Posts by Tom 38

Re: Can someone...

And sinxe most Linux Apps are Open Source a ot of them haven't switched to 64 bits yet.

Name a couple.

Re: Old news is good news

Can we have 1996 ISOC back please.

Re: Good, good.

Ummmm how about the non-EU countries of Iceland, Norway and Lichtenstein? I think you'll find they all have freedom of movement within the EU.

Norway, for instance, pays a contribution to the EU budget and accepts EU rules in return for FoM and some-what free trade - eg high duties on processed salmon, low duties on un-processed salmon.

If they (Amazon inc) were at all smart, they wouldn't have asked for .amazon in the first place - .amzn would have been good enough for brand recognition and produce amazing (I see what I did there...) looking URLs to boot - footf65fufuyu.s3.amzn

Re: Sedation for tooth extraction?

You should be thankful that you do not have painfully impacted wisdom teeth that need extracting. My dentist took 3.5 hours to take them out.

I wasn't under a general, it was more like a date rape drug where you are completely zoned out and forget almost everything. My one memory is of the dentist slapping my face because I was going a bit too far under.

Re: Backups in 2020 are still important

Or just like any other host, including self-hosting. In this day and age, you should expect your servers and the data you've stored on them to disappear, and be able to handle the loss of servers and/or data without losing service or customer data.

Re: Quick maths

The nbn report says "data consumed", but this report, and almost all the commentards are turning that in to "data downloaded". It's fare more likely that he's downloading lots and uploading even more. So he's using roughly 894 GB a day - lets say he's an avid scene torrenter, downloads 6 TV shows episodes in 1080p each day, at 3GB each, and 3 movies (each 12GB) that's just a share ratio of 16:1, that's "only" 1620GB downloaded per month.

Re: Another language

Apparently common nouns for lawyers are "Disputation, Eloquence, Escheat, Greed, Huddle, Quarrel".

I like "quarrel of lawyers".

Re: So... is he an engineer?

So you can be "SonOfRojBlake, Chemical Engineer, CEng MIChemE". Doesn't mean someone else can't be "JoeBloggs, Chemical Engineer".

Re: This makes me glad

I agree to an extent, but the flagship phones tend to be just a little bit higher quality. My one trick (phone companies hate this, you won't believe #7 etc) is to get the previous flagship when the next one is released, and get it from a more budget company. My current phone is the Huawei P30 Pro, which I got when the Mate 30 was announced (replacing a OnePlus 2, which shows I work them in to the ground).

The P30 Lite is also a darn nice phone, but it doesn't have the IP 68 waterproof chops of its big brother, and its lacking quite so many camera sensors, some RAM and the Leica lenses. I got the P30 Pro for £150 up-front and £30 pcm (30GB data, unlimited everything else), which seemed just about fine to me.

Yeah, it's new generations growing up and re-inventing the wheel because they weren't around for the previous debacle.

Not to play devil's advocate, but the wheel has actually been re-invented many times, this is why they aren't still made of slices of a tree trunk. Not everything that is re-invented is done by ignorant Young Turks ignoring history, sometimes they learn from the problems and issues with previous solutions to develop better solutions.

Too many twits..

Re: Just out of curiosity

Hard drives are (usually) at the front of a rack server, with fresh/cool air pulled over them by the fans at the back. The other gubbins is all at the back of the server, and heat mostly rises.

That's assuming it was all in one server rather than the disks being in an external enclosure (I'm guessing it was, otherwise our hero would have just plugged the enclosure in to the new server rather than moving disks.)

Re: I don't like to judge people based on their appearance...

"organising unions is always reason to find some other reason to fire someone from a Co"

Really FTFY. The purpose of HR departments is to find the things that you can be fired for, and ensure that people who are fired have a reason that is legally justified for firing them, even if you only went looking for that reason because they are doing something that you don't want them to do but can't fire them for.

A guy I worked with got fired because he was persistently late to work. He was always in earlier than me, and worked later than me, but due to clash of personalities with his line manager and his line manager's line manager, that's what he got canned for.

Re: Have you ever eaten green crisps?

Does anyone know why Curaçao, with its strong orange flavour, is blue?

Sadly, the answer is because they add E133 Brilliant Blue food dye to the colourless licquer :/

Re: Ok but how much tax is fair?

Otherwise US corporations would still be shovelling all their UK-made profits back home and not being subject to UK tax.

It's worth pointing out that this is not a one-way street, the UK gets a lot of tax income from FTSE-100 companies that make most of their profits abroad. The UK arm of BHP paid £4bn in taxes last year, and don't do much mining in the Cotswolds.

Re: Foreign travelers to install a "Visit Russia" App during their stay?

When I was a kid living in 80s Hong Kong, we went on several holiday trips to mainland China. At that time, China was still quite an undeveloped country - I remember watching from one guesthouse window in Guilin City as what seemed like an army of peasants were digging by hand the excavations for a new building next door, climbing up out of the pit on ladders with sacks of dirt over their shoulders - and I think they were extremely suspicious of any Westerners wanting to go on holiday there.

On that trip, we had two fat CCP goons following us around everywhere we went - never more than 50 metres away, and when we took buses outside of the city, sure enough, when we got to where we were going they'd turn up a few minutes later in their car. I don't know why they were surprised, Guilin is one of the most beautiful areas I've ever visited.

A few years later, they'd upped their game significantly, once we arrived in Shanghai, this charming English speaking mid-20s girl just attached herself to our group and acted as our de-facto tour guide and was much less obtrusive than the chain smoking fatties. Of course, this might have been down to the differences between Guilin and Shanghai too.

Arthur wasn't animated in the saddle

A common complaint amongst the ladies.

Re: No oxygen

If I had my little way

I'll eat snickers every day

Heart attack by 40

Are there still any analogue viewers of TV in the UK?

I still watch that blizzard show sometimes. It's amazing, there are no ad breaks and its more intelligent dialogue than most soaps.

Every IKEA store is laid out in exactly the same format, Showrooms for each room in the house, then the restaurant, then the marketplace (small items, eg glasses, cutlery etc), then you go either down or up to the warehouse, then the tills.

If you want to skip the show rooms, go to the restaurant and then through the marketplace.

If you know what you want, have the box codes from online and don't want any marketplace things, walk in the exit, past the tills and straight in to the warehouse section.

The arrows for the showroom sections are because its slow enough without people walking contraflow with a shopping trolley from the marketplace.

Re: The Internet is for everyone

What's to stop ISPS from just hijacking the port wholesale? DNS over TLS uses a dedicated port, too, which can ALSO be hijacked wholesale.

Only if they can MitM your TLS communications. No ISP provided certs are on my systems, so if they tried to intercept DoH requests from me, it would just fail.

Re: Sage is flogging its payments arm to US firm

Elavon already have both Irish and British subsidiaries that are authorised merchant services providers by the relevant authority in each country, so I'm not sure on what basis you'd like a regulator to intervene?

Just because they are US owned doesn't mean the business will start operating out of the US.

Re: Jeff appears to be a little bit upset....

Right, it just happened that MS have the better cloud offering than the people who basically invented the whole thing, and has absolutely nothing to do with the Cheeto-in-chief loathing Bezos and his newspaper that says truthful and mean things about him.

Re: It really is interesting

a between-the-shins-disc-thing that I've seen used in traffic (which is terrifying...)

I've seen people using this (well, not the segway one) in London traffic, and I'm in instant Jar Jar Binks mode: Yousa thinking yousa people ganna die

Re: It's all about the money

Facebook aren't a common carrier, they curate what you see and what you don't see, and allow 3rd parties to pay them in order to make you see additional things - once you curate things, you're a publisher.

Re: Security

Idiot - from the article:

Most scholars agree that the term probably was originally used at least a century before the Mine Wars, to refer to southern farmers who were exposed to long hours in the sun while working in the fields.

Re: the senators on that committee...

Fake nudes..

Anyway, when you're a star they let you do it, you can do anything.

At the very least, corporate manslaughter - the system had a setting which would have stopped it earlier, but they turned it off because it was stopping in too many scenarios.

Re: Interesting...

I don't think they need to be on the list because US companies are already forbidden from doing business in those countries, whilst they are not barred from hiring people who live in and to work in Russian/China.

Re: Identity theft is a bummer

SMS 2FA is an abhorrent hole. I have several physical hardware tokens, all of them support NFC, FIDO, U2F...

Paypal? Nope

Banks? Nope

Amazon? Nope

Google support it... and that's about it

Re: An innocent man

A simple rule of thumb is that anything given public support by Joanna Lumley is a terrible idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurkha_Justice_Campaign

Re: We do have a pretty good idea,

Why?

'Then...' Lobsang nodded at the little volcano, which was gently smoking, 'how does that work? It's on a saucer!'.

"Reason? What reason can a mountain have? And, as you accumulate years, you will learn that most answers boil down, eventually, to "Because""

GraphQL is like an aggregator of databases - many (maybe most? I haven't seen enough personally..) are backed by an RDBMS. The benefit of GraphQL is that you describe the data that is available and define how to get it from various data stores on the backend, and then the frontend user has more flexibility in requesting what data they are interested in for that specific page. The aggregator is then responsible for assembling the pieces of information and returning it all back to the client in one response. A typical REST service architecture (say a forum), you might make a request to get info on the user, one for their posts, one for their friends, etc etc. With graphql, that's one query, even if those things live in different data stores.

The benefit is that you have one language for making these requests and that you make fewer requests in order to get the information that the frontend needs. Frontend devs only need to know what data is available from GraphQL, and backend devs only need to be able to describe that data to the aggregator.

Re: loophole?

That's not how "weight" works. To lift a 250g weight using a helium balloon, you need about 42g of helium, so now it weighs 292g (+ a bit for balloon and string). To put it another way, just because it is buoyant in our atmosphere does not mean it has no weight, its just more difficult to measure its weight.

Yes I know mass != weight, but in common parlance people say weight when they mean mass, and the "weight" they are talking about is specified using units of mass, so whatevz.

Re: Impossible task

I know a plumber socially, all he does in London is taps. Fitting new taps, fixing leaky taps (normally by fitting a new tap). He says its brilliant, £75/hr for a callout that takes max 20 minutes, he can do them all day long and never has to deal with a blocked toilet.

Re: Been there...

So re-map it. It's not exactly rocket surgery, you know.

That works to an extent, but you do know the keys and locations are different on US vs UK keyboards, right? US has a large left shift key, UK has a small one with an extra key for "\" between it and "z". US has a small single row "enter", with "\" above it, UK has a large 2 row "enter" with an extra key for "#" on the bottom row of it.

Eg, you can't remap a US keyboard to get a UK keyboard. UK keyboard has one extra key, and some keys are different shapes and in different positions. You can get close, but never right.

(edit, damnit katrinab, too quick :)

Re: json config files

Having dismissed it for several years as "why do I need yet another simple text format", I'm really coming around to YAML for all sorts of configuration files - helps that I'm doing lots of docker/k8s stuff.

Its a superset of JSON, so you get the ability to have structured config, it supports comments and it is much terser than JSON. Even with its brevity, its also more structured than JSON, so a machine written file is still quite readable/editable than a JSON file that hasn't been pretty-printed.

About the only thing I don't like is that there can sometimes be two ways of saying the same thing, depending on whether its the brief format or not.

So, quick maths means at Mach 5, they travel 86 meters in 1/20th of a second.

205 Routemaster per second to put it in to real units. Paddington to Bow Church in under 7 seconds!

Re: A serious question

Just about all with serious privacy legislation, so start with all 28 current EU members and another three EEA members. You can of course exclude the United Spies of America.

Pretty sure that isn't right. Work provided internet connection is provided to allow workers to complete their work related tasks. I just checked our internet usage and monitoring policy and it says:

IT will monitor Internet usage from all devices connected to the network to the extent permitted by law.

Privacy and confidentially of activity is not provided when using the network and you shouldn't expect it to be.

IANAL, but the people who wrote the policy are.

Re: Where do you draw the line?

Can you define what a gay cake is please?