Posts by brianpope

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Emoji free zone here

"I will not buy this record. It is scratched" ;-)

Datacenters in Ireland draw more power than all rural homes put together

Re: Datacenters vs grid power.

fair point. I meant a larger city in an Irish context. It would class as a large town elsewhere eg somewhere in England I guess.

I only used Kilkenny as a suitable example for the amount of consumption.

Re: Datacenters vs grid power.

Instead of wasting huge amounts of excess heat from datacenters via air conditioners, it could be mandated the heat is redirected into district housing systems to heat houses in the vicinity for free, or at least subsidised.

win-win. datacenter gets rid of heat. houses dont need to consume extra energy to heat themselves. District heat likely more efficient than thousands of household individual boilers. Overall CO2 reduction.

Re: Datacenters vs grid power.

Perhaps datacenters could have SMRs (small modular reactors) ?

Far safer than large centralised nuclear plants.

They could even be community owned, powering micro grids of surrounding built infrastructure - houses, industry.Resilience would be improved, preventing whole grid brownouts.

Eirgrid may not like this of course, as they wish to keep a monopoly on grid electricity supply, and have the government in Ireland invest many billions to upgrade the grid - and then fleece consumers to pay levies to cover the costs.

Datacenters vs grid power.

It would be far better to legislate for datacenters to generate the majority of their own power.

A typical datacenter in Ireland may consume 60MW - equivalent to the use of a large city eg Kilkenny

There is one major disincentive for companies though: Electricity Generators, with over 10MW capacity, are obliged by law to sell electricity directly into the grid's SEM. They must then buy back any power they require from the grid.

John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine

anyone care to comment on Trident ?

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Unhelpful comments

The last time I wrote actual machine code, I hand assembled the machine code into position to replace the first part of PCDOS (yes, IBM's) critical interrupt handler. The space is small enough so I needed to be crafty and make something small but effective.

For those of you asking why on earth I would need to do this, it involved an unmanned PC sat in a cupboard talking to VTAM area on mainframe to grab information. The link would occasionally fail, leading to an "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

AWS admits to 'severely impaired' services in US-EAST-1, can't even post updates to Service Health Dashboard

Re: what a great day - beancounters

Often beancounters' hands are tied to company 1/4ly results and other rules that mean OPEX is easier to sanction and handle than CAPEX, which can take time to realize its potential.

I've seen opportunities for cost savings and better technical environments to be overlooked because funds are in "the wrong budget".

No backdoors needed: Apple ditched plans to fully encrypt iCloud backups after heavy pressure from FBI – claim

Trust. Of the people, by the people, for the people

The real problem for society in general is not about how secure we can make backups and E2E privacy, such that law enforcement cannot access it.

The elephant in the room is why "the people" no longer trust "the authorities".

Yes, I really would personally rather prefer if I had faith my companies' confidential data and research were not being read by a (foreign) competitor.

Having chosen to operate in a particular jurisdiction however, I would be happy if said jurisdiction had access, ONLY if I trusted they operated in a transparent and legal manner, with proper oversight. Leaks IMHO such as Ed Snowden's and others should have been seen as a call to operate differently. Instead, authorities went on the defensive.

I ought to be able to tell if my data was accessed. It ought to be traceable where it went.

Until whenever, there is market space for data-havens, and their associated problems for Privacy, Crime, Business, Law and Revenue.

Real democracy and Political Reform is sorely needed. Government needs to tell the truth, and people need to believe them.

Many in the UK have never read the Gettysburg Address. It is very well worth reading.

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

I might set up a business selling TOR installations for noobs...

And sell coupons for the service in local newsagents...

Does the Government really want almost everyone to be running TOR / VPNs ?

The upside is self-censorship may drop. Free speech may increase.

Re: Next up "Harms"

And you will need your "Real News ID" to avoid "Fake News" from The Mirror, Daily Mail, Telegraph...or be permitted to access international news and journal sites, research etc.

Oh, yes, and opt out of mandatory Facebook advertising.

Loose Women woman's IR35 win deals another high-profile blow to UK taxman's grip on rules

Revenue also EU’s forthcoming anti-tax avoidance rules

These new EU rules would be a step forward to preventing tax avoidance.

Naturally, many at the top driving brexit such as Jacob Rees-Mogg wanted an early EU exit to allow certain companies and individuals to continue to pay little tax. It's good business for big accounting firms and the top wealthy.

As to valid freelancers/consultants, these allow business the flexibility to hire as needed without long-term employee commitments. Businesses can be more flexible and respond to market needs quickly, leading to more efficiency.

Should the IR35 system continue to prevent genuine freelancers from offering services to business that want them, and preventing them from claiming reasonable business expenses themselves, the businesses will find themselves in a situation where said freelancers will demand higher remuneration to accept contracts, else demand usual benefits of employment - holidays, pension, long-term-stable-employment, promotion etc.

Revenue is killing businesses for the sake of a tiny % of few pounds to justify its existence, while at the same time hamstringing flexibility and competitiveness of British business.

MoD plonks down £2m on table in exchange for anti-drone tech ideas

cannot un-invent technology

@hammarbtyp

"To bring it down the best way is probably to create hunter killer drones, that will track and disable other drones"

Next move: Wingman drones that protect the "lead" drone by taking out the hunter-killer drones ? Swarms? whatever.

Counter-value drone technology has been developed by a variety of interests including such as ISIS. Nothing can be done to uninvent these capabilities as even kids' toys now have more capability than some 10 year old military tech.

Whether the Gatwick incident was real or staged is unimportant: Counter-force anti-drone technology is needed and any good new ideas could be useful.

It will be a new arms race for the defense industry.

Re: The Ultimate Solution

I think the Brexit unicorns are becoming free soon also.

And since we are talking Gatwick, Boris is conveniently in London and knows them intimately.