Posts by John Sager 806 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2008
I do have a Gmail acct but I run my own mail server at home & scrape Gmail and my main mail service into it periodically . Same with calendar, I run Davical on Apache/postgresql. For access when I'm away, WireGuard VPN works fine. Granted, you need tech chops to get it all working, but it's a useful privacy boost.
Security at your router/firewall for IPv6 doesn't have to be any worse than what NAT supposedly gives you for v4. A couple of iptables/nftables rules and an ultimate 'DROP' policy in the FORWARD table will give you that. Of course the wifi router makers need to get on board with v6 which they haven't done hitherto because there is 'no demand'. Perhaps pressure from ISPs that are going to v6 will persuade them to get their act together.
I use the Teams app on Linux for one reason only. When we were denied the pub last year one of our Friday night group set up Teams for a weekly online pub session. It's worked fine for me on my laptop though it did choose the onboard camera rather than the USB one last week. One of the group with Windows says Teams messes with his Outlook when both are running.
I've purchased and worked from a number of specs, some of which are missing enough technical detail to make implementing them involve a large degree of guesswork
Standards ought to have an accompanying Rationale document that explains why certain design choices were made. When the process of defining the ADA language was running, the team I was in was writing a compiler (not for ADA) and we were interested enough to get the docs for the four candidates. All had a Rationale doc to describe how the choices were made for various language features. This must have aided immensely the various ADA compiler writers at the time.
Not anything like that. I once found it impossible to find the reference book for the SPARC instruction set, so in pure frustration I emailed Scott McNealy, pointing out that Intel had all this stuff on their website. He emailed me back and the book arrived by return of post. I don't suppose I would get the same response from good ol' Larry.
they just mean you don't have to turn them on as often
Which trashes the business case for the backup power stations. If they only generate electricity for part of the time, they only get a fraction of the revenue. The business case for installing renewables should include costs associated with the backup plans, but it doesn't as that would show up "green energy" for the racket that it is
What would be an appropriate sentence? 10 years in Club Fed versus a caution speaks more to the US predilection for heavy sentences. I agree a caution seems a bit light for that one.
Where a particular crime involves several offences the CPS would most likely go for the one with the heaviest tariff that has a likelihood of a conviction. A CMA offence probably isn't it.
My only use of Teams is the Friday evening virtual pub session with friends that has replaced the weekly IRL session since we were placed under house arrest. That mostly works, even though it's still work time in the US, but there are occasional glitches. Nice of MS to do a Linux client too.
I can imagine it's difficult and stressful, especially when the syntax isn't the same.
I once heard Eric Laithwaite relate an anecdote. He had been to a conference with simultaneous translation, and he was listening to a translation of a German speaker. Suddenly the translator stopped while the speaker went on. Eventually Laithwaite heard the translator mutter "the verb, man! the verb!" before finally trying to pick up again at the end of the sentence.
I was giving a talk once to a meeting in a well-known Scottish town, and a local had been deputed to meet me at the station. So we identified each other and went out to his car - a Lada. I have never heard so much gear whine in my life! It was far worse than the whine from the transfer gear on old Minis. I don't suppose the Russians thought it worthwhile to spend effort on helical gears.
Remember all those tools that sprouted decades ago that were supposed to make programming redundant? Didn't happen did it. This one is almost guaranteed to go the same way, largely because it's a Larry lucre levitator rather than an attempt at a genuine business productivity tool.
The paper is well worth reading, plus the supplementary info. The CGI videos in the latter are fascinating. It would take a talented clockmaker these days to build one, and the team propose to do just that using methods from those times. I will be very interested to see the result.
OED isn't an Academie Française type prescriptive document. It's real job is to describe current and historical usage with contemporary examples. I should think the keepers of the OED shudder at some of the usages they do document but then all languages (including French despite the AF) change at varying speeds.
Yep. They are 'Veblen goods', artificially rare & expensive so ownership is supposed to say something about the owner. It says 'tosser' to me though. I have a Citizen Eco Drive watch I bought many years ago at Argos with £100 off. It loses 30 secs every 4 months or so consistently so it's easy to reset every so often. It has everything I need in a watch, but no gold or diamonds, so no-one is going to steal it unless they value its performance like I do.
I used to get missing digit ones, but they've got wise to that now. Most now look like regular 0+4+6 or 0+3+7 numbers. Sometimes I recognise illegal digits inside them. As our phone signals 'international' (not always reliably), I see those with apparent UK numbers and even some that are genuinish overseas numbers. In any case, they all go to the answer machine unless they are in its phonebook. I really can't be arsed to string them along. The TPS is not fit for purpose unless & until UK phone companies can block spoofed numbers. Dunno whether it's a technical, commercial or political issue that they can't/don't.
The Oz battery was a vanity project by Elon Musk. It's useless as storage for the grid for any reasonable length of time. What it does do, and I think this may have been unexpected, is provide second-by-second frequency control. Apparently the installation makes good money doing that.
Battery tech isn't going to get more energy dense or even much more energy-cheap in a big step, so energy storage on the scale of even Dinorwig is not going to happen soon. And Dinorwig only works for 6 hours or so at full chat.
A bit related. The fan in the bathroom failed, and in investigating I discovered that the original installers used delta 3-phase cable - 3 phases and earth - to wire it. So they used brown as the live but grey for the neutral and black for the switched live! Not very professional since there is proper 4-wire with brown, blue, earth & the 4th (red?) available.
I suppose, since I'm not a 'qualified elecrician' that I shouldn't have been working on the bathroom circuit. Naughty boy!
a 70Mb/s connection is almost always going to be lovely, easy to deal with bursty traffic :)
Not when I start watching 4k telly on iPlayer or Amazon. This is going to be more prevalent too. A mate has just got FTTP after suffering crap VDSL for years (Al!) and he's now thinking seriously about a 4k TV.
Yes, that's one of the few times Cloud makes sense. They should have realised that there would be a gynormous spike for a few hours so spin up a lot of capacity then ramp it back down tomorrow. Thankfully Guido had captured the list so that's where I discovered how stupid the tiering is.
'In the next 20 years'. Hydrogen has all sorts of problems. About it's only redeeming feature is burning it or consuming in a fuel cell produces only H2O.
It's a small molecule so it leaks much more easily than methane or propane.
It's light so the energy density - Joules/kg - is low, also see next point - storage cylinders are heavy.
It won't liquefy easily so practical storage is just gas at pressure, so energy density - Joules/litre - is low
No distribution infrastructure so that's a large capital cost to get it going.
I saw the BBC report - said it took most of the day to fill it with enough H2 for 100 miles... Admittedly it's still an experiment but it looks very much at the 'alpha' stage. Certainly nowhere near the basis for production.
How do you pick 'National Champions' though? Benn wasn't very good at it, and would you trust any of the current lot? All those govt support for industry things just became boondoggles for smart grifters. I give you DeLorean and Strathearn.
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