Posts by heyrick 6653 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2009
The problem isn't so much the propaganda, that's been going on forever (Voice of America/Russia/China) on SW anyone?
The problem is that far too many people these days will believe whatever fits their world view regardless of any resemblance to reality.
Case in point, how the hell did we end up with https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1651078/Bring-Back-Boris-Johnson-campaign-Tory-chiefs-Lord-Cruddas-demands-update
Downvote because the idea that you can't kill yourself with a car that has a cat is bullshit.
There's less carbon monoxide, not none. It's still deadly, it will still kill you, it just takes longer.
https://www.mja.com.au/journal/1998/168/2/impact-catalytic-converters-motor-vehicle-exhaust-gas-suicides (first link I got that wasn't crap on Quora)
Pertinent quote: Conclusion: Catalytic converters and the associated lower CO emission limits of 9.3 g/km had not, by 1995, resulted in a reduction in numbers, rates or percentages of exhaust gas suicides in Australia.
Not so much compliance there as outright corruption.
The place where I work has three different audits.
1, BRC-IFS. This is known about well in advance. There is a cursory walk around the production area, but it (five days of audit!) is mostly concerned with the protocols and the paperwork. If we fail this, we cannot sell food.
2, Client audits. We make stuff for others to sell. This gives them the right to send somebody to perform an audit. They do not need to give any notice, but production usually gets about half an hour advance warning to polish the doorknobs and such. Given the really weird little nitpicky things that get noticed, I can't help but think that the criteria is not so much to check we're okay, but more "find anything wrong so we can renegotiate our prices". But that's just my opinion.
3, Service vétérinaire audit. This is a government person that turns up to perform a spot check. They seem less concerned with the paperwork than the actual practice. But given that a failure would mean "everybody go home, this place is now closed", it's pretty important.
There are always a few things picked up, it's natural. But otherwise we pass with good marks because food hygiene is important. In recent times there have been some pretty serious failures - Lactalis baby milk powder, poison pizzas, Kinder chocolate... having our company name uttered in the same hushed "how could that happen" way is not an accolade we're aiming for. Especially as bad food can make people quite ill. I have particularly good knowledge of that given a well known burger chain gave me the worst food poisoning I've ever had not so long ago. On the plus side, I've entirely kicked my fast food habit...
Anyway, only the bureaucrat audit is known in advance. All of the others turn up unannounced and the manglement has to drop everything and handle it. The entire point is to see how things work day to day, not a specially curated visit. If these audits were known about in advance, important heads would be on the chopping block.
As do we. Orders for things are made by website, and this is confirmed by a signed fax.
It's a weird quirk of law that a signature on a fax carries legal weight (probably from the days when it was literally scanning the original document in real time) while a signature in an email is just a meaningless pasted graphic.
This sort of thing matters when the orders are for tens of thousands of euros. That signature is a commitment.
Oh my god.
Where I work they perform bacteriological tests multiple times per day (it's a food factory). The results, including details of who did the test, where, and when, all have to be filed for something like five or six years. Thankfully these days it's data rather than boxes of paper records.
Oh, and we also have to preserve a ridiculous number of self generated paper records (scanned into the system at the end of each day) such as product temperature after cooking in the oven, temperature of various things as it leaves the kitchens, periodic weights to ensure the machines (or employees) are dosing out the right amount, and there's a gizmo for the final product before boxing that detects metal contamination and weights every single thing, rejecting anything out of tolerance. When the production run is in the trend of thousands, that's a lot of data. All of this, and loads more I'm not aware of, is recorded every single day.
So it seems unbelievable in the modern (computer) age that companies who have to perform mandatory testing of products have "issues" regarding the traceability of such tests and certifications awarded.
Aha, if I do 1 / (3.17 x 10e-14), that comes out as 3.1545741e+12 which, if the 12 is how many zeros follow the original number, gives a 1 in 3,154,741,000,000 chance. Which amusingly is 10x less! That much more likely to be hit by a flying lump of rock whilst holding the jackpot winning lottery ticket. Wouldn't that suck. Wouldn't that be epic. I'm torn.
Is the calculation sort of right, or completely messed up?
If you have a moment, how did you come up with 1 in 31,500,000,000,000?
I get how the number was worked out, though Google tells me (1.43 * 10e-6) * (2.22 * 10e-8) is 3.1746e-12, I'm guessing the -14 in the original is because there are two digits less after the decimal point so it needs shifted more?
The bit I'm stuck on is translating that notation into a "1 in X" value.
Genuine question - I have dyscalculia and really suck at maths.
Upvote, because lower end tablets only have 1 or 2 GB onboard and tend to run Android Go. I have two (freebies with magazine subscriptions) and they are actually pretty capable devices for "free", just a bit slow [*]. So having software that doesn't assume everything is a Samsung flagship would be good for, you know, the rest of us.
* - This is, of course, completely relative. As it's nice and I'm on holiday I've been running my old Pi1 outdoors with a little 7" LCD panel and a hefty battery to power them both. I run RISC OS and use Netsurf. (for more demanding things I use my phone) I am shocked at how astonishingly slow everything is. Once upon a time that little 700MHz ARM11 processor was extremely nippy and could run the rings of Saturn around an ancient RiscPC with an ARM710 clocking at 40MHz. Now? The Pi1 is the RiscPC and the main machine is a Pi3B+ which is like an order of magnitude faster. My phone can do stuff the Pi (either) can't even dream about. So the tablet is fast or slow depending upon what it compares with. But it's a quad core jobbie (one of those Allwinner chips) so it isn't a total piece of crap (just pretend there's no camera). Handles Netflix...
So these people have managed to break a shiny new extra special crypto using maths the likes of which the wiki pages read as undecipherable gibberish...
...and they only get a lousy fifty grand?
Clearly NIST has approximately zero confidence in their creation. And, clearly, with good reason.
Though, to be honest, this level of pwnage is just embarrassing. Destroyed in minutes not using some imaginary quantum computer, but a near decade old machine, and it probably didn't even exercise the cooling fan. Utter devastation.
Somewhere in the early '00s they changed macrovision which led my ancient cathode ray TV to freak out and show a rolling and tearing picture, which was why I started ripping in the first place - to be able to watch what I had bought.
In more recent years, my now defunct TV has been replaced by phone/tablet. So ripping is necessary to use these, though DVD purchases have plummeted thanks to the likes of Netflix.
It pisses me off no end that movies often begin with this "you wouldn't steal a car" nonsense that cannot be skipped over. And far too many then follow that up with several minutes of blatant self promotion that, also, cannot be skipped over.
It says a hell of a lot when one can pop in a DVD, then go make a mug of tea and a microwave burger, eat/drink both, and come back to find the initial couple of minutes of creator logos at the start of the movie are still playing.
If I want to watch $Movie, I want to watch $Movie and not ten minutes of forced shit.
Personally, I think the movie studios have missed a trick in not offering affordable MP4 downloads. By all means embed purchaser details in the file, like Amazon does with the digital music downloads, but it would be great to be able to buy a film as a tagged but otherwise unrestricted MP4. Not a you need this app and this crypto and you can only do this and this and fuck you.
You want to know why people pirate? There are two reasons.
The one you can't fix - some people are just cheap ass losers that think the world owes them something.
The one you can fix - when it's easier, simpler, and a lot less hassle to pirate than to do things properly, this isn't the time to start screaming about losses greater than the GDP of entire countries, but to understand that your entire way of releasing your product is simply not keeping up with how people consume media these days. The problem is that rather than look for new ways to release your creations, you bent over backwards to cling on to older methods and just interfere - DVDs infamous "region" controls, anyone?
The music world eventually got it. Albums were increasingly getting packed out with filler and pointless rereleases, so people could instead buy the songs they liked rather than complete albums. And, yet, for whatever reason sales of vinyl (full albums) are actually increasing despite the widespread acceptance of digital downloads (and as a child in the 80s it's really weird seeing more records than CDs in the supermarket these days, and they're bloody expensive, and people are buying them!).
So why can't I go on to some place (like Amazon, or direct from the distributor) and get a simple download in return for my money? That I can watch on whatever device I choose?
Yes, there will be people sharing that with friends and such, but that's been an issue since the days of VHS. It happens, get over it.
But whatever you do, fuck the entire lot of you for having the audacity to begin a DVD that a person paid for with the "you wouldn't steal..." rubbish. No, I'm never going to let that one drop or be forgiven. You basically implied that your paying customers might be thieves. Little surprise that some of them treated you with the same level of disdain.
The number of legal cases regarding patents suggests that the granting of such is more rubber stamping them anything resembling diligence.
A patent is granted and then the holder gets to shake down everybody else in court (it's set up so they pretty much have to defend the patent) until such time as the patent is declared invalid.
And now? They would like a machine, that is not a moral "person", a machine capable of creating hundreds of patents every second, to not only create patents but also to be able to be awarded them?
This ought to count as some sort of abuse of the legal system, but lawyers are likely too busy rubbing their hands in glee to care about the abuse angle...
How about put a freeze on adding fancy new interfaces and messing with the UI in pathetic attempts to copy Apple and instead fix the bugs and sort out woeful problems.
Here are a few:
* Maps photos - there seems to be no way to move a photo that is a little out of place for some reason (by a little I mean it was GPS tagged and got stuck on the wrong side of the lake). Delete and reup is not an answer if it's noticed three years later, when it's simply a bodge of location information on the asset.
* YouTube - it's impossible to upload a video taken in a specific location if they location isn't a named known place. If you're standing on a big pile of rocks in the middle of nowhere, there IS no name. Why can't a coordinate work?
* Maps - it would be nice to be able to say the speed restrictions of a vehicle (mine is limited to 45kph and not allowed on certain classes of road), which means time estimates are well out.
* Maps - what the bloody hell have you idiots done to France? The road at the top of my access lane is the C3 (communal road 3). For some reason Google has named all of the little country roads barely big enough to squeeze a harvester down after whatever house is closest to that point. It makes for a lot of navigation prompts saying "continue on to la maison neuve" when crossing the bit of road from that house to the bit of road to the other.
Best, really, is to mark these dumb names (or the C numbers) and simply not say them at all. Only locals will know which house is which, half the time the C number is only given once on a rusty plaque nailed to a collapsed well that was last used in 1944. Just STFU until there's a "turn left in one hundred metres" or whatever.
* Docs - is embarrassingly bad. While it is functional, it lacks a good fifty percent (figure plucked from my arse, likely to be generous) of the functions available on the website version. It shows something is amiss if editing a document with any sort of complexity requires both the app and an open browser window.
* Docs - one day we might enjoy the browser print preview, the app print preview, and what actually gets printed all showing the same thing. That they are often three different things shows that for all of its development, Docs is barely more than a popular toy.
For the world's second largest tech company (I'm guessing Apple is #1?), it's just poor. Your apps on your OS ought to be a flagship.
* Android - can we please, instead of having options for 2G only and 2G with everything else, can we please have options to pretend 2G doesn't exist? Where I am, it's set up so 2G data takes precedence, and it's also rather broken in that 2G is broken with modern Android because the speeds slower than dialup don't work with the amount of data spewage that happens these days. So if reception is poor, I find my 4G or H+ has become a lonely E and my phone is spending all of its time shouting into the void. Calls? Blocked (data or calls, not both). Data? Pretty much blocked as nothing useful is going to happen at those speeds. Switch back up to 3G or better? It happens, but nowhere near as quickly as to be useful. If the phone gets stuck on E, then that's where it stays for ages.
Oh, and I can't imagine your application attrition rate is beneficial to employee morale.
That's just off the top of my head, but the icon seems appropriate.
"On the flipside, my energy costs are quadrupling in a year, fuel for my car is 50% higher and my pay rise was less than 5%."
Before I start, I'll point out that I live in France. Fuel is double what it was last year, costs are going up. Nothing that isn't happening everywhere else. The government promised a 4% cap on electricity prices, yet the raw cost of a kilowatt hour has gone up by nearly a third.
My pay rise? Practically bugger all.
Macron has said that the amount that companies can give to their employees (the infamous Prime Macron) will rise to €6000 before becoming a tax issue. Well, that's all good and well if the place you work for is happy to offer (offer, note, no obligation) six grand.
It would be far more productive to many more people if he properly bumped up minimum wage, which would have a knock on effect on those paid "close to". Instead, it (the "SMIC") will be re-evaluated this coming Monday, and I expect it'll probably go up around 1.5-2%. Which is, what, a little under €30 a month extra? Any rise is welcome, but a mere euro a day doesn't even.....
On some of the machines at work, the big red stop buttons do not disengage. There is a little keyhole in the middle.
So the person who pressed the button has to go to the line manager, who has to go to the production manager, who has to call out the maintenance manager, who gets his guys to take the thing apart and check it thoroughly for potential faults, missing pieces, etc. This takes about two hours in the middle of a busy production (because it needs recalibrated, and maybe new belts).
Meanwhile all of the managers and the culprit are filling out a long and detailed report of exactly what happened. When the maintenance manager is satisfied with both the state of the machine and the report, he'll get a key from a special locked box and unlock the emergency stop button.
The process was designed to be obstructive and arduous in order to ensure that people treat it as an emergency stop and not an "I'm too lazy to do it properly" button. Especially given that the machine shuts down as quickly as physically possible (almost always naffing up calibration, and in some cases breaking drive belts).
Dunno what you're on about regarding false flags, but yes, inline adverts are shit and cause the page to jump about erratically and frequently seem to grab clicks/taps that were intended to do something else, not to mention more than a few take any form of interaction as being permission to throw away what you were reading and go to a different site for even more adverts....
...so the painfully obvious question is why are you reading a tech oriented site and not using a blocker to block, well, everything.
Governments of all persuasions spout the bullshit they want you to hear, just ignore it. Don't get hung up on so-called false flags, instead worry about what you're letting have access to your device. That's a much more insidious problem.
As I did. ;) However all trade blocs are, by their nature, protectionist. There is liberalism and lowering of barriers for the members of the bloc, something that eases trade between member countries, and by virtue of that, defavourises trade with the outside world. In essence, a trade bloc provides internal perks at the expense of outsiders. A form of protectionism. It's basic economics.
"This could be the straw the breaks the EU's back."
<gallic shrug>
The Express (in particular) has been saying that semi-regularly since the Euro was introduced. It has weathered Ireland's problems, Greece's problems, Italy's problems, Greece's other problems... this economic shitstorm is a mixture of Covid and Russia, it is an external force and it's affecting everywhere. So, yeah, things will be tough, but the Euro will continue. I won't make plans for it's failure any time soon.
If anything is going to mess up the EU in the near future, it'll be whether or not they can manage to continue to coordinate a EU-wide response to what's happening in Ukraine. But, again, external issues.
Disclaimer: I live in France.
How the EU act? What, against Britain? Well it's a fairly protectionist trading bloc and, in case this wasn't already painfully clear, you're now on the outside.
The EU would have stood up for you. Now they stand against you. That's what happens when you leave... what did people expect?
"What has happened that we now need 4GB of RAM for a lightweight distro?"
Memory is cheap, I guess.
My phone goes into panic mode if there's less than half a gigabyte of free storage. And the amount of space consumed by apps is ridiculous. That, plus I just noticed Google Photos had over 800 megabytes of cache. How the hell can it's resource allocation be that bad?!
As a person who grew up in the eighties with around 20 kilobytes to play with, where every byte mattered, this sort of thing breaks my heart.
"This is why I will never voluntarily have a smart meter in my home."
The problem isn't really the smart meter (I have one, here in France we weren't given a choice). The problem is that you seem to have suppliers who can tell what your consumption is day by day, and yet still feel eligible to take whatever the hell they like by Direct Debit.
Can you not cancel the DD and pay the bill online? Then they can't help themselves to whatever fiction they devise.
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