Posts by Roland6

Re: Now forgotten

>What are you talking about?

Didn't say they were all wired the same and thus having a break out box and an ability to wield a soldering iron were useful to a "programmer"(*) :)

I wasn't aware of the IBM special Modu 10 pin connector.

(*) For those fammiliar with the saying "Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers" and variations there of, a soldering iron isn't a screwdriver...

Re: Now forgotten

>Funny thing is I (in my jeans and T-shirt) was making more per hour than any three of them (in their three-piece Armanis)

Mid 1980's £40 p/hr for Unix system skills, I wonder how many independent contractors are getting £120 p/hr today?

Re: Now forgotten

Tanenbaum seemed to do a good job of catching both the focus of the moment in the various editions and the changing view of the past, making each edition worth keeping as there was little real overlap.

Perhaps Bruce could consolidate his researches into circa 1960 data networking into a “prequel” volume…

Re: Now forgotten

Uucp might have been weird but it did work. Back then it was common to have to deal with the weirdness of differing vendors Unix platforms, where it seemed the only Standard were RS-232 terminal ports…

The OSI reference model was good navigational and educational aid and hence has relevant today. Personally, it would be good to review and update based on 40+ years of experience, where we have moved beyond telnet, file transfer and email.

The objectives OSI were good and the Internet does embody these.

The OSI services and protocols were well thought through, but at times the “absolutists” and need to accommodate differing vendors viewpoints was irritating and ultimately tainted OSI. interestingly, some of the newer (ie. Post circa 1990) work on the Internet Protocol Suite either originated in OSI or has benefited from tools developed to support OSI standards development.

Re: And earlier...

> And any history of networking in the UK must…

Include the Cambridge Ring, the Coloured Book protocols and JANET.

Re: Wonder....

But they did get a few acknowledgements…

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

All of those reports are deeply flawed.

For example add in the housing and infrastructure provision and you negate the fiscal benefit. ie. the economic case for largescale immigration as we have witnessed over the last 25 years is at best marginal.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

>"The cheap EU labour has gone for a few years now. The supposedly artificially suppressed wages in the sectors you mention have not gone up. Explain.The cheap EU labour has gone for a few years now. The supposedly artificially suppressed wages in the sectors you mention have not gone up. Explain."

Too many years of institutionalised conservative thinking. Wage costs were kept down for many years by importing cheap labour, thus low wages in some sectors became the norm.

Cheap labour as you note dries up, first reaction is to increase the workload on remaining staff and only begrudgingly make token payments under duress.

Second reaction is to lobby government to facilitate the restoration of cheap labour imports and moan about how UK residents are lazy and wanting too much money.

After a few years you get to where the UK is now, "ancient" technology and working practises, too few workers and wages way out of line with reality. As the current government are slowly beginning to realise there are no quick fixes, a change in mindset and investment in people over many years (15 years in the case of the recently announced £36 bn NHS investment) is the solution.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

Suggest you look at the history of the UK's Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 ...

Don't know about Spain etc.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

And some other communities voted for BREXIT because they were told it would reduce immigration as the UK could take back control of its borders...

Targeted campaigning/advertising works until the differing target audiences compare notes...

Re: Lamborghini going EV ?

>I also like seeing supercars out and about, they are getting used.

In my 20s whilst in California, a (UK) friend and I were astounded that a car rental company would rent us a Ferrari for $400 a day, needless to say that was a $400 well spent and enjoyed.

>"Petrolheads" and insist that an EV can't possibly scratch their itch

An EV doesn't have that hot oil and burnt hydrocarbons aroma, nor the sounds and vibrations your stomach feels...

My son and friends a few years back got the full immersive experience at Armourgeddon Leicester wen they started their restoration project Chieftain tank for the first time...

However, given back in the early 90's my then local cornershop in Tokyo had a machine that puffed out the aroma of fresh baked bread, it would not surprise me if they don't do similar for EV's.

Re: Time for IPv8

> They can't do that, for various reasons.

I would not be so sure, if they effectively control both the regional registrar and the resale of allocations to users, there is plenty of opportunity for profiteering…

Re: The issue with V6 is... NAT

>” The other issue with v6 is its complexity and its mixed autoconfig / discovery / announce functions, which are a security/management mess”

I’ve not had enough exposure to confirm, but it does seem many router/firewall vendors configure the IPv6 stack through the transposition of the IPv4 configuration and then give little visibility of the IPv6 traffic…

I dislike how there are multiple ways to configure the IPv6 connection to a 4G mobile network, yet only one will work and the mobile operator provides no information as to which one you should be using. Suspect similar will apply to fixed lines - although expect everything to be straight-forward if you use the ISP provided router.

Re: Time for IPv8

>” Frankly, almost all of the arguments about IPv6 boil down to”

You omitted a big one: not supported by ISP.

It is obvious here businesses such as Cloud Innovation and NRS have little interest in IPv6 because they can make (lots of) money from the scarcity of IPv4 addresses. I expect having established the business model for IPv4 they will simply transfer it to IPv6, as most people won’t understand..

Re: Not an MS apologist

> NOW if the NHS had it's own build of Linux…

Point the finger at the Cabinet Off8ce, they had the full picture of UK government IT expenditure, yet decided to throw money at Microsoft rather than invest in UK IT skills and industry…

It’s taken along time for the Conservatives to realise that having 42 independent and “competing” (when the. conservatives set up the health care trusts they prevented them from working together to get benefits of scale or in some areas needless duplication of service) health trusts meant the UK government and taxpayer weren’t getting value for money.

Re: Value for money

I presume the NHS deal is based on Microsoft 365 E5, full price is £52.40 user/month and charity/nonprofit £20.20 user/month.

Which would still seem to be a lot for Teams and email, given the majority of staff would only be using the medical applications and entering patient data directly into these.

They probably do, as do others looking through the ad revenue distorted lens….

It is interesting to note the complaints about the new ITVX app/service is the level of adverting that can’t be skipped or turned off and requires user action to play - so no making a cuppa whilst the ads play to an empty room.

Likewise Amazon Prime, all was “okay” until Amazon started doing “free with ads”, these break my setup - for these features they don’t support my normal setup: iPad hdmi connected to my TV, funnily (both Prime and ITVX) support streaming without complaint of such ad supported features via my Windows laptop similarly connected to my TV…

Re: Here's a novel idea

The FTC could go full antitrust and force MS to divest its entire games business, office applications etc. leaving MS to choose to be in only one market…

Re: Sony

Yes, because they can’t out spend Microsoft…

Re: History

Remembering the late 80s when the major RDBMS’s had to be ported to the different Unix platforms, a big differentiator in major bids was a vendors place in the porting queue. Would not be surprised if Xbox is always the first in queue and PlayStation last, particularly as MS’s commitment to porting is just “in principle” and not specifically defined.

Re: Noooo! Reeeally? Who would've seen that coming.

>” OK, they could have the manuals in the van, or know a few models, but the AR headset could contain details for thousands of models.”

The engineers I called out, have a mobile data connection on their laptop, they simply keyed in the boiler / dishwasher / washing machine etc. model number and they gain access to online documentation. Not sure if having the ability to use a camera to recognise the appliance actually adds anything, likewise the use of AR headset.

The Bedford site is largely vacant. It had a fully working vertical wind tunnel and various buildings with horizontal wind tunnels. I’m sure this former RAE site could be cost effectively brought back into service.

Unfortunately, I suspect the Flowrider has been removed…

Re: What about non-artificial intelligence

> Now, try to define a licence which permits that, but doesn't allow a machine to learn from the same code.

I thought that was part of the problem, existing licences were written in an era when it was assumed humans that were doing the learning and copying and hence this underlying assumption can be used against AI usage. It is the proponents of AI wanting to change that assumption to include without any rewrite.

Re: https://opensource.org/osd/

Can’t see how restricting use for AI training violates this, unless you take a wider interpretation of derived works than the authors intended.

So perhaps a tightening of the open source definition, to clarify the assumptions made in the original drafting would not violate the definition.

But what is clear, if you can show the AI has drawn on open source the output from the AI is also open source…