Posts by Nifty

No but it had a Chinese flag on it when it emerged from the sea.

Re: Ball crud

There's a Radio 4 series called'The Reunion' where erstwhile adversaries from a historical situation meet and reminisce. This would almost make a programme.

"all cars should have it... over-the-air updates"

What if my car runs out of RAM halfway through the journey? Will the AA come out with a bigger SD

card?

Re: Sadly

"a lot of my work is hardware related. I have found it hard to fit a new piece of kit while sitting at my dining room table!

Swopping out something really needs me to be onsite."

Working with physical things some of the time can be a pretty rewarding experience. My career path however has taken me away from that so my work has been a lot of remote support and bug analysis. Perfect WFH fodder.

I think you have to accept your own reality rather than endlessly thinking grass is greener for someone else.

Little changed from the first announcement. The wording of the 2nd paragraph, that refers to all IOS devices, not just family account managed ones, says it's an in-phone scan, followed by an upload of suspicious images to iCloud. It does not say that opting the device out of iCloud will defeat this feature.

The flow diagram that Apple initially published did indicate it's regardless of whether iCloud is enabled.

Re: overflowing manholes

"It's from the Latin root meaning hand"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/manhole

"...hole or opening in a floor, pavement, etc., through which a person may pass"

"...1793, from man (n.) + hole (n.)"

I've seen several confirmations of the year of origin. But none about a Latin root. English would be the language in use at the time, though the medical profession still coins new words from the Latin.

Don't believe everything you see the posted if there isn't a decent citation with it.

How long did a 78 play for?

"Also the social life after work where you build up most of your working relationships"

Your mileage obviously varied from mine. For 20 years I worked in varying grades of soul-less office park buildings where we couldn't wait to get away at the end of the day to our homes 20 odd miles away North, South, East and West. Some of the offices were very nice, some indifferent. After work, social life with colleagues there was mostly none. And tbh I wasn't really expecting a university type experience (where I did meet long term friends). I had a family and home life after working hours anyway and was glad of the contrast.

But yeah, some social relationships did develop during working hours, mostly in the early days when it was a small office closer to our homes. Endless mergers and acquisitions semed to put an end to that however.

Politicians at the moment are grasping onto the example of the young creative/knowledge worker that needs to learn the ropes. Because if them we all need to be in an office 3/5. A fair use-case for face to face working, but how much does this represent the whole of the real job market?

Re: Do machines have rights now?

"Does the AI have sufficient mental competency to sell or licence the patent to others, and to enter into contracts for said? If not, and the AI's "owner" were to monetise the invention for their own benefit, is that a case of abuse?"

A system to sell or licence the patent to others has just been invented. By an AI...

Re: repairable

When our Dyson died (failed trigger switch - unbelievably weak design) I used the warranty and was sent half a Dyson body. A re-assemby job, no problem for me but maybe would be for a non-techie. Then a few months later another call on the warranty, as one of the attachments brushes stopped turning, was sent another complete attachment. Dyson has no interest in being sent the old parts back for quality assessment - that does worry me.

My last company wouldn't allow me to install open source programs like KeePass. Next best thing I came up with was an XLSM file with password protection on it. Column containing the passwords was made narrow and a macro was to hide the formula bar, so that passwords couldn't be casually viewed by accident during a screen share.

I use a similar file to keep a list of moderately confidential info.

Re: Homer

Bored staff were probably doing a re-enactment of a Simpsons episode.

Re: Anyone can be scammed

You may have come across those TV magicians/mind-readers who use distraction and mental techniques to convince a member of the audience of their powers. It's possible that some of the scammers develop these sorts of powers, you would not want to encounter one.

Germany and also a market town in the UK. Apparently the Milton Keynes cycle network is a squalid affair with gloomy underpasses, right-angled corners and people chucking bottles down into them.

Harlow and Bracknell have surprisingly nice cycle paths.

Re: Taling about contractors and server room

I was testing a shower to see if water pressure was good while viewing a show home once, and discovered the builders had done the same thing.

Re: Is there single key ?

Sounds like fairy dust or the ransomware was very low quality (which would contradict all the news stories we've heard about how professional the ransomware attacks were).

The idea that a decryptor can hold 'all the keys' is too fancyful. Must be more to the story.

Re: Can't wait...

"would plug their laptop directly into the internet and live in ignorant bliss with a woefully insecure setup"

It's a long while ago but when NTL first supplied broadband to my address, they supplied a long RJ45 terminated cable with it. Which I blissfully ran through the house and plugged straight into my PCs Ethernet socket. I was so blown away by the speed compared to dial up that I didn't have a thought about security. Can anyone remember if fully wired NTL even came with a router?

Later a second computer entered the household and I bought my first WiFi router (before NTL supplied them). While on the phone to NTL CS I was told that more than one device wasn't allowed on the home network, when I mentioned my router.

Re: Equally unattributed, but different...

"50% more expensive to fix a bug at the coding stage than at the design stage, 10 times more expensive at the integration stage, 60 times more if it’s caught in alpha testing and 100 times as expensive to fix in customer beta test"

True for one group of products, but a huge generalisation there.

I worked with 2 products for comparison. One was data driven with a lot of configurability - quite variable in the way it could be used. The second has an built in programming language that everyday users could use with, so was not just configurable per config files and data driven but also programmable. The variability of usage was near infinite. I would say that genuine, full scenario and regression testing was near impossible. So instead, the approach was developed to provide powerful debugging and crash analysis tools for the real-time system. This was targeted at break/fix and not at the design stage.

I used to keep my work laptop in the bedroom in a backpack. It would regularly wake up in the small hours, sometimes fan would run hard, laptop got very hot and occasionally it'd flatten the battery. On investigating the event viewer I discovered it was coming out of sleep mode to do updates. The BIOS seemed to be able to wake the machine on a schedule. It took some digging to disable this feature.

If I'd shut down instead of using sleep, the overnight updates would've been deferred until switch on (HDD in those days, 5min+ to boot up). I was baffled by the maintenance policy.

Re: I'm sure

There's a queue.