Posts by Headley_Grange 2200 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2010
QNAP do issue firmware updates pretty frequently for both the OS and apps. Even models that their website says are out of support still get OS security updates. I only use my NAS on my local network and I've locked it out of direct access to the web using my router's firewall and I install updates manually.
"If this is all the time that the driver is logged on, then drivers can cheat the system and get paid for doing nothing"
We could all do the same, couldn't we? Turn up a work, sign in, look busy doing nothing, drink the free coffee all day, sign out, get paid, cheat the system. Why don't we?
Uber's no different from other companies in this regard - if they're going to pay their workers an hourly wage (effectively) then they'll need to make sure they're getting value from them. I doubt if the court case has resulted in a wave of philanthropic conversions at the top of Uber or among its backers, so I'd expect there to be some changes to the rules for drivers to accompany the wages and other benefits.
Every journey in a cab that's not pre-booked starts with "Do you need a cashpoint cos my card machine's not working." It's odd, because before the law was changed to make credit card surcharges illegal their card machines worked fine. The council don't care; a few years ago they almost doubled the number of Hackney licences and as a result the town's full of crap cabs which are run two or three shifts a day and look as though they haven't been cleaned properly for years. This put a couple of the long established firms out of business because they couldn't make enough money.
If I pre-book then I've got a local mini-cab firm that's OK and I've got to know a couple of the drivers who I can request for long runs, but picking a cab up on the street is a crap experience and if there were an Uber-type service that didn't treat its drivers like shit then I'd use them, even if they cost more.
This - lots.
The annoying thing is that Uber offer things that my local cabbies don't and I'd be willing to pay a small premium for - clean cabs with heaters, advance pricing, credit cards, turn up on time, bad driver reporting, etc*. The implication that they can only do this by treating their drivers like shit and, as you point out, by offloading social costs onto the rest of us, is complete bollocks.
*I've never used Uber, so this is what I understand from friends, colleagues and the internet.
When I first went contracting I bought a shiny new Mac, happy to be free of Redmond's heavy chains. Then I had to buy Office 2011 for the Mac cos all my clients used MS Office and the freeware incompatibilities were unprofessional at best and unmanageable at worst. Then I had to get an add-on for Mail cos Mac mail couldn't process calendar invites from some clients with Outlook. Then I transitioned all my mail, calendar and contacts to Outlook 2011 because one client couldn't receive my emails. Then I had to buy Parallels so I could buy Windows so I could buy MS Project cos that's what clients used and there was no Mac alternative (there is, but it took me years to find it). I've also got a 365 account because a client used Sharepoint.
Getting rid of MS products is easy if you haven't got any customers, suppliers or employees.
If the GPS antenna is on the top of the aircraft with hemispherical coverage then what happens when the plane is climbing, descending and banking? It needs more than hemispherical coverage and hence is susceptible to jamming.
Although the GPS signals are below the noise, it's a spread spectrum system with 43dB processing gain, so the jammers still need a fair bit of power and ought to be pretty easy to find by anyone who was interested enough.
The military do use GPS anti-jam antenna systems. They don't focus away from jammers, they put nulls in the directions of jamming signals.
Mostly probably not. The GNSS approaches bring them onto the final ascent and into the ILS range. ILS points straight up the runway, whereas the approaches are way off centre line.
Have a look at the following approach into Queenstown. Admittedly, it's difficult to see when they might have got on ILS, but it should give you an idea of how much they rely on GPS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhkbia1dMcI
"The US Federal Government never borrows money. It doesn't need to."
It borrows money by issuing bonds.
If the "treasuries" you're referring to in you post are Treasury-Bonds then it means that the US Fed is borrowing money from China, and paying them decent interest for the next 10 to 20 years.
What about Apple selling spares to repair shops at cost plus a reasonable mark up? I don't mind paying a reasonable price to get stuff fixed, what I object to is having to travel miles to the "nearest" Apple shop to drop it off then travel miles to pick it up. There's a non-Apple repair shop in my town. When I wanted my Mac's battery replacing they charged a lot more than Apple because when they buy the battery from Apple, Apple charges them the same for the battery as they would charge me for replacing the battery.
I understand the security aspects, but I'd be more than willing to believe that it's merely a convenient side effect of Apple's designing their products and services to lock users' wallets into their walled garden.
I bet that if Apple lost sales to its competitors because of eye-watering repairability and recycling taxes then their September new-products' USP would be longevity, standard screws and easily replaceable batteries and screens.
Remember that some of the nasty manufacturing techniques they use aren't to save money, they are to make stuff thinner, because no one is ever going to buy a device that is not thinner than the device it's replacing. Oh, except when they bring a folding phone out, in which case it will be ok to pocket a folded phone that's over 1cm thick, but until then, every device has to be thinner. I assume the Apple canteen is down to Parma ham by now and they have a whole department dedicated to making a machine for slicing it even thinner before they all starve to death.
It used to be a science - maybe it still is, but I don't work in any areas that use it now; Reliability, Maintainability and Availability - RMA. Ages ago, for military contracts we had to supply mean time to repair figures from the system down to line replaceable modules. Given that the MTTR included fault finding the RMA engineer would have rejected designs at the first design review if they included gluing things down that might ever need ungluing. I worked with one who had a pathological hatred of any fasteners and I learned to give him nut, bolt and washer counts before reviews so he didn't spend the first 20 minutes trying to count them and argue about them one-by-one. Conformal coating was a real pain. US customers assumed CC was an absolute necessity even in situations where it definitely wasn't and they often specified it, but it really messed up the MTTR.
You could have a set of standards designed by production engineers. For example, one could be battery replacement using a standard toolkit. The standard includes a model (not a real phone) that scores 10/10 and the time to replace the battery is recorded. Then Apple (or whoever) just have to demonstrate battery replacement on their device. They can use only the standard toolkit, but they can bring trained techs if they want. Time it and then apply a formula to score it based on how much longer it took than the standard model.
You could have these for a whole set of tasks - screen replacement, connector replacement, memory upgrade, keyboard repair, etc.
Then, there should be repairability sales tax added to devices price, with low-scoring devices having eye-watering levels of tax added.
Software and security updates mandatory for five years to prevent them hobbling their devices to boost sales once the repairability and supportability starts having an effect.
A clever bloke once said something like "All models are wrong. Some models are useful". It's possible to create a very useful model of, say, airflow across a F1 car's surface. It's inaccurate because it doesn't predict the motion or behaviour of individual atoms or particles at the quantum level, but it's useful because it predicts drag, downforce, brake and engine air intake flow rates, etc. - so it's accurate enough for its intended purpose. Indeed, it's so good that the F1 teams have CPU time limits placed on this modelling when they are developing the cars.
From a climate change perspective it doesn't matter if it rains on Thursday or Saturday - that's just weather. What matters is whether the amount of rain in x years time is going to be a lot less, a lot more or about the same. Do we need to build drains or reservoirs is the level of question that we need to answer.
So, if we can get better forecasting then........it still won't help because a lot of people won't believe there's a problem even when the "once a century floods" happen every year (as long as they are happening to someone else) and many of the ones that do believe in climate change will change their mind when they see how much it will cost them personally to fix either the cause or the result.
My brother and I both have black-box models of the ballistics of a cricket ball that allow us to throw, catch and hit it.
I also understand Newton's laws of motion, ballistics and I can even get a high-level understanding of the maths and physics of spin into my head.
My brother is crap at maths and physics.
One of us is a much better cricketer than the other. Have a guess which one.
Littleton Chambers provide an interesting summary
https://littletonchambers.com/commentary-on-todays-supreme-court-decision-in-uber-bv-v-aslam-and-ors/
Quotes are from the judgement, selected by Littleton. The commentary is mine - and I'm not a lawyer.
".... it can immediately be seen that it would be inconsistent with the purpose of this legislation to treat the terms of a written contract as the starting point in determining whether an individual falls within the definition of a “worker”. To do so would reinstate the mischief which the legislation was enacted to prevent."
The "legislation" is the various employee/worker protection legislation. The Supremes are basically saying that the law comes first and you can't use weasel words to get round it. Actions define the relationship, not the contract. They also said:
".... any terms which purport to classify the parties’ legal relationship or to exclude or limit statutory protections by preventing the contract from being interpreted as a contract of employment or other worker’s contract are of no effect and must be disregarded.”
So it would appear that Uber lawyers can't really get round this just by adjusting the contract. The court also said
" although the drivers were free to choose when and where they worked it was the case that, at times when they were working drivers, they were in fact workers for and under contracts with Uber London"
This is not based on the contractual definitions, but on the amount of control they had over the work they did - the driving - not the choice to drive or not.
So it would appear to me that Uber's only way to get round this is to give drivers much more control over their work when they are actually driving.
IANAL, but the Supremes seem to have come at this from a direction that makes it very hard for Uber to weasel out of it without making significant changes to the way it works. The approach (how does the law apply to what they actually do, not what they signed up to contractually) seems to be tailor made to go after some other elements of the gig economy too. Littleton's closing comment in their review of the case is:
"In allowing the appeal the Supreme Court has however made largely redundant “armies of lawyers”."
It does sound like a shit place to work. The engineers at a large company US I worked at were all on rolling 12 month contracts. If their boss didn't actively renew their contract every year then they were out of work - and the bosses took full advantage of the fact.
It's doubly shit because without a job then, unless you are very wealthy, you can't afford to be sick - or pregnant.
As you say - people don't matter in the US, corporations do, but they the people keep voting for it. Half of them consider the Democrats to be rabid socialists, whereas they'd be firmly on the right wing over here. Many Democrats consider people like AOC to be way out on the left wing, whereas she'd probably be right of centre over here.
....or you could have gone to the Royal Mail website, paid for your postage - with a whole range of tracking and insurance options - printed your label and had your parcel picked up by your local postman, who gets paid a decent wage, has all the rights which UK employment law requires and whose employer pays NI contributions on that wage and pays something close to its fair share of tax in the UK.
It might be more expensive than other couriers, but that's because Royal Mail are paying for all the benefits that most people expect from their own employers - sick pay, holiday pay, p/maternity leave, pension, but, for some reason, think are too expensive to pay for other workers.
IANL. I think that the way the Supremes worded their judgement makes it difficult for Uber to simply make small changes the contracts and then carry on as normal. The Supremes seemed to say that the concept of the "introduction app" and any wording that tries to get round UK employment law are not valid, however they implemented. Uber has control over access to the app, rides, pricing, profit, so the drivers are employees. This doesn't mean, however, that Uber can't continue to change a couple of clauses and then try to go to court again and keep working in the background.
The other problem is that employment tribunals can't set precedent. Each case has to be heard on its merits, so if the current claimants get a payout it doesn't mean that other drivers automatically get a payout - they will have to go to tribunal. However, given the strength of the Supremes' judgement I suspect that there will be plenty of lawyers willing to take this on.
The real issue is that the law needs to be changed or clarified so that the classification of "gig" economy workers as employees, contractors, etc. is clear in law. Again, IANAL, but I don't think this is that simple, especially since the likes of Uber, Amazon, etc. can just drag it out in the courts forever.
A simpler solution would be for the licensing authorities to not allow Uber to continue as long as they have outstanding litigation, as opposed to the current situation where they are assumed to be clean until proven dirty. The problem with this approach is the same problem that the authorities have with all these services (Amazon, Uber, food delivery, etc.) - they are very popular and if they are stopped from doing business many people, constituents, will be annoyed. Plenty of people don't like their business model but there are only a small fraction of us who don't do business with them because of it.
They should complain when that organization has pursued an aggressive strategy of buying its competitors in order to become a monopoly and hoovered up nearly all the advertising funding that used to keep news sites alive. The risk to democracy, particularly where news is concerned, of a single unaccountable organization becoming the de-facto communication channel on the web, is serious. The fact that most posters here don't use Facebook and therefore think it's their business is irrelevant cos we're a long way from being normal web users. Do you really think it would be OK for Zuckerberg, and Zuckerberg alone, to decide which news people see every day? - cos if things don't change that's what will happen.
@Peter Christy - your number might include some coding to make it difficult to fake registrations - a sort of checksum - which means that some of the characters are needed for the coding. Credit card numbers use the Luhn algortithm - which is used for validation rather than fake-proofing. That's how websites know instantly when your credit card number isn't valid.
More likely, the number isn't random and has other information coded in like location, date, registration type, etc. Given it's the CAA, this wouldn't be surprising.
Most likely, however, is that someone who wasn't very good at maths picked the format.
News, links and payments aside, I think that a major issue here is that services which are being described as "critical" are using a commercial platform on standard consumer terms and conditions as the principal, or even only, means of getting their information out to the people who might rely on it. I can understand that the local residents association or gift shop might be OK with Facebook as their main channel, but some of the services that have been taken out by Facebook should really have their own website, shouldn't they? I realize that Facebook (and others) are an easy way to manage broacasting and interaction and it's simpler for users, but if stuff is critical then it's clear from this episode that using the likes of Facebook isn't fault tolerant.
The grid frequency is a measure of the load vs capacity. If load and capacity are matched then it's 50Hz (UK). If there's not enough capacity then the frequency drops, and if there's too much capacity the frequency increases. It's like riding a fixed-gear bike - when you have to put more effort in - e.g. going up hill, the pedalling rate drops until you work harder to get back into your rhythm. The grid monitors the frequency and adjusts capacity and load to keep it at 50Hz.
I remember the power cuts during the miners' strike in the early 70s. Because the power was only only on for half the day they had to run the generators at higher frequency to meet the requirement of 50Hz averaged over 24h. As a result our telly slipped constantly because the frame synch was locked to the mains frequency and it was way outside the adjustment capacity of the vertical slip control. Mains powered clocks were right once a day, when they'd caught up, but unreliable at any other time. I'm not sure if still a legal requirement in the same sense that it was in the 70s.
But targeted advertising is only one of your tools. I don't see adverts: I don't watch telly, all my newspaper and mag. reading is done online and I have a couple of layers of shields that mean I don't see ads. I have a decent disposable income, which I like spending on myself, and an ambition to die with no money in the bank. How are you marketing your product to the legions of people like me who don't see your ads?
The biggest companies will only ever pay lip-service to any legislation which threatens their income and the fines will never be big enough to discourage them. Privacy should be written into the criminal law with mandatory minimum time-served sentences for directors and then they'll take notice.
"....UK independent TV got 3x - 4x as much income from advertising as the BBC did......Remove it, and the money has to come from somewhere else."
But in the pre-web days this greater income didn't mean that ITV and CH4 made much better programmes than the BBC. Sure, they made some good ones, and CH4 revolutionized cricket coverage but there wasn't a quality gap that showed, IMO. I wonder where the money went?
I don't know whether paying for links is a good or bad idea. I do know that my local (UK) newspaper has turned into a useless rag full of novelty articles and no sport or arts section because they can't afford to cover it. Only ten year ago it was a serious paper and when I first moved to this area about 25 years ago it was just about the only paper I read. Local press is important - it holds local politicians to account and is part of the glue that holds our communities together. The fact that 3 or 4 US companies have swept up nearly all the advertising revenue has destroyed local press. Google's claim about driving traffic to news sites is patently bollocks otherwise the papers wouldn't be in the awful state they are in.
Avoiding using Google directly only ignores a small percentage of its ubiquity. It's bloody hard to avoid it indirectly because so many sites use it for search, mapping and location lookup which simply don't work if you block Google across the board. You could still not use these sites, of course, and let them know that Google has lost them a customer, but some of them only allow allow direct contact through social media, so you'll need an account to complain.
The web's tightening.
If the company needs to provide support outside normal office hours then it should pay people to do it, not assume you can call them outside their working hours. So, in the example you quote then the company should have someone either in the office or at least on-call for a shift which covers Aus working time.
"Can you "upgrade" the engine on your generator to make it more fuel efficient"
It's a good point but, for the majority of phone users, a poor analogy. I'm still using my iPhone SE and none of the subsequent phones or any of the real functionality changes in the software are of any value to me and certainly not the equivalent of getting better fuel efficiency. I just looked through the specs of the iPhone 12 and there's nothing about it for me and my use-case that makes it better than my SE.
".... introduced, the "throttling" actually allowed people to continue to use their phones for longer than they could have otherwise" .... because Apple had designed software updates which took no account of older phones' capabilities. FTFY
I'm well ensconced in the Apple garden and have been for years, so not a hater by any means, but seeing features forced on me that knacker my phone as Apple doing me a favour is taking the piss.
@Jake - I realize that Americans don't generally get irony, but your comment on an article about a company trying to prevent people voicing their opinion (by voting) finishes by telling me, as a Brit, not to bother voicing my opinion. Maybe that's why you're getting downvoted.
@Danny - they could - but the US is also looking at whether the big internet companies have too much power and should be broken up. If Google chucked a strop and wielded its power as you suggest then it would give the US, and other countries, all the evidence they need that Google has got too big for its boots.
