* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

You should install smart meters even if they're dumb, says flack

Tom 7

Re Cup of tea

I've got PV - when its proper sunny I do things that need a lot of hot water - like brewing and cleaning my brewing equipment, or as I have a large garden cook shitloads of jam and chutneys, or just heating my hot water etc. All for free. Now with a truly smart meter that lets me know when electricity is cheap I can, with very little automation do the washing, tumble drying (when the weather is shit), heat the hot water all for whatever the lowest overnight price is - or if it doesnt go down to the required value I can program it to run or not if its urgent.

As I said earlier this will have to be achieved by my own induction loop and raspberryPi OCR of the smart meter and a few switches and solenoids. For around about £250 I'm guestimating it will pay for itself in a year - I saved over £500 a year by using PV 'intelligently'. I've even got a low power kettle for low light days!

These meters are not for the consumer but by christ we should do everything to make sure they dont get away with this crap. Though I do wonder if they will 'advise' the government that all white goods need to be made manual only!

Tom 7

The only thing that makes a smart meter of any use to anyone

is a pi-zero with camera so you can OCR the price on the meter and use that to work out when to work out to turn on your various heavy usage items automatically without having to get up a 2am to stick your head in the cupboard to find out what the rate is. In any sensible world that facility would have been built in.

One would almost imagine that the unseemly rush to get these things installed was partly to avoid this kind of thing happening - apart from the stupid problems of having supplier specific meters.

Printers now the least-secure things on the internet

Tom 7

Printing? Is that still a thing?

OK the kids do it for homework - ironically mostly for IT - but apart from returning shit that wouldnt need to be returned if the people who sent it could use a computer we are 99.99999% in the 21stC.

Hello, Star Trek? 25th Century here: It's time to move on

Tom 7

I was introduce to ST in the US on NTSC tellies

as a kid and am still firmly of the opinion that if the red shirts dont flood out then it cannot be called Star Trek. It was never meant to be taken seriously but was great fun at the beginning.

UK will be 'cut off' from 'full intelligence picture' after Brexit – Europol strategy man

Tom 7

Thats ok - we will be so insignificant the terrorists wont be interested in us

unless most of NI wants to stay in the EU and we refuse...

Sick of Southern Rail? There's a crowdfunding site for that

Tom 7

He's called the CEO I believe.

Retired Philae lander slouches on Comet 67P

Tom 7

Every coma has a silver lining.

I wonder how much more was discovered by people staring at images trying to find this poor little lost box of tricks?

'Hey, Elon? You broke it, you bought it' says owner of SpaceX's satellite cinder

Tom 7

Re: Maybe God exists?

The thing is FB can be used for more than just selfies and school photos. Many small local groups can be set up to buy,sell,exchange things and service requests and so on. Surprisingly they kinda work better than other customised web sites. FB is actually really useful for this sort of thing (and you dont know how much I hate to say that) but I can imagine it being really really fucking useful for the people who could have had this - especially if the they can get FBP or equivalent too!

Japan's Brexit warning casts shadow over Softbank ARM promises

Tom 7

Re: Not really comparable

ARM currently employ a lot of people doing stuff that could sell up their expensive Cambridge properties and move somewhere else in the world should their new owners ask nicely enough. After all the UK just became a backwater.

I think they may have worked out it will be a while before they need to move to 128 bits and most of their 64 bit work is done and dusted. Apart from the customisations for customers who just happen to be competitors.

I didnt like this deal and I'm quite convinced I've been ripped off for my shares and willl be ripped off for ARM products that come from anyone other than Softbank.

Nul points: PM May's post-Brexit EU immigration options

Tom 7

Re: Wrong question

It was interesting to note that after all their promises the leave promoters fucked off at high speed. Some were called back by May to sit on the bloody well paid naughty step where it was in her 'control' but its all looking like they are desperately trying to cultivate some long grass and get a decent pair of boots for when the 'talking to a brick wall' phase is over and done with.

These are not just job cuts, these are M&S job cuts

Tom 7

Re: "Out of London..."

Still inside the M25, just, Stockley park in Hillingdon. So still expensive and a 'loose will to live' commute.

Next Mars landing scheduled for Monday, November 26th, 2018

Tom 7

Re: No Problem . . .

Got change for a Zonk?

Lindsay Lohan's Grand Theft Auto V cartoon case kicked out of court

Tom 7

Re: Lawyers on the dole

And the problem with that is?

Well imagine your are in a minor disagreement with someone at , say a football match, and they get involved in and take the discussion off on a sidetrack in tort law. You have no-one to get the judge to stop them and millions of lives will be ruined.

Far better to pay them too much and keep them away from the public as much as possible,

Dwarf planet Ceres has a watery secret: An 11 mile wide ice volcano

Tom 7

Re: Bigged up

Buggered up! And why exaggerate the elevation by a factor of two?

This sort of thing really gets one into the uncanny valley. Makes google earth look realistic.

OpenBSD 6.0 lands

Tom 7

@Bugger

I remember when we got on of these - a hole fucking MIP!!! We ran about 2 dozen chip designers and support coders on it and later added 120 secretaries doing 'word processing' on VT100 terminals.I had a lovely bit of code that crashed and left me in admin mode so I could up the priority of my small batch jobs so they would run in a minute or two instead of a couple of hours. Pissed of the admins but I dont think they ever worked out why everyone else went a bit slow.

Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 ... and Linux, BSD, OS X

Tom 7

Re: @fandom

And I'd imagine by then A RaspberryPi5 with 8Gig of Ram and 8*4Ghz cores using so little power that you will save money in the first year by retiring your i386 boxen!

Watch SpaceX's rocket dramatically detonate, destroying a $200m Facebook satellite

Tom 7

Can make my mind up

whether I prefer successful space adventures or well videoed fuckups of the same.

BT boils over, blows off Steam, accuses Valve of patent infringement

Tom 7

Re: What kind of utter cretin with no knowledge about computing

I still shake my head when people apply for patents on things that are 'bleeding obvious' or common knowledge amongst us old hacks. I was on holiday with some friends last year and one of their friends in the holiday group was setting up a business and taking huge loans and trying to patent something that I'd been doing 30 years ago - there is prior art for it but its in one of those journals that you now have to pay a fortune to access. I tried to explain - but he was so invested in the work he was convinced it was new.

As software engineers or architects we are pretty much exposed to every method of doing anything with everything over a long career and its easy to mock people coming in thinking they've invented the something that's old hat.

Having said that I do hope BT get severely rodgered with an old style brick phone from before rounded corners were patented. Perhaps then a large company will bribe a government to do something about the monumental fuck up that is the patent system.

Blink and you missed it: Asteroid came within 90,000 km, only one sky-watcher saw it

Tom 7

Re: Facebook announcement?

True - but they are not quite as quick as facebook - mind you if I was watching this thing I doubt if I'd stop and jump online before it went past...

Tom 7

Re: Facebook announcement?

which may have instantly alerted other astonomers so they could take a look whereas a peer reviewed journal would leave them waiting for ever to get it peer reviewed.

Tom 7

@ Doctor Syntax

Quite the opposite - the outside of these things can get a tad warm but the insides are often in the low 10s of kelvin so I'd wait until it warms up or your equipment might just break with the cold.

Net neutrality activists claim victory in Europe

Tom 7

Road Tax only for cyclists

given road damage is axle weight to the 4th power the tax charge on a cyclist would cost £4.90 more to collect than the 10p it would bring in. or £49.90 more if the contract is PFIed. And even an unhealthy beer drinking fat bastard like myself doesnt put out anywhere near the pollution of a car.

Making us pay tax will DESTROY EUROPE, roars Apple's Tim Cook

Tom 7

for the shareholders??

I'm not sure what benefit the shareholders get having all that money in an offshore bank. Its kind of funny money there - cant spend it, cant move it in case it gets taxed. If I was a shareholder I certainly wouldnt want my money to be securely inactive out of reach.

You'd think and inventive company like Apple would think of some clever way of making money from that money - perhaps cutting the corners off.

Windows 10 Anniversary on a Raspberry Pi: Another look at IoT Core

Tom 7

RE esp8266 seem a more suitable

The thing is you can get a zero for less than the price of one of these and you can use it to program itself up in a gui all run from itself. I've been a lover of arduinos for a while but the Pi Pisses all over it for most applications I can think of, and the ones that I cant do on a Pi I'd do with a pic - I can get them for free from my local washing machine repair man.

Tom 7

Re: We should use neither

Its seems the Pi3 will now boot from a 'mass storage device'. This makes it a very useful full blown computer. I'm hoping someone will do a 'Superbook' for it so we can turn it into a laptop for $99 too.

But dont use windows on it - its pointless even if free cos they cant get .NET working properly on the ARM and will always use that to leverage you onto more expensive and licensed hardware.

SETI Institute damps down 'wow!' signal report from Russia

Tom 7

Re: Have they thoroughly analyzed it?

Alien porn!

EU verdict: Apple received €13bn in illegal tax benefits from Ireland

Tom 7

RE: tax competency

Unless the Irish government pissed the 13 Billion up the wall then I'd imagine the Irish citizens are going to be quite please with the boost it gives to their economy - that's 2000euros for each person and is not to be sniffed at - probably far more than they got from Apples presence in the economy.

Europe to order Apple to cough up 'one beeellion Euros in back taxes'

Tom 7

The ability to attract and retain large US corporate job provider

that dont pay tax is of little real use to an economy. It merely adds 'value' to GDP Apple have ~6500 direct and indirect employees in Ireland. They all need healthcare and education and roads and all those other things tax levied on the business should pay for. No country can survive by subsidising all of its businesses even though the UK seems to be heading that way.

FBI: Look out – hackers are breaking into US election board systems

Tom 7

Only allow the web user to run stored procedures

makes maintenance easier too - honest!

If you haven't changed your Dropbox password for 4 years, do so now

Tom 7

I've forgotten it and its staying forgotten.

Experimenting with a Nextcloud, pizero and a hardrive round at a friends. Seems to work so far.

Need to see if I can get two people cohosting with me (and me for them) and thats all sorted.

Linux turns 25, with corporate contributors now key to its future

Tom 7

corporate contributors now key to THEIR future

They need to help Linux more than it needs to help them.

Apple is making life terrible in its factories – labor rights warriors

Tom 7

Re: Apple makes life terrible for me too...

That just triggers my spam filter.

Robot babies fail in role as teenage sex deterrents

Tom 7

Re: Useless for the intended purpose

Didnt work with my missus. We ended up with another despite that.

I think people who imagine they can control the breeding instinct of humans really dont spend enough time with them to realise that if humans had any choice in the matter most of them would not exist.

MIT brainiacs triple the speed, double the range of Wi-Fi

Tom 7

MIT Braniacs triple the speed

and content 'providers' quadruple the data load of 2k of text from 100MB to 400MB.

Plus adverts.

Voyager 2's closest Saturn swoop was 35 years ago today

Tom 7

Re: Shorely we wouldn't coast all the way?

Shore being a good word - on account of how easily they are eroded. One of the problems with travelling at high speed is the damage very small bits of floating around shit cause. Meteors the size of tiny grains of sand hitting the atmosphere at 70Km/s are visible for thousands of miles - they punch through anything. The planned(?) travel speed to the nearest star would be 1000 times that. The kinetic energy of a grain of sand would be a million times that of the meteorites - so around a small nuclear weapon going off on your hull - focused on an area less than a pin head.

Watch the world's biggest 'flying bum' go arse over tit in a crash

Tom 7

Re: But will it blend?

mmm Salami!

Tom 7

Re: Blimp Crashes...

"The suspense would make it worse." No - a gondola without suspense is a brick,

Tom 7

Cardington

went there years as a kid. My Grandad was an engineer on the R33 and I think he helped park it there. I seem to remember it was bigger than outside.

Tom 7

Re: Let's party!

like its 1919! septemberish

Excel hell messes up ~20 per cent of genetic science papers

Tom 7

No - dont use anything that is immune to software engineering techniques developed

over 70 years for a reason.

Its easier to drive a car without a brake pedal to slow you down but you really ought to learn to use it if you want to go more than a few yards.

False Northern Lights alert issued to entire UK because of a lawnmower

Tom 7

Re: One sensor?

I've been signed up for years - first time its happened and I'm quite pleased as it shows I will get messages when the sun explodes.

As for one sensor - I imagine its possible for a small but contained burst to set off just one.

Tesla touts battery that turns a Model S into 'third fastest ever' car

Tom 7

Re: Damn

Do we need much more improvement? As you point out screaming to 100mph in the blink of an eye is pretty pointless in the long run.

!00KWh is not bad and a lighter less flash car is going to have a far more usable range. And then we come to the idea of self drive car pools. When you get to a hundred thousand of these then you've got most of the urban-urban travel covered - I personally dont give a shit what my taxi looks like and most people will be happy with wifi and a window and a comfy seat and a smooth drive.

Musk is selling to the movers and shakers but with luck this technology will drip down. Still not sure about that tube thingy though.

Corbyn lied, Virgin Trains lied, Harambe died

Tom 7

Re: Cant see where he lied

Still cant see where he lied. The train was pretty much fully booked and all the seats were reserved and others were sitting in the corridors before he started.

I really cant see why Virgin trains would try to contest what a man who has said he would privatise the railways and ruin their cash cow would try and make him look bad.

Tom 7

Cant see where he lied

just saying.

No, we haven't found liquid water on Mars, says NASA

Tom 7

Things fade in the sun - even on Mars.

Or get dusty. I'd put money on there being very little water on Mars - a lot of the things claimed to be evidence of water can be explained by wind and dust erosion or the effect of dry lahars.

One advantage of the dryness is at least solar panels will work pretty well at high latitudes so we can at least colonise the poles.

Sunday lunch with the neighbours is going to be a long trip mind.

Fujitsu: Why we chose 64-bit ARM over SPARC for our exascale super

Tom 7

Re: Selling Arm is starting to look like a dumb move for all concerned

As a shareholder I'm going to make a short term killing but in the long term I think I would be better off to keep it independent - as would the market and future users. In the long term 47% looks completely shit for a company that has doubled in price in 3 years and is opening new markets across the board.

Tom 7

Selling Arm is starting to look like a dumb move for all concerned

apart from the buyer in the long term.

DVLA misses out on £400m in tax after scrapping paper discs

Tom 7

Re: Lower tax cars

Part of the process is to ensure you have an MOT and Insurance. But of course the people who dont pay tax tend not to have the others either. It's like many things idiot government does - see things from the completely wrong point of view. A simple post out a window based certificate would cost around £1 a car in competent hands and a small reward for reporting untaxed cars would reduce infringement to fractions of a percent pretty quickly. Some would say that this kind of activity sets citizens against each other but the dont do anything about the Mail so that cant really be of interest.

Tom 7

Wasnt one of the ideas behind this to sneakily make more money

by ensuring 13 months of road tax in the year a car was sold on?

And like any other 'saving the tax payers money' move by a tory government it costs me more.

You shrunk the database into a .gz and the app won't work? Sigh

Tom 7

Replace tape

When trying to restore a backup for someone we discovered the tape was the 2nd part of the backup.

Where's the first tape?

That's all there is.

When you run the backup does it ask for the tape to be replaced?

Yes, we pop it out and pop it back in again and after a bit it comes up with 'finished successfully'.

Turns out this has been going on for ages and its only the customers close resemblance to Susanna Hoffs that encourages an almost certainly futile attempt to recover individual bits of disk and compare them with the corrupted database and the eventual disappointment of actually being able to stitch the database successfully back together, rewriting the backup to check that fresh tapes are being inserted, running a backup and verifying and then wending off into the night only to be punched by my trainee in harness for not spending time pretending we weren't there yet even thought running and verifying the backup twice 'just to be sure' had got the customer looking sideways in a definitely not alluring way.