Posts by Pete Sdev

Hardware switches for WiFi, camera, and microphone on a laptop sound like a good thing to me.

A pain of course if your l-users cause problems with them.

Re: I'll pass this on to management

Gus from Drop the Dead Donkey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_the_Dead_Donkey)

Re: 22 months and a 50K fine?

$5 million for Microsoft COA labels between 2018 and 2023

If we assume a 100% markup, that would be ~ $333K each (3 people are named in the article) per annum, before taxes and business expenses. Not too bad.

I wonder who is losing out in this scheme - I'd guess the OEMs purchasing bulk licensing from MS from which some of fall off a back of a lorry.

Re: Old Nokia phones

Given Welsh's similarity to Cornish (and Breton for that matter), maybe it was an easy mistake to make.

Re: When it gets to the point where you can use 'export DISPLAY=remotebox.lan:0.0' let me know

So, you're telling us that your problem is that a piece of software that you don't actually use doesn't have a feature you want.

Do you want to swap problems?

Re: Reality bites

Canada's plan if invaded by the US (again?) appears to be to go for guerrilla tactics. (E.g. https://thedefensepost.com/2026/01/21/canada-military-us-invasion/ )

Given the reputation of Canadian fighters, the US would probably experience a snowy Vietnam and lose.

Keep your elbows up my Canadian friends!

Re: So restrict ammo?

This is why there shouldn't be regulation - for anybody "courageous" enough to use a 3D-printed (plastic!) firearm, the problem will *handily* take care of itself in most cases.

Re: Just a couple of decades away

You need a Dyson Sphere

Expensive, made in Singapore, and has no bag?

Yeah, instantly lost any respect or interest in what he had to say after I read that quote.

It may, depressingly, become true at least in environments where the PHB measures productivity in LoC and no-one cares about quality or security. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

Lending the ethernet diagnostic tool out is however to be encouraged.

Icon -> BOFH

Re: Confusion Was Rife...

Be picky though, as many providers are just reselling MS-365 MS-364 MS-363 these days.

Pro version of Protonmail allows using your own domain IIRC, for example.

Posteo and Tuta may also be worthy of consideration.

Then they should dammed well learn!

How and when? In my part of the world there are indeed free courses provided for parents (at least in some areas) as a guide to children's media consummation and similar. These are relatively recent, generally non-technical, and as far as I know an outlier.

If you think it's simple a case of enabling filtering on the home router (itself something that's probably technically beyond a not insignificant percentage) you're very much mistaken.

Simple scenario: your child wants to install Roblox on their tablet. You look at it - seems fine, good even as it has an educational aspect. Except the games and chat functionality is insufficiently moderated, presenting a real risk.

I'll reiterate a point I've made elsewhere on a similar theme. For our parents it was easy - there was (and still ist technically IINM) a 9 PM watershed (state control of content) and the TV was in the front room which meant monitoring was easy. In the beginning of home internet access, pre smart-phone, there was usually 1 PC in the household, often also in an easily monitorable location.

Today, the task is a lot harder.

It's a typical knee-jerk Disgusted-of-Tumbridge-Wells reactionary response, including by some A. cowards here, that it's simply a case of irresponsable parenting. While the fact is, most parents (the middle lump of the Bell Curve) are trying to do the best they can with the resources they have, and balancing supervision with freedom (not unimportant for teenagers).

Re: There must be clarity on who is responsible:

How could the devs be responsible?

It depends. We all (at least adults) have our own personal responsability. Have they implemented something knowing it's ethically or functionally dubious? The "lack of explainability" of a machine-learning-model doesn't excuse for example biases in input data, or training, or risk analysis.

"I was only following orders" hasn't been a valid defense for 80-odd years. There's also the wonderful German word "Schreibtischtäter".

Re: "as long as it isn't for something important"

AI can absolutely generate 100% functional code

As any programmer worth their salt knows, functional (i.e. "it works") is only half the job. With allegedly over 40 years experience you _should_ know this.

- is it robust?

- is it maintainable?

- is it secure?

- does it handle error conditions as elegantly as possible?

- is it well documented?

Re: Elon's pants

That image was generated by and posted by Mr Musk himself.

So consent for the image and its publication is implicit.

In strong contrast to the images the article is referring to.

Re: Please allow me...

This is originally a British site, for British geeks, we'll use good old Anglo-Saxon words here.

[End Royston Vasey Voice]