[Ed P]

If you read the rumour mill, the Treasury are already woriied at the £40Bn loss of petrol/diesel duty and VAT caused by EVs. Talk of a car mileage charge e.g. mileage reported at each MOT then the Government levies a mileage charge to be paid during the next year..

[Ed P]

I hope that someone is sending the Rozzers/Press around to check whether ‘Sod the Law’ Cummings is adhering to the mandatory self isolation after his sacking by Bojo!

I wouldn’t put it past Carrie to already have that well in hand, given all the trashing she has received care of Cummings in the Mail & Express. B-)

[Ed P]

Not only that, Government has to bang heads in the car industry and tell them that they MUST standardise the charging system to iso 155118-2. The industry is procrastinating at the public’s expense.

link

[edit] PM have a look around at your local Tesco, they seem to be adding charging points to bays near the store.

[Ed P]

Dido Harding – Queen of Chaos and Mismanagement, has been told to self isolate.

Twitter link

[Ed P]

My Apple loving son is faced with two years of living in a building site (revamping his home), and will be without a study and his usual multi-monitor setup. He is seriously considering a networked  Macbook Air as his main/sole production machine (compile time is a big consideration for him).

[Ed P]

” Err Pascal, in 2018 ?”

Probably Delphi – it still ranks in the top 20 or so of programming languages. Hard to say if is used very much in enterprises. I suspect that it is used for prototyping commercial solutions but, as Dave will probably confirm, prototypes have a horrible habit of morphing into long term solutions. Delphi does however have the advantage of being very readable (unlike C++) and is highly capable of writing efficient interface systems that incorporate in-line code.

During the 2010s Delphi was the Russian/Eastern Bloc  hackers language of choice! :wacko:

[Ed P]

Dave Rice wrote:

So now Boris’s girlfriend runs the country?

Probably got him by the short & curlies! :yes:

[Ed P]

Windows does allow you to switch off ‘most’ of their tracking via the privacy settings. The browser is of course something else, and Firefox now allows a lot of the tracking spyware to be neutered but you have to dig a bit into the config.

[Ed P]

I’ll give Apple a miss – its spyware is far too intrusive.

link

[Ed P]

Wash my mouth out but the new MacBook Air looks interesting with single core performance that is better than the AMD Ryzen 5900 with a Geekbench score of  1687 vs 1616 for the Ryzen 5900! Of course on the multicore stage the Ryzen eats the MacBook’s lunch and nearly doubles the Macbook score. However for a ‘pad’ this is amazingly good performance.

link

[Ed P]

As I understand it there are a few different vaccine approaches being used. I know an elderly female who volunteered for the Oxford trial. She was accepted, and had no issues post the two vaccinations. Of course there was a 50:50 chance she had the placebo, but the Oxford one appears to be less fussy on vaccine candidates.

Incidentally I know that it is the gold standard to use placebos – but why? Surely in a pandemic there are enough candidates who have received no vaccine and catch or do not catch the disease to enable meaningful statistical results – or am I missing something?

[Ed P]

It is interesting comparing the US and UK with respect to vaccine priority.

The UK emphasis is on offloading pressure on the NHS e.g. Care Homes & Old Pharts/vulnerable first.

The growing US position is that the young 18-30 year old super spreaders should be vaccinated first leaving the vulnerable to continue to look after their own safety.

There is merit in both arguments, but I tend to think the US position is more pragmatic and will result in a faster return to normalcy and economic well-being. The US position is not getting any airing over here as I think the old pharts in the Commons are giving themselves the highest priority (as usual). It is however an interesting topic for debate. :wacko:

[Ed P]

Unless you are in a development team producing ‘Enterprise’ code, you probably will never use 50% of C++ templates etc. :negative:

[Ed P]

+1 to the thoughts and best wishes. :good:

[Ed P]

It was the need to convert from the ‘wide’ character to the old ANSI ‘byte’ character that used to cause problems. Iirc it used to be mainly in the graphics dlls that such conversions were required.

[Ed P]

Other than being time limited, the edits seem to break if you include a link.

[Ed P]

Yep, it is a bitch, but Windows uses it!

Imo the real problems came when there was a need to convert ANSI to or from Unicode. I’d guess it is less of a problem now, but it used to be a real B if libraries/DLLs required and emitted ANSI. :wacko:

[Ed P]

Many of the complications in C++ are to ensure ‘safe’ code, and avoid unsafe code that results in ‘read beyond’ situations.

Have you finished grappling with the differences between the old ANSI strings and Unicode Strings?

[Ed P]

Apparently all the Ryzen 5000 series chips are now on backorder following reviews/benchmarks showing AMD now eats Intel’s lunch pretty much across the board. Their power/performance is particularly impressive.

[Ed P]

Not too surprising really as it is analogous to the old assembler level ‘push’ and ‘pop’ stack commands.

[Author]

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