Posts by JetSetJim

Re: Couldn't happen now?

Perhaps there were more than 256 parameters for each entry, which is the column limit for Excel2003?

If the patents are numbered sequentially on grant, then it would seem that the USPTO is issuing ~830 patents per day in the time period between the first and the last of these if you compare patent grant dates and patent IDs!

Re: As it could have been done *decades* ago

I have two issues with it, both probably surmountable, but I don't think much thought has been given to them yet:

a) blurring the lines between work and home - for sure, some folks will goof off (I sit @home writing this during work hours, natch), but equally some will end up working longer hours due to it being harder to switch off (e.g. I turn on my work phone and scan emails from APAC region when I get up, and some come in from the US in the evening). It needs to be addressed that in the complete wfh scenario, your work/life balance is managed

b) starting a new job is a bitch, remotely. I've had to redeploy during this time and it is hard to get into a new job when you can't meet people, and there are less of the chance meetings that help you figure out just who does what, or who is a good contact, or even just the brief bits of help that get you "into the groove" with a new role. It will take longer to make an effective employee.

Sure, the IoD will see lots of benefits of wfh - much reduced office/utility bills, no need for an office manager in some cases, and that's all good. I can stand it if Pret goes out of business because fewer people are having their commuter coffee and buying their sandwich lunches on the way to work. Things will change - perhaps small suburban shops will make a comeback as in many places the village/suburban high street has gone. Also, pollution will drop - another plus. But don't expect it to be plain sailing...

IIRC, macro code can be used to suppress warnings and errors. Wouldn't be too hard to imagine some bright spark thinking this solves a few problems on importing a new file.

This might do the trick, and gets rid of those pesky "are you sure", "file already exists" type messages. Perhaps also the "file got too many rows or columns" one?

Application.DisplayAlerts = False

Re: Why use the word racist.

> perhaps it's time to start thinking that, maybe, algorithms have a harder time distinguishing black faces because it is an objectively harder problem?

Perhaps it is, but then perhaps people should also stop releasing products that claim to do something, but don't work so well for the people of colour that make up large portions of society in general. Perhaps these algorithms are not yet ready for the prime time and need further work?

Re: Can we do this for all manufacturers

Jim not sure I've ever worked for a company that didn't have default credentials on their kit installed in customer premises. The critical issue is how to gain access to the kit to be able to enter credentials. The Huawei kit, in particular the core network infrastructure, will be a server farm with rigourously policed network interfaces. The default is usually to shut everything down except for the explicit ports and routes needed for the kit to provide service. I've had cause to ask an operator to open a route between 2 IPs and it took weeks to authorise and even then they went by the letter of the (possibly clumsily specified) request and only opened it in one direction, necessitating another delay to get the reverse link opened.

> I'm amused folk are complaining about phoning HMRC

I'm not complaining, just pointing out that 1 day before the final filin deadline for the previous tax year that ended 9 months ago their phone lines get a bit busy.

I'm thankful I've never had a bad experience calling HMRC - sometimes a bit of a queue when I have been close to the wire, but otherwise all good with refreshingly competent staff each time.

I can't beat the 6 hours on hold - 2 is about the most and that was each of Enstroa (v bad utility provider I inherited in a house move that tried to force an account on me before they'd let me attempt to switch) and BT (when applying for a new line for a new build). I no longer have to deal with either of them, thankfully.

Re: I have to say,

Indeed - I suspect the "destruction of evidence" charge has to come with proof that there was evidence relevant to the case in the first hand. But then if what he wanted to do was conceal evidence of a relationship with Lugovoi, using it as his excuse kinda blows that cover...

Re: juJ52

yes. There's also a couple of YT vids of the ending knocking about that allow for a more direct comparison with the pic and it looks the same.

Are those markings on the pic from the RAF?

Re: Home is where the data is.

Or because MTBF (RAID / backups notwithstanding) :)

Re: no major bugs?

At least:

a) it could be a fasle negative (have at least anecdotal 1st hand evidence of friends who quite clearly had it but actually tested negative)

b) you could still be growing sufficient quantities of the virus inside you to both be asymptomatic and not register a positive *yet*

Re: Too damn tall

upvote for tall screens meaning less interference by onscreen keyboard. Just recently attempted to commission a small-ish phone for my youngest, and one app I installed had some config that was competely unable to be entered as the keyboard covered the area of the dialog for data entry, in particular a country selector to that the app server could be told a phone number to send a text to. Couldn't bypass by entering "+44" in the phone number field, as it defaulted to US and wouldn't accept it

Re: Simple solution

> I can only assume that you're a geneticist.

I'm not, but still haven't come across such tools. Formatting doesn't cut the mustard - sure you can swap from mm/dd/yyyy to dd/mm/yyyy, but if you've already got a date in there it preserves the internal "days since 1/1/1900". If I've accidentally typed 1/3/2020 for first of march but Excel stores it as USian, converting the format to UK will have it read 3/1/2020 when I wanted it to read 1/3/2020.

Functions? Which ones? You could mangle it by extracting day/month/year via the functions of the same name, and then reassemble while swapping day and month around, but that doesn't strike me as elegant (summat like "=date(year(a1),day(a1),month(a1)")

Scripts - sure I could write some VB to do it, but it's only happened enough to annoy me, not regularly enough to warrant making a custom macro that I store and add to spreadsheets when I need to deal with it.

Happy to be told if I've missed something

Re: Hacking

They were watching the birdie

Re: Blackmailed

Several papers are reporting today that she didn't have diplomatic immunity. Quote from the metro:

The parents of Harry Dunn have been told by the Director of Public Prosecutions that his alleged killer did not have diplomatic immunity when she fled the UK

Not been reported in more reputable sources, but we'll see

Re: What about UK ?

Having worked on 3, 4 and now 5G for the last 20 years, I pay no attention to the hype. Headline grabbing data rates are probably theoretical numbers, at the physical layer, and give one mobile the entire cell capacity with perfect transmission. In practice, user experience is about 60-70% of those numbers due to protocol overheads and variability in radio.