Posts by 2Nick3

Re: A what USB stick?

He also says it to the PFY, who doesn't bat an eye at it:

“But they DO have a Class-10 USB stick with a key logger on it.”

“Ah!”

So there is something more there than meets the eye (or USB port)!

I wonder if they are answering "What time will the sun cross the horizon line?" rather than just "What time is sunrise/sunset for this location?" That's a significantly more challenging question to compute for fixed point, much less for a device that is mobile. And that's just with physical terrain - if they are also including weather and/or man-made structures it gets pretty crazy.

"So, in such cases, my only option is to request a password reset, login, and either close the account, or change the email address to something else."

Are they able to do that without confirming you are really the person who opened the account? Why not just run the account out of login attempts with a bad password, then the actual owner has to get a reset done without the right email address - if it's important they'll fix it, and they get to jump through all the hoops. That way you are only attempting to access the account, not actually accessing it - which is less likely to end up with you in trouble.

Re: Universities in US

Sometimes that Support contract is wonderful to have...

Laptop "stops working" and the student just goes to the IT department and gets a replacement. Standard model, standard platform build on it, so the only change is the serial number/asset tag. Which isn't normally tracked well enough (by the bored student who does the swaps and only verifies that there is an asset tag on the machine being turned in) to determine who turned in the machine with most of a can of Mountain Dew dumped in the keyboard...

Re: Shameful

"What makes SpaceX's tail-landing Falcon cutting edge?"

Doing it in an atmosphere with higher gravity probably increases the challenge factor a bit. And doing it without a human pilot, as I understand the Apollo landings were done by feel as much as anything else.

Re: Can't or wont?

I can see a case where they wouldn't want to expose capabilities with an example ("We were able to hack the camera on Little Bad Guy's cell phone, seeing he was running Android Marshmallow and connected on 3G on a Tuesday in October when it was raining, and see that Big Bad Guy was there with him.") but you would think they could at least say "We captured Big Bad Guy."

Re: I've never worked in AI in any form...

"That isn't a solution as the car shouldn't stop for any object, such as those I mentioned above, it should only stop for those that are a risk."

If you see something dart out into the street, as a driver your first instinct should be to avoid hitting it. If you then realize it's some leaves blowing in the wind you can then abort the avoidance and carry on. That's usually going to happen before your foot is all the way off of the gas pedal, and before you've committed to a swerve.

Defensive Driving starts with everything being a threat and then reclassifying down. With training you are able to do that quickly for most things, but something new should always trigger that same response.

Re: Somewhat curious...

"How much would that cost them? I cant imagine very much."

They have to keep the environment secure, which is a daily operation bigger than they expected. And getting that wrong could leave them liable.

Re: "simple but elegant"

"In the car park at work? Arrive, plug in, clock on, start the day's work, bleep from phone "your car's finished charging, please move it to a non-charging space within the next 30 minutes"."

My boss at my last job does exactly that - his Leaf lets him know when it is charged, he drops down to the parking lot to move it so the charger is available for someone else. He'll often tap someone on the shoulder so they know they can move their car to the charger (and the EV community seems to work that way pretty universally - they're pretty supportive of each other).

That's manually switching. Having a charger with multiple leads - one power source that switches between multiple vehicles - is a pretty easy thing to set up, and would eliminate needing to moving the charging lead between vehicles.

Re: Alcohol resistant glue

Since the ear buds are going to get all coated with ear wax nastiness the glue needs to be proof against what people are likely going to use to clean them - alcohol wipes.

If Apple used glue that the alcohol breaks down you'd be hearing cries of "How dumb can they be, using a glue that won't stand up to cleaning!" They picked longevity here rather than repair-ability. That may not be the choice everyone would make, but there is a logic to it.

Re: So let me see if I've got this right.

Exactly - it's doubtful the price increase was extended to the customer. We are looking at commodity drives here, so the price increase was probably pretty low - if the price was overly-inflated someone would have noticed ("Gee, I can get that same drive cheaper at Best Buy!"). So if the supplier can get an extra $0.50 a drive, on a million drives, they net $500k, but since the consumer unit sales price is still going to be rounded up to the next $9.99 the increase was absorbed at that point by HP. And HP isn't going to change the number of drives they are ordering because of this, so it's pretty lucrative for the suppliers.

"So I take it you don't think any of these things ever helped anyone:..."

Microwave ovens

And my personal favorite - Astronaut (Freeze-Dried) Ice Cream!

Re: I bought one at that time!

$10 should be a good chunk of a new battery for it.

They only have the one Tesla - the article indicates it is the first EV in the fleet. So there is no spare. If they have to have their one and only EV out on patrol (say for political reasons), noticing that it wasn't charged at the beginning of the shift simply means the shift will be shorter than expected.

It's a learning curve switching from IC power to EVs, especially for managing a fleet.

Re: Hold music

Or Jackson Browne's "The Next Voice You Hear Will Be Your Own", which I still encounter on occasion.

You mean Lyft, right? The former Uber employees know just how bad things are there for the drivers!

Re: As ye sow, so shall ye reap

"CA, where good software goes to die."

Good, bad, mediocre, and every type between. Did anything they touch improve or flourish?

Re: $270 per site per year

"Somehow I think AT&T and Verizon would see things differently..."

Bronx Telecom would have to have roaming relationships with Manhattan Telecom, Brooklyn Telecom, Queens Telecom and Staten Island Telecom, and that's just so you can move around New York City and have your Bronx Telecom phone work. Jersey City Telecom would probably not join the group, so your calls (and data) are going to cost a lot more across the river, if your phone will even have a signal.

It's one of the advantages the big guys have - you're almost always on their network, and if you're not they know who's network you would roam to, so it's easy to have those relationships in place. With thousands of independent providers it would be a nightmare trying to figure out what a call would cost outside of your provider's service area.

Re: IT Policy led to pranks

Changing the default WAVs that came with Windows to more "entertaining" ones was always a good trick. The fact that "DING.WAV" is now not just a 'Ding' sound gets past any locking down of settings.

Not that I know from personal experience - I think I read about it here on The Register Forums. Yeah, that's it!

Re: "Vanishingly Small"

People have been predicting the death of the Windows desktop for a very long time. There are far too many who find Windows works "perfectly fine" at this point to see a real change.

If ME, Vista and Win8 didn't chase people off, 10's not going to have much of an impact.

Re: "In a reminder of a golden age when we still had physical media,"

When your "unlimited" data plan slows to a crawl you realize that having your music locally on your device has some significant advantages.

Plus not having to tote your full-sized phone everywhere is a plus. Seeing people with the new iPhones at the gym is pretty silly looking sometimes.

Re: hyprocrites

I'll just point out that Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi both spent a lot of time in jail, knowing it was a consequence of their actions. They knew the law (right or wrong, it was the law they were under at the time), chose to violate it, and accepted the consequences. Before you put Julian Assange on that same pedestal you have to get past the fact that he is putting avoiding those consequences above trying to clear his name as an accused rapist.

Re: Bodily fluids.....

Urine and the next person to play the game don't get along, either.

Thankfully I lost the game of Rock/Paper/Scissors and didn't get the first turn...

Re: Still,

"You know things are bad if you have to use Facebook as a positive reference."

Sounds like a new corollary of Godwin's Law (common use, not original)!

"Yes, but have you seen the prices Amazon charge for retrieving from Glacier."

How long do you expect the update to take to install? If your pre-upgrade backup has migrated to Glacier by the time the update finishes you might need to update your hardware!

Why in the world does your toothbrush need to be online? It's a piece of plastic with bristles at one end. The electric ones that live on their chargers really don't need to send you a notification when they are recharged, do they? Or do you need a model that reports to your dentist how often you brush, for how long (on each tooth, right?), with how much pressure (on each tooth, again, because why not???).

Yeah, a brush that tells you that you are pressing too hard (or soft) with some kind of audible notice would be reasonable, or that tells you when you've been on an area long enough, but can anyone really justify why it has to be online to do this?

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Re: Spazturtle

"Good point, just like the famous case of McDowell's that opened up in Queens, New York back in the 80s."

Was that real, or just in "Coming to America"??

"I still see sometimes some "3com" strings coming from snmp requests to re-branded routers"

Got to think that microcode is a bit out of date...

Re: MOSFETs and clean rooms

Funny how "TEMP" sometimes translates as "Keep the most critical data you have right here - it will be safe forever!"

I once had to admit to an IBM VP that I had indeed reformatted the 3995 optical disc that the DBA had stored the copy of the DB2 config file on just prior to his managing to corrupt the production config file.

When the VP finally stopped for a breath I added, "The disc was both physically and logically labeled TEMP002A/B." He took 2 more breaths and the tirade was redirected to the DBA.

Re: On the other hand...

Had a friend in college who would buy a new printer, whatever was on the best sale, when his ran out of ink. He'd sell the old printer for about half what he paid for it (super-cheap printers don't last long on a college campus), and at least in his own head he was coming out ahead of buying ink.