Posts by Stoneshop

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Re: Charging

Most cites have multi-level car parks and many of them are putting in EV chargers. Park there and go to the shops in the area to do your shopping.

Over here IKEA offers free EV charging while shopping, and their car park isn't that close to other worthwhile shops[0] so there's little incentive to park there and shop elsewhere. They started with two stations, they've now got 10 or 12. Also, standard mains sockets for charging e-bikes.

[0] except Hornbach, the best hardware store around, but they have their own pair of dual chargers. Although the last time I saw them they were roped off as somebody apparently had driven into them; they're quite inconveniently placed that way, and insufficiently protected.

Re: Charging

Long distance driving is almost the only thing people bang on about, but just having an EV for the other 50 weeks a years can save enough money to fund a nice holiday.

We already owned a (diesel) Renault Kangoo van, but added an EV version of same close to two years ago. That one is for local trips, 40 to 50km one way as the battery is ageing[0] a bit, the diesel is used maybe once a month for trips outside that range[1]. Power is, for a good part, from the solar panels on our roof, though the past two weeks the dreary weather has them barely compensating the house's base load at best. Also, get home, plug in, which makes even more sense with the limited range it has. EV advantage is no engine wear and tear from cold starting, not being prohibited entering the nearest big city centre's environmental zone, and no clutch and gearshift to operate. The diesel has better heating though that also doesn't cut into the range.

[0] it's leased, so it's probably time to stop by the local Renault dealer and have it tested. If it has dropped below 75% capacity they'll put in a fresh one (probably refurbished, but those are fully guaranteed too)

[1] selling it was a non-starter, there's no market for diesel vans that age, and we _would_ be inconvenienced having just a 100km-range EV.

Re: Summon the lawyers!

I’d go with the simple solution: cut the damn cable in two places,

You'd better start looking around for bulk discounts on isolated cable cutters as they tend to be rather ruined after two or three times, cutting a live cable.

Re: Charging

Unless they have to stay, to prevent jokers from surreptitiously unplugging the car before it has finished charging...

The cable is locked into the sockets both ends, simultaneously with the car doors being locked.

BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss

You're not a coffee drinker, obviously...

Not an experienced, BOFH-aware coffee drinker that is, otherwise they'd know to put away the coffee, tea, and basically all fluid and solid choking hazards while reading.

Also, breakable stuff that might be subject to forceful acceleration due to uncontrolled muscle movements, for good measure.

Re: Parts of it date back to when fire was invented

and he comes out of the house with a large pan of his used motor oil and decides to dispose of it by hurling the contents onto the fire.

I used to go winter camping with a small group of motorbike riders from my club, usually for 2 or 3 days between Christmas and new year, and the custom is that the last night we'd be making oliebollen (basically donuts without the hole, or deep-fried sweet dumplings), after which the pan of oil would be upended into the campfire. After sufficient warning, with everybody except the thrower at a decent distance, and with a forceful swing so that the oil doesn't end up near oneself. Haven't seen it go wrong more than just slightly, in over 20 years.

And the effect is very worthwhile.

SpaceX Starship blows up on landing, Elon Musk says it's the data that matters and that landed just fine

"Jamie wants big boom"

I expect the esteemed mr. Hyneman has been watching.

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

Re: Old typewriter

Comment wrong the to replying are you.

Re: Old typewriter

For example, a program to broadcast a specific piece of music to indicate where to plant bombs.

That's code, not encryption, and depends on the receiver(s) having been given a set of pre-defined actions corresponding to the messages that are going to be sent, the most famous ones likely being the two that announced the Allied invasion of France, one a day ahead, the second at the actual start. Getting such a list of actions to, in that case, the French Resistance may well have employed cryptography, but the messaging mechanism itself is code.

Re: MH370

It's possible, but the pacific is 500x larger in surface area,

Indian ocean, not the Pacific. Still about 40 times as large as the Baltic sea, and while not as deep as the Pacific, 7.2km is not to be sniffed at either.

Re: Old typewriter

as the forth cog was in essence superfluous for certain transmissions

If you look at the mechanics of an Enigma, you'll see the rightmost rotor moving one step every character, then the next on every complete revolution of the rightmost one, so after 26 characters. The third rotor moves one step every 676 (26^2) characters, and a fourth rotor would move only one step every 17576 character, so for all in tents and porpoises it would be stationary, and only the starting position and the rotor wiring would matter. Later modifications would have rotors stepping twice on every full revolution of the one to its right, but that would still leave that fourth one stationary except for very long messages (2197 chars).

Backwards move would rotors Forth, way the By.

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

Re: Amateur move

By law they have to accept "returns" if they sell electrical goods.

If I'm not mistaken they should do so too if selling batteries and LED/CFL bulbs, which I expect nearly all supermarkets do.

Re: Amateur move

Over here the recycling bins in supermarkets accept batteries, bulbs containing electronics and/or hazardous substances (so LED and CFL), and small electronics such as phones, power bricks and such.

Re: Call me Ishmael

There is a girl in her class called Monalisa <surname>.

And her surname is Twins?

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

There was a Gofundme for stray cats at Arecibo; maybe we should have started one for maintenance, too.

And given the current state of the bowl they can't even fill it with kibble.

Arecibo inspection drone footage OF THE CABLE SNAPPING

Those cables definitely look their age

And you can see the tops of the towers snapping off.

ignorami

The art of folding annoying lusers into decorative shapes.

Cayman Islands investment fund left entire filestore viewable by world+dog in unsecured Azure blob

preventing people from breaking in and stealing secrets

They should. But theft and provision of power have been vulnerabilities for a good while longer than this information technology malarkey, so they're more prominent in most people's risk assessments. It's pretty straightforward to figure out what can happen if some miscreant heaves a brick through a ground-floor window or when there's a power cut, and what should be done to minimise that. Much less so when the issue is remote entry and data exfiltration through software vulnerabilities, misconfiguration and phishing. That attack surface is much more varied and opaque, and could well be growing by the day unlike any of the weak points that can be physically attacked.

Arm at 30: From Cambridge to the world, one plucky British startup changed everything

Re: Who killed MIPS?

IIRC - didn't Intel "borrow" parts from the DEC Alpha CPUs?

Not really. HP got, via Compaq, a good part of DEC engineering and software development. When Itanic was taken over by Intel they got the compiler group, which makes sense as that is intimately tied to the CPU arch; fabbing became Global Foundries and hardware engineering for the most part went to AMD; several chipset subsystems for x86_64 strongly resemble those of Alpha.

Re: Who killed MIPS?

x86 drove ARM out of desktop machines in the late 80s I think, later x86/x64 drove MIPS (and everyone else) out of workstation/server processors

And AMD gave Intel a good kick in the danglies when they launched X86_64 where Intel were pushing Itanic as the 64 bit Industry Standard (harhar) arch. Didn't quite kill Itanic, but severely cut short its predicted dominance, which was already hampered by at best lukewarm uptake because of non-existent x86 compatibility.

Re: Who killed MIPS?

and that was solely based on wildly optimistic claims about future performance made by Intel.

I have to say it's one of the best space heaters I know.

70 floppies, that was a big distribution

400k per disk, so you were looking at 28MB (max) but probably more like 25MB, though that would still expand a bit because of compression. It'd take about half of an RD53.

Jockeying 70 floppies might still have been faster than loading VMS off a "my, those glaciers sure are frisky in comparison" TK50, but likely a little less cumbersome. Because if you finally had the console incantation right you could then sit back with cuppa. Or three.

On the 11th day of Christmas TalkTalk took from me... the email address of my company

Re: Car Mechanics are not IT people

Him and all the staff are techno-phobic.

I doubt that. Very, very strongly.

Computer-phobic I'd grant you.

But a techno-phobic car mechanic? There are few jobs where you don't have to deal with technology at all anyway, and ones that do so in the most limited way imaginable are also scarce and getting more scarce every year.

‘Father of the Indian IT industry’, Tata Consulting Services founder F. C. Kohli passes, aged 96

Hailed as visionary pioneer who changed both India and the software industry

Would that he had also changed the attitude of his countrymen employed by TCS, to actually contemplate posed questions and answer them truthfully instead of replying with the default "yes".

Behold the drive-thru of the California Highway Patrol: Fry me a river, has 'CHIPS' stopped working again?

Coronary Hazard In Paper Sack

Culinary Hubris Implemented (through) Processed Stuff

Ticketmaster: We're not liable for credit card badness because the hack straddled GDPR day

when there's no way to purchase the tickets at the venue

s/at/from/

Some tickets you want to be able to buy well in advance instead of queueing at the entrance, so that you can follow up with travel and lodging arrangements. Like in the case of wanting to see One Down, Four To Go, which would have required an 8-hour train trip just to get to London, then an inevitable queue at the ticket shop, returning home again, booking accommodation, and finally the second trip around the actual date.

Instead, just sitting at a computer at home, selecting any two adjacent seats in a good enough viewing position but no more expensive than UKP $mumble, and any day, was much more convenient. And once you have those tickets you can plan travel and accommodation, and other activities like visiting TNMOC around that.

Re: Small Claims Court

I was very pleased when I received a pretty cheque in the mail from said agency for the amount of the invoice minus their fee.

(Different country, different procedures) In the one case I had to open the invoices were paid in full to me, and the collection agency's fee had to be paid by the 'business' I was dealing with.

As it should be.

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

Re: But what then

It has been defined as an unit of force by the Register Standards Soviet, and for doubting the correctness of this you will be sent to a re-education camp well away[0] from the corrupting influences that have caused you to doubt their authority in these matters. Physical work and fresh air[1] will soon cure you of your mistaken opinions.

[0] Several tens of megalinguini

[1] At negative double-digit Hiltons

Norrisses per Nanowales are not quite a suitable unit

And the elephant per ballet shoe definitely isn't, as already incompletely expounded upon in the article. Tons/tonnes, and by implication badgers, rhinoceri, Aussie trams and Queen Lizzie (both variants) are an unit of weight, not force. There's gravity involved in the conversion, and an elephant on top of Mount Everest would weigh less than at sea level, although I'm under the impression that it would be somewhat unlikely to encounter an elephant there. If so, it would probably[0] be an Asian elephant anyway, which are smaller and thus one more factor in the impreciseness of the definition.

[0] Still, it's the African elephant that is migratory[1].

[1] And even able to transport an entire coconut tree.

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

Re: The Truth?

I expect his tax advisers will find a way to write that off against his next two decades of personal tax, though.

Methinks Trumpo needs to spend the rest of his life, dead for tax reasons.

Re: It is unclear what President Trump hopes to achieve

It's what El Trumpo considers himself, with the fact that he was elected predisent as supporting evidence.

Re: The Truth?

Yes Hitler crouched in his bunker

Trump is doing so too, but armed with golf clubs instead of a handgun. And unfortunately he's too much of a coward to beat himself to death with them.

BOFH: You might want to sit down for this. Oh, right, you can't. Listen carefully: THIS IS NOT AN IT PROBLEM!

Re: Older gear is always an option

They're fairly recent Eizos (mumble2450's ISTR), and their bezel width is already expressed in Ångströms (or picoLinguini, if you prefer).

Re: Older gear is always an option

I'd happily use a 4:3 monitor again, almost everything I do is long, not wide...

At work I have the two 16:9 24" monitors in portrait mode, resulting in a 2160x1920 desktop. That's 80 or 90 lines of logfile text for a screen full even if using a 10pt mono font, so you get a decent amount of context. Still, people find my setup weird.

Re: Older gear is always an option

Everyone wants the newest 14:9 ones, the old 4:3 ones pile up in the corner as they're replaced.

One day I found two 17" Eizo flatscreen monitors in the ToBeDisposedOf container, and for some reason they didn't look very ToBeDisposedOffable to me, at least not via the standard process for ToBeDisposedOf kit. Took them out and to my desk, plugged them in and found they were quite OK except for having a partial column of always-on red pixels. Well, good enough for my 'lab' at home, so they went there.

Looking them over again when I got home I noticed their date of manufacture. Which was about three years back; Eizo's warranty is five. So I called their local representative who assured me that they would indeed accept these as warranty cases, even where I didn't have a receipt or their original packaging.. "Just pack them well, and UPS will be along tomorrow to pick them up."

Two weeks later they were back, with new panels. Seven years on they're still working fine, replaced only just three months ago with two 21" Eizos that were sold for three-fifty and a kick in the nuts as they too were 4:3.

Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe

What sort of horrors do you think we'd be served up?

Ads from Carpetland and Lincolnshire Lime? Doesn't sound that horrible to me.

Oh, and Armitage Shanks, after reading one of Dabbsy's

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

Well

I would cover the outside of the plug with conductive paint, with just a nice little trace to the live pin. Maybe, for Elfin Safe Tie reasons add a note saying "Do Not Touch", and bill this solution for about half the amount of the loss incurred by the last such incident.

Mr President? Donald?! Any chance you can actually decide if Oracle can buy us or do we have to leave?

Re: Don't forget...

Who knows what alien pets or vermin might look like.

You know, that fungus stuff on top of Trump's head?

UK tax dept's IT savings created 'significant risk', technical debt as it faces difficult conversation with Chancellor

Re: SDLC?

written in languages that only those whose IT career precedes Java can support

They may as well be in Sanskrit given the grasp most current devs have of anything but their native programming language.

(compared to them I'm a polyglot: Algol60, Pascal, C, x86 ASM, Python, some Perl)

Re: SDLC?

But this is in a closed system where you don't need to give a stuff about security.

O rly?

For the past seven months our entire team (a dozen bods) has been WFH. We do second-line application support in what's supposed to be a walled-off environment, inaccessible from the Greater Internet. Other teams: networking, OS and hardware support, storage and middleware, work from home as well. This basically is no different from being on call outside office hours: you have to have access to that walled-off environment, using a VPN, Citrix, whatever. That gets you into the office environment, and from there via a jump host you can get into that walled-off area.

That's going to need a few security hurdles before you're in. And once inside all the standard authentication to get on to specific hosts and run privileged commands should still be in place too, if only for accountability.

Re: Defer (or cost-cut) regular Tech Refresh at your peril!

One metric is to keep track of failures and cost of replacement (parts, systems, etc...).

Ah, the small-business Windows view again.

Larger businesses and government departments don't work from that metric, as maintenance contracts already cover the replacements. What they do track is downtime, although more often than not that downtime tends to be caused by software or operational errors, not hardware. And when the time comes that the hardware is closing in on the far end of its bathtub curve those businesses and departments will find their maintenance contracts getting more expensive. Still not pure cost of replacement, but a result of simple statistical arithmetic by the vendor.

There's also the cause of operational errors increasing as not only the kit gets older but the staff does too, experienced bods leaving (the company, the workforce or this earthly plane) and being replaced with less experienced folk, often outsourced.

But replacing kit can also incur downtimes due to the new software not being quite ready, integration problems, users being insufficiently trained and several other reasons. And as long as this is seen by the beancounters as the greater bunch of risks they will put off the necessary changes, increasing the technical debt.

if she runs a cheese shop like mine, maybe...

One entirely uncontaminated by cheese?

Uber is now a food delivery company with a substantial sideline in taxis

Re: Uber eats

I invariably parse it as "rubbereats" initially.

(Icon: would probably be insufficiently discerning to care what flavour of rubber he's eating)

Re: Once again, sidestepping laws

Also, 5 months pay while you go looking for another job.

For developers the job market isn't that dire that you'd still be out of work after those 5 months. Probably. But marketing and finance? Though it'd be less likely that those would be expats, so a different situation anyway.

Once again, sidestepping laws

"One thing that hasn’t changed is Uber making losses, about $1.1bn in this quarter. But CFO Nelson Chai offered the caveat-laden comment that “we remain confident in our ability to achieve quarterly Adjusted EBITDA profitability before the end of 2021.”"

Which they're trying to achieve by cutting 25% of their 27k strong workforce[0], and halting their experiments with self-driving cars and trucks[1]. This is done the US way, even in NL, where employment rules are rather more favourable towards the employee than Uber would like. As 200 of the about 1000 employees have to go they pressure[2] them into taking an oprot-package, where otherwise Uber would have to obtain permission from the UWV benefits agency, properly[3] substantiating their need to get rid of the excess. Instead, Uber offered a separation package, 5 months salary plus tickets back home[4], and kept hammering those that hadn't yet signed to take it, allowing less than a week to decide. So not much time to check out one's position in the job market to gauge the feasability of staying. And nearly all of the 200 caved.

Once an asshole company, always an asshole company.

[0] That's developers, designers, marketing etc. Not the drivers; they're freelance and aren't included in that count.

[1] Bicyclists everywhere breathe a sigh of relief.

[2] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/11/06/zo-gaat-het-als-uber-personeel-ontslaat-als-je-niet-tekent-dan-is-dat-jouw-keuze-a4019122 . Run it through https://www.deepl.com/translator if Dutch is not among the languages you master.

[3] Hah. Incomplete and incorrect, as well as insufficiently documented regarding Uber's financials.

[4] A good part of the workforce are expats.

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: Yay! Party time!

Clearly this leads to quicker reporting of the results, but it also has the potential to influence votes cast later in the day.

As long as the actual results are kept secret[0] until the voting has closed, I see no influencing of later voters by counting while voting is still in progress. Some countries even have rules to severely limit or even prohibit exit polling because of that potentially influencing later voters.

[0] Of course that means ALL officials involved in the counting, including observers, have to stay incommunicado for the day, working in rooms into which full ballot boxes can be delivered, but no messages getting out. I doubt that's feasible though. Technically it would be easier with electronic counting, but that introduces other problems unless REALLY well thought out, vetted and implemented.

Re: One down ...

(2) Britain will join the Trans Pacific Partnership with the USA and be part of this big trade bloc

That's REALLY cutting the UK loose from the Continent, but as it's a long way either around Africa or Tierra del Fuego you'd have to take good care it doesn't come apart during the journey.

(Also, would they really be taking NI with them? Wouldn't that mess with the Good Friday Agreement?)

I'm sure he'll be doing the rounds

on the jail's inner courtyard.

Re: One down ...

Four Seasons (the gardening company,

Which has adopted the slogan "Make America Green Again".

And there's probably some bargain merchandise to be had there, although you'd want to limit that to white caps, T-shirts and such which you can then run though a tub of green textile paint.

And with $210,000 a year pension.

So just 1905 years until this adds up to 400 million.

I expect that he would have to pay those Big Mac meals himself, so that lowers the net payoff. But that would be only as long as he manages to stay out of jail.