Re: More Wireless
Downvoted for a mildly amusing anecdote from twentyish years ago? Tough crowd :-)
GJC
1875 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2008
Oh, I forgot - many years ago, we trialled a bidirectional satellite broadband service. Huge bandwidth for the time - 14Mbps symmetrical, from memory, when 128Kbps ISDN was about the best competitor.
But the latency. Oh, man, the latency. 1,100ms RTT, which made terminal sessions hilarious, like a 1970s teletype session. Web browsing wasn't too bad, they'd implemented some sort of smart proxy that assembled the whole page then squirted it across the satellite link, so that worked well enough, but anything interactive outside of HTTP? Forget it.
After about 18 months of diligently filling in monthly beta-tester feedback forms, an engineer came and took the dish down, and that was the last I ever heard of the service. Can't remember the company name, now. Still, 18 months of free broadband was definitely worth having.
It's interesting how many service providers and customers hear about Starlink, and say "nah, satellite service, latency will be horrible, nothing will work", because people don't understand orbits. To this day, I think Sky maintain that their services simply won't work with Starlink (spoiler: they do).
GJC
Definitely. We live up a big hill in rural Wales, where we've been for 26 years. Started off on dial-up, moved to ISDN (Home Highway, remember that?), then various generations of very slow ADSL. Although we were doing better than one of our literal neighbours in the next house along, a few hundred yards up the lane. We got about 6Mbps, they got 0.25Mbps at best, and long periods of no service at all. I did a bit of research, turns out the phone line came to us, then did a sharp left up another lane to a pair of houses about a miles away, then looped back to our neighbours another mile down a third lane. That house is still, years later, waiting on decent wires.
So we went wireless. First a local WISP, who kindly gave us free service in recognition of us hosting a pole in our yard to serve a bunch of other local properties, and then back in 2020 we added Starlink. So we now have two truly diversely routed services, speeds of around 250Mbps or so, and rock solid reliability.
Which is good, because we won't be seeing fibre out here within my lifetime, I'll wager.
GJC
Did you previously have that same downer on waiting staff in other restaurants? Maybe you should try talking to the McDonalds "biological robots" you despise so much, perhaps that would bring in some job satisfaction for them? Is it, in short, just possible that you are the problem, rather than being the solution you so obviously think you are?
<wanders off, shaking head>
GJC
Well, I just re-read your comment, and your claimed meaning really isn't as obvious as you seem to think it is. But, no matter.
It matters to me that the touchscreen tech was bought in, because I have had far too many fanbois claim that Apple were geniuses for inventing it. Am I on a bit of a hair-trigger for that now? Yeah, probably. So sue me.
GJC
> Had Apple not made that
Ah, how quickly history gets re-written. It was FingerWorks that made the multi-touch capacitive touchscreen (and, interestingly, the lowercase "i" prefix for products, with their iGesture touchpad in 1998).
Apple bought FingerWorks, and very quickly wrote them out of the company history, because ego trumps academic credit every time.
GJC
According to Gartner: "Operational technology (OT) is hardware and software that detects or causes a change, through the direct monitoring and/or control of industrial equipment, assets, processes and events."
No, me neither. I smell a company trying to carve out a new niche to infest.
GJC
Yeah, I know, Bloat is Bad(tm). But I can put together a Raspberry Pi with a good fraction of a terabyte of fast storage for, I dunno, a bit over £100. I priced up a Pi5 with a 128GB of refurb'ed NVMe storage the other day when embroiled in a similar conversation, and it was significantly under £100, in fact - I think £89, but I might be misremembering the exact figure
It's nice to be able to keep really old hardware running, sure, I get that. But let's not pretend that it's a productive use of time. It's a hobby that is a fun way to waste some of a weekend, and if I'm reconditioning a twenty-year-old machine, I'll be using a contemporary OS on it, because I'm weird like that.
Anyway, go ahead, downvote me all you like. It's your own time you're wasting.
GJC
This came up in a discussion in the pub a few weeks ago, so I started paying attention whilst in big cities.
The actual number of people walking around looking at phone screens is tiny. One particular walk across central Manchester in the week-day morning commuting time, I saw precisely one person doing that, and maybe 2-3 others using the phone to make a phone call (weirdos, what were they thinking?).
I can see a use for AR glasses, if they can be made small and unobtrusive, but I'm not sure that I can see a mass market.
GJC
We didn't have any on the curriculum at secondary school, despite having an RM380Z, a BBC B, and a ZX-81 towards the end of my time there. I did do the first year of a Computer Science A Level at technical college, but it bored me rigid, which meant I was in constant trouble with the two lecturers for being a smart-arse (only partially deserved, mostly they were extremely poor teachers and the course material was very bad, plus the Prime 550 the college had was riddled with security holes - what's a chap to do?).
I recall one day about half-way through that year, we sat an exam that was supposedly to A-level final exam standard. I turned up drunk, finished the three hour paper in about 45 minutes, and scored 100%. I was accused of cheating, but I hadn't, it was just *really* simple questions, mostly things like binary and hex arithmetic that I could do in my head almost instantly after four years of assembler programming at home, plus a bit of really simple basic and assembler debugging.
So at the end of the first year I dropped out, and got a job as a programmer. Haven't looked back since, just about to notch up my fortieth full-time year in the industry next year, still completely devoid of any formal education or qualifications.
GJC
I suspect that depends how one defines "users", as ever. I'm probably counted as a user of the Google stuff, as I occasionally look at documents generated by other people in it, and I use a Google Sheets macro to manipulate Google Mail items in bulk, but I'm predominantly a Microsoft Office user for my main work.
I suspect that anyone with a Google Mail or Google Drive account is being counted as a user of Google Workspace.
GJC
I do a lot of free support for friends and family. For quite a long time, probably around early 2000s sort of time, almost every phone call I got from them started "I just installed iTunes and now <weird shite>". Often this led to a lot of work to unwind the devastation that had been wrought.
GJC
That's a complete myth.
I do pretty much all the work on my Teslas, and getting hold of parts is trivially easy. Teslas are in fact very good for repairability, with all workshop manuals, wiring diagrams, connectors lists, and parts lists freely available online direct from Tesla, so I can just get the part number, go to my favoured third party garage, and ask them to order for me. I could also order direct from Tesla, but I like to give business to smaller companies, not least because they will know if there's a good third party equivalent available for stuff like suspension or brakes.
As for repairing "bits of sheet metal", if your crush structure bends, you do not under any circumstances repair it, it *has* to be replaced. At that point, it matters not at all if it is bent steel or cast aluminium.
GJC
If you took even the most cursory look at the link I posted, you would see that both cases are way better than the average, and that Autopilot is way better than meatsack drivers. Although one could argue that Autopilot is used more on highways than back roads, which in most countries is a lower-collision environment.
GJC
I, too, give a lot of my work away for free - I won't list it here, because special pleading is very unattractive. But I never expect anyone else to do the same, otherwise I'm not giving my work away for free, I'm bartering for time, and that's something rather different.
Appealing to popular applause is also rather unattractive. I've been around these parts for years, and I know that stating any kind of approval for Microsoft will get downvoted into the stone-age. But, as I say, I care not. I am old enough and ugly enough to choose my suppliers based on what I need and what they provide, not on what popular opinion tells me I should use. (But I should point out that I currently own and manage more machines running various forms of Linux than those running Windows, for the record).
So, yeah, it answers whatever my question might have been. Funny ol' life, isn't it?
GJC
Why do you do that?
No, don't knee-jerk me with some abusive rant, please think calmly and carefully and explain to me the actual reasons behind that decision, and allow me a minute or two to lay out why I don't care at all.
Thing is, if you're running, say, Microsoft Windows on your PC, you already have everything you are doing, creating, and consuming within the bounds of Microsoft's OS and applications. You might care about that, you might not - I don't, personally. But the point here is that extending that boundary out to some servers in a data centre somewhere that are 100% owned and controlled by Microsoft makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to what you can know about what Microsoft are doing with that data. It's an emotional, illusionary difference.
If you don't trust Microsoft, don't use their products. That's cool, and a perfectly logical stance. Saying that you trust Microsoft just so long as they only control everything in your local PC only makes sense if you fully, Tempest-level, isolate that PC from any external communication whatsoever. And actually probably not even then.
And saying that you trust, say, Apple more than you trust Microsoft is also just nuts. They are all just corporations. Trust no-one, ever. But don't pretend that setting some geographical boundary on trust/don't trust is just nuts.
Me, I use Microsoft products because they are under the gaze of a billion hackers and regulatory wonks world-wide. Because nobody trusts them. So I can be reasonably certain that any abuses they try will be fairly swiftly picked up and publicised. And also because I have a commercial relationship with them, so I have a legal recourse if they start screwing me.
Once again, not a particularly popular view around here. And once again, I care not one jot.
GJC
Yeah, go ahead, downvote me. I care not a jot.
For 99p a month, I get a solid printer with good, genuine ink cartridges, which can go through its profligate head-cleaning routine as much as it likes because I'm paying per page. Which means when I occasionally need to print, I know the printer is going to work, unlike the previous Canon and Epson units, which hated occasional use and let you know by drying up and refusing to print until they had been fed new cartridges.
Very occasionally I have a busy month, and have to increase the Instant Ink subscription to £2.99 for that month. And the software is great, you can increase the sub, then immediately decrease it, and you get a single month at the increased rate, so there's no need to remember to decrease it later.
<shrug> Works for me.
GJC
Yup. I'm typing this on a PC with a 12th-gen i9, 64GB of RAM, and an NVMe SSD on the motherboard. Which mostly gets used to access websites and do simple Office applications work.
I'll be replacing it next year, probably with something ARM-based, but the reality is that it is *massively* over-spec'ed for my usage. (And, yeah, the components will get re-purposed when it is replaced, they won't go to waste.)
GJC
1) If a society started basing major governance decisions on divining rods and tarot cards, that would be very bad indeed.
2) AI has a small but still non-zero chance of developing into something that could be species-ending for us. Yes, that's very much an edge case, extremely unlikely, but the consequences are so extreme that it needs to be taken seriously. Which is exactly what I was referring to when I said I would like to know why the relationship between board and CEO fell apart - was one of them not taking the possibility seriously enough? Or taking it too seriously? Or something else? I'm not pre-judging anything here, I'd just like a bit more information.
GJC
I wonder if we will ever find out what the reasons were for Altman being sacked back at the start of this? I'm mostly positive about the future for AI, but it has to be recognised that there are paths it could take which could be rather bad, and so it would be interesting to know what was behind this organisation falling apart.
GJC
I've been using Intel's on-chip graphics stuff for years in my main PC, to simplify the PC build and keep costs down. They've been more than good enough for my needs for a long time now, with any serious 3D gaming kicked off onto an XBox.
The new Snapdragon X stuff from Qualcomm is looking even better than that, with a welcome return to a nice simple CPU core. I personally think that we went down a serious dead-end as soon as we started doing things like OoOE and massively complicating the CPU core as a result. In any world that contains decent multi-threaded processing, that sort of complication just isn't needed for general-purpose computing.
GJC
Mars gravity is approximately one third that of Earth, so take-off requires one-third the thrust like for like. However, the rocket is likely to be mostly empty at that point, and carrying little weight of fuel, so it's even less than that.
The very thin atmosphere makes no difference to powered landings, as I understand it, only parachute or winged landings.
GJC