* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

UK union pens letter to data watchdog on icky workplace monitoring systems like Microsoft's Productivity Score

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I wonder if you work where I work. That sounds alarmingly familiar. The sad thing is, though, that there are probably many organisations that are that badly run.

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Re: Templates...

When I was working as a developer, I'd probably have half a dozen emails a day, would go to meetings maybe a couple of times a month and spent most of my time actually working.

Hahaha, I wish. With working from home, managers are ever keener to prove that they have value, so the number of meetings to "touch base" has proliferated. As a dev, I'm lucky if I get to spend 50% of my time actually doing productive work. If recent history is anything to go by, the other 50% is largely spent analysing why the work is late and rescheduling it. Now if only I could have the time to actually get the work done...

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Requiring Training

From my experience, and observations, training occurs when the manager does not have the skills to properly manage the employee.

The training consists of sending the employee on a "communication skills" course or similar.

Rinse and repeat until the employee finds another job. Then repeat some more, just with a different employee. La plus ça change...

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Re: how to do a fucking sum in Excel

The Dunning Kruger effect in full play there. I get the feeling that the higher up the pay-scale you go in most organisations, the more it applies.

We got it! Japanese space agency confirms its probe has Ryugu asteroid samples

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Alien

Re: Space dust, 2020, Japanese

It's anyone's guess whether 2020 will end like the Andromeda Strain, or like another great film of a few years later, Phase IV.

The ants still have time for a late entry...

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

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Of course, as with a "free" account, they can't bill you. As soon as they have your billing details, that promotional feature disappears.

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It is eminently possible to have a flag in the user account database set to "do not exceed billing limit", and to stop services / virtual machines / databases when that limit is about to be exceeded, or is exceeded by only a small amount. It's also eminently possible to have that set to 1 by default, and to have obvious and intuitive user controls for it, along with appropriate warnings.

The fact that no cloud provider does this means that "surprise billing" is very much their business model. Until the industry insists that they provide these controls, and they listen, or more likely, legislatures regulate them so that it is a requirement, they will continue to fleece their victims customers.

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Facepalm

Re: Surely though...

If you had read it, you would have realised that this was probably an intentional part of the joke.

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Presumably, the induced rotating field in the rotor and in the stator have the same rotational period, so never change relative to each other, so a force is never effected in the rotor, as the filed lines are all nicely aligned. If anything, it would magnetically "glue" the rotor in place as the aligned fields would have a lower energy configuration from "snapping" into each other.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

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As, oddly enough, do many larger supermarkets, albeit usually at an eye-watering markup.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

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Hmmm. Sounds like the overzealous optimiser there didn't know about determinism...

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Joke

Re: Tight loop

So this is how you create a paperless office - use all the paper...

Next day delivery a bit of a pain? We have just the thing... nestled deep in the terms and conditions

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Re: Newfangled

nah, you should use baconipsum.com

Where's the mysterious metal monolith today then? Oh look, it's atop a California mountain

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Re: Technically ......

Technically ......

...... I don't think I've ever seen Aluminium. But I do see Aluminium Oxide all over the place.

Technically, you have seen the aluminium (note for our crosspondian cousins, not aloominum), because the couple-of-atoms-thick layer of alumina on the surface is thin enough to allow the vast majority of photons to pass straight through it. If pure enough, it can grow pretty transparent crystals as well, more commonly known as sapphires and rubies (depending on the colour, which depends on the impurities).

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Mushroom

Re: Technically ......

Having seen what was left of a fume hood after finely divided aluminium that was cut in an oxygen-free atmosphere subsequently came into contact with air, I can confidently assert that aluminium very definitely does react with air given half a chance.

I'm reliably informed that it will quite happily continue to burn underwater, once started.

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Flame

Re: Mondelez Advert

Tell that to a stoichiometric mixture of aluminium and iron oxide.

edit - "aluminium dying of rust" is pretty much a perfect description of the thermite reaction...

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

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obsolete in 3... 2... 1...

Glastonbury hippy shop Hemp in Avalon rapped for spouting 'plandemic' pseudoscience

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Re: Glastonbury

I feel a bit bad being so rude about Glastonbury. I enjoy visiting the Abbey.

At a tenner in to see a bunch of ruins, it's a bit steep though. If it was three quid, and I was going that way anyway, I'd consider it...

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

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Re: ::insert moment of silence::

Zauderer said that maintenance in recent years had been completed according to schedule.

One wonders whether it was "according to schedule" but the schedule was emptier than it reasonably should have been.

Uri Geller calls off 20-year ban on Pokémon trading card that 'stole' his 'signature image'

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Re: Who Cares.

And we care that you don't care?

See, we can all play the "I don't care" game, and we all come off looking like dicks...

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Re: Hardly unexpected.

"It's too late, I've seen everything"

Cayman Islands investment fund left entire filestore viewable by world+dog in unsecured Azure blob

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The difference being that if you're going to put in a ring main, you have to get an electrician in to do it, which helps prevent you from electrocuting yourself.

If you put all your data into "the cloud", all you need is a means of payment, you don't need to get an IT professional to do it (and many businesses see IT people as an unnecessary expense). This then results in the metaphorical equivalent of standing in a bucket of water while licking a frayed HV cable.

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

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Listen for the *loud beeping sound* as the user turns off the UPS under their desk.

Not sunshine, moonlight or good times – blame it on the buggy

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Well that sounds like a problem with the DVD itself.

I'm assuming the DVD you were creating wasn't a physically pressed DVD, but one written onto writable (or rewritable) media. Writeable optical media are notoriously tricky beasts. Media written with one drive may be perfectly readable on the same drive but unreadable on another. Because the media is written by basically burning holes in light-sensitive dye with a laser, they can be susceptible to corruption if exposed to a UV source. Scratches and dirt can render them unreadable, and in some cases bright sunlight.

There's a reason they're not often used any more, and that is that, unlike a commercially produced CD or DVD, which has physical indentations in a metal layer, protected by a layer of plastic, which is fairly robust, they are fragile beasties. They're certainly not suitable for any sort of long-term storage or backups (which is why we still use magnetic tape for this, some 130 years after the technique was invented).

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

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Paris Hilton

Re: Ask any actuary

Insurance is about mutualizing risk, not adjusting payments according to statistics that applies to the groups you belong to.

Which is why actuarial tables are just big spreadsheets filled entirely with the number 1 in every cell, right?

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Re: Ask any actuary

For similar reasons, when I used to ride a motorbike, it was actually cheaper to insure fully comp than just 3rd party. Presumably, the logic here is that people who are insuring 3rd party only are not expecting to survive being in a write-off that's their fault.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledges £12bn green economy package

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Re: Not a chance !

You've not met Bristol City Council...

Dell online store charges 16 million dollars for new laptop with paint job

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Gimp

Well that would explain the pricing then.

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WTF?

Re: Probably because the pigment

Sorry, so you’re saying it's 12M quid more expensive for this laptop, because hurricanes? I'll have some of what you're smoking.

Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe

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Re: They just don't get it.

I think, for eBay at least, their thinking is, "you looked at it once, so you must want to buy it."

The thing is, for most page views, I'm either not going to buy it, am going to buy it elsewhere, or have already bought one. Quite often it will be when looking for the best price to buy something for someone else, so profiling my "preferences" for musicians I don't like, or for women's clothes* isn't exactly going to help them.

*Insert appropriate "only at weekends," "call me Sandra," etc. etc. joke here.

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Re: They just don't get it.

Nope, not using Chrome. Try again. Also, in terms of "offline storage", it's not permitted to do anything other than store the cookies from a site, which, according to EU law, should get my consent first.

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Re: But to be the advocate of the devil

I stopped reading your comment after the first sentence, because it is demonstrably wrong.

The "main" search engine that people use didn't used to spew adverts at you, back in its early incarnations, and other search engines exist that don't advertise, or track you in any way, for instance DuckDuckGo. To claim that the internet "couldn't exist" without advertising conveniently ignores the counter-examples.

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Indeed. What you have described pretty much exactly matches what the Independent's current "ad-blocker-blocker" incarnation does. They should stop kidding themselves that complaining about ad-blockers will magically make people decide that they both want to see the adverts, and that they will deliberately follow them.

I, for one, wish there was an easy way to save such edits as a domain specific stylesheet that the browser would then use in subsequent loads. If there is such a thing, it's well hidden, in Firefox at least.

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Which to me, as a web developer, is just cute.

I'm all for helping non-technical users with how to use the console to inspect page elements to set their properties to hide those "ad blocker" banners.

Usually involves setting "display:none" on the top element, and possibly removing properties that disable scrolling.

I'd rather do that than have advertising gunk spewed in my face.

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Re: They just don't get it.

I recently had occasion to buy a new toaster, after one of the elements burned out on the 25-year-old one I had from when I was a student (it wasn't economical to fix). After shopping around to find a suitable replacement at a decent price, I settled on one and purchased it from a well-known web retailer.

Cue several emails from eBay over the next month or so asking if I'm still interested in toasters, as well as ones from Wayfair touting their range of bread-heating devices. Now, it might be fair to class me as a weirdo, but I'm not the sort of weirdo that collects toasters.

So even though I'm using an ad-blocker, and NoScript, these fuckers are still using tracking cookies, none of which I recall opting into - I generally try to decline permissions for these as much as possible.

Quite often I'll see adverts on Facebook for things I've recently been looking at on other sites as well. Facebook is notoriously sneaky with its adverts, and seems to be able to sneak them into your "feed" despite using an ad blocker.

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Re: They just don't get it.

Yes, more accurately, it's beneficial to the people selling the targeted advertising to the advertisers.

Also, it's arguable that the "end user" isn't the person receiving the adverts, but the one buying the advertising "space".

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Re: 95% Don't Care

Which is exactly why it should be clearly, and explicitly opt in. And that doesn't mean with one giant "yes" button, and a tiny grey link to a page where you can click the no button after scrolling through pages of text.

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Re: It's this...

Dear advertising industry, it's this sort of bollocks below that makes us all feel as though you are a lower form of life than pond scum

Pond scum is just the relatively benign stuff that floats to the top. They're the stinking oozing stagnant mud at the bottom of the pond, where the crawling and writhing things live.

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Re: They just don't get it.

"As an advertising industry, we’ve done a very poor job of communicating to the end user as to why we’re tracking them, and why this is beneficial."

Let me have a go - it's beneficial (to the advertiser) because it allows them to make more money by using personal data to profile individuals and target advertising at them.

The problem is, that if you explain this to the "end user", who in this case, is the person about whom you are collecting personal information, they are, quite rightly, going to want you to get their consent first, and if they do understand what you're up to, they won't consent. If your whole business model is based on doing stuff behind people's backs and hoping they won't notice, I'm going to push the boat out here and suggest that maybe you shouldn't be in business.

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised

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The Indie doesn't play nice with ad blockers, forcing me to hit F12 and use the element picker to select the top two layers and set them to display:none

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Why do you get profound joy from frustrating an inanimate object?

Perhaps that sense of joy comes from confounding the people who designed it to do so, rather than defeating the object itself? Of course those same people are probably profiling you in myriad other ways in order to better direct adverts at you, and thus make more money, or to influence you in other subtle ways, such as curating the news media that you see on the internet to slowly change your political opinions by reinforcing certain biases whilst not feeding others.

This isn't even the ramblings of paranoid nutter; in the US, political profiling is big business, and political adverts tailored to individuals based on data held about pretty much every citizen are a major part of campaigning, especially (but not exclusively) on the right. Of course, they're not 100% effective, which is why The Orange One is now so upset.

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Re: BBC

Our local BBC news program regularly featuring a local doctor as their "Covid Expert" who has been asked at times to comment on Government policy - he was pretty critical of the Government - had the BBC explained he is also a LibDem councillor then his opinions might be better put into context.

If he'e being asked for his medical opinion, not his political opinion, it doesn't matter, does it? It's pretty obvious that the government hasn't been following the SAGE advice, which comes from actual doctors and scientists, so if the opinion of a doctor is critical of the government, it's hardly going to be either surprising, or biased.

Then again, there has been more than one instance of questions from the Question Time audience coming from "Joe Publics" who have later been revealed to be Tory councillors. Almost systematically so. Asking political questions. This is known as "astroturfing", i.e. pretending to be "grass roots" whilst actually being part of a larger political movement, for the purposes of skewing the perception of public opinion. That's very definitely bias.

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Re: BBC

The one thing I like the most about the BBC is that both right and left wingers whinge about it being biased against them in equal measure

Whilst this is undoubtedly true, you should pay some attention to what the right and left are complaining about, and where that bias is. You will quickly see that certain portions of the political output (such as, infamously QT) bias very far to the right. Just count the number of times Nigel Farage and his far right cronies have been on that program, compared to any balancing far-left politician (hint: there aren't many actually on the far left, it's just that some in this country like to portray the centre-left as Marxists). Bear in mind, also, that the news output is always going to be biased somewhat towards the party in power, simply because that party holds the purse-strings. The BBC is terrified of losing the licence fee, and there are elements in the current government who would be quite happy to make that happen and replace it with a subscription system. There is also the eternal fight to draw a distinction between balance and equality of viewpoint. Giving equal air time to both a consensus viewpoint held by 99.999% of the expert community and a small group of wacko nutjobs isn't balance, but at the same time silencing dissenting voices in favour of the status quo isn't always great either.

Then, on the other hand, much of the comedy output is very left-leaning. I don't actually think this is down to bias against the right as such, but more because there are very few right-wing comedians, let alone ones which are actually funny. Similarly, the educational output is biased towards facts. Who's to blame if the moderate left tend to base their values on facts rather than irrational beliefs?

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

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Re: That reminds me..

In a previous job incarnation, I worked for a print processing company that was licensed to print cheques, on sheet-fed Xerox belt printers, so sadly I know more about this topic than I ever would have wished to, as well as knowing what a corotron is, and how to operate a 440 ft/min continuous feed laser printer (whilst still being required to wear a tie, because we were 'IT', health and safety be damned). MCR / MICR are interchangeable terms, MICR probably gets the preference when spoken out loud, simply because it’s easier to say "mica" than "em-see-arr". MCR is easier to type. YMMV.

Anyway, having actually used the magnetic cheque readers for checking proofs (which were large beige boxes with a slit in the top which probably dated from the 1970s), it was stressed into us that it was important that the numbers on the cheques were printed properly because it is a core security feature. It therefore surprises me a little that banks would be so willing to forego this and not to even place their hands on cheques that are being paid in. Then again, that security feature is several decades old, so it's probably not exactly the most secure any more.

Long story short, the company in question went out of business not long after I found another job and left. I like to think it may have been a contributing factor, but to be honest, it's probably just because it was run by lying shysters.

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Re: That reminds me..

Depending which bank you are with, you can usually pay cheques in by taking a picture on your phone via their banking app.

I was made aware of this by the counter staff in Lloyds after queueing up to pay in a cheque last year.

It did strike me at the time that this circumvents at least two of the security features of the cheque; there's nothing to prevent you doctoring the image of the cheque, and there's no verification of the MCR line, so presumably it rests entirely on the issuer of the cheque to notice fraud on their bank statement.

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Re: That reminds me..

"Double your pleasure, double your fun....

Xerox your paycheque"

You do, of course, have to use the Xerox machine with the magnetic toner in.

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

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Facepalm

Re: Yikes!

Learn how to use the mobile.

Learn how to read the article?

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For anyone below 40 they are called 'phones'. Older people call them 'mobile phones' or 'moby'.

I'm over 40, I too just call it a "phone". Also, Moby is a bald vegetarian. I have literally never heard anyone refer to their phone as a "moby", but then again, I tend to avoid hanging around with annoying twats.

BOFH: You might want to sit down for this. Oh, right, you can't. Listen carefully: THIS IS NOT AN IT PROBLEM!

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From what I've seen in offices, the lifespan of the average office chair before something snaps or breaks (usually the levers for the riser, or the bit that stops the backrest springing forward) is about 18 months. I would be wholly unsurprised if a good 1/3 of the office chairs that got sent out to people's homes in March are now broken. The ones that aren't being used as clothes hangers that is.

[Checks meeting agenda...] Where does it say 'Talk cr*p and waste everyone's time'?

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Re: It's not really a bluetooth headset, but...

I've had similar success with a cheap pair of MPOW BT noise-cancelling headphones. They're fine for calls, where there's a certain amount of lag anyway, and listening to podcasts, but far too laggy for gaming / watching movies. Because they're noise-cancelling they have a mic in them for the NC feed, which is surprisingly okay for using as a headset.