Posts by John Brown (no body) 25355 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"For example, that department sometimes does controlled fires as part of their forest fire control strategy"
Surely not! The esteemed President Trump has quite clearly stated that the forest fires are caused by the States not looking after their 3% of forest. It's nothing whatsoever to do with the 50% or so the Feds are charged with looking after or the privately owned forest land run for profit by businessmen like President Trump and properly and safely managed.
"When you take your car to the garage for a new fan belt, do they change the exhaust too free of charge without asking you?"
No, but they'll usually, for free, cast an eye over the rest of the car and tell if they think other work needs doing. Reputable ones will even be mostly honest about it too.
"We all know chipsets get used in multiple hardware projects from different companies and they often use the same badly written software one company wrote which often has vulnerabilities. Think IP cameras/DVR's for example."
No one seems to have looked, or at least reported on looking, for any identifying text inside the binary code. Most seems to have some sort of copyright or similar embedded these days
"Being of Italian extraction, family originating just outside Rome, I would prefer the Priory to be razed and my Great-great-great-great Grandfather's villa be restored."
Have you prostrated yourself yet for the sins of your GGGG-grandfather? He took my GGGG-grandfather and sold him into slavery.
The solution to that is ticket machines which require you to enter your full reg number. Oddly, they are much more expensive machine than the ones that simply issue a parking receipt/ticket. On the other hand, ticket machines capable of giving change are seen as too expensive, so it does seem a little odd that they suddenly have the extra money for a different type of expensive machine.
"Apparently the Germans practised tank manoeuvres on bicycles which I thought was an impressive act, considering the USSR churned out much better tanks with much better armour and still lost to panzers."
Large amounts of German logistics was carried out by man and horse power too, but their press and propaganda were under very strict instructions to never show this.
"For rather loose values of 'give', as that verb is not commonly associated with armed conflict against independence movements."
You're right, it wasn't given back. Nor was it taken away. It was both. And other reasons too. There was also huge pressure from the USA too as they were feeling a bit adventurous after WW2 and didn't want the competition.
"Once library size becomes the target I can see lots of libraries becoming nothing but a plugin framework, replacing an 80kb library with a 10kb library and 100kb of extensions."
If I'm understanding the article correctly, that's what this "shake the tree" thing is about. Modern JS libraries should be able to be pared down on the fly as required so your web page/app only downloads the code it needs, not the entire library.
I'm no financial whiz or even a wannbe Gordon Gecko, but I'd have thought a reduction in phone sales would be all the more reason to consolidate into one seller, not to take your products out of one shop and open more shops to sell only your own product.
I can only imagine that their thinking is that once a potential customer walks into your shop, the hope is that you can hard sell/bamboozle them into not shopping elsewhere. Except those customers may never get to your shop because they popped into one of the other 6 phone shops on the street, all in a neat row next to each other, and got hard sold/bamboozled there first. It all sounds like a recipe for even greater churn where the only number they look at is new sign-ups.
"First you identify the system limitations that are being worked around in laborious ways, THEN you work out how you're prefer thing to be done, THEN you go back and see if what you've come up with actually makes sense or if there are other things elsewhere which are causing the entire broken chain you just devised a fix for that could be fixed and make the whole thing redundant."
THAT used to be the job of the Systems Analyst. But that's no longer hip and cool.
"The EU is not a single economy. Though people like to pretend it is for convenience or for show."
You could say the same thing about the USA, Canada, or anywhere else that is a confederation of states with some level of autonomy from their federal government. Germany and Italy, while being part of the EU are relatively new countries with some very independent-minded states/regions. The EU is not a federated nation (yet!) but is effectively so in many respects.
Yeah, That's my take away from the story too. $4.8bn of rental fees with nothing to show for it other than a few fleeting moments of pleasure interspersed with a lot of "meh!". Nothing to pass on to your kids. I still have most of my dads record collection. All ripped to HDD of course after being carefully and lovingly cleaned. Some might even have a some monetary value these days.
It's not a pay rise. It's a reduction in your costs. Nothing to do with your employer, other than the work from home that could have been part of your job years ago. Depending on where you work and where you live, you might have been able to save that by moving house. Likewise, saving the 2-3 hour per day commute isn't you working fewer hours. Your employer is still getting the contracted hours from you. You just don't have to travel as far any more or at least as often. Again, something you always controlled by choosing where you live and where you work.
It's win-win for you and your employer because you have more money in your pocket and far better work life balance and happy employers are usually more productive employees, but it's not a pay rise nor a benefit to be grateful to your employer for. If anything, your employer should pay you more for working from home as you are now subsidising their heating and power costs while, in the longer term, reducing their office space costs.
"This is why they'd take a dim view of gaming the system, it would be as unthinkable as useing a radio controlled golf ball to steer a putt into the cup."
No, it's more like inventing a new golf club that make s a hole in one far more likley while still being within the posted rules. It may break the spirit of the rules and be "unfair" in the minds of many, but still be completely legal.
"NASA's SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellite)"
Something the US is very, very good at (on the whole) Acronyms/Bacronyms. Do US orgs and corps actually have people with the specific job of coming up with them? Is there a graduate course one can attend with the aim of having that job title?
To guess what the OS or anything else might be. That's a BIOS reported error so it could be any OS, none of which are to blame in this case. Well, some blame may be passed to the OS if the OS didn't see the thermal trip coming and shutdown safely. It's likely the OS was killed with extreme prejudice by the BIOS forcing a reboot rather than the OS seeing the temp rise and doing a clean shutdown.
"Within 2m for more than 15 mins" has been the "rule" since lockdown. It constantly surprises me how many people still have not understood that basic message. The app should not be warning you of people you might have been near for 60 seconds or so. If you are pressing pedestrian crossing buttons after 100's of strangers, then you need to consider your risk level and mitigations. Like maybe wearing gloves or carrying wet anti-bacterial wipes. Same applies to anything that others may be touching before you.
What gets my goat is the blatancy with which they claim that keeping a list of where you have been is "privacy preserving".
Until we see it and get a chance to see how it works, the only "facts" we have at the moment are that the app stores the data on the phone and then checks for alerts from a central database. Your phone then lets you know if any of the places you've been are in that list. It doesn't send your data anywhere. Considering the outcry over privacy (rightly, IMHO), I can't see any reason why the QR code thing should work in the same way.
So, instead of "Oh Noes! Privacy", let's wait for the evidence which may or may not prove your fears.
"Test more people, yet more positive results. "
While both true and a Trumpism, the rate of positive tests is also increasing, irrespective of the numbers of tests being carried out. That's typical of people who are in denial and how Trump operates constantly. Carefully picking just enough "truth" to make statements sound plausible that are demonstrably wrong.
As for your accusation of the conflation of "cases" and "positive results", anyone not a denier, especially in the medical profession, will tell you that the number of cases is highly likely to be one or more orders of magnitude more than current testing would indicate. I'm sure even you must have heard of asymptomatic infections, let alone those who get it relatively mildly, most of whom probably don't get tested. Certainly the vast majority of asymptomatic case don't get tested unless they are in a job where regular testing is required.
"On leaving, the few people ahead of me ignored the sanitiser at the exit too."
FWIW, I don't either. I use my own before I go in, same on the way out and always use anti-bacterial wipes on the trolley handle and to use the coin slot key thing. I also have a second anti-bacterial wipe for opening fridge or freezer doors etc, keep wiping my hands after touching stuff. I've seen others do the same.
Having said all that, I know what you mean. There are people who are still not taking things seriously. I followed a guy in a motorway services the other day. No mask for him or his wife. He also walked back out of the toilets after pissing and didn't wash his hands either. Twat!
"Somehow I think I might have worked out where I've been for myself."
That's probably true for some people, maybe for a lot of people, but I can't say for sure exactly which shops I was in last week. There's the "usual suspects" I go to every week, but did I go in the local butchers, bakers or candlestick makers? Or the fruit shop last week? Might have. Maybe not.
"Paper based contact tracing is by far the best as it maintains anonymity as much as possible"
Interestingly, I went into a council building the other day. They had a sign-in sheet requesting name, full postcode and phone number at the main reception. Considering the strict and often overzealous application of GDPR by local councils, the sheet was not covered in any way, the data not protected from prying eyes, ie the people being asked to sign in. A full set of personal details on view to everyone.
"I eventually had to stack the disk drives to the side of the system unit."
That's what you were supposed to do. Stacking the drives side by side and then the screen on top was just because it looked "cool" in the adverts. It was never a good idea to place a CRT on top of the floppy drives. Apple marketing hype from day one! :-)
"Turned out to be memory."
Could have easily been a part of RAM where Windows put something not executed, eg a message string, or maybe a stuck bit that was stuck at 1 where the OS actually expected a 1, but a different OS used it from something more important such as executable code, or stored data than should have been a 0 when read and was stuck at 1. There can be many reasons why a small RAM fault might work or fail under different circumstances.
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