Posts by big_D 6779 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
Bayerische Oberlandbahn?
I haven't seen The Black Hole for years. In fact, I think I have only seen it all the way through once, and that was in the early 2000s. I remember watching clips from it on Screen Test as a kid and wanting to watch it, but we never got to see it in the cinema when it came round.
This was the concept behind the killer drones in Kill Decision (Daniel Suarez). Cheap, disposable drones that had just a few shots and then were replaced by the next wave of drones. Send out thousands of drones with 1 - 2 shots, you don't have to worry about jams etc. just let the next one take over.
It is part of the different attitudes to economics.
In Germany for the last 2 decades, they have been on course to cut out debt. That means all internal funding and also internation funding, like NATO, has to come out of the surplus. One of the reasons why Germany has managed relatively well in the current crisis and could take on new debt.
The US has been overspending for decades and faced Government shutdowns in the last decade, because it ran out of money and they had to argue over taking on more debt and devaluing the dollar even further in the process.
The US needs new conflicts to keep the Military Industrial Complex busy and making a profit for Wall Street, through military spending, while Europe wants to avoid conflicts to get their economies back in the black.
This is also reflected in the populations and language. Living in debt (living on credit) is pretty normal in the US and the UK, whilst "debt" in German is the same word as guilt and has been frowned upon until the last generation or so.
The problem is, apart from Nokia and Siemens, there aren't really any competitors left in the West.
From the 70s on, a lot of production was off-shored out of the USA and, especially, the UK. That means that for several generations coming through education, there has been no training for the manufacturing of a lot of stuff.
Just look at Gung Ho, from Ron Howard in 1986. At least some car manufacturing has remained in the USA and even the likes of BMW have built factories over there for some of their more US-oriented vehicles. But electronics was pretty much sold out and little is left in the USA, other than initial design.
The UK is even worse off, having sold industry down the river to re-invent itself as a services provider, only now that Brexit has come along, they suddenly notice that they don't actually make much of any value and what they do have, they have sold off to foreign companies anyway.
Apple has no monopoly. You can buy an Android phone.
A monopoly doesn't mean there is no competition. It generally means you control the market. So whether you can buy an Android device or not doesn't make Apple a monopoly or not, in the smartphone market. If they had a majority share of the market, they would be a monopoly.
But for apps for the iPhone, Apple has a monopoly with the App Store.
I've never seen the selection screen on Android, even though I have set up half dozen Android devices since the decision.
But the first thing I do on any new phone is set DuckDuckGo as my default search engine and Firefox as my default browser.
I actually go so far as to disable nearly all Google services on the phone.
But Google's solution is taking the proverbial. Imagine, if Microsoft hat charged for the browser ballot? I think this is absolutely disgusting and I am aghast that the EU didn't put its foot down to stop Google from profiting from the remedial action, it is supposed to be a punishment, not a new profit centre.
it will fudge the decision for the 'adequacy' of UK data law," Pounder claimed.
I point Mr. Pounder at the situation with the USA, where the EU tried to "fudge" the adequacy decision with Privacy Shield, which was declared null and void over the summer, after US non-compliance for the past 5 years (and 10 years or so of failure to comply under Safe Harbour before that).
I can see Max Schrems starting a new case on day 1.
Also, it doesn't need to become a political potato. The UK has been reprimanded a couple of times by the European Court for its failures in data protection law, having RIPA kicked back as breaking ECHR at least twice. The UK will, theoretically, have to severely tighten up its laws, before the end of the year.
The problem is, YouTube was designed from the beginning to ignore copyright infringement, so they never put anything in place, until they got too big and the cost of lawyers and fines outweighed putting in a system to allow for some feeble sort of takedown.
This is typical of Big Tech, ignore the law, until it actually becomes more expensive than doing the right thing, by which time, they are at such scale, nothing really works, so they throw their hands up in the air and say, "oh, woe is me!" And you are stuck with some half-arsed system that doesn't help anybody, apart from Big Tech itself, because it saves them lawyer and fines money.
The biggest problem with Google is, if you have a problem with Google, you can't contact them. You have to hope that enough of a stink is made and they contact you. It isn't just content creators, it is in all aspects of their web presence.
At a previous employer, we were caught in a DoS attack originating in one of Google's data centers in California (according to an IP lookup, it was a Google owned IP).
Phone Google for a quick response? 30 minutes bouncing around an automated phone system that basically says, refer to the relevant part of our website, before spitting you out and disconnecting. The problem? Google doesn't have a section of its website for dealing with being DoSed by them.
Next step, the standard email accounts, abuse and webmaster@google.com, both return a standard message saying that all mails are automatically deleted and never read, now please f' off.
Next stop Twitter and @ing Google. No response.
In the end, it was quicker, easier and cheaper to contact our ISP and get that IP address blocked at the border (they also confirmed that it was Google), they confirmed the IP was originating at Google and they were pumping 1gpbs at our 10mbps line! The first month of DoS protection was free. At the end of the month, they asked if we wanted to extend it, at a couple of hundred Euros a month. Luckily, we were mid-way through an ISP change and we could switch over to the new ISP and new IP address.
4 months later, out of curiosity, I checked the old line (we were supposed to have a 6 month parallel period, where we checked the new line and moved services over 1 by 1), just before the line was terminated. The Google server was still pumping 1gbps at the connection.
They still hadn't contacted us and they hadn't even noticed that one of their servers had gone rogue!
Or even someone totally unrelated.
The TWiT network says that it regularly gets takedowns for copyright infringement on its talk shows (new coverage) from South American entities that claim copyright on TWiTs original work and either demonetize them / take the monetization for themselves or the videos get taken down and fighting the takedown can take weeks, which means the show is no longer relevant, by the time it is restored.
Microsoft tried to save money with Vista and did the German translation in their US offices, instead of getting it done locally, in Germany.
They got lambasted when Vista was released in Germany. There were a lot of real howlers in the translation. The best being in the Network Neighbourhood properties translation, which was essentially the German for "Change your neighbours attitude". Unfortunately, it didn't work as advertised...
Apple got caught out in Germany as well. They put the EULA for OS X inside the box and the EULA said, (among other things) you can't use it on a non-Apple device. But German law says that only those conditions that are present at the point of sale (and the EULA is in a sealed package, so can't be read before the sale) are enforceable.
That left the clause as unenforceable and it was legal to install OS X on non-Apple kit. That is now moot, given that it is all online these days.
Having had to translate many legal documents from English to German and vice-versa, yes, getting a lawyer to read it afterwards is essential, otherwise the whole exercise is pointless.
And even a cursory reading of the text by the proof reader should have thrown out the DeepL link from the text...
We just went through this with each department head.
We actually listed out all of the access the users in that department had, checked what was actually necessary and put that into roles, as opposed to individual users within a department having differing access.
Apart from 2 overseen access groups in one department, the roll-out went smoothly with no complaints. A few users received more rights than before, many had rights taken away (E.g. had moved departments and still had access to the old departments data, which they shouldn't).
We have everything locked down. You only get access to what you need. Occasionally people will need additional access. The owner of the affected data gives their okay and access to the data is added to that user's rights.
It works just fine. Even as IT administrators, we don't have admin privileges on our standard accounts and we only have access to IT related areas or to projects in other departments that we are working on.
We could give ourselves access, but we don't.
Also, since GDPR, giving the users access to more data than they need is a problem and our DPO is very strict about ensuring people don't get access to sensitive information that they don't need access to.
The phone upgrading bit has nothing to do with apps developers or the government. Apple and Google retro-fitted the API to all supported iOS devices and, in the case of Google, supported and unsupported devices going back Android 6, which is over 5 years old and has been out of support since 2017.
I am not supporting the ham-fisted cock-up train that is the UK's app development strategy, but this is the one part of the chain that they had no influence over.
I've been using the German version from RKI and it has signalled green (everything OK, no contacts) every day for 4 months, so far.
That said, our region has had 170 cases in total and my town had 0 for a couple of weeks, although there were around half a dozen cases last week. The same with work, the town was also zero for a long time and is still in single figures.
Up until May of this year, the iPhone 6 was the only iPhone that fell within the subsidy range allowed by my employer. If you wanted anything newer, you had to pay the difference yourself. I'm not paying an extra 700€ for a current iPhone that I can't install private apps on or make private calls with... On the other hand, most current Android phones fall within the subsidy.
But, there again, most of our employees use the iPhone for work and have a private phone as well.
I've been using the German app for several months now and no false positives so far, just green every day... But better a false positive than a false negative.
Selfish has been redefined in Germany, after an American woman, resident in Germany, came back from holiday and was ill, was tested and, while she was waiting for the results went out on a pub crawl and infected over 50 other people!
How is it with people returning from abroad, here you are expected to self-quarantine and get a test after 2 days, then wait for the results, if they are negative, you return to "the new normal".
My wife had a common cold a few weeks back, the doctor put her on sick leave for a week (works in a school) and did a test, she got the results the next day (negative). Neither she nor the doctor thought she was infected, but the doctor still did the test as standard procedure.
We are a manufacturing company, so a majority of staff have to be at work.
Back office, sales, purchasing etc. did a split of home office and office, often rotating. The IT department I work in was 50/50, half were home office the other half on-site to keep things working (if the Internet wasn't working, resetting firewalls, manually pulling the plug on things like the telephone system when it froze). Most days everything ran smoothly, but when there was a problem, it was good to be on-site.
The teams that remained were also split up and people moved into the offices of those who were home-working.
My daily routine hasn't changed much this year, although I did do over 50 Teams training sessions - usually installing Teams remotely and then doing a Teams conference to explain how it worked. The biggest problem was getting headsets - we gave up on cameras, we ordered in March, they turned up mid-August.
Good guy: "Look, I've invented a knife, it makes killing animals easier and I can use it to cut things up."
Bad guy: "Look, I can use it to kill you!"
Good guy: "Look, I've invented a sling, I can use it to kill animals some distance away."
Bad guy: "Look, I can use it to kill you!"
Good guy: "Look, I've invented a bow and arrow, I can kill animals at long range."
Bad guy: "Look, I can use it to kill you!"
Good guy: "Look, I've invented a gun, I can kill animals at even longer range."
Bad guy: "Look, I can use it to kill you!"
...
Whenever we invent something that has a positive use, somebody will find a way of using it for bad things.
Yes, my 1.4L C3 petrol that I had before the Qashqai was around 5.8L/100KM.
Drove to work this morning on a newly resurface road, restricted to 70km/h the whole was (25km), average was 3.8L/100KM.
I don't drive slowly, I accelerate hard, up to cruising speed, but once there, I am very gentle with the throttle, constantly adjusting. I've always managed to get very good mileage, regardless of what I was driving. When I was still in the UK, I made a trip to Munich in 2001 in my classic BMW M535i and still managed a 40mpg average, whilst cruising at 160km/h / 100mph on the Autobahn. I thought it would have gussled the fuel, but it was doing under 2,000rpm at 100mph on the Autobahn.
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