Posts by dave 76 117 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
What bothers me the most is that it's clearly into user tracking since there is no way to open links in an external browser and -of course - no ad-blocking in the embedded one.
click on the link, it opens in the internal browser, then click on the three dots and chose Open in Browser.
That doesn't stop the user tracking but it does enable you to use your own brower with ad-blocking
There is BritBox in some countries, otherwise VPNs are your friends.
Problem is you still can't pay for the licence fee if you want to be legit. You cannot use an overseas address and if you use a UK address and it already has a licence you can't add a second licence at the same address (unless there is some hoop you can jump through that I haven't found).
Like the previous poster, as an expat I would be happy to pay, but I cannot.
Another very important one is independence. If you're a gardener and want to collect a load of bagged compost or some sapling trees, if you go night sea fishing and want to get to the beach by 2 AM, or maybe you want to just potter around for a whole day in the countryside, having your own car that's effectively already paid for, bar the fuel, is right on your doorstep now so you can load up and be on your way with no issues about when (or even whether) you can get transport back, is the only practicable way.
All these "car sharing", "dial a ride" and "autonomous" options assume you're a stereotyped townie who doesn't do anything out of the conventional rut of going to work, shopping, clubs, sport &c. (actually, a very rare beast in my experience -- most folk have quite surprising and varied interests and hobbies).
I disagree, this is where Car clubs shine. I can rent the appropriate car for my needs at the time I want it without needing to own a vehicle that has to be jack of all trades. I want to go to the shops I might get a small car. I'm moving a large amount of stuff, I will get the van. For garden supplies it might be the ute. For a group of friends it might be the SUV. If I want to have it for the entire weekend, there are multiple day bookings, not just by the hour.
There are enough vehicles around that I can get one on a moment's notice, so if I want to go fishing at 2am, that is no problem. And when I am not using it, I can forget about it.
Missing the point completely. The issue is that this means EVERY Australian now has to prove their age before accessing social media. Which means submitting PII at some point. No thanks.
You might be missing the point about how the age checks are being done. It's a pretty light touch, which is why there are so many stories about kids being able to bypass it (or the occasional young looking adult being blocked) but it is most definitely not a requirement to submit PII to access.
You absolutely CANNOT mentor effectively if permanently working from home. As a profession, we are letting these people down. I know there'll be downvotes, and folks explaining how they mentor perfectly acceptably, or even better from home, but IMHO this is biased/flawed thinking at the minimum.
I strongly disagree. My team is spread over 6 offices in 5 timezones. I have never met all the people I mentor and in all likelihood never will.
Never the less, I am guiding, encouraging, helping them solve issues, and generally mentoring for a good proportion of every day.
Makes no difference if I am working from home or from the office, I am not in the same office as them.
What makes the difference is that I am willing to teach and they are willing to learn. And I learn from them all the time also.
I was very happy today to find that MS Defender had flagged the email from Microsoft "Introducing GPT-5 in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat " as phishing and dumped it straight into quarantine.
All the links and details in the email were correct so it was legitimately from Microsoft, but Defender clearly knew better.
... our two laptops and one PC still running W10 have been enrolled in the continuing update programme. The enrolment offer appears under Update & Security so many will see it and may even be curious enough to find out what it does.
Annoyingly you need to have a Microsoft account to enrol, so it's another way for them to collect data. Will need to make a suitably anonymous account for this.
Singapore and Japan also have fingerprint collection on arrival. Canada does as well I believe.
As much as I would prefer that this wasn't required, the collection of biometrics when arriving in a country will continue to expand.
Come to Australia if you want to avoid it, fingerprints are not collected here (yet).
"For some reason, a few colleagues (usually of the manager variety, but not always) were annoyed when they found out that my passport always stated "computer programmer" and not anything more fancy sounding"
Just curious, what passport says your occupation? I've never seen that, mind you I am only familiar with the passports for 4-5 countries so maybe it is more common that I realise.
"If the US do pull the plug on AUKUS (which I do not actually think they will do), I suspect that that would piss off Australia quite severely."
I don't expect the US to pull out of AUKUS but I expect them to slow walk it to extract the maximum contributions from Australia.
It will be a very long time before Australia gets any nuclear subs.
I'm crap at documentation but I give it a try (I'm in the support team).
On our main document site, the top doc is the New starter guide which lists all the apps that support uses, with a 1-2 line explanation of what it does and how to install. Everyone in the team is encouraged to add new apps and strikethrough old apps when they are no longer used.
For each business group we have a page called Business Flow which starts with a "executive summary" of what that business does and how important it is (so if more than one business is screaming at the same time you know who to focus on). It then has a flow chart of the various components and how they are linked. This is invaluable when troubleshooting.
The next section is common issues - things that come up often or infrequently, or might might not be obvious. Again, everyone is encouraged to either add to this section or to tell me so that I can investigate.
And then the rest of the document is all the meaty stuff, how to install, what Devs to talk to, L2 troubleshooting, sql to run etc.
It's not perfect by any stretch but it does cover most cases. I still don't have enough time to document everything though.
not sure what your point is here.
- I'd be pretty confident that all politicians wear makeup when out in public. Like it or not, public image is a big part of politics these days.
- Of course a Harris aide had a strategy in place if anything happened to Biden, they would be remiss if they didn't. There will be one in place for Trump and for any significant public figure. We maintain a set of procedures for the royal family too.
- Many people on both the left and the right had issues with the age and acuity of Biden, just like they also do of Trump. The US needs to get some younger candidates. It's not always been the case, Bill Clinton and George W Bush are both younger than Trump and hopefully after Trump we will start to see younger candidates coming through on both sides.
"Messing around with the language options, it appears to show the name in your chosen language followed by a translation of the name in America in brackets. No other sea seems to have this treatment."
Take a look at the Sea of Japan, it has East Sea in brackets after it. Japan and Korea call it by different names.
I was working as a night shift operator and running backups on a Sunday night. I went into the Data Centre to change a tape and realised that I had left my card on the desk outside.
This particular DC required the swipe card to exit, there was an emergency button but using that would have been difficult to explain.
Fortunately the "designer" of the DC room hadn't done a complete job, and I was able to climb over the wall as it it only went up to the false ceiling!
I've just moved countries and can not access my original phone anymore.
So trying to update my mobile number on many sites, they insist on sending an SMS to my original phone for confirmation. Which I cannot access from overseas.
Why didn't I do this before I left the original country? Because I didn't have my new number yet.
Not sure how to get out of this validation loop other than abandoning my original account and creating a new one. In many cases that's possible but not when it is a banking site.
Eventually I will work out how to get out of this Catch-22, will probably involve a plane flight back to my original country for a day.
I just checked my profile too and I have been signed up since Dec 2007 - didn't realise it had been that long.
Amusing note, the country that I am currently living in at the moment is the same one that I was in when I signed up, but inbetween I have moved countries 5 times!
I once had to collect an Electrohome monitor from a bank because they were no longer subscribing to our service. If you have never seen an Electrohome, this was 9 inch monitor in a square casing so that you could stack them.
I got to the trading floor and could find the PC under the desk without too much trouble but the monitor had ended up on the neighbouring desk under a stack of paper and behind another monitor. That took a bit of work to extract.
"Common Sense Sceptic has done a series on the moon lander contract that was awarded to SpaceX. There were supposed to be two finalists, but through some suspect dealings, SpaceX was the sole awardee and NASA didn't have the funds to properly fund that due to an insufficient appropriation from Congress. It's worth a view as it makes it plain how NASA gets whipsawed with changes in the political wind."
The amount of money initially allocated was too low for two fully formed bids but there was a widely held expectation that an old space firm would win it and continue to drain future budgets under the normal cost+ contract.
What wasn't anticipated was that SpaceX would come in with a significantly cheaper bid based on Starship so they got the contract.
Then the shenanigans started by Congress to get more money so that a second contract was awarded.
I don't use the omnipod but I have a max dosage set on my pump as a fat finger warning. I would expect that Omnipod does the same thing.
Pumps are only just starting to release software to allow management from a phone app rather than just reporting - I hope this doesn't give the manufacturers cold feet.
A significant proportion of Japanese homes in Tokyo do not even have parking at home, you park your car in a parking lot. I'm starting to see charging stations appear there, but is still few and far between.
Seems there is a lot of difficulty to get a working Wireless charging solution, will be interesting to see if this implementation is able to address any of the issues.
you keep asking that but they are stupid questions. I'll take one for the team and reply.
- The booster part which caused the damage to the launch pad is not going to the moon.
- The starship that will be landing on the moon will be a variant on the existing (test) starship so no one (outside of SpaceX) knows even the proposed design at the moment.
- It will be several years of testing before we get to that point and the designs will be iteratively tested and improved.
Trying to even find a bank in Australia that will let you deposit a cheque is getting harder and harder. Just HSBC and some credit unions now it seems.
The only check I get these days is from US Tax Refund (so "check" is correct in this context) but in some years, the fees to deposit a US dollar check into a Australian bank account would be greater than the refund that I am getting.
"I'm not sure we know the whole story here. Is it possible that the boss was "playing favourites" and giving other colleagues preference in getting leave? That might explain why there "weren't enough staff" on two occasions (and possibly why the initial tribunal sided with Xu)."
or simply multiple people asked for the same period off before him and were granted and by the time Xu asked there was insufficient people to cover.
I've had that happen in my team a few times, it is not nice to tell people that they can't take holiday when they want to but we always remind them to ask before booking anything just in case.
I sold my flat in the UK, closed off all the utilities and was happy that all was good before moving to another country on the other side of the world.
About 9 months later I started getting emails from an energy supplier that I have never used that I owed them thousands and they would be starting legal proceedings.
I called them and after going through multiple people found out that my original supplier had been sold to this new company and all the accounts transferred over, including it seems accounts that had already been closed. So they had done a meter reading and billed me for usage on an meter that they were not supplying. They were also sending the paper bills to that flat so of course I was not getting them.
I got assurances that it was now sorted and there was nothing I needed to do.
Another 6 months and the emails started again, seems they still had not sorted it out. After more conversations they wanted me to log into my online account to sort this out. I told them there was no way I was going to create an online account for a supplier I didn't use, on a flat I didn't own. That seemed to me to be a way of them trying to sneakily accept that I was receiving the bills and be liable for them.
Eventually after many more weeks and calls I managed to get them to acknowledge (using the final bill from the previous supplier and the email from my lawyer saying that the sale had been completed) that I had never been their customer and that was the end of it but it was a stressful time.
We had a Data Centre on the 3rd floor and the sprinklers went off on the 14th floor over the weekend. By the time the water got to the DC, it had accumulated a lot of carpet fibers and plaster from the ceiling tiles and found its way through a crack in the concrete floor and straight over the top of the main computer.
Needless to say, that machine did not survive and within a few weeks there was waterproofing urgently applied to the ceiling of the DC.
"Ïnterestingly, I often miss seeing the BOFH, On Call and Who, Me? in the main articles. They only ever seem to appear at the very top row in "!popular" or whatever it's named now. Rather than having stories posted in order of publication, they seem to be interspersed with stories being "pushed" at the audience. I find that distracting and it makes me even less likely to read them,"
Go straight to https://www.theregister.com/Week instead, you will be thankful.
I was an operator on a site with Wang minicomputers in the 90's. The Wang computers had exchangeable disk packs which needed to be swapped occasionally and we got in the habit of sliding across the floor in our socks and hitting the unload button on the way past.
This wasn't a problem until the time I accidently hit the poweroff button (no Molly guards in those days) instead of the unload button.
Good thing there was two set of doors between us and the users so they had no idea what had happened just that we were working to fix it.
If I am just doing finger prick tests, I am testing 8-10 times per day.
If I have a CGM on, that is sampling every 5 minutes so 288 times per day.
You can do more trending and tighter control with more data.
CGM/Libre is expensive though and if any smartwatch came out out with a reasonably accurate measurement system, I would be in the queue on Day 1.
"What percentage of people who are told they have pre-diabetes make diet and lifestyle changes to improve their insulin response and avoid getting full-blown diabetes? Because from what I can tell, it's hardly any."
I know of two people who did, they both dramatically changed their diet and added exercise and are no longer considered at risk. Those are exceptions though.
I often tell people that in some senses it is easier managing being Type 1 than Type 2 (I am Type 1). If a Type 1 doesn't manage their levels, they get immediate feedback - Hypos or excessive blood sugars. If we don't do anything about it, we are hospitalised within a week.
A type 2 however doesn't get to see the consequences of their lifestyle for years and by then it is too late. And we all know how difficult it is to change lifestyle habits without feedback or reinforcement.
I would not wish anyone to get Type 1 - but if you have it, it is never far from your mind so you have to deal with it.
"Yes the person could do a zillion digital transfers to try & mask the money, but every single digital-transfer will leave a digital trail to follow. Manual withdrawls should result in the video evidence local law enforcement can use to find the local perp."
That's assuming that it hasn't bounced through a bank account in a country that won't give up details, or a digital only bank account where KYC wasn't done properly, or the money used to buy bitcoin....
Money Laundering is an issue that has been been going on for years for huge sums of money and is not yet a solved problem. If it appears simple to you, that's because you don't understand financial fraud in the real world.
"We've landed a Starship once from 10km, it needs to land 100s if not 1000s of times from orbital velocities before you put people anywhere near riding on top of it"
How many times did Apollo, Soyuz, Shuttle, or Dragon land before putting people on them?
yes, a number of trips will be required but 100s of times is over egging it a bit.
I'm normally fairly happy to upgrade to Apple's new releases when they come out but I've decided to not upgrade to iOS15 - which also means that I won't be replacing my iDevices like I had planned.
Yes I know that this scanning has been put on hold, but I bet that it is still in the software and just requires a simple switch to turn on. I'm not happy to give them the opportunity.
I am just one person with a couple of devices, but if sufficient people jump off the upgrade train at this point, it may force Apple to consider how it assures people that this functionality will not be slipped in the back door.
"While this is undoubtedly true for some, for many of us social media allows us to stay in touch with family and friends no matter where they live. I have family that lives all over the U.S. and even one family member in South America. It would be extremely difficult to stay in touch with all of them on a regular basis without social media."
My immediate family live in enough countries that the sun virtually never sets on us. We seem to do fine with SMS, email, video conference calling.
It all depends on how much you want to change - I agree the least resistance option for many is facebook, but it really doesn't take much to not use it.
I was scheduled to fly from London to Milan to help setup a new office when we had some issues with a Sun Server in our Frankfurt office not responding.
After spending several hours on the phone to the desktop support person in the office including getting them to power cycle the server and not getting anywhere, we decided that I would fly to Frankfurt, deal with that issue and then head onto Milan.
Got to Frankfurt and into the office to find that the keyboard for the Sun was unplugged - if anyone remembers those early Sun boxes, they did not like to come up without a keyboard.
Plugged the keyboard in, rebooted the server and back to the airport - total time in the office about 15 mins.
"but I know that in the UK and EU it can be literally months, especially if the employer initiates the separation. Is the expectation that the employee doesn't actually show up for work during the notice period and the pay for that length of time is severance? Because certainly I have never had a job I could do, at all, without access to my employer's computer systems."
Yes it happens in the UK, people can be put on gardening leave and basically get paid to sit at home until the end of their notice period. They are not able to start another job in the meantime because they are still employed.
Often the company and employee will negotiate to reduce this amount of time for a cash payout.
You can check a bit.ly url by appending a + to it. This causes bit.ly to show you the original URL and the date it was created.
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It's not worth the effort, I just ignore all bit.ly links and never follow them. If it is important, send me the full link so that I can at least visually verify that it is going to the right site.
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