* Posts by David Hicklin

579 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007

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Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

David Hicklin Bronze badge

> keep your car in a heated garage at night

Only if you are lucky enough to have one!

David Hicklin Bronze badge

> we will all be sorry. Not just the busted-axle drivers, but the Pavement Contractors who are traditionally major supporters of all politicians.

You realise of course that only a small portion of tax raised by road vehicles is actually used on the roads?

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Re: Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

> many cars went fooom as a result of dripping petrol.

more probably the build up from small oil leaks over the years

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Re: Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

> According to that link over one in 30 petrol-powered cars catch fire. Really?

That sounds high to me as well, although they can often be on the roads for 10 years+ which might put it up a bit but not that much otherwise our roads would be shut all the time while they put car fires out.

Infosys co-founder doubles down on call for 70-hour work weeks

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In my first job it was expected that the salaried (rather than hourly paid) staff would "do what was needed now an then"...problem is the became "work all hours all of the time" as there were not enough people to do the tasks.

I was much happier at my second (and all subsequent jobs!).

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

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Re: Impossible you say? Maybe unsinkable, huh?

It was described as "virtually unsinkable" by the Shipbuilder magazine but the adverb evaporated over time.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

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Re: Paper Tigers

ZX81 , Serial I/O card (Maplin) and a Brother thermal typewriter all hooked up together to do printouts.

I even did a simple database with the ZX81 and a fair bit of machine code work, it was a pain having to save everything to tape....and one bad tape...

Oh they were fun days.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

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Re: Building software is hard...

> cancellation of Phase 2b (to the East Midlands

Very happy with that as it would have left a viaduct through the middle if the town (Long Eaton) at the level of our bedrooms.....Mind you it would have been fun during my retirement watching them struggle to build the damn thing at the bottom of my garden, I was going to take daily photo's to build my own time lapse...

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

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Re: Automatic "upgrades"?

> sniffing outgoing network packets from the hours that the network is supposedly idle. We have now blocked 39 sites mostly in Russia, Iran, India and China

I would more concerned as to what kit was CAUSING those packets in the first place

Tech support done bad sure makes it hard to do tech support good

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Re: The easiest way to make a small fortune on the Stock Market .....

But then does all this "faster faster" approach make accidental stock market crashes more likely by everyone triggering "sell sell sell"? I think they have a circuit breaker that trips the stock market if the transaction volumes exceed a certain value???

AMD talks up car chips it hopes will join you for a ride some time soon

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Some people do like this up to a point

I am with many people here who don't want this lane keeping etc stuff but I and my family love plugging the phone into the ApplePlay (others are available) and it just working for music, satnav, hand free phone, plus automatic lights and wipers are great.

However I don't need any more than Cruise control, would like it has already been mentioned to adapt to slower traffic and going downhill, but that is about it. You can keep the rest of the self driving stuff thank you!

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

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Re: Easy or Expensive?

We had that when we were house clearing after a bereavement, yes it was old but still perfectly usable wardrobes and other furniture but nobody wanted it. Yet you hear of people desperate for that stuff.

Some stress relief with a sledgehammer and a few trips to the council tip was the result.

How the tech toy century has troubled Santa's sack

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Re: The creative maker ... has never had it so good

> the casual hobbyist is finding some of the options are closing off.

This is so true, many modern devices are available in surface mount only and if you have older eyes and hands (like me), well just forget surface mount - too small, too fiddly.

Having stated my hobby in the late 70's I have seen lots of change, usually for the better but for the hobbyist I fear SM will be the death knell and we will just be left connecting pre-made modules and programming a few PICs...

ps I love PICs, so not intending to put them down here!

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

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Re: My way or the highway

Wish I could upvote more than once, here too I have had to beat win10 to within an inch of its life to make it nice to use - and stick to 7 where possible.

If 12 needs MS account to log on etc then that will still lie dead in the water for me - everything I have uses local accounts

Artificial intelligence is a liability

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Re: "Artificial intelligence, meaning" . .

Too dammed right, plus Artificial intelligence machine learning systems can only regurgitate what they already now, and the old saying about is still true "put bullshit in, and you get bullshit +10% out"

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

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Whilst it has a lot of drawbacks...

...how about child benefit that the parents can't spend on Booze, cigarette products or lottery tickets?

Intel trims a few hundred workers in Cali just in time for Christmas

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Re: Oh really!?

> people will have already done most of their Christmas spending anyway.

Except if they have done it on credit cards "at the best time" it hits them even harder in the new year

To infinity and ... just over the Atlantic

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Re: The catastrophic non-failure was a real shock...

> The camera failed ; HotSat-1 was fitted with the highest resolution, commercial thermal sensor in orbit,

And that may be the problem - it was not robust enough for space use

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

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Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

> dedicated key on a keyboard to "restart current app" would be great

Ah but would Windows understand which app is the current one ?

Mr Cooper cyberattack laid bare: 14.7M people's info stolen, costs hit $25M

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Re: Cost of failure too cheap.

It looks like they anticipated that and are offering 24 month if you read the article

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

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> LG make an air source heat pump .............It is about £5k list price.

And the installed price ??

David Hicklin Bronze badge

> street-wide pipe networks under roads and pavements

Oh that would be fun in the middle of winter - turning the roads and pavements into permanent ice rinks.

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

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> wildfires happen when brush and undergrowth i

I did read some time back that by stopping wildfires which nature uses to clear out all the combustible material that we just make them worse when one does happen.

Yes Climate Change is making some places drier and others wetter, and we do need to reduce human made emissions but it needs to be done in a sustainable and practical way. As has been pointed out we just can't turn oil** fossil fuels off overnight without something to replace them or human society will totally disintegrate.

** Yes oil will STILL be needed as a many things in our modern world are made from it, not just fuels - this is what many people are failing to understand

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

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Re: Paper trail and zoom recordings win!

> People didn't know they were on the list until they were told to leave their desk immediately

Been through that at a previous UK company is what is probably the worst day most people go though, I survived but seeing people get called in and then escorted out is not nice.

But at least they all got pay in lieu of notice being as this is the UK (+ redundancy)

British railway system is getting another excuse for delays – solar storms

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Re: replicate these results using actual equipment?

> But what are the implications for my wireless doorbell?

The doorbell will be fine but as the internet will be down it won't work anyway

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

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Re: Copper

> their emergency phone no longer works

You need some form of power backup, here a UPS drives the OR stuff as well as my network switch and wireless AP.

That assumes of course that the Fibre link stays up at the other end !

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

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> The internet in the late 90s / early 2000s was far preferable to now. There were enough people with basic HTML skills that there were large numbers of sites on specific things, hobbies and club sites - visual design often quite basic, but many with meaningful content.

And the web sites were coded to be as lightweight as possible due to the slower connection speeds, now you get any and all bloat, ads and gods knows how many links to other sites.

I can still remember hand coding my first html pages using notpad and it was lots of fun learning it.

Broadcom to divest VMware's end-user computing and Carbon Black units

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> Fortunately my VMWare Workstation 17.5 license is not time-limited,

For now......

Here's how fast a spacecraft should fly to successfully detect amino acids erupting from Enceladus

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Re: How fast is that relative to...

as long as it does not exceed R17 it should be fine

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

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I always use local accounts and thus have never logged onto the "store" - and I will keep it this way for as long as possible !

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

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Re: EVs sitting idle on lots?

> They can still do CV boot, brake rotors, and shock absorber scams.

You missed the aircon clean and brake fluid flush

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Re: EVs not selling?

> s it just me, or are Tesla fanbois becoming even more annoying than Apple ones?

Not just the fanbois, the drivers are displacing the Audi/BMW etc drivers on the roads.........

Goldman sacked: Apple 'wants out' of credit card collab

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Re: I just don't get ..

> how in the world can that ever be a money maker for them?

Because enough people will run up big balances, not pay them off each month as get charged lots of £££/$$$ in interest

Net everyone is as savvy as me or you, or other forum users here....

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

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Re: Ban banning things

> why does the government feel it *needs* to do these things

To show that they are doing "something", even if they are unenforceable, hence new laws when existing ones already cover the activity "Look we banned it - problem solved"!

Vertiv goes against the grain with wooden datacenters for greener bytes

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fast-growing plantations such as in Brazil

Having seen the damage they do in Planet Earth III I would hope not!

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

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Re: Ideal platform

> After a few pints everything starts to seem very clear and absolute, to me: there are very few problems that can't be solved by culling.

I've lost track of the number of problems we have solved during discussions at the pub - only problem is that we seem to have a memory commit issue as we can't remember anything the next morning.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

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> scroll through a document because I can read it faster than the sharer...

Now there is an enhancement request that would make things better!

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

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> Because it has the brand "Tesla" on it

And is it just me that has noticed that Tesla drivers have replaced all the Audi, BMW etc drivers as the Nutcases on the roads ???

SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

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Re: Clearing stage zero is again the primary aim...

> gravity being a LOT lower means it doesn't need the rocket motors to be running at 100% (landing or lift off) on the Lunar/Martian surface

I thought the problem with Mars is that has an appreciable gravity but very little atmosphere which makes landing very challenging, so it will need a fairly big firework to get into orbit

Vanishing power feeds, UPS batteries, failover fails... Cloudflare explains that two-day outage

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Re: Lessons:

> ratings of the power transistors

Similar thing at home with some touch sensitive bedside lamps, touch the base and they came on dim, touch again and got brighter before they cycled to off after the 4th touch, very nice.

we had 3 "almost" identical, 1 from John Lewis and 2 cheaper ones from ASDA, the cheaper ones failed after the bulb failed for the first time as their triacs were rated right on the limit, whilst the JL one is still going years later as it has a much beefier (volts and amps rating) triac.

As NASA struggles to open OSIRIS-REx's asteroid sample can, probe heads off to next rock

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How close ?

So they are going to meet this asteroid that is due to pass quite close to us, hopefully the mass of this space craft won't make it deviate the wrong way a little to much.....

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

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Re: Just use an ad blocker

> type of "ad" on Facebook, the sponsored post.

Facebook Purity is your friend here.

The UK government? On the right track with its semiconductor strategy?

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Re: Once upon a time, in a land far away.........

You can either have a Parliamentary Democracy or a Dictatorship (by any other name) but not both

After nine servers he worked on failed, techie imagined next career as beach vendor

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Re: eDirectory ?

> Good old NDS that's what it is.

And I loved NDS until I moved jobs and left it behind me.

Intel's PC chip ship is sinking with Arm-ada on the horizon

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Re: So what's the strategy?

> empathy (measured as the ability to figure out others emotions from pictures) decreased with rank in corporations

I would say that is more of a disconnect from meeting people the higher up the ivory towers they get.

Basically big corporations are like the huge dinosaurs that (allegedly!) took s long time to realise that the tail had been bitten off, they become huge and unwieldy with the turning response of a supertanker and innovation just seems to bleed out of them the more detached from reality they become

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

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Re: Lager Attrition - ouch!

I felt the bit "occasionally works, but there's a punishingly high attrition rate." was priceless

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

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Re: rolling blackout on wheels

>> The original Mini would be feasible as an EV. It wouldn't get a very good NCAP score though

Which is why they had to make is much bigger on relaunch, there is an electric version of it though.

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Re: Never going to happen in the UK

> Horse and cart.

Problem with horses is that they wear put quite quickly when worked too hard. Mines 21 and just used for light hacking now, 25 is often tops for the bigger ones (smaller ones live longer)

David Hicklin Bronze badge

Re: But "everyone" won't move to an EV

> What's the average age of a car in the UK

Well mine is just over your average at 12.5 here in the (petrol,UK), plan is to replace it with upon retiring just before the "ban" with another one that should (prangs permitting) last another 15 or until they take my licence away !

David Hicklin Bronze badge

Re: > The vast cost of this would be of the order of three trillion quid

> So how does the UK, with <1% of the world's population need >10% of global expenditure to reach net zero? Easy.. Just look at HS2

And we are a very congested build up Island, so much of these works involves digging up and knocking down other infrastructure

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