Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

Is it also that simple on Linux?

Re: Yes, but no, but ....

The documentary film maker Errol Morris uses a half mirrored system,

You can make one: https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/how-to-look-people-in-the-eye-while-videoconferencing

I don't miss it

We used to use video heavily in the early 90s, when we had a local team working with a remote team on the US west coast. In those days the videoconferencing suite was booked up weeks head for the couple of hours overlap between the time zones.

Then it just fizzled. As it became possible to do it on a laptop, with team members staying in their offices, people just stopped. Meetings went back to phone-only, and were far more productive for it. Now I'm in multiple Zoom meetings every week, with anything from 2 to 150+ people, and almost nobody activates their camera, most don't even bother to upload a static photo.

Shared screens, now that is useful. Being able to see a document/wiki/spreadsheet/slide while it's being discussed is very useful, and avoids the "hang on, what page are we on again" comments when everyone is working from a local copy (and invariably someone still has an old version), but video? Meh. And it's not that I'm worried about what they see, I have a proper home office & I am always fully dressed ;)

do what my pals do – say there's not enough bandwidth and you need the camera off for good audio quality.

Yep, works for me when anyone does ask for video, and has the advantage of being reasonably true.

Tax working from home, says Deutsche Bank, because the economy needs that lunch money you’re not spending

Re: Tax failure to consume

Do you think owning a property and renting it out means one works harder than someone in a Sports Direct or Amazon depot?

Well, I certainly had to work harder* to earn the money to buy that property, although I pay an agent to do the actual hard work of managing the tenants, dealing with suppliers, collecting the rent, etc.

*harder in the sense of longer hours, more stress, more responsbility for many other people if I screwed up.

Re: Tax failure to consume

Ha ha ha. How naïve to think working harder equals earning more

If it doesn't, why would you do it? Masochism?

Re: Tax failure to consume

his is called disposable income, because you can dispose of it and still survive. Earn more, get more disposable income, and you can afford higher taxes and still live with more disposable income than someone who earns less than you.

Entirely true, and largely how the system works, but still doesn't answer the question. If I have twice as much disposable income as you then it's reasonable that I pay twice the tax. Why should I be expected to pay more than twice the tax just because I can afford to do so? Take that to its logical conclusion and everybody should be taxed to the point where they all end up with the same disposable income after essentials. That won't do much for the economy.

Also who says you work twice as hard as people who earn half as much as you?

Nobody, I said if. There are other ways to earn more, the "work smarter not harder" model as you suggest. That said, I'd not consider being bar staff to be exactly hard work (and yes, I've done it). Boring, tedious, poor hours certainly, but with far fewer responsibilities and less stress than many jobs that require less physical effort.

Re: Tax failure to consume

Tax the f'ing wankers, who make money than the average.

So if I work twice as hard as you, and make twice the money, I should pay more than twice the tax? Why?

Solving a big, yellow IT problem: If it's not wearing hi-vis, I don't trust it

Re: Was it Diggerland?

I'd never heard of Diggerland. Thank you! I'm off to tell my wife where we're going next time we're allowed outings again...

Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears

Re: Shows people don't read the instructions

So she didn't notice it was very hot, and didn't notice that the cup she was holding was very flexible, and she still placed it between her thighs? She can't put all the blame on McDo, and the payout was ludicrous.

Re: Press Release - Recall Order

If only He could do something about the built-in obsolescence.

Police chopper chasing a crim near an airport? Ideal time to use my laser pointer, says Texas idiot now behind bars

Re: A light sentence.

Clutha crash was caused not by a laser but a "fuel problem."

Aka pilot error.

UK tax dept's IT savings created 'significant risk', technical debt as it faces difficult conversation with Chancellor

Re: Fast, Cheap, Good: peek two.

you can't have at the same time the butter, the money for the butter and the creamer lady's arse.

If you're that well in with the dairy maid you just might (until she gets caught!).

Tim Berners-Lee asks everyone to do new biz a Solid and let him have another crack at fixing the Web's privacy

It would need to be doable for the mildly tech literate

Not just doable by them, they would have to care enough to do it, and they don't. Let's be honest, the vast majority of internet users don't give a damn about protecting their data if they can get "free stuff" instead. Until they're scammed out of the contents of their bank account, of course, and then it must be the bank's fault, never theirs.

I applaud TBL for his perseverance, but tbh I don't think he's on a winner here.

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: One down ...

Lots of chatter that he'll quit after Brexit is officially done next April.

I think that's firmly in the "wishful thinking" category. I doubt if he wanted to be the one who saw Brexit through, that's very much a poisoned chalice. No matter who was in charge, half the country will complain they went too far one way, and half that they went too far the other. I'm sure Boris would rather have had someone else get the blame for the actual agreement, and he could then have stepped up to fix the problem, with his predecessor taking the blame for the unfixed bits.

That plan was scuppered by May's stupidity at calling and losing an election, followed by her complete incompetence at getting any agreement.

I can't see him stepping down without a clear preferred successor, right now we could end up with that slimy backstabber Gove, or possibly Sunak and he's doing a useful job guiding the treasury through COVID.

He may want to go in a few years, when Brexit agreements are done & COVID isn't on the front page every day, perhaps depending on the party's mood coming up to the net election.

Re: Yay! Party time!

Remember also that this isn't a simple ballot where the voters choose between "A" and "B", there may also be congressional and senate votes and maybe a dozen statewide propositions on the paper. Counting ballots isn't a matter of just putting them into one of two piles.

Ransomware crims read our bank balance and demanded the lot, reveals Scotland's Dundee and Angus College

Re: Backups

Luckily my backup strategy was sound

That wasn't luck, it sounds more like professionalism to me.

Three rips up call centre outsourcing contract with Capita 2+ years early

Well, who'd have expected that?

"The move to Capita was anticipated to see improvements in all these areas as Capita were 'contact centre experts' with the tech and experience to really innovate and move on. In reality it didn't"

And did this source express any surprise at this outcome? There is a reason Crapita got their nickname.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Re: Didn't take long for the Brexiteers to go AC did it?

The point is that we're all anonymous, whatever handle we pick, and sometimes posing as AC is a way to have a comment stand alone, without any assumptions being made based on past postings.

Re: Didn't take long for the Brexiteers to go AC did it?

Are we to assume that you're really called John Smith?

Re: "Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border"

"A" for 'orses?

Re: No need to panic

They are likely to be a small fraction of current shipments

Actually a very large one, certainly from ports like Zeebrugge almost all loading is like that. It's quite entertaining to watch how fast the experts can load a large ship with trailers, using small dock tractors.

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

Re: Rain? Luxury!

Colleague told me of a 10-storey block of flats, all identical design with bathrooms in the same place. Whoever plumbed them installed a vertical main soil pipe, with each bathroom connected to it as it descended.

The pipe, standard plastic, arrived in the basement, where it made a 90-degree turn to run across the ceiling to the main sewer connection.

After a few months the landlord started to get calls about a terrible smell in the building, and when the plumbers investigated they found the basement a foot deep in sewage. As my colleague colourfully commented "nobody had calculated the terminal velocity of a turd after falling 10 floors". After a while the repeated impacts had punched the 90-degree elbow off the pipe where it entered the basement...

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Re: Why are sockets switched?

PS I've always wondered why we use "I" for current.

I(ntensity), since C(harge) was taken.

Re: Socket switches seem like a weird idea...

I've seen a video online of a very old installation in an American house where *uninsulated* rods were run between porcelain standoffs in the loft.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob-and-tube_wiring

Re: Hot & cold

hot water side of the first house we lived in in England was connected to an open cistern in the attic

Allegedly the fault of Napoleon. During the napoleonic wars there was concern that the dastardly French might be sent to sneak in and poison the water supplies, so all houses were required to maintain a store of water. Over time that got incorporated into plumbing codes.

Down for off is supposedly a safety measure. If you fall against it accidentally and hit it downwards it's safer if you knock it off than on.

Re: Why are sockets switched?

So why does the kettle pull more current on a lower voltage?

It's designed for a given power rating. To get 2kw on 110 volts it has to draw more current than a 2kw kettle for 230v.

Plug your US 110v kettle into a UK socket & it'll draw 4x the current, and make your tea very quickly (but nor for very long).

Re: Can't be arsed

only to find the questions I asked on the phone or tickets were answered affirmative, but in reality they never looked

Arguably that's your own fault (not you, personally, but that of support centres). It's because we're all far too used to helldesks with pointless scripts full of irrelevant questions which they have to plough through before even considering what the reported problem actually is. We've been conditioned to say "yeah, already done that" to everything, without even looking.

In continental Europe sockets are expected to be live unless the power to the socket and the group it belongs to was cut

Sockets should be expected to be live at all times, until you've verified with a tester that they are not, no matter what position any switch, anywhere, is in.

The British kept this up a bit longer than most other countries.

The older UK BS546 (round pin) sockets usually had switches, especially for the 15A variant, but the newer UK BS1363 socket outlet dates from the late 1940s and originally didn't specify a switch. The switch was added back to BS1363 in the late 1960s.

I'd guess that switches were originally required as being safer for DC supplies to avoid drawing an arc and burning contacts if the plug was withdrawn while the appliance was switched on, which is less of a problem for AC. Adding them back to BS1363 may have been a safety measure, since many devices available from the 60s onward didn't have a switch on the mains side of the supply.

US govt ups minimum H-1B tech salaries to $208,000 a year, more than startups can hope to afford, say VCs

Re: The principle makes economic sense to me...

$208,000 a year seems like a lot to me

It's the headline-grabbing clickbait, salary for an "IT analyst'. The article does go on to say "An entry-level programmer would need to make $111,946 instead of the previous $78,125.".

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

Bought votes?

One thing I've never seen a solution to when e-voting is mentioned is how you handle the problem of vote buying, that is how to maintain the secrecy of the ballot.

Say I'm siting in a bar, moaning that it's waste of time voting, they're all the same, none of them will give me more money. Someone sits down beside me and offers me $100 to vote for their candidate. With traditional voting in a curtained cubicle they have no way to be sure that I stayed bought, and didn't just take their money & vote for someone else, but if they produce a tablet & have me enter the vote while they watch (or fill in a paper form which they take & post) they know for sure that they've bought a vote. Are there any e-vote solutions that address that?

The obvious response is "it would cost too much to be worthwhile", but that isn't necessarily true. In Theresa May's 2017 UK election fiasco, 97 seats were won by a 5% margin or less, 16 seats were won with majorities of < 200, just a few hundred votes going the other way could have completely changed the composition of parliament.

Remember 2013? This coffee machine does: If I could turn back time – I'd reboot this PC

Change the battery

Looks like the usual effect of a BIOS reset when the lithium battery has died. Timing would be about right, 5-7 years.

Why, yes, you can register an XSS attack as a UK company name. How do we know that? Someone actually did it

Re: Is it offensive?

Or the best form of defence?

Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape

Re: Justice?

Tories. Donncha luv em.

Certainly more than the alternatives. I'm stocking up on popcorn for the Labour civil war. Nice of them to provide lockdown entertainment.

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

Re: That's not a reason to stop.

would expect death by dangerous driving to be the correct charge

That was the charge filed, but it isn't really relevant to this case. If she has diplomatic immunity she can't be extradited, that's a longstanding international agreement. In her case the question that has to be resolved first is whether her claim to immunity is valid. She may still be tried "in absentia".

Re: Team America: World Police

By the way ordering a crime to be carried out is a crime. Otherwise I could order hitmen to kill people I don't like all daylong.

Indeed so, and if you phoned hitmen'R'us from the UK to order the death of someone in Paris, you could be charged in the UK with ordering the crime, but the hitman would be charged in France with the murder itself.

In this case the question is where the actual crime (as opposed to the arrangement of it) happened. That's undoubtedly why the US charges are wire & computer fraud.

Meanwhile a motorist, who killed a UK national on UK soil, is protected by the same American Government who won't take action in the US or allow extradition.

Not quite the same situation, she's hiding behind diplomatic immunity which makes any extradition situation complex, since it would seem to require that immunity to be waived before it could even get to court.

Have any US citizens ever been extradited to the UK (or anywhere) under this current Treaty?

Well, from wikipedia (I know, I know):

"From January 2004 to the end of December 2011, 33 known UK citizens (including 6 with dual nationality) were extradited from the UK to the US. The US embassy in London reported that as of April 2013, 77 individuals had been extradited from the UK to the US. The US argued that this is not disproportionate, due to the US population being about five times larger than the UK population".

Re: That's not a reason to stop.

I'm not a fan of the rather one sided extradition treaty we have with the US

It's not so one-sided as you suggest. The numbers of people extradited in each direction are roughly in line with the relative population sizes, and although the UK has refused to extradite people to the US there have been few, if any, cases where the US has refused extradition to the UK.

Re: Team America: World Police

He should tried in the UK (I'm assuming some of the victims were local, but even if not, it's where the crimes were committed)

But is it? If the affected computers were in the US, and the spying activity took place in the US, you could argue that it was only ordered from the UK. Even if he were jailed in the UK for voyeurism the US could argue that he should still be extradited on release to answer the computer fraud and wire fraud charges.

I do find it difficult to have much sympathy for him.

"I'll kill myself if you extradite me"

Blackmail as an extradition defense? It's novel, I suppose, but unlikely to be allowed to set a precedent.

Researchers made an OpenAI GPT-3 medical chatbot as an experiment. It told a mock patient to kill themselves

tested with the statement: “I feel sad and I don’t know what to do,” the bot was much more upbeat, and suggested the patient should “take a walk, go see a friend,”

So basically just the advice you'd get from the landlord at your local hostelry after you've finished your third pint?

When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube

Re: load the exact same URL under IE11 & the site renders just fine

There is absolutely nothing wrong with IE11

Yet.

NASA hires Nokia to build first 4G network on the Moon as part of plan to boldly go back to lunar surface by 2024

Re: Purely on grounds of practicality

At least a 100m mast won't need much in the way of guy wires...

Can't wait to see the phones

I have enough trouble hitting the right characters on an on-screen keyboard at the best of times, I'd hate to try it in a space suit.

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

Re: Glad to see the legacy of Silicon Graphics living on

while Solaris still has unresolved date issues.

Which ones?

Solaris has been using 64-bit time_t for 10+ years, and should not be bitten by Y2038. Try it.

UFS as an on-disk filesystem will have issues, which are difficult to fix without creating compatibility issues with taking/restoring backups (and I'd expect that also to be true for Linux filesystems with 32-bit timestamps), but that is one of the reasons that Solaris replaced UFS with ZFS a decade ago.

Facebook doesn't know its onions: Seeds ad banned after machine-learning algo found vegetable pic 'overtly sexual'

Re: Should have gone to SpecSavers

You're going blind already?

UK govt advert encouraging re-skilling for cyber jobs implodes spectacularly

Re: You mean "faux outrage"?

Well the "Arch-Tory" wanted a United States of Europe,

He also said "We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not combined. We are interested and associated but not absorbed."

Re: You missed off...

Carry On up the cyber?

Crown Prosecution Service solicitor accused of targeting judge ex-wife's lover through work computer systems

Re: ?

The OP specifically quoted the full phrase used, and was complaining about the inappropriate use of the word, that is: the context.

Not quite. The OP quoted the full phrase "cavorting with her new lover", and then went on to point out that her new relationship was in fact unobjectionable (since her previous marriage was over) and objected to "cavorting" based on his assumption that it was a pejorative term more appropriate to a tabloid. The context here was entirely appropriate to the correct the use of the word.

tomorrow's lesson is on Polysemy.

I'll table that, if you don't mind.