But that would mean having to write in a "non-cool" language that just integrates and does stuff.
How else are they going to write one line of code instead of two if not to bundle the entire Microsoft.NET Framework in several versions, Silverlight for good measure, complete installs of DirectX for those people on computers so old they don't have them, several versions of the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtimes, etc.?
This is the thing that drives me mad about modern computing. I get a game having 60Gb of content. 3D models and HD textures are huge. I get a large program needing support libraries,etc. But when something is more than 100-200 Mb of download just to install some tiny freeware utility, you have to consider what the hell you are doing wrong to get that far.
X needs runtime Y? Write an installer that downloads that if its really needed rather than bundling it by default. But to do that, of course, you need to be able to write in a language that needs no runtimes but the built-in Windows ones.
Shame that the function used in the patch is NOT C, but instead a compiler-supplied and thus compiler-dependent feature that was put into the code in the kernel without any kind of fallback for those who don't have that compiler (e.g. an equivalent header that defines it if it's not already defined).
And Linus' equivalent alternative is valid C99 that works on all compilers, and does EXACTLY THE SAME while being slightly more readable.
Otherwise you might indeed have had a point to make.
The new syntax only works on certain versions of the GNU compilers. It's also more convoluted, just as easy to get wrong (i.e. the guy himself admits there's a possibility of the same kinds of mistakes as without it), non-standard, and harder to read - especially if you are unfamiliar with a GNU-only syntax.
Same as ANY OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM OR APPLICATION.
Were you expecting a different answer?
And have you EVER inspected the code to any program fully enough to satisfy your curiosity that it doesn't do anything you don't trust? If so, are you aware of the Obfuscated C contests?
Sorry, but for even a skilled coder, there is NO WAY you can audit this amount of code single-handedly and you have to take it on trust. Same as everything else.
Even the TrueCrypt audit didn't catch all the problems and THE DAY AFTER there was a bug found in it. And that took years to arrange.
To explain who these people are and what they did takes forever. There are more than 365.25 of them, in any single field you choose. And geographers want famous geographers celebrated and historians want famous events and people celebrated, and sportsmen want famous sporting achievements celebrated.
Mathematics says you can't simply have a day-long recognition of all these people on any particular anniversary and, let's be honest, 800 years is both inaccurate enough to be useless (pre-Gregorian calendars, so the date is almost certainly adjusted or wrong) and why 800? Why not 750? And so on.
Like Google Doodles, which are one of the best ways to provide people with an "on this day" piece of trivia, there's just too much that's relevant to you but not to anybody else and you could fill every day a thousand times over. Just look at the barest of Wikipedia articles for a particular date and it will be pages and pages long. Do we celebrate their birth? Their death? The date of their achievement? Or, like Ada Lovelace recently, a chosen day for them because their real birthday would be overlooked by Christmas (I'm not even fucking kidding!).
So, people, stop talking bollocks. You can't remember everyone and everything, and there are a lot of people worth celebrating, and a lot of possible dates to celebrate them on and who we choose to celebrate is personal.
Yes, I'm about to draft a Facebook post to let my friends know about George Boole, and I work in schools. You can be sure I'm going to be nudging the IT teacher to mention Boole tomorrow (in the UK, that's when the anniversary really is) in his lessons, like I did with Lovelace. But for precisely what it is - a "did you know" fact. A QI trinket. A piece of trivia.
Celebrate the achievements, but not the fucking date.
Because NEWS is the problem. As pointed out, there are HUNDREDS of Slashdot "news" stories about new battery technologies.
But all the ones that make it are the ones we DON'T hear about in the news section, aren't sending out press releases, etc. They are writing papers, then building the devices, then commercialising them.
Seriously, go search for "battery" on Slashdot. Everything from graphene to oxygen/air to new structures to quantum effects to whatever other bollocks you can imagine.
How many of them mention Li-Po?
SCIENCE is exactly what I'm after, being made into ENGINEERING at a later date such that they become something other than vapourware that we will never see.
Not "news" that comes along every few weeks on Slashdot with ZERO products out of it, nothing past a single prototype, that's abandoned literally as soon as the guy writes up their paper proving a 0.1% increase over existing batteries in contrived situations.
I wish we had a battery breakthrough for every HUNDRED articles we get on it.
What gets me is that Li-ion, NiMH, NiCd, etc. I heard precisely NOTHING off before I'd bought a product that contained them or they were on the shelves of my local electrical store.
And thus bad CSR's are the prime cause of customer loss, and not the other way around. That's excluding when they make promises to retain you that they know are rubbish, or it ends up costing the customer more and then they just cancel out of distrust of anything further.
Personally, I get through to supervisors. It's not hard. I'm not even very polite, I've just had a lot of experience (you'll see why below). But mainly because I know what I'm entitled to and what I'm not. If you give me problems, that's what recording the phone call is for. Ooops. A CSR out of a job for talking bullshit is much easier than losing a long-term customer precisely because the next CSR is paid the same and just another guy reading the same script.
It's not a question that large callcentres are always staffed by assholes, who all claim the supervisor "isn't available" (or not even there, that always gets a laugh from me too!) because that's exactly what they are told to do.
But that's not the end of the customer's power. In the UK, you can record the phone call. It's only "advised" to tell them you are recording and if THEY have a "calls may be recorded" warning - well... I don't need to tell them if I'm recording at all (I don't need to anyway, it's just polite).
And then the ball-game gets turned around. You're refusing to give me your name? You're refusing to accept notification of my cancellation? You failed to follow procedures? You put me on hold but never resolved the query that you went on hold to do? Oh, that little tape winging its way to head office is going to hurt and given that it's your JOB to help (no matter what your mythical never-present supervisor might train you to do), it's going to cost you.
Last time I phoned up with a complaint, I *did* get the mythical supervisor on the line (I always do, when I deem them necessary, but that's another matter) and I had the British Gas callcentre (if you live in Britain, you know they are one of the WORST for callcentres) that he was in charge of phoning local newsagents near me to discover one that they had a PayPoint in, that they could *pay* to stay open late, especially so that *I* alone (as in I had to present ID to the newsagent, who'd already shut up shop but had been paid to stay open only for me) could go over to them and top-up a pre-payment card to solve my problem. The problem was quite minor, their way of dealing with it wasn't, but I got my way and cost them a lot more money than basic compliance would ever have cost - by getting through to that supervisor and explaining what was happening.
I don't expect the minions on the front-line of the callcentre to understand that, they never do. But getting a supervisor isn't a fob-off that works when people are serious, and the supervisors know exactly when they have to act to not get caught.
And turning the tables of "No, that's fine, I'm recording that response, and your name was?" on them soon wakes them up because they know those kinds of games are stupid, immoral, not helpful, losing them customers, and sometimes illegal when they have a duty to act on the information given to them (i.e. cancellations).
I don't threaten callcentres and companies with court. They threaten me quite often. I've invited to initiate the court proceedings on behalf of at least two companies to save them time. Strangely it's NEVER got that far when they find out I have recordings and every letter and email ever sent or received. But I have screwed over any number of callcentre operatives who failed to do their job by playing such games and thinking it's cute to try to run rings around my efforts to do something quite reasonable. To my knowledge, I've cost at least two their jobs. One of them phoned me back up to threaten me because of that.
Being a dick on the phone to customers is all fun and games until it costs you your job. Because you ARE supposed to be there to help and you're really not important enough to lose even a medium sized customer over.
When your customer kicks up a fuss for you to "just get it done", it's not licence to just ignore your training, skills and safety procedures. Even if they threaten to cut your business, you still can't just say "Oh, let's forget all that stuff this one time because we might lose future work".
That's not how the law works, and not how it SHOULD work - the contractor shouldn't just cut corners because they're being pressured by the datacentre. They should say "We do it safely, or not at all". They didn't, hence they were fined.
It doesn't mean the datacenter are innocent in this - to them, their profit was more important than their contractor's safety (and they still have "a duty of care" to their contractors and workers anyway, written in the law). But the contractor should never have complied out of haste or threat of lost business if it meant a potential for injury or death.
They're both in the wrong. But the contractor had ultimate responsibility for the decision that caused the death.
"I don't care how you get it done, just get it done" is not free reign to break the law and allow someone to possibly die. But it's not illegal to say that to a contractor either. It's only ACTING on that without regard for safety of your workers that's illegal, and that's the contractor's fault.
The datacentre aren't blameless here, but they didn't do anything specifically illegal.
The UK has victim surcharges for most crimes. Those go directly to the victim and/or those who are victim of the same or similar crimes.
And it's a statutory fine for noncompliance in H&S. Now that it's been established by a court that the companies were negligent, the FAMILY can individually sue on that basis to receive compensation for their particular consequences.
The fact of law for these exact circumstances has been established by a professional body in court. Now the family don't have to pay lawyers to do that part, they can just sue using their precedents on this incident.
More likely, the company or its insurers will now hastily settle such claims out of court to avoid additional legal expense. That won't come cheap, but cheaper than fighting the family with lawyers when courts have already ruled you should never have allowed it to happen.
If anything, this is a case where the government bodies have saved the family lots of unnecessary grief, hassle and expense of their own.
How much downtime was caused by ensuring the circuit was safe and removing the body?
If zero, SUE THEM INTO OBLIVION. Risking either this contractor unnecessarily (you could have just switched it off) or other workers and emergency workers (because you didn't switch it off after it had demonstrably killed someone).
If some downtime, then why couldn't you have done that to do the work?
Sorry, but I fail to see how the risk of a death and possible short-circuits, joined phases etc. because of working with the terminals live in any way "secures" uptime any more than scheduling proper downtime and having properly redundant systems.
You are just ask likely to bridge the WRONG circuit while working live, or causing a short, which will cause more damage and more downtime than just switching things off to do the work. And you guys have redundant power with UPS that you can bypass to work on the UPS, etc. if necessary? If not, that downtime isn't all that important to you anyway.
There's no excuse for this, hence the court fine. And you've got to be an idiot to knowingly let people work on a live multi-phase system. Hell, even a fused, RCD'd, single-phase can be bad enough.
It's naive to believe that such a thing is universal to an entire problem set, and is as solid as colloquially suggested.
But, more than that, optimisations like this often work by transforming one type of problem into a related, but different, equivalent problem. In doing that you are indeed shifting problems between problem spaces and, thus, between algorithms of different optimisation. Though there is some conversion involved, it is by no means guaranteed that such conversion is just as hard as solving the original problem.
If even 10% of your problems can be reduced simply to an equivalent problem with a solution that can be 11% faster, then you've made a step forward.
Mistaking NFL for a universal theorem of mathematics, or even optimisation, is a critical error in thinking.
Failing on attempts from the same IP? They spread them across millions of IPs
Failing on attempts on a particular account? Good luck explaining to your users why their accounts lock out every week and they have to come to you to unlock because of random people attempting to bruteforce them.
Failing on attempts within a time-frame? These things are long-running attacks, millions of attempts per second across the globe. They only have to get lucky once.
That said, it's not a brute-force that's your main problem. They only need one in and the number of vulnerabilities etc. mean they can move around. One password hash for one browser session or passwd file aand they can spend months offline on stolen hardware (Amazon accounts etc.) brute-forcing it not subject to your restrictions.
Brute force attacks are not a problem, you can rate-limit them into obscurity. But, like spam email, even with rate-limiting, if you're being bombarded en-masse while trying to operate normal services, and they are being clever, things can still slip through and it only needs one.
Weak passwords are brute-forcible even with rate-limits. Strong passwords aren't. They will obviously try weak ones first until they can get something which might give them a crowbar into a strong-passworded account (like, say, a local account not subject to the pass rate-limits on escalation requests).
With storage systems moving from the local system into the cloud, you have inherent bottlenecks on the networking.
This might be able to do stupendous speeds but no amount of disk speed will help you get your files up and down. You might be able to process them in the cloud but actually moving them between the cloud and not is still limited by your downstream.
As such, it's actually LOCAL users who are going to benefit more from fast storage, not cloud providers. Hell, just data protection alone is in the spotlight at the moment and has the EU and US arguing and we're on the verge of every cloud company having to have at least a European-only data centre storage (so all the advantages of cloud being a world-wide solution are nullified because you can only hold EU data within the EU).
And, to be honest, Cloud is really just the new name for "external hosted". It's nothing fancy.
Because the science might be right but the engineering is still extremely far away.
We might be able to entangle two particles in an lab experiment and test them at distance, doing so as a matter of routine with enough particles to form a reliable communication channel across millions of km's with inch-wide precision with something that you can put into a craft? That's still just science fiction. And any mission you launch will still take years to bring that technology to even Mars, let alone anywhere else.
Honestly, it's like saying we've invented a battery, why don't we just light up the entire planet right now? It takes at least decades and more likely hundreds of years of engineering to fill that gap.
And then you'll find that it's not all that useful compared to, say, sending radio communications.
Though you can entangle photons/particles in theory, there is STILL not way to send information using that faster than the speed of light. It's as simple as that. And that's still an 8-minute delay to the Sun at the very least, and stupendous delays if you try to go out towards the outskirts of the solar system.
Fortunately, the people in charge of such things are physicists and engineers and not random commentors on Slashdot.
If you sign there, there is a burden on you to prove that their request is unreasonable should they ever execute it. If their system crashes and nobody else but you can recover it, you're going to be working for them, compensated "reasonably" or not, and you already chose not to be there.
If you want those people to transfer skills, then you keep them on to train a replacement. If you don't, you don't get to call them back whenever you feel like. If you only need assistance for the occasional lost password etc. then there's no need to cast it in stone this tightly.
Lawsuits don't come into it. If you're called as a witness, it doesn't matter who you work for now, you might be asked to appear before court.
Whether they use it or not, it wouldn't be there if there wasn't the suggestion they COULD use it. And that might well mean an awful lot of inconvenience even if you ARE paid, and provided for and a lot of bad times in front of your new boss explaining that what you signed before you left conflicts with THEIR contract. If nothing else, having to let a new employer know about the possibility is a burden in itself.
Pay for the proper transition, or don't. It's a simple choice. And if you let the one guy walk out the door being the only person knowing those details, not having anyone else trained or aware of what they did, him being the only person authorised to reset them, etc. then more fool you.
SPF tells them that you're trying to combat spam from pretending to come from you.
Similarlt for DKIM, that also tells them that you are checking and explicitly marking every message you send out from your domain and absence of such signing should be treated as suspicious.
Put both of those on, in a decent static IP range (nobody sensible accepts email from dynamic IP's!), and you're good to go. How do I know? My own domains are ALL run by me, on Postfix. They even forward some mail addresses to providers like GMail as a matter of course.
The only problem I ever have for delivery is when *I* have accepted a spam message and try to forward it on to someone like GMail (harder to stop than it sounds, even with greylisting, etc.). They spot spam that my system can't, even on a re-forwarder.
Hell, I IPv6'd my domain too. So long as you have valid PTR records for your reverse, places like GMail are perfectly happy with that. Never had a problem. (But if you can't set your reverse for your IPv6, there's a way to turn off using IPv6 and fallback to IPv4 just for GMail, etc. when using postfix - google it).
My entire email for the last 5 years at least has been self-hosted. I've been using tiny startup services for about 10-15 years before that without issue. If anything, I have significantly more issues with the big-brand provider we use as smarthost for the Exchange servers in work, which are routinely blacklisted for spam and I have to fallback to manual sending from our leased lines, than anything to do with my self-hosting personal email domains.
Just don't expect your no-name mailer on a dynamic range without even the simplest of anti-spam measures to be accepted by places like Google, and you're golden.
Ratings tell you - at best - how popular a movie is. Not how good it is. Same as the music charts. It has no correspondence to even sales figures, really. Measuring "sales this month" as opposed to "overall sales" is pretty much a nonsense if you think of it, if the person doesn't already own that product.
Ratings are about what's popular, what other people are liking now. For many, that's ALL they need to know because that's what they base their opinions on and then discuss with their peer group. For others, it means nothing at all.
I *GUARANTEE* you that if one of my school friends "recommends" a page to me, that I'll have no interest. I *GUARANTEE* you that the films that my friends or family like do not intersect in any meaningful or predictable way with my own personal preferences. It's just that simple.
However, I refuse to subscribe to the "You have to watch it first" kind of argument if that means parting with any money whatsoever. If I have to watch it to know whether or not I'll like it, I'm not going to pay to do so at the cinema on or DVD.
But it is possible, via trailers, reviews, ratings, comments, research and the necessary pinch of salt, to work out whether a movie is one you'll enjoy. You can still be wrong, but you can get a good indication.
I think the same of Steam's review system, There are game on there I love that get slated and games I hate that get 10/10 and Mostly Positive reviews. It doesn't affect my decision to buy or not. Give me a demo, though, or a gameplay trailer and that will help sway me one way or the other.
I've wanted "Grey Goo" since I first saw it. They did a free weekend this weekend, so I installed it. I'm pretty Meh about it now. But I wouldn't have known that without playing it, and wouldn't have bought it based on the Mostly Positive reviews alone.
Prison Architect, on the other hand, I thought was going to be rubbish. And then I played it. And now I can't stop. And no doubt reviewers and other players think just the opposite.
But, sorry, movie ratings are worthless. Ratings are worthless and ratings of something that you have to pay to prove them wrong are even worse. I've never paid them any attention. At least with a bit of music you can tell if it's going to be good for free, legally, before you buy it.
God, if only there were ways that the human body could survive cooked food, eating salt, etc.. It's almost like we weren't BUILT to be able to survive things like that.
Honestly, this is outside the bounds of health-freak and into complete paranoia.
Ironically, refrigeration has probably been responsible for more deaths on Earth - including cancers - than any amount of food-smoking.
Why you thinking smoking is somehow worse than cooking, I don't know - are you sitting there deeply-inhaling all the smoke constantly while your food smokes or are you normal? That's before we get into the cherry-picking of types of pickling and canning to support your argument at the expense of all the other (more normal) ways.
P.S. A salted ham won't kill you. Nor will a smoked salmon. Or a tin of meat. What will is the stress on your body of worrying about all this stuff and avoiding it to this level.
Please show me the group policy object for preventing the sidebar appearing. Or the group policy object for specifying the login image (or whether the login image can be changed by the user, etc.) on Windows 8. Hell, try getting the LDAP jpeg attribute to be the login image.
It sounds *really* easy. You probably think you already know it. You might even link to something that claims to do it. Now try it. Without bodges, scripts, and it only working in some instances (Disabled the side bar? Fully? Think so? You might hope), it can't be done.
Do you know where the settings for default printers are in GP? Hint: Nowhere near the print management settings. Do you know how to stop Windows 8's accessibility menu appearing on login (because it allows you to cock up the login screen with High Contrast, voice, etc. that stays until someone undoes it)? The "semi-official" fix is to rename or ACL-protect an.exe in the Windows folder.
Think group policy is the fucking be-all-and-end-all of every setting in Windows? Go run a network. Fuck, you can't even get it to do simple things.
Do you have any idea how many "easily disabled" features I have to turn off on every copy of Windows deployed in my corporation?
How many "not easily disabled" features? How many "You shouldn't disable this" features? How many "This is a feature you don't want masquerading as a security update"? How many "You used to turn off this feature here, but you can't any more?" How many "This feature cannot be disabled"?
And there's nothing yet to say the ads aren't coming down, they just aren't being shown. That's different. Several thousand machines all downloading unnecessary ads that are never shown is probably worse than the burden on the poor webfilter through normal browsing alone.
Things that are "easily disabled" should be given as choices. Because if it's easily disabled, then it should be just as easily enabled if the USER actually wants it.
Ads are "easily ignored" too. It doesn't mean you want them.
And the stuff about Windows 10 popups? That was "easily disabled". Except when it wasn't. Except when domain-controlled machines (which were supposed to be exempt from it) started popping it up too. Except when you turn it off and still have to turn off three "security updates" that don't even MENTION it to stop it trying to pre-download gigabytes of Windows 10 files that it won't install.
Such things just shouldn't be happening, "easily disabled" or not.
If you don't have a relative that smashed the hell out of some light fitting, TV, someone's head, etc. then I'll be shocked.
And the US has some of the biggest living spaces I've ever seen because they have no shortage of land. Come to Europe or the UK where if you're lucky you might have a square of 4-5 feet of usable space between your sofa and the TV.
There are inherent physical problems with any kind of VR or interactive games and hardware and this is just one. And have we really progressed from the 80's in this respect, where VR consisted of putting on a funny hat and then being confined inside a ring of plastic rails to keep you save and detect whether you wanted to "move forward".
If you want VR to take out, do a deal with paintball and laser-quest companies and borrow their facilities. Overlay the well-controlled, well-defined static layout there with gadgets enough that people with headsets can run around safely in it, seeing a virtual world overlaid on the top of plain white boxes and steps, and they can run up the steps that actually exist in front of them.
Think of it - VR CounterStrike with your friends laid over the top of a physical, but empty, replica of de_dust. You aren't actually shooting anyone, you don't need to paint the set, and you can blanket the place in sensors to make sure the locations are accurate. And when you're "dead", you take off the VR and walk to the exit (yes, griefers, I know, but you're with friends).
Slashdot Mirror
But that would mean having to write in a "non-cool" language that just integrates and does stuff.
How else are they going to write one line of code instead of two if not to bundle the entire Microsoft .NET Framework in several versions, Silverlight for good measure, complete installs of DirectX for those people on computers so old they don't have them, several versions of the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtimes, etc.?
This is the thing that drives me mad about modern computing. I get a game having 60Gb of content. 3D models and HD textures are huge. I get a large program needing support libraries,etc. But when something is more than 100-200 Mb of download just to install some tiny freeware utility, you have to consider what the hell you are doing wrong to get that far.
X needs runtime Y? Write an installer that downloads that if its really needed rather than bundling it by default. But to do that, of course, you need to be able to write in a language that needs no runtimes but the built-in Windows ones.
Shame that the function used in the patch is NOT C, but instead a compiler-supplied and thus compiler-dependent feature that was put into the code in the kernel without any kind of fallback for those who don't have that compiler (e.g. an equivalent header that defines it if it's not already defined).
And Linus' equivalent alternative is valid C99 that works on all compilers, and does EXACTLY THE SAME while being slightly more readable.
Otherwise you might indeed have had a point to make.
The new syntax only works on certain versions of the GNU compilers. It's also more convoluted, just as easy to get wrong (i.e. the guy himself admits there's a possibility of the same kinds of mistakes as without it), non-standard, and harder to read - especially if you are unfamiliar with a GNU-only syntax.
Read the rant, then look at the code.
All of the lines that you use.
Same as ANY OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM OR APPLICATION.
Were you expecting a different answer?
And have you EVER inspected the code to any program fully enough to satisfy your curiosity that it doesn't do anything you don't trust? If so, are you aware of the Obfuscated C contests?
Sorry, but for even a skilled coder, there is NO WAY you can audit this amount of code single-handedly and you have to take it on trust. Same as everything else.
Even the TrueCrypt audit didn't catch all the problems and THE DAY AFTER there was a bug found in it. And that took years to arrange.
Generally speaking, you just can't.
To explain who these people are and what they did takes forever. There are more than 365.25 of them, in any single field you choose. And geographers want famous geographers celebrated and historians want famous events and people celebrated, and sportsmen want famous sporting achievements celebrated.
Mathematics says you can't simply have a day-long recognition of all these people on any particular anniversary and, let's be honest, 800 years is both inaccurate enough to be useless (pre-Gregorian calendars, so the date is almost certainly adjusted or wrong) and why 800? Why not 750? And so on.
Like Google Doodles, which are one of the best ways to provide people with an "on this day" piece of trivia, there's just too much that's relevant to you but not to anybody else and you could fill every day a thousand times over. Just look at the barest of Wikipedia articles for a particular date and it will be pages and pages long. Do we celebrate their birth? Their death? The date of their achievement? Or, like Ada Lovelace recently, a chosen day for them because their real birthday would be overlooked by Christmas (I'm not even fucking kidding!).
So, people, stop talking bollocks. You can't remember everyone and everything, and there are a lot of people worth celebrating, and a lot of possible dates to celebrate them on and who we choose to celebrate is personal.
Yes, I'm about to draft a Facebook post to let my friends know about George Boole, and I work in schools. You can be sure I'm going to be nudging the IT teacher to mention Boole tomorrow (in the UK, that's when the anniversary really is) in his lessons, like I did with Lovelace. But for precisely what it is - a "did you know" fact. A QI trinket. A piece of trivia.
Celebrate the achievements, but not the fucking date.
Summary = entire article?
Because NEWS is the problem. As pointed out, there are HUNDREDS of Slashdot "news" stories about new battery technologies.
But all the ones that make it are the ones we DON'T hear about in the news section, aren't sending out press releases, etc. They are writing papers, then building the devices, then commercialising them.
Seriously, go search for "battery" on Slashdot. Everything from graphene to oxygen/air to new structures to quantum effects to whatever other bollocks you can imagine.
How many of them mention Li-Po?
SCIENCE is exactly what I'm after, being made into ENGINEERING at a later date such that they become something other than vapourware that we will never see.
Not "news" that comes along every few weeks on Slashdot with ZERO products out of it, nothing past a single prototype, that's abandoned literally as soon as the guy writes up their paper proving a 0.1% increase over existing batteries in contrived situations.
Great.
So in 20-50 years, we might see one of these many bollocks-battery-techs actually become a product you can buy.
Exactly my point.
And, come to think of it, the first time I heard of LiPo cells was someone showing me their drone aircraft.
I wish we had a battery breakthrough for every HUNDRED articles we get on it.
What gets me is that Li-ion, NiMH, NiCd, etc. I heard precisely NOTHING off before I'd bought a product that contained them or they were on the shelves of my local electrical store.
And thus bad CSR's are the prime cause of customer loss, and not the other way around. That's excluding when they make promises to retain you that they know are rubbish, or it ends up costing the customer more and then they just cancel out of distrust of anything further.
Personally, I get through to supervisors. It's not hard. I'm not even very polite, I've just had a lot of experience (you'll see why below). But mainly because I know what I'm entitled to and what I'm not. If you give me problems, that's what recording the phone call is for. Ooops. A CSR out of a job for talking bullshit is much easier than losing a long-term customer precisely because the next CSR is paid the same and just another guy reading the same script.
It's not a question that large callcentres are always staffed by assholes, who all claim the supervisor "isn't available" (or not even there, that always gets a laugh from me too!) because that's exactly what they are told to do.
But that's not the end of the customer's power. In the UK, you can record the phone call. It's only "advised" to tell them you are recording and if THEY have a "calls may be recorded" warning - well... I don't need to tell them if I'm recording at all (I don't need to anyway, it's just polite).
And then the ball-game gets turned around. You're refusing to give me your name? You're refusing to accept notification of my cancellation? You failed to follow procedures? You put me on hold but never resolved the query that you went on hold to do? Oh, that little tape winging its way to head office is going to hurt and given that it's your JOB to help (no matter what your mythical never-present supervisor might train you to do), it's going to cost you.
Last time I phoned up with a complaint, I *did* get the mythical supervisor on the line (I always do, when I deem them necessary, but that's another matter) and I had the British Gas callcentre (if you live in Britain, you know they are one of the WORST for callcentres) that he was in charge of phoning local newsagents near me to discover one that they had a PayPoint in, that they could *pay* to stay open late, especially so that *I* alone (as in I had to present ID to the newsagent, who'd already shut up shop but had been paid to stay open only for me) could go over to them and top-up a pre-payment card to solve my problem. The problem was quite minor, their way of dealing with it wasn't, but I got my way and cost them a lot more money than basic compliance would ever have cost - by getting through to that supervisor and explaining what was happening.
I don't expect the minions on the front-line of the callcentre to understand that, they never do. But getting a supervisor isn't a fob-off that works when people are serious, and the supervisors know exactly when they have to act to not get caught.
And turning the tables of "No, that's fine, I'm recording that response, and your name was?" on them soon wakes them up because they know those kinds of games are stupid, immoral, not helpful, losing them customers, and sometimes illegal when they have a duty to act on the information given to them (i.e. cancellations).
I don't threaten callcentres and companies with court. They threaten me quite often. I've invited to initiate the court proceedings on behalf of at least two companies to save them time. Strangely it's NEVER got that far when they find out I have recordings and every letter and email ever sent or received. But I have screwed over any number of callcentre operatives who failed to do their job by playing such games and thinking it's cute to try to run rings around my efforts to do something quite reasonable. To my knowledge, I've cost at least two their jobs. One of them phoned me back up to threaten me because of that.
Being a dick on the phone to customers is all fun and games until it costs you your job. Because you ARE supposed to be there to help and you're really not important enough to lose even a medium sized customer over.
That's th
When your customer kicks up a fuss for you to "just get it done", it's not licence to just ignore your training, skills and safety procedures. Even if they threaten to cut your business, you still can't just say "Oh, let's forget all that stuff this one time because we might lose future work".
That's not how the law works, and not how it SHOULD work - the contractor shouldn't just cut corners because they're being pressured by the datacentre. They should say "We do it safely, or not at all". They didn't, hence they were fined.
It doesn't mean the datacenter are innocent in this - to them, their profit was more important than their contractor's safety (and they still have "a duty of care" to their contractors and workers anyway, written in the law). But the contractor should never have complied out of haste or threat of lost business if it meant a potential for injury or death.
They're both in the wrong. But the contractor had ultimate responsibility for the decision that caused the death.
"I don't care how you get it done, just get it done" is not free reign to break the law and allow someone to possibly die. But it's not illegal to say that to a contractor either. It's only ACTING on that without regard for safety of your workers that's illegal, and that's the contractor's fault.
The datacentre aren't blameless here, but they didn't do anything specifically illegal.
The UK has victim surcharges for most crimes. Those go directly to the victim and/or those who are victim of the same or similar crimes.
And it's a statutory fine for noncompliance in H&S. Now that it's been established by a court that the companies were negligent, the FAMILY can individually sue on that basis to receive compensation for their particular consequences.
The fact of law for these exact circumstances has been established by a professional body in court. Now the family don't have to pay lawyers to do that part, they can just sue using their precedents on this incident.
More likely, the company or its insurers will now hastily settle such claims out of court to avoid additional legal expense. That won't come cheap, but cheaper than fighting the family with lawyers when courts have already ruled you should never have allowed it to happen.
If anything, this is a case where the government bodies have saved the family lots of unnecessary grief, hassle and expense of their own.
How much downtime was caused by ensuring the circuit was safe and removing the body?
If zero, SUE THEM INTO OBLIVION. Risking either this contractor unnecessarily (you could have just switched it off) or other workers and emergency workers (because you didn't switch it off after it had demonstrably killed someone).
If some downtime, then why couldn't you have done that to do the work?
Sorry, but I fail to see how the risk of a death and possible short-circuits, joined phases etc. because of working with the terminals live in any way "secures" uptime any more than scheduling proper downtime and having properly redundant systems.
You are just ask likely to bridge the WRONG circuit while working live, or causing a short, which will cause more damage and more downtime than just switching things off to do the work. And you guys have redundant power with UPS that you can bypass to work on the UPS, etc. if necessary? If not, that downtime isn't all that important to you anyway.
There's no excuse for this, hence the court fine. And you've got to be an idiot to knowingly let people work on a live multi-phase system. Hell, even a fused, RCD'd, single-phase can be bad enough.
It's naive to believe that such a thing is universal to an entire problem set, and is as solid as colloquially suggested.
But, more than that, optimisations like this often work by transforming one type of problem into a related, but different, equivalent problem. In doing that you are indeed shifting problems between problem spaces and, thus, between algorithms of different optimisation. Though there is some conversion involved, it is by no means guaranteed that such conversion is just as hard as solving the original problem.
If even 10% of your problems can be reduced simply to an equivalent problem with a solution that can be 11% faster, then you've made a step forward.
Mistaking NFL for a universal theorem of mathematics, or even optimisation, is a critical error in thinking.
Failing on attempts from the same IP? They spread them across millions of IPs
Failing on attempts on a particular account? Good luck explaining to your users why their accounts lock out every week and they have to come to you to unlock because of random people attempting to bruteforce them.
Failing on attempts within a time-frame? These things are long-running attacks, millions of attempts per second across the globe. They only have to get lucky once.
That said, it's not a brute-force that's your main problem. They only need one in and the number of vulnerabilities etc. mean they can move around. One password hash for one browser session or passwd file aand they can spend months offline on stolen hardware (Amazon accounts etc.) brute-forcing it not subject to your restrictions.
Brute force attacks are not a problem, you can rate-limit them into obscurity. But, like spam email, even with rate-limiting, if you're being bombarded en-masse while trying to operate normal services, and they are being clever, things can still slip through and it only needs one.
Weak passwords are brute-forcible even with rate-limits. Strong passwords aren't. They will obviously try weak ones first until they can get something which might give them a crowbar into a strong-passworded account (like, say, a local account not subject to the pass rate-limits on escalation requests).
With storage systems moving from the local system into the cloud, you have inherent bottlenecks on the networking.
This might be able to do stupendous speeds but no amount of disk speed will help you get your files up and down. You might be able to process them in the cloud but actually moving them between the cloud and not is still limited by your downstream.
As such, it's actually LOCAL users who are going to benefit more from fast storage, not cloud providers. Hell, just data protection alone is in the spotlight at the moment and has the EU and US arguing and we're on the verge of every cloud company having to have at least a European-only data centre storage (so all the advantages of cloud being a world-wide solution are nullified because you can only hold EU data within the EU).
And, to be honest, Cloud is really just the new name for "external hosted". It's nothing fancy.
Because the science might be right but the engineering is still extremely far away.
We might be able to entangle two particles in an lab experiment and test them at distance, doing so as a matter of routine with enough particles to form a reliable communication channel across millions of km's with inch-wide precision with something that you can put into a craft? That's still just science fiction. And any mission you launch will still take years to bring that technology to even Mars, let alone anywhere else.
Honestly, it's like saying we've invented a battery, why don't we just light up the entire planet right now? It takes at least decades and more likely hundreds of years of engineering to fill that gap.
And then you'll find that it's not all that useful compared to, say, sending radio communications.
Though you can entangle photons/particles in theory, there is STILL not way to send information using that faster than the speed of light. It's as simple as that. And that's still an 8-minute delay to the Sun at the very least, and stupendous delays if you try to go out towards the outskirts of the solar system.
Fortunately, the people in charge of such things are physicists and engineers and not random commentors on Slashdot.
Not in my country.
If you sign there, there is a burden on you to prove that their request is unreasonable should they ever execute it. If their system crashes and nobody else but you can recover it, you're going to be working for them, compensated "reasonably" or not, and you already chose not to be there.
If you want those people to transfer skills, then you keep them on to train a replacement. If you don't, you don't get to call them back whenever you feel like. If you only need assistance for the occasional lost password etc. then there's no need to cast it in stone this tightly.
Lawsuits don't come into it. If you're called as a witness, it doesn't matter who you work for now, you might be asked to appear before court.
Whether they use it or not, it wouldn't be there if there wasn't the suggestion they COULD use it. And that might well mean an awful lot of inconvenience even if you ARE paid, and provided for and a lot of bad times in front of your new boss explaining that what you signed before you left conflicts with THEIR contract. If nothing else, having to let a new employer know about the possibility is a burden in itself.
Pay for the proper transition, or don't. It's a simple choice. And if you let the one guy walk out the door being the only person knowing those details, not having anyone else trained or aware of what they did, him being the only person authorised to reset them, etc. then more fool you.
A domain without information is untrusted.
SPF tells them that you're trying to combat spam from pretending to come from you.
Similarlt for DKIM, that also tells them that you are checking and explicitly marking every message you send out from your domain and absence of such signing should be treated as suspicious.
Put both of those on, in a decent static IP range (nobody sensible accepts email from dynamic IP's!), and you're good to go. How do I know? My own domains are ALL run by me, on Postfix. They even forward some mail addresses to providers like GMail as a matter of course.
The only problem I ever have for delivery is when *I* have accepted a spam message and try to forward it on to someone like GMail (harder to stop than it sounds, even with greylisting, etc.). They spot spam that my system can't, even on a re-forwarder.
Hell, I IPv6'd my domain too. So long as you have valid PTR records for your reverse, places like GMail are perfectly happy with that. Never had a problem. (But if you can't set your reverse for your IPv6, there's a way to turn off using IPv6 and fallback to IPv4 just for GMail, etc. when using postfix - google it).
My entire email for the last 5 years at least has been self-hosted. I've been using tiny startup services for about 10-15 years before that without issue. If anything, I have significantly more issues with the big-brand provider we use as smarthost for the Exchange servers in work, which are routinely blacklisted for spam and I have to fallback to manual sending from our leased lines, than anything to do with my self-hosting personal email domains.
Just don't expect your no-name mailer on a dynamic range without even the simplest of anti-spam measures to be accepted by places like Google, and you're golden.
Ratings tell you - at best - how popular a movie is. Not how good it is. Same as the music charts. It has no correspondence to even sales figures, really. Measuring "sales this month" as opposed to "overall sales" is pretty much a nonsense if you think of it, if the person doesn't already own that product.
Ratings are about what's popular, what other people are liking now. For many, that's ALL they need to know because that's what they base their opinions on and then discuss with their peer group. For others, it means nothing at all.
I *GUARANTEE* you that if one of my school friends "recommends" a page to me, that I'll have no interest. I *GUARANTEE* you that the films that my friends or family like do not intersect in any meaningful or predictable way with my own personal preferences. It's just that simple.
However, I refuse to subscribe to the "You have to watch it first" kind of argument if that means parting with any money whatsoever. If I have to watch it to know whether or not I'll like it, I'm not going to pay to do so at the cinema on or DVD.
But it is possible, via trailers, reviews, ratings, comments, research and the necessary pinch of salt, to work out whether a movie is one you'll enjoy. You can still be wrong, but you can get a good indication.
I think the same of Steam's review system, There are game on there I love that get slated and games I hate that get 10/10 and Mostly Positive reviews. It doesn't affect my decision to buy or not. Give me a demo, though, or a gameplay trailer and that will help sway me one way or the other.
I've wanted "Grey Goo" since I first saw it. They did a free weekend this weekend, so I installed it. I'm pretty Meh about it now. But I wouldn't have known that without playing it, and wouldn't have bought it based on the Mostly Positive reviews alone.
Prison Architect, on the other hand, I thought was going to be rubbish. And then I played it. And now I can't stop. And no doubt reviewers and other players think just the opposite.
But, sorry, movie ratings are worthless. Ratings are worthless and ratings of something that you have to pay to prove them wrong are even worse. I've never paid them any attention. At least with a bit of music you can tell if it's going to be good for free, legally, before you buy it.
God, if only there were ways that the human body could survive cooked food, eating salt, etc.. It's almost like we weren't BUILT to be able to survive things like that.
Honestly, this is outside the bounds of health-freak and into complete paranoia.
Ironically, refrigeration has probably been responsible for more deaths on Earth - including cancers - than any amount of food-smoking.
Why you thinking smoking is somehow worse than cooking, I don't know - are you sitting there deeply-inhaling all the smoke constantly while your food smokes or are you normal? That's before we get into the cherry-picking of types of pickling and canning to support your argument at the expense of all the other (more normal) ways.
P.S. A salted ham won't kill you. Nor will a smoked salmon. Or a tin of meat. What will is the stress on your body of worrying about all this stuff and avoiding it to this level.
Please show me the group policy object for preventing the sidebar appearing. Or the group policy object for specifying the login image (or whether the login image can be changed by the user, etc.) on Windows 8. Hell, try getting the LDAP jpeg attribute to be the login image.
It sounds *really* easy. You probably think you already know it. You might even link to something that claims to do it. Now try it. Without bodges, scripts, and it only working in some instances (Disabled the side bar? Fully? Think so? You might hope), it can't be done.
Do you know where the settings for default printers are in GP? Hint: Nowhere near the print management settings. Do you know how to stop Windows 8's accessibility menu appearing on login (because it allows you to cock up the login screen with High Contrast, voice, etc. that stays until someone undoes it)? The "semi-official" fix is to rename or ACL-protect an .exe in the Windows folder.
Think group policy is the fucking be-all-and-end-all of every setting in Windows? Go run a network. Fuck, you can't even get it to do simple things.
Do you have any idea how many "easily disabled" features I have to turn off on every copy of Windows deployed in my corporation?
How many "not easily disabled" features?
How many "You shouldn't disable this" features?
How many "This is a feature you don't want masquerading as a security update"?
How many "You used to turn off this feature here, but you can't any more?"
How many "This feature cannot be disabled"?
And there's nothing yet to say the ads aren't coming down, they just aren't being shown. That's different. Several thousand machines all downloading unnecessary ads that are never shown is probably worse than the burden on the poor webfilter through normal browsing alone.
Things that are "easily disabled" should be given as choices. Because if it's easily disabled, then it should be just as easily enabled if the USER actually wants it.
Ads are "easily ignored" too. It doesn't mean you want them.
And the stuff about Windows 10 popups? That was "easily disabled". Except when it wasn't. Except when domain-controlled machines (which were supposed to be exempt from it) started popping it up too. Except when you turn it off and still have to turn off three "security updates" that don't even MENTION it to stop it trying to pre-download gigabytes of Windows 10 files that it won't install.
Such things just shouldn't be happening, "easily disabled" or not.
Kinect? What about the Wii before it?
If you don't have a relative that smashed the hell out of some light fitting, TV, someone's head, etc. then I'll be shocked.
And the US has some of the biggest living spaces I've ever seen because they have no shortage of land. Come to Europe or the UK where if you're lucky you might have a square of 4-5 feet of usable space between your sofa and the TV.
There are inherent physical problems with any kind of VR or interactive games and hardware and this is just one. And have we really progressed from the 80's in this respect, where VR consisted of putting on a funny hat and then being confined inside a ring of plastic rails to keep you save and detect whether you wanted to "move forward".
If you want VR to take out, do a deal with paintball and laser-quest companies and borrow their facilities. Overlay the well-controlled, well-defined static layout there with gadgets enough that people with headsets can run around safely in it, seeing a virtual world overlaid on the top of plain white boxes and steps, and they can run up the steps that actually exist in front of them.
Think of it - VR CounterStrike with your friends laid over the top of a physical, but empty, replica of de_dust. You aren't actually shooting anyone, you don't need to paint the set, and you can blanket the place in sensors to make sure the locations are accurate. And when you're "dead", you take off the VR and walk to the exit (yes, griefers, I know, but you're with friends).