Posts by Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese

Re: Sounds like brute force indeed

Have an upvote for the Thunderbirds reference - a most excellent game that I'd forgotten about, so thanks for the reminder

@Gonzo wizard Re: Jaywalking

Pedestrians have the right of way - theoretically - even though they're not yet crossing the road

Right of way != priority

I think the legal interpretation of right of way is that you're allowed to traverse. What matter is priority. For example, at a lighted junction all traffic has right of way, i.e. they may pass along the tarmac on any bit of road. The important bit is that the traffic on the bit of road with a green light showing on the traffic signals.

Re: Got to love undocumented fixes

I've worked in plenty of places where there's been a switch or control covered with white sparky's tape emblazoned with "Do Not Touch This", and the implicit subtext of "touching it will break something, but nobody's sure how or why"

Re: Pips

Does anybody need to use "the pips"?

Gladys Knight would be lost without them

Re: Black Friday ?

Quite how one day can last a week I am not sure

Hmmm..last time I got dragged around the shops by The War Department, she assured me it was only for "an hour or so", but it felt like a week :-/

smart meter != reduction in energy consumption

A complete waste of money, time and energy on insecure garbage. Smart meters do not save energy, I do by going around turn lights off.

Indeed. I have long been puzzled by the idea that smart meters save you energy. They don't - they just tell you how much energy your're using.

If you want a smart meter, then presumably you have an inclination to being sensible with your energy use in the first place, e.g. only heat your house as warm as it needs to be, don't leave lights on unnecessarily, etc.

Therefore, by installing a new piece of kit which actually uses electricity, a smart meter could represent an *increase* in energy consumption.

Also why the hell are we paying for civil servants to get plastered on super expensive plonk?

Why the hell are we paying for them to drink alcohol at all. Presumably they are drinking this while working in some capacity or another. In my employment, we have a strict 'no alcohol in the workplace' policy to ensure that everyone is clear-headed, focusing on their jobs and so minimising the risk of cock-ups.

Re: Holland was clearly making a point..

Holland was clearly making a point..

and I'm glad he did as otherwise everyone else would have been itching to do it anyway.

Agreed - I would have done the same thing.

And, depending on what sort of mood I was in, I might also have cc'ed a copy to the ICO

Wait for the government to start implementing the replacement for the now very dated technology of the wheel...

The contract for that will go to the company which offers the cheapest bid, based on a low-cost manufacturing process which eschews costly circular wheels and streamlines the process with simply-fashioned square wheels.

When found to be wholly unsuitable for purpose, they will make a mint out of contract changes, as they evolve the design through various ovals, finally delivering fully round wheels a few weeks before their contract expires and the whole silly charade starts over again.

Re: Perfect

People stare at their phone when they're on their own and waiting for people to turn up, afterwards they chat to their friends.

I very rarely see a lone mobile-gazer in my village local. If anyone goes in on their own, there is generally someone that they know in the pub already and they will talk to them...or if it's quiet the genial barkeep is good for both beer and conversation.

Re: 2018 is the year of stupidly sized phones

I remember struggling to find a suitable pocket-sized phone a couple of years ago. After a couple of OS updates, the hardware is struggling a bit and performance is suffering. Due to upgrade soon but have a feeling it'll be difficult to find something with performance commensurate with modern mainstream hardware but in a package the size of a phone from 3 or 4 years ago.

Re: Fun IT facts about HAL's song

Back in the days of big iron mainframe CPU's used to have speakers linked to the cpu's.

I don't remember that, but I do remember a computer room with a transistor radio hanging next to the mainframe. It was tuned so it picked up RF generated by the processor - steady white noise indicated all was well, and silence or a disrupted pattern was a telltale sign that all was not well.

Re: Missiles, Torpedoes, Mines etc.

Whereas a standard missile or torpedo might be capable of tracking an object which they were already given beforehand they can't, or I don't believe they can't, decide what to attack autonomously.

True, but only up to a point, as we are getting into a grey area. Systems like Brimstone (or is it Stormshadow?) perform an assessment of the situation and decide whether to press home the attack or just fly of and blow up in a safe zone. That decision is made on-the-fly by the missile, based on pre-programmed data and data gathered at the scene

Re: don't feel bad

I remember getting excited because I had a PC with a Hercules graphics card delivering monochrome graphical goodness into my fishbowl-like amber-on-black 12" CRT monitor.

Now that really makes me feel old

Re: Say what you will

I think ALL these guys will be giving their riches away sooner or later.

I believe the phrase is 'trying to buy a ticket to Heaven'

Re: Crimble Free Zone?

One of my biggest bugbears is how early the local council puts up the Xmas lights. Last year, the photographs in the local paper of the Remembrance Day ceremony featured a load of solemn-looking people stood with bowed heads around the war memorial, with a load of flashing-light Santas, reindeer and snowmen in the background. Just plain wrong.

Re: Still irrelevant

Being outside Galileo has no practical impact: we never needed it anyway.

Words that no doubt come as great comfort to the many people currently employed in the UK space industry who are now contemplating unemployment.

Re: Be careful what you wish for

My VDSL2 line started at 80/20 and has degraded to 68/18

Similar story here - my d/l went from 85 to around 40, and u/l from 20 to around 18. For a lot of my use cases, getting an u/l better than 10 is the more important factor rather than super-fast d/l.

That said, having been one of the really early adopters for Superfats in my village, I do kind of resent others jumping on and slowing down the bandwagon.

How long does your document persist in server or printer memory?

In the case of things like commercial photocopier/printers, for the lifespan of the printer and beyond.

Whatever you send to the printer actually gets converted to a TIFF image and stored on a hard disk inside the unit, and then printed out. The TIFF file persists on the disk after the print job is finished.

Go shopping for a used photocopier/printer and I'll offer you fairly short odds that the hard disk is still in there and it won't have been formatted.

Re: Tea with milk

With one exception - coffee in France is horrible unless it's from Starbucks...

I've rarely been disappointed with coffee any time I've been in France. Even McCoffee from The Evil Beef Clown joint was perfectly good.

Is it "sexist", or "sexual"? I feel like some people don't want to see the difference.

That reminds me of the 'Smell The Glove' scene in 'This is Spinal Tap'

Nigel Tufnell: "What's wrong with being sexy?"

David St Hubbins: "-ist.....sex-IST"

Re: So how is this a workhorse?

yet another "optimized for thickness at all costs" fashion statement

When one of those costs is lack of air between hot components, the compromise becomes unacceptable to me.

Re: Ironic, isn't it?

Maplin started as a mail-order business many, many moons ago - that distance-selling mindset should have helped with the on-line. Ironic that a business that was originally not about retail sites was killed off by the retail side...

Live by the sword, die by the shoddily-made blunt penknife which is available for the same price as a sword.

Re: 6 point plan?

...what's a budget?

The best way to answer that question is to Explain it like this....

Consider how long it will take you to analyse requirements for the job. Then consider how long it would take to design and implement a solution to meet those requirements. You should also think about how long it would take to design and develop a test plan to verify that the solution worked as expected. Now think about how long it would take to execute the solution and run all your test cases.

Each resource - designers, developers, testers, etc. will each have a daily (or hourly) cost associated with them. Do some maths to work out how much it'll cost you for the resources to spend however much time you estimated. Then factor in a modest percentage uplift to cover risk mitigation, etc.

Finally, think about the physical resources you will need to support your efforts - things like hardware, software, tools and the like - and work out how much it will cost to procure those.

Add all of those together and you come up with a number....

...then knock a couple of zeroes off the end, and that will be the budget that you're given.

Re: Standard German and Dialects?

I think I read somewhere that elements of "personalisation" in the source messages did come into it. Each operator had their own keying style, so the interceptors knew who it came from, and certain operators would have little quirks in their message content.

Real needle-in-a-haystack stuff though, nevermind the complexity of the encyphering of the message.

I've read a few books and watched a few documentaries about this subject over the years, so in theory I kind of understand the principles....but of you gave me an Enigma-encoded message I honestly wouldn't know where to start. Very much hats off to everyone involved at Bletchley Park.

GDPR LAWS DO NOT APPLY IN USA OR CANADA !!!!!! END OF STATEMENT -- PERIOD !!!!!

Interesting. I'm in the UK and in recent weeks I've tried visiting a few Canadian websites only to be met with a message with words to the effect of "We have detected which country you are in and are blocking access for you as we cannot guarantee that our website is compliant with GDPR"

I'm fairly sure TVA Nouvelle was one of the websites in question. Can;t remember the other offhand.

@ big_D Re: Shrug

All Google services disabled,

Not that I'm cynical, but I have a horrible feeling that sentence ought to read "all Google services appear to be disabled"