Posts by John Brown (no body) 25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"if not worse than the long-lived things they have replaced."
I suspect that is the most salient point in the long run. A cheap electromechanical thermostat, maybe with a basic timer, probably lasts decades and more than "pays for itself" in carbon costs. Fancy modern "smart" thermostat, lucky if it lasts 5 years due to either electronics failure or the "smart" host going under or being deprecated and all the barely recyclable e-waste it generates over the decades the old style one will last.
"Shares of Google parent company Alphabet are down 21 percent this year while year-on-year Q1 2022 [PDF] revenue saw 23 percent growth – a slowdown from the 34 percent year-on-year growth seen in Q1 2021."
Revenues "only" up 23% instead of like last years 34% (pandemic effect), so shares drop 21%. It's madness!
"What could be better?"
Adding Trump into the mix :-)
I hear Trump has bad mouthed Musk over this and Musk had a public fit over it. Bearing in mind one of Musks aims on buying Twitter was to re-instate Trumps account (and likely donate to Trumps political aspirations).
"Private citizens also owned armed warships, cannon, and fortresses."
That would be the eras equivalents of Musk, Buffet, Bezos, etc, ie a very few of the super-rich. Certainly not the average citizen. And even then, I doubt the framers thought of those few people as being part of a "well regulated militia" but felt it best not to legislate against them (or might even have been part of the "club" themselves)
...go here (https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/gb/en/) end enter your serial number and then go to the driver & software section. The auto download will find all drivers and firmware updates and install them using their app which will be/can be downloaded, or manually update from the list of available updates. Lenovo may be as shonky as most OEMs, but they do provide pretty much everything you might need to update or repair their kit yourself in terms of drivers and documentation, something I find certain other brands are a lot more reticent about.
(You may need to click the national flag at top right to select your local country)
Agreed. Much of what we get with DAB could already be done with FM. The "promise" of DAB was better and more features as well as better quality and more channels in the same amount of bandwidth. Then the beancounters figured out that lower bitrates in mono instead of stereo meant many more lower quality channels in the space we could have had many good quality channels. The relatively slow roll-out to a decent level of coverage hasn't helped either. I'd say the biggest problems with DAB are:
1. The way it's used by the broadcasters
2. The poor roll-out.
3. The lack of of an upgrade path to DAB+
DAB isn't that bad. But you live in an area with a shite DAB signal. Not quite the same thing.
I drive a lot and find DAB is mostly a decent signal. On the other hand, anyone living near Tebay on the M6 in Cumbria or 10 miles up or down from there would think FM is shite using your logic because the only signal available is Classic FM. No other FM stations, no DAB. Plenty other areas like around the Lake District too. I suspect it might be something to do with large hills and small mountains, but I could be wrong.
"As HIVE controls our gas boiler, its demise will put death from CO poisoning a nor-remote possibility."
Maybe Centrica are just bringing forward the day when new gas boilers are no longer available and encouraging their customers to switch to something else.
You have a point, but I think it will very much depend on the uptake of the many and varied subscriptions for the various features. There will be a breakeven threshold and if it's not met, it could cost them a pretty penny. I suspect that's why they are trying it out in SK. They love their gadgets there.
"Most cars (in the UK at least) aren't bought any more. People just pay a monthly fee for 3 or 4 years then return the car."
At least until all those "smart young things", renting everything, owning nothing, start approaching pension age and suddenly realise they should have been paying into their pension pot, not renting heated seats and will not have a car once the pension kicks in and the salary stops, and now can't afford 90% of the "stuff" they've been renting all their lives.
That's probably be the next "pensions crisis".
The baby is "floating" in the amniotic sack through the gestation period. The mother, on the other hand, may never float in water until the baby is due and thus be subject to 1g throughout the pregnancy. Once baby is born, it also is subject to 1g, so the birthing pool has no effect other than whatever benefits the mother gets at that time.
Unless, of course, without their human overlords directing their every action, they evolve into something "better" and go off to colonise the universe, wiping out any threats to their ever growing expansion. It'll just be a different civilisation to the one we would normally envisage for ourselves, not an ending.
I'm also a bit concerned, as per the article, about the lack of research on children spending extended periods in low or micro gravity. I think we need to start sending children to space ASAP to see what effect it has on them. Maybe ask their parents if it's ok too. I'm sure the various ethics committees will be fine with this.
Meteors? I'd be more worried about worn bearings and everything juddering to a halt, possibly abruptly and catastrophically!. Not to mention the many, many other structural and engineering issues in just building it, never mind creating or shipping the millions of tons of materials needed to build it.
"Whilst not defending Metazuckbook, isn't it pretty standard practice to lay off rubbish staff?"
Being in the 10% or whatever lower performers doesn't mean you can't do your job. If you keep culling the lowest performers, eventually you are going to be culling good people, no matter how big the org.
"Humans were not built to handle this sort of scale. I feel awe and despair in equal measure. If this fails to move anyone, they just didn't grasp the reality of what they're looking at."
Oh, we do have the capacity. For a very, very short time. But as Dr Who said of Humans, they have an infinite capacity to forget and block anything extraordinary :-)
"The thing is, the answer is very simple: you arrest and incarcerate pepetrators of things like vandalism, trespassing, public defecation, petty theft, and aggressive panhandling. you incarcerate..."
Whoa, Bob, hold yer horses. Ot's called petty crime for a reason. Fines or whatever, not jail time. Unless it's a persistent/repeat offender. Or do you want to go to jail when you get caught picking your nose while driving?
"Maybe it's an excuse to hire 100s or more officers to "watch" the feeds 24/7"
Or, more likely, minimum wage civilian employees, with minimal vetting.
It also crossed my mind that any private individual agreeing to live stream their doorbell or other security cameras might be doing that 24/7. That could come as a shock for anyone on a capped or otherwise limited BB package. Especially it it's a package that lets you keep going past the cap and then bills by the MB.
"Unless lawmakers passed laws that made it illegal and applied it retroactively. Which happens all the time."
That's actually pretty rare, possibly never, in terms of making something illegal. In most civilised and democratic countries[*], new laws are not enacted overnight, they usually come with a significant notice period, especially if it's one which introduces a regulatory framework or change to a regulatory framework, so that those businesses affected have time to adapt to it. The few laws which may be retroactively are usually laws with make some legal that was previously illegal and occasionally people previously criminalised in the past may be pardoned.
[*] I suppose I should exclude much of the US in light of the "trigger laws" abruptly enacted by the Roe V Wade decision. But even there, the laws were well publicised in advance such that people and organisations where aware of what might happen and have contingency plans in place. Even those laws neither came out of the blue nor are retroactive (so far as I'm aware)
According to the article...
"One of the Exchange Servers had abruptly died. "Consequently, half of the constabulary had lost email!"
Eventually it transpired that a disk in one of the servers had failed the day previously."
And then later on...
"The replacement was popped in and a rebuild was started.
"While in the process of rebuilding the array, a second disk decided it was going to join the party and while not quite failing..."
The timeline seems quite specific in the article. As I said, the 2nd disk failure is not relevant to "the server died and it was all down to a single failed HDD in a RAID"
"If you've not had the above played out in front of you, are you even a real IT bod ?"
Yes, because I'm the contractor who gets sent to fix it in 3 days, not the one worrying about whether your PHB is a penny pinching moron. :-)
If you want same or next day service, you need to take out a maintenance contract, otherwise you'll be further down the list of priorities than our paying customers. (Although will always try our best to get there ASAP because you might turn into a contract customer, but we'd NEVER push an off-contract job above a contract job.)
Okay downvoters, tell me why I'm wrong instead of just hitting a button and moving on. A server died and the diagnosis is a failed HDD in a RAID array where the solution is to replace the failed disk. Why did the server die? The whole point of RAID is that a failed disk, other than in a RAID0 config, shouldn't bring the server down, it pootles along in degraded state. The fact they thought replacing the failed HDD would be "the fix" means they were running with redundancy, otherwise they'd already be looking for the backups (ignoring, for the time being, that a 2nd disk failed after the fact, during the array rebuild and is not pertinent to the initial server death). I suppose it's feasible that the disk failed in such way that it caused the controller to have a fit, but I've never seen that happen before and if that was the case, on an outlook mail server, there WILL be data corruption, so again, a simple HDD replacement is not going to fix it
Clearly the server was NOT ok because in the previous paragraph we are told the served DIED and that was what started the whole fiasco in the first place. The fact a second disk died during the replacement of the failed disk is just icing on the cake. If this really was a properly configured RAID array with redundancy and not just a RAID0/JBOD, the server would have carried on working and simply replacing the failed disk to rebuild the array would not have been the solution anyway.
Either the original story smellls a bit or the re-write by El Reg got the order of events mixed up.
"So same machine, Windows 11 unusable, Mint very usable. I know the conclusion I've drawn."
Which is at odds with the MS "conclusion". From their point of view, your computer is too slow therefore it's time buy a new one with a new paid-for W11 licence. For most non-technical users, that;s exactly what they will do. And businesses running fleets of PCs/laptops as well.
You, probably like most of us readers here, are the outliers who choose and OS (or trim down an OS) to suit the machine it's running on. Everyone else just upgrades their machine to suit whatever Redmond dictates.
"If there is a problem with the law it is that it may not be possible to hold Microsoft to account for actions taken by their badly programmed robot."
It may well eventually go to court to be settled, but I suspect the outcome of a "robot" doing something illegal will put the onus on the robot owner. They programmed it. It's their problem if they didn't test for and foresee all possible outcomes. After all, if hardware fails and kills someone, the designer/company is likely to be sued if a design flaw is shown. A "robot" doing something illegal is, be definition, a design flaw. The court case, when it comes, will be a super-sized, multi-pack of popcorn event.
That makes sense, but it does throw the whole $1B termination fee away by the sounds of it. Why is it even in the contract if it's not what it says it is? It sounds like either Musk is forced to buy anyway, at the stated price, or he has to clearly demonstrate that Twitter broke the rules and walks away scot-free. Or is this a one sided termination fee? If Twitter broke the rules, Musk gets $1B from them. But if Musk broke the rules, he still has to buy it anyway? Still confused :-/
"I agree the board will not sell out for less than $44B but they might accept a settlement for less with Musk getting nothing but egg on his face."
The settlement being the $1B "walk away fee" as per the contract. Unless anyone knows different, that "walk away fee" is due if either side walks away from the deal for any reason other than the "act of god" thingies. Whether Twitter could then go on to sue for other things, such as possibly breaking NDAs or disparaging Twitter are separate issues. But, unless someone know different, either side can walk away for any reason, even a whim, so long as they pay the $1B.
"With the habit UK ISPs have of throttling and dropping connections when they notice you've downloaded more than half a gigabyte,"
I've been with VM since it was CableINet, Telewest then Blueyonder and apart from a relatively short period where they slowed you down after time-of-day dependant threshold, there's been no caps or speed limits other than the package limit in most of that time, certainly not for quite a few years now. I just downloaded 25GB this morning during what I suppose is peak time, with no issues, pretty much at the max 100Mb/s my package allows.
Although now I think about it, I think there might have been a period when "unlimited" free phone dial-up was introduced, you got kicked off after some length of time of no activity, but it didn't seem to actually work since there's always at least some activity. I remember mentioning it on the internal support newsgroups at the the time and the Network Operations Manager (or whatever his very senior title was) replied with something along the lines of "Shhhh, we know, don't worry about it" :-)
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