* Posts by David Hicklin

957 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007

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Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Not really a time to be owning a Tesla

> the cars appeared to be attracting the same stereotype as Audis (and before that, BMW's) did - that of being driven by a total wanker.

Ah you noticed that as well?

Uber CEO warns robotaxis can't find a fast route to commercial viability

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Autonomous vehicles

> problems it solves. Or will solve, when it is viable.

Solutions exist now

1 is a taxi or public transport where it exists (and yes we have 24 hours buses around here in the UK)

2 is an edge case, sound like you need to reorganise your life priorities

3 who the heck drives 1000 miles in one go ? As you may guess I'm in the UK and even Land's End to John o' Groats is quoted at only 846 miles. For that distance I'd take a train/plane and hire a car at the destination unless I had a couple of days to break the journey up.

My view is that most existing drivers would hate being in a car that is driving itself and being expected to take over if its computer craps itself , unless of course you have a level 5 car and they would not have a steering wheel at all.

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Autonomous vehicles

> By handing that over to an AV, and then getting control back when you leave the motorway then the driver can be fresh for the non motorway leg of long journeys

There is no way that I would be fresh for the non motorway leg of long journeys - instead I would be a nervous wreak always on the edge of taking over. If I have to drive at all I will drive it all or share the driving with the wife which works best as she loves straight roads and I love the bendy up and down ones

Trump admin seeks to reclassify federal CIOs, opening door to political appointees

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Political appointees as CIOs - what could possibly go wrong?

@EricM That sounds so depressingly like the 1930's in Europe

Netgear fixes critical bugs as Five Eyes warn about break-ins at the edge

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Edge? Really?

> So....I need some help understanding how this is an "edge" device.....

Implication is that anyone could access the WiFi device and once on there laterally move across your network, so yes it is an edge device by that definition

David Hicklin Silver badge

EOL?

> include two that have reached end of life (EOL): WAX206 and WAX220

So I guess here the solutions is but new hardware or have Netgear been nice an issued an update for these as well??

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

David Hicklin Silver badge

Try an see if AI can parse that for you ??

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Windows 12?

> But given some people's 'every other Windows version is good' theory

Yeah it does not quite fit and can cause much discussion bot for me the good ones were 98SE, XP SP3, 2000 and win 7. After that is has been downhill all the way and win10 is only acceptable after a lot of fixing up but why the f**k should I have to do that to make it usable.

Next OS will be Linux based, either Mint or (indrawn breath) a Mac.

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Why change?

> Works for me. Windows 7 Home Premium I have ZeroPatch installed and it did stuff recently.

> The only "malware" I see in this house is the Win10 and Win11 machines

Same here as I type on my win7 machine, all win 10's have ShutUp10 applied and are all local accounts.

Only "malware" the ms defender ever found on win7 are my own programs so I even ditched that!

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Elaborate?

> Get a pi-hole, that black-holes a load of MS endpoints

Looks like it get the adverts as well as I am yet to see one in any of my windows 10 machines

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: They do seem like a failed, desperate company

> Microsoft's share price has gone from @ $150 in 2020 to $350 today. (There was a bit of a trough in 2023) This is not a failed, desperate company.

which is down to market sentiments and bears no reality to how the company is really performing or how much then are worth eg Tesla

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: There is no reason for Windows 11

> I couldn't care less what OS as long as the computer does its job.

The problem is that windows 10/11 are no longer as OS but more of an eco-system. The last OS was probably windows 2000.

Microsoft to kill off Defender VPN this month

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: If you were relying on Microsoft's Defender VPN

:> my beliefs about the bloat of the Web these days.

Not just the bloat but also those 20+ other URL's that the site scripts shoot off to download all the adverts, images and tracking data

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Short term pain for long term gain.

> Look at the idiots above trying to claim the only thing from brexit was removing VAT from tampons

OK challenge then - what benefits have we had ? Along with the reliable proof of them

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

David Hicklin Silver badge

> Can't possibly be worse than human Tesla drivers. They are by far the most entitled twats on the road.

You have noticed that as well? they seem to have displaced the BMW, Audi etc drivers around here

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Car sales, an entirely unscientific survey

> So why should he care about depreciation?

I have never cared about that either as I also run them until the end.

Now retired thinking of the next one which may well also be the last one I ever need as by the time it dies I will probably be handing my licence back by then.

It will cost a bit but less than £20k

Even Windows 10 cannot escape the new Outlook

David Hicklin Silver badge

Another Thunderbird user here, looking forward to the post end of support to stop all these stupid, unneeded updates taking place!

Microsoft talks up 'significant capital investments' in AI as sector reacts to DeepSeek

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Be interested

> Revenue from AI services grew by 157 percent

But from what starting point? percentage by itself is meaningless

DeepSeek limits new accounts amid cyberattack

David Hicklin Silver badge

> it's good to see at least one AI thing being able to run well on lower powered hardware

But is it? So far I seen to have read about the "training" side, not much info on how many datacenters are being used to process the queries

Mega UK datacenter greenlit, but we still don't know who's moving in

David Hicklin Silver badge

2030?

Never gets built then, AI bubble will be long gone...

Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

David Hicklin Silver badge

Burn Baby, Burn

Your way through a wad load of $$$$

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: PC Update

Yup same here, new company owners decide that IT equipment needed an upgrade (we were mostly compaq 286/386 machines ranging from DOS (Novell network menu front end) to some NT3.x CAD systems)

Got a job lot of DELL PC's, absolute minimal spec running windows 2000 + word 97, they ran like dogs.

Was asked to look at them and I found the same, non-standard components everywhere, complete scrap. I was not aware of the BG boards in those days!

But they were cheap, shiny and new!

Musk torches $500B Stargate AI plan, Altman strikes back

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: I think I'll wait

The problem here is that AI is a solution looking for a problem, just as Deep Thought came up with the answer (42) but had to ask "but what is the question?"

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: WTF

>. Well, the big OEM's are already shifting away from standards on their desktop computers

Already ?? The 1990's just called and want a word...DELL I'm looking at you.....

Biz tax rises, inflation and high interest. Why fewer UK tech firms started in 2024

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Easy to address, actually

> I am old enough to remember the root cause when the wheels truly fell off.

Yes the late 1980's was the root of this, the main driver for the crazy house price inflation was the ending of the un-married coupled MIRAS when if a couple purchased a house and were un-married then they could each claim a full MIRAS benefit - but they gave a 6 month notification of this as well as relaxing all the credit controls that used to be in place.

Have too many people after houses and add in estate agents behaviour of ringing around to anyone looking at a property that "X" has put a higher bid in - you don't want to loose this do you??? result prices boomed for 6 months, people (me included) got repeatably gazumped and it has been all downhill ever since

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Easy to address, actually

>> For that Capital Gains Tax of 80% should be introduced for properties and land on sale. To protect earlier investors, the tax should be calculated as yearly average from before and after the new tax date. The tax will discourage buying property *for investment*.

So you want to penalise those of us who have just a single property that is our "home - somewhere to live in" that we have spend most of our lives and a good chunk of our earnings to pay for ?????

Owning my home was never an investment - it was to have a roof over my head that no shady landlord could yank away at the last moment, and yes it will also benefit the children down the line but we have worked bloody hard to get to this point!!

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Sounds really good...

" There isn't any fear there. Just look at the list of products and ingredients made from petroleum."

I think you meant crude oil rather than petroleum as that is just a by-product, but yes the list is long unless we want to go back to clothes being made from just cotton, leather, horsehair and clogs instead of shoes.

NASA spacewalkers to swab the ISS for microbial life

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Metorites

The thing with this theory called Panspermia is that it just moves the problem of how life started to somewhere else....

Microsoft throws more cash at its carbon guilt by replanting Brazilian rainforest

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: It does make me wonder

>Apparently you don't understand what capacity means.

Which implies 50% efficiency at best, so we need twice as many turbines as they think we do - where are they all going to come from?

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: It will work... IF

> God is protecting Trump from assassins. Trump said so himself, so it must be true.

That has a chillingly familiar ring about it.....

Microsoft joins CISPE, the Euro cloud crew that tried to curb its licensing

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Step 1

... fork ? ....

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

David Hicklin Silver badge

> TV Licensing demand turn up at our office. We're a major UK television broadcaster (with 3 letters in our name)

But you can't watch what you are producing without a licence !

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: No, I was Wrong

"If you need to test the live system" Nope.

So why then at every place I have worked that there are functional tests done on the production systems after an upgrade over the weekend before production restarted the following Monday? Are you saying that all those people sacrificed their weekends for nothing and that tests on the TEST system were sufficient ????

Sage Copilot grounded briefly to fix AI misbehavior

David Hicklin Silver badge

Yeah , always "a small number of users"

Microsoft to force Windows 11 24H2 on Home and Pro users

David Hicklin Silver badge

sfc /scannow is a red herring that the forum "helpers" love to trot out

It was probably a driver issue that booting into safe mode fixed all by itself

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: I have but ONE question..

For some reason they seem to be stuck in the mindset that they simply HAVE to provide some new or updated feature/function with a "security" update.

They simply can't stop tinkering

The old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" seems to be long dead and buried at M$

I'll keep my Windows 7 until the day it stops working (I do have a window 10 VM for the important stuff)

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Prisons' Critical Systems

> Modern prisons have computerised door locks and access controls, yet I've never heard of one having had their computer systems attacked from outside and the prisoners gone running free.

That's because their prime directive is to keep the prisoners locked up, a school on the other hand does not need that level of security.

Also at schools these days the blackboard and chalk are history, instead they have computerised smart boards - lose them and no classroom teaching

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

All those cars will not change over to electric overnight - it is going to take years and those who cannot afford a more expensive electric model will be doing everything they can to extend the life of their current one

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: There are other limits as well

> No the real problem is there are too many planes in the air,

You can ride in one in the vicinity of the next rocket launch then

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

David Hicklin Silver badge

Old Fasioned local installation

I am so glad that I have a locally installed version of office (2010) that they can't mess with.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: We had someone do this..

> when disc space was on-prem, scarce and expensive..

And now it is in the cloud, plentiful and an ongoing monthly expense that keeps on going up....

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: At least Ronnie backed up the NAS.

> "(very) cheap and cheerful" LaCie NAS device

I had one of them as my first NAS devices at home, it just a single disk device. I discovered the hard way that the OS was on the disk - and the disk only!

So loose the disk on a single disk device and it's toast unless you can manually partition a new disk and somehow get a copy of the OS on it. I think I managed to resurrect it eventually but after that I moved on to Synology where at least the OS is in firmware.

IBM swoops in to rescue UK Emergency Services Network after Motorola shown the door

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: the US are our friends.

" It would make a handy dandy missile platform/submarine base..."

well the UK was described as the unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US forces in Europe

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Solar / EMP events

> Obviously we fit the pigeons with little tinfoil hats

But wouldn’t that scramble their inbuilt magnetic compasses ?

Biden signs sweeping cybersecurity order, just in time for Trump to gut it

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: A lot of this

> They're going to be jockeying to win attention/favor from the orange moron

That so sounds so much like the 1930's are calling again

Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Trust

> 'They are all out for their personal selves.'

Maybe governments need to follow the example of the "Isle of Tega" from the David Eddings books of the Tamuli. Here when elected the poor sods entire wealth is confiscated and invested in the state and only returned when they leave office.

If the country (and hence the Government) does well they make a profit, if it does badly then they loose out big time.

Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Hmmm...

> .I don't have a Capital One account.

I find it hilarious getting all those emails for banks I have never used (well I used to, they seem to have dried up now along with the Nigerian Princes millions...)

David Hicklin Silver badge

> They're there to count the beans, not to decide how to use them.

Sadly they have a mandate to maximise the beans for the shareholders and board members.

AI datacenters putting zero emissions promises out of reach

David Hicklin Silver badge

Re: Wow

> Plus ample evidence that elevated CO2 increases yields and can reduce water requirements

Sadly it also puts the temperatures up which a lot of plants don't like i.e they die, and a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour (which also traps heat - look what happened to Venus from when it had liquid water on the surface) but most importantly it will also rain more which us poor soggy souls in the UK have been experiencing for the last 2 years.

David Hicklin Silver badge

but the wind is always blowing somewhere even if it isn't blowing in a particular locality

Try telling that when a winter high pressure zone is sat over the UK - dead calm for hundreds of miles in all directions

A much better grid so that power can be shifted from where it's being generated to where it's needed

Again in the UK they are trying to upgrade the grid but the NIMBYs are doing everything they can to block them

More storage capacity to smooth out peaks in generation vs peaks in demand

Time to get your calculator out and do some maths. As I am typing (midday Saturday) the UK power demand is 38GW. Gas is providing 20GW of that, Wind 7, solar 1.3 (!). During the week it can reach 45GW demand. The rest is Renewables/Carbon Neutral (whatever they are), Biomass (burning stuff) and inter connectors.

Now work out how many batteries it would take to cover those shortfalls for a foggy, low cloud blocking high pressure over the UK that can last for days. You would have to cover all the countryside with battery farms to do it.

Pumped storage like in Wales can only run for a few hours at most - how many mountains do you want to hollow out?

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