Posts by John Brown (no body)

"I'd expect their argument to be that they're merely a marketplace which puts buyers in contact with sellers, and any accusations of wrongdoing should be directed to them."

Go into certain bars in seedy parts of town where the owner turns a blind eye to drug dealers and said owner can be up on charges too or, at the very least, lose their liquor license. With greats rights comes great responsibilities :-)

Re: Not since 1968

"I still need a license to concealed carry it"

I've often wondered about the, me not being in the USA, exactly what it means. I'm assuming that means you are not allowed to carry a firearm in you pocket or backpack, or in a shoulder holster under a jacket without the correct licence, but are able to carry it in full view, eg on a belt holster like the cowboys of the old West?

Re: Not since 1968

"order a gun online (or via mail order if anyone still has paper catalogues)"

That's a strange distinction. Surely "mail order" is simply "distance selling", whether you have a paper catalogue or do it via a website. Either way, you order something and it gets mailed to you :-)

Same here, Pi4, OSMC and absolutely no issues playing back 1080p, wired Ethernet from the server in the attic, and my stuff is all HEVC/X265 encoded which is a bit more CPU/GPU hungry than X264

Re: Lost the plot

"And the launch price for the Raspberry Pi 4B with 4GB of ram in 2019 was $55. Which is roughly equivalent to $66 in 2023 thanks to the recently rampant inflation."

And even the original Raspberry Pi was £25, which is about £37 in todays money, so considering the upgraded speed, number of cores and RAM, it's a pretty reasonable price still.

Original Raspberry Pi - single core @700MHz, 256MB of RAM.

Current Raspberry Pi5 - 4 cores @2.4GHz, 4 or 8GB of RAM

Yeah, it's pretty hard to argue with the higher price point, and if you want, you can still order a 512MB model A+ from Rapid for 16 quid +VAT, which is less than half the price, in today's money than the original Pi was at launch!.

Re: What?

I thought exactly the same. What does that even mean? Sounds like a consultant hedging their bets over which way to jump depending on what the next client would like to hear.

Re: Given the layoffs...

In the case of a tower block, is that always the case? Could it be cheaper to strip it back to the skeleton and then just rebuild the interior/exterior?

Re: Correction

I suspect "buying out" of a lease has got more expensive in recent years since it's now much harder to replace an existing tenant. I wonder how well exit clauses are specified in tenancy agreements? I suspect the fallout will be to tighten up the exit clauses, making it harder to get out without great expense. Which will likely lead to potential tenants being a lot more wary of what they are signing. No one wants to admit their great enterprise might fail, but many will need to face the cold hard facts of how much failure or downsizing could cost them. And if the tenancy agreements are harder to get out of, the landlords will have even more difficulty renting out the space. It all seems rather Catch 22.

On the other hand, I see many businesses looking at the empty space and instead of reacting to and dealing with the problem and making changes to match the Brave New World that brings, many are now moving back their "bad old ways" and forcing people back in to actually use that space. I understand that in the USA it's common to get tax breaks on occupied buildings so having it below a certain occupancy threshold can cost the company money. AFAIK, in the UK, the opposite is true. You pay "rates" (local tax) on the value of the building, but unoccupied buildings attract a lower tax because if the building isn't used, then it's not costing the town/city anything in providing services. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but I have a feeling that lower tax is only for a couple of years, hence why empty shops/stores in town centre are often occupied by charities selling 2nd hand stuff on cheap, short(ish) term contracts. If the landlord is paying full rates, they may as well rent it out at "cost" or a little more rather than leave it empty at a loss.

I wonder if sub-let clauses will become popular?

Re: a 20-year lease ? WTF ?

"You'd think an organisation the size of Meta would employ at least two economists."

They do. But for true redundancy you need three in case one is giving you bad data. Meta are good with redundancies, but I'm not so sure the rule of three applies to economist as if you ask three economists for an opinion each, you'll get at least four different answers :-)

Re: Orbital inclination

"I don't think that is such a bad option!"

Oi! France is a nice place and the French are generally very nice people. The independent principality of Paris, on the other hand... :-)

Re: How much

"The roadster was never meant to be anything other than a publicity stunt though"

Actually, it was the "dead weight" mass used for testing a fully loaded launch. Most launches use a mass-equivalent concrete block to simulate a payload. What Must (or someone at SaceX) did was a stroke of genius in terms of turning a test launch into a publicity stunt that got a lot of the world talking about him and SpaceX, including many people with little to no interest in space.

Re: How much

And even if a Falcon 9 or one of its boosters could be attached, I don't think the engines can fire at a low enough thrust to not just rip away any mounts and/or destroy the ISS when it lights up.

Prospero, launched by the UK from Australia in 1971to LEO is technically decommissioned and "de-orbited" with an expected reentry in 2070. The type of orbit and altitude is what matters to it's stability and longevity, so no, it doesn't need to be moved "entirely out of Earth's gravity well" to keep it up there for many more years. Whether that's viable or economic, I shall leave to the Kerbal aficionados to confirm or deny :-)

"So people who told us Vax are safe and effective,"

The computers or the vacuum cleaners? Both are safe, but could be used in an unsafe manner or used in unsafe ways. I suppose a Vax computer can be used by the military to control and target weapons. Likewise, a Vax vacuum cleaner can be used as support equipment by the military to help keep the carpets clean in HQ or the Mess and help stop the spread of infection, but I'm not sure even Vax would claim that as a primary function.

Now, what was that you were waffling on about again?

Re: re: the objective reality

Are you sure?

Re: Twitter / X is a sewer

I just had a quick scan through "his" last 5 days worth of posts. It's a little like reading AManFroimMars2 but with even less sense and coherence. I think it's just an LLM that needs a lot more training and/or some gentle tweaking with a machete.

Re: Knowledge transfer

"Companies forget that employees also learn as they work and their brains don't get wiped once the contract is terminated."

They can dream :-)

Re: not useful results

"in Jan of this year that one SSD just went offline without warning."

Yes, IME, SSDs have two primary failure modes. Sudden and total death,. often no longer even being recognised as present in the system, or switching into read-only mode due to too many cell/sector unrecoverable write failures, which means you can at least recover data if needed. My experience is as a field service tech and the devices are primarily business grade laptops, so there little to no monitoring, so I've no idea if either of these failure modes are predictable from SMART monitoring. For my job requirements, I don't really care or need to know this, I just need to confirm it's covered by warranty, ie not user damage, replace the faulty parts and get to the next customer site. Personally, I'd like to know the causes and if proper long term monitoring of the SMART values would show any useful predictions, but that's something the customers IT team would have to do and in most cases, they really don't care either. User data is backed up or "in the cloud" and they are happy to just replace any failed laptops the users bring in to them.

Re: I am on digital voice

I wondered about doing that but could find nothing about what "REN" the router can provide. In the absence of that information I assume that it is "1".

Someone was asking on the VM forums about REN in relation to a family members who have 4 phones. It was reported that the REN on the VM hub is 3. And IIRC, the REN on most modern phones, while nominally 1, is actually a but lower so should probably work with at least three, possibly four phones plugged into it. Of course, other providers solutions may be different :-)

Re: I want to know the equipment...

Still can't port a landline number to a mobile though.

Re: I want to know the equipment...

"It's on my todo list to try to set up my BT router just as a modem with DHCP and firewall being handled by my Draytek and then see if I can plug my phone into the BT router and make the service work."

I'm with VM and have been reliably informed by other VM users where this has already happened, that the routers VM supply will still work in "modem only" mode and support the phone. The "wireless hub" they provide has 4 RJ45 and two RJ11 sockets. In modem only mode, only the bottom RJ45 socket works as the LAN connection to your own router and in either case, once switched over and provisioned, the top RJ11 socket is the "new" phone connection for which they will provide and adaptor to a "standard BT socket" for the phone to plug into.

Of course, that's still and effective "tie in" to the provider., but with cable, there is only one provider anyway. I can see this being an issue for people on the BT network using different providers, especially those who are happy to jump from one to another for the best price deals and have LLU providers.

Re: The aftermath of the next Carrington event will be something to behold.

"Anyway, I thought BT had a statutory duty to provide an emergency call service which is pretty much toast with VOIP."

They do. The rules have been amended to only include "vulnerable" people or those who can demonstrate they don't have a mobile phone, hence the free battery backup box for those who qualify. Also, I think the rules have also been changed regarding the battery backup that is/was at the exchanges to keeps POTS running during a power cut. The change being to reduce the capacity by about 50%. I'm not sure if the mobile phone providers have a similar obligation on their base stations though. If not, then potentially, only a very few people will be able to make emergency calls during a power cut.

Re: what about my fax machine?

"What about my dial-up modem - will I still get a 56K connection?"

I read something the other day, possibly a commentard on this very site, that it depends on the VOIP codec in use. Providers using lossless codec do seem to be able to cope with both dial-up modems and faxes. I think s/he even commented that dial-up speeds on a 56k6 modem where actually very close to that magical theoretical maximum. (Apparently there are still people out there running honest to god dial-up BBSs :-))

All that said, I expect here in the UK that most VOIP services, especially this large scale POTS conversion of BTs and VMs, will most likely use a high compression lossy codec to minimise the bandwidth usage and maximise the profits. I expect the quality of voice calls to drop, if not immediately, then over time.

Re: Err?

"unless connected to a UPS"

I suppose that can be a useful addition in places where the power is subject to fluctuation, drop-out and outright cuts, but for the vast majority of us it's not a practice nor economic solutions. Or maybe I'm just very, very lucky and have suffered only a very few power cuts over the 40 or so years I've lived in this house.

As I understand it, both BT and VM will be providing free battery backup for the phones/routers/hubs of those deemed in need. The problem I foresee, even with that, is how long the batteries in the street cabs will last. There's a VM one near me that's been open for at least two months, despite reporting it to them and VM vans being in the area fairly frequently. Even in a properly secured cab, I wonder how long those batteries stay in usable condition after a hot summer and a cold winter? Will they be replaced pro-actively or only if the monitoring kit reports a failure? Is there even any monitoring kit or will they be relying on customer complaints when the battery backed phone still can't make calls because the street cab battery lasted 30 seconds after the power went out?

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

Well, do be fair it's not really a huge technological leap from dots and dashes to ones and zeros. Just the encoding and speeds have changed :-)

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

Ghostbusters are on 16, Who's on 95475949. Who also uses 07700 900461, but that's a shared "party" line :-)

Re: Alternate headline

My take on it is "Bloke who owns company trying to develop AGI tells world he can do it in under 7 years"

Sounds like a round of VC funding is about to happen and he's setting the scene.

Re: Nothing new here.

A great many jobs in IT will soon be able to be automated. How fast can you "upskill"?

I should be ok at least until I retire. I fix that broken shit IT kit :-)