* Posts by Peter2

2941 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Public cloud prices to surge in US and Europe next year

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: On prem hosting

Hosting yourself is also going to be costing more due to the increases in energy prices, but I guess some people don't book that against "IT".

Yes, and no.

The waste product of running your own servers is heat. If you can use that in winter (and it takes a particularly stupid person to fail to utilise this) then this comes off the gas heating costs. As gas is currently 50% more expensive than electricity it actually ends up not looking too bad.

Germany stands down cyber boss over Russian ties

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Hexenjagd für Kleingeister

Russian gas is only cheap because it's a geopolitical lever to force countries into doing Putins bidding. It was reasonably obvious years in advance that the completion of the new gas pipeline to Germany would be the point that the Russians invaded Ukraine.

The price of France getting the "cheap" Russian gas at present is quite blatantly their political inactivity with respect to Ukraine.

The problem with this is that it comes with a cost. The countries that Putin has said that he'd like to invade next in the east of the EU can see quite clearly that France and Germany (as the most influential EU members) put the economic benefits of cheaper than market price gas WAY above protecting other EU members from invasion and would almost certainly do so again in the future.

This pushes them away from Germany and France, and towards people willing to defend them, which is the US which is halfway across the planet, or the UK in Europe. Neither of which are actually EU members and both of which are being pushed away by the EU in both diplomacy and trade. This meant that nobody was bothering to involve, invite or even consult the EU on important measures about supporting Ukraine and eastern EU nations. Hence the EU screaming "****" when they realised that they risked the EU becoming strategically irrelevant to it's own members and coming up with the "European Political Community" including everybody involved (including the UK) which met for the first time this month.

China dumps dud chips on Russia, Moscow media moans

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Don't forget Taiwan

China is waiting to see how the land grab for sovereign territory plays out on the world stage.

If Russia gets away with invading and splitting lumps off of Ukraine, that's quite bad for China as it undermines their position that countries territory should never be split up. They have this view because by that logic Taiwan is still part of China and aren't likely to appreciate the Russia setting contrary international precedents.

The mess in Ukraine which is likely to actually lead to a spectacular international collapse of Russia will have caused serious doubts about invading Taiwan. If Russia had of won in 3 days in Ukraine then IMO the Chinese would have followed it up with an invasion of Taiwan by now.

As it is, they'll be looking at their own military technology derived from Russia with a suspicious eye and I would imagine that their military planners will be planning a wholesale replacement of everything Russian designed (or copied from Russian designs) that's performing badly in Ukraine before clashing with anybody who might conceivably acquire western weapons.

Which "only" requires them to replace something like two thirds of their small arms, tanks, artillery, communications, aircraft, ships and submarines.

Too bad, contractors: UK government reverses decision to axe IR35 tax reform

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: This should make people happy

In my view, the actual fundamental economic problem is that the cost of living (house prices are way too high, and Russia's economic weaponisation of natural gas and resultant price spike) is eating away so much of peoples pay packet that their disposable income (which is what drives the economy) is tiny.

The only way to improve the economy is to increase the amount of disposable income to the largest possible number of people by the largest possible amount.

Tax cuts are a quick and simple way of doing that which would have worked; since we can't do anything about energy prices and if you tried to tackle the root cause of there being wayyyyy to few houses by a post WW2 scale prefab building spree to bring down the cost of housing it'd take years and risk crashing the housing market and causing an economic crisis. (which in the long term would be beneficial, especially to the younger generation but no politician is going to be willing to take the bullet)

The only other obvious avenue left to take is tackling the amount of technically just about legal (if you squint) tax evasion and using the additional income to find tax cuts for workers by (for instance) lowering the amount that gets raided from your pay packet by the tax man.

Peter2 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Screw them

A 15% rise on a flat fee of £90 for attending and defending somebody at court (which has to cover pre-trial expenses of preparing for court which is unpaid, and has to include your travel expenses and hasn't gone up since ~2006) was the minimum recommendation by the independent body that looked into it.

It's hardly generous. The only reason they got that much is because the older types are retiring, and the younger types literally can't afford to get into that area of work because if you include the required preparation then it pays less than the minimum wage and so the resulting lack of people willing to get into that area of work is causing a crisis with court backlogs.

Weird robot breaks down in middle of House of Lords hearing on AI art

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Ai-Da

One of the things humans are very bad at is in being set in our ways, holding out-dated views, etc.

My personal favourite example is the British government. The Christian world switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar by papal decree around 1580 apart from the British government, which due to having just gone independent with the Anglican church ignored the change edict, and eventually realised that it made sense and then made the switch in 1750. There were a few issues with a certain accumulation of leap years having come up over a few centuries. This pragmatically was made by 1751 being a "short" year of 280 days.

Everybody accepted this, and all of that is fair enough... Apart from the tax office. The tax people stubbornly refused to accept the change deploying the winning argument that they'd have to not charge any tax for the year if it changed, an argument which scared off the politicians involved so they got their way.

To this day, the tax year ends in March at the same point it did in 1750 before that newfangled Gregorian calendar came in.

Remember that when thinking about "technical debt" due to hanging onto obsolete equipment or processes; there is always somebody worse! ;)

Starlink, shot by both sides in Ukrainian fracas, lives to fight on

Peter2 Silver badge

There's a war going on. Any numbers given that might possibly be of military significance are subject to significant distortion to avoiding giving away information of tactical significance that the Russians might find useful.

For instance, if you knew how many were being used in a civilian capacity to restore connectivity to mobile phone base stations (which the Russians will no doubt know as they deliberately try and take infrastructure offline) then you could then know how many were being used by the Ukrainian military for military purposes such as command, control and communications with military units then you could make guesses as to the size, composition and possibly the distribution of the opposing forces. So there might be 15k terminals in total, or that might be the number that Starlink gifted and there might be another 85k bought by somebody else.

Ultimately Starlink is a civilian system run for profit which has virtually no users. Anti jamming development work against upset nation states probably doesn't come cheap so the prices given might represent Starlinks running costs divided by the number of Ukrainian users or might be what Musk would have liked billed a commercial customer for the amount of bandwidth used. (ie something along the lines of having 500MB included in the base contract price, and then paying $1 per kilobit used over this)

Scanning phones to detect child abuse evidence is harmful, 'magical' thinking

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Illegal speech???

Crying "fire" in a crowded theatre simply to try and cause a dangerous stampede would be illegal speech, and has been even in the US as long ago as 1884.

So speech can be illegal.

How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: I think we're reaching a point...

Isn't the lesson "don't rely on eggshell security"?

If somebody was able to connect via wifi and eavesdrop on internal comms then it would appear that the addition of an eggshell layer to security would be a very considerable improvement.

From the article:-

The attackers specifically targeted a limited access network, used by both a third-party and internally, that was not secure due to recent changes at the company (e.g. restructuring/rebranding, new building, new building lease, new network setup or a combination of any of these scenarios)," Linares told The Register.

"This is the reason why this temporary network unfortunately had limited access in order to login (credentials + MAC security). The attackers were using the attack in order to access an internal IT confluence server that contained other credentials for accessing other resources and storing IT procedures."

So securing the wifi network, or not allowing wifi access to secure resources would appear to be the right way to go.

Uber, Lyft stock decimated as US aims to classify gig workers as staff

Peter2 Silver badge

Some Uber drivers make £1,000+ a week

Which is revenue; and so excludes the cost of their vehicle, maintenance, asset depreciation from driving the car more heavily than we would, and the cost of fuel. All of that comes off before considering their profit, which would essentially be their wages.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that their costs are easily going to be above 50% given the current fuel prices, and if your driving 8 hours a day compared to my roughly half hour commute in both directions in a car then by simple rule of odds if your driving ~16 times more than me you are >16 times more likely to end up having an accident as fatigue comes into play, given that they'd be driving amounts that would be illegal if they were an HGV driver with a tachograph.

The "gig" economy is simply a return of "piecework", which had been exterminated so long ago it'd passed out of common memory because it was banned for being abusive and exploitative and a method to evade paying taxes, the minimum wage and sick/holiday pay.

Much like today, really.

Airline 'in talks' with Kyndryl after failed network card grounds flights

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Some thoughts...

Not to mention that (at least in the UK) every person going near the track has to have passed a safety course, which is going to seriously cut down on the number of engineers capable of being deployed to site to do the job.

Also apropos of nothing; When a prat with a digger went through the connection to my house I spliced it myself to avoid being offline while waiting for an Openreach engineer; it's easy to do with copper even if the correct tools for doing the job are at work and your improvising with a pair of pliers and a spare patch lead.

Fibre is just a little more difficult to splice under similar circumstances.

When are we gonna stop calling it ransomware? It's just data kidnapping now

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: C-Suite problem

The biggest problems for IT in this area are lack of funding and lack of in-house talent.

I'm going with "lack of in-house talent", since Software Restriction Policys have been a freebie in Windows since XP (and applocker is also a freebie in later versions although the SRP still works) and even an incredibly lazy method of setting the default level to disallowed and allowing %program files% and %//authorised network share% instantly prevents the userbase from running trojans they either download or bring in with them on external media. (since %temp% isin't in program files and is therefore disallowed from executing a program)

Without spending so much as a penny that instantly and pretty permanently kills trojans, while still allowing the users to work as normal. (as long as their normal job doesn't require them to receive .exe files via email and run them)

If someone weaponizes our robots, we'll be really, really sad, says Boston Dynamics

Peter2 Silver badge

If we could only get the Chinese to spend all their R&D money and science/engineering talent on increasingly complex and expensive weapons systems we could bring down their whole system.

Congratulations; you've successfully described the Strategy of Technology. which used to be a military textbook.

"A gigantic technological race is in progress between interception and penetration and each time capacity for interception makes progress it is answered by a new advance in capacity for penetration. Thus a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime, a strategy of which the phrase ‘arms race’ used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection.

There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed ‘logistic strategy’. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure….

A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."

--General d’Armee Andre Beaufre

And anybody denying that technological war works needs to take a good hard look at Ukraine. The Russians dropped out, and ended up so far behind that their equipment wasn't capable of competing with western weapon systems. (Which to be fair, they didn't expect to encounter)

As a result of which, light anti tank weapons were able to blow up soviet battletanks.

Shoulder launched SAM's cleared the sky of aircraft and helicopters.

Cheapish anti RADAR missiles destroyed Russian Surface to Air Missile batteries, allowing their army to be bombed from the air with impunity.

Russian Infantry found that their rifle bullets didn't reliably penetrate the modern body armour that the Ukrainians were gifted.

China might well be interested in competing, but they can't do so against the combined Military R&D of every other country in the world, and I suspect that they know it. North Korea and Iran have seen what happens when massed collections of outdated equipment clash with a small subset of modern military technology countries were willing to share with Ukraine, and will realise that they haven't even been given a lot of our heavy equipment because we don't want to show what it can actually do. I think they'll have lost any appetite for foreign adventures that they might have had.

And so after Russia finally accepts that they have lost in Ukraine and gets out, we can say welcome to the Pax Technologia.

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: 17 yrs FFS

You're being utterly disingenuous blaming wind for our continual use of Gas and other dead dinosaur products. They've barely been around in volume for enough time to start disrupting the Market.

If renewables weren't now in the mix we'd be burning even more gas and the bailout would need to be even higher.

The Central Electricity Generating Board plan (when that existed) was summarily to build up nuclear to cover most of the base load generation, and then use gas to cover spikes.

This plan was abandoned in favour of the current green plan of building wind turbines to replace coal and the nuclear capacity reaching end of life after ~50 years, with wind "backed up" by gas. As wind is unreliable, we mostly burn gas as primary generation, and as the rhetoric is that we aren't using as much of it as we actually are we then decommissioned our own gas production and bought increasing amounts from abroad hence the current gas prices.

I think you'll find that your either being utterly misinformed, or utterly disingenuous. We'd have been burning much, much less with ye olde CEGB plan; we've been burning steadily more as nuclear capacity has been replaced with gas and this is factually unarguable.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: 17 yrs FFS

The Grid is missing energy storage other than the pumped storage. Here's a simple exercise for you, which I invite anybody reading this to give a go at. Calculate what it would cost to store electricity in batteries in a "on the back of an envelope" fashion just to get a ballpark of the costs.

You can do this by taking a UPS or battery system that can supply one kilowatt for one hour, and then multiplying the cost by a thousand to get to a megawatt hour. You then need to multiply this answer by a thousand to get to a gigawatt hour.

You then have storage for 1 gigawatt, for one hour, excluding costs of land, building a structure something to put them in, connection to the grid, ongoing maintenance required and staff etc etc etc.

Multiply that answer by 24 to store one gigawatt hour for one day. How much does it cost?

Now bear in mind that we often have no wind generation for one or two weeks (look up the history chart on gridwatch), so you'd need to multiply that by 7 to supply 1 gigawatt for one week on batteries. Then multiply that number by the number of gigawatts that you think need to be supplied.

Challenge: show your working. (ie, the UPS unit used as a base, the cost of the UPS and the cost going through) and see if it changes your support for battery storage.

That exercise will demonstrate to anybody with any reasoning ability that storage is an utterly unviable option compared to the cost of primary generation.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: 17 yrs FFS

@Peter2

Why so negative regarding wind power.

Because I looked at the actual situation, rather than the PR.

Wind is massively unreliable. The nominally installed 25.5GW worth of capacity has never generated that amount even in a once in a 40 year storm. The maximum possible output in a gale appears to be around half that, and this is highly intermittent. This requires that all of the wind capacity is "backed up" with gas plants to generate the power when the wind isn't blowing.

As a glance at what wind produces over the last year will show quite quickly, this is a long term strategy to be dependant on fossil fuels (ie gas) and relegates wind turbines to a load reduction measure for the gas plants as a PR measure. It's also stupid; we can clearly see that wind turbines cannot supply enough power for our current needs and even tripling this capacity at a really absurd cost would not change this situation significantly.

Our future path to decarbonisation would be to replace all petrol & diesel powered cars with EV's which would at a rough back of the envelope calculation require us to build triple the existing capacity just to meet that demand, plus about that again if you wanted to deploy heat pumps and electric cookers to replace gas central heating and gas cookers.

This is outright impossible with wind turbines. Therefore, either your supporting remaining with fossil fuels forever, or you should be supporting something else.

In terms of this policy; if we say that the cost of building a nuclear power station of the capacity of Hinkley point is going to be £20 billion, then the cost of building ten of these plants (The combined output of which would exceed 100% of our current generating capacity) would be £200 billion and after completion then we'd have completely ended the use of fossil fuels in the UK for power generation.

Because of the current primary strategy of wind turbines, our government has just been forced into spending £100 billion on subsidising gas and electricity prices to avoid an economic collapse just on customers. They are widely expected to do the same for businesses which will cost another £50 billion. In all likelihood we'll have to do the same thing next year, which will have left us having spent £300 billion while leaving the issues unresolved and having made zero progress towards reducing the amount of fossil fuels that we burn.

And that my friend, is why I, and anybody with any critical thinking ability thinks wind turbines are a stupid idea. They are expensive, and as a strategy they are unworkable.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: 17 yrs FFS

Within 5 years would be ITER; which is a really big engineering experiment from 35 nations aiming to deliver first plasma in December 2025.

And yes, had we have put £10 billion a year into fusion and fission development instead of subsidies for wind turbines then we might not have energy prices that are 8 times what they were a few years back.

But complaining at the government is pointless; complain at the people who missold wind turbines to the public as a workable solution.

Bank of England puts cloud analytics on todo list after seeing off market collapse

Peter2 Silver badge

The Bank of England had a busy end to September. On Wednesday last week, it said it would buy £65 billion (c $72 billion) of government bonds after the pound tumbled to historic lows and pensions funds went into meltdown, all seemingly the result of the government's mini-budget days earlier.

Compare both of these charts.

Pound to the dollar chart

Euro to the dollar chart

It's interesting how the UK mini budget caused a crash in the value of the euro at the same time, isn't it?

A sceptic might think that the cause could be more related to the US's .75% interest rate rise on the date both dropped in value relative to the dollar, coupled with the fact that the entire of Europe (including the UK) is now buying gas from the USA in dollars.

You might also mourn the fact that our home grown extremists forced the closure of North Sea Gas, as otherwise we'd be self sufficient, and any additional supplies would have gone to exports, meaning that if they hadn't have done that then we'd have been rolling in money at the moment.

Alas, the green movements aim appears to have been to close down gas production in the UK in favour of foreign imports, and opposes any form of practically workable power generation such as nuclear which would threaten to reduce CO2 emissions through the closure of gas or coal plants.

How CIA betrayed informants with shoddy front websites built for covert comms

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: "Investigative research group Bellingcat"

If you look back on the Novichok poisoning affair a while back, IIRC the director general of MI5 claimed credit in a public speech afterwards for the wholesale dismantling of the Russian propaganda front story, turning it into a humiliation for Russia.

The information that did this was released by Bellingcat. Ergo, it's reasonable to assume that either Bellingcat is usable to disseminate information to the public from the intelligence services via journalists in a "here's where you can publicly find verifiable information" manner rather than BBC press release saying "MI5 says..."

...Or the head of MI5 is a lying incompetent.

My personal assumption would be some variant of the former rather than the latter.

Post-Brexit 'science superpower' UK still hasn't appointed a science minister

Peter2 Silver badge

Thatcher's speech was an excuse to remove the safety nets that society provides.

This is a pie chart of UK government spending for the last full period.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298524/government-spending-in-the-uk/

Half of the UK government expenditure is expended upon Health and Social Protection, which rises to two thirds should we include housing, social services, and education).

If that's removal of the safety nets then she obviously did a shoddy job.

Peter2 Silver badge

This is the famous "no such thing as society" article from the magazine where it was printed.

Which bit do you disagree with?

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”.

That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look! It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”

There is also something else I should say to them: “If that does not give you a basic standard, you know, there are ways in which we top up the standard. You can get your housing benefit.”

But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society.

There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

Arm founder says the UK has no chance of tech sovereignty

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Founded: 14 July 1997

Who was in power on the 14th of July 1997? Now you can blame them for not splitting it off to it's own department, but...

Soaring costs, inflation nurturing generation of 'quiet quitters' among under-30s

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Wrong!!

People doing 'the bare minimum' is not 'work to rule' - you can bet their bare minimum includes any overtime they can get hold of, no doubt to cover for the work they should have been doing. It also shows that they have no personal integrity or pride in their work.

Doing what your just is described as in your job description, and then getting paid extra for doing additional work is how it should work. I have done additional work unpaid in the (correct) expectation that it would lead to a pay rise or promotion in the future.

If an employer does not give a pay rise or a promotion for going above and beyond, then the natural result is that people will stop doing it.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Wrong!!

And, as mentioned in the article doing the minimum because you're pissed off is hardly something new.

I'm fairly sure that we used to call it "Working to Rule". As in, doing what is in your job description and not taking on additional work over and above this, which seems to be pretty much what "quiet quitting" is advocating.

Warning: That new AMD Ryzen 7000 laptop may not be as fresh as you think

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Power to the processors

Reading through it again I did fail somewhat; I said 40 hours a week and so 120 hours a month; obviously I multiplied by three rather than four, so there should have been 160 hours a month, which would reduce the figure to 34 and a half months rather than 46 months.

As you say, I think the wider point stands though!

And my usage is well, well below those levels.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Power to the processors

Surely power consumption will become more of a focus, in our current (no pun intended) climate? Of course, the Americans aren't really affected, but for us Europeans, building a machine with low idle power draw is surely a priority?

Why?

Ok, this is the current UK power prices:-

https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk

ie; 36p/kWh with the current price cap.

So if we accept that my first generation Ryzen with graphics card (gaming PC) draws 500 watts then running it for 12 hours a day would cost £4.32. If I spent lets say a thousand quid on a more efficient box that only draws 250 watts then the cost saving would be £2.16 per day that I used the PC for 12 hours.

It'd take ~462.9 days of using the PC for 12 hours a day to break even.

Now, I work so I couldn't possibly manage that sort of usage. Max possible usage would be something like using it 3 hours a day every evening 5 days a week which is ~15 hours, and assuming that I used the PC for a full 12 hours both days of the weekend that's be another 24 hours. That's a total of 39 hours a week, which i'm going to arbitrarily round it up to 40 hours. That's 120 hours a month. I don't think I could manage anywhere approaching that sort of usage as I suspect that my wife, friends and cats might have something to say about it, but just for the sake or argument...

5544 hours / 120 = 46.2 months runtime to breakeven, or just shy of 4 years. Assuming that my hasty math is right; and comments are welcome on this.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that in half way though 2026 chances are that Russian oil/gas will have been replaced with other energy sources and prices will have come down well before it'd be economically worthwhile to replace equipment, especially since my actual usage is a small percentage of the usage above.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: I'm surprised

There are actually several physical emulators on the market which does that, but most hardware has the floppy disc soldered to the board, so it requires physical disassembly and replacement instead of just being unplugged as it is in a PC.

I did it to a really old system we had, but I was only really willing to do it because I had two of those complete boards spare from buying up other systems which other people had finished using. (Manufacturer support ended ~2007 IIRC)

My design level modifications to the system freaked out the engineers who used to support it a bit. (they still supported systems around it, but not that particular bit of equipment (due to constantly incrementing yearly support charges it was cheaper to buy 3x spares of everything so we had complete spare systems ready to go.) Their managing director had actually been on the design team and came to look at in person at what i'd done to it.

(Once you had a USB interface then if your willing to play then you could have a PC next to the device and directly push things to the "floppy disc" from that computer, which meant that the device which predated modern networking was defacto networked instead of floppy fed)

I found it quite funny that he took plenty of photos, asked loads of questions and a couple of demos, but the closest he came was about half a meter from the equipment, obviously wanting zero risk that he'd end up being asked to have anything to do with supporting it!

Demand for software experts pushes tech salaries higher in UK

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Diversity should be a consequence, not a goal.

Having done technical recruitment on the employers side of the table, we had a couple of hundred people apply for an entry level position, out of which I think three were woman.

One of them was offered a position, which they accepted. It's not the case that there is an evil conspiracy to keep woman out of IT jobs; if there was then you'd expect more woman to be applying for IT jobs. There are simply a tiny minority of woman applying for whatever reason.

From where i'm sitting the first step of more woman getting into IT would appear to be more woman applying for IT jobs.

Intel's stock Raptor Lake chip will do 6GHz and overclock another 25%, if it keeps cool

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: When THz

I too personally remember using chips measured in single digits of MHz. If we'll see THz probably depends on how it's measured. Single chip performance I doubt that we'll see hit 1THz.

However, AMD already offers 64 core processors at a maximum clock of 4.3 GHz which is 4.3 * 64 = 275.2 Ghz worth of grunt on the single chip, so if you could use that lot as a single core (which obviously you can't) then we'd be more than a quarter of the way there today and i'd fully expect to live to see either 128 8GHz cores or 256 4GHz cores, which would break the THz barrier if we were to accept that particular counting method.

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C8H10N4O2

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Java upgrade

I had somebody do this circa 2000 when they wanted an upgrade from a ~450 Mhz Pentium II PC to the brand new 1Ghz boxes; so as your chap did they blew their PC up. (though I think they did theirs by flipping the PSU switch to 120v and getting a large BOOM when the PSU blew)

Given that the firm was a partnership, I pointed out to the partner responsible for him that it was almost certainly deliberate, and that giving the user a new PC would encourage a large spate of "accidental" destruction of PC's. Since in a partnership, the replacements basically came out of the partners pocket he displayed a humorous smile and then asked what the slowest computer we had available was.

The user ended up with a elderly Pentium I box saved from the scrap pile that if I recall rightly did 133Mhz and was only just barely capable of running Windows, which he kept for something like 9 months before the partner decided us to give him an upgrade: to a Pentium II box freed up from somebody else who'd had a new PC.

Everybody else in the office was fully aware of what had happened, and it appeared to have deterred everybody from killing anything else.

FCC floats 'five-year rule' for hoovering up space junk

Peter2 Silver badge

It makes sense given the sheer number of things being shoved into low orbit. And given how low orbit they are, the inclusion of a single burn solid rocket booster to drastically reduce the remaining time in orbit shouldn't be that difficult.

Taiwan chip magnate pledges cash for defense against China: 'I'm telling everyone to oppose the CCP'

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Another Rich Corn Flake?

Um. I take it that your not familiar with Korea, Tibet etc?

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Another Rich Corn Flake?

Have you noticed how far away from the Ukraine coast the Russian Navy is keeping since their flagship went down to an anti ship missile?

I'm sure that China would do better than Russia, but that's only because Russia's performance is actually the new baseline for catastrophic that anybody, including a random bunch of drunks picked out of a pub ought to be able to improve upon.

The PRC can state that it doesn't want to invade Taiwan through force, but the number of amphibious warfare ships tells a different story. Had Russia steamrolled Ukraine in 3 days then honestly I think that troops would have been landing in Taiwan by now.

The fact that it's been an unmitigated disaster for Russia has probably put China off.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Another Rich Corn Flake?

Ukraine’s civilians caught up pretty quickly and effectively in a relatively short time. Defending your family provides a pretty good incentive to learn quickly.

They used to run a form of National Service, which meant that most men had already had some basic training.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Another Rich Corn Flake?

Presuming he'll really spend the money on this, how long will it take to train these new troops to an effective and useful standard, and to form an effective logistics organization?

Effective and useful for what?

Or is this simply an invitation to Martyrville ( "Here's an old Mosin-Nagant rifle and 20 rounds. Go get 'em, Tiger!" )?

Add a scope to that old Mosin-Nagant rifle and hand out a few million of them in a city, and no military planner is going to want to go within a mile of the place, and I do mean that quite literally since a moderately skilled marksman can hit people at that range with a scope and some practice. That means that the attackers would probably need a 3-1 advantage in numbers for securing that area, which is a tricky one when your landing people in an amphibious operation or paradropping them in.

It'd deny any urban areas to invaders unless they are in APC's or tanks. And I take it that you noticed from Ukraine what happens to tanks when defending infantry have modern anti tank weapons and infantry won't advance unsupported?

The logistics requirements to support these people would be quite light since a militia on home ground can get food from normal sources and ammo can simply be issued to anybody who needs it.

And you can probably do quite a lot better than an old Mosin-Nagant rifle given a few years notice.

California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Does this apply to everyone?

This is why Hinckley C's CFD threshold of £90/MWh is terrible value for consumers

If guaranteeing that Hinkley point C would be paid a minimum of £90/MWh in exchange for them building the reactor from private finance without the public spending a penny is "terrible" then how would you describe the current £420/MWh energy bills caused by the decommissioning of things that work in favour of renewables that don't generate anything, causing over half of our power to come from gas (whatever the price may be) or the lights go out?

Most people would be utterly fucking delighted if energy prices fell by more than 75%.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Odd statement ...

With many dams and reservoirs across the world starting to run dry, i've been surprised that there hasn't been a large scale project to dig out as much as possible from the bottom to create extra water capacity.

A JCB with a scoop could move something like 2 square meters worth of dirt in a single go with the scoop on the front? Given the the average daily household usage is 350 litres makes you wonder how many houses worth of capacity could be generated with a dozen JCB's at the bottom of an empty reservoir in about 3 months.

Then I realised that it would require an almost inconceivable level of competence and advance planning to increase capacity to ensure that we can fill things up in the winter this year to have more water for next years summer.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Does this apply to everyone?

As a result of which, a Casio watch runs for literally years on a single non rechargeable battery and is able to do a number of limited, but useful jobs such as telling you the time & date, acting as an alarm clock, and also as a stopwatch/timer.

Meanwhile, a smartwatch might make it through the day on a charge while weighing several times as much, provided that you don't actually use it.

Left-wing campaign group throws weight behind BT strikes

Peter2 Silver badge

Why are BT workers going to food banks?

Because 6 months ago Mr Putin decided to declare war start a Special Military Operation to invade and subjugate liberate Ukraine in a short victorious war that would only last 3 days.

He then released his victory speech early which said that his easy victory in Ukraine showed the collapse of western civilisation, and that the east part of NATO was next and we wouldn't care enough about them to do anything about it which would lead to the end of NATO and the domination of strong countries and leaders like Putin.

Everybody in Europe promptly decided that they'd really rather not conscript all the millennials and send them off the fight in places that most of them couldn't find on a map because it might not be a vote winner with those millennials, and started emptying out storehouses of old military gear to the Ukrainians, who despite lacking training and trying to master equipment with instruction manuals in a hundred languages have used it to wipe the floor with the numerically superior Russian Army.

Putin then fell back on Plan B, and basically said "give me Ukraine via stopping giving them weapons and pictures from your satellites etc and i'll give you cheap food and gas again" and then stopped exporting fertiliser, food or gas to Europe in the hope that it'll cause social unrest and revolutions. The price would of course just be to give him Ukraine for the moment, and once we'd thrown one country under the bus this would of course expand to most of Eastern Europe further down the line bite by bite.

As a lot of political activist groups have been arguing that doing anything but buying gas from Putin is terrible, too many countries have done that and left themselves reliant upon Russian gas. The same people have also been promoting "rewilding" which means reducing food output by turning fields that produce food we can eat into nature parks and buying food from Russia etc.

Hence natural gas prices have risen by 6x as demand radically outstrips supply, while food is also becoming more expensive because we aren't producing enough of it. This means that most people are finding their pay packets squeezed hard as the cost of living rises wiping out their disposable income.

The solutions involve:-

1) Stop adding 10% bio ethanol to fuel, because this means growing things we could eat, and then turning them into booze to pour into petrol. If we eat it instead, we'd have less of a food problem.

2) Reverse energy policies which encourage covering fields that could grow things with solar panels.

3) Stop rewilding and any other form of policy other than promoting farmers growing food to eat.

4) Produce our own gas instead of importing it.

5) Open up mines for coal and start feeding it into the coal plants and the "biomass plants" that are just old coal plants anyway.

6) build nuclear on a large scale to replace coal and gas in the longer term.

My view; the greens will successfully block any attempt to do any of these for the moment, and aggravate the problem until their public support gets eroded away as people see how idiotic their energy policies are, a process which will take effect after huge energy bills start hitting home.

I'd imagine that we'll start talking about some of these probably January or February because the Russian desired alternative of the British public overthrowing our government in favour of somebody who wants to give a dictator Europe chunk by chunk won't happen because nobody wants to conscript a generation to go and die in Europe's fields again.

Unfortunately, it's probably already too late to do anything about this winter and it's going to take several years worth of pain to resolve afterwards.

Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Faxing Floppies

Yep, i've done this too. I confused the crap out of the helpdesk for the company who simply didn't know what the software was. It transpired that it was from their first version from when they had two staff which they'd only sold a few dozen copies of and because it was so old it wasn't listed on the company resources, and nobody other than the CEO knew how to support it.

After sending faxes of the box, manual and floppy discs, I had an email making an offer; they'd send me an engineer to give me a free upgrade to the latest and greatest version with full licenses for everything, in exchange for the old versions floppy discs, printed manual, parallel dongle, printed box and it's license keys etc.

Which seemed more than fair; they got rid of a practically unsolvable support problem and presumably gained the software for their companies museum display, and I couldn't complain at a free upgrade to something less problematic.

California to phase out internal combustion vehicles by 2035

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Not going to happen

I see that you don't have a calculator and the back of an envelope handy.

It's not just electric cars. They also want to switch away from gas central heating to electric heating, and the same with cooking.

Grid scale storage is so insanely expensive that it's unviable. Take a calculator and scale up from UPS systems storing kilowatt hours to storing gigawatt hours to figure out what the ballpark of the cost is. Then figure out what the requirement actually is by looking at gaps in wind production at the moment and multiply one figure by the other.

My conclusion was that the only way it would work would be to toss renewables out the window and build enough nuclear plants to cover the predicted baseload. I also concluded that we won't do that, so either the lights are going out or the price is going up high enough that the lights go out voluntarily. It's also too late; the greens have already committed political suicide having screwed energy policy and don't have time to correct. It's inevitable that the current (and future) energy prices will lead to us ending up with somebody willing to produce fossil fuels to bring energy prices back down.

It's also just as inevitable that increasing electricity demand under the current circumstances is going to be unwelcome.

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Peter2 Silver badge

That looks rather more like a "how much money do you have?" issue of desired capability being delivered within a budget rather than having the desired ideal outcome on an unlimited budget.

It's not atypical to have backup servers in the same room. A lot of sites simply either aren't physically big enough to have two server rooms with two sets of high grade UPS's, generators, air con systems etc or the end user can't financially afford to do it. (but typically will spend more money on other business priorities like designer pure wool carpet tiles...)

OVH to hike prices, blames 'l'inflation'

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: OVH based in a major nuclear country has trouble with Russian natural gas prices ?

That's the cause of the energy shortage, not the solution to it.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: OVH based in a major nuclear country has trouble with Russian natural gas prices ?

How does that work ?

Have our nuclear power stations been stopped without anyone being aware of it ?

I think I have the right to be told.

Apparently, yes they have. Nuclear is down to what for France is the bare minimum possible.

https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/

France is actually importing power from abroad; which is an interesting one because France usually exports massive amounts.

I'd have thought that with the current electricity prices EDF would have been pushing your reactors to the maximum output and throwing new cables across borders rather than importing electricity.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Of course, Britain went decimal shortly afterwards!

A guinea was simply the name of a coin made from gold, nominally originally worth £1.

However as it was made from Gold and other nations also used Gold coins you could quite simply convert currency from one country to another without needing a middleman company involved like today where you have to swap one worthless set of coins with an arbitrarily assigned value for another worthless set of coins with an arbitrarily assigned value.

This (along with a shortage of gold coins, especially when we sent them abroad to subsidise foreign armies at war with the French) and them being swapped with paper notes with (I promise to pay with coins the sum of #) pushed up the value of gold coins to the point that they were in fact worth 21 shillings instead of 20 shillings due to scarcity.

Paper notes became much more common as Great Britain ran out of gold. There is some fascinating history there; The French had introduced paper banknotes, shortly before they executed King Louis. After they executed King Louis and declared war the British government printed huge quantities of high quality fake French banknotes and literally sent shiploads to cause the French economy to collapse. It worked; causing huge inflation as the notes weren't backed by coins and an economic crisis in France and the collapse of the French directory followed by the rise on Bonaparte.

The British notes were backed by coins, and in response the French government tried to siphon off British gold coins to cause Britain economic problems while solving theirs by offering smugglers goods cheaply if they bought in bulk with gold coins to cause Britain to run out of gold. (eventually, silver was also targeted)

All this goes to mean that the gold £1 coin ended up being worth 21 shillings instead of 20. This meant that you could (at least theoretically for a time) swap the period equivalent of 50p coins for a £1 coin, and then sell it on for £1.10 in silver coinage. Technically speaking towards the end of the war the coin could be was actually worth about 30 shillings internationally by the prevailing exchange rates.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

Electricians are taught that volts shock, and amps kill.

Any electric current causes your hand to spasm, however AC causes it to spasm open and DC causes it to spasm closed.

Therefore, touching a live cable at 240v AC at 13A will give you a painful jolt and your hand will spasm open while you recoil from the cable; it's inherently safe.

DC is more dangerous as it'd cause your hand to spasm closed on the cable so you couldn't release it. 12v DC though is picked for low voltage precisely because it shouldn't be particularly dangerous.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: These coins kept their value (and therefore inflation damn near flat) …

Henry VIII's coins were debased; ie no longer made of base material and so were valued less.

The previous coin made of base metals retained their original value.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

Generally speaking, Imperial is good at division, metric is good for multiplication.

For instance in imperial, one pound goes down to ten shillings, to five shillings, to two shillings and sixpence, one shilling and threepence, to ninepence, to four and a half pence, to two and a quarter, one and a half, three quarters and then it breaks at the next level of division.

with metric, you got from £1 to 50p to 25p and it breaks at the next level of division because you don't have a halfpenny now in metric. (although they did issue one initially)

Pretty much the same story applies to measurements. Imperial is also the king of scarily accurate approximate eyeball measurements simply because so of the building trade is really in Imperial even when it's nominally in metric measurements. If you want the length of an office then counting the number of two foot square ceiling tiles in a row and doubling it to get the length in feet is quite a bit simpler than doing the same with 0.6096 meter tiles, even if it's been metricised by taking it to 0.6m.

It should be noted that I have never formally been taught imperial, but think that certain things should actually be taught to people; both systems actually have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, when I have done scale drawing for office plans for wiring etc my favourite scale is one inch to the meter, simply because it's large enough to see without a bloody magnifying glass; one centimetre to a meter is simply too small and an architect who used my office plan knew the scale for that off the top of his head, so it's obviously not particularly uncommon!

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Of course, Britain went decimal shortly afterwards!

A guinea is no longer legal tender, but would have a face value of £1.05 if it were.

And if it was the gold guinea then it'd be worth £246 as scrap as of a few months ago when I looked it up for a post in a different thread so you'd be even more of a fool to try and spend it at face value. ;)

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: The d in £sd

It's actually a pretty simple system which was very long lasting.

4 (copper) farthings/fourthlings to a (copper) penny.

3 pennies to a (silver) threepence

6 pennies to a (silver) sixpence

12 pennies to a (silver) shilling.

20 shillings to a (gold) pound coin with a value of one pound of silver coins.

These coins kept their value (and therefore inflation damn near flat) from the 8th century through to the 19th century and the advent of paper currency where "I promise to pay" [in base metal] appeared, with the promise secured on the collective wisdom and honour of politicians.

Shortly thereafter we went with debased coinage (literally coinage no longer made from base metals) and currency and inflation has exploded.

In 1800 you could buy a bread loaf for around two and a quarter pence (this was high; as a result of bad harvests and wheat shortages.) In 1930 the same sized load cost two pence. In 2022 it's around £1.30 so a twopence had a purchasing power well over a modern pound.