Posts by Timo 448 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2007
The origin story and the whole tired Northern California and silicon valley narrative is what is new. You know, where a couple of startup nerds try to tell you how to perceive things. And how they co-opt normal words to mean something completely specific to them, like a cringey inside joke that you're not enlightened enough to be in on.
I was expecting it to end a different way. The places that I have worked the PHB would have a bright idea that if one job ran faster as top priority then ALL the jobs should be loaded with high priority.
And it would be back to long job runtimes and handwringing.
Do you have to unlock your phone to show your digital ID?
Because in the US with privacy laws and illegal search and seizure you've basically handed all of your info over. Cops can't make you unlock your phone, against your will, in order for them to find things that might incriminate you. But if you have to unlock it to show your ID they'll take it from there.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a lot of info, here's one:
https://ssd.eff.org/module/how-to-get-to-know-iphone-privacy-and-security-settings
and an excerpt, not exactly in the same subject, but it hints at what could happen if you unlock your phone to show ID:
"In the United States, using a biometric—like your face scan or fingerprint—to unlock your phone may also compromise legal protections for the contents of your phone afforded to you under the Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled incrimination. Under current law—which is still in flux—using a memorized passcode generally provides a stronger legal footing to push back against a court order of compelled device unlocking/decryption. "
Sometimes when trying to explain "the cloud" to my parents they spark to the idea that its just a faceless/unknown server somewhere unknown that someone else runs, and you put your data on it in hopes that you can trust them with it. They can "get" a mental picture of what a server room looks like.
Days like Monday are how you reinforce that idea.
Never mind that all that management "oversight" took perfectly good time away from letting you solve the real problem. There's an opportunity cost to all that. And they hate it when you explain that back to them.
Oh managers love finding the red dots on the dashboard, it lets them feel like they're doing something. Like kids toys.
You don't need real time management interruptions.
Solution to all this is to create a separate management dashboard that is "filtered" or delayed so that you have time to fix things or investigate. It also gives you the chance to appear so proactive in that you've identified the problem before anyone was aware of it
I applied for a job at a company that had the questionnaire, but decided to subject its candidates to a video interview format where the question was presented and then you had to formulate and record a response, with a two hour time limit. Somewhat stressful, and completely impersonal. They had some semi-robotic claim that it would let the team review my answers when it was convenient for them, and so I wouldn't have to answer the same questions multiple times.
The cognitive dissonance with their HR marketing material that claimed "we value all our people" was pretty off-putting. We value people, but not enough to be considerate to the applicants.
On the systems I've worked with it seemed that tripping the panic threshold would cause the ntpd to give up permanently, and the only way to get it right was the run ntpsync before starting ntpd. So this "change the time server and hope all the clients fall in line" would not have worked, would it?
I guess I never had the ability to change the time source as it was synced to an internet pools.
OK been out of the cellular industry for a while now. Back in the day getting support for random blocks of spectrum was expensive and didn't always line up with the "economies of scale" for the network or mobile device manufacturers.
The fact that the selling price is so high seems to indicate that these bands are useful. Is that true? Or is there a bunch of work needed to make these bands interesting to vendors? Even having the new blocks be adjacent to existing bands doesn't automatically make them supported.
If Echostar is already trying to operate networks in these bands then they might be a) useful for an ATT-adjacent business (backhaul, point-to-point), or b) if they're already operating a cellular network in these bands then being able to share them between ATT and EchoStar is a big improvement in efficiency and utilization.
At the last 2-3 places I've been it seems that as soon as I start working and get an email address I'm getting hit with spam emails. I get spam before I have a chance to sign up for anything.
It must be that spammers are harvesting the list of users at microsoft365 or somewhere. How are they getting it, and is that a sanctioned thing (by Microsoft)?
This is really the key distinction. A phone or tablet with a touch interface seems to be for consumption devices. Maybe just because it is hard to "create" on them. OK there are the handful of photoshop type apps for iPads that cross over, but its nearly impossible to edit a spreadsheet or document or write code with a touchscreen.
Recently visited a friend in Oregon and she mentioned how she noticed how the people there made much more use of those "third spaces" that weren't home or work, and for the most part it was nice. The next day however we went to a brewpub and the best table was taken up by a grubby person and his dog. We could not decide if he was a customer that had stayed there a while or if he was homeless.
Every culture will have their own relationship with the unhoused, and so the use of third spaces will be highly interrelated with that.
Jimmy Fallon (US comedian and late-night TV show host) did that to his ring finger.
https://www.nynjcmd.com/jimmy-fallon-suffers-ring-avulsion/
I grew up in a rural state, and we were shown the farm safety videos in high school. Lot of pictures of people that jumped off something and left their ring and finger behind. Also the effects of loose shirts caught in PTO shafts.
That reminds me of a customer site a long time ago. Machine room with lots of server fans and general noise, and the manager's office that overlooked it with a glass window. Nice and quiet inside the office. Right outside said office was a fax machine. While having a conversation in front of the fax machine was pretty common, you had to speak loudly to do it. And that made it very clearly heard inside the office.
I don't remember if I got caught out for saying something disrespectful of the site, or if a friendly customer worker made a point to tell us. I think he did a demo and it was shockingly clear.
Use AI against AI. Seems like there would be a way to put in a honeypot or blackhole or long list of bad/misleading fake AI pages that a robot would readily follow but a human would not see, or would realize that its obviously garbage. Dump a bunch of links off to a 3rd party location that can be continuously updated to keep the AI scrapers confused.
thanks for the explanation, I ALMOST understand it. Just got done with a day or two of that fun when I had to change my password on my machine, from home.
There seems to be a way to get it to sync everything (desktop and apps etc) but our IT dept haven't been able to write it down. There are myriad ways to initiate a password change, from the desktop ctrl-alt-del menu, to going to myapps.microsoft, and with or without VPN engaged, and I SWEAR I got it to work one time so that the login to my computer was updated along with everything else, but I can't seem to reproduce it. It could also be some misconfiguration by our IT people, they seem to be in the low cost arena.
So I'll have a machine (win10) that I have to use the old password to log in, then everything else uses the new password. Until I go into the office and on powerup the machine will get its update and then everything is wobbly for a bit while the machine and everything microsoft and in the cloud somehow thinks that its out of sync (when it should be in sync.)
I have had this sort of thing happen at a live football game. During the pre-game action a brief excerpt of the tone was played with a lot of graphics on the jumbotron to indicate an offensive "storm coming".
It was startling even though it was a clear sunny Saturday in September.
That alert tone is very unique and only gets used when something important is going on.
Someone may have already brought up that the cellular alert system has had its share of problems with mapping alerts to coverage areas.
I worked in a business that made it's margin on selling hardware, which supported the software and services for the customer. At some point customer realized that they had more than enough hardware to satisfy their growth for years or more. And the business flipped to being a software business almost overnight.
The trick is that customer wanted to keep getting features and functionality and system releases, but selling the features one at a time would have meant a very unpredictable revenue stream that would support the software developers. This is where subscriptions come in. If you can find a customer that needs your solution bad enough you could basically sign up for a committed stream of developer man-months. It doesn't guarantee that every release is going to have the same value however. It was in effect a paid retainer to keep developers and support around.
Can these accounts somehow be auto-blocked or flagged? Is there an equivalent to web page ad blocking for Twitter/X?
And then let us know when the researchers publish their findings about Facebook. The signal to noise ratio there seems to be very low, and there seem to be many more angry reporters on that site.
It dates back to the ancient old days of app stores and buying apps, before the apps themselves had a way to charge you directly. You could (maybe still can) buy and pay for apps / "channels" using the credit card that you stored in Roku, likely when you originally set up your account and then forgot about.
Remember when you'd go to the app store and buy an app for $1.99 and that was it? And Apple or Google got their cut? Now you download the app for free and sign into your Netflix or Amazon.
This is all great but now it means each provider is going to have to run new wiring to each apartment?
I see it as improved choice yes, but possibly not lower cost, since each apartment has to make its own contract at retail? Maybe someone with insight can contribute to their current bulk situation.
This seems like a side project to find another market for those devices.
Has Amazon published sales figures for the FireTV platform? Reviews are mixed, many noting the cost of the device and the amount of ads. Doesn't seem like it fills a need, there are other devices from Amazon itself, or Roku, that are cheaper. Or for that kind of money you could get an Apple TV device.
I think the first counter-point to your point is that they'd pay the lease whether employees are in the office or not, so its a false economy to have people come in to the office.
Second counter-point: the company is actually saving money over the lifetime of the lease. One of the other posts here calculates the lump-sum vs. the total lease payments. They just elected to buy it out in one lump sum.
Article mentioned also-ran status, but your post captures why it made it unloved. A previous employer used it and the majority of the time the video feed would fail to work or would be irritatingly blocky, even if only between two people. The hassle factor was very high, the conference room features and functionality were aggravating at best.
I think that employer probably got some early adopter silicon valley deal where Blue Jeans was buying customers with VC money. The platform never seemed to improve. Didn't take long to dump them for zoom.
In my experience computer cases come with tons of sharp edges. Will these flatpack cases be any different?
Some of the pieces in the picture look like large cheese graters. Will they come with a pair of chain mail gloves for you to wear during assembly/disassembly?
Have a Honda product with this feature and I'm trying to figure out how to disable it. Anytime we're following a car in front making a right turn the car will jam on the brakes. It's so predictable and so undesired.
I can't wait for every car to have this capability.
Hopefully the UK will benefit from years of learning in the US. Everyone comes up with a rainbow of new alerts, almost all of them with good intentions but just fail for all the obvious reasons.
For the first couple years we got "Amber Alert" (missing child) or "silver alert" (missing old person) to look for a vehicle that was last seen hundreds of miles away. And lots of alerts for dumb minor stuff or local alerts but misdirected to an enormous alert area. There's a whole mapping of cell site to broadcast area that has to be sorted out.
And then it seems that the people directing the service realized that the more trivial alerts that are sent increased the chance of people learning to ignore them altogether, so they must have reined in the well intentioned idiots that thought they had something important to notify people about (always in the middle of the night.)
Back when cell phones only made voice calls my mobile phone number must have been fat fingered into a fax distribution list somewhere, and I would periodically get those calls with the beep. It was infuriating.
At some point I realized it wasn't going to stop retrying until it had gone through successfully. I hurriedly forwarded the call to the office fax machine and managed to catch it after a few attempts. I believe it was a travel agent or some other spam fax. An angry phone call later to the contact info on the fax and it was more or less sorted out.
It felt like the Star Trek movie where they got vger to finally transmit it's info and stop destroying the universe.
Same for Pullman, now a neighborhood in Chicago. Pullman built housing for his workers, and some reports are that he was then able to dictate their behavior and actions, and charge them exorbitant rents, so that most of the wages came back to him.
Historical riots and spurred creation of many workers rights rules.
Similar experience here. Company says flexible and hybrid, but then drops the hammer with mandatory three days in the office, in the city center. We all know that HR is having problems filing positions with that sort of "flexibility", I've heard one position has had three candidates turn down their offers.
Company has been working on this since the spring. Many times people are in the office but connected to common meetings over zoom which is jarring. Meeting rooms are slowly coming back into use.
Evernote is meant to be a cloud notebook, so that you could work on it from a mobile device to load notes and pictures and drawings, and then later could access from a tablet or desktop/laptop. One person I know took pictures of expense receipts with phone as they were collected, dropped them into a note, and then the receipts were all ready to load into the expense platform when convenient at desktop/office.
Evernote picked a really bad time to try to charge for the platform, as Microsoft OneNote and Google Keep were knocked together pretty quickly and worked just fine, for the low low price of free.
You can share notebooks from those, but its not usually the primary use case that you'd think of when you use it. My kids use it share their Christmas lists with the rest of the family.
I have the same issue. Brother printer, that is on my home network and old enough that it doesn't support mobile device printing. Simple enough, I thought, just get a Rpi and run CUPS. Only to figure out that the driver only exists for x86 and not ARM.
It would seem that Apple put themselves in this situation a long time ago when they created the lightning connector but decided not to license it out to the industry (or too make it too expensive to consider).
Imagine if they had licensed it at some sensible rate, that form factor might have become the standard and not USB-C.
I have two recent examples
Coffee machine at our house has three buttons, each with some cartoon on them that may have meant something to the product designers but not to anyone else. The middle button is the one that starts the brewing. The other two don't. It took many times for my parents to remember which one to hit. I've seen similar machines with a label maker arrow to the button that makes the coffee come out, likely with a "push this one" note.
And my kid #2 just learned to drive. Started out on a recent car with the keyless fob and they did great. Get back into my old car (2001) to learn manual transmission and I handed her the key. We sat there for a while while she figured out what to do with it. That made me feel pretty old.
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