Posts by MachDiamond

Re: Workhouses

"Clearly it doesn't, if people still can't afford the basics."

A visit to somewhere such as San Francisco/Silicon Valley to look at the cost of living and the difficulty in getting around goes a long way to showing why a worker may not be able to afford the basics. Take that SF wage packet and live someplace with a low cost of living and you don't have money in the bank, you have royal coffers.

I've said it many times, I earn less than many of my peers in the same business but the cost of living where I am lets me keep more every month than they do. My home was much cheaper (and paid). I have big garage workshop with vacant land around my home and I'm looking to purchase the parcel next to me at the next tax auction. I'm using that plot for a garden anyway since its sat unused for 4.5bn ish years and it would be expensive to extend utilities to it compared to many other properties in town. My car is owned outright and I don't have an CC debt. That's not all just due to living someplace inexpensive, but it's easier to achieve because of it. I'm a couple of hours from the big city so I can still see major concerts (except for Ticketmaster), sporting events, theatre, ballet, symphony, etc. I'm going to a big trade conference and it will take me 45 minutes to get to the train station with an end point around a block from the convention center so I won't be sat in traffic for hours just to attend (between the petrol, parking fees (don't know if they take cash or not)) and the time, the train(s) are a bargain and mean living outside of the big city isn't an impediment. It's not like I attend one of these monthly.

Re: Just waiting for...

"an advertisement for a porn site using either AI generated Elon Musk or Donald Trump - or perhaps both?"

Oh, good god! Something like that would put me off faster than a dip in a glacial lake.

Re: An interesting twist

"Anyway, its kind of wrong to use a person's likeness without their permission unless it falls under 'fair use' or that person's long deceased (and even then there's a small matter of the ethics of bringing dead people back to life)."

By "long deceased" you'd have to mean >100 years. There are estates such as with Elvis Presley where copyright and moral rights are still in term and maintained. Once those copyrights expire, any descendent will be far enough removed for there not to be any chance of repetitional harm. One of the boys in my graduating class was a direct descendent of Benedict Arnold but it was much more interesting than actionable since it was many ancestors ago. From Wikipedia "He led the British army in battle against the soldiers whom he had once commanded, after which his name became synonymous with treason and betrayal in the United States."

It could be very interesting to have AI generated historical figures come to life to reenact history to the extent that we think is accurate. I'd rather see a movie than read page after page of dry text. It also give a chance to show clothing, what cities would have looked like and how people lived. I see a lot of people that criticize people from the past without any understanding of those times. Their judgement is based on modern circumstances.

Re: Why does anybody want to go there?

According to Heinlein it would be "loonies".

Re: Artificial gravity doormat

" IIRC it's static that keeps it on the spacesuits..."

It's bone dry so there's a big problem with static electricity. It's easy to see all of the regolith that clung to the Apollo astronauts suits.

I've met a fair few of the moonwalkers and they describe the smell of the moon (once back inside the lander) as more like burnt cork rather than gunpowder.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"The biggest shock to the US system was probably the OPEC crisis that helped kick the shift from muscle cars, land yachts and assorted gas guzzlers into high gear. Now, the US is creating another OPEC crisis by destabilising many of OPEC's members, cancelling US production and has been flogging off it's strategic reserves. Politicians really are smart, aren't they?"

As old as I am, I can barely recall the OPEC crisis (1973?). One has to remember that the answer from the US car companies was to come out with "mid-size" cars when everybody was buying small imports that got much better mileage. The US companies did deals with the Japanese companies and re-badged some small cars so they'd have something on the lot that would sell.

There's plenty of US oil that can't be processed in the US. Not all oil is the same and refineries can only use certain narrow grades that they are designed for. New refineries are not being built in the US and haven't been built for decades. I agree that plenty of reserves are not being tapped that could be mainly due to politicians pandering to one anti-oil group or another. I don't see it as being a bad thing to not use it all up as fast as possible, but the political angle is not good. The selling off of strategic reserves is also politicians buying votes even when it makes no sense at all to do it. I'm sure the military could use up what's left in a month of war given how inefficient military machinery is. A B-52 long range mission burns up over $1 million of fuel. Pilots don't often train the full cycle due to the costs.

Politicians are smart, it's just that their aim in self-enrichment, not running a country for the benefit of the citizens. If you look at it that way, they're genius level.

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

"Of course we also just cut out a major distribution step in the petrol supply chain, and we wouldn't need to refine the fuel as heavily (saving a pile more energy), so the balance is actually even further in favour of the EV."

A further benefit is that on a kWh basis, the emissions from a power plant are much less than a bunch of ICE's producing the same amount of energy in cars. It's not feasible to fit the same level of emission controls on a car. I haven't seen a verifiable scientific study I can quote, but I have seen many articles on how even a coal fired plant with modern scrubbers outputs less per kWh than vehicles. If carbon capture is ever perfected for utility scale coal power plants, that would make EV's even more eco-friendly.

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

"I don't think having kids is the problem, it's more general population growth."

The historical way population has increased is through people (women) having kids. Weather local population growth is home grown or imported is just fiddling detail.

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

" Replacing all that with electricity is a lot more than just a few kw per vehicle per night."

All of that petroleum based fuel was refined using gobs of electricity so swapping ICEV with BEV gets some of that back. The transition isn't going to be overnight and it's a good thing for it to take time so all elements of grid, car repair shops, etc have time to adapt. This is why I'm against government mandates and taxpayer money being spent on public charging. It wasn't needed to go from horses to automobiles and it shouldn't be necessary for people to switch from ICEV to BEV if it makes sense. The infrastructure took some time to build before many people didn't need to own a horse or saw value in something with a petrol engine (or an EV early on). The bonus now is electricity is all over the place and it's a matter of having the right amounts in the right place. In the mean time, if you need a charge and all that's available is a bog standard outlet, it can work even as painfully slow as it might be. The same thing applies if your horse needed to eat and the only fodder available was a grassy field that was going to take more time than if you could have put hay and oats in a trough.

Re: people like me who drive about 3 miles per week.

"Get a bike and use a hire car/van if you need to shift anything heavy?"

I can't count how many times I've seen a good deal on something that won't fit in my car and hiring a pickup makes it too expensive. I can't justify owning a pickup truck, but I still move enough things and drive in inclement weather often enough to justify having a car.

Re: No shit

"You're confusing power with energy. "

I agree with the OP about using the term "power". Electric showers draw a bunch of power to be able to heat water instantly. A 3 hour use of the shower would total a lot of energy where a quick 5 minute sluice wouldn't be nearly as much.

Re: The EV hysteria peak will pass before long

"The grid is not ready. Production is not ready. Technology is questionable (fires). Cost is ridiculous. Raw materials are too few."

What you are arguing is that an artificially accelerated ramp up is a bad idea. It was once thought that Uranium was very rare and only in very few places. The problem was that before nuclear bombs came into being, the demand for Uranium was limited to people using it in glazes and laboratories. Once the lid was off and prospectors/mining companies could see the created demand, Uranium was found all over. The same sort of thing applies to Cobalt. It hasn't been in high demand so large mines using heavy equipment weren't going to be profitable. There was enough demand that using manual labor in poorer countries gave some people an opportunity to earn an income. The whole thing about child-labor has to be looked at through the lens of those locations. There aren't many schools or daycare so parents have their kids with them while at work. Not something we see in the developed world. Just like I used to "help" my dad with property maintenance, I suspect that the 'labor' the kids contribute isn't very valuable until they are big and strong enough to do real work. That's the point in many places where they will be entering the workforce no matter what.

To the extent there are the raw materials, mining will expand to fulfill market demand and the grid will be improved to keep up with the load. The issue is that capital costs money so a mine operator can't just order a few hundred million in diggers and haulers in one go. The same with improvements to power grids. Change/growth isn't the problem, it's the rate of them. Forcing just puts strain on the system and any mistakes are immediately amplified.

"You don't need transport when your whole life is confined to a single tower block."

Is there a genetics module for SimLife to look at inbreeding problems over time with such an existence?

"It will be a blessing if local areas need to provide for their local communities, so all the local services we've lost over the decades reappear."

What? Nobody wants that which is why all of these "local" people are ordering online from Amazon and having it delivered the next day. While they might be frustrated from time to time that the high street is mostly boarded up, they don't make the connection.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"I would LOVE to be able to walk to work. I've just done a 136-mile round trip today to install an IT suite."

When I have office days, I do walk to work. The path from my bedroom to my office also goes right past the coffee service.

When I have field days, I'm in the same boat with 60-150mile totals while carrying a fair bit of gear.

That's not to say that it won't work for people in other situations. I've seen some really nice train stations that were designed with bicyclists in mind. Lots of secure racks under a roof to secure the bikes that includes on-site security and CCTV so thieves don't get any ideas. My closet train station isn't within biking distance, but it's also in a very bad part of town with no overnight security so I wouldn't leave my car there to take a train 175 miles to stay with friends over a weekend. I'm stuck driving.

Re: Finally doing what I said they should do

"After all, companies manage to pay bribes without writing "cost center: general corruption, item: bribe" on their balance sheet. "

It's not a bribe, it's payment for consulting and local project guidance.

Re: The "ransomware is a false flag to crack down on crypto" meme

"The cryptobros are just worried that one of the biggest "markets" for crypto will go away if everyone quits paying ransom."

There's still guns and drugs with some underage pr0n thrown in.

"I've got a sidearm, I can take care of myself."

Not at the scale we rely on government to secure for us. Even for up close and personal, being armed may not be very useful. Not being armed in some situations could mean staying alive since if you draw your weapon when a bad guy already has his out, you immediately become a priority target. Feeling lucky?

Re: It is funny

"There needs to be term limits and age limits."

I agree. Public office should not be a career. It should be something that one does as a service for a limited time and goes back to doing real work after.

My mom is older than many politicians and still sharp as a tack, but I know of other people that haven't aged nearly as well so it's hard to say that people over a certain age are unable to do what's required, but statistically there is a good cut-off point. 65 could be a good where at the end of the term the person will be 65 or under. It could as easily be 60 or it could be that there is a required cognitive exam that has to be passed for a candidate over a certain age (still with a max age in place).

I'm older and I'll admit that I'm more "set in my ways" than I was when I was younger. Some of that is not bad as I've seen quite a lot of what doesn't work and what does, but too much of it leads to a stagnation of policies in a changing world. Will that latter part be me? Maybe, I won't rule it out but at that point I'll have far less personal future to worry about so it's all about getting to the finish line in good standing. For somebody in politics, they need to have to ability and care to do the most good for at least a couple of generations into the future, if not longer.

Re: ?

"Genuine question, how many big cyberattacks have they been able to stop,"

They can't comment on those in any detail due to national security. It's IS more than one.

In the mean time we are still inundated with robo-calls that don't get stopped due to the fat checks the phone companies make. There's still issues with people being scammed using the ol' gift card payment trick. Why can't there be purchase limits on buying gift cards so people aren't going to be scammed for more than a couple of hundred?

Re: They operate outside the law already

"They just have a more difficult time with evidence during a trial if it was collected illegally."

It's possible to gather evidence illegally that points at more evidence they wouldn't have known about for which they go through the process of getting a warrant to collect. It should be "fruit of the poisonous tree", but good luck with arguing that if they've covered their tracks in a minimal way.

Re: It is funny

"It has everything to do with Trump, because before him / without him the republican party would be unified"

Behind who, exactly. The GOP collectively is suffering from dementia. They can't find anybody that isn't so tainted that they can't run them for US President so it's the lesser of evils and a shoe in for D. Trump based on little more than he has better presence than all of the others. The US has a bunch of geriatric weirdos in political offices with very few exceptions. Nobody is going to convince me that the Pelosi's have't gotten fat on insider trading and Nancy's paid influence nor is it likely that I'd change my mind that Joe Biden is nothing more than a front for some cabal hiding in the shadows.

Re: It is funny

"It's got precisely nothing to do with Trump, hence the downvote."

I have no issue with the mindset of "Make America Great Again". It's better than "now that I'm a politician, how can I game the system to my benefit" that most "elected" leaders have tattooed on the insides of their eyelids. I'm not saying that Mr Trump is some sort of saint, but the premise is a good one.

Every person should support where they live. If you do nothing but take, pretty soon there is nothing left. If you toss the packing from your take away out of the car window, the landscape gets more and more covered in litter. If you treat others like dirt, you wind up with a village of really grumpy people. I don't see any of that as a great way to live.

Re: Real stats

"And yet, that stat is meaningless unless we also know how many of that technical intelligence could also have been obtained by other means, how many could have been obtained if they had asked for a warrant first, etc. If their only way of getting " technical intelligence on malicious "cyber actors" " was being able to spy on everyone in the US, their "intelligence" must be really crappy"

The stat also isn't giving any sort of ratio. They've relied on this intrusive and abusive legal dodge to hit that 97%, but is that by hoovering up massive amounts of data that is no more than an invasion of privacy? I see this as an admission that they have no way to catch the bad guys unless there's no rules they have to adhere to.

A couple of decades ago police were catching criminals with half a stick and length of string (old fashioned detectoring). Now they need computers listening to every phone call and reading every email to come up with leads and evidence. Not surprisingly they also seem to be coming up with private communications of the committees that oversee their activities.

"Even with a 5-way Teams conference, I don't have to quit other applications - on the ThinkPad, I had to quit just about all running applications, because it ground to a halt and started stuttering."

Maybe someday we will get to the point where the next performance increase in hardware are so expensive that even large companies start deciding to extend what they have a few more years. This should give devs a big kick in the pants when it comes to optimizing their code. I had some engineering friends that escaped from the USSR when the wall came down and since they only had access to 640kb PC's, the code they wrote was about as optimized as it comes. One showed me an FEA program that blew my mind that it would run on a very antiquated PC. The output was mainly numeric, so you didn't have pretty pictures to look at and needed to know what you were doing, but ..

Re: We need a new metric

"Default behaviour of chrome "

Microsoft, Apple, Google: Choose your manner of torture. Given the sorts of things Google gets up to, I'll stay clear of Chrome.

Re: We need a new metric

"People edit video on an Apple Silicon computer with 8GB."

It can certainly be done, but it's not efficient if you do a lot of editing or are doing complex video effects.

Somebody just doing office tasks can certainly be just fine with 8gb of RAM. But, that's today. Next month with a new OS release it could be a problem or the computer is needed for another task where 8gb isn't sufficient.

The cost of 8gb of RAM has dropped in the last several years while the cost of an Apple computer has gone up. If Apple is going to continue to make throw-away computers that have no CPU, Memory or Storage upgrade path, they should at least have enough of all three to survive longer than a Chromebook.

Re: We need a new metric

"Yeah - fully agree. Its also that a lot of devs have nice wizzy machines and just don't understand that Fred in accounts has a 20 year old Windows 98 PC (ok a bit OTT but you get the idea)"

A little hyperbole never hurt anybody and it does illustrate a good point. If a new app requires the latest OS, which only runs on the latest generation of hardware, the buy-in to be able to run that app can be thousands. I just saw a neat utility for Mac that would be handy except it won't run on anything more than a year old and with Apple prices, that's a big pile o' money. If it would run on something older, I would have sent them the money.

I think there could be a market for software that runs on older machines. I have an old CCTV application that runs on an older computer and it's fine. I'd love more features but I'm not going to splash out for a brand new computer just for that. I also have a stack of PC's in the closet I've been given (I have a friend that does estate sales). They all work and I've popped in a freshly formatted drive with W7 or Linux on it so they are ready to go. One is slated for a small CNC router I want to build. That doesn't need gobs of performance, but many new CNC programs require the latest everything. Why? G code is just a text file and the computer isn't doing anything more complex than squirting that out to the router. If you want to write your own code, you can do that on a Pi, but it's easier to manage on a Windoze box.

Re: We need a new metric

"Biggest question really is what you need all that RAM for and why 8GB isn’t enough."

You don't edit any video files, do you?

There are plenty of applications for more than 8gb of RAM. I can sometimes get into projects where I have a couple of VM's going and a handful of applications open and it would have the OS using disk storage as swap space. I can be much more productive if I'm not waiting on the computer. When my new cheesegrater is swapped into my office array, I'm going to add another 32gb of RAM (making 96gb total) for ~$25. That's very little to pay for the times when I'll use that much RAM. When I do need it, I expect it will be in the midst of a big and complicated project that I'm being paid good money to do (on a fixed contract). The faster I can do that work, the more my customers will love me.

If I did nothing be commentard on el Reg, this wimpy little laptop would be sufficient.

Re: We need a new metric

"-- things ought to have moved on since then! --

WHY?"

4k video. Highly compressed media files (that need very fast decoding). The biggy is that memory costs have dropped so it's the same or less money to equip a new computer with 16-32gb of RAM for what 8gb cost several years ago. The same applies to storage. It seems like everytime I buy another SSD, I spend the same money and get twice the storage, yet Apple wants an additional $400 to go from 1tb of storage to 2tb the last time I looked at a Studio. Everything I have now has a 4tb main drive as I'm tired to the system bitching at me when temp files use up all of the free space and I have to close everything and reboot to clear the docks.

Re: As some of us said at the time...

"It might be that other countries are subsidising the sector heavily, but throwing money into companies to make them "competitive" is a cost, not a benefit"

If there were a business advantage for a company to have fabs in the UK, there would be some. Government, no matter where, only has one tool in their box and that's to throw money at things. If they concentrated really hard before their 3 martini lunch, they might develop a new tool that can be used to analyze why there are no fabs in the UK and working on fixing those issues which might cost nothing at all.

In the US, top level politicians are tripping all over themselves to spend taxpayer money on EV charging stations. Going by the recent past for this type of thing, whatever they come up with will be rife with fraud and waste from the onset. A huge problem is when the charging companies have to deal with local government to get planning permission, permits and inspections. The red tape is akin to concertina wire and the locals are always adding to the barrier. The same goes for putting solar on your home. The compliance and permitting costs are a significant percentage of the build and the delays through inspectors showing their importance by nit-picking items or just not being able to visit sites in a timely manner to do their work adds endless costs.

The Tesla Shanghai plant was built in short order partially due to it being a government project (they hold the title) with full time inspectors on site checking and signing off work in real time so the next trade could come in and start their work without delay. If this show of urgency was implemented in other places, loads of money could be saved.

"They can build factories in the USA, but where will they find people with the needed knowledge to work there?"

The plants are mostly automated so they don't have to find many. The bigger question is how they will make any money when they have to petition the US State Department to get a license every time if the customer isn't the US government. I can't remember the cut-off, but processes smaller than a certain size are considered a National Security concern. Build the fab in Asia somewhere and export is no problem.

The USSR was building ICBM's with Z80's and it was a big concern for the US. It's not like they need the latest cpu's for something like that. Perhaps the worry is RADAR, SONAR and signal analysis or supercomputers decrypting communications.

"My question is, how much cheaper is it to build a 32nm fab today than a 3nm fab?"

The cost to build and staff a fab is so expensive that it makes little sense to not build a new facility to the latest spec. I think it's hitting hard limits on scale at this point and what's needed is a new approach to the overall layout. Another factor is how many quarters (not years) before there's a return on the investment. It can be faster if one spends a few more billion to be able to charge much more per chip.

Re: Poor, deprived Americans

"People of where?"

Way back before my time they used to say "colored people" but that's very racist so they changed the order of the words and now it's politically correct. <sigh>

Re: The Great Firewall of Britain?

"Education is the ONLY way to protect children online - to arm them with the know-how to avoid, as best they can, the bad things."

Parental monitoring is a good idea too. I was no angel when I was younger and often was pushing boundaries. Now there's the virtual world where "bad shit" is readily available. When I was young I couldn't visit an adult bookshop or cinema. I'd be grabbed by the collar on the way in. It was difficult (but not impossible) to buy beer and spirits. These days you can have all the pr0n you want just by clicking the yes box when a web site asks if you are over 18. Want some weed? Order online and have it delivered. Beer, again, order online and have delivered. The delivery driver has a quota to meet so isn't going to fret about ID if you will just scribble something on the signature line. YMMV, not available in all locations, consult your physician before doing anything, have your attorney on speed-dial.

Re: Only as "smart" as the dumbest link

"Actually, knowing the 12 month rule, the longer they take to sort it out, the better :-)"

That's good for not having to pay all of the back usage, but if they've consolidated usage so it looks like you used 8 years worth of gas in 1 year, that can affect estimated bills if they can't get a meter reading and possibly what they might demand in deposits.