production to cause major oil-shocks that have shattered the world economy. This idea of moving to domestically generated renewable energy with no paid inputs and predictable maintenance costs is totally unnecessary!

The reason energy prices are high are down to a combination of Herr Putin, the insane way the UK energy market is structured and the failure by NG to build interconnects concurent with highland windfarm construction so that we have the capacity to ship power down to England - with the result we're now paying windfarms to shut down when the Scottish grid is saturated. That's not the fault of the windfarms - it's the fault of government for dragging their heels on infrastructure (of all sorts).

spend over £700 million for a fish disco to save 0.08 of a salmon per year?

Nobody saw that, and neither did you. HP-C's total budget for protecting marine life is ~£700m. Of which the acoustic deterrent/"fish disco" bit is £50m. You can argue about the necessity of that, but it's not costing £700m. It's <10% of the total environmental protection budget.

UK Digital Services Tax raises £800M from global tech giants

Re: How about 20% tax?

Taking Netflix as a clear example of a content streamer

1. You can't cherry-pick one streamer from a system that covers streamers, social platforms, online marketplaces and search.

2. If Netflix had net margin of 22%, then a 20% revenue tax is roughly equivalent to a Corporation Tax rate of 90%. Likewise with Meta having a 37% margin, you're eating >50% of their profits. And it's not like I have any love for Meta, but that's clearly a substantial divergence from our CT regime of 19-22%, given this is only supposed to be making up some of the difference in lost CT! If 22% of profits is what we consider to be fair, then lifting 90% of those profits is divergent from that principle. Of course maybe we think CT should be >50%.

3. If we're going to cherry-pick examples, eBay's profit margin last year was 19% (down from 27% in 2023). So a 20% tax on revenue would have claimed 80% of their profit in 2023 and run them into a loss in 2024. Taxes shouldn't force businesses into the red. Okay, there may be cases where mismanaged businesses can't make rates payments - but they're likely going bust anyway. Presuming that a business has an underlying profit margin in excess of 20% is a huge assumption. The problem we've had is multinationals choosing to declare their profits in different jurisdictions to the ones where the profit was earned. But the solution to that is not to run them into a genuinely loss-making position.

The most important part here is what Paul Monaghan (The Fair Tax Foundation) said - the DST is "clumsy but needed." The expectation is that DST is a stopgap which needs replacing with more cohesive international rules/tax regimes.

Based on these figures we've bandied around, then yes, maybe we could run DST to 10% rather than 2-4%. But 20% on revenue is a huge chunk.

Re: How about 20% tax?

Because the DST is a revenue tax. So it's on total revenue, not profits. If you were operating on a 4% profit margin, then a 2% DST effectively amounts to 50% of your profits (rather higher than the UK Corporation Tax bands of 19-25%). Now I doubt Amazon's margins are as razor-thin as 4%, but that 2% of UK revenue is going to be a much larger percentage of their UK profits.

Of course they'll calculate DST as an expense, reducing the taxable profits, so HMRC loses a bit of CT, but on balance wins.

The concept of a revenue tax is pretty controversial because you could be taxing unprofitable companies as well (e.g. startups, or companies doing high levels of R&D/investment), which is why this is quite specifically on firms generating over half a billion in global revenue and at least £25m from UK users - we can presume they're profitable at that scale (and if they're not, then that's very much their problem, we're not crushing small-scale domestic innovation).

The DST was necessary because all these firms were reporting huge revenues but contriving to declare improbably low profits from that enormous turnover, thereby avoiding Corp Tax. We've also seen in this week's budget a move to cut business rates on hospitality businesses (i.e. local, physical premises - pubs, restaurants, entertainment, etc) whilst increasing rates on big-box warehouses which employ relatively few people per sq.m and are disproportionately owned/operated by the sorts of multi-nationals who prefer to pick and choose where and how much tax they will pay.

But you can't run a 20% revenue tax. Even the likes of Google are unlikely to be have profit margins significantly in excess of 20%. We could probably push to a French 3% or maybe even 4% pretty safely though.

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

Re: Hang on

Somehow Canada has the legal tools to force OVH's Canadian subsidiary to give up data in the EU but the US doesn't?

...

I think what we were told back then was not strictly the vérité.

The US subsidiary is more technically and legally separated, presumably because of the PATRIOT/CLOUD acts.

IIRC an account on OVH US can only spin up services in their US regions. A regular OVH account anywhere else can spin up services in any region except the US. It's an entirely separate entity running parallel infrastructure.

I'm still surprised that an order against OVH Canada is met with anything other than "We do not have the technical ability to access data held by our parent company on another continent.", but it sounds like there's insufficient separation (either an internal policy matter, which the Canadian court is ordering them to ignore, or none at all). Any contempt of court prosecution would be contentious - every executive in every Canadian subsidiary of a foreign firm would suddenly be very nervous about potentially being ordered to leak information from their parent, or being prosecuted for "refusing" to hand over information they literally don't have access to. The business associations would riot.

As Charlie Clark mentions though, it doesn't need to go to full CoC charges. It's a matter of whether they can pressure OVHC/F with threats of sanctioning OVH in Canada.

ICANN distances itself from radical proposal – which it funded – to give nations a role in internet governance

Re: "a board dominated by African heads of state"

We still have unelected kings in Europe. Not exactly a good personification of democracy.

But - weirdly - those are some of the most democratic nations with the highest standards of living, education and public services.

Admittedly, the Scandi royals are all pretty much entirely ceremonial with even less procedural involvement in government and legislating than the UK monarch.

It does go to show though that's it's perhaps got less to do with the de jure structure and more to do with the de facto culture and way the government runs.

I'm one of those annoying pragmatic Brits who thinks hereditary monarchy is an insane, obsolete and anachronistic system of governance. You certainly wouldn't set it up that way today. But I am also of the belief that if we ripped up our constitution (such as it is) and replaced Charlie with President <Blair/Cameron/Johnson>, we would be absolutely no better off than we are now, except for some vague and thoroughly intangible sense of the system being more fair (even though the country is actually run by billionaires. See: USA, even before a literal billionaire was elected POTUS). Republicanism certainly wouldn't get us to the standards of living that Denmark or Sweden enjoy with their archaic, undemocratic monarchies!

As for Africa, we must be careful not to be colonial/lazy/judgmental here. Historically however, it has been the case that you can have long-lived stability (Gaddafi, Mugabe) or democracy (People's Republic of...). Pick your poison. And it's mostly Europe's fault for trying to carve up a continent of tribes and proto-states into a completely different map based on colonial resource claims and then dubbing those territories "countries", then doing our best to prevent them developing industry that might compete with ours. Pin them down to base agriculture and resource extraction with minimal local refining or processing - send that stuff to us for the value-add!

Europe's IT spend to surge 11% as cloud sovereignty fever takes hold

Re: What people say and what people do.

The push to move to cashless payments also increases the dependence on American payment providers, both the old ones (Visa and Mastercard) and the tech ones (Apple and Google).

Sort of. I was surprised to learn that a lot of countries do have national payment networks. For instance, in Norway >90% of card transactions (ATMS, payment terminals and online shopping ) go through BankAxept, which is run by a Norwegian company owned by a consortium of local banks on a non-profit basis. Cards are then dual-coded to use Visa or Mastercard abroad. Payment terminals also accept those networks for international visitors. I can't speak to what the implications are for using Apple/Google Pay, but in terms of a straight card transaction, domestic transactions never touch the Visa/MC networks. Being non-profit, BankAxept transaction fees are lower than on Visa/MC (and of course running costs are employing Norwegians), benefitting the Norwegian economy compared with shipping out profits to the US.

Several countries have such networks. Italy has Bancomat, Denmark have Dankort. Of course it's still very unsatisfactory for international payments to be tied up through an American duopoly, but at least those countries can process transactions locally without US permission.

There's also a European Payment Initiative launching a digital wallet under the Wero brand, which will allow interbank paments across participating countries.

The UK of course doesn't do anything so sensible. We just rely naively on Uncle Sam.

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

That's how MOD "budgeting" seems to operate.

Not just MoD budgeting either - it's just Treasury brain.

We need a good dose of neo-Keynesian injecting into the heart of Government and Treasury (neo- because Keynes still operated in a time of the gold standard, so some of his thoughts are no longer relevant, and indeed being on a fiat currency gives us more flexibility to adopt his strategies and policies than even he would have dreamed of).

Re: Again why beancouters

Their purchase and supply department (Abbey Wood) is dysfunctional and would be bankrupt in any commercial environment.

Without wishing to defend any actual incompetence, they're also kind of underfunded and understaffed. There was a case a while back when some numpty ordered a load of face/hand towels and ordered polyester instead of cotton because it saved a few quid. This was a problem because polyester is rubbish and just moves water around instead of absorbing it. Also, these are the same towels that chefs get issued extra of, which are used to hold hot pan handles. Polyester melts.

One ranking officer at Abbey Wood was asked how this was allowed to happen, and basically said "How much do you think towels like this cost? We're dealing with billions in procurement each year, including complex projects like T45/F35/etc. It was a million quids worth of towels. Something has to be going wrong to the tune of at least 8 figures before I can spare someone to go out and see what's going on".

And he has a fair point. In the scheme of government or even MoD spending, some spod at Donnington thinking they can save a few quid and putting in an order for the wrong towels is small beer and below what Abbey Wood can reasonably vet - they have to trust that base chefs are ordering food appropriately and the "day to day" stuff is turning over whilst they worry about strategic procurement. They can't micromanage all that. But it does make some great headlines when it goes wrong because £1m is a lot to you or me, even though the MoD can casually write it off.

Fixing this would allow reallocation without cutting the budget.

The problem is that actually fixing this generally relies on capital expenditure - investing in the services and infrastructure to save money overall. And that isn't something we do in the land of Milton Friedman - Friedman demands that we add more layers of bureaucracy to ensure the wrong sort of people aren't claiming benefits, which in turn costs more than just doing the thing properly in the first place.

For instance, an easy way to cut unemployment would be to fix our railways and properly fettle public transport across the country. This would mean that low income workers and people with conditions like epilepsy (who could hold down a job but aren't legally allowed to drive) can access employment, instead of struggling to find work because they're restricted to sites either within walking distance or accessible on public transport. The same applies to 16-year-old apprentices who must either be driven by a parent or rely on public transport. All those out-of-town business and industrial sites? Nope, sorry. Out of reach. If you want to cut disability support allowances, fettle public transport. Transport is probbaly the most important point of UK domestic policy now - not because it's inherently more important than hospitals or schools, but because it's basically been ignored, run down and sidelined for 40 years to the point it's now blocking access to health, education, employment and actively holding back the economy.

Means-testing winter fuel allowance would cost more than it would save. But if you invested in electrical interconnects so that we stop paying wind farms to not generate electricity, and get energy prices down so they're basically too cheap to meter, then you don't need a fuel allowance because people won't be in fuel poverty to start with. And the cost of goods can level out if business is not facing ever-rising energy bills. It's been well documented that Scotland could basically be getting free electric right now except for the way our energy markets are structured.

Meanwhile, eliminating SEN expenditure on private schools requires that we invest in quality SEN support in state schools and - more generally - improve the state system and reduce class sizes. Because there will be a propotion of SEN students who are kind of marginal, and could get by without so much SEN support if they were working in a class of 20 instead of 30 and the regular teachers could offer more time and support to them. At which point they might just need a weekly check-in and support/tutor session to keep up instead of a whole special SEN track. Of course there are those who will always need more intensive support, but the crisis in frontline SEN is indicative of the crisis in teaching. Much the same as 999 gets a lot of calls when councils have their social care budgets slashed - what might have been a timely call to a social worker now festers until it becomes a mental health crisis and requires the attendance of Police or ambulance because there's noone else to call. Half the NHS's problems are the fact they're the last line of resort in areas where social care is on it's knees and people turn there when they have nowhere else to go, even though they ought to have been sorted out at home by a council social care bod.

The funny thing about all those policies is that they would also benefit the rest of society. Lots of non-drivers and people who prefer not to drive would benefit from better transit. The remaining drivers benefit from less congestion if more people use the bus/tram/train. Individuals and businesses alike benefit from lower energy prices (and stable prices - insulated from the capricious whims of OPEC or Putin). Want growth in the economy? There's your growth. All the other kids benefit from smaller class sizes, not just SEN kids. All of us would benefit from an NHS which wasn't snowed under with geriatrics who ought to be released to council social care but can't be because there are no beds available.

Incredibly weird we don't implement these very straightforward and well-defined policies. But that would involve government taxing billionaires, giving councils revenue powers to invest in infrastructure, and for polticians to stop pretending that all the economic problems we have in the midlands and North of England stem from some boats on a beach 200miles away in Kent, which are a wonderful distraction from all the other structural political failings, but ultimately irrelevant in the scheme of things.

This idea of spending £5 this year rather than £50 and it being a better option even if that means it costs you £5000 extra over the next 3yr I cannot rationalise.

* Move to rented premises

* Sell the existing premises

* Pay out the profit to shareholders

* Exit the business, which you were never actually interested in, just the assets they held.

They don't care about the long-run costs because they'll have ditched the company by then. It's a carpet-bagging, asset-stripping mentality.

And in private business... well to an extent, caveat emptor. But for some reason we elected these charlatans to public office, and now they've saddled all our public services with the fantastically good value concept of "renting in perpetuity", even though it's far more expensive than investing and owning outright.

England's local government shake-up promises to be a massive tech headache

Ah, the promise of cost savings and efficiency improvements.

This was adequately explained 15 years ago.

And Reform still had to learn this the hard way in Kent, because in all honesty they're a bit thick (that's a personal attack on the individual councillors btw, not a sweeping partisan generalisation. And if you think that's unfair... take a look at them. Go on, look upon their works ye Mighty, and despair).

Redrawing the boundaries on local authorities is just fiddling with the deck chairs. We won't see any meaningful improvement until we get strong County/Regional councils akin to those of the 1960s/70s with the funding (or funding powers) powers to match. It was the County Councils who built the motorways - with MoT money and following a general schematic from central government. But Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Somerset County Councils were the commissioning authorities for their sections of M5. Goodness, if we'd waited for London to build the motorways they'd have run out at Reading.

We've had decades of Conservatives centralising power in Westminster, and apathetic Labour not reversing that. It is long past time County Councils (and equivalent unitary authorities) had tax and commissioning powers on the scale of German Lander (or at the very least, French cities - which is saying something when you understand how centralised French political power is in Paris).

The VT/BRS powers to build trams and bus networks, to run public services on a non-profit basis for public benefit. To build, rather than rent in perpetuity. And for central government to nod sagely and say "yep, we'll fund that. Infrastructure spend always pays back" instead of allowing Treasury to fight every step of the way.

A thousand years this city has stood. Now at the whim of a madman it will fall. And the White Tree the tree of the King will never bloom again. They guard it [still] because they have hope. A faint and fading hope that one day it will flower. That a king will come and this city will be what it once was before it fell into decay. The old wisdom borne out of the West was forsaken. Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the name of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the people of Gondor fell into ruin. The line of kings failed. The White Tree withered. The rule of Gondor was given over to lesser men.

Tombs more splendid indeed. Remind us of anyone? Navel-gazers and con artists. At some point we must choose politicians with a vision to improve our nation. A big picture view. People who want to build infrastructure - railways, schools, hospitals, sewage plants and power interconnects. For now, we have only lesser men. Caretakers, who quietly manage the decline of our nation with no ambition or vision.

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

As awomanmanhasaname menions, Liquid have an east-west connector already, albeit a bit south of where Seacom are looking. So that seems to be an issue of routing, connectivity and capacity than engineering. Can an ISP in Kenya peer/send traffic to an ISP on the west coast using that link, or will the route go via Europe or South Africa due to routing? Likewise, will an ISP in Mozambique be able to route traffic up to Kenya, across Africa and out to a west coast point, or will it - again - route via the coast?

That said, some submarine cable tech could be of use. Following the Congo, a river-bed plough that buries cable (not just dropping it on the surface of the riverbed) could get you from the west coast - Port Banana - all the way past Kinshasha to Kisangani. It;s a wiggly route, but we're not doing high speed trading over it, and it passes a lot of cities - which tend to cluster around major rivers!

From Kisangani, you've then got the mountainy bit to get across the African Rift Valley, through Rwanda/Uganda/Burundi into Tanzania/Kenya and down to the coast.

The Congo is... a large river. A cable buried deep in the bed would not be readily accessible to vandals, albeit the same might apply to repair teams! It does dispense with having to carve a line across central Africa. Of course, buidling a railway from Kinshasa to Kampala and/or Mwansa (linking across the top of the N-S lines at Ilebo and Kindu), would do wonders for mobility across that region, and you can lay in some fibre while you're at it alongside the railway's comms hardware.

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

Re: keep governments away

The reason big tech have become so dominant is due to our increasing reliance on big data. That is only going to become more prevalent.

Most corporate entities simply cannot afford to rollout the required infrastructure and maintain it, it’s not their core business.

The idea of freeing themselves from big tech via self hosting is unrealistic.

But that's not what they're doing. They're doing things that are extremely realistic. To say "it's impractical to self-host big data" rather misses the point that even for very large businesses, the total requirement to self-host your key productivity/business services runs to - at most - a couple of racks of hardware. Crikey, you can host thousands of mailboxes from a single 1U server. Obviously it would be preferable to have some redundancy and backups(!) - but we're not talking hyperscale compute here. It's actually an underwhelmingly small estate.

Also, On-Prem/Colo-ing your core business functionality doesn't mean you can't selectively use cloud for big data/analytics. But that's a tiny proportion of your workforce.

Email, Filesharing, LDAP/AD - there's simply no need to bundle all that into Google Workspace or M363 except that the right people have been wined and dined.

Schleswig-Holstein migrates 30k state workers off Exchange/Outlook to Open-Xchange/Thunderbird. (The state began rolling out LibreOffice as its standard office software last year)

Austria's Federal Ministry of Economy, Energy and Tourism (BMWET) migrates 1200 users to Nextcloud in 4 months. (Albeit hybrid, with Teams still available for external meetings).

Denmark's Digital Ministry is replacing Microsoft services with LibreOffice and Linux.

France bans Whatsapp for govt workers and mandates self-hosted Tchap service (Matrix).

Bundeswehr moves to a Matrix-based messaging platform

At the end of the day, 1200 staff on 365 Business Standard is £11k/month - and realistically, some portion of them are on Premium, or E3/5, so you're actually looking at ~£25-30k/mo just to Microsoft - nevermind your own helpdesk payroll.

£350k/yr buys you a stack of basic mail and file servers (which will last 3-5 years), with more than enough left over to hire some additional in-house admin staff (because it's not like M363 frees you of the need for in-house helpdesk). And it keeps the lawyers happy since cloud was being deemed incompatible with both GDPR and NIS2. It's not all about money.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

Re: HMRC

If the US owner has the power to appoint / fire Directors of the UK entity, they almost certainly have the power to exercise direct control *despite* the objections of current UK Directors.

Well yes. They can say "do this or you're fired".

However, if the alternative is a criminal conviction, then most people would walk - directors are not necessarily employees, so wouldn't be able to sue for unlawful dismissal. But realistically, the engineers setting up access (on orders from domestic or parent directors) will be. They have a lawful duty to say "UK law says go swivel" and if they're sacked for that, then they'll win a year's salary at the employment tribunal because refusing to break UK law is automatically going to be unfair dismissal.

Re: HMRC

I wouldn't be so sure that this is a British entity.

...

US Cloud Act likely apply there as well.

Crown Hosting is a UK business of which all the directors are British nationals. It is owned by Ark Data Centres Ltd and the Cabinet Office. Ark is also a UK Ltd, and all the directors are British nationals.

The fact that Ark is in turn owned by an American somewhere up the tree doesn't mean that the American owner can make them ship data out to the US. I mean, the US might try, and they might even imprison the US owner. But they have no direct hold over the UK directors, who would say "Nah, sorry. It would be a crime in our jurisdiction to send you that data and we're not going to prison for you".

It's a UK based/managed/engineered firm that happens to have some American money in it somewhere up the chain.

The ability of a US financier to dip into arbitrary servers in a UK datacentre is quite different (and more limited!) than for AWS, where the European regions are run by a US-based engineering effort and the US engineers - under duress - can in fact dip into overseas regions at will, despite the fact that AWS UK is merely a branch of AWS EMEA SARL in Luxembourg, and is registered as such with Companies House, declaring themselves under Luxembourg law, with a bunch of Luxembourg-based directors.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Re: Good email server

BTW, if you setup such a system nowadays, the odds the big email providers, Gmail, MS, etc, will actually accept emails from your servers seem to be pretty low.

This seems to be a common misconception. I have a few domains on non-big-boy providers. A couple of clubs/societies using email provided with web hosting on cPanel & Plesk, along with some other fully self-hosted bits. I talled up the members of one of those societies and it came out about 25% Google, 25% Microsoft, 25% BTInternet and 25% "other". Leave the anglosphere and you'll see lots of other ISP and local providers who Google and MS have to exchange mail with. It's very much not the duopoly that people would have you think.

It is true that if you stand up a mail server and start firing out mail, then you'll have a bad time. If you want mail delivered then you need:

* to check your provider actually allows SMTP traffic and hasn't got port 25 closed.

* PTR records

* SPF

* DKIM

* DMARC (weirdly the presence of a record is more important than whether it actually imposes a meaningful policy)

* Checking your IPs are not on the spam lists. Which they will be if you've just spun up a DO Droplet or cloud VM.

* Some sort of TLS - STARTTLS at a minimum. Ideally MTA-STS, but that calls for configuring a web server as well to serve the MTA-STS policy.

And you'll want to slow-loris your traffic until the big boys get to know you. Don't send a billion emails on day one. Whenever I've stood up a new mail domain, I always get a few people on gmail/outlook to send some emails to me. I also send some to them and have them reply to me (and mark the domain as a safe sender). This gets you off the ground and builds a little domain rep.

That all sounds rather onerous, but it's mostly setting DNS records, and overall those bits are all easier than getting your head around Postfix and Dovecot configs.

If you've got a web-facing server and you're capable of hardening it and managing the mail software, then the other bits are pretty easy. You just need to know to do them.

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

Re: DNS

If you're wondering where your car is, don't worry, you'll get it back next month.

In the UK, that's actually not stealing. The criminal offence of Theft is defined as taking property with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of it.

This made it functionally impossible to prosecute car thieves/joyriders because they could always say they just fancied a razz in that natty GTi and were going to take it back afterwards. Honest! The intent therefore couldn't be proved.

As a result, we have a specific offence of "Taking without the owner's consent" (TWOC) for cars to cover theft and/or joyriding.

Of course, removing a book from a bookshop without payment is theft. It's up to the bookshop whether they wish to allow refunds on a once-read book. The "refund an unread ebook" dodge on Kindle is iffy, since the marginal cost to Amazon of delivering that eBook is basically zero. It's more along the lines of fraud than theft - obtaining goods or services by deception.

It's morally wrong, though I have no sympathy for Amazon. I'd be more concerned whether the author still gets their royalty (probably not on a refunded ebook - whereas a theft from a physical bookshop is on the retailer. The publisher & author have had their cut).

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Re: the sums are insane

Unfortunately, hunger and lack of food operates as a check on population growth, especially in regions where there isn't access to birth control for one reason or another. In some places, it's a practice for couples to try for as many children as they can since they know many won't make it to adulthood and having no children will mean nobody to take care of them in their later years.

This is what people were taught in high school geography c.1980-2010. The world has moved on a bit. Most countries in the world now have plateauing populations. Birth rates have dropped back to replacement rate (or less) and populations are only growing because healthcare has improved to the point of older generations living far beyond their life expectancy at birth, plus the large families of the 1990s are now all becomng adults.

There are of course some states - mostly in Africa - with high birth rates, but even these are crashing. For instance Niger is often quoted as having a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of ~7-8 babies per woman. But in the last 8-10 years this has dropped to ~5.8 or 6 depending who you ask, and continues to fall. Population growth is slowing globally, and UN estimates are that global population will peak at ~12Billion in ~2100.

Moreover, the majority of the global population is in Asia, so high birth rates in Africa are "high growth on a small starting population". A TFR of 5 in a population of 25m people is a rather different issue than a TFR of 5 in India or China. Global population distribution is "1115", which is the population ratio of the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. By 2100 it will be more like 1125.

Malthus was wrong. There is no need to allow famine or other malthusian disasters as a population control. We do actually have the farming capability to feed 12B people. The issue is one of politics and distribution.

It's not actually difficult to do famine relief - we're extremely well practiced in it. It all comes down to a politician giving the green light (or not). And for those decrying "Ah, but we can't afford to. Charity needs to start at home". I simply direct them to the US farmers currently facing bankruptcy since their USAID contracts were cancelled. Wow. Much efficiency, so great for the US economy. Foreign aid is basically state aid for domestic farmers and producers. Government buys domestically produced goods and ships them abroad. The money stays in the donor country!

Re: “This gap between usage and payment represents a major opportunity”

After all, people use Asocial Media... though they haven't quite dared to say 'you can have this without adverts for ten bucks a month!

Yes they have! Well, maybe not ten bucks - £2.99 for ad-free Facebook and Instagram coming soon.

Of course the barstewards will still scrape and sell all your data for off-platform advertising.

Flickr has also had paid tiers for a long time (in so much as it's social media), though this was for user-based benefits like uploading more and larger images. But those tiers kept the ads away.

There are also various platforms popping up with a paid-for business model, such as Glass - a photography community built along the lines of Instagram and Flickr, with robust copyright statements (your images are yours, and we're not going to train AI on them) and no data collection/advertising angle. Their long-term success is yet to be determined.

Apple goes all in on AI acceleration with M5 MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pros

The switch from PowerPC to Intel aside, processors haven't really been getting faster for over a decade.

They certainly have. The issue is that outside the datacentre or heavy/workstation users, those improvements in top-end speed are basically irrelevant, and have also been swallowed by OS cruft and nonsense like Electron-based software. The saying used to go "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away." Substitute your preferred vendors. But even on the base-spec Intel MBPs, there's objectively a significant performance bump between a 2010 model and the final 2020 models.

The inconvenient truth for vendors though (including Apple) is that an RPi-grade SoC is more than adequate for standard productivity tasks. The MNT Reform packs an 8-core (2022) RK3588, which benches slightly better than a (2011) i5-2500. The Rockchip is marginally worse on single-thread, probably due to clock speed - 2.2GHz vs. 3.3Ghz. This wouldn't be very impressive except that it achieves this with a TDP of 15W instead of 95W, with obvious implications for battery life and heating/fan usage. Some combination of shrinking node size and improvements to IPS. My mum kept a 2011 MBP going for 14 years, which is testament to it's build quality and "good enough" processor (I did bump the RAM and swap in an SSD mid-life).

As you mention, the user experience over the past decade has really been defined by faster (and more) DDR and greatly improved storage speeds (SATA, then NVMe SSDs). Processors have long been "fast enough" for productivity and consumer-level media work (photos, home video).

The differentiator is now really power efficiency. I wonder how much extra battery life we could enjoy if we had a properly stripped back OS that got out the way and just ran decent productivity software with no "AI", and we could dispense with the tensor cores, NPU, etc. I don't allow "well just try Linux and find out" because very few vendors supply linux laptops pre-installed and even those that do won't have done the level of battery management tinkering that - say - Apple have. I wonder how power-efficient we could make the world if you had an M5 with no tensor/NPU cruft and a version of MacOS stripped back to ~2011 functionality.

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: "And they make Star-Trek-like noises as they open and close"

And they make Star-Trek-like noises as they open and close.

I'm choosing to believe that was a specification/requirement in the design and tender documents.

Not interested in being boringly told otherwise!

Imgur yanks Brit access to memes as parent company faces fine

Re: Yet more Starmer authoritarian stateism - Oh no it isn't

It isn't vanilla GDPR though. It's an extra added to the Data Protection Act over-and-above EU requirements.

The EU disagree! See Article 8 - "Conditions applicable to child's consent in relation to information society services", which is backed by Recital 38 - "Special Protection of Children's Personal Data".

You've just managed to link to a specific Lords discussion about the UK implementation of this article and inferred that it's UK-specific. But the underlying law is vanilla GDPR and EU-wide.

The ICO have brought an investigation against Imgur for failing to comply with GDPR.

Re: Crazed bureaucrats

It has nothing to do with GDPR. Why do people keep repeating this lie? Its due to the OSA

Why do YOU keep repeating this lie?

The ICO have brought an investigation against Imgur for failing to comply with GDPR. Specifically Article 8 - "Conditions applicable to child's consent in relation to information society services". This was brought in February BEFORE the OSA even came into force.

It's not about adult content. It's about serving personalised ads to children, through the unlawful processing of PII.

Nothing to do with the execrable OSA, which is under the remit of OfCom, not the ICO.

Re: The ICO 'court'

It has nothing to do with GDPR and its all down to the UK specific OSA

The ICO have brought an investigation against Imgur for failing to comply with GDPR. Specifically Article 8 - "Conditions applicable to child's consent in relation to information society services". This was brought in February BEFORE the OSA even came into force.

Nothing to do with the execrable OSA, which is under the remit of OfCom, not the ICO.

Re: Yet more Starmer authoritarian stateism - Oh no it isn't

But this isn't about GDPR, it's about OSA. Irrelevant argument.

The ICO have brought an investigation against Imgur for failing to comply with GDPR. Specifically Article 8 - "Conditions applicable to child's consent in relation to information society services". This was brought in February BEFORE the OSA even came into force.

It's not about adult content. It's about serving personalised ads to children, through the unlawful processing of PII.

Nothing to do with the execrable OSA, which is under the remit of OfCom, not the ICO.

Re: The ICO 'court'

Bullshit. GDPR doesn't say anything about age and it's *all* OSA (and other non-GDPR legislation about advertising to minors).

Wrong. And not just wrong, but trivially checkable. Try harder. The entire world's information at your fingertips and you can't be bothered to do a simple google.

Are there any specific safeguards for data about children?

Your company/organisation can only process a child’s personal data on grounds of consent with the explicit consent of their parent or guardian up to a certain age. The age threshold for obtaining parental consent varies between 13 and 16 years, depending on the age established in each EU Member State. Check with your National Data Protection Authority.

A reasonable effort must be made, taking into consideration available technology, to verify that the consent given is truly in line with the law. That means that your company/organisation must implement age-verification measures (for example control questions, actions on the website).

It is this which Imgur basically just said "Nah" to.

-----------------------------

Article 8 makes specific provisions to the legality of processing children's data - "Conditions applicable to child's consent in relation to information society services"

1. Where point (a) of Article 6(1) applies, in relation to the offer of information society services directly to a child, the processing of the personal data of a child shall be lawful where the child is at least 16 years old. Where the child is below the age of 16 years, such processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that consent is given or authorised by the holder of parental responsibility over the child. Member States may provide by law for a lower age for those purposes provided that such lower age is not below 13 years.

2. The controller shall make reasonable efforts to verify in such cases that consent is given or authorised by the holder of parental responsibility over the child, taking into consideration available technology.

-----------------------------

This is further expounded in Recital 38, which is not technically an article of GDPR, but it part of it's raison d'être and would therefore be considered in interpreting and ruling on GDPR.

Children merit specific protection with regard to their personal data, as they may be less aware of the risks, consequences and safeguards concerned and their rights in relation to the processing of personal data. 2Such specific protection should, in particular, apply to the use of personal data of children for the purposes of marketing or creating personality or user profiles and the collection of personal data with regard to children when using services offered directly to a child. 3The consent of the holder of parental responsibility should not be necessary in the context of preventive or counselling services offered directly to a child.

Re: The ICO 'court'

If it's GDPR related how come they are still active in the rest of Europe? ... From what i understand it's only the UK, which would imply online save the children bollocks

Because GDPR is enforced on a country-by-country basis, although rulings in one country could make cases in other countries easier. Imgur have been dinged by the UK regulator have have blocked the UK. To confuse matter further, some countries - in enacting GDPR - may exceed that minimum baseline, so if they required stricter handling of some particular data then a ruling under that specific countries act (which is not really GDPR, but GDPR-adjacent) would only be locally relevant. That's not really the case here though.

GDPR requires lawful purpose to process personal data, and it requires that to be handled especially robustly when it relates to especially sensitive data, such as health data and that relating to children. Since Imgur have made basically no effort to comply, they are in breach.

It's nothing to do with the excreable Online Safety Act, whose enforcement falls to OfCom, not the ICO.

Re: Yet more Starmer authoritarian stateism - Oh no it isn't

When we divorced our geographical neighbours we just copied the GDPR(EU) legislation into our own as an interim measure (and we all know how interim measures go)

Not quite right. We enacted the EU Regulation into UK law via the Data Protection Act 2018. This is normal - you require a bit of domestic legislation to deal with local/domestic legalities of things like "you must have a regulator".

So we didn't copy GDPR into UK law at the point of Brexit. It was already a part of UK law which would require manual repeal by Parliament, and we haven't bothered (although such a move would be Very Bad^TM for British business given that it would halt data transfers between us and our biggest trading partner).

Re: The ICO 'court'

but they're specifically being dinged for not implementing special considerations for juvenile accounts, which requires obtaining some quantity of PII beyond an e-mail and IP address.

Treat all accounts as juvenile until proven otherwise. Not hard to do, but it also might affect shareholder value - unacceptable!

Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead? No, wait – it's on Windows

Re: "Having a snappy, responsive editor makes coding so enjoyable,"

What on earth have people been doing to make *any* editor non-snappy, non-responsive

Electron. Writing desktop apps in a web framework instead of natively is always going to murder the UX.

No Electron?

...then wrote our own GPU-accelerate UI framework to transcend the limitations of Electron."

What?!? Someone wrote a desktop app that wasn't just a webapp wrapped in Chromium? Is such a thing even possible? It's amazing what they can do these days! Not f-ing surprised it launches into <200MB instead of the bloated mess you get with anything using Electron.

UK splurges £4.4M on drones, e-planes, and other flights of fancy

Amazing to be at the cutting edge of technology!

What do you mean Rwanda have been using drones for rural blood deliveries since 2016? UKGov, probably.

Re: OXCAM

As a city to city taxi I'd agree it makes more sense

If you're travelling city-to-city, then use the train. We're spending good money on East-West Rail. One train carries 300-700 people. At a sensible service pattern like 4-5tph that's 3000 seats per hour in each direction. 300-700 air taxis would be... problematic. All of this air-taxi gumpf fails to allow for the sheer density of required landing pads, noise and airspace required, much as central OXCAM have had to do away with parking for private cars and tell people to use the bus.

Unless by "taxi" you're referring to high-dependency patient transfer, in which case yes, aviation can be helpful.

Good for Highlands & Islands or edge medical cases (albeit - as you point out - they're still inferior to standard air ambos at the moment).

How I learned to stop worrying and love the datacenter

enterprise customers running their own datacenters are in decline. There are just so many risks and hassles. Do you know whether your cabinets in five years are going need 10 kW or 100? Nvidia threatens to roll out 600 kW racks within 18 months and a megawatt after that.

10kW. Or less probably. Moore's Law is dead, but successive generations of silicon tend to offer lower W/Operation, so the total demand for AD, Email servers, web hosting, network, etc is all likely to continue falling. If we're talking about "Enterprise Datacentres" in terms of a business pointing to a building and saying "That's our DC", then I wouldn't expect them to - what used to require a mainframe or rows of gear now fits a few cabinets (all your basic mail/AD/productivity/business processes). Colo that (or on-prem it, or stick it in M364). Don't need your own building for it.

Or what, is our enterprise suddenly going to go all-in and start ordering £250m of nVidia's finest for... reasons? I don't think so.

How many actual enterprises are actually investing in AI compute? They just rent it from the hyperscalers don't they? And that's at the moment whilst the bubble is riding high and managers have FOMO. Nobody is actually willing to CapEx it. Are Sainsbury's or JCB about to start investing in 100-600kW/cabinet systems? Don't make me laugh.

The government's ambition is for the UK to hold third place in the AI pecking order, which - given the UK has twice as many of the world's top 100 universities than the whole EU put together and is not encumbered by the EU AI Act – might be more feasible than most Brits themselves realize.

Third by what measure? If UKGov wants us to be an "AI Powerhouse" then they need to bung a billion quid into sponsoring PhD projects (and probably funding a handful of research clusters at appropriate unis). Not just bung some tax breaks to hyperscalers and ride roughshod over planning processes at their behest.

But of course investing in foundational research isn't something UKGov has wanted to do since the 1970s.

Toys can tell us a lot about how tech will change our lives

Re: Adams was right....

Is Wikipedia the proto HHGTTG?

Actually the successor to it (but yes, perhaps also the prototype for whatever comes next).

Before Wikipedia, there was "h2g2" - a collaborative online encyclopaedia founded by the man himself in 1999 and run by the BBC between 2001 and 2011.

It's still going, and articles are peer-reviewed by the community.

Obligatory link to the "h2g2 article" on Wikipedia

Google unmasks itself as mystery hyperscaler behind yet another UK datacenter

Re: Might be cynical but....

I support mini-nukes on the basis that they are built to be safe.

No they aren't. They're designed to be batch-produced in a factory and therefore cheap.

Most of them are based on the same basic breeder chemistry as every other fission plant and are not passively safe in the way a TRISO or Molten salt reactor would be.

Albeit their smaller size and thermal output means the cooling demands in the event of a SCRAM are lower; you can keep emergency generators fuelled easier or even replace failed gensets with standard rental units that are readily available - you're not reliant on big specialist units (jet turbine on the back of a semi-truck type arrangements).

Re: Sellout

sovereign procurement contracts

This. UKGov doesn't even need to do anything French or "state aid-y" to support UK firms. Just buy their services.

Also in today's El Reg. UK Cabinet Office hands stalled Microsoft migration to another department

WTF are they migrating to Microsoft? I get that any move away from the incumbent - especially for something like your base email and productivity solution - is a major decision and not done lightly - which is why we won't see Govt moving wholesale to Collabora or anything this year.

But if you're committing to a major migration anyway, WTF would you move from one of the problematic US-based, CLOUD-obliged duopoly providers to the other one?

Oh, I know. Because there were special favours done, the minister in charge probably got a lovely tour of the MS offices and the tender was written in such a way that only Google or MS could even bid, with the winner being pre-selected.

Re: Google Cloud, Maps, Workspace Search are AI?

First draw the line you want, then plot your readings. [Which is actually how I expect todays 'AI' will handle the task.]

Bold to imagine that today's "AI" would bother itself with anything so troublesome as readings! Just draw the line you want and colour in to suit.

I'm off to eat my daily portion of rocks. AI told me to.

Whether that heat ever leaves the bit barn...

Whether that heat ever leaves the bit barn will depend on the council and utility firms building the pipes to make it happen.

I don't think there's any doubt the heat will leave the bitbarn. The question is whether it's vented to atmosphere or piped somewhere useful!

It would however be very impressive to see them retain the heat. I wonder if the place would self-combust within 24hours or if it'd take more like a week?

Jaguar Land Rover supply chain workers must get Covid-style support, says union

Don't count on it - Keir Starmer is a tory in a red tie. So far the only thing he has done in office has been to agree with whatever the tories have said, even down to sacking his deputy for a tax dodge so small that Boris, Farage or Michelle Mone would have sacked themselves for being too honest

Oh, I don't know. He's simultaneously manged to piss off all the centrist Tories he might otherwise have been touting with the changes to Inheritance Tax for agri land (which needed to go, because it was - ironically - killing farming, but that's an economics debate for another time).

A recent poll by the CLA (Countryside & Landowners Association) showed that even in areas that went red last year, rural voting intent has swung all the way back to Tory & Reform on level pegging, a smidge of Lib Dem.

There's a real possibility that Farage gets some serious power and suddenly realises that after a career spent being a blowhard who never had to worry about implementing his musings and "policies", he's suddenly going to be in the hot seat. And it'll go about as well as Johnson's "over ready" Brexit deal.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Hate Broadcom, not Tesco.

No, hate both. Tesco routinely engage in practices that are not merely competitive or "sharp business", but openly and objectively abusive. For instance, making their farmers sign exclusive contracts, but those same contracts don't stipulate that Tesco have to take 100% of production. It's like being in a zero-hour contract which also prohibits you from working for anyone else if the company doesn't offer you any hours.

It's a wonder the NFU haven't done some group action and basically said "Nobody is signing a one-way exclsuive. Either you get exclusivity but commit to taking everything, or both parties are free to see other people".

Or farmers haven't fought back by signing their supermarket contract under "Jolly Farms Produce Ltd", which is actually a shell company that buys produce from the actual farm (on a non-exclusive basis), which in turn is free to sell elsewhere if the supermarkets dont buy their produce.

At a time when there is homelessness and hunger in the world, it is immoral for farmers to be ploughing crops back into the ground because their contracted buyer has said "no thanks" and they're not contractually allowed to even attempt to sell elsewhere. Food waste of that sort should be illegal.

They all are notorious for stripping down their farm/frozen/ambient suppliers to tiniest of margins,

And at the same time as they're pushing farmers to pretty much sell their crops at a loss, they're price-fixing with other supermarkets to make excess profits. In the knowledge that if they get caught, the fines will be a small percentage of their ill-gotten gains. Basically a cost of doing business.