Posts by Kevin Johnston 1736 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2007
No, no...never order what is prepped and ready, always get something fresh cooked. I know they have timers for how long stuff is up before it has to be binned but the law of Sod says you will get in 20 seconds before it hits the threshold and by the time you sit down it will be cold and even less pleasant than usual
It seems they have already considered the concentrated defence option in combination with limited manpower. Explained really well here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5upVdJuKp4
AI Assisted machine gun turrets deployed around critical targets and supported by the staff working at that target with some training from the military.
I suspect it is the most effective way to get the range/speed needed for this type of interceptor as while there are fast battery powered drones they have very limited range while turbojets are very easy and cheap to produce for single use systems. You can take a lot of shortcuts with materials to make them lighter/cheaper and they will still last long enough to do their job as 'good enough' really is good enough in these instances
I see this so many times from companies like Microsoft (actually, very few seem to be immune) where they have the testing models reversed. Once the code it written it is reasonable to assume it does what you intended and at that point you should be testing to ensure it doesn't do what you do not want it doing. This is the one time you want ill-informed users testing it out so they can try to break it or get to places they are not meant to be.
Whether or not the cross-signed certificates should have been considered, proper testing should have shown it created a scenario where security was now reliant on the weakest link and even created the way for a 3rd/4th party to create malicious code which Microsoft would accept as good.
I would suggest the people conducting this study have a talk with Mythbusters who did some sterling work to determine the effect of diet, albeit in a short timeframe, and to analyse the gases produced. This should enable a much more accurate sensor to be used.
Just do what Sweden are doing and buy the Sea Snake system from Reinmettal
30mm cannon with all the necessary sensors to detect drones and uses NATO standard airburst munitions to FOD them out of the air. Tested in Ukraine and worked so well that Sweden see it as the best option for their Littoral boats patrolling the inshore waters
So, no design period required and we could get onto the delivery list fairly quickly...sorted
While they undoubtedly do have those numbers from the built-in datascraping they are hardly likely to release numbers which show things are not well in WindowsLand. My money would be on a chunk of that 'improved market share' coming from PCs spoofing the OS in use on websites which are optimised for Windows or undercounting of non-MS OSes by putting older or less popular variants of ChromeOS/iOS/Linux/etc into a 'Not worth reporting' bucket
I understand your thinking but this will actually deter companies from working towards standards since that would mean any costs for work they do which is incorporated into a standard cannot be recovered. What there should be is a discovery phase where each contribution to a standard is assessed to assign a percentage of the whole 'price per implementation' value. You would extend this to have a license cost determined by the standard committee for companies who were not contributers to certify their products met the standard
If a government decide to make a standard a lawful requirement then they need to cover the costs of that standard otherwise it is simply theft by fiat
Without blocking the use of VPNs entirely, how on earth do they think this will work? If I set a VPN to pretend I am in Vanuatu or Laos then how will any measures designed to pick up UK users work?
We could even go a step further and suggest that the next challenge would be how to handle online VMs
Our blessed MPs repeatedly show their woeful ignorance of the real world and anything more modern than a twintub washing machine while the younger generations are fully integrated into technology and how to slide past Security Theatre blocks
When just about every online systems wants all 3 volumes of personal data, why did nobody think to do the obvious single step of asking for Driving License number when booking a slot? They have access to the backend to check that the number matches the name and at a stroke would stop touts booking up all the slots
I worked in Switzerland for a couple of years and fully agree with AC. I was in Zurich and finding a rental property was insane as there was so much competition that you needed someone to be scanning the ads and racing to the apartment to stand a chance. In addition the prices are indeed higher than the surrounding countries. I was stunned to realise after being there a few months that I considered CHF300-400 (£250-300 at that time) to be 'walking around' money since grabbing a meal with drinks for 3-4 people could easily hit that.
There is/was a great site which showed you basic prices for things like a MaccieD Happy Meal and similar such staples for various countries and Switzerland was always towards the top of the list. Just searched and indeed Switzerland is top currently for a Combo Meal at £14.20 compared to £8.00 in the UK and at the bottom of the list is Indonesia at £2.40
Back in the 'dim and distant' I was a Special Constable and as part of the training we had a lecture from a Firearms officer. He had brought in a wide range of homemade firearms including one based on a number of steel 'spacer' tubes packed into a tin can which was then back-filled with resin. Firing was all electric with a battery, rotary switch and filament igniters for the homemade black powder charge but the maker got a Darwin Award as his soldering was not good and when he fired it nothing happened until he looked into the barrel.
As above, how do you regulate ANY of that?
I suspect this is like a lot of storage offerings even down to options as prosaic as those self-store units. It starts with good intentions but ends up as the place which stuff goes to avoid the delete function since 'it may be needed one day'.
This type of online storage model is used based on price and simplicity and was probably selected on the basis they already had other MS stuff so why not. There is of course an XKCD https://xkcd.com/1360/ which shows exactly what the stuff stored looks like but the reason it got stored is the same reason it will never be checked. Having recently gone through the process of checking all my digital photos (those that I could find at least) I was horrified to see that in some cases I had 8 copies of the same photo in different locations/drives. De-duping brought the total storage down from almost 100GB to just 16GB. I am sure if I continued that to remove junk images it would be half that figure.
Out of sight storage just encourages junk collecting and everyone is guilty but in this day and age nobody seems to have time to clean it up
I blame the game reviewers who are all about 'immersive experience' and 'frame rate'. Real gamers know there had better be a plot here with at least a few sub-plots or else the game will get no-starred so fast your head will spin.
As you say there are so many ways to create games where graphics are a bonus rather than the main element while AI driven 'open world' exploring is little better than hold music
You forget that he original radio play was many many decades ago when the current Board would have been impressionable Uni students recovering from a jolly good evening paid for by their Trust fund. That would make it quite possible they heard it on the wireless in the San and retained the details without realising it. Once in their memory it then becomes 'self evident wisdom' just waiting for that moment when the world around them joins in the game of Snap.
I got the blame all the way up to an HR admonishment because I was working on something which had the same name as a process in the automated account creation which suddenly started failing.
I tried pointing out that what I was doing had no link and relied on people logging into a specific system before it even took any notice of them (so well after account creation had happened) but I was not flavour of the month/year with either my manager or his and they needed a scapegoat urgently.
I took it on myself to checked the process which was failing where the cause was easily identifiable and presented all this to everyone involved. Two weeks later they finally agreed that I was correct and my work had been totally innocent but strangely I got no apology from either manager and my HR black mark remained...
I went mad and bought a bean to cup unit over 5 years ago. It has been happily producing 10-12 cups a day since first installed and requires just two buttons to be pressed for the first cup of the day (one is the power button as it reverts to standby after 30 minutes)
I use good quality beans from Bob Marley's family (no - really, currently on the Buffalo Soldier blend) and they don't have a chance to get stale
Yes I have to offload the grounds when a 'hopper full' light comes on and load up water when the 'tank empty' light comes on but previous comments discounted that type of activity so I am too :)
Actually this is very much NOT complicated to setup and just needs you to be logical. You should know which devices you want connecting to the Internet so just block anything which is not them, this is the simplest level of security and only takes a few minutes to setup.
Anything that starts complaining after you do this can be checked for what it is trying to do and then dealt with appropriately.
While we have a 'smart' TV, it has no direct network connection and receives it's video signal from a Roku stick via HDMI so regardless of the data it collects, nothing is getting back home.
I still remember from back in the days when the office wars were a thing and I had a user call the Helpdesk asking why the spellcheck was not working on the database in their spreadsheet. That got printed, laminated and put on the wall as a warning to all Helpdesk staff that there was no depth users would not stoop to
There has already been reaction against these cameras in a way which killed their use. One citizen in Washington requested footage for some of the cameras and it went to court as the people managing them tried to refuse citing privacy of the subjects. This went up to the courts who pointed out the hypocrisy in this argument and stated that the images were a public record and as such must be provided on request.
The cameras have now been switched off while the powers that be rethink their data/revenue gathering approach
Link to non-firewalled report on this here ---> https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-off-license-plate-reader-cameras-amid-ruling-on-data-access/
I had an email from my network to say that 3G was being shutdown and my device 'was not 4G Calling compatible'. When I tried to use the link they supplied to check it my phone was not listed but I could see the only phones listed were those they included in their shop. Some searches suggested it was down to the carrier needing to whitelist the phone so I called them to ask but clearly they had not been supplied a script for this.
After 20 minutes I finally got an acknowledgement that my phone would work but then they were looking to push me into an upgrade to be sure.
Through a variety of means (all legal in the country I was in at the time) my music collection is now good for 125 days if I played it without shuffle. This is now on a big USB stick which my car audio system is able to see and play from...who needs 'rinse and repeat' radio stations
Assuming you do not want the potential PR disaster of using live fire defences against drones at commercial airports, why not go the obvious route? A small team available 24x7 on airport equipped with drones that have a capture/shred system fitted. They should be able to launch and intercept in just a few minutes by using trained spotters to search for the intruding drone.
While there is a cost to this, it would be a lot less than the cost of shutdowns and it would only need a few intercepts to take the fun out of it for the 'black-hats'. Each captured drone will also provide another piece to the puzzle on whether this is organised or just mindless muppets
That rings a bell from the early days when Lotus 1-2-3 was still the front runner in spreadsheets. Transferring data between 1-2-3 and Excel was a nightmare as the file produced through the export/import function kept breaking. Every time Lotus would supply a fix, MS would supply another break
I worked for a while on flight simulators including units for various military and some of the tales I got told about bean counters were legendary.
The best two examples included one from the RAF where the egress shop had to bin multiple million pounds of batteries for emergency radios as someone had noticed they were being purchased at low volume on a regular basis which they decided was not cost effective so they changed it to bulk purchasing. Sadly this meant that when kit was serviced and the batteries changed the new ones had a shorter and shorter life until it fell below the 'service interval plus a bit' level at which point all the remaining batteries had to be dumped.
The other example was from the sim maker where the IC sockets being purchased were changed by someone in Purchasing Dept to save 1p per socket. Unfortunately the new sockets could not cope with the test equipment probes being plugged in as it spread the contacts too far apart so they no longer made contact on the programmed chips when they were fitted. Three complete systems worth of boards had to be scrapped at a cost of rather more than 1p per socket.
You are correct in that a number of different mail systems do offer that but one of the biggest limitations is coping with the different ways other systems do their Out of Office responses. Then add on to that different languages if you are sending email internationally and you discover the good old 80/20-20/80 rule where 80% is easy to handle and only takes 20% of your time and effort, I'm sure you can guess the rest. This rule also comes in a 90/10-10/90 flavour
When I was an apprentice I had to do the usual 'experience all the different departments' thing and in the Industrial Engineering department they had a frightening example of this that everyone had to learn by heart.
One of the mobile weather radar systems had inspection lamps with 30 foot cables that clipped to the battery for use as general lighting. These are the things that were common back in the 70's/80's in garages and were a bulb in a cage attached to a clip.
Because these were for a military product they had to meet certain specifications which had all been worked out and approved and resulted in lamps costing just over £300 each. Then the bulbs they were using went out of production so they raised a 'minor change request' (MCR) to use a different bulb. Sadly the new bulb needed a new socket so another MCR was raised. The new socket didn't fit in the existing cage, another MCR. The cable needed a larger gland for weatherproofing the new socket, another MCR.....
In total there were at least 8 MCRs raised at a cost of over £1500 per MCR, only 15 lamps were sold at a new cost of over £400 each. Civilian versions in the garage across the road were selling at £5 each
Clearly AC has not done any checking here as Jimmy Kimmel's contract explicitly states that he is free to say whatever he wants in his monologue. This was revealed by a number of people after Disney pulled the plug and is probably part of why they reinstated him so quickly. The loss of subscriptions was bad but a breach of contract lawsuit would have put them in a very sticky, and expensive, position.
