Posts by John Brown (no body) 25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
10? Not 8? or 7?
You sound a like a smoker whose been promising to give up when the price of a packet of fags reaches some randomly selected but ever increasing threshold, every time the duty goes up in the budget.
I remember a guy I work with telling me "I'll give up if they go over a fiver". Well, they're over a tenner now and he still smokes :-)
"It's a calculation. They probably reckon that most users will carry on as normal, and those are the ones they make money from."
Has anyone seen this thing in action? If it's inserting code into a page on the fly, does it screw up the payments page layout? Does it put itself more prominently on the payment options than those of the intended options from the page host, ie is it hijacking the intended option?
"the only proper fix is the throw the printer in the trash* and buy a new one,"
Many of the HP MFPs out in the wild may be leased on a pay-per-print deal, which seems cheap up front but can get expensive long term. They will usually be "managed" by the lessor, who needs constant external access to your network, the MFPs need to "phone home" frequently to report on usage and order supplies etc. The organisation leasing them will have little control over firmware upgrades, that's the lessors problem. Except now it's also your problem. There's a great big hole in your network. (I would hope that the management interface is a box inside your network and the lessor managing the devices has to log in securely through that, but I bet that's not always the case.)
"I guess it'll be hard to figure out who lifted it"
I suspect it'll be a fairly limited of pool of people as to who actually created the video in the first place. That's probably at least one person wishing they'd not took their phone to "work" that day. Knowing the military mind though, it probably got circulated all over the ship very quickly. Tracking down who let it out into the wild may be a bit harder, depending on who did it and why. If it was just an average matelot or a friend/family member of one, odds are they didn't do anything to cover their tracks.
"Insurance is a complex product and ultimately the onus is on you to understand your cover."
While I agree with the general thrust of statement, I'd point out that few people are legally trained, unlike the people who write the policies. This means certain words and phrases may have a specific meaning in terms of the law that many people will not understand and consequently can mean a policy may or may not cover what the purchaser thinks it does. As you are in the industry, I'm sure you must be aware of many words and phrases used in policies that have specific legal meanings but often mean something quite different when used in day to day conversation by people not in an industry full of legal caveats.
"Be interesting to see if the CMA has teeth here, its dealing with a big multinational that is not headquartered in the UK."
Even if the CMA has legal difficulties due to drawn out appeals and eventual enforcement of the fine, other countries will be looking at how they can use the ruling in their countries too, assuming they agree with it. This could get quickly get expensive if multiple countries find against the buy-out too and MetaFace have to go to appeal in multiple jurisdictions. Many countries are finally beginning to get concerned about the size and scope of Big Tech and their seeming "creative" observance of laws and taxation systems.
"Instead of charging space tourists big bucks on a mission to nowhere, charge adolescents small bucks to play Space Debris Invaders -- piloting drone cleanup "ships" via VR. High score gets to go on an actual rocket to play Space Debris Invaders -- in real life. "
Wasn't that the plot for The Last Starfighter?
"That orbital velocity of about 8000 m/s is the one way speed. If two objects collided head on, that's a doubling of the closing velocity, or 4 times the kinetic energy. So a dropped biro colliding head on is like 4 hand grenades going off!"
That all sounds very impressive, but of course is an implausible worst case scenario. It's unlikely something travelling at low earth orbital velocity is going to hit something "at rest". As for "head-on", how many sats are in retrograde orbits? And by that, I mean one where you could get a "head on" collision, not just any old orbit with more than 90 degree inclination.
"they may be replaced more often than an owned one which increases the pace of waste electronics."
This happens. I have clients in both camps. Those leasing their laptops/desktops get them replaced after 5 years. Those buying them take the 5 year on-site warrenty, but after 5 years, keep using them until they break. The broken ones are then piled in boxes and used as spares where possible. New ones are then bought as required in smaller batches. At least one client has told me they have a very few 10 year old laptops still out in the field, still adequate for some users. They are planning on leaving the Win 11 "upgrade" for as long as possible! For normal Win10 business use, kit too old to be upgraded to Win 11 is still more than adequate for most users. They are seriously looking at options to support both Win10 and 11 long term eventually, if MS will let them remain on Win10 without stupid "extended support" costs.
"While there's nothing wrong with the argument given here per se, it seems to be focused very tightly (exclusively, one might say) on climate/eco issues. Yes, they are a hot topic these days, but there are surely other issues to be addressed?"
Not to mention the security issues of running on shared hardware. If you use cloud and use exclusive hardware, then much of the so-called green advantage is lost. On a similar note, yeah, it's "easy" to scale up and down as required for those sudden short bursts of very high load. But where is that extra capacity coming from? Well, clearly the "cloud" has lots of spare, probably idle capacity. I'm sure they don't want contention issues where a client asks for more CPU cycles and gets told, "come back later, we don't have any spare during peak periods".
My grandad remembered seeing the news headline here in the UK of the first powered flight by the Wright brothers. He also watched the Moon landing, live, and had a flight on Concorde. I wonder which of the new inventions we have seen will be the "Concorde" of our dotage. Especially those young whippersnappers who are reading here.
At the very least, most of us have seen the birth of the Internet, the WWW, wireless comms, smartphones etc.
AOL, GeoCities and the like were doing that so long ago that the likes of Facebook and MySpace were not even a glint in the eyes of their creators yet. There's a very long history of service/space providers giving themselves perpetual and wide range rights to any data placed on their servers. Although they never seem to accept any of the responsibilities that go with hosting that data.
"Moral of the story: don't bite the hand that feeds you, its likely to take away your food dish & let your sorry ass starve."
Change the above a bit to refer to cable or satellite TV companies and the channel providers and we've all seen exactly that scenario play out multiple times over the years.
Although Sky, on the other hand, looks like it's getting out of the satellite TV business and moving to a streaming model. I guess they have "run the numbers" and worked out that it's cheaper to stream their data over someone elses pipes instead of paying for transponder space on satellites. I wonder how long it will take them to make "streaming only" channels and move all their best shows to that channel to nudge people off their dishes and eventually drop the dish service completely. After all, when Sky were forced to sell access to cable TV in the UK, they managed to get the channels named in the ruling and almost immediately created a new channel not in the agreement and moved all their best stuff there (Sky Atlantic) and didn't sell access to cable for that.
"Without their content, no one would buy the telcos’ Internet service."
Naaah. There was and is plenty of content without going near "Big Tech". It's primarily video content coming from "Big Tech". Most people buy the cheapest service available, so no, they generally don't buy service based on how much streaming they might do. I suggest that the very high capacity home connections are way more niche than many here might think and of those who do have very high capacity probably barely use it anywhere near full capacity.
"The customers of the ISP already pay for the fucking roads."
...and they built some very nice "fucking" roads. The problem is that now there are 50x as many cars trying to use those roads and those cars are being given away for free or very cheap to the punters. Now people are complaining they can't drive their new shiney because no one expected the sudden influx on the "fucking" roads. Roads aren't built to manage everyone using them at the same time, that would be silly. But if you suddenly give everyone free or cheap access to a vehicle, human nature shows that so many more will use them that the system become congested. The answer is almost always to restrict users in some way.
And yes, as always, car/road analogies break down more often than a 30 year old Ford Escort :-)
Of course, in this case, I don't know if it's really the telcos bleating or if this is a genuine problem. Maybe a bit of both. I doubt any of the telcos or ISPs predicted the levels of video streaming going on these days.
With the mention of Windows SDK 1.0 and WinUI 3.0, I was expecting an article about MS open sourcing the original Windows SDK :-)
Probably because I just read the article about the Win 3.1 mouse driver
Maybe if you weren't being so selfish and self-absorbed, you might stop and wonder about all that hydro power being used in Sweden that could be used and/or exported to replace the fossil fuel generation. See? Some you CAN do about reducing fossil fuel usage.
As for your co-generation suggestion, almost all crypto mining not only treats the heat as waste, but spends more energy on getting rid of it because it's low grade waste heat. Of course, low grade heat CAN be used for other useful purposes, but that needs investment, location and equipment to turn it into something useful such as concentrating it for heating purposes, assuming there's somewhere nearby that needs heat. But it'd be even more efficient to just generate the needed heat directly for the end users rather than wasting it on a volatile currency system that can swing so wildly you can go from barely to comfortable to millionaire and back again in a swing of the pendulum.
Yeah, it's funny in a strange kind of way. All those protestors blocking Amazon warehouse access because of the Amazon Carbon footprint, but I don't see any big protests about cryptocurrencies and huge carbon footprint and/or "waste" of green power going on there. I wonder how much extra coal and gas have been burned because of all the cheap hydro power not being used to heat peoples homes.
"That might apply to outbound messages but TFA says specifically that the sender's permission is required, not the receiver's. On this interpretation it makes it illegal for inbound messages."
On the other hand, the sender is sending to a minor and the legal guardian is installing and authorising the checking of what is being sent to that minor. This is why lawyers get paid the big money to argue the finer points of law.
“…we were intercepting incoming messages, without the authority of the person that had sent it in the first place.”
Surely every email service available which does incoming spam filtering is also legally on shaky ground based on that? Only the recipient has signed the T&Cs allowing that filtering and only the recipient has the power to change the settings. In the case of a child, the parent or other legal guardian is the "legal authority" and is allowed to take measure to protect their charge, which may involve filtering their email or other incoming messages, either on the device or at the server end, including forwarding those message automatically to another filtering service. Just like everyone already does now.
On the rare occasions I've almost had to give up, I have phoned back to base to get help from the bench/workshop guys. Often, the answer arrives in my head during dialling, while the phone is ringing or sometimes as it's answered, at which I say "never mind, fixed it now". As you say, it's just getting away from the issue, away from the concentration on specific detail, letting your brain do it's thing and see the big picture.
"and this X270 and the latter is my favourite so far."
Just make sure you look after that keyboard very, very carefully. It's a bastard to replace. One of the worst in the Lenovo range (not consumer range, I never see them, so don't know).
To replace, take the bottom off, then keep digging till you eventually have it almost totally stripped down to get the keyboard out. If you are careful and know the "trick", you can avoid having to remove the screen when removing the keyboard. It's possibly the most likely part to fail and pretty much the hardest to replace. Almost every model in the X, P, L and even E range is a 5 minute k/b replacement procedure. X270 and Carbons are a pain (and a very few others where the k/b is part of the cover/chassis/palm-rest, probably for spillage protection))
"the moon is much, much lower mass than the earth, so you'd get much less kick"
On the other hand, you can get within a few kilometres of the surface for a faster kick, just need to avoid any tall peaks, either by staying above, or going through! Could be tricky, but great visuals :-)
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