Posts by Kevin Johnston 1542 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2007
We just replaced our TV as the previous one had developed a major fault linked to no picture and iffy sound. Repair cost was well over replacement cost so went on the search and found a 1080p Dumb TV which has 3 HDMI, 2 USB, no wi-fi or ethernet and was a brand I had heard of...Blaupunkt
Purchase made (at around two thirds the price of a similar Smart unit) and all is again harmonious chez moi
The problem with politics is that the parties get to choose who the population can vote for and there is no way to effectively protest the offerings. If you choose none of them then the one with the money gets in, if you choose the one you dislike the least then you will hate whoever gets in.
To get public confidence back in elections you need to have a 'none of the above' option and if that gets the most votes then there is no winner and they have to try again after a set period (a year? a decade?)
Very loosely linked but exactly the same concept...I was shopping and at the till the voucher printer flashed it's little lights and whirred for a while but nothing came out so I reported it and was told ' there are not many vouchers being given out today'. Well yes, that's because the printer is broken...DOH!
If someone tells you something is broken and this is the first report then what that means is this is the first report...no more, no less
I have a much simpler method thanks to an odd option from my ISP
In the ISP-supplied router there is a 'think of the children' option where I can restrict internet access for defined IP Addresses/Machine names. I run my Win10 in a VM with it's own IP Address which can only connect to the internet between 04:15 and 04:30 when by a stroke of sanity I am tucked up in bed getting some well-earned sleep.
My Linux host runs perfectly with full internet access, my Win10 VM does what it is told whilst being restricted to the local network whenever I launch it to run Windows only software and I have no worries that an update will creep in behind my back
My Google account exists purely because I have an Android device where it is a pre-requisite but the only usage for the account is to fire up that device (and presumably track any activity etc etc..paranoid? Moi?)
Almost all of my real internet activity is done on a Linux box through either Firefox or Opera with the usual Ghostery/No-Script style blockers and if that means I cannot use YouTube then I consider that a bonus.
Had they included me in the survey the results would have changed dramatically. My record for keeping one of these parasites on the phone is almost 40 minutes as there was nothing good on TV and I had just finished a stressful day so need something to relax me...it worked a treat I felt great afterwards
My daughter's car has a camera set to pick up speed limit signs and show them on the dashboard as a driver-assistance. A lovely idea but general clutter brings the hit rate down to probably 60% or so and it can be even worse away from primary roads where foliage grows rampant in the hedgerows.
If even a passive 'advisory' system struggles then a system using this to actively control the car could never be considered acceptable.
The article mentions that the docs disappeared from Google 3 months before the arrest so it is possible, almost a certainty actually, that the company fixed the issue and then reported the 'theft of documents'. This would mean that when the police checked they could not be accessed without logging in through the site hence they must have been 'hacked'
With most locks on uPVC doors, if you insert the key in one side then it stops a key being fully inserted from the other. Was told this morning of a relative having done than before suffering a medical issue and it required the Fire Service as it was a 3rd floor flat but had an open window.
So DOS beaten by backdooring (ish)
Try going back to the early 80's when Bird of Prey was on TV. This was a VERY plausible 'hacker' scenario and would have been a secret nightmare for every security force as this pre-dated almost all the automated data-gathering which most people now seem to delight in feeding their whole life story to.
Out of curiousity I did a count-up and I have installed a whole 9 Apps on my phone not including the OS apps. Of those, 3 are to replace OS items with ones I prefer such as maps/weather etc, 3 are 'loyalty' apps for coffee/shopping/travel, one is an alarm monitoring and one is a game.
Not much room for in-app fees there :)
"At the core of this case is Spotify’s demand they should be able to advertise alternative deals on their iOS app, a practice that no store in the world allows"
So when you say 'No Store', you mean the 2 (OK, 3 with Microsoft) stores which claw money into their coffers with an iron fist by forcing all payments to be made through the store with a cut for the house, kind of a 'nice app, it would be a shame if people couldn't download it any more'. I also liked the bit about how Apple made Spotify a giant of a company implying that Spotify now owed Apple a pay-back
There was an incident at a Radar site where a tech was working up the tower having carefully taken the 'Man aloft' key with him. Officer came along and wanted to use the system so got the spare key from the safe and turned the transmitter on.
No matter how hard you try, someone will find a way
I have had the nagging too but it seems that any date which defines you as over 13 years old is good enough. I also tried to find out what legislation demanded this with no success and since an acocunt is required to be able to use an Android-based phone it seems to be aimed at reducing sales since there will be little this provides which Google didn't already have in other forms
I am probably about to drown in downvotes but is it not the case where the ISP quoted figure is megabits while the download tracker is megabytes? Not to say this magically brings the observed download speed in synch with the ISP's quoted but it would explain getting around a tenth of the quoted speed.
While I was an apprentice doing a stint in the cable build area a deathly hush came one morning and everyone looked over at one of the wiremen who had almost completed a cable loom for a Comms cabin and found the shrouds for the 128-way connectors sat on the desk. He was calm, collected, just picked up his coat and went home.
When he came in the next day he found his Team leader and the manager had re-worked the loom and fitted the shrouds. One of the guys explained that it could happen to anyone and the guy it happened to would have been first in line to help anyone else with an issue.
Sort of supporting this viewpoint(ish)....
It was shown that ABS was not as effective as some drivers in some circumstances. This was qualified by pointing out that the drivers were professional racing drivers and the circumstances were very unusual. In the normal situation where ABS saves lives (Ice/Heavy Rain etc) it was leagues ahead of normal drivers with non-ABS braking.
If you cherry-pick your research it can come back to bite just like when I point out to my wife all the studies showing lots of black 'full-leaded' coffee is good for you...She then points to the mountain of studies which would beg to differ
Having been involved very peripherally with Exchange for many years I have watched with 'Cannot look away car-crash horror' at the way even the simplest activities have morphed from clumsy to odd to WHY? as the versions changed. I have even had the luxury of official training course where the Instructors themselves have shaken their heads at some of the decisions such as processes which were complex, then got a GUI, then a GUI update to show the Powershell equivalent command, then having the GUI removed and only permitting the Powershell command (including very long hex strings for critical values).
Dear Exchange Admins...You have my sympathy
The real embarrassment factor comes when everyone obligingly bats back to all with 'please remove me...' etc etc etc and you have over a thousand people getting spammed in the tennis. Oops, I missed out the important bit...It was to the core IT Admin Team distribution list.
I can understand why you say that but I think they have pitched it very well. With over 7 million people in Arizona, setting a '1 million in a year' trigger would guarantee to catch Apple and Google while still soundign to be a high threshold. It also gives an easy number for the other states to bounce off when setting their trigger levels
I suspect this comes from the same thought process as the one in Australia which puts Facebook's nose out of joint.
Continual chatter about these companies and their net presence tends to numb people to just how big they are and it takes an activity like this to shock people into resetting the marker for what big really means on the web
Just wait until you discover the joy of being deluged by Meeting invites and chats launching almost at random as people start to play with Teams. Then there is the joy of trying to delete old chats (you can't) or removing a file added into a chat by someone (this can be done but requires waiting until the 3rd full moon of the month and having a three-eyed goat and vial of unicorn tears to hand)
While working on flight simulator visual systems I was supporting a senior engineer with testing some upgrades and one area was not working as expected. We traced the fault to a single card but everything about it looked good according to all the circuit diagrams etc. As we walked back to the test area to have another go we passed another engineer who shall be known as 'The Guru' as from us passing 6 feet away at walking pace he looked at the card we were carrying and said "that's the wrong chip type". Apparently one of the 40 or so discrete ICs on the board was a 74Fxxx and should have been a 74HCxxx. We changed it and all worked perfectly
I can see your thought here but you have fallen into the same metaphor that allows the monopoly to exist. They do not own a shop or a market stall, they own the whole town/market in which they also have a shop/stall. Everyone else that wants to have a shop/stall pays them a fee before they can even start to sell anything and then pays commission on everything they sell. Even if these 3rd parties make a loss, Amazon still makes money from them.
eBay lost the lead in this because they were too casual and allowed Amazon to steal their market with delivery service etc which kept all the profits and customer data in house. This gave Amazon new avenues to push offerings and enhance their grip
So all those 'Doomsayers' that have been going on about the IoT junk security being a problem may not have been nutters after all....Whatever next, Pope is a member of the Catholic faith? Bears defacate in woodland areas?
May be an old phrase now but no less accurate...As you sow, so shall you reap
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