Posts by Vestas 50 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Nov 2021
"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......
...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.
...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.
....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.
...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.
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.
"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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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 :)
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....
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....
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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.....
In general if you are in an ex-Blueyonder area then its pretty reliable as they built things properly.
If you're in an ex-NTL area then its a total bag of shite - cables tacked to wooden fences and left loose on public pavements outside terraced houses is the norm. There's a cabinet where we used to live which hasn't had a door on it for 9 YEARS - and yes its in use.
Virgin Media "customer service" is non-existant unless you want to upgrade, took me 5 hours and 13 phone calls to cancel last year. I finally worked out that if you selected cancellation on the phone menu it never got answered so the best option was to let the phone menu time out and then someone eventually answers. Admittedly its some twat in an Indian call centre who deals with multiple companies customers & couldn't give a shit what you want but that's the way of things with Virgin Media.
Defibrillators actually work from a battery, not mains but nice try ;)
Having said that here's a special mention for Morrisons in Loughborough who have had a non-functional defib due to a "global battery shortage" for 6 months+ now. They have put up a message that the nearest one is in a school (open 5 days a week and not accessible to the general public) miles away which I'm sure is a great help to anyone requiring a quick zap...
Clearly the yank asset stripping scum (sorry "hedge fund") who bought them have prioritised their asset stripping accordingly - along with demanding "cash contributions to the business" from "managers" earning less than the living wage.
"If UK law says the battery has to be removed and sent for recycling, then that is what the scrappy has to do."
You are utterly clueless about scrapyards in the UK. In fact you're beyond clueless.
How do you think the "travelling community" sell off the huge amounts of metal they steal? Do you think they ship it out of the UK or something?
NOBODY is enforcing the regulations in the UK and they never have. You're more likely to find a unicorn than you are a 100% legitimate scrappy.
Dual-stack IPv4 over IPv6 is deployed fairly widely (not in the USA) in ISP-supplied consumer routers. It has issues but arguably a lot less than CGNAT.
I realise we're diverging somewhat but IPv4 NAT over a native IPv6 network is the norm for a lot of users and isn't in any way new.
You could just NAT the IPv6 range you're assigned if you wanted to. You have both public and local IPv6 addresses on a native IPv6 LAN anyway so just NAT the IPv6 WAN to the local IPv6 addresses, same as you'd do with IPv4.
Why you'd want to do that is a different matter as its unlikely to improve anything - security/obscurity/whatever you're thinking of......
Sky started trialling IPv6 to end-users nearly a decade ago.
I was one of the UKOnline customers they "acquired" when they bought Easynet* and ended up doing some beta testing for them - it got you a direct line to third-line/NOC support back then so was worth the hassle.
More end-users were added when the SR102 router started rolling out - 2014 maybe?.
They rolled IPv6 out to all** end-users in 2016 and achieved something like 95-98% usage within a year or so.
If you're using a modern device (not designed for the USA market) then you will be using native IPv6 on all Sky broadband services - you can force IPv4 but unless you've got serious OCD then the 20-byte extra overhead in the header isn't noticeable.
The reason its taken BT/EE so long to transition the same way? They decided it was cheaper to acquire other ISPs IPv4 allocations by buying them - I lost count of how many small ISPs got subsumed into the absymal BT-owned Plusnet long long ago.....
*Easynet were the reason Sky were successful from day 1 on broadband compared to other entrants to the market. Great guys.
**there were some people who used their own routers which either didn't support IPv6 or had "issues", mainly user-generated ;).
You already lost that bet so cough up the house... :)
The ONLY reason we're having this stupid fucking discussion again is because the USA has over 40% of the IPv4 addresses available and insists that IPv6 is "too difficult".
Buy non-USA networking kit and oh look - it works. PROPERLY!
If you can't/won't implement a working IPv6 stack in equipment* then GTFO of the industry as you're not competent.
*Liberty Global (Virgin Media in the UK) being the poster child of this.
Li-ion battery fires produce their own oxygen unfortunately - only way to stop/reduce the oxygen production is to cool the fire. CO2 apparently helps reduce the intensity/duration of the fire for that reason. Doesn't put it out though.
Big fires? Dump a few tons of sand on it and wait for it to burn out. I can't remember how long it took the Aussies to put out the container fire on the SA "battery" but it wasn't quick.
Its also worth pointing out that Ubiquiti have on more than one occasion had to withdraw all stock of certain wifi products from the ETSI market because they didn't submit them for approval testing. IIRC the German regulator got exceptionally pissed off with them. Ditto Japan and probably some other places I've forgotten about - Israel rings a bell but that'd be ETSI I guess.
They have an exceptionally USA-centric viewpoint on all regulatory matters IME.
Their AirMax kit is still decent.
The Unifi wifi, switching/routing & CCTV equipment is vastly overpriced underspecced crap. Its also VERY unreliable - switch PSUs weren't derated for temperature properly and went pop in their tens of thousands. They then started to put in sealed bricks (laptop chargers - I kid you not) into new designs simply because they didn't have any decent hardware engineers left. The CCTV cams are eyewateringly overpriced and I found they had a 20% failure rate/annum - they'd either only connect at 10Mbps or (most of the time) the IR filter would simply get stuck.
QA on software is non-existant. They have a few fanboys on a forum who they throw test builds at. I guess that worked OK before anyone with a clue binned them. Last time I looked (some time ago now) there was probably about a dozen people there who weren't home users.
Coincidentally(?) they were an OK company until the 2016 phishing incident. Downhill all the way after that.
IIRC they opened a dev office in Latvia & tried to poach the Mikrotik staff. Dunno how that went as I was exiting their "ecosystem" before then.
Avoid like the plague is my advice.
I think the North of England would object as well - last time this was trialled the RTA rate went through the roof, as did pedestrian casualties.
Now that all the streetlamps are on part-time lighting outside cities I suspect the same would happen again - probably with higher pedestrian casualties due to distractions like phones/earphoes etc.
North of Inverness/South of Watford people probably don't much care as it really doesn't make a lot of difference - one is mainly dark in winter anyway (lived up there myself) & the other is mainly illuminated on even minor roads. Its the bit in the middle where most people live that's contentious.
Also worth pointing out that the whole of the UK is north of any USA state bar Alaska so it actually does make sense to continue BST here.
These days many PCs come with a single DIMM fitted.
On laptops its pretty much across the board too - from Asus gaming laptops to HP business laptops if you buy from the manufacturer.
That means you're not using dual-channel memory and hence the CPU is (almost) literally half as fast in terms of memory access as it should be. You might not need another 8GB/whatever but you need another DIMM to enable dual-channel memory on the CPU.
This isn't really relevant to the article but is probably worth mentioning anyway.
Spot on.
You have more chance of Boris not lying for a day than you have of making contact with Leics Firearm Licensing "team" - ie none whatsoever.
I know of several people who simply send a recorded delivery letter to the Leics team to prove they've complied with the law as in at least one instance it took the Leics team over 2 YEARS to acknowledge a firearms transfer notification. That was only after they threatened to prosecute the person transferring the firearm mind you!
Plod are in general a total waste of oxygen IME.
...they do actually have higher minimum password standards than most other major UK ISPs.
For example they do require upper/lowercase characters with at least one number - this is also for the web login on the router and the wifi as well, unlike (last I checked) BT & Sky.
I'd be more concerned about why the login server is accepting that many incorrect logins from (presumably) the same IP address (even CGNAT) without even rate-limiting login attempts never mind anything else.
I'm currently on a rolling 30 day contract with them prior to moving somewhere (new build) that has Openreach FTTP and Virgin FTTP. Lots more scope to play them off against each other come renewal time....
I remember Richard Ashton - he setup the nospam.demon.co.uk which so many of us used back then. Also he was a regular (like me) on the comp.os.os2 newsgroups - his "aggressive" dialing script written in REXX was a thing of beauty, you'd be on your third redial while Trumpet Winsock users were still listening to an engaged tone :) He definitely didn't suffer fools gladly.
I'm another of the initial Demon subscribers....
You have to use a system which doesn't use factorisation as those algorithms can be solved in polynomial time on a quantum computer.
Lattice-based cryptography is the likely candidate to replace public-key applications.
Symmetric key systems (like AES) are currently resistant to quantum computers provided a large enough key size is used but that's not a long term solution.
...I just got pissed off with Amazon whinging about Visa charging them more to process UK-based transactions in Luxembourg which Amazon do to minimise/avoid tax in the UK. I'm sure Visa are no better but Amazon just took the piss. I cancelled the Amazon (Prime) account same day.
I think many of you might be quite surprised at how limited online ordering has become over the last decade if you don't use Amazon or Ebay.
You will save a shedload of cash by not casually buying crap though :)
The SIQ bug didn't actually "freeze" the other applications, they'd be running happily in the background. In most instances it didn't "freeze" the application running in the foreground either. What it did do was make the machine's UI totally unresponsive to the user.
Headless OS/2 servers/machines ran forever - they simply didn't crash. Some ATMs in the UK were running OS/2 until the late 00s AFAIK - don't remember many "Bork Bork Bork" articles on those ;)
What killed OS/2 was IBM and IBM alone.
MS didn't "play by the rules" or anything close but that's pot, kettle, black territory frankly.
You have to remember this is back in the days when IBM were losing money hand over fist - they set a (then) world record for the largest annual corporate loss in history ($2bn IIRC, small beer now). They were largely clueless regarding the x86 world by this time as everyone with a clue on the hardware side had long since departed.
IBM simply didn't believe you could make serious money on operating systems unless you controlled/specified the hardware platform, which to be fair has been/still is the case now, MS are/were pretty much the only the exception to the rule.
OS/2 Warp ran Win16 programs fine but they never got the license for Win32 so Win95 killed any significant consumer use on OS/2. In that regard it was very successful.
OS/2 Warp had plenty of major developers writing native programs for it but given IBMs ambivalence/hostility to the x86 platform they all left one by one. When I saw Brad Wardell (Stardock Systems) bin OS/2 development I knew it was dead. Brad was a big advocate of OS/2 but he's done OK on Windows.
My abiding memory of OS/2 was the look on people's faces when you showed them three DOS virtual machines running Win3.1 FASTER on OS/2 than the machine (486DX, 8MB RAM) could run a single instance of Win3.1 when booted via MS-DOS.
Oh and I still miss the PM on OS/2 - proper OO inheritances, not symbolic link shit.
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