roryirvine

That was for radio & hifi kit, but they had a bunch of others.

I remember Enercell for batteries, Supertape for cassette tapes, Genexa TVs and VCRs, Archer TV/radio aerials and distribution systems, Micronta meters, and, of course, the Science Fair 200-in-1 electronic project kits.

The branch opposite my school had several "characters" amongst the staff who, amongst other things, would pelt you with dud resistors if you refused their entreaties to sign up to the Battery Club. A great place for nerdy teenagers to visit, but I can't imagine them actually ever having sold very much...

According to its logs, my bargain basement Huawei 4G router from 2019 got an update last week.

I hope that most of these devices actually do update themselves automatically, and people just aren't noticing. (Whether the updates are any good is another matter!)

It's much better these days.

The old installer (boot-floppies) was legendarily prickly at the time Ubuntu was introduced, but it's long since been replaced by the much friendlier debian-installer. And the default install images now include non-free firmware by default, so modern wifi, bluetooth, and graphics hardware are fully supported.

To be honest, Debian now tends to be fairly vanilla and boring and it's actually Ubuntu that often ends up being a bit weirder. For example, consider how they treat the Snap packaging system for consumer software, or the rust rewrite of coreutils. Debian provides both as supported options (of course it does, Debian supports pretty much everything!), but Ubuntu pushes them to all users by default.

And for all that, they still managed to refrain from distributing the audio.

Nihilist complaints about "the MSM" aren't a productive way to deal with such ghoulishness.

Hard to argue that the BBC isn't mainstream, yet the article we're discussing contains only selected extracts from the transcript and doesn't link to the audio.

Might be a good idea to rethink the name (or at least run it past a speaker of British English) before going much further...

He served a couple of terms as one of a dozen Deputy Chairmen of the State Duma (an administrative rather than leadership role), and got single digit percentage vote shares on the five occasions he ran for President.

So, yes, he was a thuggish populist troll, and I agree that his mode of operation was often comparable to that of Trump. But he never had power, and never came close to getting it.

For that reason, I think most would see Trump as being in a completely different league.

Amateur vibe coders who raised a $60M Series B a few months ago.

I'm genuinely not sure who comes out looking worse - the coders for their reckless amateurishness, or the VCs for providing a misleading veneer of professionalism.

But 4 decades ago is exactly when nuclear was being built up in the UK - indeed, most of the AGR fleet came online between 1985 and 1989.

And "quite expensive" vastly understates it - high temperature gas-cooled reactors are in theory more efficient in operation at the expense of increased construction cost. In reality, construction costs far, far outweigh the raw cost of fuel (reprocessing is a different matter!) so we landed ourselves with all the extra expense for very little benefit (probably actually a negative benefit since the much-vaunted ability to refuel whilst at full power turned out not to work in practice).

So they were late, hideously expensive, completely failed to be sold to other countries, and now have an availability factor no higher than that of offshore wind.

We knew that they would be unlikely to live up to their promise as early as 1964 and yet still went ahead despite several opportunities to change course. The nuclear industry never learns.

It got less cringeworthy once they toned down the dated American culture references during the second season but, yeah, it's as if a homage to Star Trek were created by someone whose favourite Trek series was Enterprise.

More common in the North and Scotland, I think.

Scots (the Scots language, not Scottish English) tends to use bare "else" wherever "otherwise" is used in English, so I assume it's coming from the Northumbrian dialect of Middle English and leaks through to those dialects of Modern English with more Northumbrian influence.

The most recent MacOS update does indeed revert any manual changes you've made, and re-adds the offending cert: https://mstdn.social/@jschauma/117513596272504904

Their attitude seems to be that you don't own anything outside of your homedir, and touching system-managed files is done at your own risk.

I'm fairly vague about post-1990s Microsoft products, but wasn't Windows 2008 exactly that?

No GUI, with admin through Powershell, remote MMC snap-ins, or the SCUM/SCOM automation stuff. The managed hosting company I worked for around 2010 used it fairly heavily, and it didn't seem much worse to admin than the CFEngine / Puppet type tooling we had for Linux at the time.

Even tech-adjacent folk in areas like product, user research and enterprise architecture seem to love it.

The bulk of the hands-on-keyboard time for those disciplines now seems to be using Copilot 365 as "fancy autocomplete" and "make this presentation better", Copilot Notebooks for deeper work, and coming up with all sorts of Copilot integrations and agents for managing email, Teams meetings and chats.

It's almost as if "copilot" has already become the generic term for "professional LLM", and many genuinely can't understand why us techies find it so limiting.

I mostly agree with you, though I think it's more of a sharpening of focus onto a narrow subset of the original grand vision that's more likely to be immediately useful as a product.

Whether it's a product that anyone actually wants is another matter, of course - as is whether they'll ever be able to zoom out and bring the entirety of the original vision into focus if this more limited version does become a success.

Britannica actually had a great website during the dot com era - hyperlinked, very browsable, and definitely had that semi-addictive "rabbithole" quality.

The hurt themselves badly by imposing a really annoying paywall just as Wikipedia was beginning to take off. A hybrid model with tiered access (maybe even a limited ad-supported free tier) might well have kept them on top - instead, they offered only a single expensive annual plan priced to compete with the paper or CD editions.

Kai's Power Tools / Power Goo / Bryce took the custom interface stuff to the most extreme lengths - people genuinely loved it at the time but I think most would be horrified if anything went that far today.

https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/index.html

I've had 3 so far this year in the UK - all to do with car finance overpayments (I don't have a car!). They were all marked as spam automatically, so none of them caused a notification.

I suspect this is another example of the pathetic form of American exceptionalism - "no way to prevent this, says the only country where this regularly happens".

Is there no regulator willing to step in to force the telcos to block spam and scam texts? If not, why not?

Yeah, as I understand it, student visas have one of the biggest GDP multipliers of any visa type (second only to the Tier 1 Investor). It's reckoned that the window allowing you to stay on after graduation for long enough to find a good job on a subsequent employment visa is a large part of that.

Unfortunately, it's also one of the easiest types to fiddle with when people start screaming about immigrants / the evils of student housing / etc - prospective overseas students don't have nearly as many people willing to speak up for them as people with employment offers or who have family members already in the UK.

Hence this scheme intended to reduce the supply of places, the 'visa brake' under Starmer, and all the wild variations in policy under the previous Tory governments. We've not really been able to find any sort of happy medium since Brexit, and in the meantime - as you rightly point out in some of your other comments - it's the universities that are being harmed.

I'm probably showing my age here, but I'm astonished to read that 8 GB of free space could be considered so exceptionally low that you'd receive OS alerts about it or that apps would start preemptively failing.

The most my homedir has ever grown in one year is 3.2 GB, and I don't really go out of my way to keep things tidy. I'd be very pissed off if things started pestering me to clear stuff up years before it actually became a problem.

Much of the variation between accents lies in the unstressed vowels. We could simply omit those, treating the alphabet more as a semi-abugida.

You'd end up with something pretty close to early 2000s txtspk, so it might actually be a surprisingly easy conversion for many people.

And, though admittedly not really exposed much to the public, canals and railways both manage to mix chains in there, too... agh!

Because to convert from one to t'other, you have to multiply by 22 x 10 x 8 or whatever it is, rather than simply shift the digits.

For example, there's a park that's 1 mi 180 yds from me - if you were to pick one and stick with it then you could say either 1.1 mis or 1940 yds, rather than mixing the two and expecting people to do multiple rounds of arithmetic.

The UK tried it as part of the 1909 "People's Budget", coming into force two years later at an annual rate of 1p in the (pre-decimal) £, so about 0.4%.

There's an open question over whether anyone ever thought it would actually raise significant amounts of money, or if it was primarily intended as a tool to force a confrontation with the House of Lords. If the latter, it certainly did the job and helped establish the supremacy of the elected House of Commons over the unelected Lords.

In terms of revenue generation, though, it was much less successful - at the time it was abolished in 1920, the costs of surveying and valuing land had outweighed the amount of income generated so it was a net negative overall.

And mixes it with miles, too. Crazy decision.

In discussing the boundaries of animal sentience, the most important question is whether they can feel pain or distress.

So whilst a car's ability to sense and react to its environment may be at least as sophisticated as that of a plum tree, it's hard to see how it would meet the legal threshold for sentience in the same way that, say, a lobster does.

More to the point - if Musk genuinely believes that his cars are capable of suffering, why isn't he doing anything to prevent them from being harmed?

Samsung have experimented with bringing back the 'passport' format on the Z Fold 8, presumably as a hedge against the Duo taking off.

People seem to find it pretty ungainly compared to the more common tall/thin format - it has to be used with both hands even when closed, even though Samsung's one handed mode shifts the keyboard across as well as down (I don't think Apple's does, so it'll even be worse).

Sure, it's a better format when opened but that might account for only 10-20% of the time in use.

The other big datapoint used to justify the idea of a "millionaire exodus" is the relatively soft super prime property market in London.

But, again, the reality is that many of the former super prime buyers were either non-dom (ie. not tax resident) or were buying through offshore trusts or other tax-avoidance mechanisms. They've tended to be replaced by a younger set of "lifestyle-led" buyers who are more interested in London as a (relatively!) stable, secure global base rather than just as a convenient set of tax loopholes.

So we're replacing tax dodgers with tax payers, and British society as a whole is probably better off as a result - even if the individuals themselves do have lower total net worth than their predecessors.

Try jingling your keys too often, and your cat will start acting with disdain rather than excitement.

Ever more of us have reached that point with Musk, and he'll soon be reduced to dancing a jig with his underpants on his head in a desperate attempt to forestall yawns from his audience.

What happens at that point? Will he calm down and start acting a bit more sensibly, or will he react against the ingrates? Will he want to send us all away to, er, live on a farm?