Re: How does that work then?
Depends how well or badly the law is worded. To be checked, the PII has to be "stored" for some finite amount of time, even if only in RAM. If the wording is loose enough, someone will sue.
25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"And if the majority are US-based, then clearly the editorial will be more focussed on US based content."
And yet, when it was slightly less US focussed, it attracted a great many US readers. So sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. It's how advertisers work. If a market is expanding, concentrate on that one, even if what you are doing alienates other markets and removes the uniqueness you had.
Back when |I was a kid, peoaple walking around talking to themselves were the local nutters[*]. Now everyone is at it (phone in pocket, in-ear wireless ear buds you can barely see)
* not PC nowadays, but I'm using it in it's historical context. Please don't cancel me!!!!!
"In the 1970's, there was an expectation of the "end of programming" -- that all the (green-screen) applications needed by business would be completed, and all the world would need would be a small coterie of operations and maintainence programmers."
And less than 30 years later, the Millenium Bug hit and there were no programmers left to fix it, bringing on the downfall of human civilisation :-)
Being the two most populous countries in the world might have something to do with it. Both have some very good universities too, but by dint of their population, they also have a large number of less good universities. It's up the potential employers to sort out who is actually good.
For that matter, what about that steep windy hill place in SF on a busy day, with Amazon type deliveries to the residents just to make it even more congested? Or the daily police chases down the hills past the trams, bouncing over the cross roads and leaving hub caps flying everywhere (Blame Hollywood for my view of SF!)
Blocky! It's surprisingly sad how poor old games look on modern LCD/OLED screens. The imperfections and foibles of CRT displays where used to advantage by games programmers and they can look shite on a modern screen unless you use "shaders" to simulate scanlines etc to attempt to recreate the old look and feel. I recall some NTSC games that simply never looked as expected on PAL systems because of the different foibles of the two system. Probably vice versa too.
"Oh, and 2 HP MicroServers, 1 of which is BNIB"
There's an ancient HP MicroServer in my loft too. It's got a 250GB boot drive in the CD-ROM bay and 4x4TB HDDs[*] in the main drive bay and has been running for quite some years now.
* upgraded a couple of times, running ZFS filesystem in RAIDZ, so 12TB of space, mostly filled and thinking about another upgrade :-)
She was a pretty shit FD then. Everyone knows that kit has a selling cost, ie there is a cost to be factored in to the process of actually selling the item(s). If the deprecation is allowed to fall below the selling cost, then it costs more to dispose of it than it's sale price value. You get shot of it before that happens, unless it's being scrapped, in which case you price up the scrapping costs too. And annual depreciation of 15%? Sounds like she had no idea of lifecycles and was depreciating based on heavy machinery with a much longer expected lifetime. Even our company cars are depreciated at 25% to 33% annually.
The Tandy 1000 had a 3 channel AY-3-8910 sound chip in it and some games supported that. That would sound more like "8-bit tunes" than anything from the PC speaker. Maybe DOSBox needs setting to emulate the Tandy 1000 Sound device. Try setting machine=tandy in the config file.
On the other hand, I remember speech coming out of the basic PC speaker. Poorly, but understandable :-)
"(spec'd, provided and installed by IBM, gratis!)"
Well, the electrical and RFI specs for devices in most countries usually specify that the device not only should not produce too much RFI but should also continue to work in the presence of RFI. So either IBM or Otis would be on the hook to resolve that situation :-)
But yeah, spotting it in the first place can be interesting and fun. Most often it's when a fresh pair of eyes turn up knowing that the people who already looked at it are good and will have tried all the obvious things already. The right pair of eyes with the right type of brain behind them knows it time to think outside the box.
Multi-I/O cards changed over time. Anything other than an original 8088/86 or 80286 based PC would likely have had the realtime clock on the motherboard, and the multi-I/O card would have been 16-bit and had FDD, HDD, parallel and one or two serial ports on them and most likely IDE-based by the time 486s came along.
...how many of the people involved in these long term probe missions have in the back of their minds the likelihood that Starship will, over the next few years, make it much, much cheaper to send probes on higher velocity orbits and send newer, better and bigger probes that will get there faster merely by being able to boost a cheaper more fuel-filled probe into orbit for much less money.
A pint or three of barley Juice for everyone involved, it's still great science and engineering :-)
Yeah, I noticed that too. It is, of course, recycled plastic, but showing that MS are not just being green by using recycled plastic, they are being "super green" by helping to clean the oceans too! I suppose the fact it's made from plastic recovered from the ocean makes the green-washing that bit easier since it's pre-washed plastic.
"Who knows, maybe with Windows 12 we'll finally get another version that looks pretty, consistent, finished and flexible. Not holding my breath."
Probably best not to, considering the time from Win 10 to Win11. Win12 is a few years away yet! I wonder if there'll be a Win13 eventually? Americans seem to be very wary of the number 13, at least in marketing terms, floor numbering etc.
Maybe, maybe not. Do you want Joe the binman[*] to be made a Lord to help redress the balance? Alan Sugar made it from London barrow boy (sort of!) to the Lords. Probably not the ideal example, but an example nonetheless.
* No offence to binmen. They do a vital job. But it's probably not ideal training to be one of the people sort of in charge of the country :-)
"I'd also expect that having the existing radio strapped to the shoulder (as now), with a phone in a pocket for data duties is not as significant an issue as you might suspect."
If you watch any of those motorway cops type shows, they all seem to have two handsets, one strapped to each shoulder. I've always assumed it was radio + mobile phone, so carrying two devices seems to be SOP these days anyway.
"Tesla to actually do some advertising and point out the limitations of their software"
It'd be nice to see the court dish that out as part of the punishment, assuming Tesla lose. With the court having a veto on the adverts Tesla produce, ie there must be NO "spin" only the unvarnished "truth in advertising" :-)
In the UK at least, sentence guidelines take into account all sorts of things from pleading guilty from the outset to whether remorse is shown etc. If there's a range available, I'd expect people who "play" the system and keep appealing and losing might get a longer sentence than someone who accepts the guilty verdict in the first place. But, as with so many court cases, it's always possible that the verdict is actually wrong for any of a number of reasons and so an appeals process is rightly part of the system. I think under UK law it is required that all known evidence is produced during the case and appeals are granted based on technical failures in the original case or if genuinely new evidence likely to affect the original verdict which can be shown to be not previously known to either party. From what I've seen of some US court cases, it seems like the defendants legal team only provide the minimum evidence they think they need to win the case. When they fail, they then appeal with the second string evidence they already knew about but didn't use. This seems to mean, as in this case, constant and seemingly never ending appeals over years.
"We asked Samsung Electronics for a statement regarding the verdict in this case, but did not hear back from the company at the time if publication."
Samsung statement: We are pleased to receive the courts judgement and our lawyers are looking forward to discussing any and all possible grounds to appeal while sipping cocktails on their yachts in the Bahamas. (said with more of a grimace than a smile!)
Yes, happy days when it was not seen as incredibly risky and instant dismissal to acquire some random bit of software and install it on corporate PCs. There were viruses around then, but thankfully relatively rare and usually a bit less vicious than nowadays, although even then, AV was part of the toolkit.
"I concluded he wanted that file to be found, to scare off some CS students, and I never did encounter a "flunk-out" CS course."
There may well have been an ulterior motive for a scheme which never actually materialised, but I don't think explanation adds up. After all, those who "discovered" said file would probably be those least likely to flunk out.
...and I'm sure we've all noticed that no matter the enforced password complexity, if the user is told there is a specified minium length to the password, that is the number of characters used. 8-16 character passwords allowed? 99% of users will have an 8 character password because they are forced into making it "complex" and the natural reaction to that is to not make it any more complex than it needs to be :-)