Posts by Nick Ryan

Re: History lesson

There have always been different classes/categories of shares. It's entirely up to the organisation involved and up to the investor to pay due care. In the UK at least there are various laws around the dissolution(?) of shares as in if you have a particular type of shares these may not be expanded upon and offered to others without being given the opportunity to purchase more at the same effective ratio. Or something similar - in any case the laws are surprisingly fair.

I've often wondered about the exit strategy or just business model of various of these companies. I still don't quite get how FB isn't losing money at a phenomenal rate, on the other hand they have developed, and patented (start argument here) quite a few technologies and they have in their posession a very well profiled database which they can, and are free to, utilise to promote third party services. Even at its most basic level, the hosting, development and support services have to be paid for somehow. If you're ever in doubt, follow the money trail.

Re: Available to your Office365 admin

Well it wasn't very honest or helpful anyway:

Title: Can't access email

User Impact: Users may be unable to connect to the Exchange Online service

At least it's been updated a bit now.

Title: Can't access email

User Impact: Users may be unable to connect to the Exchange Online service.

More info: Affected users may be able to able to access the Exchange Online service if they refresh their connection.

Current status: We've determined that availability dropped below acceptable thresholds due to a networking issue. We've restricted some replication and migration requests through the affected infrastructure and while increasing connection points on alternate infrastructure to remediate impact.

Scope of impact: Impact is specific to a subset of users who are served through the affected infrastructure.

Start time: Monday, November 26, 2018, at 10:10 AM UTC

Next update by: Monday, November 26, 2018, at 2:30 PM UTC

A good start would be to reclaim and protect the word Engineer for its real meaning, just as the title Doctor denotes a certain level of either academic achievement or medical training.

The person who fixes the photocopier is a technician and not an engineer, no more than the (invaluable and useful) person who takes X-rays is a doctor.

A fine concept let down by semantics. Could you define when someone stops being a technician and becomes an engineer?

Very similar to the discussion regarding what is a scientist and what is an engineer? There is a very large grey area in the middle therefore how and where is the division made?

Re: Nothing beats them

I believe the word you may be looking for is "tools"...

Re: There will be £10m for a scheme to identify ways to keep physics and maths teachers in schools

@ Intractable Potsherd

I agree, it is a very strange situation to be in - wanting the best for your own children while not wanting a society where those that are able to be successful and those that aren't is dicatated by the level of education that they have available, or where they were educated. Because thisn't good for your own children either.

If the state schools were better, would you send your children to them then? Then the solution is there to see...

Sensible error handling is so last century. It is much better to not do any error checking and to throw exceptions for relatively expected events and to then process these in the usually unhelpful "an error may have happened" kind of response.

Muppets. While there are near religious flame wars about error handling vs exception handling, they both have their place. Error handling is for the expected failures, exception handling is for the unexpected ones - use both to their advantage in other words.

...and about 10 years.

Pretty sure that everything is stil ten years away???

Sadly I don't know which of several very broken "Western" "democracies" (hahahahahaha) you could be talking about here. It could be any of a few, each of which are rapidly sharing more and more in common with dictatorial repression regimes.

Re: Connect!!!!!

Did you mean something as hard as:

Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.OneConnect | Remove-AppxPackage

?

Re: This isn't about porn

They are halfway there. Expect more, much more to come.

Luckily we have the EU to protect us from the UK gov's desire for thought and mind control. Oh dear...

Re: For shame!

Are these things not left in phone boxes any more? Just asking because many phone boxes claim to have WiFi which might help with the streaming side...

Re: Even when the audio works..

At last investigation, Skype uses three different dart boards. Sometimes these agree with each other, sometimes they don't. When they don't (which will happen on a previously working system before an important call) then Skype will operate in the most retarded, useless and uninformative manner and simultaneously tell the user that it's configured, testing, not working and not configured (no audio devices available).

Re: this is just the start of a very ugly battle for your home

How disappointingly true where what we, as in the ones not needing to be screwed over - both as users and likely given many commentards, implementors, need is simple, effective, reliable and secure standards.

Simple: Not some bastardised overkill of monstrous technology abuse which can only be implemented using a library with more code and dependencies that is sensible to use in a small device. No sensible device manufacturer is going to use something that requires a small computer just for simple functionality.

Effective: Tied in to simple, as in allows interoperability without complicated and unnecessary vendor and device specific exceptions. This would require effective standards which aren't controlled by single vendors.

Reliable: Also tied in to simple as in the simpler something is the less there is to go wrong with it. Multiple interacting state machines and vasy dependency trees don't make for reliable.

Secure: Appropriate security built in from the start, not tacked on as an afterthought - such security never works. Also ties into the above.

Re: major business software for Windows were made available for other OS

At one point in time MS spent a lot of time and money performing good user interface analysis and producing standards (for windows applications).

Unfortunately other parts of Microsoft just ignored these and bodged and hacked the "latest look" into the application, regardless of the OS it was running on, or just ignored it and did whatever they felt like because they felt they knew better - they never did. So a whole set of non-standard and sub-standard applications were released by Microsoft who produced these standards in order to avoid this mess. Genius.

Re: Grikath

You're not going to get much processing out of anything at ~50nm in size. In this case there is a claim that a chip has been inserted and while it's small, it's going to be nowhere near ~50nm.

I am dubious mostly because of the speed and heat issues - in order to intercept and modify what is effectively cross bus information on the fly the intercepting chip needs to be rather fast otherwise the communication between components will be unreliable and a fast processing chip tends to generate heat. Put a generator of heat inbetween the substrates of a board and you're asking for (thermal) trouble.

Not impossible, of course, but rather unlikely. It's much more likely that a chip is inserted just on the board itself because this is going to be somewhat easier to achieve. Or alternatively to just modify the software that is on these devices in the first place - no physical trace at all then.

Re: Organic material?

There was an interesting demonstration how all you needed to create many organic molecules was some basic chemicals, a little pressure and lightning: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14966-volcanic-lightning-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth/

Re: If they can build it, someone will weaponize it.

A load of plasma hitting the satellite from a few metres will probably do terminal damage to the satellite anyway. They're well shielded, but not that well shielded - particularly the solar panels.

Of course money is important to Facebook. How does Facebook make money? Have anyone here, personally, paid any money to Facebook. They have huge storage, Internet connectivity, management and development overheads... where does the money for this come from?

• The (information stealing) apps and the cuts on the micro-payments within these.
• Advertising. This is very low income however when scaled out massively can still produce a good return, however untargetted advertising is nearly worthless.
• Profiling. Profiling trends in content and topics to sell to those who are interested. Ideally entirely anonymous, however then there's the temptation to link this to the advertising and feedback loops become possible.

Any more?

Re: MOSFETs and clean rooms

Or electronically... storing emails or calendar items in the "Deleted Items" folder and then wondering why they can't find them later because they've been deleted (usually due to a centrally controlled purge).

I once had to physically demonstrate to one office manager the stupidity of storing things in a rubbish bin by shoving the contents off her desk into the bin under her desk and asking her if she expected them to still be there in the morning after the cleaners had been.