Aibos exist, *and* they work even without their cloud connection.

On the flip side, you end up with days like today - anticyclonic gloom, not much wind, no sun, 59% of the UK's electricty being generated by burning gas (and a whopping 5% from burning Canadian forests shipped a quarter of the way around the world to us). If only we'd built some new nukes... but this is a country which can't build a runway, train line or tunnel despite decades of wrangling.

It's so bad at the moment that as I'm writing this I'm being paid *not* to use electricity by my supplier: they'll pay me 60p (77 cents) per kWh of power that I'm not using, compared to normal. That compares favourably with the 24p (31 cents) per kWh they normally charge!

When the system works though it works well. My supplier had several free electricity sessions earlier this year where they encouraged you to use as much as you could. Great fun if you have a plug-in hybrid or full electric car...

As a kid, I always thought the whole idea of tinkering with clocks was silly. Here in the south of the UK, no matter what you do, there's still too much daylight in summer (16 hours, but it's light for longer) and not enough in winter (8 hours in late December). I go to bed early, get up early, and used to struggle getting to sleep in the summer when the clocks went forward. I've never been woken by an alarm clock, as I'm a natural early riser.

So, 25 years ago, I decided I would stay on GMT year round. It worked wonders, no more trouble sleeping. To me, in the summer, it was a case of going into work an hour earlier and coming home an hour earlier, and as still I used daylight savings time at work (no missed meetings for me), it was as if every day was like a day trip to France!

I can't say I'll ever go back to tinkering with clocks, but what I will say is that you really shouldn't need the government to tell you to go to bed an hour earlier in summer, which is what daylight savings time means.

I've been using Excel since I was at school in the 90s - around 30 years, and as a nerd I soon found the "import text file" feature has options for delimiters - tab, space, semicolon, comma...

I'm guessing you were never in an IT lesson where you finished the work early, and thus had time to explore the various options and settings in Excel!

(As for CS degrees, at least in the late 90s in the UK they focused more on things like learning various programming languages, logic operations, maths, hardware etc rather than how to use Excel or how to format text files for importing data... that was deemed "ICT" rather than "CS", and mainly taught in schools).

Good! About time MS cracked down on companies, like Google, which create a hidden Admin user and use that to run their updaters, thus bypassing UAC and so forth.

Oh, it wasn't deliberate? Drat!

Oldest "PC" which gets used at least once a year - a Commodore Plus/4, with disk drive, which I was given in 1988 (on my 9th birthday)
Oldest actual PC which gets regularly used - self-built P3-450, used for old DOS games. Dual boots Win98 and Win2000. Built in 1999 - it has a GeForce 2 GTS and Voodoo 2.
Oldest PC which gets used at least once a fortnight - self-built i7-2600K in the living room, from 2011; it's my backup PC and used when I need to look something up when friends are round. (Like the P3 above, it served as my main PC back in the day).
And the PC on which I'm writing this is a self-built i9-9900KS from 2019, I've no plans to upgrade any time soon.

Mmm, 20 megs to do something which fits on two floppies with space to spare... (Back in the day, Doom used DOS/4GW - it even called itself the "Doom Operating System" as it loaded.)

Thinking back, it's absolutely amazing what they managed to do with the meager resources available at the time. I guess I just took it for granted back then!

...as I write this, I'm listening to music on YouTube played back via a SoundBlaster ZxR - which came with an analogue volume knob. That's the killer feature for me, but the sound quality isn't bad either.

As for the DOS days, I never did have a problem with any of my ISA SoundBlasters, which culminated in the AWE64. They just worked under DOS, although yes, the older ones did need configuring (IRQ7, as used for the printer port, was a good one to use, or IRQ5 as the later ones defaulted to). On the other hand, the various clones out there... some of those, the less said the better!

The author of that report ought to come to Kent (next door to London). No shortage of housebuilding here!

I live on a small island (9 by 5 miles) and in the past 15 years the western half has been trashed by the building of thousands of unwanted houses. Unwanted by the locals, that is, who watch their roads clog up, see their doctor waiting times increase and have to bus their kids to the mainland each day. The locals can't afford the houses, either, they're mostly snapped up by outsiders. (A classic is to sell a small house in London for £750K, then spend most of it on a much larger house 35 miles away, with say £200K pocket change).

This scenario is playing out across the southeast of England - wooden boxes shoved up with no garden space, all overlooked (seriously, who wants to go into their back garden and have a dozen houses all looking in), all in little dead-end estates. Awful.

What's needed instead of these cancer-like blobs is new towns and cities. Build from scratch, with the infrastructure in place from the word go: roads, hospitals, schools etc - as opposed to the current cancer-like growth system we have here.

As for major infrastructure projects, we are indeed a laughing stock and that won't change any time soon.

Intel have put features such as clock speed and extra cache behind software locks before, but in the low-end consumer space:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Clearly that received a big fat "up yours" from consumers, but many years later they're trying the same thing with servers. Maybe they'll have better luck this time, maybe not!

Coming from the UK, where roundabouts are two-a-penny, you'll see the evolution of junctions (as traffic amounts rise) goes as follows:

* Crossroads with give way (yield) lines
* Crossroads with traffic lights (causes queueing)
* Roundabout
* Roundabout with traffic lights (causes more queueing, these are unpopular)
* Massive over-engineered crossroads with loads of traffic lights
or, if you're really lucky,
* Junction re-engineered to be free flowing (grade separated)

Over the past couple of decades I've seen several go from the roundabout to complicated crossroads stages, while one near me is going from the roundabout with lights to the free flowing stage, having (briefly) been planned to go to the complicated crossroads stage.

It'll be interested to see what happens in the States when roundabouts become too busy... traffic lights? Reverting to crossroads with traffic lights? Or something else... time'll tell!

FWIW I put the leaked build on an old i7-2600K machine (sans TPM). I had to add a registry key before it'd let me install it - to bypass the lack of TPM - but after that it installed and runs just fine. It even supports the onboard Intel HD 3000, despite the requirement for a WDDM 2.0 driver.

I'd imagine, based on Windows 10 not supporting the Core2 Duos we still have at work but still working fine with them that as long as you have a 64-bit processor with the required instructions it'll work well enough.

The TPM thing, though... various sources say either a 1.2 or 2.0 module is required and if it turns out to be the latter then that writes-off a big chunk of PCs out there.

I fully expect MS to enforce the TPM requirement too, the various skips and tricks to avoid it so far are bound to be nobbled.

Ars have it wrong too in that case!

The name was invented, as I said, on TheWeatherOutlook forum around 2001. It then spread to the other weather forums (NetWeather, UKWW, even uk.sci.weather) in the UK.

The media, then, picked up on it in 2018 and ran with it - it's catchy, after all. You then get places like Ars bastardising the name as they don't know where it came from in the first place.

FWIW, the primary driver of the Beast in 2018 was actually SSW which occurred a few weeks earlier.... much as was the case this year, which also saw an easterly with snow. This year was actually the first midwinter easterly since 1997, the 2018 event coming right at the end of winter (in late February, spring starts on the 1st March). Before 1997, we had them in 1996, 1993, 1991, 1987, 1986, 1985....

Needless to say those of us who like snow and cold in winter are hoping the miserable run of snowless winters is coming to an end!

It was "The Beast *from* the East" btw, not "of the East". I live in the SE of the UK and the term was actually invented on a weather forum nearly 20 years ago.

While the article is interesting, it doesn't explain how during the 80s we had several much stronger and more persistent easterly spells brought about by a Scandinavian High - including January 1987, which led to 20+ ft drifts in my area, temperatures of -7C by daytime (the coldest here for hundreds of years) and a week off school!

In other words, it's just one piece in a very big jigsaw. It was nice, though, as a reminder of how things used to be. Growing up in the 80s I assumed every winter had snow on the ground, inches of the stuff... how naive I was.

I live in Kent, which is where the UK variant seems to have originated from. I work in a school.

The run up to Chrisstmas last year was horrendous. The UK gov't had a so-called lockdown in place, but it allowed schools to stay open. Have a site like mine, with nearly 2000 people on site each day and it was a recipe for disaster... even during the lockdown cases rose and when it was relaxed towards Christmas they rocketed. We were reporting 1000+ cases per 100K for weeks on end, and that will of course missed some cases.

Around 20% of staff at my workplace came down with it (I managed to avoid it - so far). The concerning thing is that months later, previously healthy people in their 20s to 40s are still suffering from it - 160 heartrate when climbing stairs in one case, overwhelming fatigue in another, plenty of panters and gaspers, plus one person who's had a persistent headache since "recovering", plus fuzzy vision in one eye. They hadn't even gone to the doctor, which is plain crazy.

You do not want to catch this variant (or indeed any variany of Covid)