Posts by SAdams

Re: Because xG was so lucrative! Insert x of your choice.

I expect they will nonetheless. I’d give my money to whichever can give me a reliable 4G service, which in my area is a joke.

Also depending on how long it takes Ofcom to get their act together. Starlink’s Direct to Cell will not be fast to start with, but they can’t do much worse in terms of coverage. No one really needs more than 20mbs to their phone, so whilst I get the cases like stadiums where sheer bandwidth capacity is the issue, network companies could make themself far more appealing by providing 100% coverage, than by providing faster top speed. Yes there are some using 5G for broadband, but how much are people going to pay for that in cities where they already have FTC/FTP broadband?

Re: Hmm

Amen! So many of the comments here slagging off Musk etc before the even start. It’s not as if the US, UK or EU governments spend money effectively. I was recently involved in reporting potholes to the local council. Three potholes within a couple metres of road. One was classified as small, one medium, and one large. The large one was declared to large to fix, so that was put on hold for a road resurface. The guys came out to fix the medium one, which had been prioritised, within a few weeks. They closed the road and went to work, but left the small one right next to it. Why? Because they were only authorised to fix the critical one. In effect the same team will need to visit the same 2 metre stretch of road three times. When this was escalated to the council, they saw no problem with the process.

Multiply that issue hundreds of thousands of times across hundreds of departments, and across many countries, and you have the reality of modern government.

I too hope they succeed, and that Britain gets a different government next time around that is also interested in getting stuff done in the real world, rather than entertaining their pet ideologies from university.

Re: 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland (Winter War)

“ Learn some history yourself.

During Operation Barbarossa, from 1941 onwards, Finland was an ally of Nazi Germany.”

That’s only nominally correct. It was the USSR that had invaded Finland in 1939. When Germany decided to attack Russia, Finland understandably took the opportunity of a distracted USSR to regain some of it’s lost territory. Yes there was some co-ordination between Germany and Finland at that time, but purely on the basis of “my enemies enemy”. The history of Russian invading Finland goes back a lot further than WW2, and a big part of Finnish life is geared around the next one. I think that’s the real point.

But anyway, arguments about who did what 80 years ago are a bit pointless here. The current Russia is a bully and has brutally invaded Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and now the rest of Ukraine for no reason other than Putin’s megalomania. Many brave people in Russia have tried to stand up to him and have either been imprisoned on trumped up charges or paid with their lives. If anyone is going to get all prissy about the creator of Linux following the trivial restrictions which are the rest of the moderately sane worlds response, with his own OS, them arguing about who sided with Nazi Germany 80 years ago is at least a touch ironic.

Yes exactly. Also you can get your whole family on it and not spend ages supporting their devices, and have the benefits of ecosystem integration. Yes it would probably be better of they all used open standards, but I’m not even sure I would want an open standard for “find my phone” etc

Re: "they were required to sign an NDA"

I believe in France you get 2 years full pay?

Re: Good luck mate!

Strange comment in the JD: “ For the next 12 months, we are focused on introducing our new brand to the market as we divest from Broadcom and become a standalone company”

“ It sounds like a command. So unless local councils have gained much greater statutory powers recently I think commanding dead saints to take up their bed and walk is probably beyond their remit.”

Yes it’s changing the meaning. Whether or not Mary is alive is a question of faith.

Re: Charging

Yes I was thinking exactly that:

£££ high bandwidth, low latency

££ medium bandwidth, medium latency

£ whatever happens to be available at the time

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

Exactly right. However in that sense, there cannot ever be AI, as silicon logic gates cannot become self aware. No one has ever proposed even an idea of how it *could* be possible (other than ontologies like pansychism where your teapot become self aware).

Of course that leaves a big reality in term of how we (cats, dogs, dolphins etc) are self aware. However that is just reality, anyone who tells you that we understand how first person conscious awareness works is lying.

Re: God botherers strike again!

So you think it’s normal to sign your daughter up to a coding summer camp with a company that claims to be encouraging coding for women, and for her to then receive a load of emails from that company about her sexuality, and more specifically questioning whether she is actually a woman?

Is there some reason to assume that girls interested in coding must actually be boys?

Oil and Gas

What the media don’t report much is that large oil and gas reserves have been found in Ukraine / off the Crimea coast. Russia gets a big wad of it’s income from selling oil and gas to Europe. Ukraine/Crimea suddenly became a threat to Russia economically, which has added to Putin’s “make Russia great again” megalomania…

Re: confidentiality clause

Apart from asymptotic cases, one reason that your numbers are off for the UK is that anyone who dies after a positive covid test is recorded as a Covid death, presumably even if they were run over by a car. This is different from the way other countries measure it.

Re: "Instead, the BBC team devised a new architecture based on serverless computing."

They say they need to be able to scale quickly, which is not surprising given that when there is a big news event, a fair portion of the UK (as well as the rest of the planet) go to the BBC site. The cost difference of only paying for the necessary resources when you need them at that scale will be massive.

Re: Been there, lost that battle

It must be an age thing - I’m assuming you’re younger than, say, 40?

I’ve been using email systems since the 80s, and I find Gmail’s web interface a complete mess. Its very slightly less turgid when you disable the threading, but still a mess even for simple tasks like replying to messages.

I suspect the phoenix was a victim of a round of cost cutting where the business was cunningly trimmed of all the capabilities needed to actually do stuff, whilst at the same time the senior executives found new ways to pay themselves more.

You don’t need to be left wing to be cynical about the mess that is western capitalism.

Re: Not true

Its worth having a watch of this on the recent study in Germany -> https://twitter.com/freddiesayers/status/1257620247034630146?s=21

Re: Use Zoom instead

I’m piloting Teams with a team of ~15 spread around the world, and it seems to be pretty stable. Also the call quality is far better than Skype which is our standard (yes we’re a bit behind). When do the reliability issues come in? Is it when you reach a certain number of participants on the call?

I also don’t think Zoom is like for like in terms of all the collaboration functionality?

Re: Google search has become almost useless

It is going downhill, but all the other searches seem to have issues too. I always scroll past the adds anyway, so my biggest complaint is AMP which destroys the whole search experience on mobile phones.

If only Alta Vista had carried on and developed as a feasible alternative. I may switch to DockDuckGo, but its algorithms can be flakey...

Windows can have file level snapshotting, storage level snapshotting and be backed up.

Even ignoring the Pulse patching issue, and possibly some privileged accounts with dodgy passwords, this is not a Windows issue but a Windows management/governance issue.

Re: Neoliberalism SUCKS

“ Cool; about 60 years worth of transmitting things on that energy band without any adverse effect is a sufficient long term experiment to be sure about the safety of radio waves in this frequency band?”

No adverse effects? Have you been watching the news?

Re: Noop

Getting drivers on tends to be trivial compared to removing bloatware in my experience. Far better to start with a clean Windows build when new - let alone during recovery...

Isn’t the issue using the likes of facebook, rather than sharing personal information as such ?

Re: Hm...

“How is this different to WiFi points that could take a 3G PCMCIA card back in um, maybe 2006, or the Flash OFDMA 4G PCMCIA card or USB stick in 2008?”

Errr .... far more bandwidth, and far less latency ?

Re: They learned from the best!

“Whatever happened to that treaty which got signed after World War II which prevented both the USSR and the EU from expanding their borders? So, like, who's the aggressor here?”

The treaty was not for Stalin to do what he did and install puppet communist goverments in Poland etc etc., if you really want to go back there....