* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

SpaceX flings another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit in firm's heaviest payload to date

Tom 7

Re: 59 out of 60

"has taken a leaf from Google: if it's faulty, junk and replace it." Which Google is this?

Teachers: Make your pupils' parents buy them an iPad to use at school. Oh and did you pack sunglasses for the Apple-funded jolly?

Tom 7

Re: Free iPads?

My kids went/go to an iPad school. I cannot believe just how fucking shit the whole setup is. Its basically an email and browser system. Thank god the school sec knows what's going on as a phone call is required to find out anything about homework/sports events/exams or anything to do with the school that a parent or child would need to know!

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

Tom 7

Re: SCO Unix

I was using a work station with a *nix os on it and my somewhat accident prone friend on the one next to me recursively deleted the root directory and entertained me by screaming at it to stop for about 10 minutes before revealing what he was wanting to stop. A running club at lunch he shot passed me and round a corner, I came round the corner to see a large pine tree rocking backwards and forwards having flung him into a ditch. After a shower and needle removal we retired to the canteen where he managed to collect his large lunch (we ran a long way even with me laughing) and somehow slid the tray under the cashiers till depositing his lunch all over the floor. Once we'd finally finished and were returning to our offices as we approached his I commented on his appalling luck today and he turned to me to speak and smacked into a great big red fire extinguisher hanging on the wall just outside his office.and slid to the floor. As did I and crawled the last 10 yds to my own office on hands and knees completely incapable of anything other than uncontrollable laughter.

Google throws new version of Dart at the desktop, will be hoping it sticks with app devs

Tom 7

Re: Hobbyists and workers

Thanks for that Phil! That somehow slipped past my radar.

Me and Flask are going to have some fun!

Tom 7

Re: Hobbyists and workers

It used whatever HTML allowed.

Tom 7

Re: Hobbyists and workers

I've said for a long time people write new languages because they fail to understand the old ones. Javascript was probably different in the sense that it needed to be IP free in the browser but then its main enemies got access to its development and maimed it when it got into its teens and prevented it (in mid 1990s IIRC) from being a really useful thing that makes people write stuff like this when it should never have been needed.

I now have the joy of not being able to write things in JS that I could in JavaScript2* - it had proper classes and inheritance - and my Python libraries are compiled in C++ on installation except for some big scientific shit which is compiled in Fortran!

*cant seem to find it now but it was offered as a FF script engine by Netscape (IIRC) in late 90s or so and in a weekend or so I managed to write a very usable browser desktop in it.

They say lightning never strikes twice, but boffins have built an AI to show where it'll come next

Tom 7

Keep away from things that point into the sky. The logical conclusion to this is to walk down the middle of the road!

Tom 7

Over longer than proper records exist I believe tsunamis would actually come out top as "natural hazard process" deaths there. I did read about a massive loss of life due to a landslide into a lake there in the distant past.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Tom 7

Re: Beautiful

The true solution would be to make the Document folder completely read only or otherwise unusable, A bootup script that deletes all files would soon get the message across.

Tom 7

Re: Beautiful

Probably useless too. I've been amazed at people who have no clue what the Z: drive is. We have regular fire alarm tests. We should have regular 'restating the bleeding obvious to management again and again in the knowledge they wont get it despite the bollocks they put on their CV about 47 years Windows95 experience.'

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Tom 7

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

Most people need access to single accounts as part of their day to day job and its quite easy to set up something that gives you access to half a dozen accounts at any one time to focus searches on the right record and prevent those with that level of access from dumping all the records in one go. And a trigger for when someone tries to get a lot of data is fun too!

Tom 7

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

Stop making it look like the workers were to blame. I would imagine the security was set at a level so the shit management could demand details on anything at a moments notice and the workers would have to be the ones to provide that so full worker access was necessary. I've implemented 'authorised need to know' access at a couple of places only to have those higher up ride roughshod over it because 'you will be fired if you dont'.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

Tom 7

Re: You could get into a room?

On a skiing holiday we arrived at our hotel and went into the lobby and registered. We then went to the back of the hotel and down about 8 flights of stairs, through a small tunnel and up another 10 or so flights of stairs to get to our room. The hotel had been built in a valley and ran down one side and the tunnel was in fact a bridge built to withstand floods and avalanches and then up the other.

Meals were of course near reception so by the end of the week I was marathon fit despite not having done much skiing.

Tom 7

Re: Interesting problem

Surely anything programmed by anyone over the age of 5 then the computer would program the key for the room just allocated?

Oh sorry my bad...

Tom 7

Re: Hope the hack is up to date with his TB jab

ISTR the test was done with a multiple needle device that left a pepper pot mark on the inside of your forearm. If that reacted after a couple of weeks(?) you were sent for further tests and new underwear - a couple of friends at school reacted and their fear was palpable understandably having just been reading shit by poets that had died of that crap.

The actual immunisation came from something on a needle that was put just under the skin on the shoulder rather than an injection. This reacted to create a blister like bubble that in my class at school varied from 1/4" across to one lad who had one about 3" across and make him look like he was smuggling a tennis ball - something there almost certainly was a rule against somewhere in the imaginary school archives.

Where the skin lifted you were left with a scar that resembles that left by a burn.

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Tom 7

Re: Forget the risk of fire spreading through the holes in the wall

I lodged in a 1930s art deco house. No plaster board just a thing layer of plaster. Decided to put up some shelving and me and the landlord got through half a dozen masonry bits and his hammer drill before going and buying another hammer drill (as the old one was obviously shit) and finally got a hole deep enough for the first rawl plug, A handy man was called and he knocked on the door, asked what we wanted, said 'No, for some reason the houses here were made with 'blue' bricks and if you wanted to put up shelved you knocked off the plaster to find the mortar and fitted into that." So we pollyfillad over the rawl plug, got some standing shelving and watched Dr Strangelove knowing we were safe.

Tom 7

Re: Forget the risk of fire spreading through the holes in the wall

But the bog roll holders aren't and after a while you cant get the bolts in for all he butterflies mounting up at the back.

Tom 7

The do nice beer there too!

Tom 7

Re: Forget the risk of fire spreading through the holes in the wall

Plasterboard would never do anything useful in stiffening the studwork.BR sandwiches would be better.

Tom 7

Re: Forget the risk of fire spreading through the holes in the wall

There is something in building regs about not putting studding anywhere near where you wish to fit a toilet roll holder. I have given up using 'plasterboard' screws to fit bog roll holders now and wait until the holes from re-mounting attempts merge and create an opening bug enough to slide foot long planks that can be stuck on with Jesus' favourite glue and then at last one has a stable platform to fix the damn thing to!

Tom 7

Re: Seems fine to me

Reminds me of rewiring my old home before we had lots of things that needed plugging in so only a few sockets per room and a few lights. Managed to pay for the whole thing by flogging of the old lead cable for more than the replacement copper. Purely lucky timing as for some reason lead prices went astronomical at the time and many churches and public buildings were water damaged at the time as roofs and flashing disappeared in overnight waves.

A friend rented a house in the remote westcountry and I swear it must have been 'rewired' twenty times and all the old cables just left. You could get lead poisoning if you didnt duck going into the kitchen where a collection of lead cables some 20 across and seven or 8 thick had accumulated over the years made there way from the fuse box or nearby to 7 rooms in what was probably some kind of Faraday cage.

Tom 7

Re: Forget the risk of fire spreading through the holes in the wall

Only when we forget our keys.

Imagine OLE reinvented for the web and that's 90% of Microsoft's Fluid Framework: We dig into O365 collaborative tech

Tom 7

Re: OLE Enemy

Not in my apps you dont.

Well not until management overide the security they asked for but cant understand.

This news article about the full public release of OpenAI's 'dangerous' GPT-2 model was part written by GPT-2

Tom 7

Re: Awesomesauce!

Have you ever read an art students essay on almost anything? Its only engineers that need to stick to relevance!

'Peregrine falcon'-style drone swarms could help defend UK against Gatwick copycat attacks

Tom 7

Re: Do Peregrines hunt pork?

A swam of peregrine bots sounds like a great place to hide a rogue drone.

PSA: Turning off silent macros in Office for Mac leaves users wide open to silent macro attacks

Tom 7

Re: Boeing

I love the smell of long pig roasting in the morning

Boffins hand in their homework on Voyager 2's first readings from beyond Solar System

Tom 7

Re: Some surprising results (for the layman)

"I love when Science throws up curve balls like that and makes you think about your basic assumptions on the universe."

When I was at university that was called 'being stoned'.

Tom 7

Re: Obligatory PTerry reference

Isolated teeth? Is that from too many beers in bad company on a friday night?

Bad news, developers: Apple Mac App Store tells cross-platform Electron apps to get lost

Tom 7

CrAPI

I dont program on these things but it strikes me that if user apps can actually make API calls that Apple dont want them to then the problem lies in a shit security implementation.

I dont know how Apple check this but I dare say I could think of a way of preventing MY app making those calls until long after the app is distributed and disguising the API call in some way so it is not immediately apparent to a code scan. These things should not be callable from 'USER' space full stop.

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

Tom 7

Dont call it food poisoning - call it pickling.

I know a lot of people who hate sauerkraut but love it when you call it German Kimchi.Gluten intolerance affects less than 1% of the population and yet 15% claim to have it. If you throw up in a restaurant many people will throw up too even though your were just pissed. We're animals who know that some things are poisonous and its better to throw up than risk poisoning so we are easily talked into, and can talk ourselves, into being sick remarkably easily.

I have no doubt we could stop everyone eating shit food it Ronald McDonald was more closely associated with the far better for you IT.

Boffins don bad 1980s fashion to avoid being detected by object-recognizing AI cameras

Tom 7

Re: Er ...

And dont forget to wash your hands in the buffalo after going to the loo.

Tom 7

Dont be surprised when the US smart bomb your high st

when a couple of students in Che G tshirts set off a panic over the pond.

Pro-Linux IP consortium Open Invention Network will 'pivot' to take on patent trolls

Tom 7

Just to say Gnome fund seems to have exceeded its target

Well done all and sundry.

IT protip: Never try to be too helpful lest someone puts your contact details next to unruly boxen

Tom 7

Re: On Call

If you cant just bring yourself to down a bottle of whisky in one you can always play a slightly modified version of Fizz-Buzz. We once tried Fizz-Buzz-Guzz-Wuzz - 3,5,7,11 3-say Fizz, 5- say Buzz and reverse order, 7 Say Guzz and skip one, 11 say Wuzz and reverse skipping one. Oh and you have to use roman numerals. I think we made it to CL once before calling for an ambulance.

Tom 7

Re: Overtime

I have filled in a timesheet with 'researching timesheet regulations' which got quite recursive as it involved a long argument about whether it was fair for me to risk being fired filling in a timesheet incorrectly due to improper training or whether the company wanted to risk a lawsuit for trying it - given they hadn't bothered with timesheets before they thought about downsizing and assumed no-one would spot that. Got a few people redundancy the company were desperate to avoid but as the company was in trouble due to shit management downsizing the staff didnt help in the long run.

Tom 7

Re: Overtime

I always pointed out I was exempt from working for free.

Tom 7

"The developers," he remarked, "got a very stern talking to about running production app

And the managers who ordered this to happen? I always made sure they put that shit in writing or got some witnesses to make a note for protecting my posterior.

Move along, nothing to see here: Auditors say £100k grant to Hacker House was 'appropriate'

Tom 7

Re: An innocent man

TBF to Lumley the garden bridge she suggested was to be built by public subscription so the cost to the taxpayer would have been 0. It took Johnson to turn it into a massive disaster.

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Tom 7

Re: Great

I would have thought a PiZero would be a better host. SHould be able to run your whole house too!

Xiaomi the way to go phone: That would be with a 108MP camera by the looks of things

Tom 7

108mp?

I look forward to my bandwidth being eaten up by pictures of peoples dinner in ultra hd.

You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

Tom 7

Time to ditch the keyboard!

Tom 7

Peoples data is a lot more secure if the dont have access to it themselves.

Until the machine is defenestrated that is!

Linux kernel is getting more reliable, says Linus Torvalds. Plus: What do you need to do to be him?

Tom 7

He lives in the US - not many people look healthy over there any more at his age!

Move over Ceres! There's a new, smaller dwarf planet in town called Hygiea

Tom 7

Re: Eh?

Is the Asteroid World Cup on at the moment?

Tom 7

Re: "its surface only had two meager craters"

Why more impact craters? Its gravity wont be enough to attract anything with enough speed to make an impact and most of the debris near it would be moving in a similar orbit. Anything moving fast enough to make much of an impact crater would be more likely to kick it out of its orbit or destroy it completely.

Cringe as you read Horrible Histories: UK Banking Sector, sigh as MPs finger cloudy Big 3 as future risk

Tom 7

TSB are still shit

I've been trying to change my e-mail contact for 6 months now and all I get is 'service temporarily unavailable' so I've got to go into a fucking bank to sort out their internet banking by strangling an innocent teller.

We can go our own Huawei! Arm says it can flog chip blueprints to Chinese giant despite US trade embargo

Tom 7

Re: Unintended Consequence

Battery life could be interesting!

Tom 7

I was working on a high speed bipolar process in the 80s and found a design for 600 gate 16 bit processor and laid it out for amusement and simulation. If would have been the fastest processor in the world at the time : a 2.4ghz clock version would have run at less than 10w. The memory for the same would however have taken that for every 1/2k!

I have no doubt you could make a 60Ghz GaAs chip with ease but providing the RAM for it is going to be very very very expensive as it will be a while for the demand for it to reach a point where it is worth mass producing it.

Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos

Tom 7

Your are assuming its unique.

Plan to strip post-Brexit Brits of .EU domains now on hold: Registry waves white flag amid political madness

Tom 7

Re: Selective...

That will be your advertising that needs looking at!