Posts by Nick Ryan

Re: I'm a bit confused

Baby eating is done by the Bishop of Bath and Wells. I've seen the historical documentaries citing this.

What's concerning is that this is where Ree-Smogg likes to lurk when he's not tending his oversea tax havens.

Re: 17 yrs FFS

Wind turbines are generally a good supplemental source of power. Combine enough of these, with, for example tidal power and there can be a lot of electricity generation. Not always at helpful times, nor predictable like tidal power.

What the entire grid is really missing is energy storage, where energy produced at unhelpful times is stored to provide energy for later. With this the likes of wind turbines can be very useful as a supplemental source of power generation. The same goes for solar, which tends to produce very little electricity at night, but any excess can feed into energy storage. When energy storage runs low though is when we need on-demand power generation and this is where non-renewables and nuclear can step in.

Re: Nuclear power?

While I love the concept of fusion reactors, the unfortunate reality is that they are not nearly as clean and simple as the sci-fi hype would have people believe. The shielding and other components need to be regularly replaced and the state of this shielding is typically rather dangerous by the time it comes out. These components are not cheap and often not overly safe to dispose of and that's before the fuel is taken into account. Therefore the operation of a nuclear fusion plant will almost certainly have to include very regular periods of down time for maintenance.

Re: A centre for industrial decline?

Their next trick will to be to bollocks up the date formatting so we're left struggling with the US-only backwards date format and struggle to work out whether we are looking at, for example 10th June or 6th November.

Luckily they appear to be mostly sticking to day number and month name, which while not immediately translatable to non-English, or non-American, languages, is quite easily interpretable by them and is quite reasonable given that the articles tend to be in English, except when they are in American of course.

Re: Size matters

Not only that, but the prototype was 1.4m long and they worked hard to shorten it to 1.6m long.

Re: The future crippled - today

...and a big collection of optical media... What will they think of next?

Ripping said media to a NAS and playing it whenever I want to play it. Regardless of which damn box the disc happens to be in, if in a box at all. Also I get to skip all the "Copyright theft is theft" bullshit... it's not, it's copyright violation and cannot ever be theft.

Oh wait, that's what I thought of next, and not the parasitic industry desperate for me to re-purchase and rent everything that I previously bought.

Re: The future crippled - today

The controllers were pretty rock solid.

Re: a low-end "smart" TV

I'm not so worried by the "reporting everything to the mothership" angle, as in order to watch much content one must use a streaming service of some form and you can guarantee that this information is all recorded somewhere.

My take on the "smart" TV is that they are inevitably anything other than smart. They have moronic interfaces which make what was previously a simple task as annoying and slow as possible, the software spewed into them is usually so inefficient that it makes whatever underspecified dumping ground of basic computing components on them choke at the simplest of things. That most manufacturers, in particular Samsung, deny all knowledge of their software within a few weeks of release of the device and just lead it an abandoned mess which becomes steadily less and less useful does not help.

Give me a good quality display and a replaceable control/playback device for it and I'm happy. That way when the control/playback device becomes obsolete, which it will within a few years, I don't have to replace the entire display.

Re: The future crippled - today

While some of the Microsoft hardware is acceptable, a lot of it is dire. For varying reasons, usually through Microsoft cost cutting in really stupid areas.

For example, the key cap printing on the rather pricey Microsoft Natural keyboard is such poor quality that the letters on the key caps wears off after just a couple of weeks of use. That's appalling seeing as even £5-10 keyboards get this right.

The original Microsoft Surface was a quite interesting table based interface. Just rather seriously flawed in a couple of fundamental ways: it was impossible to sit at which makes it a very poor table and the top surface was going to be damaged very, very quickly. The product that was released with the same name was just a badly balanced tablet with an expensive and not very good keyboard, as in worse that most laptops. These devices have improved a lot since, although the cost vs performance compared to a regular laptop is still not great.

The Microsoft mouse, while some love them, the majority seem to favour mice that have some weight to them and don't feel incredibly cheap as a result. Having a really spongy mouse wheel action doesn't help them either. £5-10 generic mice or even large PC manufacturer mice that are both essentially clones of the cheapest Logitech mice are often preferred as they weigh more and have better button and wheel actions.

Various XBoxes have had fundamental design flaws, the "red ring of death" being one of the earliest and most severe but there have been other odd design flaws in later devices too.

Re: Not a glitch

Yes, Excel regularly destructively formats data. Import data including large numbers or number fields with leading zeros and Excel will merrily go ahead destroy the data with no recourse other than to recreate/reimport the data...

True, it does feel like very poor planning. When the average temperature for July/August is 35 degrees, with regular variances +/- 5 degrees, not being able to cope with twice the regular variance is quite poor.

Re: On fire

Like many things, this depends.

A water cooling system tends to have a much higher thermal mass than a cooler/fan system and therefore it can hold much more heat which allows it to cover spikes in heat generation better.

If a water cooling system has a large radiator (large surface area) and large, slower fans blowing air through it then this can be quite quiet. However, should the amount of heat getting stored in the water get too much then the fans need to be run faster, and therefore noisier.

When a water cooling system doesn't have a large enough radiator then the heat dissipation mechanism needs to be more active, which tends to mean louder.

We're not quite at the stage where it's worth seriously considering integrating heating systems into a property but with the way the CPU and GPU manufacturers are going it won't be too long. 800W of heat dumped into underfloor heating from a PC will provide quite a thermal mass to warm and the heat may as well go somewhere useful. Not so good during warm periods though...

Re: It does suck

I can't remember the brand that I had, Asus possibly. As a PC it was pretty lacklustre but it had a nice enough display and was reasonably portable to carry around and show things on. It did feel a bit pointless compared to just using a laptop though.

Two or three years earlier I had use of a micro laptop type device - again it wasn't fast but it was incredibly portable and very good for demonstrating software on as it was small enough when closed to fit into a large jacket pocket. The power supply had to go into a different pocket of course... Essentially an EEE PC form factor just many years earlier.

Re: Use Open Shell on Windows 10 (and I think 11)

"Imaged by your company" is probably translated to "asked HP to provide the OS installed".

Something that has been true for decades: Always, always reinstall Windows from scratch and never take the OEM provided installation. This removes the stupid drive partitioning, the trial applications, the shovelware, the annoying OEM customisations and logos and all manner of other junk that is easiest to repair just be nuking from orbit.

Re: It does suck

That is pretty much the mentality of these worthless UI designer who think that moving user interface elements on an interaction is a good thing. It's like a never ending and extremely frustrating game of pin the tail on the donkey. Except in this case the donkey is the UI designer.

Re: It does suck

Like many others, I ditched distributions that inflicted Unity on users as the desktop. It was barely usable for any serious work, with more than a couple of applications running at once it became an interface from hell by way of navigation between them and launching a new application. It did get better with considerably higher screen resolutions, but that only served to demonstrate the appalling core design of the user interface. When the developers just told everyone to STFU and that they liked it and anybody who didn't could just go elsewhere, we did. It's not that they couldn't have improved it, but they actively chose not to.

Re: It does suck

So many people have forgotten about Windows XP Tablet Edition. It was pretty much stock Windows XP but with stylus support for scribbles to text conversion and a popup keyboard.

Using it as a touch interface sucked, but that was largely due to the legacy of pixel based interfaces, the worst of these tended to be dialog windows and in particular settings windows... Microsoft in other words.

If application user interfaces were designed for scalable output in the first place then they worked well. Unfortunately unless using the Borland tools, a scalable native user interface was really hard. Microsoft Visual Studio only promoted and encouraged appalling interfaces and the drive to bork the model of modal desktop applications into web page applications just made everything worse.

Not helped by Microsoft changing the Windows GUI composition interface every couple of years, leaving an abandoned trail of 80% complete debris everywhere, with the remaining 20% of missing functionality being cobbled in place by individual application developers.

Even the current fad for "dark mode" is a complete exercise in total and utter stupidity. Why/how? 32 bit windows had system colours, for example button face, button light edge, button dark edge, button text and so on, and an application only needed to use the system colours and it would be largely compliant with any Operating System level colour changes. For example changing to a "dark mode". Custom coloured elements such as icons were an outstanding problem, but Microsoft's braindead fix for this was not to implement anything sensible, it was to hard code it's own applications in whatever colours it felt like (rather than letting the Operating System do it's thing) and the death of custom colour schemes shot into mainstream. Then later as application developers cobbled their own "dark mode" into every individual application, which is as stupid and unproductive as it sounds, did Microsoft consider vomiting into windows a "dark mode" configuration which, of course, would require the rewrite of every application that did its own thing because of Microsoft previously dropping support for Operating System level colour schemes.

Re: Advertising weary?

I'm sure much of this behaviour is down to marketing people who, to put it bluntly, are abject morons and don't or cannot see the damage they are doing to their own brand.

Take s typical local newspaper's website and try to view it without some form of ad blocking. They are totally and utterly unviewable. Advertising revenue goes down? Simple, insert more bloody adverts. Advertising starts to go down again? Insert more bloody adverts. Advertising goes down yet again? Insert more bloody adverts.

It's highly important, evidently, for such a site to have at least 50% of the space taken up by the same bullshit click bait that is on every other single news type site - personalised for the detected IP address therefore "local mum from <X> makes this much through this one trick" type bullshit. Nothing says more about the reputation of your own website as including bullshit clickbait on every page.

Should there be any content to see, it will be frequently trampled on by ad content slid over the top of it, which moves with the content and only needs to be looked at to auto-play some video for the advert. Then when you scroll down to read the rest of the article, it's critical that the advert is moved into the middle of this, causing a whole page refresh and, of course, the bloody video advert to appear in the middle of the screen.

The end result is a toxic piece of shit of a web page with 0.1% content and 99.9% complete shit. The website will then either fold or be borged into a larger entity that has the remaining resources to spam bullshit "content" into what is left of the reputation of the original website.

Re: Pedantic description alert!

Don't forget that the word "final" must be included in the file name of files. Particularly for the fifth revision of said final document

Re: Hmmm

There's a difference between easy and having a lot to do. The "have a lot to do" side of things was inevitably because the organisation previously ignored data protection and privacy. It's not new, it started with the Data Protection Act.

Re: Hmmm

One thing it has achieved is give companies/organisations another excuse to be unhelpful

Re: Small companies

I heard that there an enormous, almost £100,000 worth of cheese to be traded. That's £100,000 per year, pre-global recession and that's the entire market.

Sorry, I forgot to add tortuous pauses in the above sentence. Where's the cheese icon?

Hmmm.... what's next after algorithms to blame for a government's own actions/inactions/beligerance...

• Them in the neighbouring village
• The Scottish
• The Welsh
• The French
• The Germans
• The Russians/Communists
• The Irish
• Travellers
• Northerners
• The Romanians
• The (Generic/Wider) Eastern Europeans
• Poor people
• Experts
• Scientists
• The EU
• Algorithms
• ...probably AI will be next despite there not being any actual AI? (But then facts never matter)

I suspect I've missed a few.

Re: Hmmm

Ah, but this is the shower that wanted all kinds of specific protections and loopholes... for "celebrities and other important people". Themselves, in other words.

Re: Hmmm

No, it was not.

The aim of the GDPR was the protect individuals from corporate data predation, to give individuals control of their own data and to give them legal rights to challenge companies that abuse trust and personal data.

It had a tough time trying to balance fair use, appropriate use and necessary use of data alongside individual privacy and in general it did a pretty good job considering.

Companies that struggled with it were the type of companies that just collected data regardless, used data without reasonable expectation that they would and so on. GDPR was, and is, easy. However one of your other comments about the snake oil consultants running amok to fleece cash from others was too spot on... some of these consultants really didn't like to be called out on their idiotic interpretation of GDPR, particularly with a copy of the GDRP in hand in front of me, and went back to wanting to fleece others for more money while they could.

Has the ICO been rather toothless at times? Yep. Have some companies just ignored the GDPR and continued doing whatever they felt like anyway and gotten away with it as a result? Yes. However this is often because the ICO, and their international equivalents, were toothless, gutless, or often just staffed by lobbyists from data stealing firms.

Re: UK rejoining the EU?

For whatever the various haters go on about things, when we were in the EU we had a very potent veto. Which we almost never used. We also had the potential to have negotiators to put forward the UK's case and requirements, which unfortunately we often squandered by sending abject rejects like Farage and "friends" to the EU parliament.

Re: GDPR teeth

In the meantime, for the rest of us, the UK will be judged, quite correctly, to have inadequate and non-equivalent data protection by the EU and we'll yet more hurdles to trade. However the move to be like the US where the consumer or employee doesn't matter and all that matters is the mighty dollar, sorry plumetting pound.

Re: Good god...

I can't help thinking that taking the S from the second word to make "Insane", we really need to find something to do with the remaining letters (d.i.o.r.d.e.r.)

Re: Broken Bagpipes?

Some are broken and don't make a sound. Better? :)

Re: I assume a continuation of their efforts to anex NI

So the EU would fuck up Ireland because of a personal grudge? Damn, almost like they are childish and its a good job we got out.

Please stop projecting your own bigoted blind views of the UK's responsibility. The EU have kept the peace in NI as a high priority while your beloved Johnson was repeatedly lying to everyone, and in different ways, about there being no border and no risk to the Good Friday Agreement. The EU is not fucking up Ireland, the UK is, through blind rabid brexiteers and corrupt, incompetent politicians. Hell, the Tory party repeatedly gave the NI secretary job to individuals whose only skill was to say "Yes, Boris" and no actual knowledge, skills or any competence in anything. The exit agreement that was written and signed by Johnson/Tory party/UK gov with the EU was touted by Johnson as being complete and great, and then a few months later this same exit agreement, which is an international agreement, was being criticised as if the EU imposed it... they didn't even write the damn thing, they contributed to the discussions and in the end signed to it despite the childish antics of the "negotiators" that the UK sent to work on it. But somehow to rabid brexiteers, the oven ready, great deal and agreement signed by the UK is the fault of the EU. It's not, and never has been and is cannot even be.