* Posts by KayKay

91 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2008

Page:

Dodgy payday loan ads make up 83% of cases probed by UK's FCA

KayKay
Unhappy

They can do officially very low interest. But if you can't repay at the end of the week, they roll it over into a new loan -- which has its own setup fees. Naturally nobody can afford to pay back a full week's pay as they need money for food. Whatever they can afford will generally be less than the roll-over fees.

Help Australia's PM and attorney-general to define metadata

KayKay
Black Helicopters

NSA is already collecting for them.

They just need to make :"our own" s they can use information from it without giving away that it was NSA. But they don't know what NSA is collecting, that's why they can't describe it.

Put down that Oracle database patch: It could cost $23,000 per CPU

KayKay
FAIL

mmap has existed in unix since??? 1970's? so this is new?

Chrome browser has been DRAINING PC batteries for YEARS

KayKay

Re: Poor Bug Fixing

Hotel California

KayKay
Meh

Re: I, personally, am not surprised

about:config

right click, >> new >>> Boolean

config.trim_on_minimize

true

open all windows and minimize them, and watch the RAM usage plummet. If you don't leave open web mail tabs, and kill (through Task Manager) the plugin container when not watching videos, you can go up to 100 tabs in bursts, and not have to reload the browser for 9 or 10 days at a time. Running AdBlock also helps.

EDIT: Oh and don't used Firefox. If you have Windows you have the choice of Pale Moon and Waterfox, FF variants reset to having normal behavoiur.

EDIT: SVG support in those, too.

Google is your friend. Well not when they're designing Chrome, but their search engine is still okay.

Bad back? Show some spine and stop popping paracetamol

KayKay
Unhappy

Re: Personal tale ... (cannabis)

Big Pharma is working on synthetic cannabis, not containing THC. The legalised medical marijuana places have worked out, by trial and error, what % works well, and actually offer different strains of the plant for different medical problems. But I'm betting that if it becomes fully legal, it will be the synthetic pill-form prescription-only profitable type, NOT letting everyone grow their own. Fools. This is being debated in Australia right now, and they keep talking of this "medical marijuana", NOT about "marijuana for medical purposes".

KayKay

Chairs

Totally agree. Had my office chair dropped and broken in a move, and worked from home for 8 days sitting on a dining chair (move coincided with a deadline). Nearly killed me. Price was a big factor at the time, but I found a specialist shop with a good range of affordable refurbished chairs.

KayKay
Happy

Re: Nothing works faster ...

Anything with spasms -- magnesium. Available in tablet form in various chemical forms, but by far the best is Epsom Salts :(magnesium sulphate) which you "take" by soaking it up through your skin, in a lovely relaxing bath with a cupful of it tossed in. If you are unfortunate enough to only have a shower, soaking the feet in a bucket, or even wearing Epsom salts soaked long socks (until they dry out) will do the trick (every second day is enough). Magnesium is not only a superb muscle relaxant, but an important mineral in building bone, useful for anyone with fracture or crumbling problems in the spine.

Paracetamol is good for toothache and headaches, if taken together with aspirin (they seem to double each other's effectiveness). Aspirin alone will prevent blistering of burns, if taken immediately.

Motorist 'thought car had caught fire' as Adele track came on stereo

KayKay
Facepalm

Re: Imbecile design

yep, by the designers.........

Normally you'd go nose-down to pick up airspeed, therefore undoing the stall.

However the First Officer for some reason went nose UP (which stalls the plane even more) BUT the stall warning always stopped when he did so. So he thought that was problem solved. Being night, over water, no visual clues to where they really were or that they were rapidly descending.

Reason for more-stall turning off the stall warning? sharply nose up, the pitot tubes were not getting enough airflow to KNOW the airspeed was too low, and the software was written to assume it was adequate unless told otherwise.

AF447 was an Airbus. They've been know to try and prevent pilots from landing, on ground proximity grounds.

Another neat trick on early heads-up displays was, air speed and altitude shared a display window -- under pressure a pilot might assume it was showing the one, when he needed to know the other, but had not pushed the change-display button hard enough. Old analog days they'd be separate dials and he'd know from the position on the dash which was which. I think they've changed this one.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 claimed lives of HIV/AIDS cure scientists

KayKay
Flame

8 days later

Pretty much everything said by ANY official (ie government of anywhere) source has been blatant propaganda and/or provocation of the other side(s).

The likeliest source of the missile was the separatists: they had one since June 28 (liberated from Kiev forces) and had been shooting down approaching aircraft in the area for a month. They themselves have no aircraft so Kiev would not be using missiles, so can't have made a mistake -- trigger happy half trained separatists fearing being attacked could have. cg USS Vincennes.

They arranged finding and collecting the bodies (while the world accused them of doing it to destroy evidence while at the same time criticising leaving the bodies to rot). They did not let in anyone they didn't trust -- which around there, in the time frame, would have been Kiev people who could not be trusted (they are a war with them, remember?) They quietly negotiated to hand over bodies to the Netherlands and black boxes to Malaysia.

As Government forces have stepped up- bombardment of separatist areas, there is now open war within 30 or 40 miles of the crash site, and the separatists are too busy fighting to keep guarding the site -- but most foreign investigators are afraid to go. Kiev cannot guarantee their safety as they have no control of the area, while the separatists who do have control feel they've done their bit (even if it WAS their error that started it) and can't be sure forces won't be brought in to surround them, under guise of investigators and their security teams.

The few investigators on the ground are finding more bodies, and these will somehow be removed. Passengers' property held for safe keeping will be somehow handed over if they can find out who to (locals approached journalists with passports in the first days).

Finding missile parts will prove nothing, as everyone in that area - Kiev, separatists and Moscow - all have identical ones. They are unlikely to find the very bit with the serial number.

This is the most publicly documented air crash in history. Just from what fell where, it is possible to piece together that

* the missile hit some miles west of Petropavilvika village

* the front roof section and most business class passengers detached and fell in that village

* the rest kept going to Grabova village, the rear section landing in trees after spilling more passengers

* the main centre section turned into a fireball on impact another mile away.

Locals went out and cleaned up as they could. Today they're being criticised for harvesting (their livelihood) in fields that "may" contain a bit of useless debris.

The one perpetual machine in the world is the propaganda machine.

Evidence of ancient WORLD SMASHER planet Theia - FOUND ON MOON

KayKay
Alien

Re: I'm tired of hearing bits and pieces about our Solar System genesis.

Sorry, black websites with white text are not very convincing. If you believe your theory to be worth something, please publish it in a format people can actually read.

Oz refugee data leak a SNAFU, says KPMG report

KayKay
Facepalm

incorect.....

The server has to know who/what to serve to.

So if you ask or something from your own PC, it has to know YOUR IP address to return the requested data to. So the logs will contain your IP address. So they can count how many separate IPs asked.

What the downloaders later did with the data is not known to the server or its masters, true. But they do know how many downloaders there were.

Firefox, is that you? Version 29 looks rather like a certain shiny rival

KayKay
Mushroom

Menus for beginners?

Anyone remember 123? Word for DOS? blank screen and no idea what to do next UNLESS YOU KNEW. Word came with keyboard strips to explain what each Function key could do (plain, or with shift, ctrl or alt added).

Then menus were invented -- a way to tell users what actions were available and how to get at them. Also stopped them hanging or crashing the program by giving the wrong keyboard command at the wring time.

Now the fashion is to hide this information, make people remember keyboard shortcuts again (but it is still too easy to hit the wrong keys by mistake). Grey down any text to invisible. Replace text with icons which are meaningless unless you already know the feature they represent, 0or make these only show up if (accidentally) moused over.

And then slag off "amateurs" who don't use all the "rich features". How would they know these exist, if you've hidden every way for them to discover them?

This new(ish) google-inspired flat mono interface is a step back to the DOS days.

===============

Palemoon is what FF used to be while it was still good. Waterfox is another, for 64 bit machines. Iceweasel also. They all run all FF add-ons.

==============

For safe computing, the first two things to do are

* turn off all automatic updates and searches for updates (even if you need hack the registry to achieve this).

* remove caps lock key from any new keyboard

Australians are suckers when it comes to buying tech drugs

KayKay
Unhappy

supply and demand

dictates that people will pay more if there is a shortage - which is partly caused by Australia being an island. Customs and police keep confiscating huge percentages of drug imports, creating a severe shortage on the street, of the drugs that can't be made/grown locally.

Lower retail prices would not necessarily mean more people would buy. It might reduce the crimes committed to obtain the funds for the expensive ones.

On Levis etc -- you can't use the exchange rate for comparison. The Oz and Us dollars are close to parity, but the costs of living are not -- our minimum wage is $16+ against only $7.25 in the US. US supermarkets sell chicken breasts under $2 a lb, about $4 a kg which here is around $9 on special. Rents (for shops s well as housing) are commensurately higher, too, so business costs are higher.

None of this applies, of course, to downloaded software, and the double prices there are just an "all the market can bear" issue, the market being pre-conditioned to high prices. .

Google stabs Wikipedia in the front

KayKay

Re: Agenda...

Bing doesn't always honour robots.txt. Google always does. I have even seen search results that give the headline or url of a story/website and them states that because of robots.txt settings no content is available from it.

Faster, more private, easier to read: My 2014 browser wishlist

KayKay
Meh

Re: Memory bloat

Right now I have Pale Moon (FF variant) with 140 tabs open, running at 920 MB which averages to around 60 MB a tab. More than 100 of those tabs are work related from a site with no ads, just simple pages of data, all in text. Half of them have no more than 15 lines of text on them and 4 or 5 links.

You don't need to totally kill Firefox to get the memory back. Just minimise each window (you need to open and re-minimise any that already are) and it will dump easily half the memory. You can also type in about:memory and click a button to free up memory it's not really using. At the point I'm at it will only give back about 100MB but if you do it sooner, ie around the 1/2 GB mark, it will give back more. A lot of the "weight" is from tab data it is holding to let you go back in tab history, this is what you get rid of when you restart it.

KayKay
Unhappy

Re: Preferred caching

What is the next page???

How can it know which of the many links on this page you will want to click next?

Time travellers outsmart the NSA

KayKay
Black Helicopters

Re: Yes

You certainly DO need more computing power. I had no trouble finding that.

http://tinyurl.com/l5dejpj

Drug dealer demands jail to escape 'unbearable' missus after NYE row

KayKay
Facepalm

Re: Deserves it

Yep, because a lot of problems are ultimately caused by poverty. They have to steal stuff to get a crust, then they drink to forget their woes, then the arguments turn into loud fights. The drug dealer has good steady income, and has to stay more or less sober24/7 to b able to do business without making mistakes or getting robbed. Having a cop car outside because he lost his temper won't inspire confidence in his clients, either.

Boffins claim battery BREAKTHROUGH – with rhubarb-like molecule

KayKay
Happy

Re: UNENDING GRANT RESEARCH BAIT-AND-SWITCH

No need for AC to be transmissible. There are very long runs of DC lines in Sweden, Germany, Canada, Russia, Brazil, China etc, the longest (in China) over 2000 km long. Admittedly these are bit higher voltage than 1.5 volts.

For home use, I don't see why people go to the trouble of converting to AC, when they're not producing their whole needs anyway. Good LED lighting runs on low voltage DC anyway; you can have DC power points for charging up the electronics. There are DC fridges and TVs. And you don't lose any in converting it to AC to sell it, then buying AC to convert back to DC to charge your phone. Make DC and use it as such.

Brit inventors' GRAVITY POWERED LIGHT ships out after just 1 year

KayKay

Re: Nice idea

Wood. Twigs. Dried grass. Dried animal dung.

NSW privacy exemption shares personal data with private sector

KayKay
Happy

Re: Canada was first

We already have similar in OZ for drugs. When you take a prescription to a chemist the computer tells him if h\you've filled a similar one elsewhere recently. This stops people doctor-shopping to get multiple scripts (usually for something they don't need and they can sell for $30 a tablet on the street). No invasion of privacy in your medical people knowing what you take. You just don't want all the neighbours being told you're on something for "being mental" or having an STD.

Why a plain packaging U-turn from UK.gov could cost £3bn a year

KayKay
Flame

They don't get it

First of all, with smoking being banned in so many indoor places, smokers now congregate outside. And in Oz you can do that all year around. So kids get exposed to SEEING a lot more people smoking and enjoying it. In fact it looks like it's done by a LOT of people, not just say Dad and 2 visitors at home. This makes it a more socially acceptable activity.

A few years before the plain packaging, they did something really stupid. They removed the (up to then compulsory) labeling about the nicotine content. The explanation was , young people would think it was ok to smoke as long as they smoked a weak one.

The reality was, a lot of SMOKERS of strong cigarettes, say 16mg ones, were cutting down to weaker ones, 12s and maybe later 8s. Not giving up, but at least cutting down. Many gradually cut down by 2 levels. This reduces the level of addiction and makes it easier to gradually stop altogether. Then they took the numbers off. Now a kid starts up, he might start on 16s for all he knows, and get hooked in a week. If he names a brand and the shopkeeper asks which one? blue? green? grey? gold? the kid says "gold sounds best", Yeah guess what? that is the strongest.. Yes they still have COLOURS written on them, to HIDE the strength.

Every tobacconist shop sells fakes and imports under the counter; you just have to ask for them when there's nobody else in the shop to hear. They're about half the price of the "real" ones. Most have more real tobacco and less fillers and chemicals than the "real", too. Some now come in proper looking "plain" packaging as well, the selling point being the price.

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

KayKay

Re: What are the alternatives?

Templates are not HTML type style sheets. If you insert a paragraph and type a few lines, they will follow the default (normal.dot). If you want it to follow the template, overtype the last character of the previous (templated) line, put the full stop, put the line break. THEN it knows you mean your insertion to aslo follow the template.

Test this out for yourself just using bold or different coloured text. You have to continue on from inside the /end or </endstyle> marker or it won't continue the style (whatever that marker internally is).

KayKay
Facepalm

Re: And this is news, how?

You can save a document as a template. Any file (doc or docx of course, not xls etc) you open in that template conforms to it. I've done work with 3 or 4 others, each contributing a section. As long as they marked lines header, subheader etc instead of hand formatting these lines, it would take about 6 minutes to get one decent looking document out of 5 contributions. (After the first time THEY had to manually remove their manual formatting, they started doing it right).

Cannabis can CURE CANCER - cheaply and without getting you high

KayKay
Thumb Up

Re: Good news and bad news

it is NOT the tobacco that causes the lung problems. It is the SMOKE. Fine particle smoke that clogs up the alveoli, creates irritation and eventually rips the air sacs and stiffens the lungs with scar tissue. The SMOKE.

Very few tobacco smokers would smoke fewer than 20 a day, many would be in the 30-40 range. Nobody would ever stay awake long enough to smoke 20 reefers a day, every day, for 20 or 30 years (which is at least the time it takes for emphysema to develop).]

Incidentally a lot of smokers never get emphysema, and only 16% of smokers get lung cancer. So much for "cause".

Startup claims 1W wireless charging at 10 metres

KayKay
FAIL

savings?

Considering the likely price of one of these, wouldn't you be better off just buying a 1 metre extension cord for your charger?????

UK investor throws £14.8m at firm that makes UNFORGEABLE 2-cent labels

KayKay

Re: @cornz 1 - Hmm... little pins and a physical test, eh?

MICROFICHE.

Only device needed is light and a magnifier.

Verizon finally drags FCC into court fisticuffs to end one-speed internet for all

KayKay

Re: One can only hope Verizon doesn't win.

If they are running it on the same wires, it is. It's like bumping off the normal mail to make room for more premium deliveries.

If internet is now considered an essential infrastructure, the Government does have an interest in ensuring lower income or geographically isolated residents still get a fair level of service at an affordable price. They can and do make such stipulations when letting contracts for electricity, highways etc.

Turnbull floats e-vote, compulsory ID

KayKay

Re: Just another thought grenade from TurnBULL

In Vaucluse? Woollahra? Double Bay? doubt it.

KayKay
Big Brother

Re: "His intent was clear"

No, he just doesn't understand his own language. If I say I'll get someone else to vote for you, that means I will talk X into voting for you. Not that they will vote in my place. OR if they intend to vote informal anyway, they may as well get a friend to get their name ticked off for them. That does NOT mean the friend will

actually go in and vote. Even this is highly unlikely, as there are only 2 or 3 list-checkers in every polling place, so the one person can't claim to be several.

If you're not crossed off, the worse that happens is a $60 fine, which you get out of by writing back your car broke down on the way to vote. Besides Malcolm lives in one of the richest electorates of Australia, where his party wins about 80% of the votes, no matter what. So it doesn't matter about 3 or 4 who "vote fraudulently but they do it honestly ".

His party also for many years , ie every time they get in power, pushes for a National Identification Card. Surprised he brought it up so soon. The last reincarnations were going to be a $300000billion IT monstrosity involving facial recognitions databases, that viewers of your photo ID card would not be allowed to verify you against. Said card was also to include your health data, available to nobody as you hold the only password , oh, but, somehow in an emergency, if you were unconscious, the hospital would be able to access it by miracle. It wold also serve as your pensioner concession card but without anything written on it to say so, but not every provider would have to have a scanner.... and a few other well through out details.

Going to be an interesting few years.....

Yahoo! starts $1.99 'watch list' to recycle old usernames

KayKay
FAIL

Re: Security: That's someone else's job

It's Facebook or the bank etc that will get the blame if they DO send the password to the wrong person -- so it in their interest to check up. The RRVS is automated, I am sure they don't need to manually check the last email they got from the guy.

Still it does seem to have some leeway for error in it.

KayKay
Big Brother

They said they only removed the email address, NOT the contact form. So if you had anything else for the people there, that would still be there. So now you have 15 contacts called John or Mary with no email etc to remind you who they were.

KayKay
Pint

Re: @John

sorry that is taken. Actually by someone I know. Do you want me to negotiate for you?

Oh noes! New 'CRISIS DISASTER' at Fukushima! Oh wait, it's nothing. Again

KayKay

Re: How many people do you think were killed at Chernobyl?

Do you have any credible figures on birth defects? that's something wind and solar are not known to produce but radiation is.

KayKay

Re: Did any of you lot actually read the article?

I am sure the Government Guidelines were not set at 99% of the fatal dose.

KayKay

Re: "that's called Democracy"

Also only a small number of people were qualified to vote. Women, slaves, strangers (ie not local born citizens) etc were excluded; in some cases poorer real citizens were also not eligible. So it wasn't so much a "democracy" as a very populous ad-hoc parliament.

Heaven help us if "internet democracy" is established. First they'd have to have a way of ensuring everyone only votes once... and the IT is not up to that yet.

Microsoft warns of post-April zero day hack bonanza on Windows XP

KayKay

My XP crashed last week

I've run this laptop for a month short of 3 years, 24/7, rebooted about once every 6 weeks......... and it crashed last week for the first time ever.

May threatens ban on 'hate-inciting' radicals, even if they don't promote violence

KayKay

Re: MI5 incite terrorism

In the US there have been a number of "terrorism" convictions of people who had made or planted (fake) bombs in schemes entirely concocted by the FBI pretending to be some foreign terror organisation. Does that make the FBI a foreign terror organisation??

For someone prepared to make his own bomb, a bit of regular harassment by the authorities could be just enough to push him over the line from disgruntled to active. One on one harassment is, after all,. just a small scale version of the whole-country-invasion methods that are KNOWN to be a major force for radicalising hitherto peaceful, non-political, farmers minding their own business.

Let people jabber away on the internet and get it out of their system. Or start pursuing them and PROVING THEM RIGHT.

KayKay

Re: Unenforceable... unless you're after someone

In the 1950s in Australia, foreign language papers, published by "New Australians", had to carry an English version of all their content, to stop monolingual "real" Australians worrying about subversive content.

The publishers often had very poor English, and some of the resulting "translations" were hilarious. Plus many were not translations at all, just something vaguely on the same topic, or often the exact opposite in meaning. But nobody else could read the original languages so they never got caught out.

After a few years of this the Government finally woke up and dropped this stupid requirement.

Perhaps they could do something similar with these worrisome broadcasts. Put them through a speech to text converter then Google translate. And get laughed out of court.

Forget tax bills, here's how Google is really taking us all for a ride

KayKay

You're not buying tea...

You get electricity, not TV shows or tea. The SAME electricity will run your TV and kettle and light bulbs. So you only need and get the SAME TYPE of electricity, so it makes sense to pay for it by quantity.

For internet, there are various speeds available. The idea of "packages" is, you get the low-speed where that's okay, the high-speed (more expensive) where you need that. Slow is fine for email, a PITA for streaming video. They'd be saying "these sites are in the expensive bucket" and let you choose from 10 or 100 combinations of expensive ones. These might be quote extensive. Perhaps you could nominate the sites yourself, which you want in your expensive portion.

But for it work as an economy, really some of that higher fee should go to the site you're "paying" for. That way they get something too, and maybe produce better content, or slap in a few more servers so they can PRODUCE the speeds at which your ISP is now prepared to pass them on to you .

Yahoo! Poaches! New! CEO! From! Google!

KayKay
Happy

So what she's expecting

Being CEO is not like ditch-digging work.

She doesn't need the money and she doesn't need a better CV, she can afford financially to ever work again. She wants to work for the challenge of producing something excellent.

Thank heavens she doesn't have an MBA. Way too many people in Y! already have...... and look at everything in numbers with absolutely no idea what the numbers mean. Like big worry over reduced page-views, when caused by finally blocking illegal scrapers. Like thinking 20,000 new accounts a day is good business when 19,000 of them are spammers. Like thinking closing data centres will save money, when the same number of servers will cost the same whether in 2 centres or 4 (but cost a fortune to move).

A CEO many in the company are looking at with hope, not fear.

New! Yahoo! CEO! Mayer! awarded! mucho! mazuma!

KayKay
Happy

SHE IS

joined Google with 2 engineering degrees. REAL ONES.

Except, unlike some, she's not forgotten engineering is useless if it just impresses other engineers and pisses of the users, who are the ones the money comes from.

NASA found filming August's Mars landing in California desert

KayKay
FAIL

Re: Overly complicated

And they will be lowering it on cables at an ANGLE of course? so as not to have the platform crash ONTO the rover?

Cloud mega-uploads aren't easy

KayKay
Boffin

Re: Teething problems, or something worse?

This Cloud is free, is it?

Yeah didn't think so.

So for the same money or less, why not just keep TWO copies at home, one for everyday use and one for backup. You have the guys to run one, they can manage two, surely?

Solving traffic jams with maths

KayKay
Thumb Up

Re: Exactly

I use a car park with a weekly ticket.

Sometimes there's a bug in the system, so they leave the exist gate open for everyone to go out without presenting their ticket.

Then next time it won't let you in because it thinks you're still in there. You have to take a single-use ticket to be allowed in, then waste 15 mins at the office getting a credit for it.

KayKay

Re: This is new?

The sensors always controlled the light as well as collecting data. People used to reverse over them to make the lights change green.

Many in Australia don't use phone lines. They have a tiny solar panel for power and a wireless internet connection to the central control. Cameras monitor major roads & intersections. Human beings can change the lights for miles around, to push traffic around trouble spots.

Antitrust probe looms over Windows RT 'browser ban'

KayKay

Re: Antitrust

write once crash anywhere you mean

.....fixed it for you

Microsoft's FDS data-sorter crushes Hadoop

KayKay
WTF?

Bing Bong

So

this is why Bingbot notoriously steals all the bandwidth from any site it's crawling?

Crooks sell skint fanbois potatoes instead of iPhones

KayKay

how to withdraw money

may not work with all banks, but will with many...

your limit is 500

you take out 480

you ask for another 500

it checks, you are not over limit yet today, so it lets you have it

this works because the machine only asks "limit or not" and doesn't ask if the proposed second withdrawal would go over the limit. It then asks for 500, which (if you have it on the account) the bank hands over on the assumption the limit check has already been done and passed.

you can't ask for more at any one time than the total daily limit OR the transaction limit on the machine itself, which is high traffic areas may be lower (to leave some cash in for other people).

IT, where would we be without it?

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