Posts by John Brown (no body) 25362 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
It does make me wonder how much of my home insurance costs a re to subsidise stupid people who don't take care to avoid stupid, avoidable accidents. I fully understand and agree with insurance payments being a "social" thing to spread the costs and risks, but disagree on some of the included cover. I'm not sure someone causing damage when flailing around effectively blindfolded should be a claimable insurance "accident".
Yes, the problem with the existing kit seems to be people not reading the instructions first and/or the game not having a method of calibrating the playing area to the physical space. It's pretty clear from the linked video that few people have space in the home to use these devices as currently designed.
Maybe instead of bing completely immersive, they should be "underlaying" reality on the screen too, ie the headset has a camera on the front, or make the display translucent so people can see where they really are.
I think there's some sort of thing in the psychology of "free" that affects people. Offer "unlimited" and people will flock to you, and some will abuse it while still being technically inside the rules and lead to it becoming uneconomic as more "leeches" arrive. But if the competition offers an economically viable "limited" service, it fails because "limited". eg most people will choose "unlimited" free storage rather than 100GB free storage even though the vast majority of individuals will never need 100GB of space.
"The cabinet sat in a corridor and the patch leads extended in a pile of spaghetti which extended almost a metre in front of the cabinet."
I can't beat that on amount of spillage, but maybe on time reach spillage. Network cab in a school. Not a big one, maybe 6-8U, about 8 feet up on the wall. The door will no longer close due to the mess of cables. This was only a few week after I'd installed it as part of an entire wiring up of the school. All wall points went back to the patch panel. All wall points were live as I'd carefully and neatly patched every patch panel port into the switches, everything labelled and colour coded. There was absolutely no reason I could fathom as to why someone had gone in and started re-routing cables. After all, we'd designed it all for them, got the sign-offs, set up all the proper VLANS and wired the correct ports to the correct VLANS etc. I can only imagine that the school technician had forgotten all that and possibly after some classroom re-arrangements had re-patched the cables rather then edited which ports were in which VLAN.
"Honestly, this will only stop the dumb ones."
No, it will stop almost everyone. Few will have the skills or knowledge to do as you describe. If it becomes a "commodity[*]" hack, then it gets noticed that "something" is going on, leading to deep investigations.
No, not the Amiga Workbench Commodities!! (Although the commodity exchange would be a great way to hook into all user input and see exactly what a user is doing!)
"the concrete wasteland our cities have become"
Tree roots. That's the excuse many councils give for removing trees from down the side of streets. The roots lift the surrounding ground, people trip, then sue the council. Oh, and not forgetting that it costs money to assess trees regularly and lop off suspect branches in case they fall on people. And leaf cleaning in Autumn. Again, people might slip on them and sue the council who put the tree there in the first place!
Likewise, councils have money left at the end of the budget year, or get grants for "beautification" projects, but they never have the money to maintain them (different budget!!) so they end up looking very tired and messy after a while.
"Also, I advise indicating well before you start the manoeuvre. This should show other drivers that you are not making a straightforward lane change since, indeed, you are not doing it yet."
Er, you should *always* indicate before you start your manoeuvre. That's why they are called indicators. They indicate your intention or wishes.
"It is not true that cyclists hate pedestrians, and, of course, they do not try to kill pedestrians."
The important point is that some do, most don't. As with any large group, the majority are relatively normal, law-abiding citizens, the minority are self-important twats. Of course, we forget about all the people who don't cause issue and never forget the twats who jump out into the road, cycle through red lights, or turn left, cutting up cyclists.
Maybe the current chip shortage could put a stop to that. I mean, FFS, they even use chips to control the indicators so they "flash" like a rope light extending in the direction of travel. I wonder how much a failed "bulb" costs to replace just because some designer thought it looked pretty and convinced some safety board that a "travelling light" would help to indicate the turn direction more effectively than a "simple" flashing light?
"In the mid 60s, my mother knew a posh middle-aged lady who would travel in her chauffer-driven Daimler between her big house and the parish church a similar distance away."
That sound very much more like a status thing beloved of certain classes and wealth levels rather than laziness.
True, as far as on the road is concerned. Pavements etc, not so much. At junior school, the rule was keep left when moving about the school corridors. At secondary school, not only was the rule "keep right", but it was signed as such all over the place. As for out in the real world, I find the vast majority of people walk "where the hell they like" but through a system of learned behaviour, unwritten rules and fleeting eye contact, most people manage perfectly well. But, of course, there are always twats. There always will be.
On really busy pavements, somehow the crowd seems to work out that everyone going in the same direction should be on the same side of the pavement, which mostly works. Except there are "junctions" frequently along the route as people need to go look in a shop window or go into/out of a shop, which can be a little awkward at times if your direction of travel is on the outside and someone is speed-walking with a large parcel! :-)
Yes, you are correct and are describing the situation we are in now. My point was that we[*] should have been objecting tp this years ago so as not to have reached this point.
* By "we", I mean everyone, not just those us in the industry who have been watching this slow, step-by-steo sleep-walk into the surveillance society.
"Maybe you should not install any of those (potentially) dangerous programs?"
All programs are potentially dangerous. Users have to judge whether there is actual danger and balance that with their needs, wants and convenience. For most users, obviously convenience is weighted very heavily and all other concerns are weighted very low if not actually into negative weightings otherwise we'd not be in the situation of even the OS snooping on you these days, never mind all the 3rd party stuff. If people were really concerned, or informed enough that they have the choice to be concerned, snoopy programs would not have the success they currently enjoy.
"if your country deems *all analytics* to be illegal according to GDPR?"
Did you read the ruling? GDPR is about PI data being sent to jurisdictions where it won't have the required levels of protection. If Google and other analytic operators choose to do the processing inside the areas covered by GDPR and only export the aggregated, anonymised data, then they will be fully compliant.
"Ummm. No. I will simply geo-block IP addresses from there"
That's fine by me. If you don't trade in the EU or UK, have no presence in the EU or UK, then no one will miss you.
"gov.uk which has GA turned on, and on many pages is listed as necessary,"
All those sites claiming GA is "necessary" are lying IMHO. I have the GA domain blocked in NoScript and as far as I can remember, it's one of the blocked domains I've never had to temporarily unblock to get a site to work.
How much does GA actually provide though? Is there more than could be gleaned from the website access logs? Are there offline analytics that could provide all of the above without running GA scripts and cookies? It's many years since I was interested in that stuff. I was using Apache back then and, IIRC, Webalyser(??) which did quite a bit of analytics, but not at the depth you describe. But then I wasn't running a business and it was simply "nice to look at" and see where in the world site visitors were coming from. I'm sure Webalyser or equivalents must be vastly more powerful nowadays, although I can imagine advertisers insisting on GA data in the same way printshops used to insist on only Postscript submissions years ago, because they can't or won't consider anything other than the market leader.
"It's the one thing I'm glad for the pandemic - no more flights for pointless in person meetings!"
At the height of the second UK lockdown, I was tasked with a weeks work a long way from home, but still in the UK. One of the few hotels still open was booked for me, 4 stars above the door. It was probably the most soul destroying week of my life, working in a windowless cubby hole all day, having got up before sunrise (mid January!) and left site post sunset (still mid January!) I barely saw daylight all week and the evening meal at the hotel, running under COVID restrictions, was a choice of three types of toasted ciabattas or 4 flavours of pizza as there were no kitchen staff, delivered to your room. Breakfast was in a bag (at least it came with a hot bacon or sausage buttie!). That "delivered to your room" was quite important too as the COVID rules meant the hotel public areas were closed and there was no where to go since everything else outside was also closed! I barely saw daylight for the entire week. I really hope that never happens again. On a brighter note, the job was completed by lunchtime on the Friday and I made it home in time for tea and most of the drive home was in daylight :-)
Similar here. Most of my field jobs, all over the place, take time to get there and when the job's done, it's time to leave and get back on the road. There are so many places I'd like to see, but simply don't have the time. Even if I do get finished relatively early, the thought of getting home at 6pm instead 9-10PM is more enticing :-)
"In general, the early adopters will be the laggards for subsequent enhancements."
Yep. Been saying that almost since the US first got touch-tone phones while we in the UK still had dials. There's been an almost leap-frogging effect for many years. Same happened when the US started with cable broadband. Cable was pretty much ubiquitous over there while here it took far longer to catch-up, but when we did, we used the latest tech while they were still sweating the "early adopter" assets. Also, of course, why we see some countries going from almost no hard-wired comms networks to full on, high availability, high speed fibre, massively "beating" many so-called advanced countries. After all, why would they even bother to install an outdated copper network?
I've seen Teslas on the motorway, me passing them while I'm doing 70mph. On the other hand, I've seen Teslas passing me on the motorway while I'm doing 70mph and seem to be standing still by comparison. I guess they are the ones where the "fun" hasn't worn off yet :-)
Actually, I saw one today while on my way home along the M62. I was doing 70mph. He was stopped on the hard shoulder. There was another car parked just behind him. That one had pretty blue flashing lights :-)
Would it be beyond the wit of the devs/designers to put a message up on the screen informing the driver a mandatory up must be performed but it can only happen if the driver responds to the message at a convenient time for the update to happen and the system identifies that the car is parked up? With the self driving/SatNam "awareness", they should even be able to tell if you are home on the driveway.
Maybe they are paying huge chunks of cash to their parent, Alphabet and are seeing their coffers beginning to drain? Google like, for example Starbucks UK, might be paying enormous sums to "licence" the Google name, trademarks and other IP from Alphabet and so make little to no profit, therefore pay no taxes. Alphabet may have just upped the licencing fees so Google needs more cash flow.
"Think of all the potentially insanely critical research data that is just entrusted to Google, with no idea of what their backup plans / recovery procedures are."
I was thinking of what Google will be going with all that space used that is above the new 100TB limit if the researchers haven't moved it by the deadline. Will they allow read-only access for a time so it can be moved, or just cut them off at the knees?
Apart from most people in the USA being the same race as me, you might care to note that I was insulting the US media, not the people of the USA. In particular, note that even if I was insulting the people of the USA, being in a different country doesn't necessarily mean people are a different race. Of course, by some definition, I may be mixed race since I have English, German and French ancestry (at least!). My wife is part English, French, Canadian First Nations, Italian and (still to be confirmed) Semitic. And that's just the couple of hundred years of the family history she's managed to trace so far.
From what I understand, only the best of the best (in general) is what we get to see. And even then, those of us watching get to choose whether to watch or not :-)
We're all different and have different reasons for watching, or not, as the case may be. Personally, I prefer SF. I've seen some good stuff and some clearly comic-book stuff. Not just US either. Korean, Japanese, Brazilian, French and Norwegian are other foreign SF I've watched recently, some surprisingly good and thoughtful, others, just "eye candy" to kill time or as a distraction while doing other stuff, although the sub-titled stuff does take a bit more concentration since I can barely scrape through in French or German, no chance in other languages :-)
My first true use of any form of DOS was TRS-DOS and the others like MultiDOS, LDOS etc, then CP/M, then MS-DOS. Moving to Amiga, back to MS-DOS and Windows and now primarily FreeBSD, I've always used the file extensions, not just because many OS require them, but because it's a nice human readable way of identifying what a file is quickly from a directory listing.
The difference is that the menu button was called the menu button first and only later became, to some people, a "hamburger" (actually, a hamburger in a bun, because a hamburger would just be - )The mouse became a mouse almost from conception in 1964 and long before it was released as a product.
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