Posts by Peter2

Re: Maybe not Linux but Office maybe ditchable

Though on second thoughts... there is the recent article about some bits of the NHS still running on fax machines!

That's because there is a procedural niche that they fill quite nicely. If a nurse is sending pictures of child abuse to someone, somewhere (eg, social services) then a fax machine that's locked in an office on both ends ensures that the contents is only seen by the sender and receiver in a foolproof manner.

It hands a nice confirmation report which can show that the job of handing it over has been done, at which point after social services have confirmed that they've got it then the original at the hospital end can be destroyed and the only copy exists on paper at social services, making it impossible for a paedo type to get hold of it afterwards; the fax machine can't be used to produce another copy as it doesn't store anything.

Re: Maybe not Linux but Office maybe ditchable

For example: you get an X-Ray or CT scan and 30 secs later the doc is looking at it on a hi-res monitor using a custom-built Windows app.

When I was in a management position at county level over a decade ago X-ray machines tended to create digital images which were stored on system with a web interface which was only accessible internally on N3; the NHS internet connection/VPN. A decade on, one hopes that things have advanced rather than regressed in terms of being platform agnostic.

A threat to move to Libre Office ought to be perfectly viable to carry through with.

Re: To lessen the threat of becoming BianLian's next victim when using remote ...

If the sort of idiot who runs unsecured RDP with zero 2FA (and probably last patched in 1990) was running *nix then they'd be running everything as root, and in their hands any OS would be just as easy to wreck.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

An other stark problem among too many is an inbuilt assumption that you represent the golden standard

Which I take it that you are trying to demonstrate by a suggestion that another country adopts your personally preferred presidential system of government because it's clearly the best solution for that country?

I think my irony meter exploded because it went so far off the scale.

Also; you forgot to select the "Anonymous Coward" option btw. ;)

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Oh, we can protest as much as we want. Then the politicians do whatever anyway, and ignore the protests.

So we are perfectly equal there; despite the scale of protests the yellow vest protests didn't appear to achieve much, for instance.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Suppose an unfortunte outbreak of food poisoning at Buck House meant Prince Andrew (who is not a paedophile sex offender) became King.

FYI: Russia is the country with a problem with poisoning of food of political opponents. The same country where they also fall out of the first floor window. (of a subterranean bunker)

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

I can't quite understand why the British, almost uniquely, should be presumed so incapable of choosing a head of state and, more bizarrely still, that the most logical remedy for that should be a reserve pool of inbreds.

Our constitutional monarchy has worked for us reasonably well and the system of government has been evolving to meet the nations needs as they arise for the last thousand or so years. Changing it to a fixed system and declaring that the end of any development is just stupid.

Just because other people have done a copy and paste of the rest of our constitutional arrangements with "vote for your own king" and it's been a big improvement on their previous constitutional arrangements is not exactly a good reason for us to do the same; the existing system ain't broke and it doesn't particularly need fixing.

Personally I favour a deduction from the number of politicians, rather than additions to that number and if we are honest, so does a majority of the voting populace in the UK.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

It's time the British, for once, copied the French and Russians and just disposed of those leeches.

The French revolution ended up with nutters who wanted the best for other people in charge. That's all they wanted, and democracy.

Except as it turned out, if people voted against them then that wasn't ok, and if they rebelled against the revolutionaries then they "had" to kill them too. For their own good, of course. A few hundred thousand here on a revolutionary war, a few hundred thousand there on the Vendee revolt, a few million people dead in the Napoleonic wars and that's before you get into the mid 19th century coups shows how great an idea it is. For a political ideologue who doesn't care one iota about the body count. And how much more "free" is France than Britain for those several million deaths?

Russia obviously holds the record there of 7-12 million killed "for their own good" in their red revolution, and that's before we get to purges, deliberate starvation of a few million here and there and the like, and that's before you get into Stalin's war losses having purged the military of any potentially disloyal subjects and put politically loyal but incompetent idiots in charge. (Which you can see a reprise of in Ukraine at the moment...)

If you think that hereditary monarchy is a stupid way of ending up with a leader then your right. However, if you take a look at history as to why that came about then you'll find the answer in Gibbon's Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire, at a period where anybody with deep enough pockets who could afford to bribe the praetorian guard could proclaim themselves Emperor. It was complete chaos, insanity, and near anarchy which made "game of thrones" look outright tame. The roman mess also looks strikingly like Russia at the moment with secret police locking up or killing anybody disagreeing with the wisdom of the leader, precisely because said leader can be replaced by assassination at the drop of a hat and so can't tolerate dissent.

Having a hereditary monarch with very limited powers, but whom the armed forces report to instead of the politicians outright prevents politicians getting ideas too; it would be outright impossible for a political leader in the UK to stage any form of a coup as was allegedly attempted in America by Trump, and the main criticism comes from people who want that power, which is a good historical indication that they should be kept so far away from said power that they suffocate in the vacuum of space.

After expropriating their wealth as the proceeds of crime. Which it mostly was.

The 1701 Act of Settlement forces all of the income from the Royal Family (in the Crown Estate) to go into the bottomless maw of HM Treasury, and they get 15% of their own money back for maintaining various buildings and their staff, with the remaining 85% being retained by Westminster for public spending.

Your advocating something that was done 321 years ago. ;)

Re: Linked article lists Maggie as an example

In 1974 Britain only had electricity 3 days a week. In 1976, Britain was begging the IMF for a loan because the nation was bankrupt. In 1979, you have the winter of discontent with rubbish piling up rotting in the streets, and a vote of no confidence which brought down the Labour government and put Thatcher in as PM.

The country was both literally and figuratively bankrupt long before Thatcher was put in power.

And I'm not sure working long term in such an environment would be very healthy for you either!

Carrying around your own oxygen supply would sort that out quite easily, and it wouldn't matter if it stopped working as you'd still be able to get to the exit without it.

Re: death trap

I've never really understood why the discharge has to be so violent. It's obviously important to get a lot of gas everywhere in the room, quickly, but would a gradual 20 seconds versus explosive 2 seconds really make much difference?

I'm not a particular fire specialist but a fire is detected through smoke making it from inside the box of a burning bit of equipment to outside of it, to outside of the rack, to the smoke detector. This is going to cause a delay after the fire has started at which point it's likely to start spreading. An alarm sounds giving a 30 seconds notice that you would really like to leave the area. Do you then want a nice gentle gas release in one corner risking a dense cloud of suppressant in one area of the room, which would slowly (very slowly) be pushed around with air currents and to start taking effect within a few minutes and maybe start damping down the fire within 5-10 minutes?

I mention this because your not only fighting the fire; your racing the fire brigade to doing it.

The fire brigade average response is something like 6 minutes in urban locations to 8 minutes in more rural settings. (and if your in an urban location with a DC then chances are that you are probably nearer their station so their response will be well under the average) and their usual MO for dealing with a fire is to cut the power, drag a hose in smashing down any doors in their way and then they'd spray your server racks with several tons of water per minute.

Most IT equipment does not like water much, and this sort of treatment is liable to have adverse impacts on uptime.

So if I did have the option of having a gas suppression system like this then i'd spec it with about twice the amount of fire suppressant needed for the size of the room to allow for leakage out of the room and then have an explosive deployment to cause an overpressure wave to flood the room with suppressant near instantly so that the fire is out near instantly preventing it from spreading and causing further damage, with the aim of any fire being out at about the same time the fire brigade chaps have their fire engine out of the door.

This way you might just be able to get away with turning either an individual bit of equipment or a rack off instead of the entire building. ;)

Re: death trap

With apologies to BOFH fans: Halon is not lethal upon inhalation (really; go and look it up) and if you remained in a room flooded with in for a few hours then the worst you'd get is a headache at very high concentrations.

Halon does not work by displacing all of the oxygen in the air (that's a CO2 flood and those are genuinely dangerous) Halon just has a very useful chemical reaction; which is when it has more than a certain concentration in the air then it messes with the chemical reaction that is fire by essentially removing the heat from the flame, which then puts the fire out for as long as the gas concentration remains above whatever the required percentage is. (and at which point this concentration drops hours or days later you'd hope that somebody has removed the source of ignition...)

Alas, it's equally as good at eating through the ozone layer so it's been ditched in modern years. Off the top of my head, modern equivalents are FM200 and Novatec 1230.

Re: Is copying large amounts of text or images for training the model fair use?

The thing with "fair use" is, once a critical mass of countries have instituted the concept for long enough, the others are ... basically pulled along.

Indeed. After the 1886 Berne convention on copyright that allowed for these things [fair dealing, right to quote] plus protecting the author automatically the US was eventually pulled along. In 1989.

I was given to understand that one reason that many of the reactor fuel rods come from Russia is that they have been turning the soviet unions nuclear weapons into reactor fuel, and recycling from a weapons grade material downwards to a middle grade fuel is much cheaper than making it from scratch, especially if the weapons grade material is essentially "free".

IMO That's a solid win, and it's well worth buying up as much as they'll sell us even at this point purely so they literally couldn't use it as warheads or sell the stuff to the axis of autocratic idiots.

(Preferably while keeping our own facilities for making reactor fuel running so that we have a fallback for when they either run out of old soviet era nukes or decide to stop sawing them up for fuel rods)

The only reason that Russia was providing huge quantities of gas at well below market prices was to create dependence upon it and that was picked up as a risk even back in the cold war days and Germany committed to never sourcing more than a small percentage of their gas from Russia as a result. That basically went out of the window as soon as it was promised.

Truth be told, the reason why Germany has been doing very well economically for decades has been a well below market price source of cheap energy. That was Germany's interest; but it came with a price tag of letting the Russians blackmail them into doing things against their own interests; there are still what many nations see as uncomfortably large factions in Germany who want to go back to the pre war status quo and most of Eastern Europe who is on Russia's menu is not looking very favourably towards Germany at the moment as a result.

Very very early results of that can be seen already; Poland in particular has placed huge orders for weapons from South Korea in preference to weapons from Germany; Poland's order of a thousand K2 tanks is approaching half the number of Leopard 2's ever built and losing that large an order is a serious pain point for any arms manufacturer, especially since the order comes with a production line in Poland which will in a few years create an incentive for Poland to keep the production line open by securing export orders. That would be done by marketing these tanks to other eastern european countries bordering (and being threatened by) Russia which destroys the Leopard 2's export market.

So yeah, that decision is going to be haunting Germany for decades on any number of different levels, including those that aren't even foreseeable at the moment.

Re: this is simply not feasible

(2) nobody on earth has enough battery storage - not currently, but we're getting there. It seems like in the last 20 years, major breakthroughs in battery technology were always around the corner and never arriving.... and yet the steady incremental approaches from the first Ni-Mh batteries in my first ever mobile phone to the latest Li-ion are huge. Al-ion and Al-graphene batteries are starting to leave the lab and start appearing in the market... still as costly button cells for now but in 10 years who knows?

A nokia 3300 had a 780mAh battery, which was fine for a weeks usage. The first iphone had a 1400 mAh battery and lasted most of a day. The latest one has a 4323 mAh battery, but is twice the size and weighs twice as much. The real improvements have been in the reduced power usage in the phone; the 3300 could have had a larger and more expensive battery but didn't need one.

The issue is the cost and weight of the batteries, which won't get cheap enough fast enough.

As to the point that there is 10-20 years to change the shortage of electrical generation capacity, you say this like that's a lot of time.

There are 3 viable methods of power generation. Coal, gas and nuclear. Wind and solar produces some power, but are require backing up with either coal or gas because their output swings from "you can turn the gas plant off" to "we've got a blackout" on an hourly basis. Picking either of those options is a deliberate decision as to remain with gas generation indefinitely to "back up" (actually act as greenwashing for gas being the primary power generation...)

Nuclear could replace the lot, but it takes 10 years to build from the point that you get a politician to pointlessly shovel the first spadesful of dirt to their successor cutting the nice ribbon and power coming out.

So "we have 10-20 years to change that" means "we are already to f****** late".

Re: It won't be the SCOTUS

It's called "outside of London". You know, that scary place 1+ hours drive outside of the M25.

This covers quite a lot of the country and while you do have to accept buying a smaller house that could use some renovation for the lower end of that (Victorian terraces/semi's) rather than a new build it's quite possible; i've done it. Jobs are less well paid than in the smoke, but on the other hand everything is cheaper and you don't have to pay quarter of your salary to the railways to travel.

Prices have gone up somewhat recently with the mass exodus of snobs from London to the provinces during the pandemic, but they typically went for the high end properties that didn't need any work doing, so it's still possible to do.

Re: It won't be the SCOTUS

Then there are states that are actively passing laws to ban EV's (or make them so expensive to own that no one in their right mind would want to own one) then the battle is just beginning.

Given that the new set of high end EV's cost £70k-£100k each (which is 50% of the cost of buying a house in the UK) i'd suggest that they are already so expensive to own that noone in their right mind would want to own one at the moment. Even the "cheap" options are excessively expensive.

Comparatively, going with an EV is up to one hundred times more expensive than buying a second hand car, and the second hand car has a longer range, cheaper running costs and a higher likely resale value after 5 years. Additionally, after a thousand or so discharge cycles on a lithium battery then it's going to need replacement and this generally works out as something like 70% of the value of the car at new. If you accept the range in the brochure as being 400 miles then a thousand charge cycles would give you a range of 400k miles before basically having to spend as much as buying a new car on maintenance which is presumably the reason why there are virtually no second hand EV's filtering down through the second hand car market. My existing second hand car has some something over 4x the most optimistic battery life of an EV, so doing that mileage would be utterly unaffordable for an EV. On top of that, electricity from a public charger is more expensive than diesel.

That said, it's far from impossible to make EV's work. If you want me to buy an EV, he's a quick guide to how to do it.

1) Build enough nuclear power plants to actually generate the power required for mass adoption of EV's which will bring the electricity generation price down to around 20% of what we are currently paying and it will also produce enough actually green power to power the EV's; because gas or coal powered EV's is just lunacy.

2) Forget fully powering the things with massive expensive batteries and put a "third rail" type charging strip down major roads in towns, and across the countries key motorways and highways. This means that you don't *NEED* a 400 mile range on a battery; you could probably manage at that point with a 40 mile range as the batteries would only be needed for random back roads which don't have sufficient traffic to justify electrification. At this point you can massively cut the purchase price and battery replacement cost of an EV. (and preferably mandate a single battery size and shape and interconnectors to further force the battery replacement price down)

At that point, EV's would be cheaper to buy, greener and have lower running costs and people would naturally switch to them because it'd be the sane and sensible thing to do. At the moment, the sane and sensible thing to do is avoid them at all costs.

Quite. Royal Mail's business model is optimised for delivering letters, and emails have taken over that role almost entirely; it used to be the case that wet signatures were required, but emails have even eaten that with the advent of easy electronic signatures.

This leaves Royal Mail being just another parcel delivery company.

So Russia kinda noticed we rely a lot on air power. So it developed ways to counter air superiority and came up with very effective layered GBAD that can detect, engage and destroy aircraft and incoming missiles at long ranges.

Yes, Iraq had lots of those. It worked well, didn't it?

Go on, mention that those were "export versions" and the Russian versions are much better. That was said about the tanks, and they have lost just shy of 2000 of those where we have photos or videos of them being destroyed, which is going to be well short of the totals so that clearly wasn't actually true.

And then there's the boring logistics. Russia claims to be producing 1-1,500 new tanks every year.

Yes. We've seen the 1000 - 1500 T14's produced victoriously rolling across Ukraine.

Alternately it might be a standing joke that Russia's T14 stands for "Total of 14 Built" and they might be dusting off T54's (having run out of T90's, T80's, T72's, T64's and T62's) because they don't have anything else left.

Sure, we're also sending 4 Challenger 2s and some other assorted AFVs.

28, actually. And this weeks threat of nuclear war over them being provided with standard anti tank shells suggests Mr Putin has extreme confidence in the ability of his super powered new 1000-1500 tanks to deal with those 28.

That leads to another point that has come out of the current war - Russian Army logistics is atrocious. the concept of palletised loads and HIAB type self-loading equipment which has been standard practice in NATO forces for 50 years or so (if not longer) still seems to be absent in the Russian army.

I think that a lot of that is down to a cultural thing, the Russians have heavy logistics requirements met by train and have lots of cheap peasants as labour to move things; we do things via road and labour is expensive so we tend to worry more about automation, and so our militaries have benefited from western civilian logistics improvements in shifting containers and pallets around in the most cost effective way possible.

Also; one suspects that the overall Russian result would probably be better if the Ukrainians hadn't picked up on the NATO practice of striking the Russian army logistics hubs.

Mind you, i'm not quite sure how it's possible to fight a war where Ukraine probably knows better where the Russian forces are than their command, courtesy of every satellite in orbit being pointed at Ukraine; if people are giving military equipment then they'll near certainly be giving satellite photos.