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r00ty Admin

@[email protected]

I'm the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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So, also usable as a weapon if required. Another feature.

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I generally change every 4 years anyway. It's around the time battery performance starts to become noticeable I find.

I suppose if there was nothing worth upgrading to I'd just change the battery. But after 4 years there usually is.

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This is the right way to do it. Make it clear this IT process is causing reduced performance. Especially if you're a profit centre you will likely see the problem solved soon enough.

This specific thing. A password on task manager is really dumb though. I assume they have some spyware they don't want users to be able to stop. But, most of this kind of software (think antivirus) generally have other ways to prevent tasks being closed. They don't need to remove task manager. Task manager is an important and needed tool for any windows user.

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I think most of Western Europe is on the same page with that rule.

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This seems like they took all the downsides of contracting and all the downsides of being an employee and none of the upsides of either.

Why has the world gone to shit?

In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in...

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Capitalism seems to run in a cyclic manner. If you remember in the 80s we had movies like Wall Street and Other People's Money, because I think things were at a similar point then to where they are now. But, through the 90s (and I joined the workforce in the mid 90s) I recall a more customer-centric view, and even some level of consideration for employees. This has gradually deteriorated starting in the new millennium.

The last 10 years I think has seen this accelerate such that the only consideration for a company is to the shareholders (public or private), customers are in the equation somewhere but way, way after providing value to shareholders via cost-cutting in any way possible. Employees are absolutely just a cost of doing business and if they could eliminate them too, they surely would.

The only hope I have is that I've seen this reverse before, so it CAN happen again. But what makes me place some doubt about this is headlines like the four richest people doubling their net-worth in an incredibly short period. The economy is a zero-sum game, if they doubled their worth other people lost everything, MANY people needed to lose everything to achieve that. Those people need to lose, and lose a lot to bring us back, and I can't imagine they will let that happen.

Maybe things will improve, maybe there will be a revolution/uprising when it just gets too bad. Who knows?

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Hahaha. If they remove the "basic" which I believe is standard since that's the lowest I see. Only leaving the Premium option then I'm afraid I'm going to pull a full dragon's den.

I really did like Netflix, but they're just getting greedy and trying to extract blood from stone now. And for that reason, I'll be out should they remove the standard tier.

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Well, I've not been affected so far. But this will definitely be a huge hit to me and that will be it.

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The thing is, every Boeing plane that has any problem is going to make it to the news right now. So it's very hard to see what is relevant and what is just "one of those things". So, this will make them look worse than they really are.

Having said that, they have problems. My opinion is that cost-cutting has created all their recent actual problems (MCAS, missing bolts, loose bolts etc) and I'd argue that unless the actual location(s) responsible for these problems is identified, the safest thing to do would be to recall ALL aircraft recently (last 3 years AT LEAST) serviced, repaired or had their configuration changed at a Boeing owned or subcontracted location should be reviewed for substandard work.

My reasoning here is that if we have loose/missing bolts on the 737 Max 8/9 and -900ER. It won't stop there, it is going to almost certainly be an institutionalised problem of quality control slippage that could affect any aircraft maintenance, repair, or adjustment operation.

But, I'm not an aviation expert, so my opinion is worth very little.

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I don't think we have enough information to say whether it's a Boeing thing or not. The reason I say that is, that my understanding is some maintenance and repair operations will be performed by Boeing, or Boeing appointed subcontractors. What we may never find out is whether there was any work done on, or requiring access via the nose wheel area, and whether it was performed by Boeing/Boeing subcontracted technicians.

But, as I said in my other comment. This will be an ongoing problem where every Boeing plane issue will be reported now and unless announced by the operator or Boeing themselves, we'll never know whether it was a Boeing maintenance problem or just neglect by the operator.

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You know, I'd not be surprised if some brexit votes were to leave Eurovision. :P

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Just fence off those two squares forever, and we'll never talk about it again.

A Colorado town's newspapers were stolen after a story about rape charges at the police chief's house (apnews.com)

Nearly all the copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer published a story about charges being filed over rapes alleged to have occurred at an underage drinking party at the police chief’s house while the chief was asleep, the owner and publisher...

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So, you print the story on the front page the next day and print double the copies. And keep going.

Make them work for it.

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Favourite of all time? Between snes and dreamcast.

I stopped with consoles after the first Xbox. PC ever since.

Consoles I had.

Phillips odyssey / intellivision (don't remember too much about those)

Atari 2600. Amazing for the time, and now I know more about the architecture, I have huge respect for the developers of the time.

Sega master system / nes. I cannot remember which we had first, probably Sega. Again, good good for the time. I think we had double dragon and golden axe on sms (and it had cool built in maze game). Mario games on the nes were of course also great.

Megadrive. Mortal combat and sonic, that is all. Great system for the time.

Snes, Mario kart. Mode 7 was pretty good.

Psx, was quite good but pc gaming was starting to warm up.

Dreamcast, I mostly remember metropolis street racer. I loved that game.

Xbox. Burnout games were great. But it was around the time I was getting more into PC gaming.

Mostly retro stuff as you can see.

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I'm on mbin BTW. The fediverse arch.

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It's all smoke and mirrors!

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Well base operating system or hardware driver. There are exceptions, the pps driver for timekeeping makes sense to be kernel level too.

But games developers? No, they have no right to ring 0. I understand they want to protect from cheats, but they're just moving the battleground to a part of the system that results in blue screens/panics when it fails. And cheat developers will follow them there and even move to the hypervisor if needed, trust me on that.

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I don't think either of the main mobile platforms allow users or developers on unrooted devices to install software at this level.

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Because it just moves the fight to kernel level where the stakes aren't task crashed, but blue screen instead.

Tesla charging stations become ‘car graveyards’ as batteries die in subzero temperatures, abandoned cars left in the lot after cars wouldn’t charge (www.kansascity.com)

Tesla charging stations become ‘car graveyards’ as batteries die in subzero temperatures, abandoned cars left in the lot after cars wouldn’t charge::undefined

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It's true, our plain old dinosaur fuel car was notably slower in turning over on the -5 and colder days we've had recently.

But since tesla bother to heat the propulsion battery why don't they either 1: have a 12v power supply to provide ancillary power from the propulsion batteries if the 12v supply fails, or 2: also heat that battery too?

Supermarket responds after Reddit user’s warning about self-checkout overcharge — ‘Was annoyed that the total amount due on my supermarket purchase did not equate to the individual items I purchased.’ (7news.com.au)

Supermarket responds after Reddit user’s warning about self-checkout overcharge — ‘Was annoyed that the total amount due on my supermarket purchase did not equate to the individual items I purchased.’::‘Was annoyed that the amount due on my Woolies purchase did not equate to the individual items I purchased.’

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But, what kind of software do they have that uses one price source for the unit pricing display and another source for calculating the total? It seems that it is destined to create more problems like this one.

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Deductions should also appear as a line item though.

How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity (www.wired.com)

“This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers, tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the existing financial system.”

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I think people confuse anonymity (similar to the made up names we use here, or character names in online games, and your wallet ID in a crypto coin) to privacy. Technically, if you receive all your funds in crypto, and you spend all the crypto directly (on goods and services that do not require you to give any PII) without it ever turning to fiat. Then yes, it is anonymous but not private. People can see that wallet hash x received funds from wallet hash y and send some of that to wallet hash z and will be able to confirm that for as long as a copy of the ledger exists somewhere.

Really not sure a codebreaker needed to work this out. Anyone that spent a bit of time understanding how it worked would realise this right away. I have no doubt though, that many people had a total pikachu face when their barely concealed illegal activities were easily discovered.

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If the situation is that you ban a political party because you're worried the people will vote for a facsist dictatorship (and I'm not saying that's an impossibility these days), this is just a band-aid at best. Because clearly the people will get what they want somehow, some day.

The solution needs to be to educate people better, because no sane and educated turkey votes for Christmas (Thanksgiving I guess for the Americans).

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Well, I'm not advocating against party banning. I'm just saying that if the reason a party is being banned is because there's a real chance they might win an election. Then it really is just deferring the problem.

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Here in the UK, I don't think I've seen one of those in use for more than 20 years. Maybe it is still in use elsewhere?

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If you were over 40, you'd call them opal fruits!

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I have a clear memory from the 80s for sure where these were routinely used on pre-sliced bread loaves. I'm sure I have seen them since the 80s. But they became much rarer for certain.

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Also going to throw in, it's definitely a dodgy URL. Evri is a common target for this kind of scam and they count on exactly what's happened here. The small %age of people that were actually expecting a parcel by that carrier.

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What I came here to say!

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Hah, I remember using ksh on an old IBM AIX box.

Boomers won’t part with their homes, and that’s a problem for young families (www.cnn.com)

Buying a family-sized home with three or more bedrooms used to be manageable for young people with children. But with home prices climbing faster than wages, mortgage rates still close to 23-year highs and a shortage of homes nationwide, many Millennials with kids can’t afford it. And Gen Z adults with kids? Even harder....

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Here in the UK it's generally the same, but also in a way worse.

Developers are "required" to build a percentage of homes that are "affordable". I put both of these in quotes because, yeah. They dodge it over and over and somehow are still granted permission for their next project.

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I've had tinnitus since my earliest memories. Will I get tinnitus on my tinnitus? Tinnitus squared?

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I have a general tone (or set of tones I guess) which is around equal in both ears usually. But they will sometimes just change for a while, which is extremely jarring since generally I do get used to the constant sound that suddenly being consciously aware of it generally distracts from whatever else is going on. Sometimes that change only happens in one ear, or at least starts in one ear.

Since I've had this forever, I actually thought it was normal. Until I guess one day my teacher at school ran out of material, or had a hangover and just wanted us quiet. So, asked us all to be quiet and start to talk about the quietest things people could hear. Others heard a few things I could hear. Sounds in the school building. Then people were talking about hearing traffic on the street nearby and other things I just couldn't hear at all. At that point I realised, just me hearing this sound then.

I'm probably quite lucky in that the noise floor for me isn't terrible. Only at night when trying to sleep does it become a problem.

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Not how I read it. I read it that of course the other guy wanted him to kill Hitler BEFORE all his deeds. But how I read it was he went to the bunker and it was really him all along that killed Hitler. Just, a little too late.

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Well, I'm not a lemmy user. But I generally read the comments to gauge whether it is worth reading the article.

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The headline says "near". I'm not sure there's anything suggesting they targetted them. At the same time targetted doesn't matter much. If people were killed in the consulate, the result would probably have been the same as if they were targetted.

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I hate self-checkout. It's just annoying and a downgrade from an actual. cashier. I'll use it when I have to. But really it's just terrible.

However, scan as you shop. That's just great. Put your bags in the trolley, scan and put it straight in the bag. Go to checkout machine, pay and your stuff is already bagged.

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I generally write a single line summary and then a list of the specifics like:

Did stuff (except more detailed than that)
 - The first thing I did
  - Maybe some more detail about the first thing because there's a rationale to explain
 - The second thing I did
 - Third thing

Etc.

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I don't think you understand the problem. The issue is that some of these people might actually believe they did something wrong, or didn't measure up. That is the problem. They should just be honest.

There's no law against laying people off because you hired too many people and need to downsize. They are using performance as a reason because they think (and in many cases, they'll be right) it will subdue the person being laid off from a position of anger or resent, to a position where they're upset with themselves for not measuring up.

It's a really bad way to do this, for the person being laid off.

So, yes. Asking about the fictional performance metrics to at least make them feel a little uncomfortable too is completely fine in my opinion.

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Reddit must not, says I.

Seems we're at an impasse

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It was just self defense! No, wait I read it wrong. Self defenestration.

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It's not poorly written software if it's is old. Likewise the y2k bug is often declared as bad programming, but at the time the software with the y2k bug was written memory was measured in kilobytes and a lot of accounting software and banking software was written in a time when 64k was the norm. Oh, and I'll tell you now I know of at least some accounting software that is based on code written for the 8088 and has been wrapped and cross compiled so many times now it's unrecognisable. But I know that 40 year old code is still there.

So 2 digits for year was best practice at the time and at the time software vulnerable to the 2038 bug 32bit epoch dates was the best practice.

Now, software written today doing the same, could of course be considered bad, but it's not a good blanket statement.

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I mean, technically you could use unsigned 32bit if you don't need to handle dates before 1970. But yes, the best course of action now is to use 64bits. The cost is pretty much nothing on modern systems.

I'm just cautious of people judging software from a time with different constraints and expectations, with the current yardstick.

I also wonder what the problem will be. People playing ghost recon in 2038 are going to be "retro" gaming it. There should be an expectation of such problems. Would it prevent you loading or saving the file is the question?

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Yeah, that's my point. It'll be a retro game by 2038 and anyone playing it will know it's "one of those quirks"

The bigger problem is software where the date really matters.

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It's what I covered later in that message. That we'll need some mix of home charging, fast charging but ultimately if we can get some kind of charging on trunk roads at least, it could just make EVs better than fuel driven cars.

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The Boeing MCAS story and the fact they were not held accountable at all terrifies me. Not the idea of the augmentation, I kinda understand they needed to fit bigger engines onto their existing frame until they can make and certify a new one. It's not a good solution, but I can understand the business thinking behind it.

Here's where it goes wrong for me.

  • Not documenting the MCAS system, in order to cheat the system to not require recertification for the plane. Adding a system that can make trim changes without informing the pilots and that there isn't a documented way to override was an accident waiting to happen.
  • Worse to me, is the fact that while the aircraft has two AoA sensors, the MCAS system only takes input from one of them. This is terrifying. There's no way the software can know the inputs could be wrong. So the software would effectively try to kill people all the while thinking it's actually doing you a favour.

It was a debacle that should have been investigated further. Now, it's not fair (although it probably is) to compare Boeing putting their toes into more flight automation against airbus. But the modern airbus jets use multiple sensor sources, and when there is a disagreement, they will reduce flight protections and inform the pilots about it, pilots that will be trained on the various flight modes that can come out of this. Just using one sensor was just a crazy decision, and I bet it was based on cost.

What's going on now though is more a general QC/QA situation. Where I think it overlaps with the MCAS situation is that both the lack of redundancy in MCAS sensor input and the lack of QC in general just reeks of ruthless cost-cutting.

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Yeah, it's a race to the bottom. But we have strict aviation rules across the west for this very reason.

The crash in Japan is actually an example of a failure that fits the Swiss Cheese model. I think ultimately most of the blame will fall on the surviving coastguard captain, but everyone involved had a chance to stop that crash. The coastguard messed up and joined the runway when he shouldn't have. Mistake 1. ATC didn't notice the warning on the monitor that would have drawn attention to this. Mistake 2. The pilots didn't see the coastguard plane on the runway. Now, this one, is a tough one. With all the bigger planes with beacon/nav/interior lights, the runway lights, the airport lighting. It may well have been hard to see the small plane on the runway, but it had beacon lights on, and they had the opportunity to see it and abort the landing.

So essentially there were three chances to stop that accident and all three were missed.

I completely agree, designing a feature on a plane that doesn't respect this way of thinking is not the behaviour of a responsible aviation company.

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