Posts by Dale 3

Re: Microwaves

Psssh - two days after they finish with that finishing laser, SGN will be there digging it back up again to fiddle with a gas pipe.

Re: Marketing strikes again

Y2k bug all over again.

Re: English Translation

Ultimately, the most significant problem Quantum Computing will solve, is what Quantum Computing can be used for.

Re: SDR? Why is there any wireless comms used here at all?

Until the next exploit we hear about being unique ID spoofing.

Re: Heat island

Or indeed 'London' Oxford Airport, which is closer to Luton.

Re: WTF?

And now look how far you've come, Elon!

Re: Withour a purchase power comparison it means little

Exactly. The cheapest country supposedly is Syria ($2.15). Their average monthly broadband package is 5500 in their local currency, against an annual average salary of 149000 (according to SalaryExplorer), giving 3.7% of annual salary. In the UK the monthly average is 29.66 against annual average salary of 71000, which is 0.4% of annual salary. Even putting aside arguments about how representative the various averages may be in real life, there is still an order of magnitude difference.

The only time this list is beneficial is if you are a global traveller who earns in one currency and pays local rates for access as you go.

Re: VR drinks?

Obviously the natural progression would be for humans to simply deposit their bot representatives into the metaverse to take care of work now that our jobs are all going to be in meta-offices, freeing us from having to wear funny glasses and leaving us more time to lie on a sunny beach.

Re: Ubuntu was right... sort of.

Like Samsung flagship phones, that went up to S8 S9 S10 then leapt to S20 and now S22, presumably to latch onto the year number, which makes much sense (at least until they need to beat the market by releasing the S25 in November '24).

Re: Pronouncing...

Indeed, the official logo does stylise the Q to look like a fish, so I presume the author's intent was for it to be pronounced "Koi".

Re: I'm increasingly disliking the man

You don't have to be rich to not care what people think on the internet. Not caring saves you an awful lot of bother.

Re: Nothing to see. Move along...

Packing the executable with DLLs wasn't the novelty. The novelty was in how they packed it, removed redundancy and encoded entropy to improve compression ratios.

Re: Forgive me for saying this...

Ah Teams... it reduces my workload... mainly because I can never find anything in it, and the time it would take to find the thing is more valuable than the thing I wanted to find, and the other guy who added the thing can't find it either so that job just goes away.

Re: qantas never crash

I hope the seat in front at least has something the iPad can slot into. On the one hand having it loose gives more options to avoid glare from the neighbour's window, but on the other hand I wouldn't want to have to hold it up for three hours straight given the cramped space available. And where to put it when the "food" comes?

Re: There still remains......

Those numbers are likely for the current model of filling up to the top and then running down to almost empty, which we do because of the relative inconvenience of having to go to a petrol station every so often. But the electric charging model doesn't have to be like that. With charging points able to be so much more ubiquitous, cars could be topped-up just about every time and everywhere you park. Perhaps even automatically with wireless charging in parking bays (even at traffic lights?) It doesn't always need to be high-capacity high-speed empty-to-full charging.

Of course this doesn't suit every use. Long distance trips benefit from fast charges - the faster the better, but a 10 minute break every 800km seems reasonable.

I wouldn't mind a bit of lateral thinking - how about a Eurotunnel-like roll-on-roll-off train that gets you most of the way to your long-distance destination, faster than a motorway, and charges your car while you take a nap, grab a snack from the restaurant upstairs or watch the scenery go by? Eurotunnel is remarkably efficient once you get past the whole check-in and queuing bit, while at the other end you're off and on the A16 in minutes.

Re: Its very easy to detect ground based broadcasts

Although TV "detector" vans may still exist, I doubt they are anything more than a PR exercise trading on the (diminishing) fear that it once was possible to detect emissions from TVs, maybe 30 years ago. I bet it won't be some nondescript white van trawling the neighbourhood in secret, but emblazoned with large colourful logos and driving around in the middle of the day to maximize exposure.

There could be some faintly detectable signal emanating from your TV, if only it could be separated from the myriad other devices with screens which aren't watching TV, and dozens of ways to watch TV which don't involve having a set at all. I suspect the only "detecting" being done nowadays is a bloke listening out for the Pointless countdown blaring out the soundbar or peering through your Windows to see what you're watching.

Re: Idiot marketing people at work again

Their marketing looks nice but I'm wondering how their OLEDs are producing black wingtips on the butterfly. I suspect you'll need Samsung's "Black Background" shade of paint to make this work.

Re: How does it work?

Exactly. Until there is a solution for number spoofing, none of these solutions are solutions at all.

I spent last monday playing dumb with a multitude of scammers trying to convince me my internet was about to be disconnected due to "hackers" (my favourite moment was when I asked whether I should plug my internet back in because the plug had fallen out) - the calls were relentless on monday although seem to have stopped now.

But every call came from a different, presumably randomly generated, UK number. If crowdsourced number blocking grows in popularity, eventually the chances are some legitimate numbers will start getting blocked and people will have a hard time why their phone seems not to be working although there is still a dial tone.

It can't possibly by that hard for telephone service providers to eliminate number spoofing.

Re: Here's a thought

Would that make Parliament a type of git-hub?

Re: Close, but not Glenn Close with a cigar.

Yellow is always the last to run out on my printer. So whatever encoding they're using, is very efficient.

Were you hoping to influence opinion? Because I was exhausted halfway through the first paragraph. Amanfrommars would be proud.

Re: Applefying the car

I think that's what he was getting at.

Re: And there's another

Not sure why he needs to have the same code on all three screens though.

Re: EOL for Drupal 7

Also see https://www.drupal.org/psa-2020-06-24, which updated the PSA-2019 announcement to move the date to 2022.

Note that Drupal 8'd EOL is still Nov 2021.

Indeed! It's like the argument that scam emails are deliberately written with terrible grammar and spelling because the types of people who wouldn't notice are also the types more likely to believe they've won an email lottery they never entered, so the scammer receives fewer replies but with better chances of getting some cash out of them - it improves the efficiency of the scam.

(Offtopic)

(Sorry for going offtopic, but I'll mention this in case someone finds it useful...)

In the UK, credit cards are covered by Section 75 protection, which is a very powerful legal right. (It basically makes the card issuer equally liable as the goods/service provider so if something goes wrong and the provider doesn't deal with it adequately, the card issuer is equally liable to put it right.) Debit cards are (usually) covered by chargeback, but that is just a feature which card issuers offer, not a legal right and they don't have to honour it. S.75 protection is much stronger, which is why it's usually recommended to use a credit card over a debit card for big ticket items.

Re: Why would anyone use it?

That was you? Dammit!

They fixed http://natwest.co.uk, which now redirects to https://personal.natwest.com. But they haven't fixed any of these:

https://natwest.co.uk still has the dodgy certificate and doesn't redirect anywhere else.

https://www.natwest.co.uk is the same.

http://www.natwest.co.uk redirects to https://www.natwest.co.uk, which has the dodgy certificate.

They clearly must own all of these names; I can't understand why they haven't fixed all of them. They're not even getting rid of 15% of their workforce.

Re: Bless..

Thanks for the video. It explains Oddball's righteous indignation at SODDERING!

Re: Debt = Bad

"As the A/C said, the [root] cause was cheap credit so why is cheap credit the answer?"

And as Tom 38 answered, cheap credit wasn't the cause, inappropriate lending was. Mortgages being given to people who were at very high risk of not paying them back, then the lenders would take all their high-risk mortgages, package them together into the CDOs that Tom 38 talked about and sell them on to other banks, who treated them as less risky without looking at the contents.

You could argue that the cause of the problem was the CDOs being incorrectly (or fraudulently) rated less risky than reality. Or you could argue that the cause of the problem was the fact that such risky mortgages were being offered in the first place. You can't argue that cheap credit was the cause of the problem. Even if the credit was cheap, these people still couldn't afford to pay it back so never should it have been given to them.