Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: There is 'Truth', 'Lies', and ROFL

Half true. 1912 is correct.

There is a good sport in that across the ex-Soviet block by the way. A very good friend of mine was the reason why "Окръжно Номер 6" aka Order No 6 was removed in the 70-es from public display in the National History museum in Bulgaria. That document supposedly documents the decision of a congress of the Bulgarian Communist party to ramp up the "armed struggle" and attempt to take power in 1944.

The problem with it is same as with some of the Pravda issues from July/August 1917 as well as some of the decisions of the Central committee from that period - language and spelling. It could not have been written before the 1950-es.

So at some point in the 70-es a few people (mostly from outside Bulgaria) including the aforementioned friend of mine asked the rather obvious question: "Why does this document use spelling and language which was not around until 20 years later". Thankfully, they were in Bulgaria, not USSR. In USSR asking the corresponding question about 1917 Pravda issues or CK orders from that period would have worked them a nice excursion east into the forest. In Bulgaria, the document just disappeared from the public display and only its content was circulated in books, etc. With "updated spelling" and a footnote that "all documents have their spelling updated to the modern standard".

There is one thing which the 1984 history rewriting practitioners fail in again and again and again - linguistics. It takes 10 minutes for someone with knowledge of how the language changed over the years to catch them in their tracks and see through their subterfuge.

That depends.

If Pokemon Go was a gun, it would have killed NOONE.

Because it is a game, the idea that it may somehow be involved can be contemplated without the NRA demonstrating outside your premises.

Re: Politicians are already Bots, preprogammed, script driven

You could just have a new set of http error codes:

The current lot will just go to 418.

Fine both.

That makes it fair and square.

As well as every single scumbag up the food chain.

The same fine too - not split it. So if a ScumBagTelecom has worked itself 45k fine apply 45k to ScumBagTelecom, 45k to SlimeBallMarkeing and 45k to the customer of SlimeBallMarketing who ordered it. Regardless of are they guilty or not: "Though shalt do due diligence on your suppliers".

Re: Quite common in phones

It could simply be that the charger isn't what it claims to be.

It is - tested, measured. It is a proper 2Amp standalone 12V module which is wired directly into my car accessory circuit.

Or that the cable is bad (the cable makes a huge difference).

Brand new cable, the phone charges from 5% to 75% in under an hour in idle and draws wattage which is equivalent to two amps at the 5V.

Plain and simple - it consumes more than 10W in that mode. You can use it as a warmer in that mode. I never run it for more than 10-15 minutes, I suspect it will not survive it. Or you may cook eggs on it.

For the reference - the software in question is Sygic and the phone under test was my old Xperia M4.

That's good. I'd be upset to hear that he had a conflict of interest.

Come on, Vulture Capital never has a conflict of interest. It has only one interest - "get rich quick" schemes. Is anyone looking for long term returns as far as they are concerned is irrelevant.

Re: I really liked my Kindle ...

New ones do that. The original was bombproof. I still have a Kindle mark 1 (the one with the keyboard) and it still works and the battery still lasts for a couple of weeks.

If not then this is a complete waste of public money.

Not necessarily. It is basic accounting. If it is a consumer device (albeit slightly hardened), its depreciation is ~ 3 years. If its battery lasts for at least 3 years, then the bean-counting approach to it says it's fine. This differs from the older police radios which were designed to be bomb-proof and had significantly longer life expectancy to start off with.

The potential waste of public money is elsewhere. Is Samsung contracted to provide stock for X years and offer appropriate replacement models after that. I bet it is not. So the potential complete waste of money does not come from the battery side - it comes from the whole device becoming obsolete in ~ 3 years with no suitable replacement.

Re: Less is more?

I also suspect, although it's hard to get exact figures, that the Swordfish was the most successful aircraft

No, the Dauntless clocked more (as a dive bomber). Also, the Junkers based in Norway clocked quite a lot of tonnage against allied convoys. Probably less than the Dauntless or the Swordfish though.

Re: Harry who?

Ursula Le Guin. Read that at the age of 10 - the intro said 11.

I am surprised you groked it. The depth and breadth in Earthsea or god forbid the Hainish cycle is not something I would recommend to young ones.

While I do not limit what my kids read, if I see them grabbing a book from that shelf I would recommend them to wait for a few years.

Re: Coming from a US entity

Not just any US entity - an entity which has been used and is still being used today in other countries for the same purpose.

Re: Unprofessional bollocks

All code has the potential to cause user issues. Adding unnecessary code is highly unprofessional.

Oh, come on, loosen up and get a life.

Re: I have this great idea for business model

No you do not.

Al Capone already had it.

Re: Slackware-current ...

This is one of those moments when you start admiring OpenWRT, Debian, etc perseverance on staying with kernel long term release for as long as possible.

Living on the edge is for err... people who like living on the edge...

Re: Whitman did the right thing

Looks like most of the remains have been ditched by now. Making it seem a positive thing to downsize after a decade or more of bungled take overs is disingenuous.

Sorta. Most of the takeovers should have never happened. HP of old failed to correctly integrate every single takeover I can remember all the way back to the DEC/Compaq merger.

While there is nothing positive in admitting that these have failed and trying to clean up house, it had to be done. It was predetermined on the date her predecessors took over all of those previous failed acquisitions.

It will be predetermined in any future acquisitions too, because all large acquisitions are determined by beancounters and marketing, NOT engineering nowdays. Any synergies are determined as "synergies" - cost savings by beancounters.

There is no real analysis of how it relates to products on both sides and what does it change for real in the way the company does business. There is no engineering plan BEFORE the acquisition commences. It is done as an afterthought, very late in the M&A process or long after that.

Disclaimer - I have done M&A due diligence for more than one Tier 1 Silicon Valley company. I did not see an in-depth "engineering change" analysis even once. At all. It was all "what do we get from buying this sh**", not "how does buying this change OUR way of building sh**".

Some day it will enslave us.

Some day it will enslave us.

We are quite far down that way already. Just look around you at all the people spending every spare minute of their lives of f***book and try to visualise a fair election if Zuk decides to run for a President.

Re: One wonders ...

will be able to give it a fairly hefty whack with a laser

Do not complain after that when the near-C railgun missiles start hitting Earth. We opened fire first.

Re: Good call.

That's exactly how MS deal with all the ascii porn in Windows.

I suggest doing a quick search of what was the default magic number in some of the Azure/HyperV code which had to be open sourced so it can be distributed as a part of Linux. Hint - it was not the well known "0xdeadbeefdeadbeef" value.

Many charities use support workers on zero hour contracts for various valid reasons. Your suggestion would cripple charities with greatly increased labour costs and be detrimental to the care of the disabled and other vulnerable groups.

1. As Ledswinger said there is no reason not to give charities an exemption.

2. Caring for the groups you have mentioned is a blatant example of zero-hours abuse in the marketplace. If you have 30 disabled you as a charity are taking care on a council ward, the time it took this week is not going to be drastically different from the time it takes next week. The only time it changes are medical emergencies and in that case it actually goes down as NHS takes over.

The only reason the care worker taking care of that is employed on a zero hour contract is exactly that - convenience and ensuring that he/she continues to get the 7.36£ average hourly pay for a care worker at 40 the same way he/she did at 20 (this is according to national statistics for UK). Excuse me for being blunt, but as far as hypocrisy goes that is possibly on par with Mike Ashley - you are in a position to offer a proper job, you have the proper work, the work is pretty much nailed to an exact number of hours per week and you deliberately screw the worker who actually does the work. On top of that you try to climb on an even higher soap box than Uber and you beat yourself in the chest about being charitable and public morals.

Bleurgh... excuse me while I retch, and frankly I am not sure about the exemption on charitable organizations.

Re: Silent single point of failure

Bollocks.

Concur.

I had 100+ machines answering single IPs when running DNS in an ISP 15+ years ago. Every single one of them was answering for primary authoritative, secondary authoritative, primary resolver and secondary resolver.

I would not trust IBM in their current state to implement anycast correctly though.

It's "борщ", not "борьщ"

I stand corrected. Too much time spent in other Slavic countries so my Russian spell-fu occasionally gets confused :)

As far as healthy... If you are going out in -20C to chop wood - yes. If you are eating it and then going back to a desk job - I beg to differ.

A properly done single portion of the Russian variety exceeds the daily dose of cholesterol and and calories intake for an adult male. The Ukrainian variety is outright lethal unless you have grown up with it so your stomach can digest stuff like that.

Re: That is the question...

Fixed it for you: Everyone knows only Cylons can make YOU toast.

Re: You idiots!

Expect a writ from Moscow, probably with some sexual harassment allegations thrown in for good measure :-(

That... May... Be... A very interesting organizational structure of the Human Remains department...

Re: What's implausible ...

Cease being surprised.^2

USA govt has gone a bit too far down the road of privatization. Have a look at all recent incidents and read them in detail from this perspective - starting from Snowden, going through this one and finishing with the Angst In Her Pants lady.

ALL CONTRACTORS.

More than half of the agencies workload especially in the infosec and development area is subcontracted and at least some of them definitely cut corners to increase margins.

Re: No car tax?

All speed averaging cameras are capable of dumping ANPR info for this purpose. All of London low emission zone cameras can do it too. Same for the congestion charge. Same for parking charges. Same for...

Not doing so is a waste of public money - in most cases we f*** paid for the bloody things to be put up. In the cases where they are private (ANPR at parking entrances and exists) the police is perfectly entitled to ask for a nicely formatted dump once a month.

Re: Initial comments from a guy with a Class A.

Seats one. Where does the lovely Mrs. jake sit?

I just realized - the bloody thing has no left-right wheel drive bias. There is a LOT of truckers in Europe which will be very interested in that.