Posts by Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese 1868 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jul 2014
My oldest machine still in regular use (ok, as a radio / media player, mpdroid is a wonderful thing!) is a netbook bought ca. 2010. I still have some pairs of trousers that are that old.
I'm with you on the netbook thing - I have one of a similar vintage plugged into my midi hifi system (old school!) as a source of online streams.
In the trousers department....as I type this I'm wearing a pair of jeans that are at least pre-Y2K. They're a bit tatty around the edges, but perfectly serviceable in these working-from-home days. I hate clothes shopping more than just about anything else in the world, but thankfully my waistline has never expanded with age.
I strongly believe that companies should be monitored for average wait time for calls to customer services, tech support, etc. If the wait times are consistently over a certain length of time, then they should be legally prohibited from taking on any new customers, as they're demonstrating that they can't adequately service their existing customer base.
A few years ago the village where I live was having some major work done on the electricity infrastructure, so a massive generator was brought in to run everything. Power quality was really good, no brown outs or anything, but I did notice that clocks on things like the VCR (yes, this was a few years ago) the cooker, etc. were running fast. That was when I learned that (a) some digital clocks synch to mains power cycle, (b) some generators run faster than 50Hz
In a former life I ran facilities for a company's main office. It was a 7 or 8 floor block, hundreds of people, and had a total of 5 meeting rooms that I was responsible for managing booking for (this is very pre-Outlook, and everything was done on a paper booking system, because I am old).
Looking back, it's staggering...not only were there so few meeting rooms for so few people, but they were never all fully utilised. Meetings were the exception rather than the norm, yet the business ran just fine. How I got to the hellish state where my daily calendar is a series of back-to-back meetings (well Zoom/Skype/WebEx/whatever) baffles me.
On the rare occasions that I visit an evil beef clown joint I always make a point of bypassing the machines and ordering at the counter. In the same way that I always give the self-service checkout at the shops a wide berth and pay for my purchases at a checkout staffed by a real human being.
What really frustrates me is how eager the staff are to direct me to the self-checkout, even when I've said I'm happy to wait for a person-equipped checkout to become available...it's like they don't realise that they're encouraging me to make them redundant
You may have a ton of data (storage is relatively cheap) but some really intense processing which needs some big scale, bad ass hardware, but you only do that processing once every couple of months. It's not worth paying a ton of cash for a server that you only need for literally few hours per year - it's more cost effective to rent by the hour from a cloud service provider on as as-needed basis.
Other use cases are almost certainly available, but this is the first one that comes to mind for me,
Again, why buy a new house in the rural market town, overlooking the sewage works, then complain about the smell.....
Up here in Northumberland there have been people moving into the area, having bought houses where there's mile and miles of rolling countryside....rolling countryside that happens to be the UK's largest military firing range, with tens of thousands of troops doing live fire training each year....and then the incomers complain to MoD and tell them to keep the noise down.
more capable for AI and ML tasks
To me that sounds very much like bandwagon-jumping marketing puff. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a cool little thing, and I'm sure that if I was a schoolkid now I'd be having as much fun with it as I had with the class' BBC Model B back in the day, but something like this as an engine for AI/ML has more than the faint whiff of bulls**t about it.
The thought that struck me was that it's been on the go for 45 years and covered 22,290,082,734 km without any physical human intervention....yet only a few days ago a light came on in my 2-year old car to say that it was time for it's third service because it'd been driven 30,000 miles.
I'm more thinking along the second idea, simply because we know that Russia does like "copying" other nations ideas - Tupolev Tu-144 (Concordski)? and Buran (Space Shuttle)? both spring to mind...
Also, they did a respectable clone of the B29 (a fact I only learned recently because it was mentioned in these forums - every day's a school day)
I thought it was odd that they only found out about the external hard drive when they did some investigation. If that sort of access is being logged, then I would expect it to be fed into some sort of monitoring system so that infractions can be detected and acted on as they happen, rather than only finding out when doing some retrospective investigation
A shame, because an alternative pud option, butterscotch Angel Delight, is a thing of glory (although we're slightly concerned that happy childhood memories of decades ago might be sullied by the adult experience of today).
Last year I was shopping in my local supermarket and noticed that Angel Delight is still a thing, so bought a packet out of nostalgic curiosity. I'm happy to confirm that time hasn't dulled the culinary experience, although as an adult I'm more aware of how many unnatural ingredients I was consuming and how it probably wasn't that healthy a thing to do. Childhood was a far happier time, when I could eat pretty much anything without a care (or an expanding waistline)
Although Boolean false is usually 0 and Boolean true is usually >0
I'm sure I remember language(s) that I worked with back in the day when I got my hands dirty with coding, that used -1 for true. IIRC it's because -1 is represented as all 1's in binary, compared to False/0 which is all-bits-zero in binary
What happened to horizontal computer cases?
Good point. I remember back in the late 80's/early 90's when we all had horizontal cases, it was quite the fashionable thing in my workplace to stand them vertically. IIRC this was an evolution of having the monitor sitting on the desk itself, and having the case (horizontal) off to one side...I think because it was considered to be a bit cooler than having the monitor atop the base unit in a conventional manner. The practice of then putting the base unit vertically was just to save desk real estate. None of the machines even had CD drives then so there was no worries about whether a disc would stay in place.
If a "security person" wants to "test" the vulnerabilities of someone's computer, then they should ask permission from the owner of the computer before conducting such testing. Otherwise anyone could claim after being caught that he was a "white hat" merely "testing security".
Agreed. All the times I've been involved with security testing, there's been paperwork agreed between the client and the testers with words to the effect of "you're going to do something naughty, but it's OK because we've asked you to (so that we know how to detect/stop other people from being naughty)" and that makes common sense. Therefore there is no "unauthorised" activity.
I've always been a bit mystified as to why people who, without any solicitation, try to break into networks and snoop around are in some way considered to be heroic in their actions because they are highlighting weaknesses in someone's security. Outside of cyberspace, it's the equivalent of going down the street trying to pick doorlocks to get into peoples' houses, just so you can tell someone that they need to replace their aging Yale....something which feels both wrong and creepy in equal measure.
No, nothing compares to a night out in Liverpool for the sheer quantity of alcohol, vomit and threats of violence. Except possibly Glasgow.
I'm slightly surprised about the violence bit - I've generally found Scousers to be quite a friendly, easy-going lot...although I've tended to cross paths with them outside of their home city. Maybe they're a bit more belligerent when they're on their home turf?
If you have two brain cells to rub together you'd think this would be easy, but it isn't, especially in a big city like Chicago. It's so much easier to just keep using what you already have.
I wasn;t making any comment on how easy (or not) it might be to implement. What I was saying is that in the UK for at least a couple of decades emergency services have been using secure communications (TETRA, provided by the Airwave network) and I know that similar secure networks are used by these services in a multitude of other countries. It strikes me as odd that in the USA they're still using something so insecure for this purpose.
the channel used by the Chicago PD was not encrypted or protected, and could easily be broadcast over by anyone with the right equipment.
In this day and age, that sounds a bit, well, rubbish. I remember using a VHF radio to tune into British police radio traffic when I was a small lad, but that was decades ago...technology and security have moved on.
Indeed. As a native of Newcastle I have only ever known Fenwick as the department store (on Northumberland Street) and by derivation as a place where one might expose oneself if proven wrong, as in "if the Vega guys ever ship any product, I'll bare my a**e in Fenwick's window"
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