Posts by Pen-y-gors 3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010
Anticipating the demise of the UK and the dissolution of the .uk registry after Wales & Scotland become independent, and NI joins the rest of Ireland.
The United Kingdom of England just doesn't have much of a ring to it. And if the English people then decide to get rid of Queenie thanks to her resolute failure to do anything to protect her subjects from her ministers, then it's even less appropriate.
Use it or lose it!
Seriously though - if software is available in non-English, use it if you can. My Swiftkey keyboard on Abdroid happily does predictive text for me in Welsh, English, Irish and Scots Gaelic (I assume other languages are available).
My Win 10 defaults to Welsh, as does my Firefox.
Irish is not dead, and it is a useful language. But it's an interesting example of how official policies can have the reverse of the intended effect.
The Gaeltachtai are meant to protect the language, but in fact they let everyone else forget about it, as it's 'safe' in the Gaeltachtai.
And, another interesting factoid, I believe more people use Scots Gaelic on a daily basis than do Irish!
But what is the 'use' or 'value' of a language? Any language? It's to communicate of course - "Me wantee drinkee", but it's so much more. Knowing a variety of languages opens the mind to the possibility of difference. Different languages can reflect totally different world-views, based on a very different history and culture. Languages do not map word-for-word from one to the other via a dictionary (although I have met people who seem to think they do). It's interesting to see how different languages refer to colours, for instance. A colour name sometimes doesn't match a range of wavelengths. In some of the Celtic languages (like Irish and Welsh) the same 'colour' is used for grass and sea/lakes
As software users we should be well aware of this as a problem - USian software that not only comes in any language so long as it's US English, but also thinks the world does everything the same way as they do in Arkansas. Actually we don't all have addresses or phone numbers in US format.
Treat yourself, learn another language - several preferably - from different families, and open your mind. 350,000+ now learning Scots Gaelic on Duolingo, 1 million learning Irish and 440K learning Welsh!
"competent translators"
Being bi-lingual does not make you a competent translator. It is an acquired skill. Bi-lingualism means you happily switch from one language to the other, but that is not the same as having both languages working in the brain at the same time, which is needed for simultaneous translation.
My Welsh has been acquired as an adult, and I frequently can't remember what "x" is in the other language, even though I technically do know it, and would have no problem using the word if I switched languages.
The median desktop web page now tops 2MB
I remember a guideline, not that many years ago, that home pages should be less than 40kB.
And despite having insanely fast FTTP (300Mbps) pages still take an age to load - the bottleneck now seems to be in the network/servers/DNS - dozens of connections to load a page, many of them libraries and adverts.
Bring back WAP phones! (Just kidding)
BBC reported that 50% of the population on the Isle of Wight had installed and were using the app.
a) Would you trust the BBC on this? Where did they get the number - Hancock?
b) The IoW is in a 1960s time-warp. Most of the population think a 'smart phone' is an old GPO bakelite rotary job that's been given a nice polish. Not sure how you install an 'app' on that.
It's such a faff having to type in things to access my bank account online.
Think I'll launch an app that remembers all the login details and enables one-click login.
That will be a big help.
I could share it with other people - for free.
I wonder how many people will download it?
"The Arogya Setu app, is a sophisticated surveillance system, outsourced to a pvt operator, with no institutional oversight - raising serious data security & privacy concerns. Technology can help keep us safe; but fear must not be leveraged to track citizens without their consent."
%s/Arogya Setu/UK Govt/
air travel as an expensive luxury
That's an interesting and tempting thought. How do we manage the mechanics of it? Left alone, the airline industry will recover over time and grow again to the size it was last year, and bigger.
That implies some form of intervention. Traditionally, governments use taxation as a mechanism to reduce anti-social and unwelcome behaviour - taxes on booze, fags and fuel f'rinstance.
So how can we tax air-travel? Should there be some sort of tax-allowance so that we can all have one short-haul flight a year? Some sort of reverse air-miles system? 2000 miles free per year, after that there's an extra 10p/mile tax? 25p/mile in First/Business class?
Or would it be better to tax the aircraft rather than the passenger?
The whole thing smells to high heaven, but let's assume they're just not too bright, rather than maliciously planning something.
It's an emergency, Okay. Some normal rules may need to be relaxed. Okay.
But the situation has some very clear time limitations. We know how long COVID takes to incubate or become obvious, three weeks tops. So is there any justification for NOT automatically deleting all records each day once they are past 3 weeks old? They are of no use to trace contacts of infected people who might themselves have become infected.
And once the emergency is over, or daily infections are down to x, then the app stops collecting data. It could be re-enabled is there was a new peak, but say 6 months after that then the apps are instructed to uninstall themselves.
Having a 'die on' date built into the app (12 months time?) wouldn't be unreasonable either.
Teamviewer have an odd pricing model. It's either free for non-commercial use, or it costs an arm and a leg for even minimal commercial use. Starting price is £30+ per month, which if you're a small business, who may only need it once or twice a month, is a lot, and seriously encourages dishonesty. If they had a 'Light-use' option of say £20-30 p.a. I think they might get a few more people giving them money.
I think it would take a couple of hours to cross Wales. We don't really do things like motorways much, and we don't have any railways between north and south, so travel tends to be quite leisurely here, particularly when stuck behind a tractor, a timber lorry or a Mansell-Davies tanker. Even astronomical tsunamis have to learn to chill out and take it easy.
But at the moment we really don't want ANY visitors, astronomical phenomena or human. Please stay at home and stay safe there. Diolch.
I don't entirely agree about doing chores at start and end of working day.
I've worked at home for nearly 20 years. I have a separate office 10 yards from the house. I find it's very good to fit the chores in with natural breaks - coffee, loo, meals, snacks. While the kettle is boiling you can pop a load of washing in the machine, or wash the cat-food dishes. Then the next break you put the washing out to dry or in the dryer. Surprising how much you can get done in bursts of a few minutes throughout the day, and it doesn't feel like housework.
Even allowing for the usual "Up to " meaning "far less than" as in "up to" 100Mbps, what causes the 1 year limitation? Dead batteries?
And presumably launching could be a bit of a fingers crossed moment. They fly above the jet stream but they have to get through it to reach cruising height.
A fair analysis. But, being devil's advocate here, for M$ , and for the customer, an element of subscription makes sense. If we bought a copy of Office 2010, (or earlier - personally I thought Word 2.0 on about 50 floppies did most of what I wanted) then we can still be using it now, but we expect M$ to keep producing security updates for free, indefinitely. How is that sustainable without a massive upfront price to invest to pay the engineers for the next 20 years? And what is the danger of people who don't get security updates? They send me an infected .docx file! I want everyone to be up-to-date and safe. So someone, somehow has to pay for that security.
The M$ pricing model could be a bit better - £100 p.a. for six devices isn't bad, but only if you have six devices! I could cope with £20 p.a. per device (or just get an academic licence - sign up for a cheap evening class at the local uni and away you go!)
Yeah. Bit odd that suggestion of changing a car every five years. Why? If you're being greenish, half the lifetime carbon cost of a car is in manufacture. Unless you're thrashing the mileage a modern car doing average mileage should still be running happily after 15+ years. My little Skoda Fabia is now 9 years old, only done 55K miles, needed a new clutch recently and will need a new timing belt soon, but otherwise should be good for another decade or more,
I do think about an EV scooter/motorbike sometimes. What I really want is something like a lightweight EV Smart-car type thing. Range of 100-odd miles, a roof and sides for bad weather, seats 2, and ideally under about £5-6K. That would be fine for most local mileage (probably 80% of what I do), leaving the old ICE Skoda for long trips.
Do we need a phone that acts as a very thin client? All activity is handled by a box that lives somewhere else - including phone calls, web access, email etc, so nothing on the phone to be seized. Don't even need a password on it. Just make sure that you have TWO of the 'remote boxes' - one for real use, and the other that you only use to access gov.uk and phone your mum. When asked, you give the password for the innocuous one. Works as well for Homeland Security in the Land of the Free (TM), no social media trail!
Something similar...
Scene: University observatory, mid 1970s. Small group doing some work with a photometer plugged in to the telescope, to measure the amount of light coming from the target star. Working fine, but suddenly the count dropped. And then went back up again. Then dropped. etc. First theory (aliens) rapidly discounted.
Eventually worked out what was happening. There was a coax cable running across the floor from the telescope to the recording kit, and Tony had been standing on it when the count dropped. This was final proof (to us) that electricity works just like water - stand on the hose and the water/electrons can't get through.
In fact - what do we know about co-ax cable? The resistance depends on the shape - minimum when a circle and increases as it is flattened.
The rise is fine, it's the fall that worries me.
I develop a lot of sites for academic projects - typically funded for a few years, and typically delivers a nice website and database at the end, along with various books and conference proceedings.
I'm currently going through some older sites (10yrs+ in some cases) and updating them from PHP5.x to PHP7.x, losing PEAR, tightening security and various other little tweaks. Hopefully they should then run for another 10 years without major work. After that, who knows.
My worry with flavour-of-the-month framework in JS, PHP or whatever is that it may suddenly become unsupported and even stop working in 2,3,5 years. Not a major problem for large corporate-owned sites that have the resources to redevelop, but tricky for academics with no funding!
So I think I'll stick to fairly plain vanilla stuff, even if it does take a little longer.
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