A gimballed camera. Sounds interesting. Also sounds like something that might break
Posts by 0laf
1973 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Nov 2009
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Vivo Las Blowers: Chinese smartphone brand hops into Europe's crowded mobe market
Rambo: First Bork. Turns out John Rambo is no match for a bad CMOS checksum
Gamers are replacing Bing Maps objects in Microsoft Flight Simulator with rips from Google Earth
British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks
Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs
Thursday 1st October 2020 08:36 GMT 
Even bloody Amazon gives you a discount to have the ads on the spash screen of their creations (or charges you to remove them depending on your pov).
I do have a SmartTV but I don't use any of it's smart functions at all, TV OSs are too clunky. I've no TV/Sat reception at all where I am so the damn thing is a glorified monitor anyway
But even the idea of this, even if it's only in the US (or probably post Brexit UK) would put me off going near any Samsung kit. Mind you I was already put off by their reputation for bloatware.
It's ont thing to offer a free service in exchange for advertising and tracking, but to make me buy the bloody thing first (I'm studiously ignoring mobile phones in this rant).
Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it
Wednesday 30th September 2020 15:55 GMT 
Microchipping
So a vaccine is just a way to get a microchip into you is it? To track your movements and keep control of you?
No it's not and I'll give you a few very good reasons why
1 - You're really not that interesting. the government doesn't really care about tracking you except statistically as part of large groups. Individually you really don't matter very much
2 - It doesn't need a chip to track you. Your mobile phone apps, Alexa spy speaker, your credit cards, loyalty cards etc all do a really good job of tracking you. And best of all You pay for it willingly and sign up to be tracked.
3 -You're being controlled? You are the one taking advice from a random stranger running a conspiracy page on the most privacy destroying platform ever conceived. Why not go out and read some real books on virology and electromagnetism and work out for yourself if 5G and viruses are likely to be linked? If anything you're already being controlled through your stupidity and laziness. Why do you think the Russians and Chinese funnel money to disruptive conspiracy groups?
Singapore Airlines turns A380 into a restaurant, delivers plane food to homes
Lenovo sheds lockdown pounds with lightweight ThinkPad, reveals price tag for world's first bendy-screen PC
Wednesday 30th September 2020 09:03 GMT
I think folding screens make much more sense on a laptop than a phone.
I don't think this tabletised thing makes much sense but it's for the fashionista business person who is buying kit to be seen with not to use.
When folding screens get cheaper I can see them on gaming laptops. you'd have your laptop bas and a Z fold 3x13" screen. So a 39" wide screen for your laptop.
Might even fold upwards as well. No touchy so it wouldn't get damaged and folds away nice and safe in a case in a bag, fold wouldn't need to be as tight either.
Not constantantly being folded and unfolded, prodded and swiped then stuck in a pocket filled with lint, sand and dust.
Director of nuisance-calls company ordered to cough up £114k after ignoring £40k fine from UK data watchdog
Wednesday 30th September 2020 08:58 GMT
Both companies are big enough to keep this in the courts for years, maybe in perpetuity, certainly long enough to deplete the ICO's legal funds until they give in and settle for 5% of the original fine.
For the companies facing such massive fines it woukd make perfect business sense to pay to kick them down the road forever.
Tuesday 29th September 2020 15:20 GMT
The ICO has a very bad track record for collecting on these fines. At least this shower of shites were pushed out of business but why is the ICO's enforcement so weak?
BA ain't paid
Marriot ain't paid
In fact if you Google around you'll find reports that 42% of fines aren't paid with a total of £7 million.
And those don't include the BA and Marriot fines.
So either the ICO ain't doing it's job properly, or the legal framework it operate within doesn't allow it to act properly. Either way there is a problem to solve.
British Army develops AI shotgun drone with machine vision for indoor use
Wednesday 30th September 2020 08:54 GMT 
RPG
RPGs are nearly recoiless so could work quite well on alight drone.
Small rockets would also maybe work better than a firearm.
I guess unless the shotgun is mounted exactly along the centre of balance it'll twist the drone in one direction or another.
If it's mounted in pairs they would be fired together to counter the twist.
As long as the drone is push straight back maybe the recail isn't such a problem anyway. With a light load, (it's indoor at short range, 24g #9 shot) it would be enough to debilitate the target without massive recoil
UK ICO fines biz profiteering from COVID-19 crisis by sending unsolicited marketing texts to Joe Public
Former BT CEO to lead task force that will advise UK.gov on diversifying the nation's telecoms supply chain
Let's go space truckin': 1970s probe Voyager 1 is now 14 billion miles from home
Never mind that you can run Meet on any old computer, Google unveils specialised hardware for vid-chat plat
Ever found yourself praying to whatever deity runs Microsoft Teams? You're not alone
UK and Japan agree to free trade deal that excludes data localisation requirements
Q: How does hydrogen turn into a metal? A: Hang on a second, I need to train my AI supercomputer first
Northrop Grumman wins $13.3bn contract with US Air Force to kick off Minuteman III ICBM replacement
Apple to Epic: Sue me? No, sue you, pal!
'We're not claiming to replace humans,' says Google, but we want to be 'close enough' that you can't tell it's a bot talking
As Amazon pulls union-buster job ads, workers describe a 'Mad Max' atmosphere – unsafe, bullying, abusive
Thursday 3rd September 2020 13:31 GMT
Re: scum
There are specific clauses in the GDPR regarding automatic decision making by algorythm. So although Amazon might be nasty in the EU it can't be quite as nasty as the US. As mentioned the UK is only protected for now.
Give it a year and UK workers will be forced to buy themselves nappies to stay on top of Amazon targets.
Thursday 3rd September 2020 08:35 GMT
Re: Well the
Yep. some businessmen I know are even ahead of Amazon. They run nurseries and 'import' (legally) the nursery staff from the Philippines. They then house those 'staff' above the nursery and charge them most of their 'wages' in food and lodging.
They're not otherwise mistreated or overworked so have never complained as far as I know.
I'm shocked Bezos hasn't thought of this.
Xiaomi and Samsung go head to head with new phones in bargain-basement 5G battle
China trolls Trump with tech export rules changes that could imperil TikTok sale
Monday 31st August 2020 13:40 GMT
I would if were them
If they're getting a good price I'd sell the whole damn lot and run away.
I think I'd place a reasonable bet on TikTok imploding in a year or two. It's fashionable shite without any real purpose. The kiddywinks like it now, but they won't like it for long. Then you can buy it for a tenner along with MySpace.
Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19
Monday 31st August 2020 09:38 GMT
Kneejerk property sales....go
Property news this month is that tiny city centre accomodation is bieng sold and pople are moving back to more rural less metrocentric locations. It seems a lot of people think WFH is here to stay (I agree) and they want to sell their tiny London flats and live somewhere with an extra room to use as an office. Also if you home is where you will spend a lot more of your time then your home environment becoms a lot more important.
But I think people are going to find that little towns and villages aren't going to be ready. They've been hollowed out by AirBNB and the larger population moving to the cities for work. I'm not sure how this is going to end. Maybe nicely with many well populated thriving towns doing doing good lunch trade and resurgence of the village shop. Or maybe badly with many former city folk screaming about the lack of a Pret and gigabit broadband in their 50 house Hamlet, before being burned in a large wicker scupture by irritated locals.
Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles
Wednesday 26th August 2020 10:34 GMT
Re: Wee radge bastard
Wee hake round the internet seems to give a skiffy that it's of Scots origin.
However, please feel free to use this word and any others.
I don't think Scots are generally very precious about our national things. I think we like to see other nationalities try out kilts etc. They usually start out thinking they're putting on a skirt and doing drag then they feel the masculinity bubbling through the tartan and usually end up really enjoying it.
Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool
IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo
Apple hits back at Epic, says Fortnite crew wants a 'free ride' on fees: Let the app store death match commence
Monday 24th August 2020 11:33 GMT 
There is no such thing as bad publicity
How many column inches and mentions has this 'spat' got Epic / Fortnite?
In terms of advertising this might be very economical and the whole Apple store thing is actually meaningless. Maybe they were leaving anyway.
Chuck $100k at a lawsuit and get $3M of advertising.
Just sayin'....
Experian says it recovered and deleted data on 24 million South Africans after giving it to random 'marketing' person
While the world pushes back against COVID-19, Facebook has a pandemic of a different sort – medical misinformation
Thursday 20th August 2020 08:05 GMT
Re: TSDR
I agree to a point. If you're going to get health information from Facebook then the laws of Darwinism will hopefully come into play.
However...that's only any good if it only affects you, the idiot. So injecting bleach, drinking colloidal silver, buying random drugs off the internet. Crack on, it's your funeral, or it will be in reletively short order. But when your actions affect the wider population or your kids that's a different story. So the antivax loonies, covid deniers etc they are putting people other than themselves at risk. In fact you're putting me and my family at risk; so really I want you taken out of the equation.
Bunch of mugs keep risking life and limb to 'crockery bomb' sad little roundabout
ANPR maker Neology sues Newcastle City Council after failing to win 'air quality' snoopcam project bid
Microsoft: The UK is facing an AI skills gap. If only there were a humble cloud giant that could help
Tuesday 11th August 2020 14:33 GMT 
Possibly because the majority of interactions we have with AI systems end badly. Shite searches, shite email ordering, voice recognition that doesn't (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU), racist profiling, facial recognition that puts innocent people in a cell and scientists telling us that unless we're careful we'll be reduced to swapping out batteries for Terminators. What's not to like about AI
Pay ransomware crooks, or restore the network? Guess which way this city chose after weighing up the costs
Tuesday 11th August 2020 08:34 GMT
"What's driving a lot of these attacks is insurance - you can get policies against being attacked these days"
My understanding of insurance is that it will only pay out if you have taken all reasonable security steps. If you have been found to be lacking in patching, configuration or training your insurance won't pay.
Same at home, you can have very good cover but I con't think of any insurance policy that will pay out for burglary if you never lock your doors.
Too many organisations right now get away without doing even the bare minimum. Running a municipality without adequate IT to manage and maintain systems should be criminal incompetance in the same way failing to run health and safety on a building site is.
The outcome is the same these are life and death systems (not just emptying your rubbish and putting up bunting at Easter but social work, child protection and criminal justice) and must be treated as such.
Monday 10th August 2020 13:17 GMT 
Imagine if there was a criminal charge that would be levied against senior manager or officials of an organisation for allowing their security to be lax enough that they 1- allowed a significant and dangerous malware onto theri network and 2 - their systems were too poorly configured/maintained to allow them to recover from 1 in a timeous way.
If that was the case 1- security/maintenance would be much much better and these incidents would be much rarer, 2 - where an incident still happened no one would pay the fine therefore these incidents would continue to be rarer (bad business for the bad guys).
Things happen when the CEO or Mayor (whatever) has their arse personally in the firing line.
Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks
Tuesday 11th August 2020 08:26 GMT
Aviation is very tightly controlled for the most part. It's probably safe to assume that this is a tried and tested way of carrying out this particular task on this vintage of aircraft. i.e. it works and works well.
I got a tour of an active Vanguard nuclear missile sub about 10yr ago. Even then the tech on the sub looked antiquated (70s). But it was old because it was reliable and hardened against emp etc.
Sometimes old stuff works better. As mentioned by one commenter it's a terrifying though that an aircraft might rely on a connection to the internet to do anything.
I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault
Friday 7th August 2020 13:50 GMT
I have no problem with any user making silly mistakes like that. It's the attitude towards the person they have asked to fix the problem that matters.
If you are pleasent and polite and have made a silly error like putting an RJ45 in the wrong place or the USB in the network port (a common one), I will be delighted to help you out, have a chuckle with you about how easy it is to get these things wrong and give you a bit of advice for next time. I'll also know you're not a dick and will likely help you out faster next time.
If however you're are an arsehole your experience may differ.
Friday 7th August 2020 11:05 GMT 
When working ina school I was yelled at down the phone that a printer wasn't working (urgent, life threatening blah blah usual shite from a teacher). It was a 10min walk across the campus. I got there, was berated again in front of a class of 6yr olds. Went to printer, it was out of paper.
No apology, no acknowledgement of inappropriate attitude for such a basic fuckup.
I was using a dating site a few years back, I was not suprised to see a large proportion of the 'ladies' on the site were divorced teachers. And not with yours would I go near a single teacher.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
