Posts by Scoured Frisbee

Cloudflare reports it as bytes, and it's their data, so...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/total-eclipse-internet-traffic-impacts-mexico-us-canada

Check the byline, I'm pretty sure this particular author would not make such a mistake.

Dellrefurbished runs a lot of coupons in the 40-50% range especially around US holidays - not sure about internationally - and their clearance (sans OS, mostly) goes about half off once the inventory has sat too long. Even with these discounts prices can be a mixed bag so you've got to know the market you're shopping, but I've bought a number of laptops and workstations for 60-80% of current refurbisher prices.

A big advantage is that you get actual Dell enterprise support, so I was able to get brand new hinges and a fingerprint scanner (as parts) sent with two emails, no fuss, relatively easy to crack the system and install. Mostly I haven't had trouble, though.

I do usually replace drives and RAM for performance reasons, but then I'd do that anyway.

Anyway glad to see Lenovo getting into the game, hopefully they are able to tap new supplies rather than just squeezing existing suppliers.

Re: "at the end of their usefulness"

Just walked my 94-yo grandfather through a purchase a few weeks ago, the newest Chromebook he could pick up at a store expires in 2026. This was to replace his 13-year-old W10 Toshiba.

Working backward I guess he won't get an extension, so hopefully he needs at least one more refresh. I hope I am as active at his age!

Re: Have a hundred upvotes

Most likely every EMR system has those things already, but:

- no doctor is going to receive more than minimal training, and nobody is going to pay them to fuss about with the system off hours, so they won't know how to get to these features until some new kid shows up and figures it out

- paper records are scanned and - if you are lucky - OCR'd with Acrobat or some other barely-functional product, so searching keywords is at best 50/50

- Handwriting OCR is... Well have you seen doctors' handwriting?

- dates of paper records don't OCR better than anything else; especially if you have a pen-and-paper doctor the records are probably scanned and presented in the order received, muddy footprints and all

- for a specialist in the US, lots of stuff - especially lab results - come in as PDF images or faxes, so they aren't really easily searchable even if the site has been using an EMR for years

Digitizing paper is a pain. Once the patient records are entered digitally it gets easy enough to do all the things you mention and more. It is, however, very painful in the meantime, and having something transitional as mentioned in the article would at least keep down the error rate in the near term.

Re: It doesn't mean that royalties are going "straight into the pockets of the streaming services".

Non-monetized videos on YouTube don't run advertisements, generally, as I understand it. Once someone claims copyright and monetizes, or the author chooses to monetize, advertisements are added to the video, and those are revenue shared with the monetizing party.

At church we've had some services monetized by "rights holders" of hymns+arrangements written by Charles Wesley (who died in London in 1788 - even before Walt Disney!). These videos tend to get fewer post-service views as folks click away during the ads. I've considered fighting about it but haven't bothered, which I suppose is the ambivalence these fellows banked on.

I could not get the linked page to load in Firefox, it worked fine in Chrome but did not include a lot of detail.

Unsurprisingly the Register's reporting was much better:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/13/microsoft_ans_patent/

And more meta discussion:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/

Re: OS/360 had plenty of bugs

Recently deceased I'm sorry to say. The University is doing a memorial is this weekend if you want to attend the virtual event, or have already registered for the physical event. Quite a fellow.

https://cs.unc.edu/brooks

Re: Unhash?

Presumably FB already knows the address bob@email.com because Bob (or someone else) told them about it, and they just store the hash with the user profile. They can then match the Home Depot hash with what they calculated earlier.

It is mostly true that the hashes will turn out to be unique, but someone intercepting them probably can't easily reverse to the email addresses.

Maybe it should have been 5 or 10 or 100 billion.

The article implies that now it is going to be retried. From the little guy's perspective that's punitive and expensive but that's because of the attorneys, not the courts per se.

Re: Some functions are very simple

Yes of course, if you don't attribute code how can you hope to remember what you were thinking when someone asks? Why would you not want to add a comment with information -that you already have-? I usually even include 'loosely based on' or 'x does not work because y' so I can recall how I got to some solution, if I'm to the point of searching for code (which, admittedly, I rarely do at this point).

Maybe it's an experience thing?

Re: Wireless Mice

Watch out for the MacBook Pros: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/15/ncat_flexgate_apple_macbook/

All my computers are older than 4 years; my TRS80 model 100 (1983) only bit the dust a couple years ago, until then I was using it to generate lunch menus for the kids. I've been surprisingly happy with last decade's Latitudes for price:longevity, my 2015 7250 runs fine despite looking somewhat worse for wear.

I think you're just putting the year in the wrong place.

Re: As someone affected by this....

For me the sting was the loss of licenses if I didn't enroll in the subscription - I bought a lot of streaming video and TV when the kids were small and was not excited at an ultimatum to 'pay a monthly fee or lose the licenses forever'. (I have apps and music, though I've mostly repurchased those for family library.) I really don't mind switching everything else, I self-hosted everything for 15 years and don't mind doing it again if I can't find anything I want to buy.

With 7 family users, $42/month is a lot just to keep access to some old Disney movies. I assume eventually the service will go away for real and I'll just have to rebuy anything I still want. I just wish Google offered a license migration so we could get out without having to spend extra money (and that probably with vudu at this point).

> ln -s /usr/bin/ls /usr/bin/dir

Why are you running as root? You never know what might happen. I bet there's a "Who, Me?" somewhere with such a story.

I have 2FA on for PayPal - except it doesn't work for eBay, where somehow it just magically pays with one click using only my active eBay session for authentication. I imagine I set this up when I sold some stuff years ago (back when you had to get a physical 2fa card for PayPal), but now I don't have any idea how to turn it off.

Fortunately my default PayPal card messages me for purchases so at least I would know.

Re: Hummm soo...

Did you see that ludicrous display last night? The thing about Arsenal is, they always try to walk it in.

Re: What if ...

> AFAIK no one has seen fit to do an open source driver for ext on Windows...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/

Been using it recently for pulling data off a USB ext2 drive, but I seem to recall having previously used it with ext3. Can't speak to its writing but reading is great.

It is a user space reader, I'm not sure if there's a way to make it load dynamically when a drive is connected. It's been pretty stable, and I don't reboot very often, so this has not been a huge limitation for me as a technical user - for my wife and kids it would be, but then they have no interest in reading my old backup drive anyway...

I fell asleep in that stretch some twenty-odd years ago, driving across the state late after graduating and moving out of my college apartment. My mid-80s Buick was not so good at self driving - I took out a bunch of median poles and destroyed the car, but was not injured and fortunately no one else was involved. Glad it was only superficial damage for this gentleman.

That night I did receive a ticket for driving too fast while being asleep. It was certainly true and I paid it, along with enhanced insurance rates for some years My parents also paid for the DOT to replace the median catcher for the next sleepy fool - my graduation/survival present!

In NC most road construction sites are not populated; often cones are put up at the extreme ends and stay up for the years it takes to finish a project. Not to justify running the barrier but odds are good no one was actually at the site beyond the other drivers. From the video I'm glad the driver did not instinctively jerk to the right upon waking!

Re: A 'proper' use for the buttons

I am surprised it took this august community so long to get to the real utility of these (and presumably why Amazon charges cost). I have a number of the buttons, they hop on the WiFi when pressed and then drop off after timing out - five minutes if I recall. This makes it trivial to script stuff, even with openwrt or the like - just be sure to block the uplink so you don't really order anything!

They're good for counters, logging when something happens, reminders - anywhere you want a binary input and can wait five minutes between events.

Re: Overpriced kit

> We have 4 newish iPhones in our family and the total cost for all of them together is just under £750.

I bought my daughter a 6s for Christmas, the cheapest usable one I could find from a reputable vendor was us$200 - and it will be out of security in a year. (That said she doesn't have any money, so I'm expecting her to keep using it until something crazy happens.)

But where'd you pick up 4 for £750?

Re: Restrict engineering

To add to the above poster, as a licensed professional engineer I've agreed to put the health and well-being of the public before my own and employer's interests. If you disagree with my actions you can complain to the board, which will pull my license.

Once I asked some peer software engineers from a public-facing company the last time they considered anyone other than their employer and immediate customers. It took them most of lunch just to parse the question, the concept was completely alien. I don't think they were doing anything malicious, the wider impact of their code (and there is a lot!) just wasn't part of their thought process.

Personally I'm in the 'licensure is fine if you want it' camp, but I see the value in having an external group with whom to discuss ethical concerns, and the unspecified fear of having to justify some possibly-unethical action to a board of peers.

Re: "they aren't interested"

Hey, so, I totally get not wanting to reply to every bigot. However you and I would like a nice public collection of stories about women in the profession - both for advertising to students/children and also for responding to 'there's no different treatment' - and it strikes me that you are in a position to get them. Any chance you could convince the Reg editors to do a series of interviews with female and trans coders/ IT staff/ architects, and maybe women who shifted away from computers and why? It would be a very valuable contribution to the field.

Re: Funded by a car manufacturer by any chance?

Anybody have recent research on new car depreciation? I was shopping for a Camry (US) a few years ago; after straight-line depreciating for mileage the used cars were 10-20% more expensive than the new offers from Toyota, not even accounting for better interest rates. In fact for most of the slightly used vehicles I found (<3 years / 30kmi) they were -in asking price- more expensive than the Toyota new prices.

I've driven old and fixable cars forever (mostly old Mercedes and Volvos) but shopping for a newish reliable one made me second guess the common wisdom. Now that cars are basically odd-shaped computer cases I'm not sure if it was a weird market thing or a new trend, hence would appreciate any pointers to reliable recent surveys.

Re: Great!

One of the (dis?)advantages of being a professional engineer is being held responsible for the general welfare, and having access to a board with which I could discuss ethics issues. It is a reminder to think of the public (not just customers!), though that probably would mean I'd be out of the company if it came to it.

For me I'd rather be ethical than employed, but I can see how I would be tempted to compromise in such a situation. As such having the extra layer of oversight is good for me.

Re: Ten minutes??

TL;DR

Re: Similar Prob

On the subject of lemons, the worst laptop I ever had was a Powerbook. One day I came home to find it in the driveway, my wife had thrown it there hoping I'd run over it so I couldn't fix it again.

So there's my Apple story. Not to worry, I have plenty of others - my wife is great at destroying electronics from any manufacturer.

Re: UAT Testing

That's why professional software testers automate everything they can, so the next time they get to break it by doing something else. Now if someone can point me to a vendor that has enough testers to automate and also meet schedules I will buy only from them henceforth.

Re: Europa

Surely drilling Europa should be the domain of the ESA?

Assume he meant "after reader Lee Reeve"...

Re: Obligatory

After the last few gushing Apple articles I thought for sure the editors were trying to work their way into press invites. Guess Kieren didn't read the memo...

Re: no surprises here

Dunno, I opened the opposite bug on Android Wear 2 - you can set the watch to stick to a captive portal network (for example to use an aftermarket browser to login), but the setting is reset on boot. I bought an extra charger just so I could use ADB at work to tweak this setting - I usually leave my phone at my desk and just wear my watch around.

Anyway someone in Silicon Valley is thinking about captive portals, just not someone at Apple.