Posts by Vestas

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

This article is complete bollox

The largest fixpack for OS/2 (any version) was just over 35MB.

No way do you run up a $40k bill over 35MB, not even in the early 1990s in the UK. $400 maybe.

Total bollox.....

Battery trade war hits booming datacenter industry

Givenergy? The company who doesn't answer phones, messages, letters, doesn't honour warranties and lies ALL THE TIME?

Octopus binned them as a supplier nearly 2 years ago because their batteries are junk and "support" doesn't exist. Ditto EON. The very best of luck finding an installer because every single one around here (East Mids) no longer deals with them - several have court cases pending against GE.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/givenergy.co.uk

Just don't do it - I bought their crap and I know I'll have to take legal action in order for the warranty to be honoured. They're scum.

Labor organizers accuse Rockstar Games of 'ruthless act of union busting' after layoffs

Re: Mistake

Fuck off back to your retirement home. This isn't the 1990s and you are utterly clueless re IR35.

Australia sues Microsoft for misleading M365 users about Copilot subscription options

Re: Microsoft

...and even with the "Classic" plan (which I have) MS are continually trying to get me to use their copilot crap.

I'm cancelling it next time renewal comes around - renting a VPS for backups is cheaper and LibreOffice will do fine.

Framework flame war erupts over support of politically polarizing Linux projects

Re: Framework would do better to...

Doesn't matter what size the power brick is on the 16" - it will still use the battery while plugged in. The new graphics card option (probably still vapourware) will only make matters worse.

Oh and yes, power bricks large enough did exist and had done for years if not decades - how the hell do you think Alienware laptops from the early 2010s managed to power up SLI NVidia cards which pulled 85W on their own. I've still got a 280W PSU brick Alienware supplied. Edit - its actually 285W.

You shouldn't believe everything FW claim. In fact you should believe very little if my experiences are anything to go by. Hype is their product & they're masters at that!

Framework would do better to...

...deal with their completely shitty products first.

A brief look around their community forums shows EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT has serious design flaws or production flaws.

From the 12" laptop that quite literally falls apart (plastic chassis cracks and comes apart under normal use) to the 16" laptop which can't supply enough power from the power brick to run it (has to use the battery as well) to the Framework desktop which has PSU isses, DP issues, USB issues and fuck knows what else. Trackpads that don't fit, keyboards that die in months, dodgy displays etc etc etc. Fucking junk!

They are a shitty USA company who talk the talk but consistently deliver shite, if they deliver anything at all.

Anyone stupid enough to use them will have far more serious problems than culture wars.

UK chancellor Putin the blame on Russia for cyber chaos, but evidence says otherwise

Re: Evidence

The Voyager aircraft in question are NOT owned by the UK govt.

They are owned by a company called Airtanker Ltd and are rented to the RAF - part-time, they are involved in other activities in the middle east which we are assured are not UK govt policy.

Airtanker Ltd in turn are owned by Airtankers Holding Ltd, who in turn are owned by Equitix Holding Ltd, who in turn are owned by Pace Bidco Ltd, who in turn are owned by Pace Topco Ltd.

All of those are controlled by hedge funds - Polygon which in turn is controlled by Tetragon. The person controlling these is a person called E Griffith Reade who amongst other things owns 10% of Trump Entertainment Resorts.

The flight crew and maintenance crew (RAF serving personnel) are paid directly by Airtanker Ltd and are under the day to day control of Airtanker Ltd, not the RAF.

This is how the UK govt can claim they do not aid Israel with refueling despite it being done with RAF liveried aircraft and serving RAF personnel.

The UK govt is bought and paid for by Israel - https://www.declassifieduk.org/israel-lobby-funded-half-of-keir-starmers-cabinet/

Sky plans to ditch up to 500 staff in the Technology Group

"so for them its satellite or nothing"

You are aware that the Astra satellite cluster at 28 degrees east is end of life in 2029? There will be no satellite TV (paid or free) in the UK at that point because nobody is willing to pay SES for services in the UK or Eire - both of which are at the edge of the Astra coverage.

Coverage will gradually worsen from Sept 2027 as Astra 2E and 2F are shutdown so depending on your location you potentially have under 2 years left of service.

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

Re: ISP Hubs

Sky have supported IPv6 for over a decade now. Admittedly that's nothing to do with the previous (or current) owners - its more to do with Easynet (who Sky bought the network from) managing it in the first few years.

These days the "auth" used on Sky FTTP (Openreach) connections is basically a DHCPv6 PD request.

Its been noticeable for a while that IPv6 traffic on Sky is marginally faster/lower latency than IPv4 traffic. Pre-dates MAP-T as well.

Fried chips: UK's nascent semi industry risks faltering

...and just to finish off your history Racal spun off (demerged) Vodafone & Chubb, 26% of Camelot, then sold the rest of the defence businesses at vastly inflated prices to foreign (French) owners. Racal MESL was an early casualty but the sale of Racal Telecom to Global Crossing for a billion at the peak of the dot-com bubble was incredibly good business as it'd have gone the same way as Marconi.

£1000 invested in Racal in 1961 (when Harrison got them listed on the stock market) would have been worth £14.5 million in 2000 when he retired. Nice returns & what happened to the remains of the defence businesses was inevitable given UK govt spending in the late 90s.

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

Re: My supplier of choice back in the day ...

Scan were always a bit "iffy" IME. They were a monumental PITA if you had to RMA stuff on a trade account but that's a long time ago now.

First trade account I had was with Choice Peripherals - who went on to become Force9 Internet and then Plusnet. Easier life running an ISP rather than having scroats try to nick all the cpus & memory from the warehouse safe every week...

I've been buying pre-built stuff from PCSpecialist* for about a decade now. With the exception of one (ultra cheap) laptop which literally fell apart everything was rock-solid - one PC is still in use 13 years on - and without a trade account there's no way the average punter is going to beat the price by doing a self-build.

*Schenker in Germany, there's also some Italian outlet and maybe a Netherlands one too.

Hard to believe ebuyer could become shittier...

... but I'm sure Ashley will manage it.

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: Private or Work?

He's retired (mainly) and his current "apeshit" subject is Global Trade Identification Numbers (barcodes) :)

Having said that..... https://www.revk.uk/2025/07/age-verification.html

Virgin Media scraps wholesale network rival to Openreach

Well, isn't that a shocker.....

Its not like anyone has been suspecting this would be the outcome from day one or anything is it?

Still it makes that nasty business of SMP go away (again) doesn't it.....

Retailer Co-op: Attackers snatched all 6.5M member records

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/07/uk-charges-four-in-scattered-spider-ransom-group/

They all have "previous" - doxing, sim card swap fraud, ransomware etc etc.

If you stole the amount of money they have (over the years) via robbery you'd be in prison for 20 years. I'd be surprised if they get more than 18 months under current sentencing guidelines.

Time to massively increase sentencing guidelines for these offences. These people should be getting double-digit sentences.

Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything

Re: Maybe it's time we in Britain admit we're a bit crap at things nowadays

The avionics were obsolete, especially the ECM pods - which had direct consequences on how/why/when the aircraft were lost.

Sky Shadow was a fucking nightmare to maintain - it was pretty much all thick-film modules from Plessey (gone by this time) designed 15 years ago and EVERYTHING on every board was end-of-life/obsolete. Mod kits galore.

It overheated pretty much every time you looked at it in the UK, the filters weren't intended for desert use so blocked all the time and so just didn't work. There were literally hundreds of pods on the runway, all knackered. The filters? You guessed it - obsolete, no replacement.

Disclaimer : I have some passing familiarity with what happened prior to, during and post-Granby ;) I also ended up having to do some post-design work on the mapping system for the GR4 when I briefly ended up as the PDSO for that (clearly wasn't paying attention enough to dodge that bullet).....

Re: Maybe it's time we in Britain admit we're a bit crap at things nowadays

"Tornado eventually arrived and got a bit of a swan song in the desert."

A more accurate way of putting it would be "got shot to shit in the desert". Obsolete aircraft and obsolete tactics resulted in 6 being shot down and a LOT more damaged. Even the inbreds at the top of the RAF rapidly came to the conclusion "lets not do that again".

Why the RAF took so many years to identify that low-level missions were no longer effective tactics is another matter.

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: Ah, the frantic blinkenlights...

"Those wouldn't be from a certain 'ubiquitous' vendor would they?"

If you mean the company whose owner pumped and dumped the stock enough to buy a basketball team; who still can't make a working L3 switch; whose wireless engineers (all the good ones) fucked off a decade ago; who still can't cope with IPv6, who've had equipment banned on every continent on earth (faked compliance tests) and who have no s/w QA at all (fanbois "test" things") then its a distinct possibility ;)

Royal Navy freshens up ships' electromagnetic warfare defenses

Exocets/Falklands experience were primary reasons the ESM kit on the Lynx got an upgrade ASAP in the 1980s. That and an ECM module suspended below the Lynx which was supposedly going to be used to seduce missiles away from the ship, then the helicopter was supposed to "pop up" at the last second to survive/evade the missile. Bloody silly idea IMO but a lot quicker/cheaper than scrapping a load of ships/building newer ones without such a huge radar signature.

UK threatens £100K-a-day fines under new cyber bill

Well that's Crapita/Serco/G4S screwed then...

...lets not hold our breath shall we?

UKGovt can pass whatever legislation they want. Nobody is listening amongst their suppliers as they know full well nothing will happen as they're the only choice for Govt contracts now.

Elsewhere - best of luck with that, I daresay the vast majority of the "fines" received will come from Govt entities (councils, NHS, education etc) and will do nothing other than shuffle money around and cost ordinary people money.

Nvidia's latest AI PC boxes sound great – if you're a data scientist with $3,000 to spare

Re: AI PC's were a Gimmick

Yes, the Strix Halo APUs look like a better bet in terms of, well everything other than dedicated AI research really.

The more I look at the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 the more impressed I become. It pushes the M4 Pro/Max chips on cpu performance which I didn't expect given the graphics performance is on par with any currently available Nvidia "mobile" product.

Interestingly it appears the "infinity cache" is also s/w configurable - default config is that its used for the GPU, however it could be "sliced up" to benefit a specific workload via a driver update/change.

I'd rather have a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 on the desktop - which is why I've broken the habit of a lifetime and pre-ordered something - the frame.work desktop which was mentioned on El Reg a few weeks back.

I'm not easily impressed these days but I think this APU is going to put Intel/Nvidia out of the mobile device market for the next year or two and they're going to have to massively discount their premium "mobile" products. Probably not the best time for that to happen to Nvidia given the AI bubble/revenue maybe popping - Intel are screwed anyway as they're now years behind AMD on pretty much all their products.

Slightly OT, so apologies for that.

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: It takes a mix

"No one in any real job cares where you went to school or who your father was"

...says an AC (probably a yank) who clearly has ZERO knowledge of how England has always been run.

Framework Desktop wows iFixit – even with the soldered RAM

To be frank I've never found a need to upgrade the RAM on equipment I've bought over the last two decades.

16GB system memory with 4/8GB on the graphics card has always outlived the useful lifespan of the graphics card/cpu. The main benefit is making sure you have two memory channels running (2x8GB) on the motherboard rather than the quantity of memory. Ditto 32GB (2x16) if you needed that much.

I've seen what DDR5-4800/5600 can do on a 8845HS based laptop so 8000 removes the memory bottleneck even more.

I'm seriously tempted as I'm going to have to replace a desktop soon (power reasons rather than performance) but a Q3 delivery date makes me think I'll wait & see what the consumer units look like.

Re: Cache in

Ditto on long forgotten stuff - like the 128/256kB fake cache modules that were soldered to so many cheap motherboards every time memeory prices spiked.

I also remember being absolutely astounded that the internal memory bus on the first Pentiums could crack 1GB/sec.

Fuck I'm getting old..... :)

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

Re: Time to get real?

"They are only going to get the power they need in the short to medium term if they invest in their own generation capacity."

Or buy existing capacity which was never intended/planned for them like Amazon who recently bought half the output from a windfarm in the Moray Firth.

Not entirely sure how the likes of Amazon/Meta/MS/etc owning the output of renewable energy plants really benefits the UK......

Hyperoptic customers left in dark as power outage takes down systems

Probably doesn't help...

...that they're sacking a lot of their "infrastructure team" in a continuing attempt not to go bust. They pay more in interest charges on their massive debt than they make in revenue.

Out of contract pricing is stupidly expensive unless you haggle but frankly they're worse than Virgin Media which I didn't think possible.

They have no USP and will disappear in the next couple of years just like most of the rest of the altnets.

Also a third of their network is on Openreach EAD 1Gbps links which they can't afford to upgrade. Also some PIA connections which will become a problem soon enough. Again they have no cash to upgrade.

One to avoid - their honeymoon period is well and truly over.

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

Long time ago now...

...but its probably for the same reason the MoD has been so utterly shite at procurement for 40 years+

Anyone decent in terms of project management/technical knowledge dealing with contracts there got an offer from "industry" (BAe Systems usually in my day) and then someone clueless replaced them. Replacement could be "handled/manipulated" for a few years by which time a new contract was signed. Rinse/repeat ad nauseum.

I doubt a lot has changed.

UK telco TalkTalk confirms probe into alleged data grab underway

Re: Maths

....because they asked for a phone number, name, email address and premises address from anyone who ever asked for an online quote/price for their "services". Said data should have been deleted for anyone who didn't take up a contract with them but doesn't appear to have been.

Clearly they retained that data for marketing purposes, which if anyone actually enforced this sort of stuff MEANINGFULLY in the UK would leave them up shit creek in terms of fines and liability.

They don't so its just more "meh whatever" fail in the UK. Nothing will change until directors limited liability is removed, which it never will be as they're the ones giving "gifts" to MPs.

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

Never going to happen...

...apart from turning over all the data to wtf knows who? Thiel obviously but probably anyone else with enough cash, never mind how dodgy.

The AI side will never happen because there is ZERO probability of bringing enough generation capacity onto the grid before 2030 to do anything significant. Not with the projected increase in heatpumps/EVs & not when the rest of the world is competing for the same resources.

In addition the UK price for electricity is near enough double that of some European countries so why in the name of sanity would anyone site here unless there's MASSIVE subsidies paid - every year.

As the last few days have shown (to those paying attention), the UK is pretty much at the limits of existing generation capacity when the wind doesn't blow. There's no magic leccy tree to wish this away - it'll take decades of sustained public investment, which no govt has supplied for anything other than possibly nuclear weapons in the last 60 years.

Welcome to the real world you PPE fucktards.

UK financial regulator slammed for failed tech transformation

FCA is corrupt or incompetent

Take your pick.

The CPS (when it finally gets off its padded arses) will of course decline to prosecute anything criminal and the FCA is immune from ALL civil cases. You literally cannot bring a legal case against them unless its a criminal case.

So the "news" that they're just as corrupt/incompetent on IT matters isn't news of any kind.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

"Perspective from the UK here but I was at school many many years back and we were allowed to use calculators then - for some things."

Some things never change really - the problem schools had in the early-mid 1980s was that calculators were becoming available which could draw graphs and store formulae. As such you were permitted to use them for general classwork but you could only use them under exam conditions if the calculator could be reset to factory settings (or similar). You could tell who the rich kids* were during "O" grades and highers as they were the ones waiting in a queue at the door for the invigilator to reset or confiscate their calculators.

*some of these calculators cost more than the average weekly wage back then.

UK Regulatory Innovation Office vows to slash red tape – but we've heard it all before

Rentier economy

The UK is a rentier economy - there's a better RoI and lower risk if you simply buy property in most instances than investing in R&D/whatever. Been like that for near enough half a century so until that changes then the rest is bollox.

Oh and I'm talking about the actual companies themselves, not the plague of buy-to-let scum which have emerged in the last two decades.

Mega supermarket spots stock discrepancy of tens of millions amid ERP system migration

Re: That's not the half of it....

IMHO Walmart sold because of the equal pay claims they've been fighting for nearly two decades.

They had a higher profit margin than Tesco for most of their ownership period of Asda (28 years or so?) and didn't really change anything from a customer perspective. Staff perspective, sure, but to the average shopper nothing much changed when Walmart bought Asda....

That's not the half of it....

The company is drowning in debt, the idiot brothers who bought it are having some sort of family feud, the asset strippers (TDR) have majority control now and they can't recruit a CEO regardless of how much money is on offer.

They've had to get the 75 year old (mainly retired) ex-CEO of M&S to take over from moron #1 (Mohsin Issa) on a temporary basis until someone can be persuaded to be the whipping boy (CEO). Issa can't be left in charge because he's clueless.

If anyone has been in one of their larger supermarkets then they can't have failed to notice the epically long queues at the self-scan checkouts and perhaps one in ten tills actually open (but often broken - card readers). Add to that the chaotic supply of product to the shop floor, not very attractive pricing (in-store & fuel station) and they're fucked for the busiest time of the year.

That's what you get when two idiots borrow shitloads of money from asset strippers to buy a business they know ZERO about. If Walmart couldn't make a decent return on capital with Asda over three decades then two wide boys were always going to crash and burn.

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Re: Retrofit 4G?

That's what they do - change the comms module. Meter stays the same.

Electricity (Smart) Meter and Gas (Smart) Meter are effectively proxied through the comms module, which either communicates with DCC via 3G (O2) or radio (Arquiva). 3G contract runs until 2033 then the comms modules will need replacing.

Its not true.

You can get* a meter which is configured to only take remote readings once a month - default is once a day.

If you're in an area which has ZERO coverage then you can get* a meter which is preconfigured for dual-rate, but only after all the various antenna/comms unit options have been tried.

That's your lot. Nobody is fitting Ferraris meters now.

*in order to get either meter you'll probably have to take a complaint almost all the way to the ombudsman.

Another law firm piles on Intel for Raptor Lake CPU failures as complaints grow louder

Re: unclear if

Intel claim its only deskptop chips. However Intel aren't to be trusted in these matters IMHO, they'll shove any crap out the door to shore up share prices.

I didn't take the chance and recently bought a Ryzen 7 8845HS laptop in preference to Intel 13/14th gen cpus. For once my timing was right in terms of pricing :)

Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, literally, something else

OS on UV EPROMS

I remember upgrading my mother-in-law's RiscPC back in the mid-90s to a new version of RiscOS.

The reason it booted so fast became instantly apparent - the entire OS came on two UV EPROMs :)

Much like OS/2, RiscOS lost to Windows because of Microsoft's illegal actions. Two proper OO desktops beaten by a complete pile of crap with "shortcuts" and a marketing campaign.

Just goes to show what you can do when you bribe, blackmail and commit fraud on an epic scale....

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: Replaceable modems

They were.

The comms unit is seperate/detachable from the metering unit. For SMETS2 meters they just change the comms unit.

However the SMETS1 meters need replacing anyway so they may as well do both at once in that instance.

Re: Time of Use tariffs

Indeed it will change but for now its more of a carrot than a stick. That might change, depends on politics more than cost frankly.

Incidentally your original response mentioned decoupling of generation/supply. One of the reasons Octo can offer these tariffs is because they own an increasing amount of wind/bio/solar generation which makes them pretty much the only one of the mass suppliers to be spending on new generation capacity.

Don't know if you've also noticed but Octopus/EON/others are increasingly entering the market for installing/managing home battery storage. Why you'd want to turn over complete control of your generation/storage to your supplier is beyond me but I guess it appeals to the mass market. Personally I think its the next financial scandal just waiting to happen :)

There's a lot going on now which wasn't ten years ago, not sure its been entirely worth the ride so far but you never know....

Re: Time of Use tariffs

I quite agree with you and that's why I said Tracker was a no-brainer.

My daughter has nothing other than an aged smartmeter and has pretty much zero interest in looking at websites every day to find out what time is cheapest :)

The tracker electricity tariff is usually 30-40% lower than SVR (Octopus flexible) and gas is usually 40% lower than SVR. Gas price stays pretty much the same every day, electricity varies.

The other big suppliers are starting to do the same sort of things but for now Octopus is the only game in town - which is a shame because their customer service is utterly crap (1000% increase in complaints year on year).....

Mainly the post was to show that there are actually some benefits starting to appear from the smart meter fiasco, rather than a totally pointless in-house display which is all smart meters have offered in the UK until fairly recently.

Time of Use tariffs

For those of you still living in the past re electricity tariffs, try taking a look at these sites :

https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard

https://tracker.octopushome.net/dashboard

If you don't have a battery to load shift then Agile can still reduce your bills provided you mainly avoid 1600-1900. Agile prices change every 30 minutes.

Octopus Tracker prices change daily so are suited for people with no battery. Also it cuts the gas tariff by 40%. Complete no-brainer and has cut my daughter's bill by 46%.....

I'm currently averaging 9.4p/unit over the last 6 months on Agile imports.

NB - those tariffs are free to change, no tie-in or penalty so if there's another "Ukraine gas moment" then you can change to flat rate tariffs instantly.

Re: Alternatively...

OHM currently requires a change in law/electricity suppliers licencing terms before Octopus can use it for billing purposes.

This was clarified at a recent Ombudsman hearing where an end-user lost connectivity from smart metering and was in the Arqiva area (so not using 3G). Octopus/Ombudsman stated that it was illegal to use a OHM for meter readings/billing purposes alone.

In the future when the English* have fucked up the replacement of meters then who knows, but for now Octopus are not permitted to use the OHM for billing purposes.

*who are incapable of any sort of engineering competence these days.

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

Re: "Sixty people died before just seeing any sort of justice served"

The inquiry has covert recordings of people in "Project Sparrow" discussing keeping information from Vennels.

I watched it.

The chair had to tell people not to applaud him at the conclusion of his evidence because "undoubtably witnesses who are less acceptable to you will be appearing & I don't want to have to sanction people for bad behaviour when they do".

There's prima facie evidence of a conspiracy amongst multiple POL staff/their counsel to pervert the course of justice (at the very least) over a period of years and its in emails the inquiry has.

This is England though so they will get away with it.

Edit - POL even tried to get their board members & officers additional criminal liability insurance VERBALLY with AIG to "avoid a paper trail". That gem came from their lawyers...

UK council yanks IT systems and phone lines offline following cyber ambush

Re: Jumping to conclusions

Except of course LCC have already stated on Monday that they are working with “cyber security and law enforcement partners” so nobody is jumping to conclusions.....

UK data watchdog fines three text spammers for flouting electronic marketing rules

Bit worse than that.

Two have come within a couple of days of being struck off, one has renamed itself twice, and one moved address on the day of the judgement. Two have pending court cases - but looking at the directors that's a normal state of affairs given their MANY MANY previous "ventures".

Companies law "enforcement" in England is an open invitation to commit fraud and money laundering - no surprise there as England has depended wholly on money laundering/tax evasion to stay afloat for the last 75 years. The Spider's Web is well worth a view for anyone naive enough to believe England is anything other than totally corrupt.

There are NO CHECKS WHATSOEVER on any details of a company - in fact there's been plenty of examples of literally hundreds of companies (Chinese exporters on Amazon marketplace mainly) registered to the same residential address. Do Companies House give a toss? Do they fuck because they've been told not to by the Tories.

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

Re: nothing to see here, move along

"Strange. Making that selection is supposed to immediately take you to the customer retention department."

I suspect the reason for that may have been I was on a 30 day rolling contract (and always had been), therefore no possibility of retention so they simply didn't bother answering the call.

Doesn't change the fact it took 5 hours on the phone to cancel.....