* Posts by Roland6

10619 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010

This is the best pay offer you'll get without more strikes, union tells BT workers

Roland6 Silver badge

>BT back in government hands by 2030 just like the trains

Given what we've witness these last few years in Westminster and some decades back with a previous Tory government, I'm not sure if that is a good idea...

What we really need is some form of public ownership that can deliver the goods, yet be able to tell the amateurs (aka politicians) what to do with themselves.

Roland6 Silver badge

Consider it a 'benefit' of not working for a highly unionised company and probably also working for a company that if it went bust tomorrow joe public would hardly notice.

Roland6 Silver badge

Not necessarily. One would hope that if someone was highly valued this would be reflected in their performance related pay review and promotion. Basically, the system should result in those who join and not delivering having their pay fall behind and so gain an incentive to leave and create space for new blood.

Gunfire at electrical grid kills power for 45,000 in North Carolina

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: probably wasn't an act of terrorism

Well if you have watched C4's The Undeclared War, isn't as far fetched as some might believe.

Roland6 Silver badge

Nah! with all that electricity wireless powered drones with submachine guns.

Prototype Quadrotor with Machine Gun!

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Fragile

>but that seemed more like "I bet I can hit this" type of activity than anything truly malicious.

Surprisingly we get this also in the Uk. However, the typical target is the bird on the weather vane a top the local church tower.

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: The real surprise

To me the surprises are:

1. How static over time the overall market split reported by Statcounter between Windows, MacOS and Linux OS's has been.

2. How much Statcounter differs from LanSweeper and Statista on there assessment of W11 market penetration.

3. The growth in W11 has been at the expense of W10 installations, which would indicate people are running XP, 7 & 8 for a reason.

Given Apple's business model and the way they sell and obsolete MacBooks, I suspect they will have problems rapidly increasing their market share, because they are unable to leverage third-party production and sales networks or the installed base of Intel PC's. Their decision to EoL MacOS on Intel would seem to indicate they have no interest in challenging Microsoft's market dominance.

Obviously, Linux's market share is slowly growing (just under 2.5% according to Statcounter), so potential opportunity for something to light the blue touch paper, however, I suspect whatever that something is will come from-out-of-field...

Roland6 Silver badge

KB5020683 - Getting closer to a W10 version of W7's GWX ?

What I find really irritating about the "upgrade to W11" ad that seems to regularly appear in the W10 Windows Update available updates list is that it seems to prevent the installation of W10 updates until the user clicks on the stay with W10 option, at which point Windows immediately goes away and finds a few dozen W10 updates that need to be installed...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Three letters TPM

Never found a compelling reason to use the fingerprint reader finding it easier to be consistent across machines and simply key in username and password...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Market size

>Finding an XP SP3 ISO is easy

Agree, any OEM ISO will do, just need to personalise it to the motherboard's serialisation so it activates without needed to access the servers.

The most difficult CD/ISO I had to trackdown a few years back was an XP Pro x64 Edition SP2C - it was the only edition that recognised my motherboards serial number.

> what is difficult is activating that XP installation..

From memory, MS had promised to keep the activation service running untril 2029...

But if that fails, there is the telephone...

Stack Overflow bans ChatGPT as 'substantially harmful' for coding issues

Roland6 Silver badge

It clearly demonstrates the limitations of current AI programming ...

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

Roland6 Silver badge

" From 2026, the company says it'll be inkjet only " - So its not the end of paper yet.

From my experience there are times when there is no real substitute for paper.

What it seems is that we've become better at using the technology instead of just printing stuff off - a bit like the telephone and email, where they in turn replaced many reasons to send postal letters but not all reasons.

Microsoft 365 faces more GDPR headwinds as Germany bans it in schools

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Office - open or closed?

My reading of the Nextcloud groupware pitch is that it is browser-based ie. online only - hence of zero use to mobile workers, who aren't always online.

Personally, if there isn't an "offline" client I stop looking, but then I have spent my life in the real world of mobile working...

As for Outlook, the issue is covering the email client and PIM functionality along with the integrations with Zoom, Office etc. and add-ons like Egress Switch.

Which email server did you go with?

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Office - open or closed?

>NextCloud/Collabora Online/Office

Shame it doesn't include an Outlook replacement. I appreciate there are open source mail clients et al but as a replacement for MS Office they do need to cover Outlook, both directly (ie. mail and PIM) and cross app integration.

What email client (and server) are you proposing to use with Nextcloud et al

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Office - open or closed?

>Don't use proprietary document formats then.

The trouble is the way MS Office works.

For example with Office 2019, I can create a default install profile which sets open document formats as the default save format. However, Word for example will still on saving a document warn the user that some features aren't supported and would they prefer to use the proprietary format...

I think many would prefer Office to disable/grey out functionality not supported by the user-set default document format.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Office - open or closed?

I've noticed similar very slow behaviour with MS Edge (Chromium) PDF viewer -

I clicked on a link in another ElReg article

https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2018-481/readings/mythical-man-month.pdf

Edge is very slow in both online and offline reading modes, Chrome is only slightly better. Load the same document with Acrobat or FoxIt...

Equinix would offer more liquid cooling but struggles without standards

Roland6 Silver badge

Is full immersion really "the solution"?

Given the main heat generator in a server is the CPU, I would have thought as a here-and-now solution the use of existing liquid cooling rigs scaled up to handle racks etc. would be a viable solution. Okay it is not as simple as just dropping a server into a cooling pool.

UK cuts China from Sizewell nuclear project, takes joint stake

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Honesty? We've heard of it

>Let us not forget that it was Germany that declared war on the US, not vice-versa.

From the information disclosed from Bletchley Park, it does seem Churchill suspected it was only a matter of time and so Britain needed to hold on until the inevitable happened, at which point the US political establishment would be forced to choose sides and take action.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Honesty? We've heard of it

The US do have form...The US profiteered the most from WWII

They were reluctant to join with the allies, as they were doing nice business with Germany. Then when they did get involved it was on commercial terms.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Local generation

This was one of the points that raised my interest. It would seem the idea is to have fewer but larger panel arrays feeding a "distributed battery, so each tenant gains some benefit.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Rough timing

Which statement is untrue: "rapidly consumed" or "not ramping up" ?

I thought the amount of money the UK government were publicly committing was a bit on the low side...

I hope your old friends brother is referring to the UK based defence sector and that the Conservatives are not reverting to form and preferring to spending UK taxpayers monies in the US...

Roland6 Silver badge

The trouble is that the smart meters aren't that smart.

So for a smart Economy 7 tariff to work, we need more intelligence - although a Rasb Pi is probably an overkill, so that devices I want to run on SmartEco7 are set to run accordingly and can be invoked when the relevant tariff becomes available.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Design life

>And it seems cheaper ... to simply replace the entire thing with a new and higher output unit rather than repair.

This is an interesting article from MDPI:

Lessons Learned from the Construction, Inspection, and Defect Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Foundations for Wind Turbines

Seems the upgrade to higher output might be a contributor to a surprisingly high failure rate of the concrete foundations.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Also

>If it wasn't viable

Define viable?

Remember when Cuadrilla started not much was really known about the UK situation, I expect Dr Chris Cornelius would admit that he took an (informed) punt when he founded Cuadrilla.

>If it's not viable then some private firms lose money. Who cares?

You should!

Private firm drills a well or digs a coal mine, loses money and goes bust, the liability for the safety of those disused workings falls on the public purse, not on the directors enjoying the wealth they fleeced off investors...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Local generation

It surprised me how poor the national grid is in the US with the energy companies seemingly unable to create an infrastructure capable of delivering their product to its customers, without government intervention and funding...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Local generation

>The reasons for central generation still apply, it is still more cost-effective than having lots of lower efficiency units everywhere.

...

In strict economic terms it does not pay.

Depends on what you are using locally and pricing...

Solar panels combined with a battery pack are proving to be a very good investment, even though they might be of "lower efficient" to a central nuclear power station...

I see a UK housing association has realised that because they own a multiple neighbouring houses they don't actually need every house to have solar panels, as one set of panels can gainfully charge multiple sets of batteries.

Central government, likes centralised generation as it facilitates taxation...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: waste heaps of batteries.

>No we won't.

Yes we will see waste heaps of EV batteries, because we are at the very early stage of ramping up Ev recycling facilities - Northvolt themselves recognise this in their blurb.

The environmental benefits of EV's depend upon two big factors: the removal of carbon from the electricity supply chain and the recycling of batteries.

Currently, we don't have industrial-scale battery recycling, but that isn't a problem as there isn't any real need for it today (outside of Norway) - insufficient EoL batteries on which to run a large-scale recycling facility, but come 2030 there will be, which is what Northvolt are aiming at in their business growth plan.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Local generation

>or you can just crunch them up and use them as filler for concrete or the such

Which currently seems to be the preferred option.

Obviously, with increasing volume (as more wind turbines go EoL), there is hope better solutions will be found and developed, hence why many are simply stockpiling EoL turbine blades.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Design life

I can see my comment was rather too succinct...

Wind turbine blades have a circa 20-year life, and the fixed structure (concrete base and typically steel tower) circa 25 years; much shorter than the circa 60 years for a modern nuclear power plant.

Additionally, with the rapid development of higher-output wind turbines, it is questionable how much of the fixed structure can be reused in situ.

So when comparing "unicorn renewable schemes" with say a nuclear power station, we do need to be a lot more careful in our calculations to ensure we really are comparing like-with-like.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Local generation

>A lot of the unicorn renewable schemes completely ignore the cost and losses of...

We shouldn't forget that wind turbines (for example) have a design life. Already there are waste heaps of end-of-life turbine blades that currently aren't recyclable. We will in the coming decade see similar waste heaps of batteries.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Rough timing

I wonder if the Government and politicians are learning the lesson of insurance - if you don't pay the premium, don't expect commercial entities to maintain the facility.

Aside: Interestingly and concerningly, it does seem we aren't ramping up our defence industries to replenish stocks being rapidly consumed in defence of Ukraine.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Also

>rather than the dividends going abroad

It's more than the dividends. With foreign ownership, the host country operation is typically treated as a cost-centre with revenues beyond those needed to maintain the cost-centre rapidly moving off-shore...

Creator of spec for melting RTX 4090 cables urges Nvidia, others to 'ensure user safety'

Roland6 Silver badge

My impression was that the PCI-SIG was reminding their members, (including Nvidia) that is them (the members) who drew up and approved the Standard; so if the Standard is deficient...

US commerce bosses view EU rules as threat to its clouds

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

>Kind of but not necessarily. It is reasonable that it is not sold on for illegal purposes.

Good luck trying to enforce that one.

Remember the US companies are merely complaining that someone else is setting the rules and that complying with them will cost them money - life is so unfair...

>The kid churning out his idea shouldnt be squashed by the weight of bureaucracy.

If the kid wants to sell their product in the market then they will need to comply with the regulations. Bureaucracy only gets involved when that requires filling out lots of pointless forms, waiting on bureaucrats and jumping through hoops - ie. what the UK government created when it proposed the Brexit NI protocol....

.NET open source is 'heavily under-funded' says AWS

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Re: MS's "custodianship" of Mono lasted, what, 6 months?

>I suspect it's probably moved on so much it'll feel like a foreign language again.

If you are tempted to revisit the past and learn a "foreign language", perhaps learn Rust and thus aim at assisting in the porting of .Net to rust...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: So in summary

Microsoft set up the .NET Foundation which says it is "an independent, non-profit organization established to support an innovative, commercially friendly, open-source ecosystem around the .NET platform. AWS is listed as one of just 10 corporate sponsors."

It would seem Microsoft also think someone else should fund this work.

Intruders get their hands on user data in LastPass incident

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: OnePassword next?

If we take the press release at face value, it would seem the user/customer data that exists outside of the zero trust user password safe will be a user's email address and subscription details which potentially includes payment/bank details.

Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Earned a huge amount, and spent a fortune to bring in the money often go hand in hand.

> but these are the same jobs which were paying £80k in 2018

And were paying £60k in 2000. ie. salaries haven't gone up as much as we would like....

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: What do we expect?

Don't know why you feel the need to post this rather obvious observation as AC.

I suspect if the BCS (of which I'm a member) analyzed their membership data they would see similar.

Also look at the university data, back in 1980 few university places for Computing, over the decades the number of places has massively increased, so you would expect there to be fewer people 50~60 with Computing degrees (and even fewer 60+).

Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Add it to the pile

?Real Estate

I think you mean Estate Agents.

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Contract clauses

>What roles do you have in mind that justify higher wages?

I thought my answer was clear:

Salaried IT related roles which come with a 35 plus unspecified hours contract of employment; which seem to be normal outside of Dev environments.

Most dev contracts I've seen over the years come with a standard 35~40 hours - with occasional overtime and single place of working contract.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Contract clauses

> But any accrued overtime has to be taken as time off before the end of the current month

I really dislike this rule. Back in the 80's and early 90's it was common to allow multi-year accrual. This enabled me to plan and take 3 months off and do something other than a "beach holiday" every 2~3 years. This length of time (and the notice it required) also meant both the company and myself had to plan around my absence.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Contract clauses

>£40k for 35 hours/week? Yep, fine with that. £40k for 35 + an unspecified number of other hours? Get to fuck.

Outside of IT £40k is a good salary for 35 plus unspecificed hours job...

Personally, if dev's are being paid £40k then I expect IT experts in non-dev roles to be paid at least £60k for 35 plus unspecified hours contracts.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Contract clauses

You probably also signed a Working Time Directive opt out.

This type of contract seemed to be typical of UK contracts for non-dev salaried staff over several decades. I know in one company this did create problems, as we, in pre-sales needed things doing out-of-normal-hours and having to negotiate with developers over overtime payments.

Given we were being paid significantly more than the developers, I didn't have a problem with the clause, given there were times when "the job" required significantly less hours, so provided you were contactable by phone you were free to not attend the office.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Hence "leaving them on at the switch"

>When you leave, you take all the "smart" lamps with you to the new place and put normal ones back in.

I'm probably ahead of you, this strategy works fine whilst few have smart lights, like a few years back when energy-efficient lights weren't widely used and carried a price premium, but once they become more common...

Roland6 Silver badge

>Had you ever have to teach an adult who's never seen one how to use a light switch

Been there, also had to teach them how to use a western toilet (and wash their hands), among other things.

I can say it is significantly easier than having to teach them how to achieve the same thing via a smartphone app. particularly when a room switch is readily available to all and doesn't more around; unlike a smartphone... So if a static wall switch, which once you've seen one, you are well on the way to being able to operate any switch in any location, is "terrible interface", I suggest the interfaces being offered for smart lights are insane.

>Pushing a specific bit of wall

Not come across this style of switch, all the switches I've come across are obviously not "a specific bit of wall" but an obvious object on the wall.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: We recieved one as a gift from a family member

>got them to do it in person

Don't know if it still is the case, a few years back, the only way to deregister a device was physically on that device.

The Prime forums were full of people who had set up their girlfriends TV, split up and now unable to deregister the device as they no longer have visiting rights...

I frequently find at holiday cottages, previous guest(s) have left their Prime, Netflix etc. account active on the TV complete with auto payment enabled...

Low code is no replacement for software development, say German-speaking SAP users

Roland6 Silver badge

Programming is just a small, but important part of software development - just like bricklaying is a small but important part of construction.

Low-code doesn't remove the need to think about the problem and design and implement in a structured and maintainable way, otherwise you are simply back to the business critical spreadsheet some user knocked up and thus is flying under the radar.

IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Venue and jurisdiction is going to complicate this

The complaint filing seems to be specifically targeting Micro Focus Inc (the US subsidiary of Micro Focus plc) and its distribution of certain products to New York-based companies.

A win for IBM would I suspect mean US law trumps UK law, when it comes to products being distributed (ie. not necessarily directly sold to US-base companies).

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: CICS is still a thing?

>one of the board members thought "big companies use Oracle, we are a big company, we should use Oracle"

Way back I had a client who was a successful mortgage broker handling >£100M of funds. Their datacenter was a rack of NetWare servers, the plan in-progress was to replace these with a microvax cluster. The business wanting to improve their image with their City customers (who provided the monies for the mortgage products) recruited a new CEO from the City. One of the new CEO's first dictates was that the IT should be replaced by a suitably large IBM system... I seem to remember the company disappeared a few years later...