Posts by Dazed and Confused

Re: I knew it!

> I stopped using Skype when Microsoft took it over

But when MS took over Skype all of a sudden a lot of very attractive girls wanted to be my friend.

Re: Negative towards who?

woman in blue as jealous....

Oh leave it out, anyone can see she's saying "Oi! I saw her first"

Re: In numbers rounder than my stomach

Cost of Apollo* - something around $250bn - $300bn, inflation adjusted. Benefit to humanity - some practical, huge psychological

I thought the normally bandied about figure of the US economy benefiting to the tune of $10 for every $1 spent on the Apollo program was generally considered to be somewhat conservative.

Re: Is it the micro, or the soft that causes you so much anguish?

I can cope with soft, I mean soft cheese is very good.

I can cope with micro, I grew up thinking about computers being "micros" and still tend to think of CPUs as being microprocessors.

No, it when the 2 words are combined that they represent a concept which I find too ghastly to contemplate.

Re: redefining what a watch can do for you

Anything else??"

I'm a much more demanding user than you. I want a watch to tell me not just the time but the date too!

I wound have been with you up until a couple of years ago. Sadly I can now only read the date on my watch when I'm wearing my glasses.

Re: wonder why people pirate ?

More like, most people wonder who the real pirates are.

Re: Helium leaks

> Helium leaks will cause cloud servers to lose altitude

Is that why servers keep going down?

Does Helium leak more through windows?

Re: other options

Paying Torvalds to rebook his family holiday for a different week, or move the holiday to Vancouver, would surely be other options - and less disruptive than booking 30 new sets of flights and accommodation.

They probably discussed this option and then someone realised that that it would involve explaining it to Mrs Torvalds and they decided that all heading over to Edinburgh was a better plan after all.

Re: Right to be forgotten

> Criminal records are public so that it is possible to check them without using a search engine.

Yes, but would the average member of the public know how to do this?

So if search engines such as Google must hide the information then major league investors won't be taken in by previously convicted fraudsters because they can afford to employ legal teams to search things like the court records, but Jo public can be ripped off easily.

Re: ..well in Cal about 90% of ADA lawsuits are straight scams

Our local supermarket's bays are so narrow it's physically impossible for larger vehicles to park legally (by which I mean of the former agricultural type now commonly owned and driven by the wives of wealthy businessmen).

There needs to be a law that if the vehicle doesn't fit in the bay then it can't be parked.

When I used to visit the US frequently it was common to find that there was parking for "compact" cars near the mall and larger spaces further away. If the chelsea tractors had to park 1/4 mile away then they'd probably be a lot less popular.

Re: EU Standard plug

> Also the most painful thing in the world to stand on.

Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I think it's a close run thing with a Lego brick.

Re: Too big for my pockets

A number of years back I was teaching a course in Seoul to a group of Samsung engineers. The guys made similar comments. The Note (?can't remember which version) had come out in winter time and lots of them had bought one and it was great in coat pocket. Then come spring time where the **** do you put it. The hand bag carrying engineers all still loved their ones.

Re: Actually back in the 1990s I was at a company...

I think I remember that issue, didn't HP provide a clip on tray to collect the dropped letters

Provided? No chance, they might have sold one, you might have needed to order option -wdlc. It probably wouldn't have been available as a standalone product.

Re: What about the manufacturers' rights to the data?

If I buy a secondhand car, how does the manufacturer know the owner of the car has changed

I think this is a key issue here. If the car is sold through the main dealer chain then they should know, sure. But if I sell a car privately do the manufactures have the right to know that I have sold it?

It's sometimes hard enough to get the DVLA to recognise the change of ownership.

I don't believe the DVLA pass on the information to the manufacturer so who is going to be responsible for informing them.

What happens if there is a third party monitoring device?

The second hand car we bought for our kid to learn on isn't connected as a standard feature but VW provide a module that plugs into the industry standard diagnostic port to collect data and then uses a app on the phone to upload things. So this shouldn't leak, but I can imagine a business providing many of the features of connected cars as an after market add on, if they included their own comms unit instead of relying on a phone and app, they'd face the same issue. Tracking devices already do this kind of thing.

This looks like being a much wider issue that just the car manufactures.

its scanning 127.0.0.x

Well there's a big difference between opening port 59xx to listen on 127.x.y.z and listening to VNC connections more generally. This also means they are failing to test whether you're protected by a firewall. On Linux boxes I'd often have VNC ports open, but that's got nothing to do with malware.

Re: Costs?

While part of me agrees with your sentiments the problem is that ICANN doesn't have any money of it's own. So if you award costs against ICANN then that money needs to come from somewhere and that somewhere will be you an me. The one groups of people who won't end up paying are the people who run ICANN which is presumably the people you want to suffer.

Re: I can see where this will lead

I swear at toasters when they trap my toast, swear at self-service checkouts, swear at

I frequently swear at my PC because it's so bloody infuriating, intransigent (which I expect, it's a bloody computer after all) and inconsistent (which I don't, see above). If it was a person I employed I'd have fired them years ago for all of the above reasons.

Re: There needs to be a concerted push to bring FTTP to all areas

In the news yesterday they were talking about insisting all new homes get charging points for electric cars. How about insisting that they get fibre too.

Re: Insurance Black Boxes

> saying they'd caught them doing over 100mph round a roundabout.

I've just got insurance for my son which requires a black box. The cost difference is over £1000.

On his first trip with it they logged him doing just over 40 in a 30 zone and included the location. It's a bloody great dual carriage way which has a 50 limit all the way down it.

Re: Now he can get a tattoo, "Shot by the Mom!"

LRRH kept her pistol in her knickers.

Everyone knows that.

"The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers."

Roald Dahl

Re: To which I reply "autopilot".

The safety driver's job is... well, the clue is in the title isn't it?

To which I reply "autopilot".

To my mind this is the problem with the Tesla autopilot. They say that the human driver is responsible for safety and is supposed to step in and take control when they notice the automatics not doing the right thing. Well this tragic case highlights a total failure to understand human nature. Here there was a "test driver" specifically tasked with monitoring a protype out on the road and yet they still can't keep their mind on what is happening. What chance is there have your average customer is going to be paying enough attention to make split second decisions and over-ride the vehicles automatics.

Re: Auto-crash-pilot

> I can't stand all these driver assistance aids, even automatic lights are pretty annoying. Cruise control is the only item that might be useful, and even that isn't always perfect. Rain sensitive wipers are never quite right. Reversing sensors are useful, but proximity sensors when driving along occasionally get things wrong and actively distract from being able to to study the road.

The roads over here are rarely quiet enough to contemplate cruise control but most cars that have cruise control can also be set to use it as a speed limiter and this I do find much more useful.

Your point about rain sensitive wipers I find interesting. The Mrs' previous car had them and they worked really well, after 150K miles we upgraded it for couple of generations newer model and the wipers are no where near as good as the previous ones. I assume that the earlier one was a first generation and the solution the engineers had found wasn't too cheap, so the bean counters sent them back to the drawing board and told them to find a cheaper way to implement the function according to the 80/20 rule.

We don't care if it's only 80% as effective so long as it only cost 20% of the working version.

Re: Tigra 07

Also most new doctors, by some margin are now female - yet we're not even talking about gender imbalance or how men will be treated for male-only problems by female doctors.

Also far more female teachers, particularly in younger years education establishments.

Weren't the figures for last year that 35% more females went to university than males, in the UK?

As to male teachers, for my kids there was not a single male teacher at their primary school the entire time they were there.

Re: I'm feeling left out

Hmmm well I can't find any from .men, but acoording to my mail log I've had 6 from .date.

So when I find enough time to be bored I'll have to work out how to get postfix to just block all these buggers.

Re: One would expect a consumer magazine...

> ... to know somewhat more about Microsoft, than to expect that they would now compensate their users.

It's W10 we are talking about here so the term "users" is perhaps not the best. If they were able to be "users" then they wouldn't be griping. It's the "not able to be a user" that needs compensation the most.

Re: 1^15=1

but it's so much easier to scale from 1^15 to 1^18.

Re: Not an "autopilot"

> It's about time they banned these driver "aids".

It's no good the manufacturer saying but we told you to look where you're going too, so don't blame us. The average car driver is not like an airline pilot plus co-pilot pair. If they don't have to concentrate they won't concentrate. Even if they are nominally looking where they are going their minds will wonder. So when a problem happens they aren't immediately ready to handle it.

Re: Déjà vu

I seem to recall MS Word did that once - going from 4.x to 6.0 just to beat WordPerfect which was at 5.1 at the time.

Given the signs of logical behaviour exhibited by MS Word it wouldn't have surprised me in the slightest if they'd gone from version 4 to version 6 followed by version 5.1.

Re: Paul

I feel for you Paul. There are 2 green cabinets on out housing estate and BT only chose to upgrade the further one to fibre so all my lines are limited to 30Mb down and ~5.5 up. No Virgin here either (stupid greedy cable company tried to extort money from thick as shit builders) so no other option for the last mile. I know a lot of people do a lot worse.

Re: Problems

someone stuck in a lift who almost certainly has a mobile phone on them

Back in the late 90s my wife was working for an IT supplier managing customers support needs. One of her accounts was one of the mobile phone companies. While visiting their site she was in the lift with a number of their IT managers when the lift broke down. The emergency phone didn't work. Done of the guys from the mobile phone company could get their phones to work, no signal. Luckily my wife's company had a deal with a rival mobile network and her phone worked fine much to all the techies amusement.

Re: fscking BINARY LOGS.

And config too

When it comes to logs and config file if you can't grep it then it doesn't belong on Linux/Unix