Posts by Stoneshop 5950 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
leave a note telling you to come and collect your package from the disused lavatory (the one with the sign 'beware of the leopard') in the cellar of the distribution center in some remote corner of an industrial estate with a fractal road layout incorrectly signposted and mapped, inaccessible by any means of public transport, and only between 10:00 to 10:05, and 14:50 to 14:55 on odd-weeknumber thursdays in months that do not contain the letters 'a' and 'e'.
They don't need to have the same keys.
Still means the delivery driver(s) needs to have that key, which is inconvenient to say the least. Unless the outer door has an electronic lock that can be opened either remotely, or via a code that comes with the delivery slip or something comparable.
Well, the chances the gardener would run off with the lawn are quite small.
Quite.
It's the Landscaping Architects that you need to be wary of. Once they have replaced your lawn and rose bushes with concrete slabs, gravel and flagstones there's nothing for them to do any more, so you may one day arrive home and find that damn maintenance-prone lawn and those sodding prickly irritating-insect-attracting rose bushes back in place again, so that you need to engage the Landscaping Architects once again.
The much simpler solution of a box with a lock for which the amazon bloke has the key (or combination) doesn't seem to have been considered.
A physical key can be copied (even by simply photographing it), and needs to be carried by the assigned driver. And if there's more than a dozen or so deliveries per run going into an Amazon Delivery Box, a driver will want a single key that fits all locks, or at best just a few keys. Even more so if there are several hundred or more of those boxes in a city, so that otherwise the dispatcher would need to make sure the right set of keys gets handed out to each driver. And with one key potentially fitting a rather large number of locks they become more attractive to nick or copy.
So the better option appears to be an electronic lock with single-use codes that the owner can hand out to delivery services (not limited to Amazon), with possibly even a confirmation being requested from the owner as the code is entered on the box.
As the people being let go find jobs some of them will go to customers or potential customers.
Not that long ago my then-manager asked me what my thoughts were on hiring our 'default' HP (not HPE yet at that time) CSE, to make sure we still had a competent and knowledgeable guy to service the pile of stuff we run. I could see his reasons, but it would cut the CSE off from their in-house diagnostic tools, and probably make parts exchange more complicated. And I wish I could cite access to 3-rd line support as well, but given their quality it's a non-issue.
I expect this matter to come up again shortly.
A lot of people don't change the codes very often, and the action behind keys that are used most tends to soften fairly quickly.
Similar problem with electronic locks using a keypad: you can often see the keys in use as having a grimy area around them and/or being more worn, so it's now merely a matter of finding the right permutation of those keys.
I just stated that it's not proven it was a drone impact.
The CBC article states there was (some) damage to the plane.
If the damage was caused by a bird then the impact area will show bits of tissue, and blood.
If there was damage but no traces of blood or tissue it can't have been a bird that the plane hit. And it doesn't take a deep investigation to discern the presence or absence of those traces, especially if there was little time between the incident and the landing, and no rain.
That was bad, sharp taloned raptor? no thanks.
Two years ago, an Eurasian Eagle-owl (Bubo Bubo) had gotten rather territorial concerning a cyclepath. Over fifty attacks have been reported, with several people wounded.
People preferred to make detours. Those birds have a wingspan same as the height of an average person.
A King Air prop, with a PT6A driving it, could probably shred a DJI and never know it.
There would definitely be traces. And an aircraft propeller runs at higher RPMs than helicopter rotor blades, so the impact involves a lot more energy.
Not sure if the manufacturers have added in redundancy to avoid a repeat scenario of American Airlines Flight 191.
Redundancy didn't prevent United 232 (same airplane model, incidentally). With that one, the technical crew on the ground had a very hard time getting convinced that yes, all three hydraulic circuits were out.
While Das Ordnung is all good, it also needs Das Politzei and Das Gefängnis
Ahem. While 'das Gefängnis' is correct, both "Polizei" (without the 't') and "Ordnung" are feminine, and thus should have 'die' as the article. Also, articles don't get capitalised, except at the start of a sentence, obviously.
or just carry a suitably large brick,
I was thinking, two bricks to prevent further procreation, but then realised that if the drone operator was knocked out, most birds of prey are sufficiently equipped to deal with that anyway, they'd just need some additional training.
This was the same computer room where the on-site engineer once saw a workman on a stepladder drilling holes in the concrete ceiling. The mainframe operators were apparently unconcerned that this was taking place by the active exchangeable disk drives - whose lids were now covered in debris.
A colleague of mine had a similar story, with the difference that the workman was standing on the glass lid of one of the drives. Several microseconds after being spotted, said workman was flat on his back on the floor, as Jamie had grabbed his belt and yanked him backwards. "Any pain and damage from that will be far less than that from having your legs chopped up by broken platters mixed with glass splinters spinning at 3600rpm."
There's also the one for men at work that clearly shows a man opening an umbrella.
Can be hard work, those damn things tend to get stuck much too often, especially those compact ones where the ribs are supposed to fold.
Apropos, there has been a study comparing the sizes of the pile of soil on those signs from across the world, but I can't find it at the moment. Personally I know of the difference between the Dutch and Norwegian warning signs for cattle on road: on the Dutch sign the cow is moving, the Norwegian one shows a stationary one. Which matches the actual animals's (lack of) action.
Meanwhile, they should be dealing with all the disappointed people going to zoos/wildlife parks to find that there actually isn't an elephant there!
Just install matrix LED panels showing the various animals present in the zoo being signposted. So that if you're looking for, say, an aardvaark, you can skip all the zoos that don't show one.
I initially tried to be positive about this story seeing they had donated but then you need to do some maths. Facebook makes about $1.4m profit (not revenue) an hour....
A week's worth would go a long way helping Puerto Rico, and FB's bottom line wouldn't even ripple.
But only briefly - I have to blow hard into the air vent to clean out the cooling fans before they seize.
My X61 decided to get the CPU fan to seize while on holiday for a week. A trip to one of those local Pakistani-run WeSellEverythingIncludingKitchenSinks store somewhere in London for a set of jeweller's screwdrivers, a tin of lighter fluid and a flacon of universal oil solved that.
Remove keyboard, peel sticker off fan hub, mix a bit of lube with lighter fluid (otherwise it's too viscous for that bearing) and put that in the fan hub.
Done. Kept going for several weeks, long enough to get home, order a new fan and wait for it to arrive.
I think you'll find the scanner in the supermarket is way bulkier and more expensive than the scanner in the tape library.
Bulkier? Yes, but only because the handheld ones need a grip and a battery, and the till-mounted ones contain both rotating and stationary mirrors to move a laser beam over the area where a barcode might show up. More expensive? See previous remark. The library reader needs to deal with only one size of label in one position (respective to the orientation of the tape cartridge), so can be much simpler mechanically/optically. The optoelectronics and the software are not that different.
One customer I visited occasionally had a large StorageTek carousel installed that read the tape barcodes using video cameras (this was the second half of the 1980's), and for shits and giggles they had a set of monitors hooked up in parallel with the decoding units. Fascinating, especially when the robot arms had to pass tapes between them (they had two storage carousels but only one had drives installed, the other was just for shelf space expansion).
I looked up properties for sale in Paraburdoo. Average asking price for 14 homes was $358,000. Doesn't sound so undesirable to me.
The price of an item is a reflection of demand versus supply. Try figuring the demand for luxury mansions on Tristan Da Cunha.
In the case of Paraburdoo demand will be limited (by number of miners not owning houses already, roughly), but supply is also limited (noone's going to cart in house parts unless there's actual demand) so that will keep prices at the level you see.
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