Posts by david 12

Re: Not good

They don't, of course, have 'a script' that collects all that. For your printer, depending on how expensive the printer is, it's just going to be firmware, or manufacture date, page count and ink details. Your HP PC will report other values, and various installed software will have other 'scripts'.

I'm on 10Mbs at work. Me and the rest of the company. And yes, we use that for bookkeeping, banking, research, documentation, mail, and government websites. It's going to be obsolete sometime in the next couple of months, because our providers are forcing us out of 10Mbs services. But unless downloading and playing high-bandwidth games becomes a human right, I don't predict a human-rights problem in the next couple of years.

Re: Nuts on basic principles

>That is a ratio of 13.8 times revenue.<

Which is why we've been discussing what the numbers mean in terms of growth. If the company is growing exponentially, then it's 14*turnover this year, 7*turnover next year, 1* turnover the third year, 30% of turnover in the 4th year ---- and then you're in gravy.

Re: But but

It was c purity they were trying to maintain, as also shown by the <> != change, and the insistence at the time that the c library was the only possible way to do math (thankfully abandoned soon after, but following years of amazing blindness)

The people who maintained python-written-in-c were really c programmers at heart, and at the time of the fork between 2.x and 3.0, their idea of what a language should look like was still defined by c.

Re: I bought a drive on the weekend

Although I used 10, 20 and 40MB HDs, I never put my own money into a hard drive until they were cheaper than 1.44 MB floppies. When floppy storage was $1/MB, I couldn't justify the personal expense of a $10/MB hard drive (I was poor). Floppies haven't fallen in cost very much: I can still get them for around $1 each. And a 20TB drive is just 20 million floppy disks........

Re: Is this where X-Server steps in (for Linux) ?

I have been using Remote Desktop on my home machines (not even proper 'server' versions of Windows) for years, and it delivers me a remote virtual desktop (that allows multimedia*) without any palaver.

Can't help but feel that someone is trolling here.

*multimedia in the ordinary sense of the word. I take the point that video streaming wasn't directly supported by Windows RDC, but my use of other platforms for video streaming from my home computers was exactly in proportion to my need to do so.

Re: A hard choice

Yes, a lot of academic research gets quietly ignored unless it comes from a high-profile research centre with a good reputation.....

Re: I've got a little list

"TfL's introduction of the whole zonal / smartcard consistent fares system (along with Hong Kong) is a structure now being copied across the world"

Including Melb.Aus, where it was used to protect the jobs of tram conductors and station staff, replacing a whole-of-city travelcard that threatened to, and was intended to, make them all redundant.

The zonal fares system copied from London also shifted the power from the sub-urban private bus operators, who were collecting the cash for the whole-of-city fares, to the transport unions of the government-operated urban hub.

Re: Can't say white / black

"melanin-deficient" vampires?

That's why they have to stay out of the sun.

Re: Signing = worthless

The signature on the back of the card is your vow that you will be bound by the terms and conditions, and responsible for the debts you incur. The signature on a bill is your acknowledgement that you owe the money on the bill. Comparison of the signature for "security" was never more than an afterthought and never had any value.

Re: " He was also handed a victim surcharge tax of £140."

Adding it "on top" or "after" doesn't make it not a tax. Lot's of taxes are added "on top" or "after". Income tax is not typically a surcharge: in many countries stamp taxes are a surcharge.

Re: Nah

"Standard QWERTY" keyboards didn't have control keys.

I take your point that the IBM PC keyboard was designed to match CPM keyboards, rather than IBM green-screen keyboards (which had the function keys across the top, where IBM returned them with the later keyboard layouts)

Our Kaypro keyboards had the control key to the left of the A key. This made the WordStar (on CPM) shortcut keys natural to type. When the keyboard changed to the PS2 keyboard layout, the WordStar shortcut keys were no longer nearly as natural. And when the keyboard got dedicated arrow keys, using the numeric keys on the right no longer required disabling the arrow keys.

> I guess Windows users are used to this kind of unsecure hackery.<

Only in cross-platform applications. "Not understanding the security model" seems to be a common problem with cross-platform developers.

VBscript wasn't just for web applications. It was for Apps. And before the iPad, the environment where you needed to run Apps was the Windows Desktop.

But VBscript didn't have a native GUI. IE had a scriptable GUI. VBcript+IE=Windows App

One of my older friends, with his pal, put half a stick of gelignite (lashed to broomstick) down a deep drop toilet. "We saw the owner come out of the house and head towards the dunny. Oh no we thought, he's going to be killed. We're going to jail for the rest of our lives. Then the gelignite went off. A /gout of blue flame/ erupted into the sky, demolishing the outhouse. Followed by a rain of shit..."

Re: Ahhh passwords...

One of my friends married an admin/helpdesk type who's secret super power was remembering passwords: <type type type> -- 'hey how did you know the password?' <type type type> You told me the password. When I was here 3 years ago'

Re: name of your first pet + mother's maiden name?

Remember, the name of your first pet should be at least 8 characters long, and should include both letters and numbers...

Re: Improved security . .

Back in the day, when we signed up to G Suite, it only meant we had to login to use it. It didn't mean we had to tie our authentication to our global ID, the same global ID used by location services and the same global ID associated with our web browsing.

But now that we are locked into gmail and the G Suite, they're tightening the noose.

Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'

Right. My unix scripts use a shebang to indicate the actual file type. The shell has to actually open the file and look inside it to see what the file type is. This is so clearly superior that I don't know why we don't do the same thing for houses and cars.

Re: Time

Well, they're not fitted with an observation port because navigators aren't using celestial navigation any more. Airplanes (like the 747) /were/ fitted with observation ports when navigators were using celestial navigation.

But evidentially it was relatively complex: I was intrigued to see that Kee Bird (in 1947), was carrying both a navigator and an "astro navigator".

Re: where there is no fire there is no smoke

The "mechanical triggers" were in the late model flashcubes, branded "MagicCubes". They didn't require the camera to have a flash battery, and they didn't fail to work when the flash battery was flat. And they could be triggered by hand, by a 10yr old! (Although you probably had to steal them from your dad's supply).

But they weren't the original kind of flash cube.

Re: Fileless?

And the files are stored in your file system. Cem Ayin isn't trying to pretend that a DLL, or that a memory loaded file isn't a file: they are using the word "fileless" with a completely different technical meaning, specific to the area of internet malware. It's like "printer resolution" or "radio discrimination".

Re: Now we wait...

SMB1 is not a broken protocol. And it isn't used to store data. And 99.9% of the time it isn't used to connect to encrypted file stores.

Perhaps you've been confused by wishful thinking: I don't see any other explanation.

Q: How many developers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: "That's funny. It works on my machine."

Re: Surprised it took so long

Damn those CIA agents subverting and repressing terrorism in China. We want our Muslims to be free to commit terrorist activities, so that we can round them all up and intern them..

Gambling machines are heavily regulated. That's why the claw machines are "skill" machines. If it's not a skill machine, that gives her the basis of a complaint.

Re: "They were always 6 months behind the competition "

You didn't read the post you were responding to?

Re: Probably rewriting it they rewrote it right...

Well, it's right there in the article:

"The speed up was mainly due to algorithmic changes "

Re: Benny Hill

Not at all. The article tells us that the software is misogynistic. 14 yr old boys are not, in the main, women haters, so this software must be appealing to some other group or class of people.

Re: It's floating around the web

That is NOT a standard navy 'Old Buzzard' logo. Where ever they got it from, they didn't get it from the navy Old Buzzards. Perhaps the Old Buzzards protect their logo too strongly in America?

Re: cutting edge caching schemes

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!'

Even in WinXP, the default was that external disks were not cached, as had been the case since the days of floppies.

When MS says "previous versions of Windows defaulted to Quick Removal", what they mean is "previous versions of Win10." Maybe even Win8.

Actually, the bigger point is that MS never admits to anything good about previous versions. You will always see statements like "Version 10 of Microsoft Windows includes support for a fully graphical 'windows, icons, menus, pointer' User Interface." That does not mean that Win8 lacked that feature. It's just something to be aware of when reading MS feature lists.

Re: The due diligence report wasn't read

The draft Due Diligence report specifically calls out the fact that hardware sales are not accounted for the way you would expect, and reports that management told them that the amounts involved were not material. It certainly looks like the amounts involved were material, and that the 'draft auditors' were misled. It remains to be seen if this was criminal.