Re: Normal
I now think that milliband is 1/1000 of an octave!
588 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Aug 2020
I wish the taskbar on windows 10 would obey the "hide taskbar" option even when a needy and emotionally insecure app has a notification and shouts "look at me, look at me, me me me!". If any app is in full screen mode, then the taskbar covers the app's controls. And where are the controls for word, excel etc? All round every edge so there's nowhere to put the taskbar out of the way.
And before anyone suggests not using Microsoft Office, this is my corporate kit that I have no control over.
"When Windows 10 dies"
Nothing to stop one bringing forward that happy event. What wait?
I did that myself ages ago, simply because I didn't want to wait until Windows 10 was unavailable and I was forced into a Linux learning curve not on my timescales. My computer is still dual boot, but I haven't booted it into Windows ever since. There is one task I keep meaning to use Windows for, but it's been months and I still haven't done it so I guess it's not that important.
"Plant a trillion trees over the next few decades"
That's impossible.
Land area of the earth is 150 million square kilometres. 1 trillion trees is about 7000 trees per square kilometre, or about 81 trees per linear kilometre, or one tree every 12m.
12m spacing between each tree doesn't feel wrong but still feels quite dense for mature trees (that need to be self sustaining and not managed as cash crops). And that's assuming we cover every bit of land with a tree every 12m - every desert, every Antarctic ice field, every mountain peak, every exposed piece of rock. Remove all habitations to make room for the trillion trees. If only 10% of land can support trees, then the density is a tree every 4 cm. Impossible.
The trillion trees isn't too far off though. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are at about 35bn tonnes per year. A fully grown tree absorbs about 25kg of carbon dioxide per year (very variable according to species, location etc). That works out to about 0.14 trillion mature trees.
Carbon capture by tree planting is not a long term solution by itself. Eventually the carbon comes back out as the trees die and decompose. In fact it may make things worse as a tree absorbs carbon dioxide as it grows but emits methane as it dies - methane being about 21 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And this happens every year as trees grow leaves which then fall and rot.
It's got me wondering how much of that 25kg of carbon dioxide absorbed by a mature tree every year comes straight back out as leaves decay and rot. Even if only about 1kg of methane is emitted by rotting leaves, then it achieves nothing in terms of carbon reduction.
"You are cooled, but the net heat in the environment goes up."
You're right, but it misses the main cause of climate change. Climate change due to global temperature increases is not due to us turning energy into heat at the earth's surface. It's due to the solar radiation hitting the earth's surface, warming that up, but then that heat not being able to radiate back out into space (the short wavelength radiation from the sun passes through the atmosphere, but the long wavelength radiation from the warming ground does not). The earth has always had this greenhouse effect but the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that we have pumped out the last few hundred years has increased that greenhouse effect to the point that the earth is now noticeably getting warmer.
Painting a house white will radiate some of that short wavelength solar radiation back before it can warm up the house and turn that energy into the long wavelengths that get trapped, but the effect on global temperature by doing that is negligible and not the solution to climate change. White global ice caps do the same, but they are getting smaller due to the warming earth, creating a horrible positive feedback loop (more heat means less ice means more solar radiation absorbed means more heat means ...). It's still a good thing to do as it reduces your air-conditioning demand though and in turn your energy demand. And while our energy demands are still met by burning fossil fuels, climate change will keep on happening.
"because all they're doing is earning their crust"
I think that's highly dismissive of scientists and science generally. Nobody pursues a career in science for the money. People become scientists because of the intellectual challenge and the thrill of learning and working stuff out.
And that's why the world should pay more attention to science - it's a discipline that isn't driven by anything other than the pursuit of understanding.
So many of our simple machines these days need rebooting, or just work a bit rubbish because computing has become so cheap that computers run everything. And I don't mean a simple microcontroller, I mean an entire (albeit small) OS on a general purpose processor to do simple mechanised tasks.
In our office we have new paper shredders. They have one task to do. When they are switched on, nothing happens for a long enough time, to make you crawl behind it to check the power lead, then the full colour screen (on a shredder!) lights up to tell you the shredder is "starting up". It takes longer from power on to starting work than it does to do the job. Same goes for my "simple" inkjet printer at home. I get that it needs some software to make everything work together, but it takes an age to not only turn on, but off as well. And since when did turning off a printer require a user message saying "ending, please wait a moment"?
Light bulbs, door bells, light switches, watches, car heating controls (my other half's car won't allow you to use any of the ventilation controls until about 10s after switch on because "booting up"). Grrr.
We have similar issues with an in-house IM/chatroom system that pulls data from outlook calendars to determine the free/busy icon. You can manually override it but the flaw is that it shows "busy" if there is anything in your calendar at that moment. So an all day entry like "in office" , "WFH", "Sarah, John and Felix on leave" or "forecasts due today" shows you up as "busy".
"as people often use their own devices, and/or use the public internet to access work-related resources. And again, those both carry significant security risks"
Using the public internet for work stuff is fine so long as you do it from your work devices. Never, ever, ever use your personal device for work or vice versa. It night seem convenient in the moment but can always come back and bite you later.
Bit of fun number crunching:
That Wikipedia page mentions a challenge set by Richard Feynman to squeeze a page of A4 down by a factor of 25,000, highlighting the explosion in data storage that the new computing paradigm of the time would require.
Just messing around with some numbers and assuming Feynman meant a page of A4 text. If a microSD card is 1/378 the size of a page of A4 and stores 32 million pages of A4 text (assuming 4000 characters per page at 8bits per character), my rough calculation suggests that a humble 128GB microSD card beats his challenge by a factor of about 0.5 million.
This corresponds to a data shrinkage of a factor of about 200million over 65 years. Or to put it another way, a factor of about 2.4 every year. Not too far off from Moore's Law.
"I've also seen channels go "I want to do X instead of Y" and then privatize/delete all their old Y content"
So long as it's their own content, then I have no problem with that, they can do what they want with it and if they choose to take it down, that's fine.
"Normally I delete them, but if I do find it really interesting, I keep it."
I get why you would do that, but at the risk of being a legal pedant, that might be illegal. I don't know where you are in the world but in the UK, the law on copyright permits making a copy for time shifting or format shifting but in relation to "broadcasts", making a copy for long term retention is probably illegal. Whether a YouTube video counts as a broadcast, I have no idea.
"The only increases in NHS funding have been either Covid related or inflationary."
Not so. That graph over time shows year on year increases in NHS funding (except 22/23 -23/24 which I suspect is a covid related return to the norm). The graph is labelled "real terms", ie inflation corrected.
If you want to bash the Tory/ coalition governments since 2010, you can point out the year on year increase in funding that has somehow ended up with the NHS still getting worse.
"Moving that money out of the magical EU budget and into the NHS budget, like we were promised"
The £350M per week Boris Johnson said we would take from EU membership and put into the NHS* (I don't think he ever actually said that in a way that you could hold him to it, only in that cunning non-legally binding way politicians tend to say things, and it was fact checked to be more like £250M maximum - still a lot but not the £350M claimed). That's £18bn per year. NHS funding certainly has gone up over time and between 2020 and 2023 excluding COVID related cash injections it rose by more than £18bn per year. But, I don't you can say in all honesty that it was a result of leaving the EU and having that £18bn per year as extra cash. The annual increase in NHS funding is just following a rough trend going back to at least 2010 (as far back as the graph linked to below goes). Leaving the EU resulted in no additional funding for the NHS that wasn't already going to happen or had already been happening. (I hope I got that tense right, my copy of Streetmentioner wioll haven not been to hand)
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-budget-nutshell
*Using "NHS" to mean the Department of Health or the Department of Health and Social Care
"Part of Russia is in Europe"
Well, what is Europe anyway? There's the continent itself, which is loosely based on where the interesting rocks currently are, the UK-centric "Europe" which means everyone across the English Channel (and that bit to the West that we forgot about so then tried to ignore until the problem went away), Europe-centric "Europe" which is pretty relaxed but most certainly does not include Russia right now, the European Union which is a political grouping of most of "Europe", the European Economic Area which includes the EU and a few places not in the EU, the "Eurozone" which is different again and where you can spend the same money without having to bother with tedious exchange rates, the European Space Agency (which includes Canada as part of) but most importantly of all, "Europe" also includes Israel and Australia (and Russia but they aren't welcome at the moment) in the Eurovision Song Contest.
The two o rings aren't meant to be a backup for each other. Two o rings spreads the joint load and helps make it more stable against be doing forces.
At the time, NASA management knew of the o ring erosion problem but since no o ring had ever eroded completely through, they considered it an engineering margin that was more than sufficient. The actual engineers saw it differently and viewed any o ring erosion as a failure and knew that there was a fundamental flaw that wouldn't have been solved with more o rings.
Too true.
At the government department I worked at, part of it was chock full of IT expertise, whose job it was to to design, build and deliver bespoke IT systems to parts of HMG. But when it came to our department procuring (externally) a large HR system, our own in house experts were locked out of that process essentially being told they weren't required. Result was a delayed system that didn't meet user demand and many years later was still subject to internal ridicule and get well programmes.
Same story beyond IT as well. When the admin departments need to do some stuff that involves technical skills, which a team of professional mathematicians just down the corridor is chock a block full of, not welcome.
I don't think I've ever used the windows key - despite years of using Windows at work, except those odd occasions when curious just to see what happens. In those instances it's more like a big red button just taunting you.
I sometimes used the menu key that seemed fashionable 25 years ago, but now I think about it, that might have been on Linux systems to bring up some menu, probably an old version of kde.
"There is no point in generating vast amounts of power if up to 10% of it is lost just moving around the country"
I disagree. I think there is no point inventing room temperature superconductivity to reclaim that last 10% when fusion derived electricity is so plentiful in the first place. As someone else here has pointed out, that distribution loss is not the biggest loss in the whole system.
Government often know that to fight poor contractor performance in a court against well paid corporate lawyers would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming with ultimately little real chance of getting recompense appropriate for spending tax payers' money on it.
One could say that governments should equip themselves with the at least the same level of legal firepower as big business. The same argument could be made about technical skills as well. But it comes down to the same challenge that when it comes to salaries and the ability to attract and retain lots of high talent, government pockets aren't as deep (or as future focussed) as big business.
"Is the UK averagely bad or is there something about the UK Civil Service system that make it exceptional"
I've had exposure to UK and overseas government procurement and the UK isn't unique. There so often is a gap between government and private sector suppliers. I can best sum up as government is over optimistic about what suppliers will deliver for the price, and suppliers over promise. That's a big generalisation, but it's what I've seen over the years.
"Do you change your car when the old one runs out of fuel?"
The problem is that Microsoft Office is so integrated with Windows that it's like having to change the engine oil every time you run out of fuel, because the fuel tank and oil sump are the same part and every Tuesday an update that you never asked for causes the fuel filler flap to be welded shut again.
"I've owned a couple of high-performance cars and the insurance specified minimum ages and years holding a driving licence for unnamed authorized drivers - 25 years old and holding a licence for more than 5 years"
I've got the same clauses in policies for very low performance cars. I presume it's to stop parents buying [cheap] insurance in their own name when it's really for the children to drive.
Certain organisations (e.g. large government departments) are permitted to self insure. When I had need to look into this closely self insurance turned out effectively to be no insurance, but said department being big enough to financially cover any insurance type claims. I presume that high level bean counters deemed this more cost effective and an acceptable risk. This is an exception to crazyoldcatman's point 1 (every vehicle needing minimum third party issuance) but legal.
"I don't get that impression, but I'm happy for you to prove me wrong with data that shows that the UK is out of kilter with the US national average of either total DCs or government DCs per capita?"
Cloudscene.com says there are 5390 DCs in the US and 512 in the UK. That's about 10x difference, compared to about 5x difference in population. Or to put it another way, the US has about twice as many DCs per person than the UK.
I haven't looked any harder with regards to how big these DCs are, whether they are commercial or government etc.
That article about reduced tropical cyclone activity in the South Indian Ocean is a very cherry picked example. The paper itself says it is the only region in the world to show such a trend. In fact, while that particular measure of cyclone activity is lower now in the South Indian Ocean than it was in 1995, it's also been on the increase since about 2010.
"The 'biggest heat sink on the planet' has a finely balanced ecosystem contained within it. ...it will only get worse if you suddenly decide to place every new data centre within pumping distance of the ocean"
True, but how much worse?
From the International Energy Agency's website*, total DC energy consumption was about 300TWh in 2022.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there is about 1.3x21kg of water in earth's oceans.
The specific heat capacity of water is 4200 J/kg/K. So if all the DC energy consumption was turned into heat and dumped into the oceans (and spread about evenly), this equates to an annual temperature increase of about 66 nanoKelvin, which I suspect is not even measurable. Even if DC energy usage increased by an order of magnitude, it would still take about 1.5 million years to increase the ocean temperature by 1 Kelvin (or 1 degree centigrade if you prefer).
Of course, the heat wouldn't be distributed evenly and some areas of the ocean would be warmed a lot more than this.
I think the solution would be to stop building DCs in areas where their existence places stress on local water supplies in the first place. Nothing is impact free though.
*https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks
"Leaving inactive accounts in place is a perfectly good data archiving solution"
Err, I wouldn't expect any inactive account to remain accessible, or even to remain in existence. It's the data equivalent of locking an employee's office door on the day they leave and giving them back the key.
..." unique selling points that made your product so much better than the competition that people would buy your product over the competition?"
What competition? Microsoft are dominant*. They have the market sewn up. Businesses will go the Microsoft route because they always have and businesses are too risk averse to do otherwise. Go into a consumer shop and it's Microsoft everywhere because Microsoft and the PC manufacturers make deals that make it so. The only way a consumer would choose anything other than Microsoft is because they already know what they want (probably what they are already using and they just want a legitimate hardware upgrade). OS choice isn't majoritively made on the basis of a healthy competition and the ability to compare and contrast and make an informed decision, it's on the basis of what the dominant player pushes. I'm surprised authorities haven't chased Microsoft on the basis of having an unfair monopoly on PC OSes. They control the consumer OS market and through that drive the hardware industry in a way that isn't in the consumer's interest - ie forced hardware updates because of corporate decisions to prevent security updates being available to users of older (but still perfectly functional) hardware.
...and relax.
*73% dominance of desktops/laptops according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
And reversal of all the prosecutions that relied on evidence derived from Horizon followed by immediate assessment and compensation for all affected. Given the scale of the case, an independent cross party group of MPs and/or civil servants should have been put together immediately, defined some guidance on compensation levels and assess each case. Even 1000 cases, doing a few every day could be done in a year - top priority.
"It wouldn't be so bad if targeted advertising actually WORKED"
I think that's the whole point. Targeted ads don't work and companies like Google want them to work. The only way they can see of making them work is to use huge amounts of intrusive personal information about people.
Personally, all the stuff in the article about fingerprinting devices and building user profiles, I presumed was already happening and has been for years. And that's not me being all tin-foil hat. Wasn't this why Google started slurping WiFi SSIDs all those years ago for example, to track where people go, how much time they spend there, what they buy while they are there (via Google pay/wallet) etc? Maybe what's new is the amount of this type of data Google etc. would like to collect and use.
"built under licence by Rover, and not a joint development as the 200/400/25, 600 and 800 had been)"
I worked at Longbridge during the early 90s when they were building the rover 200 (aka the Honda concerto). Occasionally there was a mix up on the production line and a car would pop out the end that was Rover on the outside and Honda inside.
To this day I have no idea how anybody could this without thinking "this can't be right". Except that the general attitude of the workforce on the production line was pretty low on quality and care. Despite the Honda influence and all the "quality matters" posters around the place, most people I knew there cared little for what they were doing and were full of cynicism for the company. Which could explain how body shells would go into the spray shop already with splodges of rust on the bare metal. The fate of Rover a few years later surprised me not one bit.
"EV buyers, meanwhile, expect their purchases to have plenty of tech inside to power automation, safety, and entertainment systems"
"Expect" is not the same as "want". Especially as "tech" when used in marketing is just a euphemism these days for a crappy touch screen, privacy invasion and a generally rubbish user experience.
"So you mean if the garage where you took your car for maintenance forgot to screw the wheels on, and they fall while you drive, it's still 100% your responsibility because you're the driver ?"
In the UK, yes. Well, perhaps not always 100% but that's the grey area where lawyers would need to be involved to figure that out. As the driver, the final responsibility is yours and in the event of something like you describe, you would have to show you took every reasonable care to ensure that the wheels were screwed on. You can delegate that task but you can't delegate your legal responsibility to ensure that the vehicle you are driving is in a roadworthy condition.
A big phased array isn't necessarily simpler than a single large aperture. True, a phased array has no moving parts but each antenna element has to be separately wired up through its own RF channel with time delays, amplifiers, mixers etc. That's a lot of RF equipment to operate, maintain and buy in the first place.
I fondly remember sitting for hours gradually swapping floppy disks from one pile to another via the floppy drive of the installing machine.
I remember one enterprising young idiot in our office who decided to copy the installation disks so he could install it on his home machine. From what I recall, which these days may or may not be accurate, some of the floppys (floppies?) had bad sectors in deliberate places as a form of copy protection. If the installation programme didn't see the bad sectors in the right place it would abort installation. The idiot found this out but thought the bad sectors were real and so fixed them. Thus, rendering the office's only installation disks unusable.
A good manager would prioritise the list themselves before giving it to you to give back.
Years ago, my employer went through a big priority refresh, asking all our "customers" to list their priorities. Some did it properly. Others, realising their priorities would be set against others, just returned their wish list with everything set to top priority.
I don't disagree with you about the resources and prompt engineering that is needed. But I do think that we are at such a very early stage of "AI" that none of us can really see where it is going to go and how widespread it will eventually be.
I'm thinking of the early days of computing and punched card machines. All the computation cards had to be created and set up just right and often didn't work first time round. Human [prompt?] engineers frequently had to unblock the machines and they needed constant fettling. It wasn't even your computer, but stored and run somewhere else by someone else, a precursor to today's cloud.
The chair of IBM was once rumoured to say that world demand was only ever going to be for 5 computers. Bill Gates the same about 640kB being enough for anyone. All of us can say "who is ever going to need this?" but it will still happen.