Posts by Stork

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

I know it is a joke but yes - or at least SW integration with your phone.

Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

What Camera makers have missed here is making it easier to get the photos off the effing camera - in far too many cased it involves shuffling around with cards or cables like 15 years ago; the SW integration is more often than not atrocious.

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Re: I don't understand...

Only if they are the soggy British copy of the Belgian/French original:-p

I’m for mayo.

Re: food abomination

I remember seeing it in the frozen counter in UK supermarkets in the nineties.

Re: I don't understand...

In Denmark you can get roast beef and sauce bearnaise on yours if you fancy.

No, I didn’t.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Similar story from print times

My aunt was working at the Royal Danish Mail, responsible for correspondence in English with other postal services.

In the seventies there was a lot of publications of graphical nature posted from Denmark, and in one case a shipment was returned from the US with the comment that they could not let that sort of stuff into the country. My aunt took a quick look and wrote back: “yes you can, it says printed in the USA”.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Re: MAX anyone?

Thinking about it, I guess I prefer my flying boring.

Re: MAX anyone?

To be fair, the A320 is a more recent design than the original 737 which has got more facelifts than the average Hollywood star

For me pitch is much higher up the list than number of aisles. And I am only 1.89 or so, my poor son is 1.95 and possibly still growing.

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

Mrs T did have a chemistry degree, and used it, but as I remember it she then passed the bar exam (stupid she wasn’t) and went into politics.

Fun fact: she needed her husband’s permission to stand for parliament.

Re: How about the ministers go next?

What should that be good for? Everything is well with the PPEs and classics graduates in charge, right? /s

It’s not just in the UK though. Here in Portugal law graduates seem to dominate politics, in Denmark it is a mix of graduates of law, political science and economics (but they only do one of them, and then usually a masters).

I am afraid numerate and scientifically literate people find something more rewarding to do.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

A bit sad you have to rely on government incompetence to feel safe

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

I have the feeling they also needed quite a bit of fixing compared to more modern cars.

Who buys sedans? Very few here in Europe, US may be different.

Re: connected services as a strategic imperative and a driver of future revenue

Even here in Portugal, on mornings with 3-4 degrees I appreciate my heated seat. Probably more as they are leather -> higher thermal density than fabric.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

I assume you mean Baltic state

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

FSD _may_ be better in motorway conditions with decent markings and no snow. But until it can cope with Copenhagen or Amsterdam it’s not FSD.

It appears to be difficult to make FSD trains, and much less complex environment.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Re: It's the HIVE MIND collective

I am happy to know I have been tagged in more photos I am not in than I am in.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

Switzerland?

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: WordPad

27/7 use? That’s serious pressure.

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

The Catholic Church has scaled back that sort of approach in recent decades, but try to go back 50 years in Ireland.

Many religions still take a rather dim view of former adherents, even if their means of enforcement varies geographically.

Re: Expose

How about the holy ghostwriter?

Re: Expose

Perhaps i have not thought deeply enough about it, but so far I have not come up with good reasons why Scientology or Pastafarianism should not be afforded the same privileges as e.g. the Catholic Church.

All are based on unprovable claims and both the first and the last have histories of making money by dubious means.

US Republican party's spam filter lawsuit against Google dimissed

Re: Pure speculation?

Snowflakes!

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: "it is increasingly difficult to develop entirely new features"

Perhaps that’s why I like Calc, I do simple stuff and it doesn’t get in my way.

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

Re: Skip the Java - go straight to Rust (or whatever the new flavor is today)

You remind me of my last project before I left IT. I came in as tester on this project of a modern application which should replace some old, hard to maintain but business critical mainframe code.

On the question of when it went live, the answer was “August”. According to a senior tester it had also been August the year before, and it was still August when I left a year or so later.

No one dared pulling the old code, just in case, they were not completely sure what other processes used it.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: Not holding my breath

This seems to be a British thing, at least I’ve not heard of them in Portugal or Denmark.

Re: Not holding my breath

You fairly much have that in Basel, if you include public transport and bicycles.

California DMV hits brakes on Cruise's SF driverless fleet after series of fender benders

Re: Well forget the second accident

On a smaller scale, I had a Cupra Leon as rental car recently.

It surprised us (my driving license holding son and yours truly) by slamming the brakes because it found I was getting too close to a parked trailer.

I am not having one of those.

Re: Well forget the second accident

I must also say that I find it a curious decision to take half of them off the road. Are they a problem or not?

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Or alternatively from your offline archive of particularly important stuff.

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Also, as in most European countries, just because you hand the house keys to your mortgage lender doesn’t mean you don’t owe them money. It’s quite hard to get debt wiped, which as I understand it is not the case in the USA.

Depending on country, some banks issue bonds with maturities matching the mortgages. That way the maturity problem is passed on.

In Denmark the link is even more direct: when you take out a mortgage (up to 80% of assessed property value), bonds are issued and you pay the interest of the day for the next 20 or 30 years, plus 0.5-0.9% to cover admin and defaults.

Obviously there are more details, but the bonds are AAA and have not defaulted since creation in the late 18th century.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Re: Election Integrity

In the case of Germany, the Nazi party didn’t win a parliamentary majority. They only got one after ganging up with a conservative party to expel the communists.

It is good you write kinda worked around. The episode with mr Johnson sending parliament home after lying to Lizzie showed that system to be rather weak, and everybody seemed okay with internment in NI back in the day.

If you dig into details of how democracy works, I am not sure current Britain has much to lecture Germany on.

Re: Election Integrity

It is a paradox of democracy. How do you deal with groups whose aim is to abolish or ignore it? Germany had it with Baader-Meinhof, Algeria with islamists. Do you tolerate the intolerant?

To me it is quite understandable that the framers of the German constitution wanted to avoid a repeat of the end of the Weimar Republic.

Re: Election Integrity

If you consider the last hundred years or so of German history, it may not surprise you that German law (constitution I think) takes a dim view of organisations that attempt to change the democratic order. There are authorities (Verfassungsschutz/Verfassungsgericht) tasked with checking what organisations are up to.

They have looked at various organisations left and right in the past as is their legal duty, do you have any indication it’s not what has happened here?

Re: Election Integrity

Downvoted for the lawfare comment. I have lived in Denmark, Germany, Britain, Switzerland and Portugal and did not see lawfare to be a major part of the electoral process in those places.

Re: Election Integrity

In a lot of those places you also more or less automatically get on the electoral register, and can expect to vote without long queues.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: Getting stuck in a lift is no fun

At the fire brigade responsible for my uni the universal key weighed 12kg and ran on oil mixture.

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

Dire Straits

Abolish Monday mornings and Friday afternoons.

Brit healthcare body rapped for WhatsApp chat sharing patient data

Re: Sigh..

Yeah, I remember those. Used one just last millennium.

Re: Sigh..

Sounded like those systems had not reached Larnarkshire yet.

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

Re: But why tho...

In Steve Job’s case it wasn’t helped by him trying alternative medicine before actual medicine.

US adds Euro spyware makers to export naughty list

Export promotion

Don’t buy spyware from those nasty entities. We have a list of much nicer vendors here.

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

The difference is rather small. Our system varies at most a couple of % between 25 and 35 C air temperature.

The panels are of course much hotter.

Re: 4 cents?

Portugal here. I think we pay about €0.20 in daytime (including VAT), half that at night.

We also have photovoltaics, so the worst period is early evening, 18-22.

I am sure the body heat is negligible compared to heat transfer though walls and roofs.

Even more so if thermal insulation is as poor as what I got impression of in American house remodelling programs.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - Wrong

Yeah, I’ve heard about those surreal American rules. Can’t you have laundry with a message and use freedom of speech as argument? Or your religion demands it?

Tesla plots entry to Britain's stagnant energy market

Re: Reminds me of China

I clean mine, they are right next to the roof terrace

Re: I'd give it a chance...

Last year I did some estimates for photovoltaic with and without battery for the Algarve.

Payback without batteries just over four years, but payback for adding a battery was about 20 years.

This is essentially all on savings, we would receive just over €130/years for feed in.

As it happened, the supplier offered interest free payments over five years, but only installed a year late; that is, they have not quite finished as they were short of a widget to measure the feed in and have not started sending me invoices yet.

Chaotic, but the electricity bill is lower by about the predicted amount.