Posts by Sgt_Oddball 2317 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2010
The thing is.... The 2019 last Intel Macbook Pro also suffered from issues (specifically having a too short monitor ribbon cable) so you'd think they would trying to avoid repeats of that?
(For the record, I've got one, already had the screen replaced once under warranty - it's a company machine so I'm not hugely invested in Apple. It was a surprise though as the thing has barely moved since I got it, just open and closed once a day)
The thing about that idea is that the tanks tend to be very strong in a very linear direction. Landing the things on Mars intact would be possible (see SpaceX for details) but getting it into a usable orientation would be somewhat more challenging without alot of specialist equipment to hand to lay them down without having them crush like a soggy paper straw.
Also once they have landed they'll need a huge amount of work to turn them into something usable (think taking the pumps off, the ends maybe, possibly adding a window or two).
You'd be far better served landing some inflatable, airtight tents and just letting the rocket bodies crash so they can be recycled into something more practical rather than using them insitu.
Now, if you just left them in orbit... That's a different and more practical measure since an orbiting station would pretty much be a must.
The Peak Alum works (near Ravenscar in North Yorkshire) used to import the stuff in bulk from Newcastle pubs and other large cities on the North East Coast....
They used to use it by the barrel for making dye fixes.
The unfortunate thing is that no-one wants to ship empty barrels back to those cities. They did however make butter locally, so that was shipped back in lieu of being empty. The barrels were coated inside with salt then shipped off... Rinse and repeat.
Pretty sure they weren't the only Alum works doing this and it goes someway to explain why you see both salted and unsalted butter these days...
Yum.
Wow... And I thought I came from a deprived town (went to two different secondary schools, both with good metal bashing/woodworking shops, music rooms, the electronics lab was in the second of the two).
All public schools, no private nonsense. The first seemed happy to just label me as thick because of dyslexia but the second one gave me a shot at the top classes, the result? I only dropped from the first to second class in English lit/lang.
Maybe then we're asking the wrong question of if tech can improve things but more we should be asking how we can give all an equal crack at education?
At the age of 7 (local authority experiment for heavily dyslexic kids) I was always a hands on kind of child.
As such being given all work via a laptop at first would have been fascinating but after the first week or two I'd want to be back playing with the toys the school had. I mean think about it, does everyone's home have a science lab, a music room (soundproofed so your Dad working shifts isn't woken up again, ratty as hell), a Design and Tech rooms with etch tanks, soldering irons and metal workshops?
Not everyone learns by sitting still. Some of us do so much better by doing, not reading.
In my household we're lucky enough to have a few spare laptops for the kids to work on but whilst the eldest got on well with it. The youngest struggled, mainly because neither myself or my wife was constantly available to help.
Having willing parents is fine, but attempting to have the kids engaged and doing classwork over the daytime instead of the evening was a huge struggle.
This debate doesn't take into account that some parents still worked over Lockdown which made supervision of the kids difficult to put it mildly (my daily average for meetings is 4+ hours a day. The wife wasn't even in the house since she's a dentist).
Thankfully we were lucky enough to have keyworker status for my wife and after explaining my own work situation the school did take them in when allowed. I'm also aware not everyone had this available to them.
It does however make for an interesting point, has there been any research yet over which has benefitted children the most? Being in school, being at home with both parents working or having one or two parents furloughed? Did access to tech change any of that?
It's also good to keep track of new threats as they occur. Whilst for the most part there's not that much to change year on year but as time goes on things change.
Even this years list has 3 new listings. These are worth paying attention to because arrogance that you're secured against last year's list does not mean you're covered for this year's too.
Remember, those seeking to do bad things have to be right once. It's a devs responsibility to never let them be right (it's also on management to ensure that checks and balances are in place and occur regularly as no dev should be an island)
Why laptops with grayscale LCD had a dimming slider. Always felt like a pointless thing since no-one in their right mind would turn it down unless they were some kind of psychopath who liked ghostly text on the screen.
Though I do miss the old early 90's laptop keyboards. They always felt so solid to work on.
It's been on my 'to finish' list for far too long.
I have however upgraded to a better graphics, sound and monitor since I last tried. And now have a small, claustrophobic room with my pc set up in...
I might have to find some time when the wife and kids are elsewhere and try again (I do hope it supports ultrawide... And the new headphones should help pick out the slightest of sounds now).
Have a HIK vision system at home (came with the house).
I can route traffic to a cloud based login system through HIK's servers (Europe based in my instance) or through a firewall hole (via changed ports, redirected, encrypted traffic etc) and I've not seen any traffic going places it shouldn't when I've listened to what it's upto.
The irony of sorts is the previous owner worked for EDF on nuclear reactor design so the sort to have sensitive stuff and if trusted it, I don't think I've got too much to worry about. (it's also on multiple occasions made local oiks nope away from the end of the drive after they spotted the cameras, that and the large gravel with a nice 'crunch' sound with each step).
Once equipment is in the hands of users how much control a business has over its use is somewhat limited.
I mean if we're going to take this stance over Chinese CCTV cameras, should the same scrutiny be offered on British bombs sold overseas? Maybe Colt small arms in the US should be implicated if some PMC commits a war crime? How about pressing Intel/AMD to make steps to stop hackers using their CPU's? How about blaming car manufacturers for drink driving?
It's the same ignorance that somehow thinks we can use technology wrongly to think of the children (as opposed to honest police work...).
Nose to tail traffic because there's nothing like having a busy A road go from dual carriageway to single and back again... And the engine overheating light comes on. Slow enough not to cool the engine, fast enough that I couldn't stop the engine.
Cue turning the heating on full blow - high heat. Did the trick in saving the engine but cooked the occupants somewhat.
Whilst a much lorded ideal, do you honestly think the earth will ever be fixed?
If so, then when will it be fixed?
Spending on projects like these as wasteful as it might first appear, can often bring in a large number of secondary benefits to industry, economies and yes, even the environment (if millions was not spent on various launch vehicles then things like weather satellites, atmospheric monitoring satellites, observation satellites would not exist).
Sometimes it more than worthwhile to do these things because the benefits can be numerous and immeasurable. Not to mention, satisfying our curiosity.
Think of the hijinks that could ensue using a drone mounted up with a speaker... Imagine a whole swarm of them (some really dinky ones holding the tweeters and some bigger drones for the sub-woofers) at an outdoor festival or rave party.
It'd be quite something to have a speaker array airborne above a crowd.
Alternatively, having a lens speaker to whisper into peoples ears from a distance if only to troll them. No end to the fun*!
* until the batteries run out, natch.
Does this AI figure out the users 'intent' ? I mean yes some content is obviously vile and should be treated as such but what of a user taking a photo on a beach with a naked toddler running off, refusing to be restrained by a 'bathing suit' happens to be in the background? Or if the kids are being cute in the bath so you take a family pic? What of having a group of children dancing in the back of a camper van at a communal meet up and one of them decides his clothes aren't for him (I dare not guess the reasons why)?
As always with these things I suspect nuance will be lost (probably because the devs are looking for it on a map of France) </sarcasm>
The only reason I ever learned to code ASP classic after getting asked by a local company to fix a badly borked site.
Tons of near identical code on multiple pages and not a single common functions or sub between the lot of them (that alone removed about 2/3rds of the errors).
Otherwise, having a team of multiple other devs that I work with these days does mean that we communicate and give eyeballs on each others work to stop such giant acts of stupidity. Pretty sure I couldn't go back to working with only one other dev any more.
Card payment services? Alot of them use an embedded iFrame to offload liability within the PCI-DSS compliance framework. Think of a large company with many different brands taking payments, do you a) Certify each and every site to the top PCI-DSS level 1 merchant compliance with all the security checks that entails, b) Create a separate entity to handle all payments for all sites and use an iFrame to handle the payment (thus meaning no money is put through each individual site but only the payment service, and only needs one site to be fully scrutinised). Or c) Hand it over to a 3rd party provider like PayPal for example... again via an iFrame.
Now amended to 40TB a day which makes a big difference to the headline.
Though doesn't feel that big to me... Considering the small distie I used to work for could push around 100GB a day when price lists changed and the API got hammered about 10 years ago so 40TB for 1000x + customers/users seems quite reasonable.
You've never had the fun of tinkering with IOS have you?
It wouldn't surprise me at all if it didn't bother listening to the commands lovingly mashed into either the SSH command or if they're more locked down via a RS-232 to ethernet adapter and minicom software. Janky does not come close.
It's not quite as rage inducing as handling HP's iLO cli but close.
I feel like I should see if I can find a rack mount since I've got space in the basement wooden rack for more servers...
Bring it out every now and again and try to do something even remotely useful with it.
*checks eBay.....*
On second thoughts let's not. Especially since there's only blade servers available for sane money. The only one I could get home and run is £2,400 (free shipping, bonus!) so sod that for a game of soldiers.
Ditto, if its something that can cost me money then I don't save it to browser. If it's something with personal info that isn't important then I use slightly off data (think changing a year, being one street over or a non-existent number, wrong phone number) and then save password to browser.
That said i do have a cypher book, written in fountain pen with my left hand whilst drunk for certain passwords on infrequently visited sites. I wonder if I should consider burning... Especially since even I can't make out what I attempted to write.
Just fine for any length of time without issue then I'd put good money on it being caused by poor maintenance.
Think a nut on two of them where the wheels are being loose enough to contact, knocking one of them enough to hit another then topple over.
Either that or something started to escape one of the baskets removing clearance.
Any which way, it wasn't catastrophic and seems to have been handled well.
Twitters pretty bad too.
Fairly sure by this point that anyone with more than a couple of numbers in their account name should be banned.
What gets me about all of the social media companies is that insane, dangerous crap is given the same weight as talking about the weather.
And like having a soapbox with a few standing around already, it never takes much to draw in a crowd.
It also should have rules about adding titles to names someone spouting off on one whilst being a "Dr" shouldn't be allowed (same goes for professor etc) and even then only if their specialism is openly declared (who wants to be given a lecture in how bad vaccines are by a homeopathic Dr? Or how 5G is controlling us by a Liberal arts professor?).
By this point the cleaners must be in on it.
I mean otherwise Simon would be cleaning up all of the extra plasterboard that's rubbed off as it's been dragged across floors, the detritus from drilling holes plus the muck from the ceiling tiles being lifted to plug cables/route vents etc.
Either that or they still haven't managed to shut down that cleaning robot *ponders thoughtfully*.
To their friends who just so happen to run a charitable organisation?
Or a charity that happens to favour/promote one of their personal pet projects?
Or perhaps even to a charity in a far-away land to provide food and clothing to exploited locals...maybe the same country that provides some of their required resources like unrefined rare earths literally dug out by hand...
Cynical? Moi? With my reputation?
5 days? That's better than what the wife got (isolate for 2 days over a weekend too....).
The thing is, she's a dentist and walking back the dates was at work. OK so far, but her phone was on the reception desk (practice rules, plus her room being lead lined doesn't lend itself to good phone signal).
So if she got pinged... Why did none of the other staff she was working with get it as well? Not one of them...
Then there's the transmission controls in place being an order of magnitude better than most work environments (something about working with transmission sources, aerosol generation and generally staring people in the mouth for long periods of time) and have only tightened up since they were allowed to pickup the drill again.
Then there's the constant testing that she takes anyway ontop of being double jabbed (she managed it before my grandma did).
That evening we went to a local brewery for some food and a few beers. We both checked in, we both were there for the same period of time, so why haven't I been pinged?
The app has no sense of nuance or finesse. Even just letting you know where the contact took place would be an advantage (where you sat having a picnic in a breezy park with only one person nearby who tested positive or locked in an airless office with twenty someone others who came down with it? Who knows...)
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