Posts by MachDiamond

Re: I was once rushed to a meeting...

"No, that was definitely an autocorrect, but I'll take it."

Turn that crap off.

I just noticed that when I intended to type "friend", I typed "fiend". Of course "fiend" is a real word so the spell checker didn't flag it. It's no longer in the computer's dictionary until the next time I update so it will be flagged the next time I do that. I've been making changes to the spell checker so real words that I'd almost never use will be highlighted and I can manually decide if that's what I wanted to type or if I'm having especially fat fingers/brain farts that day.

Re: I was once rushed to a meeting...

"edit - then invoice them, individually, for "emergency remediation work" at an appropriate rate (I'd suggest £1,000 per item)"

If you are an outside provider. Otherwise, there's going to be a whole load of overtime to get everything processed quickly in addition to needing to bring in some extra people (friends, SO's, etc) on danger money. If you have to, you can take the OT "in kind" so you can take paid days off when you know there's some days you really don't want to be in the office/on the same continent. Of course, your friends and significant others will be getting paid so they can stand most of the rounds wherever you decide to hole up.

Re: Oh yeah !

"Fit them with those detonator caps, by all means !"

I'm not happy that links for those wasn't provided in the article. I can see how they would be very useful and worth the time to research the best ones to buy (through several dummy accounts) and some coupons for cleaning supplies, but my salary only supports a certain amount of waking time at work per day.

"The obvious reason is if you need to use cellular connections. If you need active phone numbers,"

That's the rub. Often you don't need to go through a cellular service since many phones will work via wifi especially for data. If necessary, the phone can have a SIM with a duff number since it won't be required to access a cellular network that would reject it. The unique IMEI and other numbers will be what matters. If the phone will work via wifi, it will work through a hardline connection so you wind up not broadcasting incriminating radio waves. Even reused IP addresses aren't a problem. If each rack of 20 phones has one IP number, each phone in the rack is doing something discrete from the others. Perhaps it's not a problem to have 2-3 phones with the same IP number since that's what might happen with an internet cafe/public access point. So 2 phones in one rack are posting fake Amazon feedback and another couple are building up eBay accounts. Each rack allocates a certain number of phones per task multiplied by as many racks as a firm wants to run so there's an array of IP addresses being reported.

Re: 1,000 smartphones all hard at work

"I think those halcyon days of just going to the hotel vending machine and getting a SIM along with a snack are well behind us (....and that was in the UK)."

Then it's down to the corner shop for same. It's handy to have a "burner" SIM when traveling to a different country. You get a local number to use while there and that's often less than the 30 days it might be good for. If you are bouncing across the Atlantic, you don't want calls on one side finding you on the other. The bills could become rather astounding.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"When I looked at changing jobs and the application process seemed unconnected with getting the right person"

The problem is companies think that hiring has to go through HR rather than the old way of the department head handling it. The problem is that HR people live in a bubble that excludes knowing what those jobs require, what the company does and, apparently, don't know much about their own jobs to boot. I have a folder of job postings with such glaring errors that I'd never want to work with those firms. If they care so little about that sort of thing, I imagine that working there would be like a room full of chimps hurling feces all over. The bigger the company, the worse the problem. The last large company I worked for never understood that I wasn't "requesting" a day off, I was letting them know I wasn't going to be in that day. The HR people had the opinion they were in charge of my life and where I had to be each day.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"No it isn't because that would just be someone else deciding how I should format my docs and I don't need to be bugged every five seconds cos I don't do things the way that a programmer who never uses the product beyond the odd five-page write-up decides. "

I think that some of the developers don't realize that every industry and even sub-industries have a traditional way of formatting documentation. It's no use fighting those systems as you don't endear yourself to everybody else so it's wiser to just shut up and go with the flow. Just look at what a mess legal documents are. It's archaic and don't get me started on patent drawings. After all of that, look at what the city/county might want in formatting on a solar installation you propose to put on your house. It's like they tried to dumb down technical documentation and came up with something that makes no sense to anybody, but it must be done that way or they'll send it all back and charge you to resubmit it again. The software just needs to let you decide how to format something and provide tools to make that easy and the ability to save the formatting as a template.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"I thought so too, However, the website has a placeholder for a possible WIN binary download link http://www.gnumeric.org/download.html with the clear and consize "We do not currently release or distribute Windows binaries." The "currently" bit, however, leaves a tiny spark of hope. At the same time, it seems to build a lot on GNOME, which, as far as I know, is not a part of the WIN ecosystem :)"

When I started in aerospace it was a small company and I elected to BYO on my computer. I set up a Mac Pro and the others looked at me sideways until they saw me running Windows..... and Linux........and MacOS, easily switching between them at will with copy/paste intact across VM's. It allowed me to choose the best applications for what I was doing while also using things such as Solidworks which was our CAD application. SVN was a bit of a Kludge having to be 3 separate commits, but it got to be habit so no itch.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"Calc does not work well for the analysis and visualisation of bulk data such as traction battery pack charge and discharge curves."

I use Igor. Excel couldn't deal with really large data sets so I found this some years ago and it works well for that. We used it to analyze all of the telemetry data we'd get from rocket flights.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

+1 more for LibreOffice

It's been working great for me. I imagine that if I had very special formatting needs such as what blood sucking lawyers use, M$ might be the only (damnit) option. Not that LibreOffice couldn't do it, but access to templates/forms might be an issue if they use M$ only functions. The crap that 99.9999% of people never need, so isn't a big deal if alternatives leave them out.

Re: Biden may be in trouble.

"A friend's daughter has worked at it and now gets most of her orders on it. It would bankrupt her business if it was shut down."

I'm with Mark on this. It's not just a problem is TikTok were shut down/banned, but if they change their Terms of Service and her activities became against the rules. I've never had an issue by not having an InstaPintaTwitFace account. The hours and hours of times spent I already know doesn't equal the business I'd bring in. I know some people that have done well using Social Media to drive people to their websites, but know many more that have wasted their time when they could have been doing something else to make money. If you just want to be entertained or need lots of likes and thumbs-up for your self worth, fine, but don't think that they are good places to house a real business.

Amazon has crushed marketplace sellers that based their business on using the platform. The sellers had a nice little operation going when they suddenly received a notice that their account was closed. That left them with a garage full of merchandise, the loss of their music, videos and other digital assets that go away when an account is closed. I'm not sure how often that happens, but it does and should be a cautionary tale for people. To pick on Amazon some more, if they see somebody getting too successful with a product, they might have the same thing made in China themselves in quantity at a much lower cost (and quality) and even shunt searches to the Amazon item leaving the original seller in the lurch. Amazon is using the marketplace sellers to spot new products and trends without having to do much more than some automated data mining.

Re: US politics is basically

"Unfortunately, the average IQ of the voting population seems to be on par with a shoelace, so we keep getting clowns elected."

And the "machine" keeps putting forward clones so there's little hope for change.

Re: US politics is basically

"Neither Trump nor Bien are fit for anything more than a cage in a 3rd rate circus."

The bigger worry is the uncounted power brokers behind the scenes that are making those two the front runners! The alternate parties (Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom) are not even in left field, they aren't even in the car park outside the stadium. Out of all of the politicians that represent me at various levels, I've only met two and being able to chat with them has made a big difference in my opinion of them. I'm not sure if the in-person charm is covering up any warts or if the sort of politicians that make it a priority to mingle in their districts are the best ones. Too often I go to the polls to vote against things/people.

Re: On every level: no

"Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space. Progress has been so slow that he is likely to die of old age before we find out if this is genuine intent or just public relations."

Jeff is big on that as Gerard K. O'neil was one of his professors. Whether Jeff thinks it's possible within his lifetime is far different than Elon promising there will be a manned colony on Mars in a couple of years. Of course, Elon promised that years ago and the first of the 100 person Starships should have been on its way by this year, at least.

"Too bad they couldn't strap a couple small thrusters on the puppy and aim it at the sun."

Too bad they can't strap it to a prototype lunar lander and try to set it down on the moon. The more refined materials there are on the moon, the easier it will be to do things. It would be interesting to design something like an ore processor/smelter for the moon and send parts for it up as parts of other things destined for the lunar surface. If lunar landers that won't be used again were made like something from a Mechano/Erector set, there would be more and more uniform bits and pieces that could be turned into something else once there. ISRU is great, but the first steps towards that are the most difficult.

Re: On every level: no

"Trying to think of a task that is easier to do in space than on Earth that would not also be far better performed by a robot rather than a ham-fisted monkey."

There's some interesting science to be done in micro-G, but millions? I don't see it. It would be far cheaper to make things in the moon that to support a million people in space. We already know that us meatsacks do very poorly spending extended periods of time in space. What isn't well known is how much better we do in fractional G. The moon could be healthier for humans and even with that, a million is not going to be sustainable.

Re: On every level: no

"he will stay in the space business until Kuiper crushes Starlink."

Neither will be around that long. Gwynne has already admitted that the life expectancy of the Starlink satellites is 5 years. Elon has said the fully deployed constellation will be 42,000. Going from memory, after build out, it will take around 70 replacement sats being launched every 3 days, forever, to keep the slots full. For two services to be doing that is insane. Even having one is criminal.

Re: The Master of understatement

" but those are 1 in a million chances"

Wait, a 1 in a million chance is almost a dead certainty. Right, Nobby?

"Patents are not trade secrets. They are mutually exclusive."

There have been patents around the world for things that get used in the military that are both. Normally, you are correct.

"A patent would protect you in this case, but is time limited."

Maybe a patent would help, but since it's public information, it shows one way to skin that cat which might show somebody else that it can be done and there are other ways to do it. Defending and challenging patents is massively expensive. You need to have an idea that's worth hundreds of millions or you are better off getting that product to market as quickly as possible or finding a buyer that can make use of it and pay you money. A million dollar idea is useless to patent and just money down the drain.

There's a subtlety to patents that people often don't appreciate. It's often not the overall idea that gets a patent, but a very narrow and specific part of it that does. I've been through all of that before and learned how to dissect patent claims to get at what is really covered. I made a product that somebody else had received a patent for but the prior art for it was in an old text book so the patent should have never been issued and I never got any nasty lawyer letters. I'm guessing the other company realized that the patent was tens of thousands of money sunk into a deep well.

"Is Trade Secret (I noted the repeated capitalisation in the article) something special and protected in the US? Unless it is, it's not really "Intellectual Property" as such since the only protection is others not knowing about it. I'm not even sure spilling the beans is a crime."

If the person violated an employment contract or received the information knowingly from somebody who did, it's at least a civil crime. I couldn't say if it would be a criminal act.

What is criminal is that this "speedy production" information isn't something that Tesla has been able to make work. The 46800 cells for the truck are a hot mess with loads of scrap. Sure, make them fast, but if they're only suited to be used to practice recycling processes, it's not that useful.

There could be laws against divulging trade secrets to intentionally damage a company. That can get into the realm of people losing jobs and investments losing value. Although, with Tesla, loss of company value due to trade secrets being divulged would be very hard to distinguish from Elon's antics damaging the company's reputation.

Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

"OK, maybe you think Apple makes enough off iPhone sales and doesn't deserve a cent post sale."

There's still the cost of running the app store, building APIs for iStuff, banking costs to handle loads of small payments, etc. 30% doesn't sound like a big slice of pie, but it can depend an awful lot on the size of the transaction. For a in-app buy of a couple of bucks, the payment processing cost could be as high 25% so Apple demanding 30% doesn't net them all that much. 25% could be on the high side, but it's going to vary from country to country for the banking as well as Apple being required to hold and process taxes of various sorts related to the purchases.

I've felt that Epic was going about this in the wrong way. Instead of breaking terms of the contract with Apple, they should have bargained as the renewal date approached to reduce Apple's take with higher price brackets. While it could be 30% for small in-app purchases, it could be less for totals over ~$15-$20 where the hard costs become a smaller part of the transaction. The out for Epic is to pull their titles from Apple iOS and put more emphasis on Android and desktop. If that becomes common with other publishers, Apple will need to sit down and bargain in good faith so they aren't just left with lots of tiny devs that don't earn them very much.

Re: Thats ok then

"When did you last sign something?"

I wind up having to sign things often enough. I have a couple of businesses so there's always paperwork that requires a signature. I'm a real weirdo too. I don't digitally sign anything. When there is a need for me to sign something, I do it with a blue pen. "Wet" signature on paper. If I have to print something out and send it in, I do that. I could honestly stand up in front of a judge and claim never to have used a digital signature which might be a good thing in future and save boat loads of money, a lost house, etc.

Re: Oliver Dowden has the solution - NOT

"2. So, why do we need to put in the info into a database?"

So it can be shared. It can take years for a police officer to learn all of that info. Somebody new will get up to speed faster if they can look those sorts of things up and judges could use that information to make correct decisions about bail or releasing somebody on a personal recognizance bond. I've seen a few shows where some petty criminal who gets arrested at least once a month is on the catch/release program due to prosecutors never bothering to prosecute them. A judge might see a long arrest record with only a couple of minor convictions and believe a defense attorney that the person just gets picked on when in reality, the person is a career criminal and should be locked up. A load of unsolved cases might not happen in future while that person is banged up since it would be unlikely that they were being arrested for every crime they commit.

"Just look at how pale and male the average board of directors is for Fortune 500 companies."

Those boards are the end of a very long chain. Some of that chain has, indeed, been comprised of exclusions. It shouldn't be expected that even over the course of a decade things at the top will change that radically. There are changes and it's not impossible to find women and people with a complexion darker than than of a pale blue Scottish person sitting on corporate boards of publicly traded companies. For most, that's the culmination of a decades long career. There's also still cultural roadblocks that some communities impose on themselves when it comes to education and career decisions where in others, an emphasis is put on aiming towards upper level management positions and high paying professions.

Re: Even worse

"It suggests a job being rushed,"

As slow as the job is going? A real tunneling company would have installed and finished a much larger tunnel ages ago.

Las Vegas is trying to one-up Dubai on silly projects. LV has a monorail for Pete's sake. They could have taken money to extend that so it made a whole loop through the area rather than the somewhat incomplete state that it's in. So now they pay PT Mush to make sewer pipe size tunnels to drive Tesla vehicles in? Bonkers. The convention center loop, which was silly to start with, could have done better with slidewalks. They try to pump it up as being useful, but I've never had a great need to get from one side of LVCC to the other in one go. I start at one end and pace the aisles at the shows to wind up back at my starting point when I've done the whole route. If I have an appointment, I think it would be faster to walk and there's always the chance of meeting somebody I know with an after hours party ticket to hand me. Next week I'll be there for a photography conference, but this is their first year back and it's really small so it will only be in one hall. I may go to another show in April (I think) that should use up the whole facility, but that remains to be seen if it will be that large. Those shows plus going to watch the dragon swallow the sun in Texas will mean 3 big trips in the first half of this year. Good grief.

Re: What is it with these hard-right muppets?

"They're as different from each other as the rest of us."

They do share a lack of morals.

Re: Odd, isn't it?

"I blame it for the VR trend as well; science fiction is replete with VR and AR technology, but most authors actually considered what it would do, or at least made the technology conceivably useful by writing around the technical challenges."

Most SF is that way. At least the good stuff is. Everything works except for one or two things that seem a bit out there. It's a bit of handwavium and some of that has come to fruition over the years. I love "A Logic Named Joe" that was written ages ago but describes the internet and modern computers very well with a dash of AI. It makes me wonder if the nerds that were reading these stories used the author's ideas after becoming an engineer as a basis for much of the tech we have now. Are we going to have a Quantum HOLMES IV in the moon that becomes self-aware? The rest of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is engineering, not science or fantasy. The Handwavium element is Mike.

Re: Odd, isn't it?

"Every single one of "his" ideas is something I read about old mid-20th-century adventure comic annuals I bought in 2nd-hand fayres in the 80s."

The Cybertruck was a concept drawing by Curtis Brubaker that was printed in a 1978 Penthouse magazine. A wee bit different than a comic, but entertaining none the less.

Re: Odd, isn't it?

"There were pictures a while ago of lots of robots stacked outside a factory after this failure."

When every other car maker on the planet would also like to get rid of the pesky meatsacks and combined have thousands of years of experience making cars, it was a bit cheeky of Elon to come along and claim he was going to build an automated car plant. That it didn't turn out very well and came within a whisker of killing off the company should have been a big slice of humble pie. But, Nope, he never learns. After struggling to get the Model X to the market, Elon said he insisted on too many features that bogged down the design process and he learned his lesson. Every subsequent vehicle has been through the same bloat. For the believers that think he will finally have exercised all of those demons now and can finally rein in his fantasies to make a low priced EV, good luck with that. The unpolished Cybertruck just barely wasn't held back to make it amphibious as well as ugly.

Re: Loretta wants a word...

"There are different human definitions for the start of space. 50 miles and 100km are both popular."

The internationally recognized beginning of space is 100km. Virgin Galactic uses 50 miles since they have a problem going higher with Space Ship 2 and advertising rides "almost" to space isn't as enticing.

Re: We only just got Windows 10 settled....

"Are you seriously saying you can't or won't manage more than one update per decade?"

You say "update" as if it implies an improvement.

Re: We only just got Windows 10 settled....

"MS are seriously out of touch with how Windows is used in small/medium enterprise...."

The article says how there's new add-ons for shopping. As if everybody is doing nothing with their computer but use it as a giant catalog to buy things from 4-6 mega retailers. Some do, but work has to get done somewhere along the line too. M$ should consider publishing an OS devoid of "helpful" bots, shopping extensions and ever changing UI's. My Windows box (not connected to the internet) is running W7 and does just fine for the very few applications I use it for. I use a MacBookPro for comms, a MacPro cheesegrater for media and linux for everything else (on the cheesegrater). I have another MacPro that's my media box with a Mac Mini for the accounting program. It's a bunch of computers, but I have a load of redundancy which means if any of them go down, I can fix it in short order even if I need a new drive and total reinstall of everything. Several of the computers have come for free and none cost me more than a couple of hundred. It's the plug strips that cost but thanks to estate sales, I have a large box full of them now.

Re: Furtive Frog and Wanking Wallaby

"Well, I tried to get ChatGPT to extend the story, but even the slightest hint of innuendo or fun gets stripped out, and the results are amazingly dull and derivative."

Try a different one and you may wind up with a tale that's offensively racist (in any direction you like) and says naughty things about your mother.