* Posts by commonsense

124 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2011

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Financial watchdogs want to know what traders are talking about on WhatsApp

commonsense

Re: Question - how?

So what they do is subject us to "mandatory training" courses through the "it's a Friday afternoon and I am running the click down" portal where we click Next over and over and hope to pass the "assessment" at the end.

Somehow that absolves then of any blame.

UK Parliament bins its TikTok account over China surveillance fears

commonsense
Joke

Re: social media service probably sends data about its users back to Beijing

They probably can't trust their IT security person not to use the same password for Tiktok, Twitter, nuclear launch system, etc.

Samsung fined $14 million for misleading smartphone water resistance claims

commonsense

Re: I propose a new law

Well if they're that well sealed to humid environments, why do they have indicators to detect if you've had the phone in a humid environment?

Microsoft to blockheads: NFTs and blockchains aren't welcome in Minecraft

commonsense

Trading of physical commodities without physical taking delivery has been a thing for many many decades. We've never needed NFTs to trade oil or pork bellies. Nike might be doing something sensible, but it doesn't need NFTs to do it.

(This fad of daftly expensive trainers is similarly stupid, but off topic).

Alibaba sued for selling a 3D printer that overheated, caught fire, and killed a man

commonsense

Re: These have had firmware protections turned OFF

The reason you'd turn these off is because they're all points of failure, and therefore reasons to return a faulty item.

"Fan breaks down, better not tell the user, otherwise he or she will return the item."

AMD is now following More's Law: More chips, more money, more pressure on Intel, more competition in the x86 space

commonsense

Re: Again seems history repeating itself

You mean in the same way that everything ran just fine on IA-64? Oh wait...

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

commonsense

Re: HP printers

... fixed the ‘security issue’ by not letting the printer onto the Internet.

All bets are that they'll just stick something in the driver to foist the update onto the printer through your PC instead.

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

commonsense

Re: interested in knowing how an Osman is defined

An entirely Pointless unit

UK data watchdog slaps a £500,000 fine on Cathay Pacific for 2018 9.4m customer data leak

commonsense

Re: No!

How and why is the mainframe accessible from the public internet without connecting via the VPN? You can't blame the directors for that (unless they mandated that the mainframe was accessible without those pesky login screens).

Windows 7: Still looking after business (except when it isn't)

commonsense

Windows 7 Professional

Am I right in thinking it's not running Windows Embedded, given that ATM shows a Windows 7 Professional login screen? Seems like an odd choice.

Don't use natwest.co.uk for online banking, Natwest bank tells baffled customer

commonsense

Marcus is about 1.2% at the moment. Santander 1-2-3 is 1.5% up to 20k. Inflation is 1.76% according to Google.

Quite easy to find really.

Deutsche Bank calls in AWS, Microsoft and Google to tout for cloud biz: Come in to tender, deal value unknown

commonsense

Re: Bureau

If so, what disruptive gadgets will come out of the woodwork to bring everything back locally in a decades time?

No gadgets, just the realisation that the support offered is rubbish, turnaround times aren't good enough to meet SLAs, and that it's ultimately cheaper done properly in-house.

Come to Five Guys, where the software is as fresh as the burgers... or maybe not

commonsense

Re: I'm sure they can afford support

Been a few times, every time I find the bill jaw dropping for a few burgers, chips and a coke.

But you get loads of chips, and you can load up/down your burger, and the burger is better than anything Byron, McDs, BK, Honest, GBK or any other burger joint rustles up. I like Five Guys. And they give you a free drink if you turn up and your food isn't ready.

'Windows Vista' spotted doing a whoopsie over EE's signage

commonsense

Plain text passwords?

"We'll leave it to you to work out what that log file means – we've blocked out serial numbers and passwords to protect the baffled."

Does TeamViewer log passwords in the logs? For what reason?

Well, well, well. Internet-of-Things speaker biz Sonos to continue some software support for legacy kit after all

commonsense

Yeah right

I thought this time last week they'd realised that the old hardware had been stretched to its technical limits?

What's the betting that interoperability between legacy (i.e. a little bit old) and new kit will get glitchier and glitchier as updates come along?

Totally Subcontracted Business: TSB to outsource entire IT estate to IBM for a cool $1bn after 2019 meltdown

commonsense

Re: So, if things go wrong again

IBMTSB - I Bet (my) Mortgage Titsup Service Beckons.

Leaks point to Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra with mammoth 108MP camera and ... what? 16GB of RAM

commonsense

Re: I thought

There is one advantage, if you look beyond the likely huge amount of noise in anything other than perfect lighting. You can crop a lot more and still have a usably large image.

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

commonsense

I think "pickpocketing" really meant to be "theft from the store where it's hanging, by opening up the package in the store and nicking the contents". Cardboard wouldn't prevent that, though in this age of online shopping, it's a dying requirement.

commonsense

Re: Remote bricking

I see, thanks for the clarification. They're effectively automating the process of taking a sledgehammer to it and sending them video evidence with today's newspaper. That's one way to kill the second hand market I guess.

Every other "trade up" program I've seen involves you posting the old device back, which puts the onus on the company offering the scheme to responsibly dispose of the item. This really does smack as a "recycling? Not my problem, Jack" scheme.

commonsense

Re: "the backlash is a wee bit overdone"

It's still Christmas... the interns are still running the show. Hopefully normal service will be resumed next week.

commonsense

Remote bricking

How exactly does this work? You buy a new Sonos, you give them the serial number of the old one, and they remotely brick it? If so then that's wrong for so many reasons. Somebody needs to legislate that devices cannot be remotely updated without positive confirmation from the user.

2 more degrees and it's lights out: Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix's toasty mobile bit barn

commonsense
Holmes

Re: I'll never really understand...

Jordan scored points in every season they competed.

Boeing, Boeing, gone! CEO Muilenburg quits 'effective immediately'

commonsense

Re: Fault tree

It's a culture and direction issue. The ability and choice to do dangerous things on the cheap comes from a culture of cost cutting and lack of control, which typically comes from the top.

What's that? Encryption's OK now? UK politicos Brexit from Whatsapp to Signal

commonsense

The feature also prevents a nefarious app recording or screenshotting what you are doing without you being aware, which is a more useful function.

This isn't Boeing very well... Faulty timer knackers Starliner cargo capsule on its way to International Space Station

commonsense

Re: Can't help thinking...

Ah, trotting out the whole "you've never done this before so you're not in a position to comment or have an opinion" line. I suppose you have no opinions on politics, having never been an MP, or sport, having never played at an elite level.

'Tis the season to be wobbly: HSBC online and mobile banking services suffer not one but two major outages in 12 hours

commonsense

Re: Definitely annoying...

Some go the other way, apologising and even saying "it's me, not you" even when it's not.

Google Chrome will check for leaked credentials every time you sign in anywhere

commonsense

Re: Embrace, extend....

...what comes next?

Lube up.

Just in case you were expecting 10Gbps, Wi-Fi 6 hits 700Mbps in real-world download tests

commonsense

Re: My Mantra

Check your TV. Mine has a 100mbps ethernet interface, which is slower than what the WiFi is capable of.

Intel end-of-lifing BIOS and driver downloads for dusty hardware

commonsense

The Reddit post linked in the article contains downloads which combined weigh in at less than 2MB. Two fucking megabytes.

The last version of their new UHD drivers for Windows 10 64 alone weigh close to a fucking gigabyte:

Interesting. A video card back then would have had about 2MB video RAM, compared to one today which would have something of the order of 4-8Gb.

Apples and oranges I know, but at a simple level would you not expect driver complexity to increase roughly proportionally with the complexity of the device.

Apple's credit card caper probed over sexism claims – after women screwed over on limits

commonsense

Re: Different things

It's not a waste of time though, is it? Some cards give you cashback for pretty much nothing. No annual fee. Some give you points which, if you spend a fair bit, can easily cover a long haul business class upgrade or two, which outweighs the fee.

If you're not bothered about points or APR, then why have you got a card with a fee at all? There are plenty of fee-free cards out there.

Microsoft Surface Pro X: Windows on Arm usable at long last – but, boy, are you gonna pay for it

commonsense
Facepalm

Opportunity missed

Why couldn't they have made the Surface Pro 7 with the same form factor, keyboard, pen, etc. as the Surface Pro X? That would make the SP7 a worthwhile (cosmetic, at least) upgrade on a fairly stagnant SP line, and also if you happened for some reason to need both an Intel and an Arm device, you could share the same pen, charger, keyboard across both devices.

commonsense

Re: the device starts at £999 for the 8GB version

It's not storage, it's RAM. Though £56 per Gb is still ridiculous money.

A cautionary, Thames Watery tale on how not to look phishy: 'Click here to re-register!'

commonsense

Re: Why no subdomain!?

You run it on one record, it works fine, and then let it run through every record, and then see it fail miserably when it gets to "Mr Customer O'Water"

Three UK goes TITSUP*: Down and out for 10 hours and counting

commonsense
Joke

Three customer here...

I hadn't noticed... the service is the same as it always is.

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

commonsense

Re: My relentless workload...

Whilst we're at it, let's stick "mental health" in there, because it's not OK to not understand mental health issues, and I really have had mental health issues from making loads of cash from other peoples' work.

That lithium-ion battery in your phone or car? It has just won three chemists the Nobel Prize

commonsense

Re: Isn't Chemistry, Physics?

Genuine question - why is this downvoted? Mathematics does not rely on testing and empirical evidence, which I thought was what was fundamentally what science is.

Brighton perv cops community service for 'hacking' women's Facebook accounts

commonsense

I don't seem to remeber that looking at pics of scantilly clad women was a crime..

Having sex with a woman isn't a crime either, but doing so without their consent is.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

commonsense

Re: Quality Control

"You have purchased a premium product manufactured by a premium product manufacturer."

Ah this old chestnut. a.k.a. You've bought something expensive, you should expect to have your pants pulled down to use it as you'd expect to. After all, you must be rich so what does it matter?

Contrary to what Apple marketing purveys, Apples are not special phones. The lithium in their batteries isn't mixed in with Apple Fairy Dust.

You wouldn't take a 10 year old Rolls Royce the a back street mechanic...Bit lest not forget. It's a message in the settings. Nothing more!

No, but you might take it to a Rolls Royce specialist. You know, somebody who knows what they're doing but doesn't charge as much as the dealer. You'd be a little miffed if, when taking your Rolls Royce back, it said on the dashboard "Cheapskate alert! You should have taken it to our shiny dealers. Attention future buyers, this car hasn't been looked after."

Lyft pulls its e-bike fleet from San Francisco Bay Area after exploding batteries make them the hottest seat in town

commonsense

Re: Looks like the technology hasn't been properly studied

What's with this growing trend of capitalising words that don't need capitalising (or italicising or given any specific emphasis)? Is it a Generation Z 2.0 thing that I've missed?

Coincidentally or not, everybody I know who writes in this style is a berk.

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

commonsense

Re: not just you

Ah yes, the days of "it must be the spring that's broken", in the face of unreadable data errors.

Have an upvote.

commonsense

LS120

Those LS120 SuperDisk things were a complete joke. A disk that worked in one drive often wouldn't work in another. It meant countless trips back and forward to the university computer room (do such things exist anymore?) to re-download whatever it was I was trying to transfer. The overall time taken meant I was probably better off just using a big pile of normal 3.5" disks.

Boeing's 737 Max woes trigger BEEELLIONS in losses – and that's just for the latest quarter

commonsense

Re: Will the 737 MAX ever be safe?

Please point us to where they say it, we are all agog.

Ah, the royal 'we'. Um...

Speed and altitude are the classic "burn our way to a safe zone" kneejerk drilled into any pilot but, in this case, the speed was the wrong thing to do

commonsense

Re: Will the 737 MAX ever be safe?

Do you think it's acceptable to design a system for which you should do the exact opposite to what intuition tells you to do, and opposite to what you would do with a previous version of that system?

AI solves Rubik's Cube in 1.2 seconds (that's three times slower than a non-AI algorithm)

commonsense

Re: chess

Fair point, reasonably explained.

The problem is that you started talking about cars vs running, and the physical actions of playing chess, which does not illustrate your point at all well. Not accepting that a computer can beat a human at chess because nobody has yet made it look like a humanoid and physically move pieces without being tethered to a power source has no bearing on the result.

commonsense

Re: chess

It's not at all like saying a car can run faster than a human - the point is being missed entirely. The difficulty in solving a Rubik's cube or playing chess isn't the physical effort required to rotate the blocks or move pieces. The difficulty is in the thinking (without using a dumb algorithm) what to do next.

Would you say that playing a chess game on a computer screen where there are no physical pieces is not playing chess?

Blackburn ain't big enough for the both of us: Mr Creamy and Mr Whippy at the centre of new ice-cream war

commonsense

Re: They've got...

Cops shrugged: "We have received a complaint of nuisance,"

I hope they don't hand out a dra-cone-ian penalty.

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

commonsense

TL;DR

Before: "We design on a computer. They are then physically tested and certified in the real world before we put them in service with real people on them, to make sure it's safe."

After: "We design on a computer. It's safe."

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