Posts by John Miles

Re: My Bullshit Meter Just Exploded

Or at least some people believe others will believe him so the greater fool game can continue.

Re: Dominate

Yes the long journeys and those without suitable off street parking are waiting for the "quick and ubiquitous charging stations"

But for families with two cars available and suitable parking - having an EV instead of a small petrol/gas for local runs is a something to consider

Re: They were not worried, absent any evidence

and in the news today - Four injured after runaway military horses bolted in central London (hope all are recovering)

Re: war still primarily consists of human attrition one way or another until one side gives up.?

Star Trek also gives us a few examples of where AI warfare may lead

Prototype (Star Trek: Voyager) (When the two planets called a truce and attempted to terminate the robots, the robots destroyed their creators out of self-preservation and continued their war)

The Arsenal of Freedom (Star Trek: The Next Generation) - When a weapon sales AI doesn't take "no thanks" for an answer

and The Doomsday Machine (Star Trek: The Original Series)

Re: Semicolons and curly braces, forever.

Most Editors and IDEs I've used have a view "White Space Option" or similar, in Notepad++ go to "View -> Show Symbol -> Show Space and Tab", normally they'll be shown as a dot for space and arrow for a tab

Re: I actually wouldn't worry all that much about this

The sad fact is this has been going on for at least 12 years - back in 2012 it was BMWs going awol, if you got access to the inside of the car you could plug into the ODBC and program car to accept another key pretty quick. A particular weakness was for right had drive vehicles where the alarm sensors didn't cover the area around the port or drivers window and putting a screwdriver in the lock and twisting it hard would wind the windows down - so easy access.

Re: Vardøgr

What you were hearing from FM radio was the pulses of signal the phone uses for talking to the tower, these will be picked up by the audio circuits and amplified - giving the noise you expect. Phone signal strength has reduced as technology improves and new radios are better designed to reject the noise

Cat's hear frequencies well above humans - it is likely when screen switches on it will make noise the cat hears we don't or may just be the light flashing

Re: her credibility for preaching & giving sermons on Christian values

She'll fit right in with a lot of top clergy, same mode of operation - demonise the victims and those who dare stand against the church to keep the flock in line, then protect the guilty at all costs.

Re: AI actually does anything properly

AI aka. Machine learning, has been doing things properly for quite a while - but they've been focused on one thing to aid rather than replace workers - then along came ChatGPT and the mba's hallucinations of computers replacing everyone started.

He was working for Verizon - article:Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work

Sounds like he was doing a better job at getting quality work than most Outsourced stuff I've seen

Re: Coders vs Developers

and when you have them trained use parameterized statements, next thing you find is they are building xml/json by string concatenation (though I suppose should give them marks for using string builders) and passing those in as a string to stored procedure and processing that in the proc.

Re: I disagree - a reliability incident is temporary, a security incident is permanent

Reliability issues will generally have users complaining (though not always), you can even automatically monitor system and have it email when things go wrong, running late etc.

Security issues will generally only have people complaining when the attacker makes a move at which point it is too late. For security you can't let your guard down, you need to monitor logs and ensure the system logs them, look for the unexpected/out of place and verify them.

But above all for security you need people who understand how things work in depth and not just following a script.

Being pedantic

I'd expect the computer to calculate "£500 * 20 / 1+(20/100)" to be £10,000.20

They'd like people to infer there is that there is a 40% improvement - but that would suggest coding is analogous to "short algorithmic coding challenges" that have been done before and consumed by the LLM.

Then there is the fewer code-smells issues, that suggests they aren't using code scanning tools in IDE or CI/CD pipelines (or ignoring them) which would highlight such things.

May have been, my memory is a little hazy half a century later

Re: It's still happening

I'm not sure it is a modern myth - I was told by by a manger that nearly 40 years ago, needless to say when he was let go by his employer a few decades later he never found anything comparable

Re: Word Processor?

Its predecessor, Write would not only open binary file, but it would save them again - there was a trick where you could load the Flying Windows Screen Saver, change the windows symbol character and save it again - then have whatever wingdings character you wanted flying at you

Re: Thermoelectric fridges

and after many hours on CAD/Modelling system, several redesigns to make it printable and test prints to only realise you've overlooked something - you decide to start something else

Re: Truth is a function of time

I suspect it will be here to stay but, like a lot of hyped things, not in the ways it is being hyped - e.g. I don't recall Java being thought of as a back-end language when it hit hype mill - more an applet language which would change the way we saw applications

Re: when somebody shows her an XY plotter.

or even an XYZ plotter - i.e. 3D printer

Re: wasting an enormeous amount of time with meetings-that-should-really-be-emails.

Now add wasting time with emails that shouldn't exist or at very least to much more focused recipient lists.

Re: Why the hell does a TV need anything related to AI?

So it can automatically skip/hide adverts - though I doubt they go for that

Re: Three point one pints please

It's called plausible deniability - we thought we'd ordered enough for people to relax not get rat-a****d, but it looks like someone forgot to convert percentages to a fraction

HSBC - despite the logon always encouraging the changeover

There was a tick box available the other day to say don't show this again (I don't recall that before)

Re: It forces the developer to start with the UI.

Believe me, some developers will still try and force something completely different and incompatible into the mix, I've had to fix Delphi Apps where they started with a state machine and hammered the UI onto, rather than use natural state flow a Delphi UI would give you.

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells on Wiki, though I would normally expect the stereo-typical "Disgusted" to be writing to complain about Musk's profanities

Re: that would be evidence enough for me

Or maybe evidence things like transporters and replicators or even just holodeck technologies from Star Trek were real.

I'm not sure there is anything that could prove the entity demonstrating they were God couldn't be they just have very much more advanced technology available to them.

Re: I can remember SuperCalc!

I can recall rebooting PC because I could workout how to exit Supercalc

Re: The secret to successful lying to to make yourself look at complete idiot.

Once had a discussion with a supervisor about the difficulty in sacking someone who was very unreliable. He'd put stuff on his self certificated sick form like "had to go shopping", "couldn't get be bothered to get up" - for a while it worked as Personnel said we can't sack him as is obviously isn't firing on all cylinders, he was eventually dismissed.

Re: Ok, let's abuse the children!

Having dealt with some onshore ones - I think you can remove the "overseas" part and still be true. The larger the outsourcer organisation the higher the probability they are useless, that is not to say the staff are all useless as I've seen a few that have lots of potential and most have potential, but no large outsource organisation seems to want to develop them, even though that would mean they could do more with less staff to extent of paying less overall for same work

Re: Shocking!

When I worked with testing and fixing electronic equipment as day job then static used to an issue. We'd work on rubber mats for protection and movement on those could generate quite a bit of static (sliding back the chair to change something in rack would generate a painful charge).

When have I done a bit of electronics at home static has never been an issue

Re: "what the blazes were you thinking ?

I've done that but as I dig further into it I realise I should trust my younger self more, though he did need to learn about reducing code complexity and style etc.

Re: Well that was like reading an error report from a user

If someone told me their system had "rogue code" I'd expect it be an Easter Egg, logic bomb or supply side attack

This sounds like a bug and someone is worried about being sued

Re: Yet another bloody cloud device

For a lot of Reolink stand alone cameras (not battery ones) - you don't need an app, you can just use the web interface - I've no complaints about them, especially for the money (and they can't talk out as they are on isolated network, reverse proxied through a server)

Re: Plug into back of broadband hub

I have a Fritzbox with Zen with call screening phone plugged in - but it is connected to A&A voip and a free SipGate connection (was using it to test before I ditched the FTTC connection) not Zen's which I thought dear for what I wanted