Posts by Roland6 10736 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
Very few of the barns that are being built around me have roof mounted solar panels.
A planning proposal out for consultation has a "solar park" aka business park and a few acres of open fields covered in solar panels to provide the electricity for the business park. I.e. there is no intention of actually utilising the roofs etc. of the business park for the collection of electricity.
>We can't see a problem. Perhaps someone out there can explain.
You probably aren't familiar with the world of wide area communications from a few decades back when encryption was rare...
Okay traffic volumes were much lower, but because the majority of the traffic wasn't encrypted, the encrypted traffic stood out.
I'm sure there are ElReg readers who have experience of working in some countries where unencrypted communications were reliable (well during office hours) and encrypted communications always seemed to get a bad connection.
So, in the new word of unencrypted communications being the norm, if you wish to draw attention to yourself go ahead and use tools that create data blobs that are clearly encrypted... whilst I suspect you will get away with the occasional encrypted communication, repeated and regular usage will raise your profile...
>Let's assume we trust the Government of the UK to not abuse this...
Now add in the "special relationship" - if the UK Govt have your data, so do the NSA et al.
Add in what we know about US intelligence security and distribution [See:Jack Teixeira ] and we can be sure both Russia and China will also most probably have some form of access...
"Obstruction" is similar to the US "wire fraud" - if you don't do as the Police ask that's obstruction...
As for "The gentleman doth protest too much..." I He's a journalist/publisher so we expect them to be more like canaries in a coal mine.
Interestingly, given what we now know about mobile phone security, I suspect they have already accessed the memory of his phone, handing over the access codes just enables them to publicly use what they have found as evidence without having to gain a warrant etc.
>Banking websites don't need to break E2E encryption. The traffic is already decrypted at the server side...
However, if the server is in a foreign country... Best to be safe and ban encrypted communications.
sarcasm/
Perhaps this is a good application of "AI", I'm sure AI can be trained to recognise encrypted communications and thus proactively block them by dropping packets.
/sarcasm
> Linux is simply not user friendly for most people once you get beyond clicking on icons and have to go into the terminal
Interestly, I am finding MS are putting more into powershell so I am increasingly finding (particularly on windows servers) functionality that is only surfaced via the powershell command line…
Given the very sharp practice being exhibited by SoftBank over this, I suggest it is in order for ARM to do a quick and dirty bankruptcy and reappear as ARM 2023 Ltd. Who have taken over assets and staff of ARM Holdings (UK) Ltd. leaving the debts with the bankrupt entity…
As we know this is wholly within UK law, given the number times it occurs and isn’t followed up by law enforcement…
> If you are really that desperate for total reliability
I would use a similar pattern as the “ancient Racal system”, however, I would increase the number of nodes to 3, use a Stratus in each node for processing and closely couple the units with fibre optics to ensure electrical isolation, naturally, I would implement a voting system over this.
This was what was effectively at the heart of solid state interlocking deployed on the railways back in the 1980s… writing the distributed OS etc. was challenging and fun…
> You literally turn it off in the options.
Wow!
A really useful addition MS could make would be to provide the facility to export all these user settings in say a .ini file that a user can read and edit, but more importantly can import to any system they wish to use. So when MS change stuff it is a quick and simple load to get your settings back.
Don’t really see the iOS screenshoot as being “different”, it takes the screenshot THEN feeds back what it has captured and offers next action choices.
The Windows Snipping tool just gets in the way: I’ve pressed the hot key combination for screenshot current active window or whole screen, Snipping tool like an idiot interrupts this and effectively says are you sure you really want to that, select again the action you wanted - pointless extra clicks.
Agree change can be useful, like with iOS screenshot as it assists …
Opinion in the 80s was that Ken Olsen missed judged the market opportunity and so failed to cash in by reducing the price of the MicroVAX to match the IBM PC-AT. Consensus was that had DEC done so they would have probably greatly hindered Microsoft’s rise to dominate the business desktop market (DEC had a good business applications portfolio compared to the IBM PC). However, in Olsen’s defence, doing this would have killed the margins they were getting…
Encountered a similar conundrum in the late 1990s when I and a Colleague put together an offering where the company effectively took their own mainframe customers and re host them on their Unix servers, instead of allowing their competitors to do it. To my mind the mainframe revenues were time limited and it was better existing customers spent with us rather than the competition, however, in both cases management had to grapple with a downsizing of the mainframe business…
> Non-intuitive commands and each one has its own non-standard switches and options.
And that was by deliberate intent !
Encountering Unix after having used TOPS-10 and VMS and studied OS design at Uni. to Unix was a shock ...
Yes it is powerful and there are things that are easier to do in it than in VMS, these however don't excuse the abomination of the Unix/Linux command line syntax.
Well with a supported version that runs on (some) current commodity hardware it may attract further investment and rise phoenix like...
The real hurdle is too many people in IT today think there is only Windows and Linux and these represent the pinnacle of OS design and development, because that is all they know...
I note OVH have effectively looked at the rack cabinet as effectively being a large box containing many CPUs and thus have scaled the well tested gaming PC solutions. Once you target the big heat producers (CPU's & GPU's), simpler and cheaper solutions are more than adequate for managing the temperature of "warm" components.
>Judging from interviews while she was still the big thing and things that came out during and after the trial, she was entirely and utterly convinced that it should work
Seeing exactly the same reality denying mindset in the lettuce (aka Liz Truss) and her speeches to the US conservatives such as the Heritage Foundation. Although, I note she at least seems to have the sense not to make such speeches to UK audiences...
It would seem a bit of both.
Phyllis Gardner, an expert in clinical pharmacology at Stanford, recalled discussing Holmes's skin-patch idea and telling her it "wouldn't work".
... "she just seemed absolutely confident of her own brilliance. She wasn't interested in my expertise ..."
[ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58336998 ]
Well working simply on land area
The US is 3.797 million sq miles and the UK is 93,630 sq miles giving a factor of 0.0.246.
So it would seem to broadly equal the US investment the UK government merely needs to invest 216M USD/173M GBP...
” if you're a beancounter, it's far preferable to pay a monthly/quarterly fee for your compute than it is to dig into the company savings and tie up a vast sum in buildings, hardware and people.”
We saw the same arguments used for sale and lease back of business premises these past few decades. The trouble is this thinking bakes in higher overhead costs which have to be met regardless of trading conditions. As we saw with the risk of the web, where transactional costs were massively reduced, those with high fixed costs found themselves unable to compete and so failed…
With activist “investors” also encouraging businesses to take on even more debt just to pay them more, despite massive changes in the business environment, we can expect even more companies to fail…
” What's more, the analysts report that many of the same forces driving up cloud costs are negatively impacting colos and private datacenters too, which means the savings made from ditching the cloud may not be as large as enterprises are expecting.”
Savings will most probably be larger as we can expect cloud prices to increase at a faster rate than actual input costs. Remember the business model of the moment is subscription and companies need to keep increasing subscription rates to keep meeting the unrealistic expectations of market analysts….
As for the extra regulations, many will be more easily satisfied in a smaller and more local environment.
Well…
Egghead is also slang for a bald man…
It would seem boffin originated from military research.
Given the earliest reference to boffin seems to have been in the air force, I suspect it is a word play on Backroom boys that resulted in a word that sounded like a bird, which given the air force flies birds… lending the word some parallels with “a patchy server” which became “apache server”.
[https://wikidiff.com/egghead/boffin?utm_content=cmp-true , https://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bof1.htm ]
> I know he did Space X and that worked
From all the reports everything was riding on the final test launch and it was far from certain that everything would work given what had gone wrong previously and their level of understanding of the problems, however they got lucky and the final test was a success, it could of easily gone the other way and Space X would have been finished, just like Virgin Galactic..
Corrugated cardboard is light and strong - a few years back a cycle helmet was made out of readily available corrugated cardboard and not only was lighter than equivalent composite plastic cycle helmets but also gave significantly better protection. The design meant it was possible to make a bespoke helmet at the equivalent to a Photo Booth, which the user needed only to assemble from the laser cut flat pack cardboard, the main downside was its vulnerability to water (rain and sweat).
I see this being similarly useful, especially if the airframe can be DIY’d from locally sourced cardboard and the electronics can be readily reused.
MS aren’t the only ones with form…
I would avoid the backup tools OEMs bundle, they are great at creating backups, but try and restore in the event of a system failure and you will hit the problem, you need a working system from the same OEM with a compatible version (ie.one that can read the archives) of the bundled utility. Lesson learnt from a Thinkpad running XP, who’s HDD had failed, my replacement (W7) laptop to hand was from Dell…
Perhaps what is necessary is a maintenance and support broker service….
Open source developer signs up and receives a trouble ticket account which they use as their support contact.
The broker offers a costed support service to business and handles the negotiations with business.
joke/ Given their success in getting money out of businesses I suggest a good candidate for this task is Oracle…only downside I suspect most of the monies will go to supporting a yacht… /joke
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