Re: Hang on
Oooh, well played sir!
25432 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"Though generally nowadays, 'Tarmac' should actually be 'Bitmac', since I believe it is made from bitumen, rather than tar."
Tarmac, the company, would probably beg to differ. Tarmac is the word used for that type of road surface in the same way that Hoover is commonly used for any vacuum cleaner :-)
"Micros~1 may be able to pay if they "decide to", but I'm pretty sure that internally there's panic and alarm at the size of the demand."
Yes, when huge tax demands such as this come in from national tax authorities, unlike you and I, the little people, these corporations get taken out to lunch where they can begin negotiations on how much will actually end up being paid. Invariably, it ends up being less than half of the headline figure. But even to the likes of MS, half of the this headline figure is a fair chunk of change.
I did, however, like the MS defence of "but we don't do it like that any more". Sorry MS, but there;s still such a thing as back taxes based on when you did do it like that!
...if a mini version of the original IBM PC, a basic system board with expansion slots might be something to look forward too? Rather than ISA slots, I'm thinking vertically mounted M.2/PCIe slots running lengthways so would accommodate external ports on the end of the expansion card through the back of the case. Of course, not quite as basic a system board as the original PC, since so much more is already in the onboard chipset. Whether an eco system of 3rd party expansion cards could grow may be the real sticking point. It would probably depend on whether the specs were open enough and no silly patents on board shapes, sizes etc.
It won't happen, of course. The way to make huge gobs of money is to make everyone buy the special custom box they need, not allow them to spec and expand as required to make their own custom box with just the bits they need.
"IPv4 addresses are also widely traded and/or leased,"
Why? I thought unused addresses were supposed to be returned, since they have no "value" and are "owned" by IANA and the RIRs. Maybe it's time for them to "man[*] up" and start forcibly repatriating all those IPV4s being sold, loaned and leased and killing of the brokers making money from a "free" resource. Likewise those large orgs with huge allocations who are not fully utilising them.
*, Yeah, I know, in these modern times it should be "person up", but that just sounds so wrong.
From just over a year ago Hydrofoil: World's first electric-powered 'flying' boat launched and also, from about the same time but also predicting a 2024 service launch as per the El Reg article, Hydrofoil: Electric ferry will run between Belfast and Bangor
"Methinks this is nothing more than an attempt at re-filling the grant money coffers. Philosophers gotta eat, too."
We need a bigger computer to identify what the actual question to "Life, The Universe and Everything" actually is. It might even need to be the size of a planet!
"Would a post-human society capable of creating a simulated universe be as unethical as to allow all this suffering?"
You never played Sim City? Introducing "natural disaster" or conjuring up Godzilla to help clear some old buildings for redevelopment was a useful and "fun" part of it.
"About the only thing they got right was the rendering quality,"
As the simulated "intelligences" advance through the program, my experience is that the render quality starts to reduce with added blur effects and the action tends to slow down a lot. Possibly another power saving feature.
"I hope all their future sats will also be deorbitable"
That is a license requirement these days. De-orbit or move to a "graveyard" orbit if it's a high flyer. This applies to most sat launches, Russia and China possibly excepted since they tend to ignore "inconvenient" rules. Certainly anyone requiring FCC licenses due to launching from the USA or having a presence in the USA and I'd be surprised if most other launches didn't abide by the same rules or be required to by the host country they launch from.
Ditto the trailing or lack of trailing / in rsync paths changing the behaviour of what gets transferred or where has probably caught every *nix user out at some stage.
Also, for those of use using pip on CP/M and moving to MS-DOS and discovering source and destination are reversed. Although to be fair pip using destination=source feels like a bit of an outlier since I think pretty much every other OS I ever used from TRS-DOS on up used source:destination format. I never really used mini or mainframe OSs, so I'll have to assume that CP/M did things they way they were expected on some previous OS.
"someone asked "are you sure you didn't type 'format c:' ?""
Worse, on Apricot computers, the A: drive was the floppy until you added a hard disk, which then became A: and bumped the floppy up to B: or C: or whatever came next after each hard disk and/or partitions had been allocated driver letters. Not fun if working with both those and "standard" PC's. There may have been others that did it that way, but IME it was only Apricot.
"There is no such thing as an "Indian Internet" or a "MyCountry Internet". It is "The Internet" and it neither needs or recognises idiotic concepts like borders or countries."
Internet: An network consisting of many networks all interconnected. There is no such thing as "the" internet :-)
"How many replacements before you just put a simple shield or flap over the front of the floppy drive?"
My "solution" at a pottery where the optical sensor on the tape drive kept getting clogged with dust and ripping the tapes off the end of the spool, was to open the PCs PSU, turn the extractor fan into an intake fan by physically reversing its orientation, and put a filter on the the new "inlet", so clean air blew out the tape/floppy drive/other open holes at the front. The filter needed changing every week but that was no longer my problem.
Reading through the comments, and the reference to the degaussing being used to clear the persistent letters on the display, I was starting to imaging some sort of Etch-a-Sketch display and the "DUNGGggg!" noise was to shake the display and spread the dust properly again :-)
Yeah, those built-in degaussers were scary the first time you came across them. I never saw a display like that, but did come across many 19" or larger colour CRTs used in CAD and process control rooms[*] over the years.
* control room screens were the ones most likely to have screen burn, since they invariably showed, 24/7, a mostly static schematic of the factory/refinery/chemical plant systems with things like kettle temperatures and valve positions.
Is this incompetence or are they trying the Gus Gorman[*] approach to shaving a little extra profit? After all, they design computers and write operating systems, so an efficient and working payroll system should be a doddle.
* See Richard prior playing the roll in Superman III
but needed a new battery/cell."
Oh, yeah, my batery has been down to something like a 5-10 minute "life" for years, but since it only ever gets used in the powered window mount in the car, it doesn't seem worth the minor hassle nor minor expense of replacing it :-)
I never considered that feature of a SatNav might be a video in port. But now you've mentioned it, a combined SatNav/reversing camera makes sense, especially from before reversing cameras become more or less standard equipment on modern cars.
That's an interesting summary, thanks. It looks like they are all simply "middle-men" buying wholesale and selling retail, with a very few who may some some solar capacity of their own, but the biggest takeaway from that list is that almost all of the regulator-imposed customer transfers from bust retailers is to sellers who are actually in the energy generating business.
"All Amazon is responsible for is delivering the product. Almost nothing they sell is actually made by Amazon, so they aren't on the hook for post sale support any more than Walmart is for the jeans you buy. Are you saying that you think Amazon should be on the hook for stuff they sell but someone else makes?"
If the poster is in the UK or the EU, then yes, the retailer is the one on the hook if they supply faulty goods, so Amazon is responsible for the the stuff they sell as Amazon, but not the other sellers using Amazon as a "fullfilment agent". I'm not sure I can remember[*] the last time I bought something that came with a "manufacturers warranty card" since almost no one ever filled them in and returned them because of the decent consumer protections in place.
* It's entirely possibly I have had some more recently, but since it's basically just waste paper in the package, it would go in the bin/recycling with everything else not required and that info would not be committed to long term memory :-)
"But, alas, who wants the cost (money, time, stress) of taking them to court over it? And what would you get if you won?"
In the UK, it's the retailer who is on the hook. Most large reputable retailers will refund or replace for an obvious fault in my experience. I'd probably expect them to be less aware of "software faults" such as home automation remoter/cloud server no longer existing and be more reluctant to refund or replace because they don't understand the nature of the fault. Worst case is to go to small claims court, which is fairly cheap and easy to do and in many cases, the defendant won't even turn up and you'll win by default. At that point, the legal system it completely on your side and will enforce payment, even if that requires sending the bailiffs to their HQ.
"Something over your head"?
"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."
Douglas Adams
"Magellan SatNavs with "lifetime" map updates define "lifetime" as three years in the fine print."
Funny you should mention that. I just updated the maps on my Garmin SatNav yesterday. The "lifetime map updates" was included in the price and it was so long ago I can't remember when I bought it. It's at least 10 years old now, possibly as much as 15. Oh, and there was also a firmware update too, so I suppose that must be quite impressive in terms of long term support :-) It did get "confused" a while back due the GPS roll-over so it didn't automatically switch into night mode at the right time and IIRC there were two firmware updates before some sort of s/w workaround came through. When it fails/dies, my experience with Garmin will strongly point me at another Garmin device :-)
The problem with the subscription model, in my opinion, is no one has yet managed to come up with a viable and workable micropayments system. There's too many middlemen wanting a percentage cut with a minimum "floor level", so you can't take out a subscription for, say 20p per month, or 1p per usage and similar things we were told would be happening Real Soon Now(R), or at least that's what I read in the tech press about 20 years ago, and repeated every other year or so since. Those middlemen all want a couple of quid/dollars for processing the payment. Interestingly, I believe the processing charge for using my debit card is 5p per transaction, and that almost certainly includes a profit margin, so ultra-low cost subscription models clearly are possible.
You seem to be assuming that a "smart" house of any kind must be controllable remotely by a smartphone while out and about. For many, many people, that simply is not an essential use case. For some it's actually undesirable. If the system running your house is "smart", why do you need to be able to control it? It should be clever enough to work out what you want based on normal activities, whether you are at home or not, how many people are present and in which rooms. There should be no need for remote control except in rare circumstances and especially no need for control by some company hosting a back-end.
"An essential smart meter install"...very carefully worded to imply that it's compulsory without actually saying so.
I think they are under pressure from Government to deploy them in customers homes and get fined for not meeting targets, so despite them not being compulsory for the end users, they are effectively compulsory from the point of view of the energy suppliers, putting them in an awkward position of having to be lying bastards[*] to meet some random Government target.
And yes, I've had almost the identical experience about once per year for the last few years, including the phone call ending fairly abruptly when I say no thank you :-)
* well, more so than usual, anyway :-)
"so whatever system they are using to calculate it isn't very accurate!"
Wow! In my experience, whenever they get around to re-assessing my monthly payment, without fail the automated systems over-estimate my usage by a significant margin. Every single time I phone up and suggest the future payments are too high, the person on the phone has a look, agrees and puts it back down to something close to the current payments.
I see from todays news that collectively, the energy supply companies are sitting on over £8B of customers over-payments and some of them, despite the law, are seeming quite reluctant to pay the customers their own money back on request. I've not personally had that issue, but with that amount of free money sitting in energy companies banks, there's probably a fair bit of interest they are making on it too.
80 minutes probably covers them for the vast majority of outages. I'd imagine MS have data on their own genny usage and have costed the battery to be big enough that the savings on genny and diesel usage pays for the battery, but the genny is still there, ready to kick in for those rare few outages at the wrong end of the curve that stretch beyond the battery capacity.
Let's just hope someone has pointed out to the beancounters that diesel has a limited shelf0life and must be replaced even if not used, every now and then.
In the UK at least, large consumer of energy are usually on contracts whereby they get a discount on their bill in exchange for the energy supplier being able to cut them off or enforce reduced consumption under condition of heavy load.
And while I see your point re. Google, it could depend on what the data centre provides. Just pulling the plug might have much further reaching effects than most people imagine if it's a regional "cloud" supplier for Google Docs etc. That might be cutting off business resources over a multi-State or, in the EU, multi-country customer base, possibly even including those providing emergency or disaster services. We already know from various headlines that Google cloud, AWS and O365 are not as resilient as they would have us believe but still business and government use the services.
You;re right about there being a space junk problem. But there are companies and agencies already spending money on possible solution. What ESA are going ro do is try to get more data on the behaviour of that debris and how it's affected b y space weather so as to better be able to clean it up when the relevant technology is ready. After all, when there's an oil spill, you don't just in and start clean up attempts without getting the best weath forecast you ca, taking note of the shape of the sea floor if it's shallow water and being observant of the water current. The more you know, the more you can adapt your techniques to the prevailing conditions, and whether it's oil spills or space junk, there are multiple different solutions that work better or worse in different conditions.
"In late September, however, China flipped the script and accused the US of breaking into Huawei servers and stealing data as far back as 2009."
The Trump Defence. Don't bother denying, just claim the "other side" has already done the same and worse, so it's alright, nothing to see here.
"Throw all the Linux variables on the Average Joe - from desktop choice, to repository distribution choice, to questions of hardware compatibility, to questions of software compatibility, to learning curve - and you get...dead in the water. No Average Joe wants to commit to that level of plunging off the deep end."
If Linux was for sale, I'm sure you could "sell" it in exactly the way you described. Start with a choice of the three main GUIs, find the specific needs of the user, and then present them with a choice of the suitable distros that use the initially chose GUI. I'm sure that would be simple for anyone in retail who knows their products.
In my experience, most people in retail DO NOT work like that. They have other motives or pressures such as specific brands or models that need to be shifted NOW 'cos the new one is coming soon, or the better commission/profit margin on a certain brand, or the high commission extended warranty with certain brands/models etc. Or, they simply don't understand the products well enough or even don't care, so long as they get a sale.
"studios promise not to use an actor's work in AI training without the actor's explicit consent."
...and the consent will be given by signing a contract, because it will be a clause in every actors contract unless you are big enough to refuse and they still want you. The vast majority of actors are interchangeable if they are "difficult" and can be easily replaced if they don't consent. After all, that's what actors do. They become different people, that's the whole point of the job, so collective bargaining is pretty much the only power most of them have, so long as they all stick together.