Posts by Mendy

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

An alternative would have been to use a 'rubber duck' - though this might have taken longer to procure.

Cancer patient forced to make terrible decision after Qilin attack on London hospitals

Re: Hackers are responsible for what they do, but not solely.

"And if stuff is life or death or basic infrastructure, your tech should never touch the public internet"

NHS policy is that services should now be on the public internet (and hence secured accordingly). I think part of this is that there had been an assumption that N3/HSCN was secure but we were getting almost as many port scans etc. from compromised machines as we were on the internet.

Re: Work to hack everything helps.

Related to that we've found it quite beneficial for managers and whoever has seen these things in the paper to come to the meetings and ask why whatever happened here wouldn't happen to us. They go away reassured, we make sure we're not going to fall foul of anything we should have been aware of.

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

Bridge Design

"Back in the Day" we (or rather the users) were using a program called SuperStress to review a bridge - but it was somewhat bigger than normal.

We ended up having to temporarily strip every PC in the vacinity so the chap doing the work had the massive 32mb required to get the job done.

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

What should one use now, if anything?

Aside from being an apparently okay product the advantage was always that if anyone were to have my "dick pics" I'd like it to be the country I have no plans to visit.

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

They also came in handy for the C&W 50p max-cost deal they did at weekends.

The challenge for teenage me being to see how close I could get to 48 hours without a parent trying to use the phone.

Re: Demon

Ahh happy days.

Though despite naming our qwtf clan the Demon Dispatchers in reference to the subscriber magazine I don't think we ever managed to get any swag out of them.

Future Range Rovers will report pot-holes directly to councils

Re: What a great idea

"Unfortunately I don't see how I can choose to spend my money on pot-hole repair."

This is something it's worth contacting your local councillor about as they can and do (within the constraints you mentioned) influence where money is spent. Trunk roads and Motorways are the responsibility of central government though.

"I believe (I read it on the internet...) that damage to your car caused by driving into a pothole which has not been reported to the the council is your problem, and if it has been reported it's their problem."

It's a bit more complicated than that. As I remember it (in days of higher funding)...

If a problem has been reported to the council and they have not fixed it in an adequate time for its severity they are liable.

Otherwise a council has a defence under s58 of the Highways act if they can prove they weren't negligent in maintaining the highway. A council would have a policy for how often they would check different classes of road (so perhaps 3 times/year in the town centre, once in a remote location). The council would then dispatch a chap to go down the road and record any defects they found which if sufficiently serious would be fixed.

So - if you had damaged your car the process in addition to asking the council if they knew about the defect would be to ask for their inspection records to see if they covered that role. If they had you might also argue that the defect was of a kind that must have been present at the last inspection so they missed it.

Some councils have(had) decided that rather than spend money on a legal defence it was generally better to settle out of court rather than pay the costs associated in defending the claim.

"So, reports generated and sent automatically (at least in Chelsea) can only be a good thing."

Not entirely - at least from the council perspective. In an ideal world a council would never fix pot holes. Pot holes are (by area) very expensive to fix (perhaps less so than legal liability) and are just a temporary solution. The most efficient way of maintaining the network is to monitor and predict the wearing of entire sections of road (such as by using HGV traffic estimates) and then replace it at once before any appear.

It's a bit of a vicious circle as the less money a council has for preventative maintenance the more potholes will appear and the more of their budget will be taken up with these inefficient stop gaps.

YES! It's the TARDIS PC!

Tools

Do you need a sonic screwdriver to get into it?

Bury council defends iPads for binmen

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

I've implemented similar things in a former life.

A typical authority could be responsible for collecting waste from thousands of streets, each of which needs assigning to a particular route to be done by a particular truck on a particular schedule. There could be special notes about where to find the bins for certain properties or warnings based on past experience. Some comments have suggested paper maps and it's quite possible this is what they do now but it can be a full time job keeping these up to date (costing more than the cost of the technology). For bin collection failure to keep these manual records up to date is self-correcting as people will complain if they're missed, in other areas such as safety inspections omissions can go some time without being noticed.

If the truck has an up to date list of the route (perhaps operating like a 'TomTom') then it makes things a lot simpler. It also means that there is less reliance on local knowledge which allows routes to be reassigned and can cut down on the amount of overtime. There is also the potential to look at route optimisation to save time and petrol. It could also be used to allow the operators to record issues they've spotted that they can't deal with themselves such as graffiti or fly-tipping.

As to the hardware itself councils tend to be split between those that will only buy mil-spec (Toughbooks etc.) and those which will buy general consumer kit. While the more expensive kit is 'better' it can cost thousands more than an equivilent off the shelf product and based on the experiences of peers consumer kit seems to be fine, especially if you have a few spares. Another thing to remember is that it's not just managers who like shiny gadgets, half the battle in one of these projects is getting the workers to take to using the technology and if an Apple product can help with this it's a plus.