Re: So let me recap...
Then flip it back over and try the first way again.
157 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Feb 2009
I could never quite place why my old broadband was (more) shonky sometimes. Turns out that it still had paper-insulated cables, terminating in the chamber underground beside the poll. A little water would obviously seep in when the weather was inclement, and the insulation would become a little less insulating. None of that became apparent until an openreach van came to fix some neighbour's more blatant phone problem. Said engineer did not properly place the foam or cap properly on the chamber, a day or so before there was a proper downpour, and the paper insulation on the cables in there went from theoretical insulator to just not. That followup job was a more involved job than the initial fault/fix.
Can't say I've heard a credible offering to host servers at home, sounds like a logistics nightmare not worth the potential cost savings. But there are several, I'd go as far as saying many, projects where waste DC heat is channeled into local civil use, either directly supplying warm water to consumers (simple heat exchange to make it a reliable 50-70degC output from the DC) for heating or general use, or output to generator turbines, where the water starts much hotter than mains supply, so needs less external energy (fossil, biomass, etc) to convert to steam.
"the puck would need to be bigger to allow for a battery." - not so much, these days. With the advent of both USB-C power, and more accessibility to lithium cells in general, it may be that for occasional use you just hook it up to the USB power bank that you carry anyway/carry when it might be needed. Whether that's just dangling from a cable, or some custom clip-on pack to the puck, that happens to also have USB-C ports to use as a regular power bank other times,
For me, someone who's always owned big power banks, for a day of playing demanding AR games, it's been curious to see those larger units now being touted as a solution to someone's chromebook/ultrabook/etc needing a top-up without tethering themself to a wall socket.
Some irony that the 2 original major manufacturers of rocket motors I used both build them around Si units (the hobby rocketry system classes motors by letter, C is 10N, D is 20N, E is 40N, F is 80N, etc) and has then always graphed their thrust profiles in N too. And those have been working that way for decades.
My whinge is that they keep saying first 3D printed rocket, then need to add some qualifiers because hobbyists have been 3D printing rockets either most components as with this one, or even whole rockets printed in single pieces (for smaller models, where designs suit that better than more complex, larger systems). Uni and school student teams have also been huge users of 3D printers for their rockets, it being the magic answer to all of 'don't know how to combine single components to achieve desired results' plus 'this is the future' and of course 'someone else is paying for the hardware/filament/lab tech who deals with the things that go wrong'.
Previously whatnow ? Have you been on this internet thing ? I mean apart from to save some money on shopping ? He did enough before, and enough after, and he's certainly never been one to hide in the background, or keep his views quiet about things that don't work as they should.
For all peoples' upset in england about the trouble getting a jab, things pretty much lined up with the planned outcome. Those desperate to book 30 seconds after announcement got their appointments ASAP, those willing to keep hitting reload and try all sorts of options got one with as much time as they wished to invest to get it a couple of days sooner than they otherwise might. And as more centres came online, it became an option to check if you can move your appointment to somewhere nearer or sooner.
It's still going to take a finite time to jab 30M people, so sure, they could have spent a fortnight, probably
more, making sure they had enough appointments already on-hand (no doubt with a chunk of wastage especially as then it was all getting on for christmas) and then open the floodgates. But instead they made what was available available, some people got some jabs sooner, and everyone (ish) has got their jab. Kind of like the LFT situation - some people claim 'none have been available for weeks, but what they actually mean is that none have been available at the specific times they've checked every few days. Is that unfortunate for their specific circumstance ? Sure, but they may not have got any, any sooner, if supply and distribution was assured, and supply/need increased weeks later.
If you haven't paid all the money for the car, you haven't bought the car. Whether it's styled as a proper lease, a lease to own, or credit (especially for those with poor credit), then it's only if you think the credit provider has a generous nature that you should be surprised that failing to pay means failing to be able to drive said car, one way or another.
However much you or the people taking up the offers might not like the down sides, there's obviously some up sides else people wouldn't be accepting the terms, and such schemes wouldn't be worth offering.
I do recall realising that mice didn't start to fail because the 'rubber' was coming off the rollers, but that the rollers were pure metal (or plastic) and the black rubbery layer round the middle was a well-processed buildup of human grease deposited from desks, via the ball, onto the rollers, or years/months/weeks (depending on which particular user).
When I'm explaining it to folk with a scientific background, but not up on their rocket science, is that I'm sure they're familiar with the horrible smoke from burning plastics, but they also know from simple flames such as candles, that when you get badd smoke that's just because you're not doing an efficient burn. That problem with burning plastic is fixed in hybrid motors because they're no longer oxygen-starved, hence none of those bad combustion products get to hang around, due to the heat in the reaction, breaking down most of those, and outputting more energy as the bonds holding the complex chemicals are destroyed.
Sounds like (obviously is) a shonky done deal. Until one of the other possible competitors files court proceedings there challenging the process, and hires some local PR to explain to the local news media how the minister is not working in the best interest of the country, and leaves a dangling question of whose interests he is working.
The weakness will be disclosed regardless of any services purchased or not. Either the compromised company will disclose the personal data has been compromised, as legally required to, or they will be reported for failing to disclose it. The technical weakness will be reported because it's in the public interest to ensure others can learn from this mistake and avoid leaking people's personal data due to poor practices or common mistakes.
This company says 'we're sure no data has been lost or misused' but it's hard to believe a company that makes this mistake in the first place has such complete network and system logging to accurately determine this claim, in act quite the opposite. Exactly which outfit they choose to hire to help with their information security is up to them, they're not obliged to do that but they're going to have an even harder time brushing it off next time, to their directors/shareholders, to tee ICO, to their customers, and to the people whose data is leaked, if it happens a second time, having already been warned their processes are insufficient.
That the problem wasn't fixed with the first several emails, and they eventually sort it then whine you'd contacted them several times prior is arrogant, it's not admitting they should have fixed something sooner, not acknowledging that you helped them in pointing this out. If I tell you that you left your car unlocked, you don't need a 'prior relationship' with me to thank me for pointing out your carelessness. if it had your laptop bag sat on the passenger seat, I've just done you a favour. if it had thousands of other people's property sat on the passenger seat, I've done them a favour, and you're doing them a disservice to not acknowledge you've been negligent to leave other people's things unsecured.
Seems to be a weird failure more in several triggered noise-making toys. I guess at a too-low battery level, it fails to be able to keep a transistor path open, so the noisy bits trigger - but with so little current available it just drones at a low, sinister frequency because that side can't power it's oscillator well enough to get a kid-friendly squeaks and beeps you'd expect. Evidence as to how they knows to start only in the hours of darkness is beyond the explanation of electrical engineering/the laws of physics.
The difference is that you can't disable your samsung tv if it's stolen. If samsung's property is stolen, they'll press a button so it's got no resale value... but they won't let you press the button when your property is stolen, even though clearly that could be an option.
Most tansomware isn't targeted, they simply hit any and all machines they can find a way into. Then data on the size of the target organisation probably based on both what the software says it sees and what google says about the identified org, is used to give them a price to pay.
You can't trade in china unless you have a chinese company, and you can't have a chinese company unless there's a large chinese stakeholder. There's a very limited pool of chinese investors who will take on those 'partnerships', and you may guess that their influence isn't limited to simple business interests.
Really depends on your circumstance, but how often does wall power fail ? If you don't have UPS redundancy, then one PSU plugged into the wall and the other into the UPS gives you redundancy for PSU failure, for mains failure, and for UPS failure, Dual feeds cross-feeding dual-input UPSs, feeding in twin-psu boxes is nice and all, but a small office with one server sound like 9 times out of ten (if not 99//100) would be better off with mains+UPS, and if anything, putting extra budget into a better or bigger UPS rather than a matching pair.
Sensors, just like film before, don't just take a pure, level view across the entire spectrum and brightness. They are designed and picked, and similarly at the lowest image improvement level, to take absolutely any scene, and hopefully make it most intelligible to the viewer. What this means in practice is that flesh tones, which feature in many pictures, are enhanced. And by flesh tones, obviously I mean the pinky pixels in pictures. And similarly, detail is more readily available from enhancing light sections, people want detail that their eyes also do similar with; the darker parts of whatever random view the picture includes are more easily lost. Dark tones contain more noise, so look better if they're evened out, rather than 'detail'/noise picked out. This approach means that for any million random photos you take, the majority will look better than that even, pure, imaginary sensor - you're a winner. Except it means many specific circumstances will likely always end up doing worse, because they are different from some platonic ideal picture in ways this approach does not favour.
Like most people, a few of my bits ended up over there via a long chain of acquisitions. Moved everything important a very long time ago, but I'm not giving godaddy another penny (think these were all last renewed before then), nor any more voting weight on Nominet matters.
I might add something about the last one out turning off the lights, but too many people lap up GD's adverts, and tso seem quite willing and able to switch stuff off without any prompt being necessary.
The US is a total mess with it's gun control/gun law, obviously. However, the security services, like members of the public, don't conceal their guns, they're all still just open-carrying (except LEO will be carrying loaded, not just 'expressing their constitutional freedms') So if his case is that he's been thoroughly vetted for trustworthiness and mental stability, but doesn't want to be seen carrying a gun a lot, then it doesn't make the world of difference imho. And thanks to these stories, an even wider circle of organised undesirables are aware they wouldn't be attacking an unarmed target, should they target him.
> How the hell is everyone buying that many phones?
Because first world phones are only a small part of the picture. Markets like china, india, most of south america and africa are being sold phones for a pittance, because the R&D and tooling costs have been covered already - not just the phones overall, even components like chipsets and radios - where someone else already designed and perfected them, and clone parts at various levels (from straight piracy, to new implementations but based on the optimisations to performance and production cost learnt from the market leaders). That lets you build phones from runs-just-well-enough to passable, and then to the flagship models from those suppliers that often slip into the EU marketplace as high-spec, comparatively budget pricing offerings that a lot of geeks will choose, instead of the latest samsung marketing tool at twice the price (even after the extra costs passed on to us that make that possible)
Someone did the maths some years ago of BT's value at the time vs the scrap price of the copper they owned, and the copper of course won. But getting it all (a) out of the ground and (b) minus the insulation takes away far too much, with most of it in such a thin web across pretty literally the entire country.
Whose bloody country ? The good guys will tamper with your computer if it's in the national/their interest. Always have done, always will do. The time to install strong security was forever ago, and it still won't keep anyone determined, good or bad, out. If your takeaway from the feds removing one piece of malware from your computer is that you need better security, you're not wrong, but you're not competent.
I can't say for sure, but sounds like they removed the shells and possibly notified the companies at the same time/shortly after (likely with a demand for secrecy). Just that the sealed order has now been unsealed, giving all the cleaned and warned parties a tiny fighting chance to sort themselves in the meantime.
Most of the votes to retain the status quo were from a very small number of very big companies. They weren't voting because they think the board are doing things right, they're voting in their own self interest, which may well be even stronger now they've propped up the incumbents, so can push for things to work even more in their favour. Plus most of those companies are not merely not known for their strong grasp of ethics, but in fact for actively making highly unethical choices.
Perhaps a few small/smaller members who didn't vote may be sufficiently outraged and shocked by what happened after the vote to throw their weight in. I can't imagine too many smaller members voted against the EGM except out of self interest, but perhaps a closer choice between profit and ethics - maybe they will see the campaign's words about the character of the board were not mere hyperbole. All these will require a good amount more effort to reach out to though, along with those who voted for, but only because they were sufficiently reminded to make the effort.
Whatever else may be lurking, the board will need to make sure their pension plans are secured, because it's going to be a tough sell for any of them to take up senior roles elsewhere, once they finally get the boot. And if they do, t's going to be a hostile welcome from anyone not involved in the hiring, because why would anyone get that sort of person involved ?
A physical button that only logically turns the machine off does have it's uses, but as the imac case shows, it's rather limited, when you can often achieve the same from inside the running OS, or from a key on the keyboard. I do like a physical switch on a psu - lets me isolate the power but keep earth connected when I'm doing some quick fiddling with it's internals in situ. Most tech here is plugged into socket-dense power strips so no switches at the other end.
Some members of the only party for scottish independence interested in an alternative party for scottish independence shocker
Maybe not the way those members wanted to let the cat out of the bag, bur hardly surprising. Much as I find both sides merely popcorn fodder, this particular nugget is not where I'd anchor the story.
Even better when they don't even have read access to the archive. Due to various corporate changes over time, the only actual archive was physical, and housed in an office drawer no longer under any care, which got cleaned out sooner rather than later to avoid all sorts of other perils to the company.
Fast forward a year or two, and being the only person i possession of (my own copy of) my contract, HR eventually realised they'd shot themselves in at least 6 or 7 feet before we'd even made it into our first meeting about my redundancy. HR could maybe have checked with other who signed identical terms, excet obviously they had parted way sooner, and there was a severe deficit of gruntle between those parties and the company at that point.
FWIW, went from a 2x SE household to an SE2 and a 12 mini. Both do the job, and going from two well-abused batteries to new ones is something of a revelation. However, at least for out hands, we've got from a phone you can comfortable one hand (while actaually gripping, not just resting in your hand) to ones where neither can fully be comfortably one-handed. Also, getting rid of the home button/touch id was a terrible, terrible idea, I'm hoping the 13 brings back the button (at least a haptic button, with under-glass fingerprint scanner). because the mini is mine, and I'd upgrade it in due time to 13 that did. And I'd upgrade it today for something in the 5/SE sizing.