Posts by Lee D

Correct.

And I've yet to meet any outsourcing company where a random can turn up, understand the problem and just fix it like "the usual guy" in any significant fashion. That problem isn't solved by outsourcing, except maybe on huge scales.

And that's made on the assumption that the outsourcing company are employing a team of people who are all skilled and interchangeable even when they are not needed, just in case one of them is off. Which is a lie before you start, and an even greater expense to yourself to finish.

Just in the last two weeks, I've had contractors fail to turn up (twice), turn up without equipment to do the specified jobs (twice), install inadequate equipment despite specs (multiple times), and subs not appear or even tell the company who was subbing them that they weren't going to turn up because they had a lung infection.

Outsourcing doesn't change that SPoF. If it does, if you find a magic company that operates like that... your costs just doubled to let them do that. So... you could have just bought two guys and paid one to sit at home, or ran a small team for yourself.

Question:

If you use GIMP, LibreOffice, Affinitiy and Adobe - all of which are cross-platform - are you honestly staying on Apple's platform just for GraphicConvertor which appears to be - forgive me - a shareware piece of photo management software that barely does more than the junk that they tried for decades to give away with everything, or even things available on Humble Bundles from names like Corel?

There comes a point where everyone sensible has moved to cross-platform tools. That point came about 10-20 years ago depending on your techniness, even if by accident of moving to web-based tools. And now you've basically done that, you're paying for Apple because...?

Re: Regardless of your views on Assange

Certainly, if I wanted to sober up, I'd read that load of waffle first, because likely I'd fall asleep and then wake up sober as anything.

US people openly in court being conferred with by the prosecution lawyer, a guy representing a country who wants to see Assange extradited to the US in this exact case! OMG! What a conspiracy!

But first let's pad out with five paragraphs about how terrible a guy looks in court and how it must be torture (prison isn't nice, torture it's not). And a known flight risk is kept in prison until he's extradited, how terrible, a prison where he's... imprisoned! Of all things! After skipping bail for years, what did you expect?

The Assange fandom really does take things too far in building this guy up.

"Assange was incoherent" - no shit, he's been incoherent for at least the last decade. If you wanted to protest at your treatment, you could have done, in front of the world's press, in open court, recorded. Instead he waffled and started rambling nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if he was whatever the medical term for stir crazy - he choose to sit in a hovel for 7 years, and he's just spent nearly a year in prison. I'd be amazed if he appeared anywhere near "normal".

But playing the crazy will just get him committed, not released. It won't let him off any crimes. And I guarantee 100% that the next time he's not having his every word scrutinised by lawyers that he'll mouth off to the cameras like he always has done. He's a Twit, Premium Edition, with all the DLC.

Re: We need legislation to force proper closing of old accounts

I once solved a similar problem by creating a rule to bounce all email from that domain back as an "Undeliverable" message to an address I found that auto-responded (someone's vacation address) and their postmaster.

It still took them a few days to spot the problem, but my server was obviously more powerful than theirs and they obviously noticed the email loop and took more notice of that than they ever did of me.

Re: They are shit...

Talk to SMARTY.

Same network, same company (Hutchinson), £18/month on a pay monthly contract will get you unlimited data with a stated tethering maximum of 1000Gb before they will act, in their literature.

Re: More Unicorn Poop

The decision to initially use Oracle is where the mistake lies.

As more and more people realise this, less and less people will use it.

It's all very well saying "but it's too expensive to change now", but it's literally never going to get any cheaper... it's as simple as that. You will have to pay that transition charge at some point, as well as the higher annual subscriptions and whatever other costs in the meantime.

Sure, it's not easy or cheap to up sticks and leave, but it won't be any cheaper tomorrow either. Continuing down that path is how people end up in bankruptcy, companies in administration, and banks clinging to outdated technology "because it's too old to change now and we can't find people to do it".

Oracle is a stupid decision. It's that simple. If you're tiny, it's *always* been stupid. If you're mid-size, it may have been understandable at one point but otherwise stupid. If you're seriously large - as this shows - it was still stupid.

You can continue to propagate the stupid decision into the future with excuses, or you can say "it was stupid, and now we're trapped" and realise that one day you'll have to do the exact same thing people are telling you to do now anyway.

I honestly judge any company whose IT department happily use, recommend or support Oracle.

I store in reverse chronological order.

Stuff on the bottom is likely to go off in the next few days (hence includes things like raw chicken/beef that shouldn't even be stored above fresh or cooked stuff, but people still put salad drawers on the damn bottom!)

Then the stuff on the top shelf is the stuff that will expire last.

If you implement a left-to-right protocol too, you know exactly what you need to eat next and/or what needs to be thrown out.

Of course, all food should be subject to the usual "does it smell/look right?" test regardless, but I find my live much easier like that and no sudden "Urgh... that's *still* in there?" shocks.

Now if someone knows of a fridge with the salad crisper drawer thing either on the top or completely removed from the rest of the food and can't have raw blood dripped on it, that'd be great.

Same in the freezer too... but that's much more often subject to packing pressure than it is things actually going off.

Privatise the end-consumer bit.

Nationalise the core-infrastructure bit that they have to use but aren't willing to pay for.

National Grid vs energy companies.

4G licenced infrastructure vs telecoms companies

and so on...

It's really easy, but politicians of all colours only ever act in personal interest. You nationalise the part that nobody wants to do, nobody wants to pay for, but which has to be done, then you force them to use it, and blanket-set the prices for everyone so that they are funding the rural installs as well as the profitable cities.

But then you don't have people paying billions for useless 4G licences that they never use to the full effect, can never pay back in any reasonable time, and which are multiple tiny competing slivers of spectrum rather than one big national allocation.

Sorry, but Ofcom and the government have let them off light.

Openreach should provide telephone exchanges and national connectivity.

BT should just be "yet another ISP".

They're not.

The reason they were separated in the first place is still present - BT and Openreach are in league and just don't care about you because they know most people can't go anywhere else.

A couple of years ago I walked into a workplace that needed a leased line. They'd literally contracted, signed and paid years before and... nothing. BT were the providers, Openreach never did a thing, they both just shrugged. Over those years that they were literally contracted to provide a line they collectively did only the following: Put in a piece of empty blown-fibre tubing. Came back six months later when complaints were made, and did another piece. Came back six months later when complaints were made, and did another piece. Nothing was jointed. Nothing reached the actual place they needed to, they were in no rush whatsoever.

I took over the IT. I looked into it. I complained. They did nothing. I escalated it like mad, and they "came and looked". Turned out, after all those years, there had never been enough room at the exchange to service that kind of line anyway. When I finally got a friendly set of engineers on-site with me in tow, they literally scratched their heads because there was nothing they could do even if they wanted to - there was nothing to connect to at the other end, even if they did all the work that they'd skipped for many years while they actually had our money still. They went away, telling us it was "at least a year away", which was the fourth time we'd heard that.

I put our postcodes (yes, multiple) into various checkers and nobody else said they could provide us with anything, because as far as the checkers were concerned, we were only serviced by BT/Openreach.

So I phoned Virgin on the off-chance, having had a leased line from them before. We had a number of LONG conversations, but I had a good contact from a previous leased line with them at another site. Turned out, a millionaire who lived quite a way away had a private Virgin line installed at great expense for himself. Because of the way they'd put it in (they'd been quite forward thinking), it didn't appear on the checkers as it only needed to service this guy who didn't live near our postcodes, but it was able to be fed off in order to provide the required service to us. We finally had a company willing to install a leased line, at a reasonable cost, which had never appeared viable from any of the automated trackers for anyone but BT.

We cancelled the BT order and told them why. We ordered Virgin. I then spent SIX MONTHS throwing BT and Openreach personnel off our site because they kept turning up to try to provide the line we'd ordered years before, "we're coming to join that tubing"... no you're not, mate. "We're coming to blow the fibre", through what? "We're upgrading the exchange down the road so we can connect you", because you could have done that at any time but fobbed us off all these years? And literally they were just turning up, unannounced, at random, trying to gain access to our site, on an cancelled and refunded contract to try to get our business, months after we got rid of them.

Three months later we had a Virgin line. They still kept coming. After many years of "trying" to install, the only serious motion happened when they realised that they didn't have a captive audience, that we wouldn't touch them ever again, and that our money that they'd been holding

onto for nearly 5 years was about to get refunded, plus interest, for non-delivery.

As payback, two months after the install, I removed all BT analogue, ISDN, etc. lines from site (about 40-50 lines in total) and SIP'd the entire thing over the Virgin line.

We've had the Virgin line five years now. It works perfectly. Zero downtime. They gave me a free speed upgrade to the maximum the line can take this year. We still don't appear on any of the checkers. I still get regular calls from BT asking if we want to use them.

BT and Openreach are in league, because they're still the same company. They honestly don't care about progressing any of their customers or the infrastructure, they just want you captive. And when they think they have no rival, they have literally zero interest in dealing with you, even when they have your money, have a signed contract to deliver, and have all the time in the world.

Only when they realise they could lose their monopoly do they bother to do *ANYTHING* about it.

There's a reason that I refused to even activate my analogue BT line at home, much less use them for ADSL/VDSL.

Re: few days?

Exactly... that password has been "in the open" since 1979 in one way or another, certainly exposed, and certainly since 2014 it's been known about.

The effort to crack such things is intense even today, and takes someone specifically looking at decrypting EXACTLY that old, decrepit hash, just for fun. They did quite well, considering. And in any live system, that password would have gone through dozens of hash updates and upgrades. It didn't do bad for something that was probably written before I was born!

Re: If you MUST use SM

Just buy a 07 VoIP number or similar... let them spam that to oblivion, rather than have to pee about with extra SIMs, phones, etc. Best thing I ever did was buy a 4G router and SIM package for it - portable Internet connection without having to rely on other people's wifi, use it as my home Internet when I'm at home, and it gives me a real-but-throwaway phone number for people who insist they need one, which I can access the texts to if I really want to (via an app for the router) but which doesn't ping, bing or notify me in any way otherwise.

Unique email - I agree. I own a domain and use a unique "username"@ for every service. Anyone spams that service, the email gets blocked. It costs a pittance, but all lands in the same (unadvertised) GMail inbox at the end.

Unique password - no. Just have a set of throwaway passwords that you use for anything that contains the same level of information. If you Twitter has no more information on it than, say, your Reddit, they can have the same password - if someone gets one, they have access to the same information as the other anyway. The username is already unique, so the password won't get re-used with that account name to try to cross into services anyway.

Other than that, the paranoia isn't worth the effort.

"These guys are bad, vote the other guys!"

"The other guys are bad, vote these guys!"

I'll have even the slightest interest in politics when it isn't just based on binary contrarian voting based on disappointment with unrealised expectations that the other side has just as many of.

Re: Panic buying ?

That assumes that he cares about the long-term effect on the US economy.

If in doubt about someone, assume their actions are entirely selfish and malicious, and then extrapolate the likely result and see if it matches reality. Similarly, assume they are trying their best and extrapolate.

When one matches the reality, you have a pretty good idea of what's actually happening and what that kind of person cares about.

Re: From 1 January 20202

That's what I've been saying to every IR35-complainer for years.

If it hurts you, up your prices. The companies aren't going to take your costs on for you if the tax office says they got it wrong, so it's all the same to them.

But if you're under IR35, that should only apply when you're working for a single employer much like a full-time employee would anyway. So... that's *exactly* what the tax office want, and what IR35 is basically designed to do: stop you being employed while pretending to be self-employed.

You are either an outside contractor there to do a contract only, working on contracts for other places, and sorting our your own taxes, or you're an employee. Pick one. That's all IR35 is.

If you pick the first and it means you have to raise prices - do so. Because *so does everyone else*. If you pick the second, problem solved anyway and you could have done that years ago.

What salary (is it a salary if you're a contractor?) you negotiate is up to you.

And, if you price yourself out of the market such that it's cheaper for Barclays to hire someone like you on a PAYE basis... guess what?

Re: Wee Bang Theory

My IT technician was an IT apprentice.

However, we had an unofficial deal - he would work for a year as an apprentice, then I would personally make sure his salary the year after reflected the sacrifice made on his apprenticeship minimum wage for that time.

It was literally that ridiculous that it may as well have been unpaid. There's no way that most apprentice-age people can survive that without mummy or daddy covering the cost of their living for the entire apprenticeship. Which kills the point of the apprenticeship as those kinds could just go to university or something anyway.

How many pool car spares would you need for electric cars versus the same for petrol cars?

I'm guessing, in this kind of instance, a lot more, thus killing the savings you would otherwise gain.

Especially as police vehicles are often used 24 hours a day, over different shifts.

You've gone from, say, 10 petrol cars taking 10 minutes to refill throughout the day, to 30 electric cars where maybe 2/3rds of the fleet are out of action at any one time to charge.

So.... what do you think powers them now?

All you're doing is moving the power requirement from the street cab, to the people's houses at worst.

Sure... it'll inconvenience people. But in this day and age, I haven't had a 999 call go through my workplace (a school) switchboard in years, except for non-emergencies (e.g. line tests). People just do it on mobile nowadays.

I can collect thousands of number plates, makes, models and colours.

I just sit in a park for a few hours with a phone to make notes on.

Number plates are public information displayed prominently on every legal vehicle. As such they are eminently cloneable. It's time we had something that wasn't cloneable. Like an encrypted RFID tag.

Would also stop all of the "We'll knock up a legal-looking plate, no questions asked" people pretty much overnight. Especially if you asserted a system where only each plate has a unique key - so your "lost" plates are useless to everyone as soon as they're reported and are actually just advertising "I'm stolen!" everywhere they go.

RFID you can target from a distance too... just use a directed powerful magnetic field (e.g. in a cable under a bridge) to induce a current so they transmit, then pluck the encrypted ID out of the air with any directional antenna and a cheap radio.

So long as you don't allow replay attacks (e.g. time-based OTP-like IDs based on an original seed - doesn't need to be accurate to-the-second, just to-the-day will do), you can easily design such a system securely.

Hell, while you're there, mandate OBD integration so the mileage is integrated into the seed... now they know if you're fiddling your odometer too...

Re: Say it ain't so???

They once tried to charge me for a contract phone that never arrived, they expected *me* to chase it with the Royal Mail parcel delivery (believe it or not, I'm not their customer so they won't speak to me anyway!), and they took three monthly payments by DD while I "waited" for it to arrive.

When I cancelled the DD with my bank, they refunded the whole thing in minutes and then 10 seconds later I had a call from Three demanding to know what happened and where their money had gone. They then phoned me a ton of times within the space of an hour to demand money and threaten me with all sorts, to the point that it was just flat-out harassment. Then they threatened to sue me.

"For what?"

"Breach of contract!"

"What contract?"

"The one we sent you!"

"The one in the box with the phone, you mean?"

"Yes!"

"The box that never arrived?"

"Yes!"

"The box that you have no tracking on because you sent it second-class cheapy mail and can't be bothered to chase it?"

"Yes!"

"The box that I phoned you up a month ago to tell you it hadn't arrived?"

"Yes!"

"With the phone that I asked you to block the IMEI of because I have certainly never received it and therefore it's missing or stolen and I diligently reported that to you in the naive hope that you would actually block it or send me another phone?"

"Yes!"

"Therefore, it would be a phone that even I couldn't use, even if I had it, and therefore wouldn't be able to make use of the contracted service anyway?"

"Yes!"

"Well, strangely, if I had that contract, then I wouldn't be complaining... and that I don't have it means that I haven't signed it, and for damn sure you haven't got my signature on a copy of the contract... which means that you have ABSOLUTELY NO STANDING."

"But... but... we'll take you to court!"

"I'll save you the bother... if you ever call me again, I'll initiate the action for you."

Never heard from them again.

Re: Apple lost in Denmark

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5geby/the-iphone-is-guaranteed-to-last-only-one-year-apple-argues-in-court

Instantaneously, or over time?

Because Eco cycles on washing machines pull far more power. But for much less time overall, and in smaller bursts.

If you have a program written by someone who can't count, index an array or stay within memory bounds, then the language really isn't the problem.

It's a good fail-safe. A barrier to hit while testing. Something to safeguard completely accidental escapes. But if you're allocating 1000 bytes and then putting 2000 bytes of data into it, without properly checking, then the problem lies with the programmer - maybe not their inability to be infallible, we all are, but certainly their ability to use tools available to them, to properly factor out their code so that sizing/allocation/etc. is always tested for bounds checks, to program in a safe way, audit their code etc.

I'm not at all sure "just use a language that doesn't have that" fixes that problem - you can still off-by-one on an array index and splat some guy's details to some other customer, while staying completely within bounds, for example. If you had a check that the row index was as expected and correlated to the web session / customer accessing it, then it wouldn't matter if you messed up. It would flag and get fixed.

When you have a programmer who doesn't have, or isn't allowed to use, tools that prevent such occurrences in the first place, then the language is only one failsafe that you've inserted. They are still liable to fail because of their operational procedures.

When you have a programmer who has their own tools, bounds checks, macros, sanitisers, code-checkers, whatever, and it goes through him and others, and testing, and bug-reporting, etc. then the language is irrespective and just "another" tool in the armoury.

Writing stuff in another language which cannot express "this memory byte" doesn't solve the problems with a sloppy programmer who isn't checking, designing their entire method safely, or not verifying their work.

Sure, he won't get a memory buffer overflow. But it also means that he's just as likely to miss other things because he doesn't have to worry about memory buffer overflows, so he's just not as careful.

More usually, you then see things like huge memory over-use because they just want everything in a memory-safe object permanently in memory all the time and let the computer worry about when to get rid of it (if it ever safely can!). I'm pretty sure that explains a lot of the "drag" of the memory-safe languages - a complete lack of understanding of the memory size/usage/management.

Like every Java program I've ever seen, .NET, etc.

Re: they have simply stuck those domains on auto-renew

Which is why I don't use any company that doesn't let me turn off auto-renew, and why I sign up only to monthly recurring agreements.

I'm happy to "auto-renew" month to month but if you try something next month... bye! Quite likely I'll just go somewhere else entirely, and most it will cost me is one month's payment.

And I barely pay any kind of premium for doing so.

T&Cs are pretty much unenforceable when they're long and/or unreasonable anyway. Opt outs you will abide by and if they are not, by default, opted-opt there are rules against that.

TV providers - I see retired people spending upwards of £100 a month on watching TV which I just can't fathom at all, as they never watch anything that's not on Freeview. After a while, you just realise that the companies are scumbags are just don't deal with them.

- No TV package (I have Freeview via a Raspberry Pi which can record/stream anything to my phone, other computers, abroad, etc. at will and without restriction).

- No landline package (I just don't bother).

- No broadband package (I used 4G on an unlimited monthly rolling contract on a device I own and can change the SIM card in at will)

- My mobile is owned outright and the SIM is pay-monthly and on a different provider (so I can easily swap my phone SIM into the 4G box if I'm ever really stuck).

And I tend to stick to online-based providers who don't have the sales teams to push their products to you.

I trialled Netflix, Amazon Prime and all kinds and ended up sticking with Amazon Prime as I save month on the postage enough over a year to justify it anyway. I also realised that Netflix is only "fun" for the first few months and then it quickly becomes very same-y and not worth the effort.

I get no phone calls. I get no "upgrade" notifications by post or email or anything. I get no upselling. I'm not contracted into anything longer than a month, and I can easily swallow the cost of a lost month if I ever need to just buy another SIM and use that immediately instead.

I moved providers about six months ago because the one I was on wasn't giving me the best deal (40Gb for £25). I switched. I saved (stated 1000Gb "unlimited" for £20). The old provider now offers the same deal. Too late! And, no, I will not spend my life looking around for the best deal and phoning them up to see if they can upgrade me... if you don't care about me, you don't care, and I'll go elsewhere as soon as I notice.

My dedicated servers are on monthly auto-renew from a company that never contacts me. Their annual price is literally the same price times 12 and cheaper than most others and I never have a problem. My domains are on annual auto-renew with another company but I get 30 days warning of it happening so I can cancel/move it if I like. I have, several times, over the years when companies started getting silly with the costs of a simple .co.uk domain.

I realised long ago that I should not be paying companies for their atrocious customer service which I never use or avoid using as much as possible, or for them to upsell to vulnerable elderly people. I'll happily take a company with no customer service or sales lines at all and a quick get-out if it goes wrong. Giffgaff, Smarty, those kinds of places just work so much better. Hell, even Amazon at the end of the day.

Life is easy (and cheap) when you do things like that. It's a bit like the original idea of RAID (gather a load of "inexpensive" things and just expect them to fail)... just gather a lot of cheap providers and when they mess you around, move onto the next. The alternative is having to tie-in with a big name who wants to do things like this to you. I can't see that there's even a comparison there.

Re: Step 1

Opposite.

I moved into an old (presumably 70's?) flat on a little cul-de-sac not far from a major town centre.

Not only is there no gas, but the only service available is a copper telephone line that they said could only do a handful of Mbps even with VDSL ("fibre" to them). Initially it was ADSL-only ("1Mbps expected"). Then they went round and stickered all the street cabinets with "Fibre is coming" and wanted me to have something around 8Mbps from that.

Day one of moving in, there was everything on the doormat from Virgin (not available in that area at all, except over BT lines as a virtual-service-provider-thingy) to BT to the landlord's "preferred" kickback ISP.

I threw them all in the bin, after checking the availability and speed testers. Bought a 4G dongle. Got 30-40Mbps inside the flat. Bought a 4G antenna the next week to keep it stable and give it the best chance outside. I pay £25 a month for unlimited data now, play all my Steam games over it, VPN into various places, stream live TV, etc. - does everything I want. Left the phone line to rot (never even activated it - it was £160 just to activate the line, and then £16.99 line rental + contract + broadband, etc.).

If you want me to use stuff, you have to actually give me something worth buying.

I could literally throw a stone from my window and hit a shop in the centre of a large town inside the M25 that I guarantee you've all heard of. But I can't get fixed broadband approaching even the speeds I was getting in the early 00's, or even comparable to what I get on my smartphone.

Re: Pointless

I have an SSH tunnel to a dedicated outside server.

To my knowledge, over all the years I've been doing that, not one dedicated server provider is subject to these kinds of blocks.

Any consumer is (i.e. my home connection, the leased line in work, etc.) but not datacentres.

And most datacentres a) don't care unless your name pops up somewhere, b) have explicit terms that VPN is fine so long as it terminates at the server and isn't just a passthrough, c) are easily replaced by just about any other datacentre from another provider in seconds.

Thus I have a route to double-check all my DNS is identical from two locations (home and the dedicated server), and I also have things like DNSCrypt and DNSoTLS if I want it.

Blocking DNS at the moment is really like asking the Royal Mail not to deliver packages that look like CDs to a particular person at a very particular address. Nothing at all to stop you using an alternative courier, obscuring the actual recipient, obscuring the contents of the parcel, or just having them delivered to the side-door or shed.

Ironically, I don't pirate anything whatsoever, and even pay proper licences for things like my forum avatar (on sites that let you have them, *cough*). If I can't get it legally, or only in an incredibly restrictive way, I just don't see why I'd try to... they obviously don't want my custom or me to watch it, so problem solved.

Hell, even my emulators are backed by having an original physical copy of the games I used to play lying around should anyone question it. And I'm not even sure why I'd want to hack an expensive piece of hardware such that it probably wouldn't play future official games, just for the sake of a cheap game.

If a game's good... pay for it.

But if even I can bypass these restrictions with nothing more than a router with a VPN option, running SimpleDNSCrypt, or even a VPS that costs a pittance each month, I don't see that you're hindering the true pirates at all.

Total annual consumption is no substitute for peak load figures.

An extra 10-20% on peak load would only show up as maybe 1% averaged annually, but would mean you need 10-20% more generation on-hand almost all day long (unless it can fire up real quick, most peak-load generation is pretty much the long-slow-burn kind of thing that takes days to shutdown/startup again so it's cheaper to keep running).

Additionally, contributing to peak load in, say, winter means that you have to increase capacity across the board and yet it'll sit idle in summer.

https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Note that the peak usage is almost all CCGT, and that it's consistent throughout the year, backed by coal still throughout the winter. Also note the consistent and stable grey bar for nuclear, which takes too long to "turn off and on again" so runs all the time.

It's also almost twice the power than off-peak requirements, wind is the majority of the renewables, and that's far too variable to rely upon for increased peak demands. Solar is the antithesis of peak demands and despite everyone's comments - where's the batteries in those pictures? They basically don't exist. Solar accounts for slightly less than the France and Netherlands power exports to us. Why do we import? To ensure consistency of supply, good margins and cope with unexpected peaks.

Throwing even 1% onto peak load basically increases all the associated infrastructure and source requirements by a minimum of 1%. Energy companies invest knowing that usage will grow over time, but the smart-meter debacle is a foretell of what they are realising - they can't guarantee supply for everyone into the future and need people to cut down and/or to cut them off. But if you increase those natural increases by another 1% on top (which may be more than the natural year-on-year increase itself), you drastically change the game.

And electric cars may be the absolute worse case - huge, quick, on-demand, sharp peak power requirements, especially in public places, etc. If you plug your car in in work, or when you go shopping, or are parked in town, or on a motorway service station or wherever the new charging stations are, you expect it to be charged by the time you get back, which they won't know. So they'll have to fast-charge. At peak. On demand.

Home use will happily be accounted for in off-peak hours (where they are perfect for it), but they are even talking about USING your home car battery at peak hours to stem the rise in peak power. That's a side-issue. Because any non-home charging station *won't* be used off-peak at all. Exactly the opposite.

And that little tiny sliver of solar and the very temperamental wind is going to do bugger all to cope with that.

Mersenne Primes are forming the basis of some ECC curves because of their special properties, as well as random number generators, not to mention being an integral part of some post-quantum cryptography candidates (e.g. Mersenne-756839).

Every time you say to a mathematician "Well what's the point of that?", I guarantee you that it's *already* in use somewhere for some purpose that will end up in something you use every day and rely on.

I have 20 years of email tied up in an SQLite database that, if I dare press "update" on the old Opera, will likely just disappear.

They even released an unintentional Vivaldi preview with the functionality in it... nothing since.

I see no reason to use Vivaldi while it's literally just Chromium in a fancy wrapper. I can get that anywhere... hell, that's basically what Edge will be very soon.

Email clients are 10-a-penny. One that works and imports all my old email (from accounts that no longer physically exist) are not.

There will come a time when I just script the whole damn thing out into Dovecot etc. mailboxes and never touch Opera or Vivaldi ever again, but I was silly enough to believe their years of initial announcements that it was going to come.

They have literally zero USP over just using Chrome.