I am reminded of the conversation I had with the father of my godson, who is non-technical. I saw his computer and asked him why he was running in a virtual machine. He looked at me blankly. Turned out the 10 year old godson (who has turned out to be very technical indeed) was running some hookey version of Hyper-V in his bedroom and his father was running a VM image given to him by his son.

I recognise that this is not "normal".

However, anyone who has been the keeper of children will know that they share information at a rate that is extraordinary. All it takes is some 16 year old to break whatever protection there is, and almost instantly the 10 year olds will know, and then the 6 year olds will know.

The other problem is that will progress like piracy. You are not going to stop people under 18 looking at porn. What you are going to introduce them to is stolen credit card details and VPNs. Everyone is going to learn that VPNs are vital, and using burner cards for ID is simple. This doesn't seem like a great progression.

I've been a mobile phone user pretty much since the beginning - my first phone was an Ericsson of some sort with a replaceable battery. I went through a variety of similar phones (mainly because they drowned), then had a bunch of Motorola V3s (which were great phones, also with a replaceable battery). I then went for an iPhone 5S, 6S had that for about 6 years and now have an 13 Pro Max.

So what?

I've never felt like replacing a phone because the battery needed replacing. The early Ericssons chewed power, so I had two batteries, but they never died. My old iPhone6 was upgraded because, well it was very old and slow, the battery was also dying, but it still did most of a days work, so I wasn't bothered. I did replace the battery before I gave it to my son, and that's the interesting environmental point - the first battery was an ebay special because I was too tight to pay Apple - it lasted 4 months, then I just gave Apple £40 to do it properly. They'll replace the battery in my 13 pro max for £89 when/if it fails. That's not going to be the deal breaker that makes me buy a new phone. I know my phone will be worth jack all then, but its replacement will still cost thousands - it will be worth replacing the battery.

If they want to slow down the phone replacement rates, then IMO they need to address two things:

1) The "fashion" aspect that leads people to replace a perfectly good phone after a year because there is a newer model
2) The creeping death of updates that slows phones down

However, both of those are in essence saying "stop innovating", so they are a bit hard.

All this will really do is send us back a decade to the days when you dropped your phone and the back flew off under the sofa. Eventually it got taped on, which looked awful, so you wanted a new phone.

EV owners only worry about the conditioning/state of their battery because it is an expensive, integral part of their car. They worry that if they do not treat it with care (20% remaining, don't charge to 100%), they will be faced with a large bill in the future.

In a swappable world, the battery doesn't matter. You're buying 250 miles of range in 5 minutes, +/- 20%. If you get one with only 200 miles of range, then you can swap again in 200 miles. it is arguable, that over the 8 year life of a battery, you'll get a better battery from a swapping service, because the battery will be properly maintained, and as cells start to fail, they will be actively swapped out. You'll also be much more willing to run it to 0%, and expect to receive it at 100%.

The looming problem with route charging, is the provisioning of power. We're already getting people with 150 kW charging bitching when the next door charger is occupied as well, and they only get 70 kW. It's going to get worse when everyone expects 150kW+ and also expects 20 chargers to be available. Suddenly every charging location needs a few MW of capacity, which is not cheap at all. You've then got the surge demand - holiday weekends on busy routes, where you need 50 - 100 chargers. Now you need GW scale connections. Once you get to this scale, then a lorry with 200 centrally charged batteries and hot swapping seems like a good idea.

About 15 years ago, I did some performance testing work at Sun’s Beaverton office in Oregon. It was the only place where we could get our hands on a roomful of E10Ks back in the day.

Lunch was interesting. There was a Mexican place over the road, we could see it out of the window. Being Brits, we looked out of the window and thought we’ll just walk over there, grab some food and get back to work.

We did it, but it was hard. When you left the office, the only way in was via the car park. You had to walk out of the main door, then you walked to the car park at the back, and then down the access road. We were now further away from food, but we were not deterred, we could still see food. There were no pavements (sidewalks), but we just walked on the grass. Crossing the road was fun, it was 4 lanes but quiet enough for a bunch of people used to London to get across. We did get beeped at. We had the same game at the Mexican - the only way in was via the car park.

Once we got in, the Sun guys were horrified. They had all driven. What was interesting was the utter disconnect between us: we could not understand how you could live in a world where you can’t walk to something you can see. They could not understand how we had been so reckless as to walk to a restaurant.

All very odd!

We have two problems with the UK reporting of Covid deaths.

Firstly there is “with not of”. Say you have a massive stroke, and are admitted to hospital for what is pretty much end of life care. While you are dying, you catch Covid in the hospital. You are now a Covid statistic. You died “with Covid”. I know someone who actually died of liver cancer 6 months ago - they caught Covid in the hospice, and were chalked up as a Covid victim.

Secondly there is the “28 days”. You could get a positive Covid test, recover, and then be run over by a car three weeks later. Congratulations, you died of Covid. When you think of the natural death rate for very elderly people, the chance of them dying in a 28 day period is certainly non-zero.

I’m absolutely not saying that this isn’t serious and that people don’t die of it - it is, and they do. But the headline numbers in the UK are misleading.

I watched the video in the article link and you are absolutely right to do this. It fixes my most common frustrations with laptops:

1) The ports die. 4 years of connecting and disconnecting and you have a laptop than only charges with a book on the power cable, or an external screen that goes on the fritz when you move. These modules will allow me to fix that in seconds, with a part that is presumably cheap. Well, cheaper than a new motherboard which is the usual solution.

2) You’ve got the wrong port. How often do I sit down in a new client office, plug in the external display and, oh, DisplayPort. I have “something else”. USB-C is solving this, but when you are in an office with USB-C displays, I’d rather swap out the HDMI for another USB so I can charge my phone. (Yeah, I know, Office, so 2019, but some of us are still going in.)

Two thoughts:

- If you can keep the parts prices reasonable, I think you have a winner. I am “Admin” for my kids laptops, which are battered Dells, that must have had 12 hours of open heart surgery each to keep them going. If I can refresh the case of the Framework for reasonable money, I will do so, rather than buying a new machine. If you succumb to the view that a laptop bought as parts = 10x the cost of a standard machine, you’re back in the same place as all the others.

- What is the plan post the current iteration of USB-C? You’ve been able to do this because you have a standardised, high capacity bus. But, it will change, whether we like it or not (or need it or not).

When are we going to get these in the UK? I like the idea!

Definitely both, and the extent of each will surely depend on the situation. We have rooftop solar panels in the UK, and they work pretty well in the summer. Unfortunately, our peak demand is in the winter. We don’t need A/C, so summer demand is limited to hot water and whichever machines are running in the house. If we added a battery to this system, it would simply drive up the capital cost and not really provide any benefit.

Locations close to the equator, with a material air con demand would be in a good position to benefit from local solar - you get power every day, you use the power when it is being generated, and a reasonable sized battery supplies you in the evening.

If you are further from the equator, then your main demand is in the winter, when there is very little solar available. These locations would be better served by connecting them to a grid that (possibly) gets its energy from a more favourable location.

Also in the UK. Also in the technology business.

Personally I've:

- Fixed my Land Rover that has been looking at me mournfully for the last 5 years
- Learned to TIG weld. Well, join metal together using TIG
- Built a massive and substantial workbench using the TIG
- Replaced the sills on another old car
- Sorted the garden which has never looked better

Ocado (online supermarket) have delivered perfectly throughout. Even during the "great March bog-roll scare".

So far so good.

I also work in technology, and yes, we're fine. Our clients are hurting, badly. I think most people are massively underestimating the economic disaster that is looming. About 1/3 of the economy is not compatible with social distancing. Millions of people will lose their jobs when the furlough scheme ends, and then millions more will also lose their jobs because the first few million used to be their customers. We are not having a V shaped recession if the "new normal" that we are being fed is reality.

The "grief Olympics" for the worst affected country is bullshit. Firstly the risk to a healthy under 64 year old is close to zero. Less than 300 people in this category have died so far in the UK - so about the same chance as getting killed on the roads in the same period in the UK. This virus will be with us for years - note there is still no vaccine for SARS and that's 18 years old. We may get one, we may not. So we are likely to get multiple rounds of this - and countries that have done "well" will do badly in the next round. Countries that have done "badly" will do "well" because there will be fewer vulnerable people. If you look at it in simple terms, there are three categories of people:

- Had it, died from it.
- Not had it, but will die of it when they get it.
- Not going to die from it, whether they get it or not.

The ratios of these people are the same in every country - it is all about when people get it, not if.

The only correct option here is "all of the above".

Fortnite is definitely more appealing to the addictive personality than the stuff that was around when I was a kid (Doom 1, I'm old). It's the whole "forage, build, fight " that allows pretty useless players to spend some considerable time in the game rather than get nailed in the first 10 seconds.

Parenting (1) - there are a LOT of parents out there who don't pay any attention to their children. Quiet child = good child = child playing Fortnite with headphones on.

Parenting (2) - parents don't know how to say no. If my kids aren't at the dinner table on time, I knock the playstation off the wi-fi. I don't bloody care if you're in the middle of a ranked match, we're having dinner. By the way - Unifi SDN is bloody brilliant for being able to control devices. The eldest got round my WiFi blocking by using an RJ45 connection - not knowing that I could block switch ports as well...

And yes, its a temporary thing. My two have moved onto Apex, certainly in this part of the UK, the Fortnite world is shinking. Most kids don't have a problem with it - they played Fortnite, but were entirely capable of putting it down. Like alcohol, drugs and gambling, there is always a section of society that can't handle it.

My experience is that on the operations space, they are being slaughtered by modern DevOps practices.

A decade ago I was in despair working on live systems with a bunch of offshore people manually hammering in random updates. I literally had a team standing behind the Indian guys telling them to follow the script on updates. We tried to persuade the client to automate it, but they rather liked the idea of hordes of £10 a day people cocking it up.

These days, DevOps is easy - the tools are all there (we used to have to write our own...), and you can have a small team of high-value people managing all environments, perfectly. So replace 100 offshore, with 5 skilled onshore, and get materially better results.

DevOps does not fit the approach of "grab some untrained people and get them on the job" - these are sharp tools, and the inexperienced will slice their hands off.

Satnav has made that knowledge utterly irrelevant. I'm sitting in an uber right now - no idea if the driver knows where he is going, but he can follow instructions.

My journey will cost about £13 in an uber rather than £25 in a cab. Nicer car, too.

i don't think there is an argument that a cab driver should speak the language of the country they are working in, and as a heavy user of Uber in London, I've never had a driver who was unable to speak to me.

If you look up the tests, you'll find that they are heavy on written English - complex comprehensions, writing short essays. I don't see why that is remotely necessary for a cab driver.

It has far more to do with the traditional cabs attempting to secure their market.

Aside from all the issues posted already, the big issue for me is that the in car GPS is stuck in the car. The sort of times when I really need navigation assistance is when I am working in an unfamiliar location. Moving between client sites for example - I can be in the office, ask someone where the next meeting is, and get it into Waze there and then. One a number of occasions I've said to someone "is this it?" and showed them the screen only for them to point out that I have entered the site on the wrong side of town. If I was doing this in the car (on my own), I'd end up at the wrong place.

At the other end (and I accept that is is probably more of a European problem than a US one), it is pretty common to be parking some distance from where you actually want to be. With the phone, this is no problem, I walk with it, and my robot overlord tells me to "turn left at the end of the road". In car GPS - not so good.

I also end up driving multiple cars - hire cars, my own car, my wife's car - I don't have the time or the enthusiasm to learn how to drive the complex & infuriating in car Nav systems, the phone does it fine.