Posts by AndrueC

Re: An awful lot of the UK housing stock

Been a race to the bottom for a while now. Minimise build costs, minimise land usage.

Re: Carbon sinks

Those sinks are only temporary. Trees die for various reasons and the carbon is released back into the environment. Planting new forest is useful initially but existing forest somewhat less so.

Re: I wonder

Well, except for the batteries, generator, and redundant switching equipment. All the things which make the ordinary telephone network far, far, more reliable and resilient than a broadband internet link.

The question was concerning the cost of making a call, not the reliability.

The clue is in the way it was phrased:

How much it will be to make a "phone" call to another digital only user across their "phone" network?

Re: Pointless to complain.

I reckon my request to Google is way down the list. I just want the sat nav voice to say 'Pavillons Way' rather than 'Pavilions Way'. The map has it correctly marked so it must just be some kind of vocalisation issue. Perhaps the logic just refuses to use French words when outputting directions in English.

Re: Bolted Horses @SonofRojBlake

In case people had not noticed, Sky has a large number of broadcast channels that are not easily available elsewhere

Most of my viewing is Discovery, Sky History, Crime & Investigation and ID (I wish they'd provide an HD version of that) and other than VM I don't know if any of those are available elsewhere. Nat Geo used to be another popular one but seems to have gone off the boil for me recently.

People have this view of Sky subscribers as only wanting to watch all the latest US dramas but not all of us do. I only have a few Sky owned channel in my favourites list and of those the most watched - Sky History - has only recently been taken over.

Most of what I watch is carried on relatively minority channels and whilst it might be possible to find things elsewhere I doubt it's as convenient. And convenience (aka 'inertia') is a significant factor not to be overlooked. I could spend my time trawling the 'net trying to find stuff or else I could do what I've done for years. Browse the EPG during quiet moments and mark things to be recorded. When it comes to watching I just fire up the box and TV and look to see what's already on the box waiting to be viewed. My 2GB Sky Q box is currently 62% full with new programming waiting for me to watch.

One born in the U S of A!

I was watching a show about car renovation recently and two of the engineers were arguing over fractions of an inch while trying to calculate a centre line and cutting point for a box. I so wish I could have been there to turn their rulers the other way round and measure everything in millimetres.

God bless America..because they need all the help they can get.

You only need to heat the room you're working in. So close the door and use an oil filled radiator. If it's a small room it shouldn't take much energy to keep it warm between you, the computer, monitors and the radiator.

The walk to/from a chilly kitchen ain't gonna kill anyone so just let the rest of the house cool down like it would if you weren't there.

Re: Turning off copper phonelines

BT who own the network, wants to turn off all copper phone lines (PSTN) by 2025.

No they don't (well they might want to but they know they can't). What BT is turning off is something called WLR which is just the wholesale voice service. Copper lines will remain active and in use across the country and will only be turned off if/as/when an exchange reaches an FTTP threshold of 75% (presumably at that point they will also fill in the remaining 25%).

Re: Tesla Dashboards

You don't really own modern cars. Yes, you might have paid a load of £££/$$$ for it and have not only the receipts but the V5/title but if the maker can brick your car at will then... who really owns it? They do.

The UK V5 document never did indicate ownership. It only records who the registered keeper is ie;who will be assumed to be responsible for any offenses committed with/by the vehicle.

application developers have learned not to ask for admin privleges unless they really need it.

So a success in that area at least. As a developer one aspect that irritated me was the installation process and especially the weird changes and choices around installation folders over the years.

Trying to create an installer that could handle ever scenario (corporate and consumer) was a pain in the arse.

Re: Charger power rating

Most people charging at home will only be topping the battery up.

If chargers are readily available the driver just has to make a minor mental adjustment. Instead of running the car until it's almost out of charge (like most of us do with ICE(*)) you charge them every time you park them. Most cars only do about 30 miles a day so even if your employer or shopping centre doesn't offer a charging facility you're still only putting 10% of the battery capacity in when you get back home. Most EVs will be recharged within fifteen minutes even on a slow charger.

(*)Okay so the more sensible of us think about refilling when the gauge says half empty but still. EV charging should be a different mindset. Very few car journeys require the vehicle to be driven for hundreds of miles between recharge points and if charging points are frequent enough it just isn't necessary.

Re: For lazy Americans (most of us), cement = concrete

Yes it's tortoisesturtles all the way down :)

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

NO ONE is above the law in the US or Canada, not even a Prime Minister or President.

That has yet to be proven.

Being accused of something is not the same as being convicted of something.

Re: Musk deserves all the bile he gets and more

The son of prominent basketball player LeBron James.

Who? What's 'basketball'? Is it like netball?

Like the other 95% of desktop users I've been using 'something else'.

Linux on the desktop is an almost vanishingly small minority not helped by all the stupid spats over which 'distro' is best. Nothing that happens in the 'Linux desktop arena' is of any importance beyond the handful of people still clinging to it.

Face it. As a desktop operating system Linux is an abject failure. Possibly not for technical reasons but still - it is providing a desktop experience to such a small percentage of users that really if it reverted to being nothing but a console-based server OS the world wouldn't care.

Re: Joke

Just drop the engine first. It only takes a minute.

Mind you that puts me in mind of the Haynes instructions for gapping an Austin Metro's distributor.

"First remove the radiator as described in chapter...".

Actually all you needed was to grab a passing street urchin and ask them to remove the cap.

Visual Studio is a big enough time waster as it is without becoming a platform for malicious attacks.

Re: less-noisy maybe but still un-sound

I was playing golf when the jets were scrambled a month or so ago. A mate of mine is a bit miffed that he took his swing about half a minute before the boom. It would've been so much more impressive if it had coincided with the boom.

Actually it wasn't so much a boom as a bang.

Re: whose swear words?

They also seem a lot more precious about it. I remember several years ago while on a business trip watching daytime TV. One of the characters got their head blown apart by a gunshot quite graphically but their partner's response was bleeped out.

WTF kind of country is it that considers the gore of a head being blown apart to be fine to watch whilst objecting to profanity?

Backward compatibility is probably the biggest issue for Windows (it being driven by the marketing and finance department the next biggest).

Truth is that software development resources are hard to find (have been for decades) and most managers can't afford to have them working on stuff that has no financial or marketing driven purpose. People continue to use old applications because they are used to them (warts and all) and the sheer number and variety of users it directly supports imposes a massive burden on the Windows development team.

Linux has - possibly - more people overall dependant on it now but the vast majority are only secondarily dependant (they do things that rely on a Linux server backend). That reduces and simplifies the interface between old and new code.

Re: It is not just Amazon

On the other hand when I called Sky to cancel Netflix last year they offered to let me have my package (ie; everything except Netflix) for half price if I just agreed to sign up for another 12 months. I didn't have to ask and there was no hard sell. The lady just removed Netflix then said something like "Oh, you know what? I could reduce your subscription by half if you are happy to sign up for a 12 month contract".

Since I hadn't intended to leave anyway it was a no-brainer :)

Re: "Based on the message trajectory from email headers"

Another problem (arguably what's at the heart of all email issues) is that the headers can be faked anyway. The headers need not be (and usually aren't) read by the receiving mail server other than perhaps a cursory syntax check.

The mail delivery process is basically 'Hi, my name is Beelzebub. Please chuck these bytes into this/these mailboxes.'.

The sending machine can put anything it wants into these headers. The actual content of the headers is unimportant and ignored by most mail servers. This is why I can send you an email that is apparently addressed to someone completely different and sent from someone fictitious. If you've ever received spam that claims to have been sent by yourself then this is how. The sender just puts your email address into the 'Reply To' or 'From' field and the server doesn't care.

The only sure fire way to know where an email came from and validate the recipient is to monitor the initial handshake process on the server. The SMTP command 'RCPT TO' is what directs the email to an inbox not the 'To' field in the header. And it's only at the point of handshake that you can be sure who the sender is because you know the source IP address and can trace the sender from there.

This is why I continue to run my own mail server. It has the ability to filter on 'RCPT TO' and do other good things at the handshake level. I really can stop the spam at the front gate and senders can't mask their identity. I use a Disposable Email Address system and give every contact their own unique address. In conjunction with RCPT TO filtering I know who is responsible for every email. And if I get spam sent to an address I only gave you then I have the option of blacklisting the address thus stopping future spam and not bothering to issue you with another unique address thus severing our email relationship.

Re: if it ain't broke, don't "fix" it

It was difficult to get through to HMRC twenty years ago. It's always been difficult.

Re: > OpenAI shouldn't put out "AI" that consistently spews complete bullshit,

It's certainly not berry good.