Re: Local infrastructure is not the major issue
Of course the Swedes have the additional handicap of a certain young lady who makes Chicken Licken/Little look sensible & level-headed.
806 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2008
I had one of the small Alphas to play with for a while. I put Linux on it and it was a lovely machine - much better than the pizza-box Sparcstation which was my main machine. Because of its power I was able to run some FORTRAN antenna modelling software on it that produced answers in a reasonable time.
It's sad that its life was cut so short by DEC's troubles. I really thought that it was a major step forward in computer architectures at the time. I still have a copy of "Alpha Implementation & Architecture" though it's now a sad reminder of what might have been.
my digital meter is set for Economy 7 but the signal that controls that is going to be discontinued
I got a letter from my supplier saying my meter needed replacing because of that. The flaw there is that it doesn't. I know that because its built-in clock has drifted over the years. I continue to ignore the blandishments from my supplier. It hasn't descended to threats yet but I recently checked their tariffs, and any 'cheaper' tariffs than the standard require a smart meter to be installed.
When I complained to Tesco about the crappy new system they said 'Take it up with the store manager'. When I asked if my local store manager was responsible for Tesco's software development they were not amused. The system is no better now than when it went live so I assume it's a fundamental design error rather than tweaking some parameters to improve the response.
Tesco replaced their in-store IT several months ago and it is a crock from the shopper's point of view. The 'smart-shop' barcode readers are now super-slow as the product lookup process when you scan the barcode has gone from essentially instant to several seconds, and it repeats also when you scan for more than one item. Heaven knows where they got the design team from.
Not everything needs regulating to the last dot and comma. The whole business of regulation consumes both human & capital resources that could usefully be used elsewhere. Caveat Emptor seems a good common-sense response, though I have to say that excessive wealth does seem to destroy that facility in some of them.
The article mainly focusses on improved data rates and capacity, but one of the supposed benefits of 5G is use by IoT services using just a few carriers in the multiplex. This is enabled by an arcane spec change over 4G (carrier phase offsets) but I wonder just how many IoT providers are using or planning to use this feature?
The really useful adjunct to terminal emulators on Linux. The only permanent windowed apps on my laptop are the Firefox and Thunderbird. I have, currently, 11 terminal emulator windows scattered over 3 workspaces, plus browser & email on another. It's just convenient to have different CWDs on the various terminal windows. I do use other graphical apps like Audacity, IDEs and graphical editors, but even building apps for Espressif, Zephyr, etc I prefer the CLI.
As with almost any idea, technically possible, just doesn't make sense in the real world
Looks like the govt didn't ask the right people if it would work before chucking our money at it. Sadly this isn't uncommon:(
If it made sense economically then the data centres would be on it already as an extra income stream, not needing the taxpayer to pay for it.
I get that as a customer with a problem too. In the early days of ISPs I had to change ISP because the previous one went bust, and then my Sure Signal femtocell device from Vodafone stopped working. Now, knowing something about network security I guessed that my new IP address wasn't whitelisted on their firewall. However trying to get Voda to sort it out was 'difficult'. The young lady on support did pass me on to her supervisor eventually but his reaction was 'Oh, that's a different department'. So we went round the houses about responsibility and I eventually persuaded him to own the problem in Voda for me. About a fortnight later it started working, and they did actually tell me the problem. That IP address range was originally used in Belgium so it hit their geofencing blocks in the firewall.
The manufacturers have probably got more clout with the government than we have. We stop buying EVs, as we can't be compelled to buy them, and when the fines start to bite, the manufacturers will just stop selling any vehicles here. That might concentrate a few minds in Westminster. Otherwise I guess we'll turn into Cuba, maintaining old bangers for decades.
True. But I've no idea what it might be
Nuclear! No, belay that. It would have been a good idea if we had done a France when they did, and carried on now when they have got cold feet. Oil and gas will run out eventually so we'll be back to coal before they do. The only other option is a low energy agrarian economy like we had centuries ago, but then we need the low population density to match...
Cue the Soylent Green factories.
I doubt that would go unnoticed. The Galileo time reference works independently, as does the USNO one for GPS. The GGTO, on the Galileo navigation message, is only telling you that there is a small offset, that will no doubt vary with the precise behaviour of the two time references. If the US tried to wobble the USNO reference then that would seriously screw with GPS, especially the military part, and Fuchino would rapidly notice that too.
than we be dead or suffering greatly due to climate change
Someone has swallowed the kool-aid good and proper. Despite what you have been told, you ain't going to die by boiling or whatever the really scary threat du jour is today.
Sadly Sunak didn't go far enough as we still have the Climate Change Act on the books with all its malign consequences.
I have Reolink cameras. They do have a cloud system for viewing the camera or recorder output but you can set up the phone app to work locally so it just works over the VPN. I've also blocked the cameras and the recorder from making outbound connections. I can unblock that temporarily if I need to do a software update.
They all have a limited lifetime.
Nice that it'll still work locally though. A bit of VPN using WireGuard would sort that for remote use. Are there any off-the-shelf border routers that support that though? I only found GL.iNet routers and that's not a mainstream brand. Of course OpenWRT supports it but that's not an option for most people.
We all do indentation anyway for readability so losing curly brackets doesn't seem too much of an imposition.
As for the RP2040, it's a nice device to play with, and I've just built a nice little app (in C though) that listens for the RF signal from the doorbell button so I can get a 'bing-bong' in my headphones when someone rings the doorbell.
The pico-sdk does put quite a few functions into RAM though for speed, as flash is over a QSPI interface so cache misses will be slow, so that does take away from available heap space.
This is like all the other stories we get about Google. People attempt to contact the company for all sorts of reasons, and it's like a big black hole. I read a story the other day about Google spending billions with cell providers for search & Chrome exclusivity. You would think they could spend a fraction of that on product service. It's not customer service because we aren't the customers, we are the product.
We haven't got to the point yet where those issues have been raised; we're at the technical design point
She said this in regard to privacy issues. I would have thought that a suitable solution for privacy features would impact significantly on the technical design. It's definitely not an extra bolt-on goody!
Not simple. Flight plans can be quite complex documents and doing a thorough input sanitation early on may not be feasible. I wonder if the whole truth of what happened will be released publicly. They may want to keep quiet about exactly what caused it to fail, if indeed it was a duff flight plan issue.
Well, how come Dragon missions have been pretty much faultless, both the manned and unmanned missions, including landing the first stages? He might have the move 'fast & break things' rep but only in the development phase. He won't do stuff unless the risk is low enough - launches often get delayed because everything is not quite right.
There ain't no such thing as a safe battery when its energy density is the same as or more than current lithium batteries. It's no accident that the main working ingredient is an alkali metal which reacts readily and exothermically with stuff, and ever more energetically as you go down the periodic table. Even a tank of petrol/gasoline is not safe if you don't treat it right, but we've had decades of experience of making safe containers for that stuff (bar the Pinto).
There have been judges who have made the effort to become familiar with the arena of litigation - William Alsup in California comes to mind (Oracle Vs Google). However I wonder if some think that may be counterproductive in an essentially legal judgement.
Yes indeed! I remember Usenet in the early 90s, and what an education that was! Quite addictive but it lost its attraction once the AOLers and succeeding waves of newbies came on. I've never bothered with Twatter or Farcebook for that reason. My wife uses FB but limits it severely to family & friends, which is the only sensible thing to do.
Trouble is, they want all sorts of bells & whistles - PTT, group nets etc, all the stuff that Airwave currently does. But they want the cell network for data & video stuff too.
The Home Office never got the right people in to ask the very hard questions of EE. Or if they did they ignored them because they didn't like the answer.