Posts by Tom7

Yes indeed, although how many people will manage to use it correctly is debatable - most RasPi GPIO seems to be done in Python, which rather defeats the purpose.

Re: Your scheduled bit pedantry whenever shell commands are mentioned

The usual reason for multiple sudos rather than sudo -s is that it leaves visible traces of what you've done in the system log files, where sudo -s just records that someone has become root but doesn't show what they've done.

Re: Won't happen in my lifetime

You should want that. The reason Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and so on have massive amounts of power today is because IPv6 hasn't been adopted, devices don't have a public IP address and peer-to-peer networking is impossible.

Hand me a global internet where every device has a public IP address and tomorrow I'll give you a social network where you actually connect with your friends instead of connecting to Facebook. Until then, any attempt to build it will drown in user complaints that it doesn't work. Or doesn't work on some of their devices. Or doesn't work when they're at work or at their friends' house. Or doesn't work when they roam onto the wrong mobile network. Actually, none of those things; the complaint will be that it just doesn't work because the average consumer has no idea how to figure out that it's related to any of those things and shouldn't have to care.

Re: Ummm, Do you work in IT?

If you have one friend, it's possible but unlikely. We're talking about both of you changing your IP address at exactly the same time.

By the time you have five friends, it is vanishingly unlikely.

Recovery involves either being physically close enough to a friend for NFC to work or being on the same subnet as them.

My thought too - this is likely to be a simple "regression to the mean." It's difficult to boost content that's already reached 99% of Twitter users through ordinary people re-tweeting it.

And the cynic in me rather thinks that Twitter might have a vested interest in this result.

Re: No comment

My thoughts exactly. I think we all know the sort of skillset they'll actually get for that kind of money.

Especially if it's loaded with half a kilo of plastic explosive.

It's interesting that the interceptor appears to be a sort of drone but one that uses two contra-rotating propellers and (presumably) variable pitch to control attitude rather than just using another off-the-shelf quadcopter, especially for demo purposes.

Re: System Failure

You do need to put this in context a bit. There were more than 700 prosecutions of subpostmasters over this time. This appeal dealt with 42 of them. The court allowed three to stand and quashed the convictions of 39 others, but based on the summaries of the cases given in the judgement, it seems likely that some of those 39 were guilty. These convictions were not quashed on the grounds that the defendants can be shown to be innocent, but on the grounds that the process used to convict them was grossly unfair. That doesn't make them innocent.

These 42 were referred to the court of appeal by the criminal cases review commission because they were the ones where convictions seemed most likely to be unsafe; three of them were allowed to stand because their convictions didn't depend on Horizon data. It seems likely, then, that the 700-odd other prosecutions were also based on evidence other than Horizon data. What I'm getting at is that these convictions didn't just happen out of the blue, but as part of a much larger number of prosecutions where the defendants probably were guilty.

When you see 39 subpostmasters have their convictions quashed in a group, its easy to wonder how no-one saw the pattern; when those are less than 5% of the prosecutions of subpostmasters over that time, it's a lot easier to understand how they seemed to fit into a different pattern.

Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

Yup. Religion was a net influence for remain but, you know, blame religion for Brexit, why not?

Re: But did you turn off the high refresh rate?

[checks quickly] No.

Re: What problem are the certificates solving?

...and trust the BBC to manage the certificate at the root of a chain of trust. It is better for a few specialist organisations to the do this than for every media streaming service to manage its own rarely-expiring root of trust.

Re: WTF?

Ah, yes, the vaunted "two sevens" reliability standard.

Someone hit the publish button a bit early?

It's a little more complicated than that because you need to find out whether nbn's numbers include the encapsulation overhead (and find out what the encapsulation is) and then decide if you want to include the encapsulation bits in your numbers. But thereabouts, yes.

Someone hit the publish button a bit early?

See here

At the same time, asking for randomized, controlled trials of methods of managing large projects is kind of unreasonable. Why not go the full medical-grade route and ask for randomized, controlled, blind trials? Engineers aren't allowed to know with management method they're using...

Re: "only when you buy them directly from Three"

Oh, good. So the only way to escape the Three walled garden is... to... join Apple's walled garden?

Re: Competition

Well, so go buy a phone that costs £650 and let the little ones find some other way of breaking it. I can afford three broken and replaced phones to break even with your purchase cost.

I suspect that having a liking for something is more important than having a "gift" for it. I remember hearing concert pianist interviewed some years ago. I don't recall the exact words, but the interview went something like this:

Interviewer: "Do you feel privileged to be so gifted at something so unique?"

Pianist: "I'm not gifted."

I: "But look at what you've achieved. You're one of the best pianists ever. You must have a gift for it."

P: "No. Anyone could do what I do. All you need is the willingness to practice the piano for ten hours of every day of your life."

Not many people have the willingness to put that sort of time into *anything*, and so not many people are that good at anything. Some people start something and really, really like it, and that gives them the impetus to keep going and work at it.

Re: I find what people hate about Ubuntu weird

Forgot to add the footnote:

[1] Except that typing `calc` brings up LibreOffice Calc and not the desktop calculator. Perhaps it's just me, but I find this one of the most annoying things about any desktop I've seen in the last five years (though I managed to avoid Win8.x).