
Once again
The criminals (the data holding companies that regard the pitiful fines and compensation a cost of doing business) get away with totally failing to compensate the victims in any meaningful way.
1493 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2013
Cheaper devices structure the power system as charger-to-battery-to-device, with no charger-to-device path. This is bad, as the battery is now being float-charged all the time the device is on, and connected to the charger. Float charging == death for LiPo cells.
Got several Thinkpads, and you'll prise my X230 from my cold dead hands. But..
I'm experimenting with a Framework. Treating myself to an AMD one, so still waiting.
The lower-specced Intel devices are quite reasonably priced.
Yet to find out how terrible the keyboard is, but the display looks like it's going to be sweet.
Not really. Bad news for the poor ordinary folks who will now have to watch their finances for pretty well "for ever' (I bet the data thieves know to wait until the free enhanced monitoring expires), but basically no effect on lucrative future contracts.
Cloud. That's what kills the consulting/support market. Everybody's stuff is on the cloud now, so, given the requirement for a robust, backed-up database service, do you pay a bunch of consultants to set you up a HA mariadb cluster, with a backup scheme, or just pay AWS/Azure for their offering. The cloud providers famously grab all the open-source they can and re-sell it as a service, with no payback to the authors.
Even more moons ago. We have VT220 terminals on our desks. Whilst colleague (who had it coming, believe me) was away we pulled the case of his off, and reversed the polarity of all of the scan coils to the CRT. Result - upside down display. We then placed the monitor upside down on his desk. He comes back, sees the monitor,puts it right way up, goes "ha-ha", and switches on. To be greeted by the login prompt in the bottom right corner. Delicious.
An announcement that was not followed by "so we have redeployed all of the workloads to europe-west9-q (a bunch of containers in a car-park} so that service is maintained". Odd that. Almost as if they don't have to give a s**t.
ISPs do charge for internet access. I have a bill here. The problem is that the ISPs business model is based on there being nothing to do with said bandwidth. Well, now there is, and the amount of data has exploded. If the ISP cares to renegotiate their peering charges, that's up to them, but the fact that there are now businesses selling content over the internet is simply the new reality, not some kind of crime.
Yes, it would be good if as well as reputational damage, it could be expanded to "stress caused by knowing that at any point, you could be scammed out of your life savings". If that was worth, say, a few grand per person, cases where millions of people are affected would indeed bring down the company responsible (TalkTalk, for example). Once that is a possibility, shareholders will start asking hard questions - which was the point of GDPR in the first place.
Python now does have typing! Mypy will do code inspection based on type decorations in your code. Done properly, it makes it much easier to catch misuse of dynamic typing.
It forces you to say "ok,l this parameter can be anything, what kind of everything do I mean" so that all of the callers are checked. And also, if you have handling a variety of types, to pull you up on "but *this* type doesn't implement 'foo'!".
Having said that, "doing it right" can be a right mare. I both hate its baroqueness and "don't-you-have-a-CS-degree"-ness (the definitions required for generics and polymorphism can get mind-bending), but love the way that code ends up with far fewer hard-to-find bugs, particularly when refactoring.
OpenAI have slurped *everything*. With no regard as to copyright, with the old "if it's on the web, it's public" nostrum. Books, code, news articles, everything. It has been copied and "stored in an electronic retrieval system", to quote the notice in the front pages of many books. And then published, if you can get ChatGPT to regurgitate great chunks of it.
So why haven't they been sued into a smoking hole in the ground?
A bunch of engineers at Microchip got fed up with the lack of impetus to improve the venerable and inefficient 4-clock-per-instruction PIC architecture, and went off to found Scenix. The SX-series where pipelined 1-clock per instruction devices that went (for the time) blazingly fast (up to 75MHz), that, whilst sharing no hardware elements, nonetheless used the same instruction set. I seem to remember that Microchip got very sniffy about it, and the line didn't last long. I still have a few, with the sx-key, in a box.
Not a secure solution. Ok, with 100% testing, and fuzzing, and wotnot, the debug build will trigger an error on a vulnerability. But with always-on checking (for free with Rust) means that even an imperfectly-tested app will quit at runtime, instead of allowing data leakage or arbitrary code execution. Denial-of-service, but not compromise.
C has had valgrind and friends for ages, to perform these checks. Heck, I wrote a horror that overrode malloc() and new() in the late 90's that used the Windows allocator (originally PharLap286/386 on DOS) to detect array overruns and use-after-free.
"Especially reputable internet publishers who have an in-house team that polices the ads shown, cough, splutter."
I don't run an ad-blocker. I run Privacy Badger. Which blocks sites that implement tracking, despite being sent a "do-not-track" header. Which mysteriously nukes 99% of ads on this site. There was a time a bit ago, where the occasional advert appeared - presumably because it was not trying to track me.
You need to police your advertisers to stop them attempting to steal information from the site users - plainly they are trying to find out (without asking you) where else the typical Commentard goes on the internet. Not cool.
Still no subscription option?
"And this, boys and girls, is why open source exists.", and why, inch by inch, "open Source" will get edged out of the business arena by legal risk, copyright, patents, interoperability, censorship, liability, anything that the Big Corps can lobby for, until once again, they get to charge what they like for what they like, with no pesky competition.
== They've taken the lot. Army recruitment, BBC license fee, the lot. The crims probably now have the data for most people in the United Kingdom now.
So, having lost personal information for millions of people, guess how much jail time there will be? And guess how many Government contracts will now be moved elsewhere? A Round Number!
yes, but you land, spend a few minutes pumping kerosene in to the tanks, then take off again. The point about liquid fuel is that it is consumed, and is then easily replaced. A battery is still heavy when it contains no energy, then must be recharged. Which takes longer.
If you recharge faster, you bring forward the time when the battery must be discarded and replaced. Replacement normally is not economically viable.
My ICE engine can just have a few hundred quid's worth of spannering, and it 's good to go.
Even at 30% efficiency, that's still 3.6kWh as against 0.5kWh.
And you never, never drive in Lane 1 of a "smart" motorway. As that is where the broken-down vehicles that can't reach a refuge that is up to a mile away are stuck, possibly with no lights.
So here am I, trundling along in Lane 2, and I don't care how many numpties undertake me in Lane 1, instead of using Lanes 3 and 4. Sorry, I don't want to risk death every time I use a motorway.
I notice that whilst no more new ones will be created, the existing ones will continue to be run in 4-lane mode, instead of permanently switching on the "no way" sign in lane 1. Even with (allegedly) more refuges, they are still death-traps and car-ruiners. Ever had to drive to the next refuge on a flat tyre that might have been repairable, instead of having to drive a mile on it and need to replace both the tyre and the wheel?