Posts by phuzz

That was my first thought, but a more limiting factor would be if you got a flat battery.

(Especially as the ones on the moon buggies were non-rechargeable).

Re: XP What? Where?

If you still have XP machines that you can't get rid of, ideally you should just keep them off the network. Failing that, lock them down behind the tightest possible firewall (and I mean a separate firewall, don't rely on the XP one), only allowing traffic on the bare minimum of ports. Perhaps investigate if they can live on their own separate network, only connected to a second NIC on a more secure computer which is in turn connected to the wider network.

Re: being introduced in the UK

You don't vote for laws in the UK, you vote for an MP who you hope will go to parliament and vote in the way that you want, same as most other democracies.

Otherwise every single attempt to change a law would end up turning into a brexit, and nothing would ever get done.

(If you actually do care and you're not just trolling, you could go through the policy consultations and see who HMRC actually did ask about this.)

Re: One “benefit”

"But this is not the core reason why the "pros" remain with Adobe."

It's because they have a tool that works, and they're not interested in learning another.

It's a good example of the differences between how It types differ from a lot of other professions, because learning new tools is part of the point of the job.

(Not all print is Adobe based, there's still pockets of CorelDraw in the signmaking world.)

Re: I am the law!

I was under the impression that there was a certain amount of Catholic/Protestant disagreement which added to all of the above, was I misinformed?

Re: So...

Bean-counters are responsible for our salaries being paid, so personally I always try to keep them happy.

And of course, if they do become a problem, just throw a handful of small objects like beans or pebbles and run away, because accountants are compelled to count everything they see. Or is that vampires?

Re: @Time Waster - I'm not sure I see how they get to profitability

"trust a driverless car programmed in sunny California"

It's not just the weather, who's going to trust a car programmed to drive on roads that were laid out probably in the last hundred years?

On this side of the pond half our road network still follows paths laid down two thousand years ago, and you can bet the Romans weren't thinking about robo-cars when they built roads.

"Someone from Govan [...] sounds nothing like someone from Milngavie or Bearsden"

They do though. Even compared to (say) an Edinburgh accent. Locals will always be able to spot the differences though.

I'd assume that most people can't tell the difference between a Gloucestershire, Bristol, and a Somerset accent if yer not from round these parts.

"How much is the current system burning a year?"

From TFA:

"it costs £1.7m a day to run the Airwave network" (emph mine)

So, about £620M per year. Ish.

Re: Uhh

If you had children who would otherwise spend all their time complaining about how bored they are?

If you decided to have movie night with your friends, but outside?

There's two answers I came up with in less time than they took to type, I'm sure if you actually used your brain you'd think of some more.

Re: Oracle sues [insert name here]

Oracle using lawyers to try and get what they want. Isn't that basically their business model?

Re: "folks like your DearOldMum and Gran defrauded"

I don't think my mum would be down with stealing, but bad things happening to someone who was greedy and ignored advice? She'd be ok with that I think.

Re: What's that sound I hear?

That's good to see, actual common sense being used in government.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a quite climb down on age-blocking in a year or two as well.

Re: Of course the FCC is doing nothing

From TFA "a 57 per cent increase on the previous year"

There's failing to stop robocalls, and then there's failing to prevent them from increasing when your job is the head of the FCC...

Re: Just Drop[ped]Box. new three device syncing limit is unworkable/pathetic, 5 minimum needed.

"Plenty of people probably don't even realise the new 3 device limit change."

I didn't realise. Mind you, we pay for the enterprise version at work, and that doesn't have those limitations. Personally I don't have much of a problem with them limiting the free version, you get what you pay for after all.

Re: IT person

Maybe not literally someone's job title, but I've had jobs where I've been introduced as "here's phuzz, they do all our IT stuff", where 'IT stuff' translated to everything from simple programming down to making sure the printer still has paper in.

Re: De centralised identity management.

"no other authentication required"

Other than having a face which matches the picture on the simple piece of plastic, which is at least one step more secure than a gas bill.

Re: Before we look forwards, has it been explained why ...

One example would be that many parts of the Saturn V were hand built, in ways that nobody really practises any more, because we have better ways of doing it.

For example, the guidance system uses core rope memory, and there's probably about five people in the world who could could wire one of those up, but then these days we'd use something solid state instead which is faster, cheaper, more robust and with more capacity in a smaller package. (ditto every other piece of electronics on the SV)

For another example, much of the F1 engine is hand welded, and not many people have those welding skills any more, so instead you'd have to redesign it to use a more modern design that can be welded (better) by a machine. But if you're already redesigning that much of the engine, why not update other parts as well, until you end up with a completely different engine. By that point, you might as well design a new rocket that actually does what's required, rather than trying to fit your mission around what the Saturn V can/could do.

Re: Wouldn't have helped here

Can confirm that in SQL Server, you can rollback a DROP TABLE (as long as you've not committed obv).

Re: What happened to committing via command line?

A CLI is great when you know ahead of time what information you want to be displayed (and any bulk, or repetitive tasks).

A GUI is better for more investigative tasks (ie problem solving) where you don't know that you need something until you look at it.

The both have their place, and which you use most is more down to what your job involves.

Re: GDPR?

There's a partial exception in the GDPR for police work, so standard GDPR rules may not apply.

There's more information from the government here, but I think you'd have to be better versed in UK data legislation than me in order to make much sense of it.

Re: Self certification?

"casts a poor light on the whole concept of self certification"

The trouble is it would cost NASA $$$ to be testing every part they receive from suppliers (even ignoring destructive tests). Testing (eg) every single rivet you buy is unsustainable, at some point you have to start trusting people.

As it says in TFA, they already test some parts, they just need to expand that, and maybe add some more random spot checks to keep their suppliers honest. Trust, but verify.

Re: The Swedes do not want him.

"the whole thing was to extradite him to the US"

If the US had tried to extradite him from Sweden there's a good chance they'd have failed (short version, Sweden doesn't allow 'political' extraditions). That said, they could have just applied to Sweden for extradition, there would be nothing to gain from 'faking rape charges' as some of his supporters seem to think.

Instead he ran to the UK completely voluntarily, despite the fact that the UK is probably one of the countries in Europe most likely to extradite to the US. So he's made things worse for himself there.

You'll also notice that during the two years that he was on bail in the UK, the US didn't try to get him extradited. That's clearly a decision they've made since 2012, so no "the whole thing" wasn't to extradite him to the US. They've just take advantage of his string of bad decisions.

Re: F1 KERS flywheels

"don't put people anywhere near it"

At least warships have had hundreds of years of design put into separating the crew from dangerous things (ie the magazine), so it should be a solved problem in naval engineering.

Re: "just as flawed"?

At least a potential attacker would need a valid username and password to access the telnet port*, rather than anyone being able to use the ssh flaw on any affected Cisco once they knew the hard-coded credentials.

* which they could grab unencrypted from the wire if they had access and someone actually logged in over telnet, which is why telnet is bad.

Re: downvoted for "black Americans"

"hurr durr statistics how do they work?"

So, you lose points for picking a paywalled source, but here's the source the Washington Post used. I'm guessing you didn't use that because they have a big quote that show's quite how disingenuous your comment was:

"Police killed 1,147 people in 2017. Black people were 25% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population." (emphasis mine).

So if you're in the US, and you have dark skin, you're three times more likely to be shot by US security forces. I won't call them police, because quite frankly the word means something different over here, something less shooty.

I decided to have a little "what if" upgrade check and came up with the idea of buying a 1600X (or other high end Ryzen 1 chip) for cheap off ebay, pairing it with a high end AM4 motherboard, and then upgrading to Ryzen 3 when they actually come out.

There's a lot to be said for AMD keeping the same sockets for (*gasp* from the Intel fans) more than one generation of CPU. All I'd have to do is swap out the CPU, which is not a situation I've been in for years.