Posts by I ain't Spartacus

If people would rather go to Google for their news rather than bookmark their favourite local news supplier, that is not Googles problem.

This is only true so long as all the media organisations whose work Google require in order to provide that content, don't go bust - because Google is hoovering up all the advertising revenue.

This is actually an area where government does need to urgently step in, because you can't have a functioning democracy without a functioning news media - and they're all going bust. To some extent this has always been true - but it's a bigger crisis than ever before and at the route of that crisis is Google and Facebook. The old media's own incompetence by giving away their content away free on the web, rather than trying to charge for it - at the same time as trying to charge for it in print - is the icing on the cake of cock-up.

One thing that can be relatively easily fixed is to align the payment with the work. So the people who generally still do the work are the journalists and editors of old media - and so if there are large amounts of advertising dollars out there - then most of those need to be funnelled towards them. Otherwise they'll stop doing it. And Google's various flailings with trying to automate news gathering suggest that they're very good at putting up evidence-free stories claiming a traumatised child survivor of a school shoooting was in fact a "crisis actor" and very bad at providing actual fucking news.

Given that Google's business model outside website search appears to be copyright theft to gain advertising revenue - I think clipping their wings can only do good for the internet. And for content creators in general.

Re: How to lose

Flocke Kroes,

The National polling was broadly correct. It said Clinton would win by a few points, she did. She got the most votes, but piled too many up in states that she had already won. And didn't campaign enough in the Midwest - where she eventually lost too many states.

Now the national polling may have been wrong earlier in the campaign, when it showed Trump being miles behind. Causing a false sense of security, and the Clinton campaign to put too much money into normally Republican states in order to get a landslide. Or she may have been that far ahead, and the voters changed their minds - as Trump started to campaign more seriously and all the emails got drip-fed into the news cycle.

That's the problem with polls of course. Even when they get it right on the day, that still doesn't guarantee that they were right during the campaign. Was there a real change in opinion or did the polls just get better as they were more frequent as the big day approached? Equally this can be true when an election is polled incorrectly - but the polls could have been broadly accurate for the years before that - but missed movement in voter sentiment in the last days of the campaign.

Re: Warning labels

I just bought an angle grinder. The first 19 pages of the instructions were warnings! Nobody is going to read all that shit! I know it’s not a fucking children's toy you cretins! What I want to know is how to fit the disc. A page of warnings might actually get read.

Might damage it?

Not if it’s an IBM Model M keyboard...

Re: Ever done a good deed, only to have it thrown back at you by an angry user

I've never had a complaint that something unrelated was my fault for fixing it, and my answer would be blunt and to the point if anyone ever does. Friends don't pull that kind of crap.

Friends get stuff fixed for free, although I'd expect drinks if they can afford it, or just tea and biccies while I work if I'm returning a favour. Friends of friends pay in booze or chocolate.

Mum doesn't get charged. But then she usually invites me up for dinner and only springs the IT problem on me once I've arrived. And there's often pudding and sometimes even custard. Home made fruit crumble and custard. Mmmmmmmm. Yum. ...mentally wanders off to happy (custardy) place...

Re: Wibbly

Yup. I've no time for rude people on either side of the transaction. You're only allowed to esacalate to rudeness if seriously provoked - and even then I prefer politeness, even if that politeness only stretches as far as to calmly tell someone that their behaviour has become unacceptable and that you won't be talking to them anymore if it continues.

So that means not laughing at people or condescending to them for not understanding, when you're supposed to be helping them. But not being rude to people about stuff that isn't working - or blaming the support minion for stuff that clearly was decided at a higher pay grade than theirs.

Demanding apologies and/or assigning blame is almost never helpful or useful. I don't do it when I'm the guy asking for support and I won't accept it when I'm on the other end of the transaction giving support.

Although that was the only time in my professional life that I've ever seriously considered telling someone to fuck off. I'd been paid, I'd watched them bankrupt one company by their combination of incompetence and litigiousness and they'd only paid half the design engineer's invoice, so he wouldn't help them. They'd literally carried our yet-to-be installed equipment out of the plantroom, raised the floor by half a meter to incorporate the strenghtening they'd originally forgotten, then had the gall to tell me the kit I'd sold them didn't fit and it was my fault.

Re: Reminds me of my mum

Mum's a smilar age. So I've done the equivalent - and feel your pain. She still works for a charity though, in family support. So you get the normal stuff, plus the extra fun questions like, "how do I install a Braille embosser on my PC?"

To which the answer is, I have no clue - and who's betting there are going to be driver downloads available on the company's website? Or even if they are, that the drivers were written for Windows 95 and never updated. Braille embossers are BIG and LOUD!

I don't think the Voyager probes not being able to stop is the problem. After all, there's loads of room out there, and they're not going all that fast (in the grand scheme of things). So they could just shout.

The problem is that we vastly under-equipped them. With only RTGs that produce a few hundred Watts, they simply don't have the power to boil a kettle and make everybody a nice cup of tea.

I'm sure that Star Trek the Motion Picture would have gone utterly differently if the Federation had simply made VGer a nice cuppa.

Although none of that Earl Grey filth that Picard drinks. Proper builders only.

Disclaimer: I rather like Earl Grey. But it's for when you're reading a nice book, after dinner, on a quiet evening. When you need a cup of tea, that's a different blend. Sainsbury's Red Label for me (loose tea made in a pot), others differ.

Re: The thing with croissants

You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's but that's just peanuts to space.

Re: Aren't we lucky!

That's no Moon. That's my wife!

Re: All for nought

John Brown,

Nope. You’re right that they did disable the auto-braking on the Volvo, so as not to interfere with their testing. But they also disabled the emergency braking mode on their own fucking system - because it was so shit that it was randomly triggering. So their own system would slow down for junctions or other cars, in normal operation. But if it saw something that it didn’t understand, it would sound an alarm for the "safety driver" to decide whether to brake. As happens, the report on the crash showed that their system was so shit that it detected the cyclist it ran over, but was unable to classify what she was and so just ploughed into her anyway, while it was deciding.

Re: Draconian

Are you suggesting that Robert Watson-Watt invented self-driving car technology along with his radars then?

LIDAR was, I believe, invented in the 60s - after the invention of the laser.

Re: “Why I went to federal prison,”

Community Service is pretty common over here. And while lots of ordinary people get litter-picking or helping old people with their shopping - I don't think it's unusual here to have the celebs do awareness campaigns against drink driving (or whatever it is they did).

Re: Draconian

Are you sure? He stole tech that allowed him to found a company and sell it about a year later for $700m! Surely stealing $700m worth of some company's intellectual property is worth jail time anwhere?

I'm sure Uber over-valued it, because they were only spending their Venture Capitalist backers cash (something they do an awful lot of) - but even so he stole IP worth hundreds of millions.

Re: Relics of the Space Age

Elledan,

I'm a bit young for the original space age. But as I started reading into my brother's sci-fi collection in my early teens (in the mid-80s), and then started building my own, it was becoming painfully obvious that I'd missed the boat. Books written in the early 70s by Niven and Pournelle were talking about developments in spaceflight dated in the 90s, a decade that was rapidly approaching and yet we were still in the era of space shuttles being new and the Soviets flying to Salyut 7 (and then Mir) on trusty old Soyuz workhorses.

At 13, the year 2000 seemed like a lifetime away, even though it wasn't even 15 years. It was deeply disappointing. As an adult I came to accept it, that human spaceflight had stalled, and to take more of an interest in the new science we were gathering and the increasing sophistication of our various space probes. Which was fine, but not as cool as flying around in spaceships - and allowing me to dream of maybe being able to afford a trip up there myself.

But now technology is accelerating again like it was in the 60s. There's lot of new and exciting stuff happening in human spaceflight, and all the great science. But this looks like it might be more sustainable too. Relying just on government is a risk, because priorities can suddenly change - or they can just run out of cash. The same can happen with the private sector of course - Bezos might get bored and take his money elsewhere, leaving the promise of Blue Origin unfulfilled. But Musk has turned SpaceX into something that's commercially viable - so even if he loses interest, it ought to have a chance of keeping going. And it has developed capabilities that mean the price of getting to space dropping incredibly low - such that spacecraft might genuinely become a mass-produced item. Which will do incredible things to cost, and therefore make more things possible, bringing in more money and creating a virtuous circle.

I guess one downside is the risk. Even if we can reduce it, spaceflight is still incredibly dangerous (a similar risk to climbing Everest) - and as you do more of it, you increase the number of times you're rolling the dice until accidents become inevitable. It's one thing risking death to test a new ship or in pursuit of national prestige or for science or progress in spaceflight. It's a lot less attractive when that's just for the increased production of zero-gravity crysal widgets to make somebody's computer just a little bit faster. But I'm still pretty optimistic. Here's hoping for avoiding the disappointment that an earlier generation had to go through.

Re: The 737 MAX is doomed

It's already been re-branded. MAX has been missed out and it's going to be something like the 737-8200 - at least for Ryanair. I don't know if that's universal or if all airlines will call it something different.

Re: Pilot training

I'm not sure this will now be as much of a problem. Anyone who wants to cancel their contract already had that opportunity. But the alternative is still the A320 Neo, which means re-training all your mechanics and possibly re-doing your whole logistics system. Which is worse.

I'm sure it'll be used to screw more financial sweeties out of Boeing. But remmeber that the airlines aren't running close to full capacity, so training pilots isn't the stretch that it would have been even 9 months ago. So I'm sure if Boeing pay up for things like simulator time, it'll be only a bit financially painful for them to sort. I presume it's more of a problem if you're running a mixed fleet of old 737s and new MAXes - but then with MCAS de-fanged like this will it have to be a new type certfification, or just some mandatory training?

That still seems the big question to me. If MCAS can be safely made so much less powerful now, how come Boeing felt they had to beef it up so much in the original test flying program? Because they've still go to fix the problem of the plane climbing due to the aerofoil effects of the bigger engines.

Who says it's corporate insanity? Apple, quite logically, want to pay less for stuff. Commercial property companies want to charge as much as they can? Both are reacting to changing circumstances - while hopefully keeping as much cash as possible.

In this case they're reacting to the move from high street retail to online, which has been predictable for a few years now, and the impact of a global pandemic - which was more of a surprise.

Due to the long duration on leases, it's not a business that moves all that fast.

However, investing in commercial property probably still makes sense. And if they income they can get from it drops, then they'll need to do something else with it. Fortunately the UK is experiencing a chronic housing shortage, so they may have a ready-made solution on hand - thus meaning their investment had a back-up plan built in.

The people they're renting off are probably all corporations too. And if they'd lowered their rents 5 years ago, maybe shops would have been better able to face competition from online retailers - and the sector would be doing financially better and more able to pay rents.

Rather like the breweries over-charging their pubs for rent, and then wondering why they keep going bust.

Re: My heart bleeds

I'm amazed Apple hadn't done this already.

I've read a few pieces about big retailers demanding rent cuts from their landlords - and smaller ones like Apple ought to find it even easier - because they can clearly move a few tens of stores to new (cheaper) locations with a lot less hassle than a retail chain with 700 branches.

My medium sized market town in the South East got a new in-town shopping centre 15 years ago. And it killed the High Street almost instantly, because it meant we had more retail space than we had shops. It did bring some out-of-town shoppers in, so we did get some extra shops - and footfall. But it also coincided with the massive rise of online shopping - and so even before lock-down the shopping centre had long-term empty spaces - let alone the charity shops and empty windows of the high street.

From what I can see, landlords haven't wanted to lower rents, because a few empty shops and big legacy rents (especially for those stuck on long-term contracts) was the more profitable option. Now that's going to have to change, or we're going to have to start converting shops into flats.

Obviously you'd expect Apple to take advantage of this. Neither they, or the landlords are charities. And actually I'm not sure it isn't a good thing. Our High Street looks awful, and has for years now. But it's not a sign of doom and recession, it's because people are buying online. So we either need rents to get cheaper so we can have small restaurants and nice interesting small shops to compete with shopping online (though that means allowing people to park) - or for landlords to sell up and have those places turned into flats, or something else useful.