Posts by Lon24 462 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2020
"Still, a bit more than 5 years of support would have been nice."
Oh, if only Google insisted its Android licensees gave 5 years of support I wouldn't have to suffer so much iPhone users' smugness boasting about upgrading to yet another new IOS version. It's worse than having to concede Amazon CS is why so many of us pass money to a company we shouldn't.
Which implies it's not just the perpetrators who are making money out of non-state ransomware attacks. Just a fresh new stream of properly managed premium profits for Lloyds and thereby incentivising more attacks as the targets who are assured to pay up.
I can understand that it's not good optics for Lloyds being seen to be profiting directly from Russian & North Korean state actors. Making all ransomware insurance illegal may have been a better way.
Hey it's not only Charlie who gets a new job at 73. I have been selected for a new post by 'Michael Page UK & Ireland'. It must be a pretty exciting international job 'cos the email was posted from a hotspot in Libya and all I have to do is click on this site in Chile. What could possibly go wro....
You take as fact speculation on who may/may not leave. But you didn't add Norway and Switzerland which are effectively part of the same trading block. In IT terms europe is 'local' if measured in latency speeds, time zones, trading law, standards or the ability to visit and support clients.
The same can't be said of the Americas or Australasia. Not a problem, maybe, for London based mulinationals but isn't the growth supposed to come from SMEs - particulary from outside London?
Businesses are programmed to surmount political and trade barriers which we have done for decades. It's a real disappointment to give up and move into managed decline.
I really hope you are right and we are replaced by successful trading companies who can benefit from Brexit. The real question is it real evidenced hope or just blind hope? I'm waiting until 2030 to look back to see who is right.
As a UK business we are screwed both ways. EU businesses can't deal with us if we are outside GDPR. And UK businesses are reluctant to deal with us because, for greater reliability, their data may be backed up on EU based servers which aren't governed by whatever replacement regulations are put in place.
Some of the fears may not be fully justified but businesses like to play safe - and our sales have taken the hit. But bully for those businesses benefiting from Brexit but there is no upside for us..
We've looked very hard.
"And they are *increasing* it by ~100 new power stations per month."
Are you sure? In 2021 they were building 90 gigawatts of coal powered plant. In typical UK terms (2GW per station) that's 45. If it took only a year to build that's ~ 4 per month and probably less. Not good but a long way from your impressive claim. Can give an authoritative source?
Yep, the very opportunity to change almost anything on KDE can be daunting at times and I have yearned for somrthing simpler. Until last night. I fdid my first Install of Windows 11 and tried to change the taskbar height.
That should be put taskbar in edit mode and drag everything to where you want. Oh, no.
It takes a deep Regedit which gives you only three choices - except if you want it smaller the systray falls off the bottom. Even Gnome on Win11 would be an improvement ;-)
I do overclock my SSD RPis and found KDE to be the desktop of choice useable for most tasks - indeed I use it more than firebreathing power monster that drives my other screen - if only to save on the leccy and [no-fan] silence is golden.
Plus I rather like Konsole & Dolphin's ability to 'fish' my network. At that level there is hardly any difference between the two.
Horses for courses. A lot of work tasks are not power or screen intensive. It would be silly to expect an RPi to handle the others whatever the installed desktop.
[Edit] It was a bit of a rigmarole getting KDE setup properly on the RPi's 64bit Bullesye 'lite'. Maybe our configuations differ?
Electrified lines are the way to go. But, as we know, overhead electrification can cost both arms and three legs on a legacy system with low tunnels and bridges. That takes nearly all the budget and causes chaos so it doesn't get done.
Hybrid diesel or batteries is a solution, but is it the best solution for filling in the awkward bits? Southern who had the most dense and complex network did the whole lot with a third rail. Doesn't need bridges or tunnels being modified/replaced. It has its disadvantages. Speed and power is more limited so you don't want to major on it these days.
However is hybrid overhead/third rail is a better all electric lower cost solution? No carting heavy diesel motors around. It isn't as though it's never been tried. HS1 (Eurostar) operated that way for many years until they built the final section into St Pancras. Changeover was imperceptible to passengers who might only note the train slowing from 160 to 60 mph ahead of when the catenery ran out and they switched to Southern's old tracks into Waterloo.
Safety has been raised before but it's less of a hazard than level crossings as most humans have worked out they are best not stepped on - though we do have three legged foxes around here. Trains can easily coast through the unelectrified 100 yard or so sections for crossings and other hazards.
Yep, false positives when the technology can never really be 100% but enough to keep drunks off the road and save lives. Maybe they should allow driver override. Perhaps a bit complicated process to confuse the genuinely drunk.
But doing so triggers a call to the local constabulary and the necessity of presenting oneself to be conventionally tested within a very short time. The touch bit helpful in ruling out impersonators.
Personally I'd spend the money in re-introducing traffic police instead.
So true. My photographic skills have toiletted since digital. Why spend time carefully choosing, framing and lighting the subject when you can just click away. Then select, crop and photoshop the best?
Except somehow they never match stuff I carefully took 40 years ago with my OM-2 when a couple of rolls of 36 had to last a holiday.
Maybe you used better toner cartridges than us. 20 years I give 'em before they fade - maybe an argument for retaining the old line & dot matrix printers.
Our solution is recopying the old backups to new media every 10 years or so. It's a painful job - if only because you get diverted by some of the stuff you find - so tends to get forgotten behind more urgent and profitable business.
I 'm running 7 years late on this ... this article is a wake-up call.
Today I installed another copy of Twilio Authy. This generates the codes used to login to 2FA sites. It's a non-Google version of Google Authenticator and so helpful to those who wish to keep some of their computing outside the ChoctFact orbit.
It's free so I'm not helping to pay their workforce.
The issue is -if you want to go to Spain then flying is way, way cheaper and more convenient then any other method. I looked at going by train or boat last night. I have the time but not the dertimantion, perrseverance and organisation necessary to sort it - even with the help of seat61.
Make airlines pay the same fuel duty as cars and we would see a demand shift that would make greener alternatives more practical and desirable. Maybe we will get back the sleeper trains that wafted me from the channel ports to Switzeerland in the 1950s. Much nicer than EasyJet ... oh, how cheap flying has cheapened us!
Yea, but wasn't it Douglas engineers that built the ubiquitous DC-3/Dakota - once described as a collection of nuts & bolts flying in close formation.
Mind you it was Chinese engineers who took a partially destroyed DC-3 at the beginning of WW2 and stuck a DC-2 wing to replace the missing bit. It flew - though apparently with a bit of yaw. If only they had MCAS to compensate.
Only a fast EasyJet excursion to Santa Cruz de la Palma in the Canary Islands. Best avoid the volcano season though - hence the icon!
Here's a piccy: https://www.inspain.org/en/tenerife/santa-cruz-de-la-palma/beaches/
As the other correspondents noticed the typical flows we saw in 2020/21 have dramatically changed this summer. Flows have reversed, we have keeping the UK gas turbine fleet hard at work at night even when there is plenty of wind around the north sea. Historically as our demand dipped they would be the first to be rolled back.The surplus often maxes out the interconnectors to the continent. Hence, it is highly probable that Germany in particular is conserving its gas supply and effectively using our gas turbines to fill the gap via France et al.
The link I gave shows a snapshot of what is happening at anytime. You need to watch these frequently and over time to appreciate the change.
Somebody is quietly making a lot of money out of this.
Yep, I noticed that too. Exporting electricity to France and The Netherlands. France & probably The Netherlands are then exporting that to Germany. Presumably so they can shut down their gas turbines at night and divert the gas saved to storage.
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk is a handy place to watch the UK & French generation and interconnector flows.
The UK voted to leave the EU. Scotland may decide to leave the UK and join the EU. Feelings are strong either way.
But do you really think that even the thought of Brussels bombing London or London bombing Edinburgh passed through any sane mind however opposed to a decision of the majority? Even if they have good justification to feel that majority was misled by a dodgy campaign and false promises by Leave.eu or the SNP? Oh, and justifying England 'liberating' the Rosyth Naval Dockyard to protect London's inalienabe and historical right to control the North Sea?
Its all about what people think it right for them not what you, I or Comrade Putin feel should be right for them. Democracy's (only?) refeaming feature is it allows power to be passed peacefully. Which was good until POTUS 45 made even that problematical.
Except that quantity is a replication of a commercial device you can acquire, reverse engineer and hack. Maybe locating a Chinese backdoor. Once achieved you may well be able to kill every approaching drone by simply sending the hack signal. Doesn't matter if they are deploying one or a thousand.
If Washington hasn't done that yet then Kyiv will soon if the quantity deployed becomes significant. Hardening devices to military standards costs in time and money and Russia hasn't set a great example in military forethought.
Nope in 2047 Windows 25 will be sporting slightly sharpened corners, IBM Red will be run as a service and the Linux world will still be divided between GT & GTK.
The first 50 years of aviation took us from the bi-plane to the 747. The next 50 years took us from the 747-100 to the 747-800. Fast moving stuff can head in only one direction - slower. As it becomes established people change from wanting change to no change.
What will probably happen is 'desktop computing' will go niche with everything else using more 'handy' devices where gesture and sound may be the chief inputs. TheRegister will become the new Saga magazine for care home techies hacking their health monitors and their BBC Netflix account.
I'll soon be a pathfinder with time to maybe escape from systemd.
Yet another case in my experience where recovery is weeks/months.
Ransomware attacks are expected. No-one can be sure of thwarting every attack. Recovery from a complete network compromise must surely be part of any professional planning nowadays. The plan will have timeframes. Is anyone actually signing off any that don't have something like 48 hour to core re-functioning? A day to flush or replace existing systems - and another day to bring back core data?
Yet so many times it isn't happening. Some may be explainable because something outside of the expected happens. But not all. I suspect that having redundant hardware/people/licences and practising live recovery is a price many bean counters may pay lip service but when it comes to shove - today's emergency trumps next week's risk when it comes to budget.
And it's going to be expensive iif you need to retain existing kit for postmortem examination which implies to you need to bring up a parallel system. Redundancy big time,
The good news is he put the terminator back. Where I worked terminators would all go to the same place as biro tops. The spares would be half-inched by staff 'just-in-case'.
"A terminator, a terminator - my network for a terminator" was the eternal cry of the DRS20 Microlan engineer.
Sometime n the early 1990s I bought some accounting software. It was unable to reliably produce invoices numbered in consecutive order which is a basic expectation. Creating invoices and getting them paid is the core business function. Everything else is just there to assist this process.
Contacted the company to submit a bug report.
"You need to pay us to fix it, they said".
"I don't want it fixed 'cos I moved to software that actually works. But you might want to fix it for others"
"You still have to pay to submit a bug report".
I gracefully declined. The company was Intuit. Hopefully they have improved their (ex)-customer experience and software.
The proposed extended London ULEZ is doing a good job of it. My 30 year old bike predates emission certification on the V05 so it would cost £12 a day to use even though its' emissions are below modern cars that don't have to pay.
Yep, I could pay to have my bike certified but at considerable cost.
Anybody outside the M25 who fancies a 500cc twin cylinder with only 18k on the clock might like to find a way of contacting me.
I did. As a pimply 17 year old she was the first woman of colour I found attractive. Or more precisely, very attractive. More importantly intelligent and the equal of anyone on the bridge. A strong contrast to the long blonde women crew members out of central casting used to, presumably, add 'male interest' to the seines.
Sorry if that sounds condescending now - but it was revolutionary, for me, at the time. And Michelle's creation still lives on - Freeview 41 (Legend) tonight at 8pm!
It's humbling that an ARM64 RaspberryPi is more than sufficient to cope with my pathetic attempts at coding. But then I was overwhelmed when I got my first Z-80 and discovered Assembler was easier than machine code making me a bit of a wimp at the time.
But good that the big boys & girls may be taking ARM64 more seriously. I look forward to the trickle down effect of not seeing so many IDE related infrastructure restricted to x64 architectures.
At least it appeared to be be a controlled shutdown which while causing some disruption should mean an orderly restoration of services should be within the contingency plans with, hopefully, nothing lost. In technical terms - a hiccup.
Whereas poor St Thomas' & Guys also had an unplanned shutdown same day due to the heat and unspecified issues (cooling or power or both?). It appears that it was less controlled and contingency plans failed completely at the time.
Worse, restoration of services is still, I hear, not complete. Patient welfare was/is seriously compromised. That's probably lethal or permanently damaging to some.
I'm guessing the pressure to run NHS 'on the cheap' compared to other health systems means when it comes down to retaining excellent IT staff to manage their way out of catastrophic situations or having sufficient redundancy has been eroded over time. Similar situation at a University not very far down the road that took months to restore services from a hack.
Hence I have some sympathy to the remaining IT staff who take the immediate blame and are expected to restore the situation pronto and then get more blame when they don't..
The fallacy here is some of us don't want to see your adverts. That's in itself trackable when you use pi-hole and cookie blockers. So why do some website owners waste your money on trying to force me to to see them? It doesn't take a child genius to work out that such obstinacy is more likely to damage your brand than make a sale.
I only wish all trackers were smart enough to sort that. Then I might not be so keen on trapping them. Winners all round.
This is getting silly.
Pet food companies now use pouches - 'cos even our brightest boffins in two millennia have yet to build a can opener that can reliably fully open cans. They are almost there but they always fail about 3/4 way round. Designed to exposing a nice cutting edge to thwart further efforts by hand and thumb.
Dates have been known to slip on government space contracts, further delayed by consequent cost over-runs, 2033 could become 2133 if a certain aerospace company gets the contract. Or we just get bored and cancel (like the moon) plans to land (or almost land) on something already landed.
So will our future boffins discover the fossilised remains of an ancient NASA lander embedded in the rocks? An intriguing glimpse of 21st century technology from a former rich and fertile planet that didn't look like Mars?
Putting the actual amount aside. When I let in a uniformed, identified service person to my home - I expect, nay demand that the company he/she is representing has taken reasonable actions to ensure they are trustworthy and any complaint about them is taken seriously - and if replicated - fired. The fact that he/she is 'off-duty' won't be known to the person inviting them in and is irrelevant unless the uniform/van were stolen (impersonation).
The sheer number of red flags missed and the inhumane treatment of the family should ensure a significant loss to the company. A loss that will hurt and ensure reform if it is to survive.
Perhaps, in this case, the jury decided it is irredeemable and best put out of business to safeguard others in the community. I wasn't here to hear the full horror so who of us here knows whether that is justified or not?
Yep - I'm a fan of the jury system. Pick people at random. Maybe require them to do a basic test or two to weed out the extreme nutters and intellectually challenged. On average you would probably find a more representative and even more competent crew than our current legislators.
I mean if you trust them, as we did, to make the right call on people's lives when we had capital punishment - we should be able to trust them with lesser stuff now.
As an example the Royal Statistical Society did a test on our current bunch of MPs to test their basic numeracy. Let's just say a considerable number wouldn't be able to understand the answers. Frightening when they end up on relying on their version of 'common sense' rather than be able to take account of the expert evidence.
WordTsar for Linux gives you a almost authentic screen editing experience. Should have channelled their efforts into vi for CPM-86.
After all the past two days were only a truncated 1976 experience when personal computing was truly personal. No MS-DOS, nor even systemd and hacking was called phone-freaking. Bliss!
And so dumb it is almost inconceivable that the software engineers who set these up didn't consider the inevitable system effect and add in a little randomisation.
Thank goodness Linux folks aren't that stupid. Anybody running a fleet of servers (well Debian anyway) will have noted that the daily crontabs are all set at slightly different times by default so spreading the load of any interactions.
"Sounds like an excellent reason to stick to the used car market for now. "
Now being the operative word. Come the next decade a car sale/transfer will be a manufacturer disconnection with a re-connection fee re-activate the vehicle. Plus an extra sub to stop the 'in-car-entertainment' playing all the optional exciting added functionality subscription ads they forgot to add when sold new. Like turning the heat on in winter & AC in summer.
Roller blades may be the alternate freewheeling future ... except they may infringe BMW's RR trademark ;-)
Conceding that, perhaps, Twitter were too wary in providing a hostile person with unfettered and unlimited access to their core asset - the delay was 7 days before it was apparently rectified according to this report. Sufficient, perhaps, for complaint and a similar delay in Mr Musk's acquisition timetable.
But reason to ditch? Makes no sense. At best it's what unfettered, unlimited access would subsequently throw up that counts.
Which is still confusing to me as I thought Elon had waived due-diligence. Maybe a real M&A specialist could explain what's going on to us lesser mortals.
Yes, it is a different company. No longer the insurgent using every means fair or foul to knock out competition - financed by folks like Goldman Sachs. Burning cash to undercut and take out competition and grab market share.
Now, of course, as a dominant company they focus on extracting return from their strong market position. Oh, and finding ways to resist new insurgents. The issue is - revenues today and future profits are built on the misdemeanours of yesterday.
The attempt to say 'nuffin to do with us guv" is about as honest as a taxi owner claiming "I have a right to use this car, 'cos the guy who stole it for us is no longer on the payroll " Except I presume Travis Kalanick got/will get a few bob selling his stock to the next generation of 'respectable' investors..
Yes, I remember that. But if you checked out how demand was being satisfied you would have seen the Norwegian interconnector peaking out on delivering hydro power and the French with mostly nuclear. The Dutch wasn't doing much because wind was presumably not contributing much there either. Oh, and stored power in that Welsh lake plus hydro was also maxing out.
Hence there is already non-fossil stuff around to bridge some of the gap. OK if we quadruple wind power that means under the same conditions it would only deliver 10% of demand directly. On the other hand when the wind blows it could easily produce surplus demand - around 200% of demand alone. Right now we don't have the infrastructure to balance out the surpluses and famines sufficiently. Hence there are times now when wind blows hard we can't use 100% of capacity.
Building that infrastructure is a massive technological challenge but may be easier and cheaper the trying to clean fossil power co2 emissions. An example using the surplus to generate green hydrogen that could be briefly stored and burnt at modified gas turbine stations is a major opportunity to use some of the most efficent CCGT fleet in future. Using last night's surplus to satisfy tonight's evening peak.
There is also intelligent demand management to keep the lights on at all times but allowing your fridge to skip an hour cooling to flatten the peak without noticeably affecting you, except reducing your cost of buying peak power.
There are no magic bullets, just a clever combination of sources (including nuclear), that with imagination can be balanced to approach a non-fossil fuel future. If we have to keep a few mothballed CCGT plants for exceptional still winter evenings so be it - then we might still be looking at 90% less fossil over the year than a decade ago.
Getting the last 10% or so of completely pure renewables will be very difficult verging on the impossible.We, or our children will see, but that shouldn't stop us going for the 90% in our lifetimes.
"How many more times do I have to read this? We do not speak British English in the UK. We speak English. Other countries may speak their own dialects of English and prepend their own adjectives, if they so desire\"
Fine in theory but less so in practice. Many apps may have an option for 'English' but don't specify which type. When it auto-corrects you find it isn't. Then comes the date misunderstanding ...
Time for the Milton Jones joke: "got offered a job in Texas teaching geography as a second language"
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