Posts by CountCadaver

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Re: Mains gangs or wall sockets

Looking at the lighting in the living room pic, some of it makes me think "art gallery" or display lighting...

They might actually have been Dorman and Smith

(borrowed from wackypedia)

Made by Dorman & Smith Ltd. (using patents applied for in 1943) the plugs and sockets were rated at 13 A and were one of the competing types for use on ring final circuits. They were never popular in private houses but were widely deployed in prefabricated houses, council housing and LCC schools. The BBC also used them. Some local authorities continued to use them in new installations until the late 1950s. Many D&S sockets were still in use until the early 1980s, although the difficulty in obtaining plugs for them after around 1970 often forced their users to replace them with BS 1363 sockets. The D&S plug suffered from a serious design fault: the line pin was a fuse which screwed into the plug body and tended to come unscrewed on its own in use. A fuse that worked loose could end up protruding from the socket, electrically live and posing a shock hazard, when the plug was removed.

Cubans launching sonic attacks on US embassy? Not what we're hearing, say medical boffins

Re: Ask a doctor...

What was the metabolic condition if you don't mind me asking....

Time to check who left their database open and leaked 7.5m customer records: Hi there, Adobe Creative Cloud!

Re: Adobe breach #2

Suggest if your not using all the features of photoshop and just opening them then there are a myriad of options

Serif Affinity Photo isn't bad, it does a lot and seems quite "photoshop" like and might cover editing needs, price ain;t bad either....

Adobe breach #2

sure adobe had a previous breach not that long ago either....

Yep they did

"Adobe: In October 2013, 153 million Adobe accounts were breached with each containing an internal ID, username, email, encrypted password and a password hint in plain text. The password cryptography was poorly done and many were quickly resolved back to plain text. The unencrypted hints also disclosed much about the passwords adding further to the risk that hundreds of millions of Adobe customers already faced.

Compromised data: Email addresses, Password hints, Passwords, Usernames"

From https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Think they would have learned by now?

That's not long division, Timmy! China school experimented on pupils with mind-reading tech

1984 was based on Orwell's experiences working in the Ministry of Information (propaganda essentially) during WW2, referred to in official documents as Mininform hence the similar titles for the ministries in 1984, also the appearance of ministry of information building forms the basis for the ministry of love.

A History of (Computer) Violence: Wait. Before you whack it again, try caressing the mouse

Re: Percussive maintenance

access to a freezer, stick it in a bag, leave in freezer overnight, keep room cold, attach hard drive and grab what you can before it warms up...

UK ads watchdog bans Burger King Twitter jibe for condoning chucking milkshakes at politicians

Airstrip one incoming

Heading more and more everyday for an Orwellian police state.....

ASA is an anachronism and gamed by "activists" on all sides of the debate, while the rest of us shrug our shoulders and get on with life,

#poor attempt at sourcecode

IF < 50% UK.Adults.population.status="complain"

Then IGNORE

Do

(I know I know its nowhere near right but you get the gist)

700km on a single charge: Mercedes says it's in it for the long run

Re: can squeeze 700km from a single full battery charge

You are correct - in the UK we run summer and winter blends of diesel due to summer diesel "waxing" at temps around 0-minus 5C, winter diesel is ok down to around minus 15C in the UK

Other nations winter diesel goes colder and some places have arctic diesel which goes down to REALLY cold, however its only suitable for some diesel engines, some common rail engines won't run on it as it doesn't have the same lubricity as summer or winter blends.

Basically winter diesel is diesel mixed with additives (used to be kerosene but might be diff now) which don't have the same energy value so hence you get lower mpg in winter.

Usually gets sent out to filling stations from now onwards to make sure filling station tanks all have winter diesel in them by the "official" start in November, stays on sale till around March, where deliveries of summer diesel recommence.

In Australia, its possible to fill up with diesel in Sydney, take the car up to the blue mountains to go skiing and come out in the morning to a car that won't start....reason being that the blend on sale in Sydney is for hot temperatures with a relatively high wax point, whereas blue mountains can get down to around 0C or colder overnight and the diesel for sale in that area is blended to handle colder temperatures.....

Re: What a pointless exercise..

How about a giant wave power install in the Atlantic...

Re: "a driver could project the arrows and so on in front of the car"

and it'll all be legal as its a "characteristic of the vehicle as intended by the manufacturer"

Re: can squeeze 700km from a single full battery charge

My cellphone lasted about 10 minutes at minus 25C, ended up having to shift it to an inside pocket on my jacket to let the battery warm up.....

and that was a Lithium Ion battery.

Now that's integrity: Bloke sinks 7 beers, turns himself in. Cops weren't looking for him

Possibly violated his parole though for being drunk if he was actually out on parole....

Apple programs Siri to not bother its pretty little head with questions about feminism

I'm told German Satnavs are male as drivers of both genders dislike being given orders by a shrill female voice....

Wait a minute, we're supposed to haggle! ISPs want folk to bargain over broadband

Unless you deal with the chains (i.e. 90% of the new market) where unless your buying premium (i.e. overpriced to start with) your told "we don't do discounts anymore, its our clear pricing policy, what you see is what you pay"

Though Arnold Clark told me that, I told them Evans Halshaw could do better and turned and started walking out, salesman "suddenly" discovered a discount from "manufacturer" (BS) and could match the price. Though they did some warranty work recently and forgot to reconnect the cable to the hazard warning light switch, some blue words were uttered when I went to use it and it didn't work. Ended up sorting it myself, took me less than 5 minutes inc removing the trim on the dash, va the 2.5 hours they had taken to remove the same piece of trim....

Re: If they have discounts available they'll give them to you if you ask. If not, they won't

I swapped Sky at £38 per month for Zen at £29.99 per month....

I once got dialaphone or phones4u to pay for a simcard line rental for a year, they seriously wouldn't take NO I DON'T WANT ANYTHING FROM YOU I JUST WANT TO CANCEL MY CONTRACT for an answer, so said simcard sat on a shelf for a whole year while they paid for it...must have had some set number of customers they had to have in contract to keep xyz perk with the networks....so it was better to shell out for line rental than miss their target or something.

O2 a couple of years back gave me over 50% off my bill for the duration of the remainder of the contract due to poor CS performance as a goodwill gesture, I was 2 months into a 24 month deal...I was expecting to get "We'll give you 10% off your next bill" at most, instead I got over 50% off your next bill" and then read "and any further bills till the expiration date of your contract" that was a pleasant shock....

Re: PlusNet Billing

local offices no longer exist for many companies, all call centres, which if your lucky are in the UK or at least somewhere they understand English i.e. anywhere other than India, rather than think they do (i.e. Bangalore, Mumbai etc - "I can certainly be helping you of that I am sure sir" "I will resolve this for sure for you sir" - all whilst failing to understand what the problem is.....)

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Re: 50 miles???

I've known people who can

However I can't, my rear end goes numb after about 80 minutes to 2.5 hours (depending on car seat - saab seats are epitome of comfort for long journeys imho), then there is the issue of bladder range, which as you age gets less and less.....

Re: The ones calling for it first.

Distorted by the city and directorships, I know plenty of guys in skilled trades whose pay rises have been below inflation for years, some having been laid off and then hired elsewhere are earning the same amount in £ per hour as they were in 1999.... (£10-£12 per hour) so a big pay cut...if the supermarkets pay much more then they will outstrip the pay rates of some manufacturing companies.....

Re: Power Demand

Gas unlike Biomass emits virtually zero Particulate Matter........

Re: The ones calling for it first.

Thats the typical flawed and wishful "comfortably well off green activist" thinking - many a mickle maks a muckle and ignores the REAL world, where most people's pay is less in real terms than it was 30 years ago and that many households have a total income of less than £25K per annum, that utilities are soaring in cost to fund "smart meters" now forecast to save nothing and in fact to be a growing cost and thus the roll out has stagnated. (Likely to be discovered in 30 to 50 years that the whole thing involved brown envelopes between ministers and smart meter manufacturers along with copious levels of incompetence.) Latest ad campaign has dropped any mention of savings in favour of branding the electricity grid "outdated" from a shadowy group calling itself "the campaign for a smarter britain" more like the "campaign for a british surveillance state"

Where people can barely afford to get to work in the first place and drive as mass transit doesn't run when they start and finish work, costs a fortune or simply doesn't serve the place they work, that they need a vehicle to look after relatives, get them to hospital /medical appointments,

Our emissions are less than TWO percent of global emissions and falling year on year.

If you want to make a difference - don't have kids or keep it to two maximum, lobby the MAJOR polluters - Russia, China, USA, India to cut their emissions (they won't)

Force people out of cars and you'll rapidly find the next government would end up being led by nigel farage on a committment to "restore common sense" "push back against green fanatics" - which is chilling to me, but equally chilling is the growing clamour in green circles for authoritarianism, that suspending democracy in favour of a climate saving dictatorship is being openly discussed in positive terms by some green activist groups.

Next parliament may end up with a sizeable Brexit Party membership given current polling in the North of England and Midlands..........

Re: legal target

No one, we just loose "face" and the suspicious amongst us would suggest that this is just the end game of "modal shift" doctrine (i.e. forcing anyone not of the "right sort" onto mass transit, and out of independent modes of transport) thats been shoved down our throats the last 25+ years and given the close proximity to many MPs and "mass transport" conglomerates.....some might say that it would be fortuitous financially and otherwise for these MPs if they could force us proles onto their associates vehicles and thus generate an inescapable captive market and ever growing profit margins (and of course fares will soar once this is achieved), with the side benefit that they then can barrel down the now empty roads, free of those irritating traffic jams and not have to be exposed to "normal people", the rest who push this tend to fall into the "something must be done" brigade and "we took the bus and walked when my grandad was young and it was good enough for them in the good old days when you could bread was delivered unwrapped and left on the doorstep" "we must get back to gentler days of sail etc before all this hideous mechanisation came about, people must get used to travel being an anachronism and adapt to living locally"

Beginning to see why a growing number see parliament as an expensive waste of money full of windbags, demagogues and ideologues....

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Re: There will always be thieves :(

My favourite would be the ancient half ton pickup I had in North America, dented, rusted, scored, scraped and big...people tended to avoid getting too close...realising their vehicle probably cost about 30 or 40 times what the truck was worth and the truck would likely shrug off a traffic shunt....

Kensington Locks

Have Apple stopped fitting Kensington locking ports to their Macbooks? (where the cable actually connects to the chassis of the laptop rather than a flimsy USB port - I just hope the author is misinterpreting where the cable goes as if it connects to the USB its not going to do much)

I suppose the thief is lucky you weren't in one of the more pro 2nd amendment states with stand your ground laws, else he might have ended up with lead in him....

Canadian ISP Telus launches novel solution to deal with excess email: Crash your servers and wipe it all

Re: "rich history"

Happy Zen customer here, albeit took issue that their site doesn't let you opt out of cookies yet as "we're working on that"

Apart from that £29.99 for no data limit 40mbps FTTC with line rental included with a "promise" of no price increases as long as I keep the service, happy enough, though new folk are now paying £31.99, better and cheaper than Sky who implemented transparent proxying and then claimed it was a faulty update, when in fact its their new "Sky Buddy" so you can turn off the net and foisted on every customer whether they have kids or not.

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: W98 was OK, but W95 and USB ..

and mine. I did some sub con work at a solicitors in circa 2005 replacing various machines and adding wifi, including a wifi card to the solicitor's own laptop.....which was running ME....(mentally noted not to use that solicitors....) damned thing fell down more often the town tramp after a 3 day bender....

Truckers, prepare to lose your jobs as UPS buys into self-driving tech

Re: What's up with UPS?

Just wait till Trump gets wind of this.....make the huawei thing look like a storm in a teacup.....someone just needs to whisper "national security risk" "shipping illegals all over the USA" "MS-13" etc in his ear...

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

Re: Or...

You obviously haven't worked for many organisations in the UK, where petty is the order of the day and "why should they get access at home for free, they should buy their own and it'll be a security risk and could open us up to legal hot water"

It's official – Google AI gives you cancer ...diagnosis in real time: Neural net can spot breast, prostate tumors

NHSScot is falling apart just like NHS England, waiting lists are up all over the place, its just we don't do private contractors. Shame the result is the same though....locally try 5+ month backlog on top of normal 12 week wait time to see physio therapy and its seemingly only going up and up and up

Was it included in funding to tackle waiting times? No, despite it being a useful way to get people back to work quickly / prevent condition worsening and ergo someone having to be off work due to the injury getting worse.

An Army Watchkeeper drone tried to land. Then meatbags took over from the computers

Re: £1.2bn

Thats about the same as PIP was designed to save the govt by penalising the disabled and cutting their support....

The word "priorities" comes to mind......

We could also have just hacked £1.2 billion off the foreign aid budget, given that most of it ends up in the hands of arms dealers, warlords, presidential palace renovations and the people its meant to help see little or none of it.....

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

Re: Based on my (Citroen) in car touch screen

Happens in the towns around Dundee also, seen people going wide on blind bends (even ones where arctics don't need to swing wide), cue almost head on collisions happening....and often with tractors, that will win that argument....

Someone watched Star Trek and thought "hey thats the future, wipe clean touchscreens"

(even ST touched on the frustrations of dealing with flat screens rather than tactile controls in Voyager...)

Re: Touch screens

Rather than actually employing someone with some knowledge of user interfsce design....or you know....testing it under simulated conditions....for the cost of a warship a training simulator costs buttons in comparison and often throws up stuff you haven't considered would be an issue...Seemingly QE carriers had sailors using various designs of prototypes to find what could and would go wrong, they modded stuff a bit when someone piped up with "is this useable with antiflash kit on?" whereupon they got them to wear the kit and realised it wasn't useable with the gloves on, so modded the controls to make them useable

Shocked that someone had the sense to realise that testing it on land in a simulator before you install it in a warship is a lot cheaper and easier than doing it AFTER you launch the thing...

£250m fund for NHS artificial intelligence laboratory slammed as tech for tech's sake

Re: Where the money goes

Worse my wife was admitted again post surgery a few years back as she was vomiting continuously and couldn't stop being sick (turned out it was a side effect of the drugs and inflationary gas and all she had to do was keeping drinking and puking and she would have been fine)

instead she would have died of dehydration had myself and my mum not been there. why? because she was so dehydrated they couldn't get a line in for iv fluids but because they were so paranoid they wouldn't let her drink anything "just in case you need more surgery" and "your liver levels are abnormal"

wouldn''t listen to me and I was strung right out anyway having not slept in days...my mum came in to see what was going on, marched all 5 feet of herself up to the nurses desk and told them in no uncertain terms that they were getting a line into her daughter in law sharpish and she wasn't leaving until they did

nurse looked at her for a few seconds and then decided complying was the best option......

Cue consultant hauled out of her office to have a go (why they didn't call on call phlebotomy is a mystery as they are the specialists in doing difficult iv lines) managed to get a line in

liver surgeon turns up 2 days later, your levels were caused by dehydration and the drugs from surgery, drink plenty of fluids and you can go home later this afternoon

wife was pissed as hell

since then I've been an awkward sod and not averse to kicking up a royal stink, albeit the health board complaints department is more akin to "deflecting criticism department" and the regulator SPSO are a toothless tiger keen to avoid rocking the boat...

Re: it's worth a go.

And if it works or not we will reduce the number of doctors and nurses

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

Re: Others are at it

No he literally means the printer won't even turn on at all with compatibles in it and they even warn "future firmware updates might remove the ability to use non genuine cartridges from any HP printer without warning"

Then there is also their "subscription" ink program, which unless you print next to nothing a month isn't a good deal IMHO

I had a panasonic camera that did the same (chipped batteries so wouldn't turn on with a generic), retailer forgot to mention that, so they gave me a hefty discount on a second battery (seemingly I wasn't the only customer kicking up merry heck either), either panasonic released an update that disabled the battery check or the generic suppliers caught up as a couple of years later I bought some generics online that work without issue.

Otherwise known as avoiding a libel lawsuit or damage to reputation case....

why not just have the battery on rails (ala power tools), use a forklift or similar tool with a fitting to relese the "battery catches" slide the battery back, pickup new pack, slide into pusition, catches engage, at worst, sill cover to hide the battery pack.....

If someone can design a power tool that can survive the "tender mercies" of the average contractor / builder for a substantial time then its surely not impossible to do the same for a car battery pack?

Just smells like CBA more than not possible

Mole/Visegrips and or hammer and a cold chisel are other solutions

Though Irwin do screw removers

Re: OMG!

or my 7250i that survived and shrugged off being dropped down tall steel staircases, bouncing off supermarket shelves onto hard tile floors and worse you know stuff that there is no way in hades a smartphone would survive (even anything milder would kill a smartphone)

1Gbps, 4K streaming, buffering a thing of the past – but do Brits really even want full fibre?

Re: Few points

Be crosstalk as well between pairs as the cab gets more and more subscribed

mine is 1970s build and has underground phone cable, they would more than likely just "mole" it, ala what the gas installers do - basically dig a narrow short trench at each end and then the "mole" (hydraulic ram IIRC) pushes its way through to the other end

Only thing is my phone line comes in from the road, and the back of my house faces the road, there's also the matter of poured bitumen sealed foundations (even some of the cables and pipework is buried in the stuff)

Giffgaff goody-baddy-bag billing faff: Ofcom fines operator £1.4m for overcharging folks by almost £3m

Re: Forgive them.

I use quite a bit of data, tesco wanted £15 a month for 12GB with 5000 mins and 5000 texts, at the time giff gaff were more money so hence I went with Tesco.

Only left O2 due to the price differential, otherwise was generally happy with O2, they made a mistake a couple of years ago and their support staff weren't much help, so I complained and as an apology they said "oh we'll give you 50% off your contract till it ends as an apology as checking the transcripts the serice was severely below our expectations of staff performance"

I was chuffed, even more so when I realised the contract still had 18 months to run.......

Re: Forgive them.

I looked at them, but Tescomobile were cheaper and still run on O2

My grandads PAYG mobile is on O2 as they charge 3p per minute vs 8 on tesco and 45ppm (!!!) on Virgin mobile, no wonder he thought mobiles were expensive to run, virgin made a killing out of him before he finally after years asked me to find something cheaper and only as his 18 year old mobile battery burst....

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

See also Liam Fox, wasn't Mandelson also implicated in at least one scandal?

Re: Out with the old, in with the, err, old

No the minister will just use the apparatus of the state to destroy the culprit and keep spying on the populace...no way this gets backtracked.

Re: She seems an ideal host for whatever the Home Office inserts in the brain of their so-called...

and road pricing and whatever else couldn't be shoved through under nulabour.....

Satellites with lasers and machine guns coming! China's new plans? Trump's Space Force? Nope, the French

Mount a GAU-8 / GAU-12 on it?