Posts by big_D

Re: That will be 244 people looking for a job very soon

I know one person, back in the early 90s, he'd been with the company over 40 years. They outsourced and the outsourcer looked for voluntary redundancies after a year, as they were forcing people onto new contracts.

He took voluntary redundancy / early retirement, which gave him well over a years salary as compensation. Then the company noticed that he was responsible for around 30 systems at the old client, and was the only person with any knowledge of them. He came back a month later as a contractor for 18 months to train up a replacement!

Re: Input of accents on mac

That makes sense. By 2 keypresses, I was thinking ⌥e, not ⌥e e. The same as compose keys on DEC PCs and terminals.

If you haven't written the code yourself, it isn't trustworthy.

If you wrote it yourself, you only have yourself to blame when it isn't trustworthy.

The first thing you should be doing with these imported modules is running your own security tests on it, before letting it anywhere near a public server. The problem is, most projects are now importing so much code this is not practical.

Re: Hit where it hurts

c't magazine seems to run a quarterly report about fake products on Amazon and FleaBay. Lately it has been "2TB" micro-SD cards (8GB cards with manipulated firmware) and similar products that look like the original, only not... SunDisk Evo or Samsong Extreme.

Re: Radio Rentals

It depends on where you are. Here, in Germany, the local council define the rates that can be charged and all vehicles must have a geeichte (calibrated) meter device that is connected to the tacho/wheels and does a distance and time calculation of the fare. You can't charge a deviation from the standard fare.

The calibration seal needs to be current and the controllers can pull a cab at any time and order it to be re-calibrated. Anybody offering fares has to have such a device, otherwise they face heavy fines. (There are exceptions, such as limosuine services that rent out chauffered vehicles by the hour / day.)

You also need a professional driving license in Germany, otherwise you cannot get commercial insurance (and private vehicle insurance is null-and-void if you are carrying paying passengers).

One of the reasons that Uber got into trouble over here - they weren't ensuring that their drivers had the correct license and therefore most were driving illegally in "uninsured" vehicles, at least when they were on the clock.

Re: An sensible response, indeed

And if the whole press and blogosphere ignored their rantings...

If the only press was that companies refused to pay and the childish rants were ignored completely in the press, on social media etc. they wouldn't get the publicity they so obviously crave.

Re: "transition from Classic Skype to something more modern"

It is like Teams and VSCode, they all are incredibly lardy applications, being based on Electron.

The world is going mad.

Re: IBM

I always though it was Incredible Bloody Mindedness.

Re: Granny pix

I did some Lightspeed Pascal on the Mac, back at the end of the 80s. I haven't used it since then.

Re: Backups? We've heard of them...

Dropbox is only a backup if you have the original data somewhere and push it at regular intervals to Dropbox, even then, it is questionable, whether that constitutes a real backup. If you are using Dropbox as your primary storage, it isn't a backup.

The 3-2-1 rule applies.

Re: GDPR issue??

Illegal in many parts of Europe, you have to get permission or at least warn people that they are entering a monitored area. For example, in Germany, you cannot use a camera that monitors your driveway, if it can see the pavement or the road outside or if it records people approaching your front door.

If you live in a block of flats, you can't use something like a Ring doorbell, if the camera is facing a public area (E.g. common hallway). You can use a camera in "private" areas (i.e. areas you would not expect a visitor to use to approach your residence - garden, rooms inside the house). But you have to have clearly visible warning signs, there are also very strict laws on how long your can retain such material.

Re: The German one seems to work

It has no effect for anyone tested positive.

It was never supposed to. It is there to help others who may have come into contact with the infected person.

But, I agree with the rest of your post completely. Looking at the rest of the world, we don't seem to be doing too badly - let's just hope there aren't too many Westfleisch and Tönnies out there, waiting to whop the statistics in the arse.

I have an image of Clemmens Tönnies sitting in the boardroom laughing as the Westfleisch story broke, then not actually doing anything, until the smile was wiped from his face this week...

Having worked in the meat industry for around a decade (software supplier to slaughter houses and meat processig plants), I've seen the conditions in small and large slaughterhouses (but not Tönnies). I know a couple of "honest" companies that used local workers, but the pressure put on them by the discounters to push down prices and the shareholders to turn a profit means that most of the big ones have resorted to "importing" cheap labour out of the former East Block and putting them up in rundown flats, where they share beds (the workers on shift swap places with those going off shift) in many cases.

We have become so accustomed to cheap meat that many are no longer willing to pay for quality meat and/or eat less meat, like we used to. As a child, I grew up in a middle-class family and we had meat probably 4 - 5 days a week, although that was often a roast on Sunday and leftovers the next day or two. My wife's family had meat 1 - 2 days a week. Now, even poor families have meat most days of the week. But the quality of the meat has sunk dramatically and the price is unrealistically low, in Germany.

Re: Maturity.

99% of our work is still on local applications.

I've been pleasantly surprised with my last 2 phones. My Huawei received updates 30 days behind Google's official release schedule, which, after my Galaxy 3S and htc Sensation (1 - 2 updates over 3 years). I upgraded to a Samsung S20+ this year and, so far, they have had the updates available within 3 days of Google announcing them.

Let's hope they really have turned a corner and will continue to provide them for the promised 3 years at the same rate.

Not as good as Fairphone, but a huge step forward to where they were a few years ago.

Re: Email already passé?

Yes. WhatsApp loads the contacts onto their US servers and shares it with Facebook. That isn't allowed under GDPR.

Signal, on the other hand checks contracts against a hash, AFAIK.

Re: I don’t quite understand this

It is more like Pirelli being charged 30% for selling their tyres through the Ford dealer and not being able to inform the customer that they could buy the tyres for 30% less down the street.

Re: Not me...

Except, a good quality keyboard, like those used on the terminal, would cost a couple of hundred dollars, heck, an equivalent keyboard mass-produced these days still costs between $100 and $300.

Then you have the high quality display, that could display 132 columns compressed or 80 normal. Most PCs of that era either used a telly (32 columns) or you had to provide your own monitor.

Don't forget, an IBM PC at that time would cost several thousand dollars ($4K?), didn't have a graphics card, monitor, floppy disk drive or keyboard - they were all extras - and had 64KB RAM. All "optional" extras.

Terminals weren't cheap, but they also weren't that expensive, compared to "professional" computers.

They were also on the COCOM list, you couldn't sell a VT100 to the East Block, it was advanced technology! We had a lightning strike and around 400 VT100s died. We had to get them all "professionally destroyed" and a government official came down to witness the deed and sign a certificate to say they had been destroyed (we used the car-compactor and shredder of the scrapyard next to the factory).

Re: Well now....

Same in many production environments. I used to work for a software company that used software to control PLCs. From the time of receiving an RFID tag on a meat hook, the software had around 20 milliseconds to tell the PLC which lane to push the tag to, before it reached the switch.

Re: "faster and...more maintainable"

Except optimization and readability / maintainability are not mutually exclusive. You can optimize maintainable code and still have it be maintainable.

Re: £175?

For a professional, workplace wireless headset, that price is about average.

At work, we use Jabras and they range from around 120UKP to around 300UKP.

Re: Memories

I bought a Gateway 2000 P90 with 16MB EDO RAM. The supplied memory checking tool started spitting out errors when I tested it after delivery. I contacted Gateway and they put another 16MB EDO in the post. I installed that and re-ran the tests, same result.

I ran the PC for a week or so, until the engineer turned up, with 32MB, what a luxury! It ran stably and flawlessly.

The engineer had a new motherboard and he swapped the old one out. Memory test threw up the same errors... It turns out that the P90 was the first Gateway PC to use EDO memory and the testing program didn't understand EDO, so reported every memory location as faulty! Ah well, back to 16MB it was.

Re: First thing I thought of

It sounds like they have the support of Hopu Investment, if they have more than 2%, that is a majority.

This is internal company politics and we are only getting the public facing bit of the iceberg.

Re: Windows 10 2004. Certainly seems a bit wonky + Older Nvidia Driver Workaround.

I've been running it for 2 weeks on my ThinkPad, only for Lenovo to announce yesterday that you shouldn't update your ThinkPad... My T480 is running fine, even though it is listed as not recommended.

I'm guessing it has to do with the Thunderbolt problem.

Thanks, I missed that bit. That makes sense.

Re: DEC Fortran

Microsoft was selling a BASIC compiler throughout the 80s. Many computers came with BASIC interpreters built into ROM, including the original IBM PC (standard configuration was a cassette port and BASICA in ROM, no floppy drive - well, and no keyboard or display either, everything was extra).

But Microsoft also sold a compiler for CP/M and MS-DOS. We had code that ran on HP-125 (CP/M), HP-150 (MS-DOS), HP Vectra (sort of IBM compatible, only not very, MS-DOS) and IBM PCs (PC-DOS). All were compiled using Microsoft's BASIC compiler and you had to replace the header file, which contain the definitions (strings with escape codes) for accessing the screen (moving the cursor, clearing the screen, inverse video, bold etc.) for each platform.

Re: Thanks Rasmus!

I went for an interview for a web development job in 2008. I had never used PHP. The night before, I sat down and wrote a quick "hello world" script. It was so straight forward, after years of C, Java, VB etc. that I got the job and was productive in a couple of hours.

Re: QNAP owners

And make sure you have applied at least one of the intervening 20 or so security updates...

Re: Never understood this

Exactly. But we replaced our dishwasher last year and finding a quality device that wasn't "smart" was a problem. Most of the Siemens line were "smart", they could order new tabs themselves and you could call up the status at any time... Why?

In the end, we got a "dumb" Miele, which will hopefully be working long after the Siemens devices tells its own do bog off, because it can't phone home.