Posts by druck 4227 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
An alternative to the dog is blaming your children, well maybe just the 6 month old now, as the 2½ year old will happily betray you, laughing hysterically "but that was you daddy". If you are without your own children, you can try someone else's; "aww, has he/she got a poorly tummy".
Unfortunately for sight impaired users each version of Windows gets less friendly to assistive software. Back on NT/Win2K/XP screen readers could hook in to every application at a low level, and find out what it was writing to the screen, allowing a full picture of text and graphics to be built up, and to improve navigation for keyboard only users. Unfortunately each step in improving security in the later OS's, has had the effective of preventing the screen reader gathering the information, and aiding in navigation. There are assitive APIs in the OS, but they fall far short of what is required to give the best experience.
With a good screen reader an experienced user can drive applications as complex as Office and Visual Studio with no difficulties - with the monitor switched off! If it wasn't for the clicking of the braille display and slight sound from the speech synthsiser through the headphones, you wouldn't know the person on the other side of the partition was visually impaired.
Actually you would, from the sheer speed which they can pull up information, being unhindered by the visual ambiguity of most applications, particular the new flat colourless Windows 10 apps, and employing far better honed memory skills to be able to go straight to the right place without having to look for it!
An when a trader is found to be selling a dodgy cable what are Amazon going to do? The same as when I pulled them up for selling equipment with potentially lethal poor quality fuseless UK style plugs - FUCK ALL.
They tried to totally avoid responsibility by saying they are just a market place - wrong - it is Amazon who take my money and the product comes from their warehouse, that makes them the seller, and the other company their supplier.
They said they would stop selling the item, but I checked and they had not, the pictures of all the fake plugs were just changed to real ones. They admitted to me that the were still selling existing stock, despite being notified how dangerous they were, after that they stopped replying to me.
I then passed it on to Trading Standards, who were not interested whatsoever. So much for consumer safety.
BlackBolt wrote:
Leaving your devices plugged in ALL night is really bad for the, so maybe if you looked after the battery a bit better, you wouldn't have such a strict view requiring a replaceable battery.
Remind me to set an alarm at 3 fucking am just to unplug the phone.
Re: Aqua Marina - Are you sure? All of those robots were in space, back in the 1970s we'd just landed on the moon, we had supersonic passenger aircraft, and were developing space planes, we could believe in the future of both space travel and robots. Now in the 2010s we are pretty much resigned wobbly earth based robots.
My wife has just bough me a smart watch - a no name Chinese one with colour touch screen for £9. The built in apps are pretty useless, and most of the notifications are annoying, but ironically it is good as just a watch, as it has a large bright display which means I can tell the time without glasses.
I told my wife about it on Monday, one turned up on the doorstep on Wednesday!
She's bought me one of each variant of model B so far. The Pi3 is going to replace the Pi2 as my ssh gateway machine, and the others are going to shuffle down the chain of media players connected to TVs, leaving my original 256MB B available for electronic projects as it was originally intended - if I ever get the chance!
But on rockets with mixture of liquid fuelled engines and solid boosters, they start the liquid fuelled engines first, and make sure they are working, before lighting the unstoppable solids. So the Shuttle, or anything else with solid boosters, can abort in exactly the same way as this did.
This would have been the ideal opportunity on bringing BT to book over their broken promises to run Openreach as an arms length organisation and finally spin it off as a truly separate business. Instead they've been given the green light to carry on the same as usual.
Particularly galling is not a thing was said about BT forcing everyone to fund their acquisition of EE via the hikes in the wholesale broadband prices (The Reg), regardless of who your ISP is (except for a tiny few that don't use the last mile).
Despite all my pre-conceptions I too ended up liking C# when I started using it. It's saving grace was that there was a commercial company supporting it on non Microsoft platforms, but not that's gone now. We can look forward to a $400m to $500m write down in a years time, mono rotting, and Core.NET changing in incompatible ways on every second day of the week.
I think anyone with a PPL and a bit of help from ATC could bring a modern passenger jet down safely.
Where as a non flyer would be overcome by the complexity of the cockpit, and frightened of crashing when taking the control manually, a pilot can find the few key controls that count, and know the fundamental rules of flight aren't any different. What you do have to take in to account is the slower reaction of a larger aircraft, and the higher landing speeds involved.
Trouble is every time I board every commercial plane now, I'm hoping that they'll make request for anyone who can fly a plane, and I can say yes.
The remake of Robocop is on UK TV at the weekend, I might watch it, but I really wanted to see the original again first. Went to Amazon, it's not on prime so would have to pay £7.99 to stream it, but they sell the DVD for £3.49. Ordered 10pm last night, here 8am this morning - chalk a win up to DVDs there!
AC wrote:
However, the mechanism proposed involves creating *signed* firmware which is signed using the *private key* which is held in Cupertino.So the Chinese won't be able to exploit this mechanism unless they can steal the key - which is likely to be very, very, very well guarded indeed.
Let's give Apple the choice of producing a one of piece of custom firmware with a couple of if statements comment out, which they can use and destroy afterwards, or the court can subpoena the privite code signing key.
Quite often this is down to a foreigner thinking they know English better than you do - and I'll be first to admit that English taught to foreign students is vastly better than what us natives had in 1970s schools, but in case this it wasn't.
We were porting Swiss Interbank Gateways code from one platform to another, the coding rules at their end specified English for all comments (understandable given the mix of German, French and Italian speakers in Switzerland), but I kept getting annoyed by a comment repeated thousands of times at every error handler
// DESASTERI changed all occurrences to DISASTER and even put in the change control logs that this was the correct English spelling, but blow me if they didn't change it all straight back again.
AC wrote:
I often re-wrote the helper classes & methods we were given to use, purely because they were so badly written it frustrated me to even try and use them....I would tell the lectureres I re-wrote them, why I did it and then ensure they had my updated code for future years...
I can imagine how well the egotistical bastards took that - did you managed to graduate?
I was lucky enough to get one one of the first Computer Science courses in the country using C++. The language was only a couple of years old, and the only compiler was CFront. There was no teaching books on it at the time, so the lecturer writing one based on the course. At the end of the year he gave us the draft printout of the book, and promised a pint for each mistake anyone spotted. I had a list of 10 by the next day, did I get as much as a single pint? The hell I did, and strangely enough things started getting a lot more difficult after that.
It reminds me of the old pilot joke about how many engines a plane should have. The captain says well if there is an engine failure, I want the co-pilot to tell me that it was engine number 9, and then I'll ask is it number 9 on the left or right wing?
Still not keen on flying anything batter powered though.
It's certainly not wasted providing WiFi. My wife and son spent have spent several weeks seriously ill in hospital in the last year, I was able to be there for them throughout visiting hours everyday thanks to free fast WiFi, which allowed me to WFH(ospital), and thus paying the taxes which keeps the NHS going.
Bloody tough things eagles, forget about being injured by drones, they don't flinch at taking on light aircraft!
Alan the co-owner of my old flying school (now sadly departed) was flying his Cessna 177 over the Northern Spanish mountains, when a massive wild eagle swooped down and attacked the wing of the aircraft, then flew on unharmed.
We'd might have been tempted to put it down to tall tails around the club's bar, but we saw the aircraft before it was repaired, and there was a dent and a series of 6 inch long scratches which looked very much like talon marks.
So an excellent idea for getting rid of drones, but lets just hope they aren't a bigger threat to the aircraft!
