Posts by Random Handle

I work therefore I ache: Logitech aims to ease WFH pains with Ergo M575 trackball mouse

>The problem with your fingers is that ALL of the tendons that move them pass through the carpal tunnel

CTS is down to wrist posture not finger use - musicians rarely get carpel tunnel syndrome despite many 10Ks of hours of intense finger use, as correct wrist posture is taught (or learned though pain) early.

With the old logitech (RB-22?) and current Elecom's your thumb is still working hard (clicking, holding clicks etc) whilst fingers barely move. The thumb ball designs still require your fingers to handle clicks, hold downs so it doesn't get you off the CTS hook if your wrist is unsupported or raised.

Thumbs are pretty poor at precision generally (even simple linear movement on a surface requires rotation and both joints bending) it's why we paint with our fingers not our thumbs.

They're a cludge unfortunately. Back in the day (maybe 10 years discontinued) Logitech made the Optical TrackMan - ergonomic/off-centre trackball where the thumb handled left click and the middle 3 fingers the ball - fantastic things they were. You can still get them on Ebay though even second hand they go for over £100 .

There was some kind of patent issue (would love to know the details) which prevented Logitech continuing this design hence they switched to these awful thumb-ball or non-biased (symmetrical) centre ball designs (trackman marble etc) - all useless if you need precision, and physically uncomfortable in the case of the centre balls.

I guess it was Elecom (Japan) who owned the patent as they produce a couple of trackballs (small and huge) with the same ergonomic design as the original Trackman. The large one is corded only AFAIK, but certainly the best trackball I've used - also have a couple of the smaller versions which are cordless, though too small for my hands.

UK's Space Command to be 'capable of launching our first rocket in 2022'

Re: 12 billion announced yesterday on green stuff, another 24 billion announced today....

>Presumably, he's unaware of the concept of "out of electricity".

No chance of that with the fusion reactors he commissioned a few months back - have you forgotten him announcing £220 million for the project, more than enough to get the job done.

NHS awards £500m everything-and-the-kitchen-sink framework to a long list of resellers

Voluntary NHS IT Jobs

On an interesting related note - checkout the ad for this role (Lead Data Warehouse Developer) at a Manchester NHS Trust.

https://www.jobserve.com/gb/en/search-jobs-in-manchester,-lancashire,-united-kingdom/-nhs-volunteer-lead-data-warehouse-developer-ce26944f1ba2818d27/

No salary, but such work is it's own reward - or possibly they have been burnt in the past and want to make sure you have a clue before parting with cash.

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

>I have Samsung TVs in two rooms, and I've never seen these ads

The only thing I ever see is a small rectangular icon appearing left of the home link. In my case it always signposts the 'Samsung TV Plus' app. TV Plus main menu seems to have 'advertising' of sorts in that it pushes Rakuten and Apple TV content at the top and I don't use either service - like Britbox (which I also don't use) these apps can't be uninstalled unlike the bulk of Tizen stuff.

If you browse down to the Terms & Privacy menu in settings you can switch off 'Interest Based Advertisements' consent (which also enables the tracking) - I remember switching it off while setting up, but not being asked so I guess it's enabled by default. It's not an option which jumps out at you, but is there several items deep at the bottom of menu.

Legal complaint lodged with UK data watchdog over claims coronavirus Test and Trace programme flouts GDPR

Re: But think of the <s>children</s> patients

>Quite. I get that they may have some need of it during the pandemic, and that the pandemic may last a few years. But 20? Hmm....

The data will be of value in preparing for future pandemics - flu hasn't gone away and Covid has arrived closely on the heals of two other potential horrors.

Palantir etc can clearly see the commercial value in a huge transmission dataset, particularly one where populus and uk gov do the intensive and expensive leg work for them.

Would be nice if someone was arguing for maintaining a freely available resource which doesn't breach individual privacy for academics and public health to pour over. Maybe next time.

Ofcom measured UK's 5G radiation and found that, no, it won't give you cancer

Re: I'll wait it out.

> if you like, of having a 500 W incandescent light bulb strapped to your head

Strapping even a 5W UV source to your head will cause PTCH mutation in the mitogenic Sonic Hedgehog pathway which is responsible for many thousands of cancer deaths every year. Truth is often stranger than fiction.

I'm sure you'll find credible experts to pronounce 5G is safer than sunshine, but the problem for the tinfoil hat brigade is no-one credible will ever say it is 'safe'.

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

Re: What protections are there for individuals?

>This is what the politicians and NHS execs. don't understand.

They don't care - this a lottery win for those politicians and execs a few years down the line. They can even kid themselves it's for the greater good.

Internet Society says opportunity to sell .org to private equity biz for $1.14bn came out of the blue. Wow, really?

Re: Vote with your feet, folks.

>It's simple. If you own an .org domain, simply do not renew it.

Or renew it now for the next 20 years @ $250 - pushes it into the someone else's, I'll probably be dead by then and certainly won't care anyway, problem box...

YouTube thinkfluencer Siraj Raval admits he plagiarized boffins' neural qubit papers – as ESA axes his workshop

Re: The sad thing is

>The sad thing is that using other people's work with proper & generous attribution would have had far more value to him than presenting himself as a guru.

Perhaps - but then again there are precedents which suggest he might end up on the back of a 1 bitcoin note in 250 years or so.

An Army Watchkeeper drone tried to land. Then meatbags took over from the computers

Re: Army culture vs Air Force culture

>the WW1 RFC only let officers fly planes because they were assumed to be more intelligent and better educated than the enlisted ranks

Promotion was automatic on qualification - plenty started from humble beginnings, observer, mechanic etc. James TB McCudden for instance - probably the greatest British pilot of WW1.

Not very Suprema: Biometric access biz bares 27 million records and plaintext admin creds

Re: Incredible

>And this is only what they've found...

More will doubtless turn up - a large scale fingertip search is underway.

Server at web host 1&1 Ionos decides to take unscheduled day off, sinks a bunch of sites

>I didn't notice anything yesterday either

I've a dedicated server there - it went down at 2am and came back up at just after 11am.

I rang support at 2.30am, got through immediately but was told there would be no-one to take a look until about 6am - which tallied with the fact that the IONOS service status wasn't undated until 6.50am.

Definitely a drop in support service though - last time I had an issue at this time of day (a dead disk dropping out of an array) someone was throwing in a new one within about 30 mins.

Ethiopia sits on 737 Max report but says pilots followed Boeing drills

Re: Class Action?

>Boeing, in collusion with the FAA, deserve to be sued out of existence by the relatives of those they killed.

Given Ralph Nader's niece was killed on the flight, that's not unlikely.

Liz Warren: I'll smash up Amazon, Google, and Facebook – if you elect me to the White House

Re: Good plan

>It's just doing what countless others have failed at before, from AOL to Yahoo, or G+.

Succeeding at what countless others have failed at before...

>Admittedly I don't use it so perhaps I'm missing something, but it's just a communications platform isn't it?

Nope, for many 100s millions their ecosystem is already 'The Internet' - in meatspace it's rather more frightening in its recent influence and potential influence....

....and if the crypto dev hiring (and disappearing under NDA) has passed you by, you should definitely have a genuine tremble at the inevitable ICO. Facebook may well become the world's largest economy.

Is your kid looking at GCSE in computer science? It's exam-only from 2022 – Ofqual

Take a look at a past paper - it might cheer you a little:

https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/computing/AQA-85202-SQP.PDF

>They used to give you a made-up programming language on the paper, IIRC.

I quite like the (AQA) course - it's difficult in comparison to some of the other GCSEs my daughters are doing. They use psuedo-code and flow charts for sketching - then write it in C, Java and Python. Most of the content is really fundamentals of computer science though, the programming project is only 20 hours officially.

You get a sense of the course priorities and weightings here:

https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/computer-science-and-it/gcse/computer-science-8520/specification-at-a-glance

Microsoft: Come and play in our Windows SandBox

Re: Erkk!!!

> "Nothing is persisted".

> Persist is an INTRANSITIVE verb. How about "Nothing persists"?

How would we know if nothing persists simply because there wasn't anything persistable?

Dixons Carphone smarting from £440m loss as it writes down goodwill on mobile biz

Re: hate it. use it

>I remember the days I used to buy new handsets all the time, back in the day. Nowadays, I find the efforts to persuade me to upgrade laughable.

Hence planned obsolescence, welded-in batteries and short support cycles. No persuasion is now necessary.

Former headteacher fined £700 after dumping old pupil data on server at new school

>Is there a transcript of the Court session, and/or the ICO's findings available?

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2018/12/former-headteacher-prosecuted-for-unlawfully-obtaining-school-children-s-personal-information/

(Although this guy is Darren and not David!)

It's 'nyet' again, yet again, for Kaspersky: Appeal against US govt ban snubbed by Washington DC court

Re: Ban the code!

>We don't want code from a company based in Russia written by the lowest bid developers in India.

It's actually a UK based company - they moved everything into a holding company registered here over 20 years ago.

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

Re: Papa can you hear me?

>we all know they are a front for the milk marketing board !

Watch out there's a Humphrey about

International politicos gather round to grill Dick, head of Facebook policy, on data slurping

Re: Ahh...

>So he's the Dick head of Facebook policy.

Actually he's Baron Dick Head of Facebook Policy to you, pleb.

Still using Skype? Good news! After HOURS of meetings, Microsoft reckons it knows when you're Not Active

>Friend of mine is still 'Away' but not offline on an iPad after about a year of not using it and uninstalling it.

It's approaching 2 years since a former colleague of mine died - poignantly Away according to Skype.

Game over for Google: Fortnite snubs Play Store, keeps its 30%, sparks security fears

Re: A free to play game

>but there's still no way to declare anything other than Google trusted

Yes there is - and for almost a year now:

I know there's a need for shock horror, Google is dead type headlines - but Google actually added the functionality specifically to facilitate side-loading and enable trusted third-party app stores.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/making-it-safer-to-get-apps-on-android-o.html

Who fancies a six-core, 128GB RAM, 8TB NVMe … laptop?

Re: What does it run?

>Dell's already sorted that out for you.

They're also certified for RHEL

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

Re: We're gonna need a bigger board

>and socks teleported out of our washing?

'Oh my God, it's full of socks'

Developer mistakenly deleted data - so thoroughly nobody could pin it on him!

Re: Vacuum??

>This being a UK site and all shouldn't it be "Dyson" up the data??

....that would mean rsync to a cheap NAS in Malaysia

UK ICO, USCourts.gov... Thousands of websites hijacked by hidden crypto-mining code after popular plugin pwned

Re: Don't load third-party scripts

> Concretely, what this means, is that they should host their own instance of the service

That messes with Browsealoud's business/licensing model - and it's far from a cheap product. Browsealoud pre-dates the (W3C) Web Speech API which is supported by all current browsers, trivial to implement and should have made the product redundant anyway.

Fancy coughing up for a £2,000 'nanodegree' in flying car design?

Re: And the job opportunities?

>11-plus?? Showing your age there, mate.

We still have the 11 plus in this neck of the woods - though there's there's the shopping centre from hell built over Avro and Ford - so little chance of flying cars I think.

Meltdown/Spectre week three: World still knee-deep in something nasty

Re: Intel "shouldn't be selling CPUs?"

>Maybe it's a good opportunity to slow down and take stock

First thing the CEO did.

Shhh! DropBox 'quietly files' for IPO

>I'd go for storage through Pied Piper

https://sia.tech/

siacoin is getting mined in reasonable quantities too - colour me unconvinced, but it's a thing.

Former ZX Spectrum reboot project man departs

Re: Fingers in my ears....

>My Vega+ will definitely arrive late on time, I’m sure of it.

...keep the faith!

You'll be playing Bandersnatch on it any day now

Used iPhone Safari in 2011-12? You might qualify for Google bucks

>Just ask Google...

Actually you can - just get a 'takeout' using Google's (not) well publicised 'Download Your Data' feature.

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

Re: Just iPhones?

They're looking into iPad as well, future case maybe, but it's iPhone users only currently (according to Money Saving Expert - Martin Lewis has some involvement as advisor).

156K spam text-sending firm to ICO: It wasn't us, Commissioner

Re: 30p/text

>This is why when someone calls me, I answer. For even the minimum wage, if I can keep them going

Little bit too much effort, I say 'ooh! can you just hang on a second while I finish this', and then say 'almost done!' in a chirpy voice at random intervals while carrying on with whatever I was doing. Most cold callers are surprisingly unwilling to hang up on a potential catch - should make an app really.

Sean Parker: I helped destroy humanity with Facebook

Re: sloppy coding

>If a tag is only a parody of html, does it need closing?

...not to engage the mind in subject-object duality is the bodhisattva's practice

ZX Spectrum Vega firm's lawyers targeted by empty-handed backers

Re: Completely authentic

>unreliable yes, but they actually existed and actually eventually arrived.

...though if we'd had social media back then they would never have received the later cascade of orders needed to fix the initial botching. Not blaming social media for Vega+ which was doomed to fail with that team, but nostalgia has led us to forget how utterly, woefully useless Sinclair's management actually was.

Mythbuster seeks cash for roller skates to wear in virtual reality

Re: There's already a solution

Paintball?

UK industry bods: Re-train one million manufacturing workers to deal with new tech

Re: Picture?

>I really, really do not want to know what that picture is illustrating

Given the article content, I'm guessing they did a stock image search for 'bear shitting in the woods' and that's one of the Fire Bear guys

Review: Magic Leap and Fantasy Funding Fiasco

Re: I'm baffled.

>Why are people funding this?

Bizarre - for the money they could have those guys in Yakutia to drop the mammoth resurrection programme and breed actual miniature hand elephants.

Let's go live now to Magic Leap and... Ah, still making millions from made-up tech

Re: headhacker

>So there needs to be an eyetracking sensor and a forward looking sensor to recognize the display environment

Conversely (as the silence is deafening) - SMI had actually working (Google for IRL demos at various shows) foveated rendering with staggeringly good eye tracking via a pair of $10 mini cameras when Apple acquired them (depressingly though I guess it was inevitable someone huge would) earlier this year.

Cost in terms of sensors and processing power for rendering is pretty much cracked I think - there's already a huge weight of successful work in terms of environment sensing. I'd guess it's genuinely useful applications as much as anything which is now the challenge.

New HMRC IT boss to 'recuse' herself over Microsoft decisions

Re: What will she actually do?

>This is the kind of "boring" story that many on here would find interesting and would like to read.

Noticed HMRC've been advertising quite a few Linux/Unix devops jobs of late with a very hopeful skillset and on the kind of money you can make chirping out websites for Fleebayers...

New Amiga to go on sale in late 2017

Re: Is anyone keeping count?

>The Amiga has become the Blakes 7 of home computers.

The Babylon 5 would be a more appropriate moniker

Flash... Nu-uh! Tech folk champing at the bit to switch off life support

>I wonder how much of the problems with Flash would be solved if it was open sourced?

Most of the problems can be solved using openfl to target html5+ or native - slightly more complex to build for non-devs but the bulk of code would be re-usable and stimuli etc identical for replication. A good (honest) dev will be charging in hours and days not weeks - in-house will find it a fairly painless leap and be back on their day jobs in no time.