Posts by TeeCee 9435 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
give drones their own 200-foot-thick piece of sky to zoom around in
Sounds like a sensible idea, as long as we're not standing underneath it when the inevitable fuckup happens[1]........ah........hang on.......
[1] My money's on some security loophole, attempted pwnage and a large helping of oops on both ends.
but what about the sat nav on my dash that doesn't know about this event.
Maybe you should think about getting one that understands TMS so it does know about this sort of thing?
Then of course there's the whole "connected car" thing on the way...... which seems to have a massive trailerload of FAIL in tow so it's probably best to stick with the working stuff we have now.
I don't suppose it also has something that you might expect to find on that antique beamer you're expected to use for your off-site presentation?
Not to mention that if you get a modern installed one in the ceiling this invariably comes with 15 pin VGA connectors scattered at handy points around the conference room. So, while it may well have other ports, getting at them means finding a very long lead and standing on the table on tiptoes to plug it in.....
Hmm. These are watches, right? So, small cases, bugger all capability to dissipate heat[1], tiny underpowered CPUs, small low-capacity batteries.
You'd almost suspect that every CPU clock-cycle is a precious thing to be fought over, just like in old skool computing.
[1] Worse still, any heating of the case is going to be noticed and vociferously complained about by its wearer.
A factory reset on Android wipes user data and reloads from the system image. If you've rooted an Android device, you'll have already found that it's perfectly possible to update software in the system image and/or add applications to it.
So if you have a root exploit and pop your scroteware in as a system app, it'll survive a reset. The only way of getting rid of it with conventional weapons is to reflash the device with a clean image, at which point it will reset from that.
Given that it is well known that anything connected to the Internet will be attacked and had better be 100% bloody bulletproof[1], didn't anyone think that a "connected car" was a Really, Really, Seriously Fucking Stupid Idea?
In fact, as stupid ideas go, that's one of the more stupid ones as the risk / benefit doesn't even begin to stack up: Benefit: Facebum on the move. Risk: Horrific flaming death.
[1] Yeah, right. One of the tools you will require here is a reliable crystal ball so that you can have foreknowledge of all the possible attack vectors that will be invented over the lifespan of your product.
What they said: "helped the manufacturers fix those problems."
What this actually means: "Made sure that the manufacturers won't make these particular mistakes again in their new products. Much as we'd have liked them to issue fixes for their existing user base, they all told us to get knotted."
The problem with allowing a wide variety of hardware and letting manufacturers customise the O/S[1] is that this customisation is being done by cheapskate fucks who regard any design more than a year old as obsolete and any effort spent supporting such as money down the crapper.
[1] MS found exactly the same with WinMo. The clever thing Google have done with Android is managed to get people to actually blame the device's maker when the thing's an unreliable bag of shite rather than the O/S itself. MS never managed this very important bit of sleight-of-hand marketing.
He's also a big fan of guitar effects pedals. Three of the most popular of which (fuzz, flanger and phaser) exist to reproduce that "AM radio" sound.
I guess it's less about distortion of the music and more who controls the distortion(!)
I also don't recall him, back in the day, refusing to allow cassette sales or banning his stuff being played through anything sporting a noddy graphic equaliser[1]......
[1] Cassette and the eighties boom box. The greatest crime against music ever. Bar none.
He worked that into his act too (from memory):
"Those of you who've seen me before will expect me to do some stuff on the pleasures of smoking about now. Well, it ain't going to happen as I've given up."
Heckler: "Boooooo".
"Boo? BOOO? What the fuck is that supposed to be? If I was sitting where you are, watching Bill Hicks and hearing him say that he'd given up smoking, I'd be standing on my fucking chair yelling 'JUUUDAAAAS!!!!!'..."
Could just be an overreaction to something.
Like, oh I dunno, if some bunch had breezed through their password security to nick a load of their customers' credit card details not too long ago.
the court heard the teen suffered from a mental illness at the time of the web assaults, had dropped out of school and shunned his family, but had later showed "complete and genuine remorse."
Translation:
"Made enough cash from being a rancid shitstain that he was able to hire a decent brief to both bullshit the judge and also coach him in doing so"
Machine learning imagines the missing pixels....
You mean just like organic learning has been doing for countless millennia?
The human eye is a bit crap....okay very crap....okay, by comparison to camera systems, mind-numbingly crap. Your eye picks up a small part of the image you see and only part of that in any serious detail. Your brain stitches all the seen bits together into one image and enhances detail in the bits that don't have it. What you see has way more to do with post processing than with optical imaging....
....the app is hard to delete – with admin privileges, it's beyond the ordinary user, and there's an extra nasty. A separate persistence package called com.nb.superuser runs on a different thread and survives deletion of the main app.
So the Android uninstall process doesn't then? Sounds like there's a sodding great hole somewhere in the Android security model if it's even possible for a user app installation to root the bloody thing to that extent.
Fixing that would be a good start to preventing this sort of thing.
The truth of the matter is that like-for-like applications do not exist in almost every case.
Hear, hear. Reminds me of the recent HP / Oracle debacle. The number of utter 'tards who trotted out "You can just migrate to ${open_source_database}, what's the problem?", was quite scary. The problem with that "solution" is, of course, Oracle Financials.....
In the real world, it's the applications that are important. Which O/S, database and such are used is immaterial, save in that they must support the applications the business requires.
Hmm, I tend to sneak a look at the junction layout picture as, with a complex junction, the voice direction for turns, merges and changes is invariably too early, too late or complete bollocks.
Easier to look and see where it expects you to end up and then work it out yourself with the aid of the signage.
"we offer a smaller-than-standard sized doughnut purposefully geared towards the American market."
Er, surely that should be larger, as in "unfeasibly colossal". There's a reason why lardbucketry is rampant amongst the left-pondians and it's the size of the food portions provided.
I once went to a nouvelle cuisine restaurant in San Matteo. I did wonder how the yanks would square the "small portion artistically presented in the middle of a plate" thing with their eating habits. The answer to that little conundrum turned out to be plates 2' 6" across......(!)
Any expats based in Europe renewed their passports recently?
Do the bunch of outsourcing thieves[1] based in Paris still force you to do this as the only[2] method of payment they'll accept?
Dunno which Civil Servant decided to remove the responsibility from the various embassies and set that up instead, but with that track record of sheer fucking idiotic incompetence they're probably a Permanent Secretary by now.
[1] With the extortionate markup they charge on return postage, the markup on the usual passport costs and the fact that, if you call them, they bill your credit card, per minute, on top of the premium rate number they force you to use, that is the correct word.
[2] They're based in France so, while there is some electronic payment method available, this doesn't work outside France as it's uniquely French, as per usual there.
Unintentional from an AI standpoint...
Yup, the important bit about an insult is the intent. A "perceived insult" isn't actually an insult at all, just a misunderstanding.
Trouble is that the legal system tends to reward people for acting pigshit-thick and misunderstanding as much as possible.
The European Parliament cannot actually write legislation..
An important point that cannot be made often enough.
I can't help thinking that the purchase of a rubber stamp with the word "APPROVED" on it and a red ink pad could save the EU a good few million EUR each year. It'd do the same job equally as well as the current setup and they could even buy two, to have one in Brussels and one in Strasbourg, to save the cost of moving it back and forth every month.
They'd lose the figleaf of democracy, but it wouldn't actually change anything in practice as all the actual power is held by the Politburo Commission who are appointed rather than elected anyway.
Hmm, it's not just third-parties buggering Android.
The app update model is b0rken. When the new version of an app is cattle-trucked, you're left with an official choice of being stuffed or reverting to whatever antique version is sat in ROM[1]. Going back to last known working involves tracking down the .apk, turning on install from untrusted and doing it yourself.
In a word, "maps". On my Ascend P6, versions since 8.x go titsup on invocation with a nasty library API error. Something to do with the "more opportunities for us to punt crap at you"[2] functionality that Google built in from 9 objecting to something in the Huawei build.
[1] Of course, if it's an app you installed, rather than one supplied with the phone, your options are more limited....!
[2] I can't see anything else in the release notes that differentiates 9 from 8. The Googly deafness on this one supports the idea that what's at fault is something that makes them cash and that they thus won't allow to be turned off.
defaulting to Google's time servers that are not offered or guaranteed to work in the future
Not the first time (hah!). Doesn't seem that long ago that the Time Zone Database, providing an "everything you need to know about times and dates" service, got taken down due to some troll wielding its IP. Cue outrage.
My perspective at the time was that the rights and wrongs of the takedown were rather less important than the fact that use of said service was squirreled away in a load of software libraries, used by just about everything and yet was reliant on the good graces of one bloke maintaining it in his spare time for its existence.
As it turned out, ICANN picked up the service and the world carried on turning, although I still wonder what would have happened had the patent troll actually had legs to stand on......(!)
Don't worry, you get used to it really quickly. Many people worry about changing gear with the other hand, I've never even noticed this.
Secret is to concentrate when approaching roundabouts and right turns, especially first thing in the morning or just after leaving a motorway. This is where the "wrong way" fuckup will occur if it's going to.
and should swap to the right.
Not even possible these days.
For around 40 years now, the junctions of major roads have been very carefully designed to encourage acceleration on joining and deceleration on exit. Likewise, newer roundabouts, gyratory systems and one-way systems are carefully designed to provide good flow and sightlines in one, and only one, direction. Just reversing that little lot, for obvious safety reasons, was costed at many hundreds of billions in the 1990's (last time it was looked at).
That's before you factor in signage and other such changes.
Elephant in the room is the stonking safety issue of having the majority drive on the right in RHD cars for many years.
Note that Japanese cars are innately RHD and yet do not seem to be significantly cheaper than converted German, French et. al. cars.
Dear Sir,
We wish to inform you that our client, Apple Computers, holds all relevant trademarks and patents relating to The Beast(tm), The Number Of The Beast(tm) and Hordes Of Zombie Slaves Of The Beast(tm), which they actively exercise in connection with their business of achieving world domination through mind control.
We take a very dim view of your encouragement of Microsoft to infringe our client's rights and require you to cease and desist forthwith.
Yours etc,
Messrs Hangem and Floggem, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.
Said Eurozone implosion wouldn't have been the fault of Greece anyway, it's Germany you should be looking very hard at here.
Much was made at the time of the fiscal fudging that went on to allow Greece and Italy into the Euro, yet the German elephant in the room was quietly ignored as it's unfixable.
The problem is the German constitution and the Bundesbank (and we have the Allied Powers immediately postwar to thank for this). In a fit of rabid paranoia over the hyper-inflation of the Wiemar Republic and its results, the Bundesbank is fearsomely independent and has as an overriding goal the control of inflation. This can be Good Thing as it stops their version of the loony left tax 'n spending their way to bankruptcy (c.f. Gordon Brown, the current greek mob, etc).
The slight snag in this arrangement with the Euro is that if the European Central Bank were ever to set interest rates that conflicted with the requirements of the Bundesbank, it's hello constitutional crisis in DE and a rapid "gexit". Unfixable, as there ain't a cat in hell's chance of getting the required votes in Germany to change the setup. The net effect is that the allegedly independent CEB running the Euro for all countries is actually the Bundesbank's poodle.
When the PIIGS states started overheating (remember the "Celtic Tiger" and such?), everyone expected a hike in interest rates from the CEB of somewhere north of 0.5% to suppress this. At the same time the Bundesbank predicted a slight slowdown in the German economy, so what we actually got was a 0.5% cut in rates.
The effect on the Euro periphery was like pouring petrol on a fire[1] and the rest is history.
[1] And had the side-effect of causing growth rather than recession in DE, compounding the fuckup, as the PIIGS blew loads of cheap credit on products by Porsche, Mercedes, Miele, etc ad nauseum.
These features crank up the rate at which the chipset looks for a Wi-Fi........signal
So, does it have the Achilles' heel of the P6 in this area? Bluetooth streaming cuts out every time it sees a Wi-Fi signal due to the cheapskate use of one 2.4Ghz transceiver running multiple stacks. Should be even worse with that feature if so.
A right PITA (and illegal, cough) if you're already on the motorway and have to juggle the bloody thing one-handed to turn off WiFi so the music works without interruption.
As I have observed before, getting a meaningful agreement on what to do about warming is proving impossible, so the chances of anything we're doing now (or looking to do in the foreseeable future) making any difference at all is somewhere around fuck all.
So, yes, stick the money into R&D, but R&D to find answers to living with a warmer climate, not into yet more pointless greenery.
...to make sure Samsung's hardware drivers were not removed or overridden by Microsoft's upgrades....
Hmm. Now you'd have thought that updated drivers were a Good Thing, unless of course the supplied ones have something else built in that they're getting a kickback for.....
Maybe it is Lenovo all over again, but we just haven't dug far enough to find the root (hah!) cause yet. It would make more sense.
See Mir, cheapskate[1] Russians, manual docking and remote control for a real world[2] example here. According to Mike Foale, who was onboard at the time, it's quite nasty.
[1] They had an automated docking system, but it was made in the Ukraine. When the Soviet Union went titsup, the Ukrainians decided that they were not going to provide this for free. The Russians decided that fitting a TV screen and rudimentary remote controls in Mir itself would allow manual docking of unmanned resupply craft and What Could Possibly Go Wrong promptly did.
[2] Okay, offworld then.
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