Posts by Headley_Grange

I've got an impact driver they can borrow.

Re: How to stay safe from online scams.

And change your email address every day. Also change your bank every week and your name every month. Move house at least once a year.

Re: What he's worried about

I don't see search, or apps in general, as part of Apples core offering, though. They don't make any other apps that are world leading and even in the creative areas they historically dominated they are no longer the best. Everything that comes as standard on my Mac is serviceable for creating shopping lists, films of your kids' birthdays and a spreadsheet to track your spending, but there's nothing you'd use if you were a professional or power user. It would cost them a tiny amount of their budget to turn Reminders into a decent GTD app, but they don't seem interested. They make their money on the hardware that's good enough to run pro-apps that they seem happy for others to make and they take their slice off the sales. Unless they start losing money on hardware, or there's a very, very long-term strategy to lock users into the garden before hitting them with home-grown produce, I just don't see Apple even trying to compete in search.

Re: See also: regression testing

Code review/inspection should have picked it up, shouldn't it?

Re: I've always been curious...

"I suspect the ads would exactly have to match a "gap" in source video"

The could put a little swirly thing in the top RH corner of the screen when the ads were due to be served.

What I've never understood is that it can do all that "intelligent" converting, but if I enter 2+2 it can't work out that it's meant to add them togethether.

Re: 2023 Model Santa's Sleigh

Maybe they've run out of European city names to copy.

Scotland's recent legislation on domestic detectors requires a heat detector in kitchens.

I used to live in a house where the detector in the hall was too near the kitchen so it went off without much provocation. It was great for grilling meat. Put the bacon/chicken/chops under the grill, leave the door open and retire to the living room to watch telly. When the smoke alarm went off it was time to turn the meat over. The meat wasn't burnt - it was just right. I think it was fumes from the fat that set the detector off because it was always a bit late if the grill pan was clean.

I couldn't make gun parts in a machine shop (I did my EITB metal bashing course and I know how useless I am) but I could download a file and send it to a printer.

Re: Only yesterday I wrote:

If the company's got a hard requirement for UK hosting then it should have ensured its hosting contract included guarantees and liquidated damages to cover the costs of moving if their host renaged. Atlassian would, I'm sure, have said "it's our standard contract - take it or leave it", at which point the company could have walked away.

Or - IT were ignored when they warned the directors that this could be a problem and running their own servers could be cheaper in the long run than moving to a new provider every few years.

Re: History

In the good old days there was a link below articles for reporting errors.

Re: That is SO StackOverflow

It's getting embedded at university. A mate's son is doing a physics degree and, for some unfathomable reason, they have to submit their lab. assignments using Python.

Re: Someone else's computer

If someone sells me an app-based service for a fixed price then they need to include the costs of security updates, OS rolls, bug fixing, etc. in that price, not come and hold me to ransom at a later date. If they can't do that, don't want to do that or don't know how to do that then they need to make it clear that I'm either buying an unsupported service that might not work in a couple of weeks time or they should sell it with a subscription from the start. If they don't understand that software support and maintenance can be as expensive as development, moreso if it's multi-platform, multi-OS and they don't know how to cost it then they shouldn't be selling it.

I wouldn't buy a toaster or fridge that was cobbled together by a hobbyist and I don't want to buy software-dependent services from one either.

%Utilization

"...as long as you get what you need that's all you need to know..."

You're thinking like an engineer, not a manager (a compliment).

They also want to know that you took the amount of time that they costed in because if you did it with less hands-on time (but still delivered and booked the planned time) then it means you've got more capacity and could be doing something else productive and the company could be more profitable. That's the main reason why they don't like WFH - the terrifying thought that they could be making more profit by sweating people who they think could be working harder.

Pegasus mail in the 90s.

My mechanical watch runs about 3 secs per day fast. I set it 30 seconds slow on the first of the month and re-set it at the end of the month when it's running 1 minute fast. That's over a month between settings and if I need to know the time more precisely it's easy to calculate to within a few seconds based on the date. I can't think of the last time I needed to know the time with such accuracy - nothing else happens in my life that starts or finishes on time to this precision. If I were in charge of this scandiuum clock it would run for almost 900,000 years before it needed adjusting.

Re: Self-reinforcing

Same here. I'm defaulting to Safari more often just to get sites to work properly. I get the login loop on one of my banks and a couple of sites I use simply don't work - either don't load fully or stuff is missing. Tried troubleshoot mode and they don't work. The most worrying is one bank where the login seems to have failed, I get presented with the login screen again but if I do nothing and wait a few secs then it logs me in. I don't know much about web design and security, but it feels like there's a few seconds where a token or something is lost and wandering and could be a security issue. The bank says "use Chrome".

It's a shame. I know it's not FF's fault other than they're not popular enough for sites to test with them.

I understand that, and legally I'm sure you're correct (in the UK) , but no one says "....yeah, I bought it from seller0985123", do they? Whatever the legal position, people "buy stuff from ebay" and if it walks like a duck........

The concept that eBay (and other sites) is just a marketplace and no different from the newsagent's noticeboard or the farmer who rents his field for Sunday morning boot sales might have been OK when they first started as an any-old-tat auction site, but they've moved on a bit since those days and, as others have posted here, maybe it's time that the law caught up with the changes.

Re: I want to know the equipment...

I've started looking at VOIP providers, but only half-heartedly - I don't want the hassle at the moment. I don't really use the landline and I might drop it when my contract comes up, but I'll be buying a new router before that so I'll get one with a phone socket which will let me me transfer to a VOIP provider or - when the pigs are on final approach - use Digital Voice when BT release the SIP settings for their service.

Resulting in an anticlimax?

Re: who is responsible?

"If a bank has reason to believe that they're giving money to the right person, and they're not, is it their fault"

If I woke up one morning to find my fence knocked over and then just after breakfast a fencing contractor knocked on the door and said "I'm in the area and noticed you need a new fence." then I'd be a tad suspiscious.

If I were a bank and noticed that someone wanted to transfer a shedload of money to an account that had been created the day before with almost the right account name then I'd be suspiscious.

I think the banks could do more, even, as you point out, if it meant inconveniencing customers, but they do seem to make it easy for some of the scammers.

Re: Elderly and Vulnerable?

From a UI - both screen and physical - I loved my BB Classic and if they brought out an iPhone with the same keyboard and PDA management I'd buy two. I could have written a novel with that keyboard whereas I struggle to type "Red Lion, 8pm" on the iPhone and phone in anything longer than that. Message organization was fantastic. I loved the idea of it - and the heft of it.

The things that made me bin it (literally - I couldn't give it away) were no way to synch anything between it and anything else without it being a right pain in the arse. All the BB/RIM native desktop synch tools for Mac didn't do anything - I never got them working and got no help from BB/RIM. Synching contacts and calendar was a pain (mainly Apple's fault, but the net result was the same) and there was no way to synch ToDos with any Mac apps.

And then useful stuff stopped being supported. I was travelling all over the place then and there was a BB app that found all travel data from mails and texts, collected it together as trips in a dedicated app and added it to the calendar. Fantastic - till it stopped.