Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Sounds like the credit reference agencies who tell you that you can improve your credit rating by borrowing money and getting deeper in debt

Re: Labour policy initiatives.

not from the 9.7m they had, which was a push to get rid of the Tories.

Labour had 10.3m votes in 2019, and dropped to 9.7m in 2024. They didn't get any significant number of anti-Tory votes in 2024. The reasons the Tories got stuffed was their drop from 14m to 6.8m votes. Those 7m missing votes didn't go to Labour, some went to Reform and some were the 3m fewer people who voted at all.

Re: "It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs,"

I never could get a coherent explanation of why or where got the cable from

75ohm cable with BNC connectors could also be from video camera/monitors, so perhaps collected when left "unwanted" in a conference room?

Unfortunately the centre pins on 50 and 75 ohm BNCs are different diameters, so tend to either make poor connections or stretch the female socket centre connectors when plugs & sockets are mismatched.

Re: Benjamin Franklin and human rights

Franklin owned slaves as a young man, but later became a very outspoken abolitionist.

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Political Correctness is about ensuring your language doesn’t cause offence without first checking to see if it does cause a problem.

It's worse than that, it's more about assuming that it is causing a problem based on one's own views, without being able to accept that the view of the people concerned should be taken into account. When those involved say "you're over-reacting, we aren't offended", the PC response is "no we're not, you should be offended and if you're too blind/thick/naive to see it then you're part of the problem". It's an arrogant, self-righteous, reaction.

Wokeness is about being aware of and responsive to what is actually causing a problem.

It started that way, and would indeed be a good thing if it had remained so. Unfortunately the problems concerned often affected minorities, and some more militant members of those minorities weaponised it to the point where it became seen as PC++. It's perfectly reasonable to say something like "we need to accept that this small group sees things differently, and we should consider that", but very different to say "our small group disagrees, and if you don't do what we want you're a nasty, discriminating fascist". Taking minority views into consideration, and finding a working compromise, is good (and arguably what "woke" was about). Expecting minority views to prevail over majority ones because minorities are more important is neither good nor useful.

when the far right accuses the liberal left of these things they are implicitly recognising that they’re on the wrong side of history.

"left" and "right"are not useful terms in such a statement. You could equally accurately say "when the far left accuses the liberal right of these things they are implicitly recognising that they’re on the wrong side of history."

And ferry happy to close the Deal.

Ginnungagap

Remember how that ended. Do you really want the inhabitants of the Capitol to seed the next universe?

Re: I keep all my PWs in a text file called passwords.txt on the desktop

I've heard the same approach suggested for physical security. Leave a door key under the plant pot on your front porch, but make sure it doesn't open your lock. By the time the burglar has discovered that, they'll be getting antsy about neighbours and doorbell cameras and will probably give up and go elsewhere.

Re: who have not seen such a device in the wild (or at least outside a museum)

Indeed, what little magic smoke they had was very well contained. Not easy to release even under extreme conditions, unlike much of today's kit.

Re: Self-inflicted

All the more reason for councils to concentrate on what matters to their taxpayers, like rubbish collection and potholes, and not waste money on virtue signalling support for things that have nothing to do with local government.

Re: Where is Common Sense in This?

I have multiple 100+ year-old books which still function perfectly-well.

Assuming they're written in a language that's still understood, or that you have a convenient Rosetta Stone, that is.

Re: Trump 1 - Europe 0…

A 4G contract is probably better. My 5G phone often switches to a 5G network with worse performance than the 4G one.

Re: Just LLMs doin' LLM things

Profitin'

Re: Am I the only one ...

why has it been trained on the data that allows it to do so?

One area that AI is supposedly good is in medical diagnosis. It has to be trained on medical texts, many of which contain images of naked bodies for perfectly legitimate reasons.

Re: Platitudes

got his "mate who can sign the certificate" in on the last day.

That's quite permissable under building regs if the mate properly checks the work before issuing the certificate. Many (most?) electricians prefer not to do it because they'd rather get paid to do the whole job than only get a small fee for final certification, but they may be willing to do it for a mate.

Re: The problem with politicians

This is the problem. People have stopped voting for someone they want, and just vote against the party they don't want. They vote for Reform (especially in by-elections) not because they want to see Farage in No. 10, it's that they have almost given up caring because they see that all parties do the same thing, and are useless at it. They have a faint hope that an electoral kicking will make them listen, although there's certainly no sign that it had any effect on the Tories or Labour.

Re: "Gartner says"

Replacing Gartner with AI might actually be one place where things would improve.

Re: Nostalgia meets modern hardware

Back in the 80s I remember using Newbury Labs terminals to talk to a Z80-based RML380z. When we opened the terminal we found that it used a Z80 internally for the display, and had another in the keyboard. Two Z80s just to interface to the one which did all the work.

Re: A SInking Flagship?

If only there were a UK TV licence that included all streaming services as part of it!! I'll wake up from this dream some day.

Just taking the basic ad-supported tiers of the main streaming services, that works out around £430 per year for them all, plus the £180 for BBC. Are you sure you want to pay > £600 for that?

Not just Linux

I remember when Solaris 10 came out, and too many FOSS scripts broke because they misparsed the underlying SunOS version of 5.10 as being less than 5.9 or 5.8.

Re: Experience includes institutional knowledge

Documented, yes. Usefully documented, not so much.

That's ISO9001 in a nutshell.

Main exchanges had lead-acid batteries that could last for many hours, and a generator to take over when required. With the move to digital exchanges and outlying concentrators the battery life was much less, but in general long enough to take a generator on-site and connect it.

The problem with fibre setups is that powered street cabinets are everywhere. BT ones rarely have more than an hour or two battery life, others (like Virgin) have no battery backup at all. Since the mobile network often uses the same fibres for backhaul, once the outlying node batteries die nothing works. Only PSTN lines on main exchanges still operate.

Re: Wait until Facewatch is hacked

That's why I always get a receipt from one shop if I know I'm going into another with my purchases.

data input and call centre-type roles wouldn't pay close to £33k.

The cost of an employee to the employer can be around 50% more than their salary, taking into account all the overheads of pensions, NI, office space, etc. £33k cost could map to £20k - £25k salary.

Re: I idly wonder

Don't zap them, tax them. $1m per satellite per year "orbit rental" should come in handy, shared among the overflown countries.

Re: The problem with scanning ...

"these days"? It has always been so.

Re: Obviousy a dual booting system...

Or some passing lowlife/drunk spotted the protruding USB stick the screen boots from and half-inched it...

Re: Dual CPU card Sun servers

There's a difference between fault-tolerance (hot swappable duplicated components,) and high-availability (clusters). Sometimes that's a critically important difference, and you need to know when to use the appropriate one.

I'm sure there is a word for this but it escapes me

Contraction?

These are the same type of people who get their lorries stuck in little villages because they blindly believe their GPS systems, even when the road is clearly labelled "not suitable for HGVs". The bigger problem is that they are allowed to get way with it, by retiring on a nice pension instead of being sacked.

Re: "costs are higher than predicted"

Because a beancounter who doesn't understand how business works has miscalculated that it will save money.

Re: CSuite are doing the right thing

only *government* can be fascist, as fascism is *goverment* control of *society*

Not really. Fascism is a political philosophy involving extreme nationalism and military-style control, but it can be associated with non-government movements like Mosley's 'blackshirts'. Such movements sometimes make it to government, but by no means always.