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gavanm

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Having recently done a timer replacement on a Dualit, I think that might literally be a Dualit timer module. Looks identical in the packing box photo. It wouldn’t surprise me if the heating elements were the same as well (haven’t checked) though those are probably more commonly available as generic items.

I'm not expert on it, but I suspect that two of them might somehow be related to the Transmit and Receive stations for Australia's JORN (over the horizon radar) that are located in Western Australia near Laverton.

Though if that were the case, I'd probably guess there should be more areas at the other site locations around northern Australia - so that might invalidate my guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Net...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B019'02.6%22S+122%C2...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/28%C2%B019'36.3%22S+122%C2...

Postgres as queue 2 years ago

SQL Server has included a message queue capability for a while now. It’s called SQL Server Service Broker:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/config...

I haven’t had the opportunity to use it in production yet - but it’s worth keeping in mind.

I’ve helped fix poor attempts of “table as queue” before - once you get the locking hints right, polling performs well enough for small volumes - from your list above, the only thing I can’t recall there being in sql server is a LISTEN - but I’m not really an expert on it.

I could see that potentially being an Anti-Trust issue for them.

Given the controversy over the Activision acquisition, acquiring one of the major engine platforms, having a major game studio, and already owning the XBox platform might make for great end to end strategic alignment / platform control - but I think it would also be a big regulatory/political fight to get done.

A blog post on the excellent IP/DE blog outlines that a Delaware judge has referred a series of related entities to the Department of Justice, and their legal counsel Texas Supreme Court's Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee in a series of Intellectual Property cases by Non Practicing Entities - revealing concealment of beneficial ownership and links to a French Sovereign State Fund.

This follows up to this discussion and report last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33504777

In Australia, after you change your licence address, they mail you a small sticker with the updated addres, that is then stuck onto the back of your licence.

There's a small section marked on the back that is specifically for it.

I guess if you move multiple times within the expiry period, you can pull the old sticker off and replace it.

I'm not sure if the video covers it, but I do recall reading that in Madagascar, they mark the beans with pinprick initials so that it's easier to identify if they've been stolen.

https://www.vanillabeankings.com/blogs/recipes/vanilla-bean-...

I might even have read about it originally from here.

Of course that only helps if they're recovered / identified quickly - once any significant amount of co-mingling happens then it's probably too much effort to track down the origin.

You've already included the answer - "using their machines as remote terminals, doing most their actual work on some remote server".

The developer uses MFA (TOTP, Push Notification, Yubikey etc) into a virtual desktop inside the organisation (Citrix, VMWare Horizon, etc).

From there, the developer can SSH / whatever into their development environment - which is hosted "inside" the corporate network, or their cloud provider, via internal links.

All code, and dev boxes live "inside" the corporate network, and only keypresses, mouse movement, and screen diffs are sent back and forth.

Most remote access packages can prevent clipboard, USB device, file transfer etc.

If you need a password manager for work purposes, then it lives on the corporate managed network - not your remote laptop/desktop - and to be really paranoid - you only ever "copy/paste" those passwords - you don't type them in.

If you really want to lock it down further, give the remote workers dedicated corporate equipment that they only use to access the remote desktops, so you can prevent some things like screen capturing, and really lock down the software to prevent things like keylogging software/malware.

You also should have the entire development environment segregated from the "business" corporate network as well.

It's only really an issue if you want to have offline developers - in which case I don't have any thoughts ready to hand - (but would expect it to be a very locked down machine, possibly with an even more locked down VM inside it).

As someone who regularly uses multiple layers of Virtual Desktop -> Virtual Desktop -> Remote Desktop, provided the network can handle it (on both your local network, and the corporate network), it works surprisingly well.

In the mid-90's, I worked at a place that had one used for our intranet server running Win NT with IIS.

Mostly used a DEC Alpha as a "visible" competitor to our major server provider at the time (Compaq) to try and manage the prices they were charging (at least until Compaq bought Digital, and then eventually bought by/merged with HP).

One interesting thing was that we had a faulty RAM chip that we only discovered due to a bug in website publishing to IIS causing a big memory leak which crashed the server. Once the the chip was replaced, we still had the underlying leak - but at least the server didn't crash any more.

I wonder if it could be a net positive for the connection point areas.

I'm speculating that areas with undersea cables are often marked as "no anchor" zones due to the risk of damage (in areas where such practices are followed).

So the drop in damage from anchors and extended motor boat presence might eventually outweigh the initial damage from laying the cable.

The high level issue here is around data ownership, and device ownership.

I think the nearest car analogy is ODBII ports and data access - ANT+ is a wireless communication protocol, mostly for reading statistics (I think it can also be used for issuing commands).

Hammerhead had a license to access the privately configured Shimano data - and then they were purchased by SRAM (who are Shimano Bike division's main competitor).

As a result, Shimano is (for now) limiting a competitors ability to see the data produced by Shimano components.

This feels very petty to me - most of the data is essentially going to be "which gear is the front/rear in", and "what shifting pattern do you want to use" - though it might also extend to preventing future interoperability (like preventing competing wireless shifting levers triggering the other manufacturers components) - which would be a loss for consumers.

I Miss RSS 5 years ago

Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms:

1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).

2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.

3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.

4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.

Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.

Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose.

On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.

RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries.

Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit.

I find the idea quite interesting - and it could be valuable just for the read-only aspect of it alone - especially if it is queryable through an ODBC or JDBC connection.

It helps avoid some scripting / token / API overhead - but I'm wondering what the trade off is in terms of initial setup time.

One general concern I have is around Data (state) consistency of the data after DML operations (insert / update). If the data represents the state of a resource - how do you know if there's a pending operation on it as a result of an earlier Update operation? How is idempotency handled? How are conflicting concurrent state changes handled (one user forces a restart, another initiates a shutdown)? What happens if a change applied to multiple records/resources only successfully applies on some of the resources?

This isn't specific to just this approach though - it's going to apply to any kind of cloud / resource management platform. I'm not sure how they tend to handle it - but a basic single record per resource has limitations around it that mean more work is needed. Maybe you end up with change history records?

I find that if you lead with the thumb-as-1 - then I can't use my little finger held down for 4.

I naturally use my thumb to hold down the other fingers leading with index-as-1.

I'm not sure what the thumb-as-1 does for 4 though.

Since the thumb is the first digit on the hand (depending on the way you go) I can see it being a logical choice - but not necessarily the most convenient once you get to 4.

I work in performance testing, and in the web space you essentially have two different main approaches:

* Protocol Testing - where you use servers to generate lots of HTTP/S traffic that is correctly structured to simulate user traffic. Generally, this is focused on capacity and server response times.

* Browser Based - where you need the complex logic present in SPAs and Javascript to accurately create test traffic. This also allows for as-close-to-possible real user response times. This is essentially "headerless browsers" of varying types. This requires more performance test compute to process - so often a combination of both types are used together.

I find that Testing application security is one of the most technically challenging aspects of performance testing. Often some parts of the security infrastructure have to be disabled to allow testing to occur. For example, Rate Limiting by source IP, any form of Captcha, 3rd party (OpenId etc) services have to be disabled - which increases the risk to application availability because sometimes there are components that haven't been tested exactly the way they will work for actual users.

Luckily most the 3rd party services we use are already significantly tested by their vendors - but it is something that I worry about.