* Posts by ChrisC

1287 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2009

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BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Laminate everything

Windows to the left of me, laptop to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with GNU...

Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Can of Worms

The common bus is partly why it's remained so popular, especially in scenarios where minimising the amount of physical wiring is either beneficial (cost/weight savings) or essential (can't actually fit more cables into the available space).

That said, you don't *need* all your CAN devices to sit on the same bus, you can run seperate buses for different classes of device, with your main controller handling any bus to bus bridging of comms data that might be required. Yes, this means having to run more than one set of bus wiring, but you're still only looking at a handful of busses rather than a few hundred (and then some in some scenarios) point to point links, so it's still more feasible within whatever design constraints apply.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

If a POS system fails, the retailer may not be able to process transactions at all, regardless of the method of payment.

Once you've used up your in-hand cash reserves, how do you replenish them? If you withdraw cash from a cash machine or over the counter, there's YOUR direct reliance on computer systems. If you get paid cash in hand, redirect this question to the person paying you, and so on and so on until, somewhere in that daisychain of money exchanges that end up with a crisp new tenner in your pocket, you WILL find an indirect reliance on a computer system for your ability to obtain that cash.

So unless you're the Royal Mint and are printing your own money, don't think that using cash in preference to electronic forms of payment removes your reliance on computer systems entirely, it merely reduces your personal exposure to the risk of a failure somewhere.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

ChrisC Silver badge

"This may be convincing at a first glance, but you are missing the fact that everyone dies at some point, so we all have "death penalty" looming. Just that "misbehaviour" could bring it slightly forward."

Except that natural death is generally random, generally unpredictable, and isn't tied into a specific action taken by the individual, so it doesn't alter how we behave - we just get on and live our lives. Yes, we all die, but HOW we die plays a rather more pertinent role in how we behave up to that point than you're giving it credit for.

"This is not merely a deterrent; it represents the permanent removal of destructive actors from society, thereby freeing it from the unjustified burden of sustaining their lives."

It has also permanently removed entirely innocent people from society, and will continue to do so for as long as countries continue to have the death penalty on their statute books. The burden making such a mistake places on society should be immeasurably high, making whatever costs are incurred by keeping criminals locked away for life pale into insignificance.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: "Don't try to find the documentation"

You are A321neo and I claim my 5 units of local currency...

UK tax agency's digital services not good enough to take strain off phone lines

ChrisC Silver badge

Indeed, some parts of the HMG online space do genuinely work well - I recently renewed my driving licence photocard, and that was a stupidly easy process - which makes encountering a part of it that's still a pile of fetid dingo kidneys, such as the HMRC site, all the more jarring.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Tax nonsense

Or dragged into the joys of self assessment, either through becoming self-employed or through reaching an income threshold where SA becomes required even as an employee, when previously all their tax affairs were handled by their employer via PAYE...

ChrisC Silver badge

They're their own worst enemy, which doesn't help either

As others have noted, part of the problem is down to how many people now HAVE to avail themselves of the HMRC support options due to how complicated our taxes are and how some allowances haven't kept up with the times, thus pulling more people into the tax system for the first time, or pulling them across from one part of it to another (e.g. anyone, like me, who now has to endure self assessment because of things like the higher income child benefit charge).

Another part of the problem is simply how incompetent they are, and how many different answers you'll then get from different people when you try to figure out why their incompetence has meant they're claiming you've done something wrong and deserve to be penalised for it. Having gone through that all last year, ending up with a resolution in my favour (all penalty payments refunded, and an assurance that the underlying problem with my tax account, which caused them to fail to take my payments as intended, had been resolved), I now find myself in the exact same position again this year... Once again, I know I've not done anything wrong, I know the problem is down to them messing things up yet again, and I very much suspect it'll take the best part of the coming year to get it all resolved in my favour again.

The time is long overdue for the entire tax system in this country - the tax rules themselves as well as the administration responsible for handling them all - to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

"Which is exactly the sort of cavalier attitude"

Yes and no. Like the previous commenter I've also adopted the principle that the Y2100 problem simply isn't something I need to concern myself with in the code I write, because I'd be willing to bet my life on none of my code (at least none that I've ever written so far or am currently in the process of writing) still running without modification by then.

I mean, I'm most assuredly already going to be dead by then anyway, given that I've just entered my 5th decade on this planet, but the principle remains - I KNOW none of my code will still be used as-is by then, because all of the date-handling code I've written so far has been for embedded systems which, no matter how much longevity the customers might try to eke out of them, will themselves no longer still be operating by then.

And should any of my code still find itself being used by other engineers by then, and should it then cause them to run into Y2100 issues, more fool them for not paying attention to the clear comments in said code explaining the short-cuts/limitations/optimisations/etc taken...

So under certain circumstances (and embedded coding is an area where certain circumstances occur rather frequently, given the limitations of the hardware on which our code operates) it's really not cavalier to take such an attitude, it may well be an entirely pragmatic and reasonable approach to developing code that does what it needs to do without incurring unnecessary overheads which may impact on other aspects of the system.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

ChrisC Silver badge

"[The Vision Pro is] clearly the future. It works like magic. But the physical tradeoffs are just not worth it for me right now," Ortolani said of his experience. "I actually went back to the store for a whole second [fitting] session … thought it helped but it wasn't enough."

I'm not sure an experience like that would see me describing something as "working like magic", unless by "magic" you mean like one of those cheap tricks you get in christmas crackers... Having to undergo even one fitting session just to be able to use a VR headset, let alone then thinking that it was reasonable to traipse back to the store to give it a second chance, suggests there's something not entirely right about the design of this one.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

Searching only works well IF you already have at least some idea what it is you're searching for and what to start entering as your search term to find it - if you don't already know the thing you're looking for exists on that system, and you then get back an empty result, how do you differentiate between the system not actually having what you're looking for in the first place, vs simply not having yet stumbled on the correct search keywords to elicit a more useful response?

Having the system present you with all the options arranged in some sort of fashion - alphasorted, heirarchical tree etc - at least gives you the chance to figure it out for yourself that the option does or doesn't exist, and where to find it if it does.

So why not simply provide both and let the user choose which one to use based on which is more appropriate at the time? Given how powerful even the most basic of entry level PCs is these days in comparison to what would have been considered a high-end setup not all that long ago, it simply beggars belief at how much LESS choice we're now given by Windows - surely the explosion in processing power, memory capacity etc. ought to facilitate a myriad of UI options allowing each user to tailor THEIR system to THEIR personal preferences, yet here we are being slowly corraled down a path where Windows Knows Best and we're given increasingly limited ability to make our systems our own.

ChrisC Silver badge

"I'd be willing to bet 10% of your income..."

I wouldn't take you up on that bet, because it really wouldn't be fair to take your money without even giving you a chance to win the bet.

I actually DO have a few VMs set up for running older versions of Windows all the way back to 3.1 (because, why not), one of which is a 2K setup. And given my comments elsewhere on what I consider to be good and bad in UIs, it should come as no surprise to you to learn that despite the best efforts of Microsoft, Google et al to beat some sense into me re just how utterly awesome modern UI design is, I STILL think the classic 95/2K look and feel is pretty much the pinnacle of Windows UI design, and it's been going steadily downhill ever since - although at least MS were good enough to still provide a native implementation of the classic theme in XP and 7, before they completely abandoned any concept of keeping their existing users happy in favour of simply ploughing ahead with THEIR vision of what Windows ought to look like, whether WE liked it or not.

I also have various retro system emulators which see regular use, so in addition to those older versions of Windows I also get to regularly remind myself what using different versions of the Amiga and Archimedes OS's is like. And guess what, once again I also find myself thinking "yup, this all still, even now 30+ years later, feels pretty damned good to me".

Yes, I'm well aware there are issues with these older OSs in terms of security, stability etc, but those are all reasons for ensuring continual development takes place on the underlying kernel etc. It absolutely is NOT justification for making fundamental changes to how the UI looks or feels, and this is the key point here - when people like me talk about things being better in the old days, by and large we're talking about the UI behaviour, not so much the rest of the OS, because it's the UI which we're constantly interacting with when we use that OS. Give me Windows 11 with a natively implemented classic theme (just like the XP/7 days) and I'll be happy. I don't need the whole PC to revert to behaving the way it would if I could persuade 2K to run directly on the hardware rather than within a VM, I just want it to look and feel *at the UI level* like it's running 2K, because that's the sort of UI I genuinely do prefer. I absolutely do want the security/stability/performance improvements that come with 11, I just don't want the godawful excuse for a UI that comes with all that good stuff, but which I'm no longer given the option to natively switch away from.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Linux's moment

"Besides, learning new things is good for you. Helps keep the mind sharp."

Some of us get more than enough of that thanks to the sort of work we do, and would really appreciate not being given even more opportunities to have to learn new crap just because the software tools we use to help us do that job have decided to randomly change their UI designs for reasons that, to those of us who've used them for longer than some of the design team now employed to keep them updated, make absolutely zero sense.

You can be as insulting as you like towards us fuddy-duddy stick in the muds who'd be happier with our UIs continuing to look like something from the 80's, but that doesn't change the fact that there are sometimes some damn good reasons why those older UI concepts genuinely WERE better than what we've got today, and it completely fails to accept that in some cases, what we're forced to use today is based around some truly awful decisions made by those wielding the power - e.g. the way in which later versions of Windows initially adopted, and have then failed to entirely shake off, a touch-centric UI design because everyone at MS thought Windows for phones/tablets/other touch-enabled devices was going to be the next big thing and therefore we all ended up with that style of UI even when running on a bog standard desktop system where all the input continues to be keyboard/mouse based.

There was SO much work done back in those earlier days to research how humans interacted with UIs, and what therefore made good or bad sense to implement in such a UI. Where's that level of research today? Because I genuinely refuse to believe that anyone with any level of scientific legitimacy could have come up with the idea that making the Windows UI a largely monochromatic affair with (next to) no contrast between adjacent elements, making it damn near impossible at times to tell which bit of the screen relates to which bit of the UI, was an even remotely sensible thing to do. Yet here we are, still largely stuck with it after so many years despite the slight improvements made in more recent iterations.

Then I fire up the emulator for one of the older systems I used back in the good old days, and I'm struck by just how immediately useable those systems were. Not because of how familiar I am with them - in some cases my memories of how to use them are so eroded that I'm as good as being a beginner again - but simply because of how obvious they made it to the user as to what they could do. Things you could interact with looked like things you could interact with, options were all laid out for you either on a giant toolbar or within the non-dynamic menu layouts, and there was next to no effort placed on making the UI *look* nice vs making it *work* well. Some people might consider those old UIs to be rather unpleasant/unpolished to look at, people like me see them and think "there's a UI designed to actually be used, not merely admired from afar".

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Linux's moment

The problem I had with the move from menus to ribbon, and which is STILL an issue in the current Office suite and other things that have adopted that UI style rather than continuing to provide a legacy/old fashioned/user friendly (delete as per your personal opinion) style of UI, is that the way the UI is now intentionally designed to self-modify based on the operating mode of the software means that it's damn near impossible to simply learn what the software can do by randomly looking through all the available menus and seeing what options are listed. It's not simply a matter of clicking on a particular ribbon tab, because the contents of said tab may well still then differ depending on what you're actually doing at the time.

In contrast, with few exceptions, drop down menus tended not to rewrite themselves based on the state of the software, other than to perhaps grey-out some entries to let you know they weren't presently useable, so a) the menus actually WERE a menu of all the options provided by the sofrware, and b) you always knew which part of the menu tree to go to for a given option. Consistency of UI design, enabling users to start committing commonly used options to muscle memory, what a radical concept...

It's now getting to ridiculous levels where, even when you DO know the software provides an option, because it's one you don't use all that often you've now forgotten which sequence of events is needed to expose that option in the dynamic UI, and so you end up having to ask your favourite websearch engine to tell you how to get to the damn option again.

In an age when we have what feels like infinitely more processing power at our fingertips than we had back in the good old days, it simply beggars belief at how much harder it now is to get computers to do even basic stuff simply because of the trend for moderns UIs to focus on style over substance - they're rapidly approaching the point at which they'll become the desktop equivalent of a Hotblack Desiato-approved spaceship control panel, and unless you know which seemingly blank part of the screen to tap/click on, you might as well just dig out the abacus and notepad, because that'll be the only way you'll get any work done...

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Unpossible!

Meanwhile, those who aren't fools know that Finland is merely a poor second to Belgium when going abroad...

Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high

ChrisC Silver badge
Pint

Re: I've had the good fortune to see this thing in person...

Fairly sure I have some of the early publicity handouts for JET inamongst the huge pile of stuff I was sent by the likes of CEGB, BNFL et al after writing to them all asking for info for a school project back in the late 80's, because it's been one of those projects it feels like I've known about pretty much my entire life.

So it's something of a bittersweet moment to see it being decomissioned, yet still able to produce some world-beating results in the process, and wholeheartedly agree with you that all who worked there over the decades should be immensely proud of what they achieved - have one from me too...

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Fuses?

"Are you trying to convince me that it would be legal to strap someone inside a heavy moving machine with a multitude of flammable components and high pressure hydraulics without giving this person a quick way to shut down said machine quickly if it fails because it would "break immersion"?"

And yet millions of people do that every time they board an airliner, or a theme park ride. And to a lesser extent, when they board a bus, train etc - i.e the myriad of everyday scenarios where people very much do place their lives in the combined hands of a trained operator and a well designed piece of machinery, because there's nothing they can do to influence the outcome themselves once they're underway.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Fuses?

Yes, accessible to the people running the simulator, not to the people training in the simulator - as the article and the earlier comments both allude to, these simulators are designed to mimic the real cockpit environment down to the last nut and bolt, so if in the real thing there isn't a big red "slap me to shut everything down" button available to the pilots, then there won't be one in the simulator either. And once you're sat in the pilots seat, trying to make it safely out to the simulator control panel in order to slap that big red button, when the simulator is simulating the most severe turbulence it's physically able to simulate, would be more an "if all else fails" move than a "this seems like the most sensible idea to resolve the problem" one.

TBH though, the real issue here seems to be the lax H&S procedures at this company, allowing two seperate incidents to occur which could have been resolved with far less fuss and potential harm had they simply operated a "no solo working on the simulator" policy. One such incident is unfortunate, two smacks of a failure to use the first as a valuable learning opportunity.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Throw me in that briar patch!

Which is why, whenever this question is asked of me, my response will be clear and honest regarding just how utterly uninterested I am in assuming any sort of managerial role, how keeping me as a hands-on engineer is not only what motivates me to do the job but is also what will get the best out of me for the company, and that I'm perfectly aware of how limiting this means my future career progression will be, but so be it. I know what I'm good at, I know what I'm not good at, so let me get on with the former and save the latter for someone who likes that sort of thing.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

Not necessarily, especially not if you remember that "London" is more than just the bits where most of the offices are concentrated. WFH might be bad for those central London retailers heavily reliant on footfall from office workers, but it was every bit as beneficial for those local retailers in each of the towns and villages that make up the wider Greater London area, as it was for retailers in commuter towns/villages outside of London.

Tesla power steering probe upgraded after thousands more incidents reported

ChrisC Silver badge

Surely the size ought to be defined as the angle subtended by the typeface? Defining it as an absolute size without any reference to the distance between it and the drivers eyes means you could end up with something whos legibility would vary depending on whether it was situated directly in front of the driver within the dash cluster (if your car has been designed by someone who actually cares about the driver and therefore still bothers to put any useful visual feedback in that position), or worse off to one side at the top of the centre console (**Tesla has entered the conversation**), or worse still off to one side and down a bit where the centre console meets the transmission tunnel (or whatever you call that region of the cabin in an EV)...

And "shall be of contrasting colors, one of which is red" - I wonder if that's why Ford, in their infinite wisdom, designed the dash of one of our older cars with red on black indicators... Because, to someone with normal colour vision, that would be considered contrasting, but to my red-green deficient retinas, they were all but impossible to read in certain ambient lighting conditions.

ChrisC Silver badge

The report you've linked to there only refers to a loss of PAS, not to a complete loss of steering ability. Thus, it's not comparable to the issue facing Tesla here, where in around half of the reported incidents the vehicles were left without ANY ability to be steered.

So no, this literally hasn't happened to every car manufacturer on the planet, and so far you've not been able to provide any evidence of it happening to even just one other manufacturer besides Tesla...

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

ChrisC Silver badge

And that's how it ought to be - employer provides the ability for people to WFO if desired by the employee/required by the nature of the work they're doing that day, but doesn't mandate it for everyone whether they like it or not.

In a mature, adult, sensible workplace where people actually get along and aren't just a bunch of scheming backstabbers out to trample on anyone they can use as a stepping stone to the next rung up the corporate ladder, teams can come to their own consensus over when they might find it beneficial to all get together in the office for a day, and when it makes perfect sense to simply let everyone work however they feel suits them best. Let the project deliverables speak for themselves as to how well people are working, not how many hours each person is clocking in at the office vs at home.

We still have some way to go before this is the norm, but the moves that've been made in the past 4 years are a definite improvement over what was considered entirely reasonable working practices in the decades before that, and are helping workers to gain a better appreciation of just how good or bad their management is. And those of us who thrive under these new conditions would very much like things to keep on moving forwards, not do a screeching u-turn and speed headlong through the oncoming traffic back towards where we came from, no matter the consequences.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Just reduced my office time

My trick to dealing with unwanted external stimulus mostly revolves around the audible side of things, and simply involves sticking in my earbuds and firing up a suitable metal playlist. For the slightly less annoying visual disturbances, I can always just recline in my chair so that my eyeline drops below the top of the monitors that form an ad-hoc divider between my desk and the rest of the office.

But yeah, for those of us who do find it hard to concentrate properly with so much background clutter assaulting your senses, WFH is a complete game changer.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Remote people might be right

In which case, the smart/safe/decent thing to do would be to make this crystal clear to your colleague on the ground so they also know why a power-cycle would be A Really Bad Idea.

However, as the article actually notes...

"Our hero reminded his NOC masters that he hadn't yet power cycled the router and was told that didn't matter."

...i.e. the feedback "Edmund" was getting from the rest of the team was more along the lines of "it won't make a difference, no need to waste time even trying it" rather than "it'll screw things up even more than they already are, don't even think about doing it once we end this call"

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: A calculator...

The kind that, even immediately after startup, has already grabbed more memory (25MB) than an instance of Word (20MB) which has an open (albeit short) document currently being edited...

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: A calculator...

Hmm, I get what you're saying, but that then requires you to decide which apps are so integral to the operation of the OS that they *have* to be considered part of it (at least if you want to be able to make any real use of the OS - e.g. we don't really need Control Panel given that it's merely a graphical front end to the underlying registry etc. settings, but take it away and I suspect even the most hardcore of Windows power users might be slightly irked), and which are simply nice little extras included as part of the default install but which in no way influence the OS itself, such as Calculator, Notepad etc.

So for me, I'd just adopt KISS, and say that, if it's included in a standard factory install of that particular version of the OS, then it ought to be considered part of the OS at least in terms of managing user expectations - i.e. Calculator et al ARE provided by detault with every Windows install, therefore it's not unreasonable for a user to expect them to still be useable following any update which hasn't rendered Windows itself unuseable on their system.

ChrisC Silver badge

"but there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth if they did so from all the people still running Office 97 or some other ancient bit of software that they refuse to give up under any circumstance"

Which is why I don't understand why MS stopped continuing to make use of virtualisation here - remember how they used to offer a VirtualPC copy of XP back in the early days of W7, would it really be too much for them to simply offer up similar pre-built VMs for other older versions of Windows, so that instead of trying to maintain backward compatibility at the API level within the current version, they could do whatever they liked in this version and let older software that didn't like the changes fallback onto whichever VM provided the appropriate API.

I know it wouldn't necessarily be the answer for every use-case (especially anything that involves hardware interfaces), but for most people who just want to be able to continue using their preferred older version of an application, or where there isn't even an upgrade available, then it'd be sufficient, just as XP Mode was back then.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

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Thumb Up

Thanks for the confirmation

ChrisC Silver badge

I'm assuming it was made clear to customers that the castor grades were relating to the weight of the rack, and not to their individual load-bearing capacity? Otherwise it's not hard to understand why a customer might think 4x300kg castors would be good enough to support an 1100kg rack...

ChrisC Silver badge

I think that's a bit unfair on today's young'uns - even 30-odd years ago when I was choosing which course/uni to go for, engineering degrees were considered hard and therefore something you only did if you were REALLY into the subject, so unless you're sufficiently old to be able to remember a time when engineering genuinely was considered a desirable subject to study, then I think you're just forgetting how little interest there's been for it across several generations-worth of students.

And having only recently completed a fairly lengthy period of recruitment for final year students to see who we'd want to offer graduate-level positions to later this year, we weren't struggling to find a suitable number of potentially good enough candidates to bring in for the onsite evaluations, so as far as UK universities, and electronics/software engineering courses specifically are concerned at least, there is still a decent pool of prospective talent coming through the system. Whether the overall numbers are down compared to decades gone by is another matter, so it may be that there aren't quite as many different unis offering the same courses, but it also doesn't feel like demand has dropped off a cliff and left only a few courses still hanging on by their fingertips to survive.

Logitech warns of logistical impact of Houthi attacks in Red Sea

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Tat

Except that in my experience, their stuff (at least the stuff they make that I'm interested in buying) is actually pretty keenly priced even when compared against the massed ranks of all those seemingly randomly named suppliers all selling what look like the same models of mice, keyboards etc., AND it's also pretty decent to use on a daily basis over extended periods of time.

Your pacemaker should be running open source software

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Certifications for Medical Devices

Similar for a lot of other types of embedded system as well - for the emergency comms stuff we develop for parts of the world which require UL certification, its granted for a specific combination of hardware and firmware revisions, and any deviation from either would require at best a paperwork exercise and at worst a full system retest from the certification body.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Going nowhere but there are alternatives

Exactly. Equally, just how far does opening up the device design (it wouldn't just be the firmware we're talking about here - you'd probably also need the schematics to know how to connect to the physical comms interface) actually need to go in order to be considered open source? Because presumably I could see a time when a manufacturer does open-source their firmware and hardware designs to enable third-party scrutiny, yet uses encrypted comms to which they alone hold the key, making it still impossible for anyone else to talk to the devices even though they now have all the data needed to fully replicate one.

So this idea that open source == open comms (or, as the article is implying, that closed source == closed comms) is a fallacy - if the issue is that we want doctors to be able to have immediate access to patient data held on implantables/wearables, then the solution is making sure the comms interfaces are open, doesn't matter in the slightest whether or not anyone outside of the manufacturers has access to the underlying source code, schematics etc.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: From what I can recall ....

"So your arguement is that the second hand market for EVs isn't as mature as the second hand market for ICE vehicles?"

Exactly. Because, from the perspective of the poor sod trying to find an affordable means of getting themselves around in parts of the country where the alternatives simply aren't alternatives, they really don't give a flying you know what WHY there are so few/no EVs in their price bracket, they only care that as far as THEIR particular view of the used car market is concerned, it's basically ICE or nothing.

It's all well and good making the comparison between EV and ICE when you're sat in the somewhat privileged position of already being an EV owner, with all the financial implications that brings with it. Try putting yourself in the position of someone who might be able to scrape together a grand to get themselves mobile, and then ask yourself if EV would still look better than ICE...

At a purely "pros and cons of the tech" level, sure - cleaner, quieter, cheaper to run, etc. etc, all good things that people would love to be able to take advantage of.

At the level of "the best vehicle is the one I can actually afford", nope. Nuh uh, not a chance. Not now, and probably not for the next decade. it's not merely sufficient for EVs to start to drop in price enough so that they start showing up *at all* to budget-constrained buyers like this, we need there to be enough choice available across all price ranges such that the used EV market looks basically just like the used ICE market today - until we achieve that, then EV ownership will remain biased towards those with deeper pockets who can afford the up front cost of entry, and therefore couldn't be better for those less financially fortunate.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: From what I can recall ....

"I can't think of any meaningful measure by which an ICE is better than an EV."

As of today, the cheapest EV currently listed for sale *anywhere* in the UK on Autotrader is a few quid shy of £3K, and in the sub-5K price range your choice expands to a mere 90 (technically 92, but I'm excluding the two cheapest listed cars because one of them has been miscategorised as an EV, and the other is being sold as a non-runner...).

In contrast, even after wading through the myriad of really low cost ICE cars that either are similarly listed as non-runners, or which you wouldn't want to touch with a bargepole due to all the issues listed as requiring attention, the lowest cost of entry via the ICE route is still only in the region of £500, and in the sub-5K range you've got a little under 49000 listings to pick through - even if you pessimistically assume half of those are for vehicles in various states of disrepair, that would still leave you with around 25000 cars to choose from, which is several orders of magnitude greater than the EV choice in that price range.

So for anyone not blessed with a reasonable amount of disposable cash to spend up front on a car, EVs remain almost entirely out of reach, and this is going to remain the case for some years to come until we see more older EVs trickling down through the used market. Enabling such people to achieve personal mobility in cases where a car-based solution is the best fit for them (because of course there'll be some people who genuinely could use other forms of private transport - walking, cycling etc. - I'm not saying *everyone* needs to be able to buy a car) is, I'd suggest, very much a meaningful measure where ICE continues to reign supreme over EV.

ChrisC Silver badge

"this hack is an EV driver..."

"...and doesn't know any fellow electric jalopy fans that would describe the current situation in the UK as anything other than pisspoor"

You may not know any of them personally, but spending 30s reading the comments of any EV-related article posted on el Reg should be sufficient to make you at least aware of those who would...

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Test on the slowest box

"You want the keys to arrive in a particular order?"

Why yes Mr Morecambe, I very much would...

Regards,

A. Preview

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

ChrisC Silver badge

I was in the last year to be taught Pascal at uni, and at the time I was a bit miffed at missing out on any formal C teaching (knowing even then how much more useful that would be for my career to come). Some years later however, when I got my hands on whichever version of Delphi first made it onto a coverdisc and I realised just how insanely good it was for creating desktop tools compared with the versions of VC++ and VB I'd dabbled in up til then, I became rather more thankful for having been given that grounding in the underlying language, and despite the best efforts of VC# to displace it, I still find myself using it from time to time even now.

So whilst Pascal is the only one of his creations I've had any hands-on exposure to, it ended up having such a large impact on my life that I genuinely feel saddened at reading this news.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Finding a working charger

Maybe I'm a little unusual then, in always considering range as one of the priorities when I've bought a car, because I've never had a car that wouldn't get at least 500 miles on a full tank when used for the sorts of longer distance journeys (e.g. between SE and NE England) where the majority of the mileage was being done at a steady cruise.

So given that the oldest of my cars was built in 1998, "fairly recent" does at least mean within the past quarter of a century, and I suspect if you could be bothered to search through all the car data available for models built pre-1998 then you'd continue to find some that were similarly long-legged going back even further. Which means that, to an increasing number of drivers today, there'll never have been a time in their motoring lives where that sort of range wasn't available. And it's these more recent experiences which we need to be comparing against when seeing if EVs offer a feasible alternative, because the more of the ICE positives you can tick off the list when looking for a suitable EV replacement, the easier the decision becomes to make the change...

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Hmmm..

Explicitly designed to create a second hand market, or just a beneficial side-effect of actually being designed to create consistent demand for new vehicles...

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: "It's all about me"

And witness the total and utter collapse of the country... The only way an idea like that would have ANY hope of working would be to first ensure that

a) EVs are available at all required price ranges, performance levels etc to be truly comparable to the current state of the national ICE vehicle fleet

and

b) public transport provision is dramatically improved such that, for many people, it finally becomes a realistically viable alternative to private transport

Otherwise all you'd be doing is what countless governments have done before, and beating people up with the increasingle well-used stick long before you've even thought about dangling a carrot in front of them first. Give people realistic alternatives to continuing to use ICE vehicles and you WILL see a shift away from them, driven by people making that choice for themselves because they can see it makes sense to do so. Make the use of ICE vehicles artificially unpleasant, and all you'll do is breed resentment amongst the masses. Look at what's happening in London with the attacks on ULEZ cameras as a glimpse into the future of how the population might respond if they feel they've been pushed too far by leaders seemingly out of touch with reality and who think people will simply be happy to comply with whatever new restrictions you throw at them...

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Finding a working charger

The problem with your anecdote here is that, for many of us, the idea of having to make *any* refuelling stops during a 500 mile round trip would be completely alien to us, because with a full tank of dead dino juice when we set off, our vehicles would manage such a trip and still leave enough in the tank on our return to not be worried about having to get to a filling station right there and then.

Meanwhile, as positive as your story is from the PoV of at least showing that such a trip is now feasible in an EV, the fact that it required you to expend an additional hour or so on charging *during* the trip would be somewhat offputting to many. No, I'm not suggesting that driving an ICE car avoids the need to make any stops en-route, but when planning a journey there's a marked difference between having to

a) merely consider the availability of services *somewhere* along the route at which, if needed at that point in the journey, you can pop in for a quick comfort break, grab a coffee/food, and be back on the road in under 10 minutes if time is of the essence

and

b) having to carefully plan the route you take to ensure that you pass at least one (and, given your 4th charging attempt comments, preferably two) location within the range of your battery, and knowing that even if you do then combine it with a comfort break, you'll still more likely than not be stuck there longer than you'd have needed to be if it was *just* a comfort break you were stopped for.

So yes, you're right, using an EV for longer journeys IS possible today. But let's not kid ourselves that it's as convenient/easy/without potential difficulties (e.g. what would have happened if the chargers at Reading had also been busy/out of action?) as doing the same journey in an ICE vehicle. THAT'S the issue for mass adoption (well, that and bringing the upfront costs down, and massively increasing the availability of EVs in the used market, and doing something about the insane costs of insuring them...), because whilst your anecdote means it's now feasible for someone who is already of a mindset to want to make the switch to EV and will put up with it still being not quite as easy as being an ICE driver, it's still not realistic to presume that the average driver would be happy to put up with a journey like this.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: UK govt, as usual, is totally irrelevant

"In a few years nobody is going to want to buy a noisy, smelly, polluting, dinosaur-powered car. "

Define "a few"... Because, rest assured, there are very, VERY, many drivers out there who, in the next few years (where my definition of "a few" is "1-5 years") very much WILL still want to buy an ICE vehicle for one or more reasons which will still be entirely valid despite whatever improvements are made by that point to the whole EV ecosystem and ownership experience - it's not just a question of how good the vehicles themselves get, the whole package has to be there.

Put it another way. No matter what your definition of "a few" is, it's going to be *long* after this point in time before the demand for ICE vehicles drops to the point where it's not entirely unreasonable (except to anyone who's a fully paid up member of The Guild of Nitpickers) to simply state that "nobody" want to buy them. Until then, for the forseeable future, there very much will still be demand for ICE vehicles, if not from new buyers once the ban on selling new ICE vehicles comes into play, then most assuredly from the huge number of people who rely on the used vehicle market to meet their needs.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Hmmm..

"Not sure why you're bothering to compare new vs second hand?"

Perhaps because in most peoples minds, EVs still are thought of as something you buy with delivery miles on the clock, rather than something for which the used car market is equally viable. And looking at Autotrader right now, where across the whole of the UK, their EV listings account for a mere 4.4% of all vehicles available, it's not hard to understand why this would be...

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Hmmm..

"Just the few I could think of while I'm on lunch break."

Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle - I haven't asked those nice meerkats to do a recently recent comparison, but when I did one last year to see where the market was at the time, the quotes I was getting back for EVs were quite frankly insane compared to those for equivalent spec/size/etc ICE cars of a type I had any interest in using as my commutemobile - *well* into 4 figures for EVs vs mid-high 3 figures for ICE. And from what I hear from others who have been looking at insurance costs more recently, including EV owners themselves (so not the sort of people you might expect to come out with negative comments re EV ownership), the situation really hasn't improved.

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Think of the Grid!

"Evs are charged at night."

If that were universally, or even significantly, true, then the entire thrust of this article - namely the need to do something re public charging provisions - would seem to be rather pointless, no? I mean, if most/all EVs really are being trickle charged overnight (which implies home or perhaps workplace charging for those doing shift work at an EV-friendly employer), then why would there be anywhere near as much of a need to provide other means of charging them? As EV proponents also like to point out, the number of people who actually need to be able to drive hundreds of miles a day is so small as to be irrelevant as an argument against EVs in general - on a case by case basis, SOME drivers might genuinely be hindered by the present maximum range available in an EV, and would therefore need to be able to recharge, preferably ASAP, whilst away from the home, but if EV proponents are correct then there aren't nearly enough people like that to justify the need for so much additional charging infrastructure.

And yet, here we are, with an article stating quite clearly that there IS a lack of charging infrastructure, and that something DOES need to be done about it in order to facilitate the growing demand from EV users. Which is entirely at odds with your claim that EVs are trickle charged overnight. You're correct in implying that many of them ARE charged like this, but it's not valid to go from there to a position of "there's not going to be a problem with the grid", because we're not talking about merely having more EVs trickle charging overnight, we're talking about having more of them fast-charging whilst en route from A to B...

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Exactly what destroyed the UK car industry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_the_United_Kingdom#Assembly_plants

There's still a LOT of vehicles being built in the UK, and a lot of vehicles built for "UK" manufacturers (at least ones that the average person on the street would think of as being UK, regardless of what their actual ownership is - e.g. JLR...) so unless your definition of "UK car industry" is so narrow that you're referring specifically to a) cars vs any type of vehicle, b) cars built in the UK, AND c) cars built in the UK by manufacturers under UK ownership, then you're somewhat off the mark in suggesting we don't have much of a "UK car industry" any more...

Microsoft's code name for 64-bit Windows was also a dig at rival Sun

ChrisC Silver badge
Coat

Re: Wang WP

If only they'd called it WordWang, they could have followed up with their version of Excel, aka NumberWang...

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: My opinion alone

Similar story here - was a very happy user of Windows-based phones from WM2003 through to WM6.1, then jumped ship onto Android where I've been ever since.

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