Posts by Christoph 3317 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007
"the unsettling implication in all of this is that some of the people who would be inclined to pay this extortion demand would be people that had in fact been viewing child abuse images."
The real nasty is that some of the people who receive this may assume that someone else in the same household such as their husband or son has been viewing child abuse images.
The engineer installing one of our machines was told that he had to let the customer's electrician wire it in - because he was the shop steward.
Said electrician wired up a bog-standard MK Electric switch box without connecting the neutral lead.
The electronics in the machine thus found itself connected across two phases (the machine included a bloody big squirrel cage motor using three-phase) and let the smoke out.
"The M25 method uses the indicators (turn signals) as a declarative, aka The blink & move. "
On the M25, if you signal in plenty of time that you are going to move into the outside lane as soon as the gap gets to you, the last car before the gap will hang back and block you.
However if you are in the fast lane and are the first car after a gap, the car in the middle lane will wait through the gap until the last possible moment before suddenly moving out, forcing you to brake. The next car in the middle lane will then wait until you have built up speed again and are moving forward before doing the same trick and making you brake again. Sometimes a third car will do it again, in each case having plenty of time to move out but waiting until you are about to pass them.
Why yes, I did use to commute on the M25.
Ah yes, the "Socialist Republic of Islington".
Where they spent all the local council's money on important things like international politics, rather than trivia like fixing gigantic potholes in the roads (which I could avoid because I'd learned and memorised where they were, despite only driving through there once a month).
A story posted to LJ some years back: IT bods arrived at work after a bank holiday weekend to find a helpful note in the computer room, from someone non-tech (sales or similar). He had noticed that the air-conditioning had been left on in the locked computer room, which was obviously a waste as nobody was in there. So he had got hold of the key (can't remember how - possibly managed to bully it from security somehow?) and gone in, switched off the air conditioning, and left the note explaining how he had helped these silly IT people who couldn't even remember to switch things off when leaving for a long weekend.
It took quite a long time to get all the crashed systems back up again.
"new treason laws, which he said would be aimed at people who "betray" Britain" by acting against the political interests of the current government.
"throwing out any jurors who might return the wrong verdict by sympathising with the accused." - see above. And of course the Clive Ponting case where the judge told the jury that the "public interest" means the personal political interest of the current bunch of crooks running the government.
On computers running Cromemco's 'Cromix' Unix-like operating system on Z80 machines, there was a command which could change the function of keys. So that for instance pressing the Return key would operate as a backspace.
This could be particularly effective for someone who knew all the alternate ways of telling the computer to run a command (such as to change the keys back) and could alter all of them except the obscure one which nobody else knew.
Exactly - they could have given the cue in many different ways. That they happened to use what we perceive as sound is irrelevant - to the bot it's just another set of numbers. Feeding the bot the usual in-game sounds might make a difference, but that isn't proved by this experiment.
"some US properties only accessible by road from the Canadian side"
Scroll a bit west of that inn and you'll find Point Roberts - part of the US that can only be accessed by sea or by going through Canada. There's another bit like that at Lake of the Woods.
I would be pretty damn difficult for him to stop them. This is his house from the Canadian side. All they have to do is stroll across a few yards of lawn.
It sounds like they developed the system, then tried to make it responsive. As if they started from scratch with no code reuse.
Wouldn't it be just a trifle better to find or develop the best responsive framework that they can and use it across most of their projects, fitting each one into the framework with whatever adjustments are needed?
That would also make maintenance easier as all their staff would know how that framework worked.
The same goes for the back end stuff - a company that big ought to have lots of existing general purpose code which can easily be tweaked to fit.
It's almost as if they handed the entire analysis and development process to completely inexperienced staff who had never worked on any other project for them and had no access to the code for their other projects or any advice from the experience gained in building them.
Since the entire point of using one of these firms rather than developing in-house is to take advantage of their existing experience in doing this kind of development this seems, shall we say, a trifle odd.
Open plan office. Group of secretarys' desks around floor flap with two 13-amp sockets. Each secretary had power to a computer, and to a CRT. And they had a fan heater. No other unused sockets within reach.
One socket had one computer plugged into it. The other had a power bar.
The power bar had computers and CRTs plugged in. And another power bar.
That had computers, CRTs, and a third power bar.
That had computers, CRTs, and the fan heater.
Well, I couldn't make it a good setup, but when I'd finished rearranging it the fan heater had one socket, and the other socket had a power bar with both the other bars plugged into it.
I managed to avoid a problem with builders. The building right next door to my ground floor computer room was being demolished and redeveloped. The computer room had a raised floor with huge amounts of cabling underneath. I made sure that the bloke from Rentokil did a very thorough job on that underfloor space!
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