I work in schools (in the UK, that means the standard, mandatory education up to 18, nothing beyond that). Most places I have spoken to are wary of 64-bit, even, so they're still technically running on, what? 3.5Gb or thereabouts?
I have 64-bit throughout so I have 4Gb, but I've seen little reason to go past that. Pretty much the bottleneck is network, and if I get the network up to speed (not cheap), it would be server-side (disk array speed, etc.). The clients very rarely do anything that they aren't waiting for stuff from the network to complete.
Next year, I may go 8Gb in the clients but I would predict to see much huger speed increases by just going to SSD on the client (Lifespan under swap conditions? Meh, drives barely last a year or two for us anyway and then we're replacing the whole machine - overprovision and let it loose and suffer a tiny client hard drive for the sake of speed).
I really need cheap 10Gb kit, though - from server down to end-switch. Gigabit to the desktop is okay for now, but it won't be long. But RAM? Hell, 4Gb is fine for basically any business task unless it's a server. There, yes, fuck, you need as much as you can get. I just doubled all my servers RAM this summer, at great expense. But the clients are running Windows, Office, a few apps and a browser and rarely make it through the day without being logged off or shut down. And we do deal with large databases and centrally-stored stuff all the time, but that's for the server to worry about. The clients, however, need next to nothing.
Is this entirely independent research by respected labs? Or is this research in one particular area, by a specialised lab, with a particular sponsor? The latter is, we all know but can't prove easily, biased.
Is this a paper designed to do nothing more than back up a sponsor's advertising claims? Or is it something groundbreaking from a lab with few political ties, nothing to prove, and some serious science behind it.
It all changes the perspective of what a "scientist" is (i.e. someone who work not-for-profit to forward the cause of humanity, versus some guy in a lab coat with a PhD who's sold out?). As difficult as it is for us to distinguish, imagine what that means to the general public. Those people who invent terms for things for shampoo commercials that have fuck all to do with making your hair shiny, even if they sound like that, are held in the same regard as that guy doing genetic research to hunt down some elusive connection is an ultra-rare but devastating condition.
The problem is that there is nothing to distinguish the two, and both are technically "science", and thus can generate papers and be done by postdocs.
Sorry, but this is why I believe that referees on paper should be chosen specifically, why all connections should be documented IN THE PAPER (didn't declare who sponsors your lab? Bam, you're in the shit pile and your paper is forever disregarded), and why anything published should not be accepted until it's been confirmed - ideally by a bitter rival.
Too much shit is published nowadays as "science", commercial crap, ridiculous notions, unreviewed papers, basically anything from arxiv.org, etc. And the requirements aren't strict enough.
My girlfriend's a PhD in a medical field. Her contributions to a book were copied basically verbatim by someone else and published as another chapter in the very same book. It discredits her work, and that of the plagiarist, not to mention the primary author/editor. Things like asking people to reproduce their work under independent scrutiny are the only way to verify what's true, who did it, and how it was done so it can be repeated by future generations. We've lost all that in the last 20 or so years, even in things like Maths, etc. by having people referee their own friend's papers and other crap like that.
A ball is a sphere. It casts a circular (ovoid) shadow at best. The overlap between balls probably means you're only covering about 80-90% of the surface at best. I suppose they don't mind losing that to allow the water level to rise and fall and have the balls move over each other.
But, to be honest, I can't imagine that's it's not cheaper to just buy a cover of some kind? Getting those things back out is going to be great fun - and expensive - if they get covered in algae, say.
We've been saying to leave a ball in your pond for decades to stop it freezing over completely, is this really such a shocking suggestion that it makes the news here, on Soylent, The Reg and the BBC?
If you'd asked how to shade a reservoir cheaply, I can't believe this would be more than 2nd or 3rd down the list.
I don't see that Outlook is anything special. It's selling point is that it integrates with Exchange, not that it's the best way to do things.
Fuck, it took me 20 minutes to work out how to discover who an email was sent to when it arrived in my inbox (e.g. if you have a lot of aliases arriving in one inbox). Double-click the email, File, Properties, scroll down, read the raw SMTP headers. Not fucking sensible.
Let's not forget that Insert Signature can fuck up depending on your HTML/Text settings (some of which you CAN'T set to always reply in certain formats by default, etc.). Let's not even get into the way you're supposed to create rules and shit, I find that horrendous.
As an email client, Outlook is servicable but nowhere near ideal. As a calendar client, it's servicable and a little better. But the selling point is only ever Exchange compatibility.
And the number of people who own Office who even know what Visio is, let alone have a sensible use for it that can't be done in other programs just as easily, are basically limited too.
Sorry, but Outlook is nothing special. In fact, I can barely stand it.
Because exercise doesn't increase your metabolism and make you hungrier or require more energy intake at all... no... not at all...
Diets don't do shit because a) most are bollocks (anything that suggests particular foodstuffs, uses the word "superfoods", etc.), b) nobody sticks to them, c) everybody stops sticking to them eventually.
A diet is about changing the way you eat, what you eat, and how much you eat. It's not about following a recipe, or some magical fix, or suddenly stopping eating. It's about looking at what you do and changing it, forever, or not at all.
As such, diet + exercise is the combination and, invariably, everyone starts them both at the same time and then wonders why it's so hard and they have to cheat, or feel elated when they "finish their diet" (a ridiculous term) and can go back to putting weight back on.
You know what? There's no real easy way to lose weight. You just have to change how you live. It's as simple as that. And if you want to stay in the new way, you have to stick with your new lifestyle - possibly forever, or at least until you have a significant change in your body's expectations (i.e. you retire, etc.).
I say this as the skinniest fuck known to man, who never exercises and gorges on chocolate, crisps, cakes, fatty stuff, sugary drinks, etc. etc. etc. and has never had to bother with any of that stuff. But I'm tired of friends, family, partners, etc. going on "diets" as if that's like having a holiday for a week or two and then returning to "normal" when they're happy. It's about rate of change - and if your rate of change is zero, you're not doing anything. If you diet and the rate of change lowers, it won't always stay at that rate of change - at some point you'll either stop (and thus rate of change goes positive), or it'll return to zero (as your body starts to change the way it works to cope).
And, actually, thinking it's all about calories is bollocks too. Different people absorb things at different rates. Hell, it's probably got more to do with your gut bacteria that anything written on the side of a bottle. I can easily consume two-three times the recommended calorie intake consistently every day for months and not put on an ounce. I might even LOSE weight. As such, focusing on shitty numbers that nobody understands (as a scientist, I still insist it's fucking kcal, not calories) and nobody weighs and nobody adds up properly and which differ from person to person is a waste of time.
Eat less. Do more. Not losing weight? Eat less. Do more. Ad infinitum. Losing weight? Good. Keep going. At your target weight? Good. Dial is down EVER SO SLIGHTLY but don't stop. Until you get to the point where your rate of change is ZERO while at your target weight. Then live the rest of your fucking life like that until you notice a change. Rinse and repeat.
Whereas oil - I mean there's just an infinite supply of that, isn't there?
Idiot.
An electric car can be powered from anything. A hydrogen car can only be powered by hydrogen, and a petrol car only by petrol and a diesel car only by diesel.
The last time I priced up an electric bike, it worked out something like 10p of electricity for each trip, which would have worked out less than 1/40th of my petrol costs over the course of a month. I can put the savings from that into something that produces a pittance of electricity quite easily.
However, that's on the cusp of being true for cars too. So much so that I'd rather have a 220V/32A outside connector on my house than anything to do with any competing technology.
Fuck, if it comes to it, I'll go to an electric bike for 90% of my journeys and literally NOT PAY for propulsion overall. I could do that in a crappy, cloudy, still country and still find a way to produce that electricity that's cheaper than running a petrol equivalent.
The only thing we don't have power for is the PEAK hours, nothing else. Otherwise, the pittance drawn by a car is eclipsed by your heating, lighting, etc.
But the beauty of electricity? It can come from ANY source. We could quite literally just burn petrol in a huge petrol engine and keep MORE electric cars powered than that petrol could have run direct.
Because that core would STILL NEED to interface with main memory just the same. It would still need to access the same hardware as the main processor does. It would still need to operate at the level it requires to do those operations such that they are visible to the main processor - and that's what SMM does!
All you've done is replace an in-die kind of SMM with an external chip that needs more complicated routing, all kinds of interactions with main memory (at DMA speed, no less) and peripheral buses, etc. etc. etc. You've not solved the security problem, but you've added a shed-load of costs and external hardware problems that didn't exist before!
To act as a mouse visible to DOS, it has to interact with the system interrupt tables. Remember the TSR days of old? You're putting stuff into main memory to have it executed whenever a certain interrupt happens. Which memory? Well, you need at least the USB Host Controller areas, plus something in low memory if you want it available to the BIOS.
Controlling fans, monitoring temperature, issuing safe shutdown commands etc.? Again all happens by talking to the main processor. This is exactly what the SMM was designed for, does, is doing, and needs in order to do that.
Sure, there's a bug that needs to be patched, but what you're suggesting is EXACTLY what the SMM is supposed to be doing already.
I just question who the guy who ultimately makes the decision is. Where there's a per-seat licence, okay fair enough? But 200 licences PER USER? That's just fucking insane. Someone knew that. Someone let that creep from one licence to two. From two to four. Each time adding MULTITUDES of Oracle licences to the deal for every single user all over again.
That's just ridiculous, stupid, bad planning. There should be fingers pointed, legacy or not. You just shouldn't not be paying more than per-seat for anything you use, and a big customer like a government I expect to be able to get "any number of seats, costed per full time employee" instead. That's how educational licensing works, I see no reason that a government department should be so special as to warrant HUNDREDS OF TIMES more licences for the same number of end-users.
And when you consider entire-government consolidation (i.e. let's do a deal for ALL government departments), it should be even less.
Some idiot took a backhander, and ever since a multitude of idiots have propagated the mistake over and over and over and over again. That's not accidental. You know what the licensing is going to cost way before you cost up a project fully. And for those kinds of licence costs you could, quite literally, write things over again on any database backend of your choice.
There's a reason I think that numbers like this should be more public. Quite how many Microsoft licences are the UK Government buying each year? How many seats, how many users, what's the cost? And then do apps. And then do databases and back-end licences. And then do silly things like cloud subscriptions and backup sofware.
Because, fuck, there is no way that is accidental. Each guy just dumped it on the next and didn't give a shit.
There's a reason that I want government to - by law - be able to cancel all contracts at a certain point each year and NEVER be obliged to continue more than a year in any single contract. Yes, costs would go up initially, but fuck - next year you negotiate with their competitor as well if they give you grief.
Getting locked in like that is just stupidity of the highest order.
And I bet even that firewall and modem had bugs that exposed more of an attack surface than you ever wanted it to.
Systems don't "stop running" without updates. They stop being secure. And now that systems are all online, all the time, it's more important to be secure than almost anything else.
I can name bugs in 30+ year old software that made it into a production release and could never be patched because of the capabilities at the time.
And that was when the "app" was the only thing running on a single processor with complete "kernel" access to the entire machine, so not at all complicated by filesystems, process interactions, security mechanisms, etc. The days when software COULD take advantage of the timing of a particular processor, and even things like undocumented opcodes.
Software is an inherently "unfinishable" product. Just as everything works, something will break somewhere - you get your app going in DOS and then all your clients move to Windows, you get it working on Windows, and then all the Windows versions move to NT-based kernels and the like. It's a never-ending game.
And, with security particularly, there is no point at which you can call the software finished. There isn't a piece of software in existence that is "unbroken" on a general purpose modern machine - even those released dozens of years ago. Nobody was considering timing-based memory cache attacks back then.
Software that stays static is THE WORST culprit of exactly this kind of shit - unfixed bugs that propagate and hang around for years undiscovered until they become much more serious and affect devices that can no longer be commercially-viable to update.
Software is not static, and mainly because our expectations, operating systems and even hardware aren't static either.
You think Word 2.0 for DOS is somehow magically "secure" or better programmed than modern stuff made with optimising compilers that warn about everything and do proper memory separation?
An open-design mono laser printer, with drivers for all platforms, that can do 300dpi, and honestly DOES NOT CARE what toner you use (literally just a reservoir that you fill).
If we can eliminate drums that "die", in some way, any way, any way at all, and leave us with just toner and sheer fatigue of components (but large quantities of cheap, standard replacement parts), I'll happily spend more than I've ever spent on any printer I've ever bought.
I have an old Samsung printer that is refillable like this, and damn close to the rest of the requirements, but is showing it's age and hard to get working (but possible) on modern Windows/Linux. And the rubbers that do wear out are getting harder and harder to find.
Don't know if you noticed but "flavour" is one of those things that, by mass, contributes almost nothing to your meal. As such, it doesn't really matter about the flavour as you can add it later with a tiny "essence" of the original flavour.
You can complain as much as you like, but flavour is a secondary option to the majority of the world when it comes to food.
You can't steal something that people are deliberately offering access to for free (or, in some cases, for a charge you have to pay in order to use it anyway - same thing).
The problem is that you have to be on a Wifi network - at home, that's easy. Outside, you're likely to be bandwidth-limited, protocol-blocked, unable to even join without paying or signing up, etc.
Multipath is a cool technology. But relying on Wifi to boost your downloads is no different to just connecting to Wifi to do a download in the first place.
Now if you had a phone with several SIM cards and could use all their 4G/5G connections to download the same file... that's pretty useful. And dual-SIM phones are not exactly a rarity, especially in Asian countries.
Why would you use consumer level drives in a business?
Clients really don't need an SSD as they are mostly limited by network speed more than anything, and servers shouldn't be touching that shit.
That said, the 840 EVOs put me off upgrading my laptop, but I just went with a 1Tb 850 instead, which doesn't have any of those problems.
Every manufacturer has problems with certain models, it's inevitable. But make sure you're using the right use case, evaluate properly, and disregard things that couldn't have affected you and you're fine.
To be honest, a manufacturer that has the nous to say "We don't think it's us, we've stuck a programmer on it, look we found a bug, here's the patch" is something worth supporting because that's PRECISELY what I'd expect of any decent company.
Doesn't matter much - this is why many Samsungs were mistakenly blacklisted, thinking it was a problem with the drive.
Unless you're running RAID0 or similar, it's not going to bite you. Not at all sure why anyone runs RAID0, to be honest, and certainly not with SSD's, but there you go. RAID10 is affected, I believe, but with 8 drives I'm not sure what you'd get from RAID10 that RAID 5 wouldn't have been better for you anyway.
To me, streaming is a long, hard, complicated way to replace a HDMI cable. Hell, even a £30 cheapy radio-transmitting HDMI works better most of the time.
Controllers are wireless nowadays and every PC, laptop, tablet, etc. has DVI (and thus HDMI) or direct HDMI connectivity. I very much doubt the common ground between "PC gamer", "Running on ancient VGA-only machines", "Doesn't want stuff in the living room but wants to play there" and "Has many spare devices" is much of an intersection.
Microsoft abandoned Games for Windows Live because it could not compete - even plugged into exclusive AAA-rated games, people hated it and then developers started REMOVING it from games that already had it.
Let's not even mention that many of the old Microsoft games are on Steam already. They could have easily made those XBox / Windows exclusive, but then they'd have precisely zero of the profit they see now.
Sorry, but MS is not a threat in the gaming arena. With Desura dead and Origin what it is, there's only one serious player and a handful of minors when it comes to PC gaming. Steam already has all the features necessary to stream to or even run on consoles (it already does, no?), and there's more tiny cheap devices to do just that en-route.
I bet Steam make more in a year than Games For Windows Live ever did.
THE SHEER PHYSICS INVOLVED MEANS HUGE POWER CONNECTIONS. What can fit in a Cat5e-thick cable at 240V needs a fucking iron bar to carry the current at 1V. DC requires even thicker iron bars than AC because it arcs like fuck.
You can't shove an iron-bar's worth of current through a microcontroller with teeny, tiny traces without things catching fire. Even if the logic is abstracted (e.g. UPS), still something somewhere has to shift enormous iron-bars carrying current around. Look inside a UPS at the size of the capacitors, the width of the traces, the amount of stuff just put through physical relays to isolate real-current-carrying stuff from the controller circuitry, and the sheer thickness of copper in the battery leads.
Sheer physics says that what you want, something that can take account of all situations, means you have to design to the highest spec in order to not start fires. And that means a huge stonking great, very hot, dangerous device.
Honestly, I can take out a room by shorting a decent-sized car or UPS battery. Fuck knows what happens if you get an arc inside your multi-convertor device if it develops a fault.
There's a reason it doesn't exist, for the same reason that 10GHz chips don't exist. Simple laws of physics.
What the bollocks was about nobody daring to suggest building microcontrollers for the things they are used for today, I have no clue. That's EXACTLY what microcontrollers were specifically built to do and have been doing since their invention.
P.S. Discrete logic runs generally slower than IC because of one very simple thing - the speed of light. Look up any of the wirewrap/homebrew "computers" made from discrete components of ordinary size. They are severely limited because the length of their traces (on the order of centimetres rather than micrometres/nanometres) means that signals get out of sync before you get past 8MHz or so. This is the same reason that you don't have 10GHz chips yet, but can have lots of multicore 3GHz chips in the same package.
An A/C capable of cooling a car or boat isn't really comparable. First, they move through outside air when in use or are submerged, so cooling is aided quite a lot. Second, they barely have to cool the equivalent of one room in a house. Maybe more rapidly, but that's just a case of brute power.
However, the volume covered means they aren't actually cooling at max power for more than a few minutes anyway, and the sealed interior of a car means they can dial-down quite quickly. They also don't have to worry about killing the battery at all, they are effectively "plugged in", and I'm not sure how long they'd last on battery - certainly it would be much worse than leaving your lights on!
Applying such things to a household running on solar? I think there's going to be more than a few small problems.
Compare size of fixed-voltage adaptors, to those able to cope with 110v/240v output.
Compare size of fixed-output adaptors to "multi-output" adaptors. Some laptops ones are tiny. All the "generic" adapators are huge.
And that's with a handful of options, maybe 2 options on the input and 3-4 on the output. Now combine sizes. Now add in an input capable of the DC (yes, you can Wheatstone bridge the AC, but that's got to be using diodes big enough for anything you put on). Now add intermediate paths capable of the MAXIMUM current that goes through it, as DC, all the way, down to the minimum voltage (i.e. if it can output 1v, that's going to give 12 TIMES the current that outputting at 12V would give, needing seriously large cables and intermediate circuitry for any practical purpose (even 30W, at 1v, would give 30A ratings... 30A DC @ 1V needs 120mm thick cable for a 1m run).
Even adjusting for "reasonable" voltages up/down, you're also expecting up and down conversion (i.e. mains to 12V and also 12V to 48V), which is rare to see in the same device.
Basically, the thing would be as huge and heavy as a car battery, get fucking hot, be prone to failure, and require internal circuitry and insulation from the power paths that's just not practical. And it would probably be quite inefficient across whole ranges of voltages.
You can't have some tiny 5v chip controlling a variable output of that kind of size without some huge, specialist "break open a UPS and see the kind of size we're talking about" components in it, with thick paths between them.
Honestly, the first thought that comes to mind is "fire", quickly followed by "fucking expensive". There's a reason that you set a standard and follow it and try not to change that standard (hence why half the world refuses to change to the other half's mains voltage). The conversion equipment is then static, and makes it practical. And there's a reason that 100+ Volts emerges as the winner every time, because you can get decent power down a decent sized cable.
Hell, even 12V DC / 240V AC input devices are "rare" in modern life compared to everything else - motorhomes and marine use, pretty much, and expensive and sometimes several years behind the technology. And internally all they do is convert to one or the other, so it's really just a TV and a convertor in a box wired to the same 12V DC input on the actual TV (which almost certainly then boosts the voltage for it's LCD panel) because that's easier to make than some generic device that can take in anything and shove it where it wants in whatever format it wants.
Fuck, even inverters or voltage convertors (110/240V) as standalone devices for generic use are bricks that weigh a ton, cost a lot, and have very limited power output.
This UK citizen would rather under-18's didn't do shit and/or post about it online such that might later affect their lives.
Take some fucking responsibility for yourself from about the age of 10/11, as the law states, and if you cock up, learn to live with the consequences.
Sure, we'd all like a time machine that could erase certain mistakes but why the hell should we legislate some cyber-time-machine that actually removes indiscretions posted publicly?
Not only that, it just won't work. You can't just erase facts forever. And if you could, the infrastructure capable of doing that is more open to misuse from adults than anything else I can think of. I bet there are certain UK politicians at the moment that would like to conveniently forget paedophiles in the Houses of Parliament, not to mention the last drug-taking, prostitute-hiring British peer in charge of parliamentary ethics.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in schools (in the UK, that means the standard, mandatory education up to 18, nothing beyond that). Most places I have spoken to are wary of 64-bit, even, so they're still technically running on, what? 3.5Gb or thereabouts?
I have 64-bit throughout so I have 4Gb, but I've seen little reason to go past that. Pretty much the bottleneck is network, and if I get the network up to speed (not cheap), it would be server-side (disk array speed, etc.). The clients very rarely do anything that they aren't waiting for stuff from the network to complete.
Next year, I may go 8Gb in the clients but I would predict to see much huger speed increases by just going to SSD on the client (Lifespan under swap conditions? Meh, drives barely last a year or two for us anyway and then we're replacing the whole machine - overprovision and let it loose and suffer a tiny client hard drive for the sake of speed).
I really need cheap 10Gb kit, though - from server down to end-switch. Gigabit to the desktop is okay for now, but it won't be long. But RAM? Hell, 4Gb is fine for basically any business task unless it's a server. There, yes, fuck, you need as much as you can get. I just doubled all my servers RAM this summer, at great expense. But the clients are running Windows, Office, a few apps and a browser and rarely make it through the day without being logged off or shut down. And we do deal with large databases and centrally-stored stuff all the time, but that's for the server to worry about. The clients, however, need next to nothing.
Before we start on the conspiracy theories - ANYONE who relies on a third party to encrypt their stuff is not worried about security. Not really.
And any cloud provider will accept and store encrypted files that ONLY YOU have the key to.
It depends on what you're looking at.
Is this entirely independent research by respected labs? Or is this research in one particular area, by a specialised lab, with a particular sponsor? The latter is, we all know but can't prove easily, biased.
Is this a paper designed to do nothing more than back up a sponsor's advertising claims? Or is it something groundbreaking from a lab with few political ties, nothing to prove, and some serious science behind it.
It all changes the perspective of what a "scientist" is (i.e. someone who work not-for-profit to forward the cause of humanity, versus some guy in a lab coat with a PhD who's sold out?). As difficult as it is for us to distinguish, imagine what that means to the general public. Those people who invent terms for things for shampoo commercials that have fuck all to do with making your hair shiny, even if they sound like that, are held in the same regard as that guy doing genetic research to hunt down some elusive connection is an ultra-rare but devastating condition.
The problem is that there is nothing to distinguish the two, and both are technically "science", and thus can generate papers and be done by postdocs.
Sorry, but this is why I believe that referees on paper should be chosen specifically, why all connections should be documented IN THE PAPER (didn't declare who sponsors your lab? Bam, you're in the shit pile and your paper is forever disregarded), and why anything published should not be accepted until it's been confirmed - ideally by a bitter rival.
Too much shit is published nowadays as "science", commercial crap, ridiculous notions, unreviewed papers, basically anything from arxiv.org, etc. And the requirements aren't strict enough.
My girlfriend's a PhD in a medical field. Her contributions to a book were copied basically verbatim by someone else and published as another chapter in the very same book. It discredits her work, and that of the plagiarist, not to mention the primary author/editor. Things like asking people to reproduce their work under independent scrutiny are the only way to verify what's true, who did it, and how it was done so it can be repeated by future generations. We've lost all that in the last 20 or so years, even in things like Maths, etc. by having people referee their own friend's papers and other crap like that.
96 million balls at $0.36 each?
I reckon you can get a very big tarp, and supports, and structure, for that.
A ball is a sphere. It casts a circular (ovoid) shadow at best. The overlap between balls probably means you're only covering about 80-90% of the surface at best. I suppose they don't mind losing that to allow the water level to rise and fall and have the balls move over each other.
But, to be honest, I can't imagine that's it's not cheaper to just buy a cover of some kind? Getting those things back out is going to be great fun - and expensive - if they get covered in algae, say.
We've been saying to leave a ball in your pond for decades to stop it freezing over completely, is this really such a shocking suggestion that it makes the news here, on Soylent, The Reg and the BBC?
If you'd asked how to shade a reservoir cheaply, I can't believe this would be more than 2nd or 3rd down the list.
I don't see that Outlook is anything special. It's selling point is that it integrates with Exchange, not that it's the best way to do things.
Fuck, it took me 20 minutes to work out how to discover who an email was sent to when it arrived in my inbox (e.g. if you have a lot of aliases arriving in one inbox). Double-click the email, File, Properties, scroll down, read the raw SMTP headers. Not fucking sensible.
Let's not forget that Insert Signature can fuck up depending on your HTML/Text settings (some of which you CAN'T set to always reply in certain formats by default, etc.). Let's not even get into the way you're supposed to create rules and shit, I find that horrendous.
As an email client, Outlook is servicable but nowhere near ideal. As a calendar client, it's servicable and a little better. But the selling point is only ever Exchange compatibility.
And the number of people who own Office who even know what Visio is, let alone have a sensible use for it that can't be done in other programs just as easily, are basically limited too.
Sorry, but Outlook is nothing special. In fact, I can barely stand it.
Because exercise doesn't increase your metabolism and make you hungrier or require more energy intake at all... no... not at all...
Diets don't do shit because a) most are bollocks (anything that suggests particular foodstuffs, uses the word "superfoods", etc.), b) nobody sticks to them, c) everybody stops sticking to them eventually.
A diet is about changing the way you eat, what you eat, and how much you eat. It's not about following a recipe, or some magical fix, or suddenly stopping eating. It's about looking at what you do and changing it, forever, or not at all.
As such, diet + exercise is the combination and, invariably, everyone starts them both at the same time and then wonders why it's so hard and they have to cheat, or feel elated when they "finish their diet" (a ridiculous term) and can go back to putting weight back on.
You know what? There's no real easy way to lose weight. You just have to change how you live. It's as simple as that. And if you want to stay in the new way, you have to stick with your new lifestyle - possibly forever, or at least until you have a significant change in your body's expectations (i.e. you retire, etc.).
I say this as the skinniest fuck known to man, who never exercises and gorges on chocolate, crisps, cakes, fatty stuff, sugary drinks, etc. etc. etc. and has never had to bother with any of that stuff. But I'm tired of friends, family, partners, etc. going on "diets" as if that's like having a holiday for a week or two and then returning to "normal" when they're happy. It's about rate of change - and if your rate of change is zero, you're not doing anything. If you diet and the rate of change lowers, it won't always stay at that rate of change - at some point you'll either stop (and thus rate of change goes positive), or it'll return to zero (as your body starts to change the way it works to cope).
And, actually, thinking it's all about calories is bollocks too. Different people absorb things at different rates. Hell, it's probably got more to do with your gut bacteria that anything written on the side of a bottle. I can easily consume two-three times the recommended calorie intake consistently every day for months and not put on an ounce. I might even LOSE weight. As such, focusing on shitty numbers that nobody understands (as a scientist, I still insist it's fucking kcal, not calories) and nobody weighs and nobody adds up properly and which differ from person to person is a waste of time.
Eat less. Do more. Not losing weight? Eat less. Do more. Ad infinitum. Losing weight? Good. Keep going. At your target weight? Good. Dial is down EVER SO SLIGHTLY but don't stop. Until you get to the point where your rate of change is ZERO while at your target weight. Then live the rest of your fucking life like that until you notice a change. Rinse and repeat.
Whereas oil - I mean there's just an infinite supply of that, isn't there?
Idiot.
An electric car can be powered from anything. A hydrogen car can only be powered by hydrogen, and a petrol car only by petrol and a diesel car only by diesel.
The last time I priced up an electric bike, it worked out something like 10p of electricity for each trip, which would have worked out less than 1/40th of my petrol costs over the course of a month. I can put the savings from that into something that produces a pittance of electricity quite easily.
However, that's on the cusp of being true for cars too. So much so that I'd rather have a 220V/32A outside connector on my house than anything to do with any competing technology.
Fuck, if it comes to it, I'll go to an electric bike for 90% of my journeys and literally NOT PAY for propulsion overall. I could do that in a crappy, cloudy, still country and still find a way to produce that electricity that's cheaper than running a petrol equivalent.
The only thing we don't have power for is the PEAK hours, nothing else. Otherwise, the pittance drawn by a car is eclipsed by your heating, lighting, etc.
But the beauty of electricity? It can come from ANY source. We could quite literally just burn petrol in a huge petrol engine and keep MORE electric cars powered than that petrol could have run direct.
Because that core would STILL NEED to interface with main memory just the same. It would still need to access the same hardware as the main processor does. It would still need to operate at the level it requires to do those operations such that they are visible to the main processor - and that's what SMM does!
All you've done is replace an in-die kind of SMM with an external chip that needs more complicated routing, all kinds of interactions with main memory (at DMA speed, no less) and peripheral buses, etc. etc. etc. You've not solved the security problem, but you've added a shed-load of costs and external hardware problems that didn't exist before!
Er... you just re-invented SMM.
To act as a mouse visible to DOS, it has to interact with the system interrupt tables. Remember the TSR days of old? You're putting stuff into main memory to have it executed whenever a certain interrupt happens. Which memory? Well, you need at least the USB Host Controller areas, plus something in low memory if you want it available to the BIOS.
Controlling fans, monitoring temperature, issuing safe shutdown commands etc.? Again all happens by talking to the main processor. This is exactly what the SMM was designed for, does, is doing, and needs in order to do that.
Sure, there's a bug that needs to be patched, but what you're suggesting is EXACTLY what the SMM is supposed to be doing already.
I just question who the guy who ultimately makes the decision is. Where there's a per-seat licence, okay fair enough? But 200 licences PER USER? That's just fucking insane. Someone knew that. Someone let that creep from one licence to two. From two to four. Each time adding MULTITUDES of Oracle licences to the deal for every single user all over again.
That's just ridiculous, stupid, bad planning. There should be fingers pointed, legacy or not. You just shouldn't not be paying more than per-seat for anything you use, and a big customer like a government I expect to be able to get "any number of seats, costed per full time employee" instead. That's how educational licensing works, I see no reason that a government department should be so special as to warrant HUNDREDS OF TIMES more licences for the same number of end-users.
And when you consider entire-government consolidation (i.e. let's do a deal for ALL government departments), it should be even less.
Some idiot took a backhander, and ever since a multitude of idiots have propagated the mistake over and over and over and over again. That's not accidental. You know what the licensing is going to cost way before you cost up a project fully. And for those kinds of licence costs you could, quite literally, write things over again on any database backend of your choice.
There's a reason I think that numbers like this should be more public. Quite how many Microsoft licences are the UK Government buying each year? How many seats, how many users, what's the cost? And then do apps. And then do databases and back-end licences. And then do silly things like cloud subscriptions and backup sofware.
Because, fuck, there is no way that is accidental. Each guy just dumped it on the next and didn't give a shit.
There's a reason that I want government to - by law - be able to cancel all contracts at a certain point each year and NEVER be obliged to continue more than a year in any single contract. Yes, costs would go up initially, but fuck - next year you negotiate with their competitor as well if they give you grief.
Getting locked in like that is just stupidity of the highest order.
And I bet even that firewall and modem had bugs that exposed more of an attack surface than you ever wanted it to.
Systems don't "stop running" without updates. They stop being secure. And now that systems are all online, all the time, it's more important to be secure than almost anything else.
Has software ever "just worked"?
I can name bugs in 30+ year old software that made it into a production release and could never be patched because of the capabilities at the time.
And that was when the "app" was the only thing running on a single processor with complete "kernel" access to the entire machine, so not at all complicated by filesystems, process interactions, security mechanisms, etc. The days when software COULD take advantage of the timing of a particular processor, and even things like undocumented opcodes.
Software is an inherently "unfinishable" product. Just as everything works, something will break somewhere - you get your app going in DOS and then all your clients move to Windows, you get it working on Windows, and then all the Windows versions move to NT-based kernels and the like. It's a never-ending game.
And, with security particularly, there is no point at which you can call the software finished. There isn't a piece of software in existence that is "unbroken" on a general purpose modern machine - even those released dozens of years ago. Nobody was considering timing-based memory cache attacks back then.
Software that stays static is THE WORST culprit of exactly this kind of shit - unfixed bugs that propagate and hang around for years undiscovered until they become much more serious and affect devices that can no longer be commercially-viable to update.
Software is not static, and mainly because our expectations, operating systems and even hardware aren't static either.
You think Word 2.0 for DOS is somehow magically "secure" or better programmed than modern stuff made with optimising compilers that warn about everything and do proper memory separation?
Did you miss the bit where nobody noticed the drone until they checked the CCTV after the event?
An open-design mono laser printer, with drivers for all platforms, that can do 300dpi, and honestly DOES NOT CARE what toner you use (literally just a reservoir that you fill).
If we can eliminate drums that "die", in some way, any way, any way at all, and leave us with just toner and sheer fatigue of components (but large quantities of cheap, standard replacement parts), I'll happily spend more than I've ever spent on any printer I've ever bought.
I have an old Samsung printer that is refillable like this, and damn close to the rest of the requirements, but is showing it's age and hard to get working (but possible) on modern Windows/Linux. And the rubbers that do wear out are getting harder and harder to find.
Don't know if you noticed but "flavour" is one of those things that, by mass, contributes almost nothing to your meal. As such, it doesn't really matter about the flavour as you can add it later with a tiny "essence" of the original flavour.
You can complain as much as you like, but flavour is a secondary option to the majority of the world when it comes to food.
You can't steal something that people are deliberately offering access to for free (or, in some cases, for a charge you have to pay in order to use it anyway - same thing).
The problem is that you have to be on a Wifi network - at home, that's easy. Outside, you're likely to be bandwidth-limited, protocol-blocked, unable to even join without paying or signing up, etc.
Multipath is a cool technology. But relying on Wifi to boost your downloads is no different to just connecting to Wifi to do a download in the first place.
Now if you had a phone with several SIM cards and could use all their 4G/5G connections to download the same file... that's pretty useful. And dual-SIM phones are not exactly a rarity, especially in Asian countries.
Why would you use consumer level drives in a business?
Clients really don't need an SSD as they are mostly limited by network speed more than anything, and servers shouldn't be touching that shit.
That said, the 840 EVOs put me off upgrading my laptop, but I just went with a 1Tb 850 instead, which doesn't have any of those problems.
Every manufacturer has problems with certain models, it's inevitable. But make sure you're using the right use case, evaluate properly, and disregard things that couldn't have affected you and you're fine.
To be honest, a manufacturer that has the nous to say "We don't think it's us, we've stuck a programmer on it, look we found a bug, here's the patch" is something worth supporting because that's PRECISELY what I'd expect of any decent company.
Doesn't matter much - this is why many Samsungs were mistakenly blacklisted, thinking it was a problem with the drive.
Unless you're running RAID0 or similar, it's not going to bite you. Not at all sure why anyone runs RAID0, to be honest, and certainly not with SSD's, but there you go. RAID10 is affected, I believe, but with 8 drives I'm not sure what you'd get from RAID10 that RAID 5 wouldn't have been better for you anyway.
Exactly.
To me, streaming is a long, hard, complicated way to replace a HDMI cable. Hell, even a £30 cheapy radio-transmitting HDMI works better most of the time.
Controllers are wireless nowadays and every PC, laptop, tablet, etc. has DVI (and thus HDMI) or direct HDMI connectivity. I very much doubt the common ground between "PC gamer", "Running on ancient VGA-only machines", "Doesn't want stuff in the living room but wants to play there" and "Has many spare devices" is much of an intersection.
Microsoft abandoned Games for Windows Live because it could not compete - even plugged into exclusive AAA-rated games, people hated it and then developers started REMOVING it from games that already had it.
Let's not even mention that many of the old Microsoft games are on Steam already. They could have easily made those XBox / Windows exclusive, but then they'd have precisely zero of the profit they see now.
Sorry, but MS is not a threat in the gaming arena. With Desura dead and Origin what it is, there's only one serious player and a handful of minors when it comes to PC gaming. Steam already has all the features necessary to stream to or even run on consoles (it already does, no?), and there's more tiny cheap devices to do just that en-route.
I bet Steam make more in a year than Games For Windows Live ever did.
God, really? What don't you get about this?
THE SHEER PHYSICS INVOLVED MEANS HUGE POWER CONNECTIONS. What can fit in a Cat5e-thick cable at 240V needs a fucking iron bar to carry the current at 1V. DC requires even thicker iron bars than AC because it arcs like fuck.
You can't shove an iron-bar's worth of current through a microcontroller with teeny, tiny traces without things catching fire. Even if the logic is abstracted (e.g. UPS), still something somewhere has to shift enormous iron-bars carrying current around. Look inside a UPS at the size of the capacitors, the width of the traces, the amount of stuff just put through physical relays to isolate real-current-carrying stuff from the controller circuitry, and the sheer thickness of copper in the battery leads.
Sheer physics says that what you want, something that can take account of all situations, means you have to design to the highest spec in order to not start fires. And that means a huge stonking great, very hot, dangerous device.
Honestly, I can take out a room by shorting a decent-sized car or UPS battery. Fuck knows what happens if you get an arc inside your multi-convertor device if it develops a fault.
There's a reason it doesn't exist, for the same reason that 10GHz chips don't exist. Simple laws of physics.
What the bollocks was about nobody daring to suggest building microcontrollers for the things they are used for today, I have no clue. That's EXACTLY what microcontrollers were specifically built to do and have been doing since their invention.
P.S. Discrete logic runs generally slower than IC because of one very simple thing - the speed of light. Look up any of the wirewrap/homebrew "computers" made from discrete components of ordinary size. They are severely limited because the length of their traces (on the order of centimetres rather than micrometres/nanometres) means that signals get out of sync before you get past 8MHz or so. This is the same reason that you don't have 10GHz chips yet, but can have lots of multicore 3GHz chips in the same package.
An A/C capable of cooling a car or boat isn't really comparable. First, they move through outside air when in use or are submerged, so cooling is aided quite a lot. Second, they barely have to cool the equivalent of one room in a house. Maybe more rapidly, but that's just a case of brute power.
However, the volume covered means they aren't actually cooling at max power for more than a few minutes anyway, and the sealed interior of a car means they can dial-down quite quickly. They also don't have to worry about killing the battery at all, they are effectively "plugged in", and I'm not sure how long they'd last on battery - certainly it would be much worse than leaving your lights on!
Applying such things to a household running on solar? I think there's going to be more than a few small problems.
Compare size of fixed-voltage adaptors, to those able to cope with 110v/240v output.
Compare size of fixed-output adaptors to "multi-output" adaptors. Some laptops ones are tiny. All the "generic" adapators are huge.
And that's with a handful of options, maybe 2 options on the input and 3-4 on the output. Now combine sizes. Now add in an input capable of the DC (yes, you can Wheatstone bridge the AC, but that's got to be using diodes big enough for anything you put on). Now add intermediate paths capable of the MAXIMUM current that goes through it, as DC, all the way, down to the minimum voltage (i.e. if it can output 1v, that's going to give 12 TIMES the current that outputting at 12V would give, needing seriously large cables and intermediate circuitry for any practical purpose (even 30W, at 1v, would give 30A ratings... 30A DC @ 1V needs 120mm thick cable for a 1m run).
Even adjusting for "reasonable" voltages up/down, you're also expecting up and down conversion (i.e. mains to 12V and also 12V to 48V), which is rare to see in the same device.
Basically, the thing would be as huge and heavy as a car battery, get fucking hot, be prone to failure, and require internal circuitry and insulation from the power paths that's just not practical. And it would probably be quite inefficient across whole ranges of voltages.
You can't have some tiny 5v chip controlling a variable output of that kind of size without some huge, specialist "break open a UPS and see the kind of size we're talking about" components in it, with thick paths between them.
Honestly, the first thought that comes to mind is "fire", quickly followed by "fucking expensive". There's a reason that you set a standard and follow it and try not to change that standard (hence why half the world refuses to change to the other half's mains voltage). The conversion equipment is then static, and makes it practical. And there's a reason that 100+ Volts emerges as the winner every time, because you can get decent power down a decent sized cable.
Hell, even 12V DC / 240V AC input devices are "rare" in modern life compared to everything else - motorhomes and marine use, pretty much, and expensive and sometimes several years behind the technology. And internally all they do is convert to one or the other, so it's really just a TV and a convertor in a box wired to the same 12V DC input on the actual TV (which almost certainly then boosts the voltage for it's LCD panel) because that's easier to make than some generic device that can take in anything and shove it where it wants in whatever format it wants.
Fuck, even inverters or voltage convertors (110/240V) as standalone devices for generic use are bricks that weigh a ton, cost a lot, and have very limited power output.
This UK citizen would rather under-18's didn't do shit and/or post about it online such that might later affect their lives.
Take some fucking responsibility for yourself from about the age of 10/11, as the law states, and if you cock up, learn to live with the consequences.
Sure, we'd all like a time machine that could erase certain mistakes but why the hell should we legislate some cyber-time-machine that actually removes indiscretions posted publicly?
Not only that, it just won't work. You can't just erase facts forever. And if you could, the infrastructure capable of doing that is more open to misuse from adults than anything else I can think of. I bet there are certain UK politicians at the moment that would like to conveniently forget paedophiles in the Houses of Parliament, not to mention the last drug-taking, prostitute-hiring British peer in charge of parliamentary ethics.