Posts by handleoclast

Re: Uber is at fault, but...

The camera is not a reliable witness in terms of how visible things were

I thought I mentioned that the camera view was limited, and possibly degraded in the video.

What I didn't make explicit is that the video may have caused some people to assume the situation appeared reciprocal: the woman suddenly becoming visible on cam means that car was suddenly visible to the woman. That is far from the case.

she didn't 'appear out of nowhere' she was crossing the road well ahead of the vehicle.

Sure, a human driver ought to have seen her. The automation may have seen her and acted (if Uber hadn't disabled that feature). But she should have seen the car. There is no excuse for walking into a car in that situation.

Oh, and she wasn't "well ahead" of the vehicle. If she had been then she would have reached the other side before the car passed her. She was on a collision course. That's not "well ahead" but "not far enough ahead."

Since you failed to grasp the point, I'll make it again. The car was more visible to her than she was to the driver. No ifs, buts or maybes. This is simple optics. If Uber hadn't disabled the feature, she might not have been hit. If the driver had been paying attention she probably would not have been hit, difficult to be sure. But if she had been paying attention she would not have been hit.

There's no excuse for walking into the path of a car, at night, when the headlights mean it is highly visible. The car was more visible to her than she was to the driver. No excuse. None.

Uber fucked up. The driver fucked up. But the woman fucked up even bigger. We're each responsible for our own safety. Anybody crossing the road dangerously on the assumption that a driver will take compensating action is a fucking idiot.

Re: None Of The Above

Sounds like it's the only smart thing Afrinic has done lately.

Only half-smart. The smart option is "Re-Open Nominations" (aka "RON"). With that option they wouldn't be in the mess they're in. Still a mess, because (theoretically) nobody would be authorized to hold a second ballot, but an improvement. Better still would be RON with a temporary reprieve for the current board until successful appointments. But that would be vulnerable to ballot-rigging (stuff the boxes with RON votes every time to get permanent power). That could have been improved upon by handing off electoral control to some independent third-party.

So only half-smart. Smart enough that it was possible to get rid of the bastards, not smart enough to get their replacements in place.

And yes, RON should be on every ballot.

Re: It's a tough one at 1/160 Earth sea level pressure.

Looks like one of those things you can get on eBay for when you're bored round the office.

My thoughts exactly.

In fact, I was thinking of one of these (having purchased one of these eyeball-removers from a different seller last year).

@Charles 9

In such a situation, phones would likely be internally routed through a PBX or the like. In which case, the call would be routed through the internal network before being forwarded outside

Yeah, that's one way to do it. Company in one location contracts out calling customers (I'm talking about calls the customers actually want, not unwanted calls) to a call centre in another location (or possibly more than one call centre). So when the call centre makes a call, it dials a special number for the company that contracted it, a number that is a hunt group for several (perhaps large values of "several") lines at the company itself. Those lines go to a PBX, which then forwards the call to the customer over yet more lines, all to make it look like the call came from the company itself. That's some rather expensive tromboning, requiring twice the number of lines as actual calls and a PBX.

Or, the company authorizes the call centre to make calls on its behalf using the appropriate calling ID for the company. Legal, legit and moral (again, assuming these are calls the customers want to receive).

Either way the customer gets a call that identifies itself as being from the company (but is actually from a call centre). One way is a lot more expensive than the other.

Note: "Lost all faith..." didn't explicitly say that this was what the call centre was doing but he/she/it left enough clues that it was easy to figure out. Yet few people managed to do so. Not even after I responded to him and left a clue that people were missing something.

Re: RE: Come IndyScotland and, hopefully, IndyWales

So Wales could return to be the globe bestriding colossus it was before the C12 ?

The Welsh still have a global presence. There are between 1,500 and 5,000 Welsh speakers of Welsh descent in the Chubut Valley of Patagonia.

Re: I disagree with what you say but I defend your right to say it

That "bubble" is being enacted as "safe spaces" by those who want to censor things outside that environment rather than challenge them.

I understand that. Really I do. But it's on a par with somebody threatening to hold their breath until you capitulate, to which my response is to say "Go ahead, then. I hope you can hold your breath as long as I can refuse to capitulate."

If they're in their safe spaces comforting themselves then they can't be out in the real world censoring people. Works for me. Oh, and if they think holding their breath in their safe spaces will help, then go for it.

Far better that they stay in their safe spaces than they go all trigglypuff.

Re: relief arrived a long time ago

Open the file in wordpad instead of notepad.

Last time I tried that (I admit, it was many years ago) I found that Wordpad had "intelligently" changed the text when I saved it.

It's a long time back, but I have a vague memory of it seeing something it thought was HTML (it wasn't) so it added extra tags to make it comply to Microsoft's standards. Something like that. It saw something in there that made it decide it needed to add its own secret mix of herbs and spices instead of just saving the fucking text AS I WROTE IT (apologies for going full bob-mode there).

Oh, the memories just came flooding back. It decided, for no damned reason at all, to add Microsoft half-baked DTP formatting to it. Something like that. These are repressed memories, after all. Notepad (back then) couldn't handle the "large" (over 32K) file, so I used Wordpad. I thought I could trust it because it wasn't Tord¹.

I never used it again. For anything. That wasn't much of a hardship because back then (as now, and all times in between) I rarely used Windows anyway.

¹ Rhymes with "Word" but describes that piece of crap much more accurately.

Re: ROFLMAO

@katrinab

A quick Google later, of course there is.

It appears there is also a tulip coin. I hope that it, as well as turdcoin, are satirical. But one never knows: I just found this.

Re: There is a reason for no one achieving this.

@John Sanders

All that it requires is to integrate a remote desktop type of functionality into the phone.

Seems like a good start.

You connect your phone with the usb cable to the pc

Why not bluetooth as well?

and use any app in your phone fullscreen with a mouse and a keyboard.

Any app? How about the one that makes phone calls? And lets me use mic/speaker on my computer?

You're halfway there, though.

@AC

It's like groundhog day with Microsoft and their developer strategies

Groundhog Day has been replaced by Groundhog Core 1.3.

Re: The GPS/localization issue is potentially pretty serious

Accurate navigation in heavily-built-up cities calls for a more-terrestrial solution, but who's going to pony up?

I'm old enough to remember the days before GPS. When aircraft relied upon Inertial Navigation Systems.

According to an earlier comment here, aircraft still do. They combine GPS and INS through Kalman filtering.

Amongst all the spiffy gizmos on your smartphone, it probably has a compass, gyros and linear accelerometers. Actually, the "gyros" might be simulated by combining compass, rotational accelerometers and the linear accelerometers (the linear accelerometers to figure out which way is down). Whatever, I figure out there's enough in a smart phone to implement at least a crude INS platform. Enough to continue to figure out where you are during a brief loss of GPS signal or those (frequent) times when the GPS accuracy is 10m or worse.

Actually, for all I know, mobile phones already do something like this but they're shit at it. It certainly ought to be not just possible, but damned-near mandatory, in an autonomous vehicle.

Make vs package manager

@ibmalone

There is no way you run an up to date desktop using ./configure and make, a server maybe, but even then I really doubt you build every library on it.

No, I wouldn't build applications individually on a server. Especially not on a server. Fifteen years ago, yes, because back then packages didn't handle common use cases. When RPM won't give you apache with everything you need, and not even in a form where you can add the modules, then you have no option but to build from source. But that was back then, this is now.

The big problem with building applications from source is that you then have to track all the bugs in every application and its dependencies. Because if you don't you end up with security holes that never get patched. That is a lot of effort. You have to maintain a dependency list so that if a bug is found in X you know that you have to rebuild Y and Z, and it's a very big list. Only it gets a lot more complicated than that. There are a lot of tools you use infrequently to the extent that you forget about them until you need them, but you have to ensure they're up to date too.

It's too much work to build everything from scratch and keep it up to date. It's the keeping up to date part that's hard, not the initial build. These days it takes a hell of a lot to justify (to me) installing something by building it from scratch rather than using a package manager, because that's just fashioning a rod for my own back.

Re: Oh yeah!!!!

Too weak. I went with '#PasswordDay'.

Re: Battlezone

Sitting in an office chair and swiveling is too much fucking effort?

Yes. First, I'd have had to get up and go to the swivel chair. Second, it's still too much fucking effort in a swivel chair. Third, it's no fucking good if you want to play something while you're on the train.

One day, if those who know you let you live that long, you'll find out what it's like to become old and decrepit.

Re: M$ should be paying us!

an upgrade causing a popular third party piece of software to make the system unstable is just unacceptable.

No, it's standard practise for Microsoft. Any popular third-party s/w magically breaks after an OS upgrade. To persuade you to use Microsoft's alternative (if they have one) or to force down the share price of that third party so Microsoft can buy it on the cheap and then offer that s/w themselves (an update after the takeover magically unbreaks the s/w).

This is what Microsoft does. They steal (if they can) or buy (if they must) any popular third-party s/w. They strategically upgrade the OS to make the competition fall over or run slowly.

And, in every instance of them doing this, the Microsoft offering is shite compared with the competition. Even if they stole the s/w in the first place, they tinker with it and bork it. See stacker for an example.

And before the fanboys complain, they ought to remember the Netscape wars. Netscape complained about unfair competition from Internet Exploder being bundled with the OS installation media. Microsoft responded by making IE an integral part of the OS in the next major release of the OS. Couldn't be removed. Except somebody did manage to remove it, and found the OS then ran 10% faster.

Fuckers.