Posts by brym 106 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2007
Are they really the actions of the civil service though, or of a small few senior civil servants / project managers who conveniently end up in the same revolving door system localzuk was talking about? Because if I were a betting man, I might be inclined to put my money on the latter.
Why do they keep on giving contracts to someone who has repeatedly demonstrated the most effective ways to sh1t the bed in increasingly creative and spectacular ways every single time? They're not called Crapita for nothing!
You'd think the government would have the common sense to stipulate competence and performance clauses after a single instance of incompetence. Yet this company continues to "win" contract after contract, with (no) control over some of the most important systems impacting the staff expected to use them, and the public who depend on them.
I know it was mentioned here once, but I've read so many articles where people complain about VMWare and the rising costs, blah blah blah - we all know the story - and can't help but to also notice a trending forgetfulness around suggestions being made of other potential solutions, but almost everyone seemingly sleeping on KVM.
KVM and VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) make a potent and capable combination, and are entirely free. Kind of blows my mind that more people either don't appear to know about it or don't appear use it.
My goodness, I thought I dragged my Flash/AS2 work out by making it last upto ~2013. I didn't think anybody would still be maintaining Director projects for this long. Hats off to you, fellow Macromedia project maintainer!
Though perhaps it's time to pull the plug and redevelop them with more modern, more flexible approaches. Such as web applications using Node.js/Bun, or Rust and Rocket. And then host them on Linux and point the kiosks to the respective web pages.
It's bs tactics for ad / PII revenue. Nothing else. I make all my sites not load ads, cookies, etc, unless visitors consent -- by default. It's not difficult. And guess what? Content is still perfectly readable! That's right, cookies are absolutely not needed to display the text or images of the page you want to visit. Fancy that! As for 3rd party JS / CSS, I don't use them. I write my own.
It's not even slightly difficult to do the right and decent thing for visitors. There should be no excusing it. At all.
I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out Google lied about those G+ API misuses. Having seen the writing on the wall for some time - you know, on account of them knowing they were doing wrong but wondering how much longer they could get away with it.
When news broke about Facebook back in March last year, Google probably went into damage control overdrive, eventually resulting in the G+ platform being shuttered.
Just a shame they couldn't be as reactive about their ads platform, which remarkably sees Google's own API's still using document.write, then having Chrome be audacious enough to complain about how it's probably not the most secure thing to be doing. Like it's somehow your fault.
I got online in 98, so a little late to the party lines. But I was a good student of newsgroups (alt's: hacking a phreaking mostly) where alot of the then old hats lingered to offer history and support to newbies like me. Found my way onto hyperterm, and eventually into a few stateside boards. Things like that and messing with war dialling saw my first phone bill come in north of £200. Teen me's thirst for knowledge that month almost gave my mum a heart attack when she saw the bill.
I haven't gone so far as offering alternatives yet. I'm working on it though. Mine's a simple Accept / Decline offer. With all the standard bloat delivered if they consent, and the choice to go off-site to the 3rd party media providers if they decline (embedded YouTube, tweets, etc). For now. And by default, none of the cookies, analytics, ads, etc get loaded in. Because how can you possibly have consented to any of that on a website you may be visiting for the first time?
And don't even get me started on websites telling visitors that cookies are essential for websites to work effectively.
And I don't mind shouldering that responsibility as a maintainer of websites. By doing it myself, at least I know visitors will be given the option to decline ads, tracking and cookies without the threat of dark patterns.
I'd want it that way, so that's what I code for. If it means a drop in ad revenue, or stats from Google Analytics, oh well. There's more than one way to skin a cat. And not at the expense of privacy.
Also, nearly all of the tabloid websites use dark patterns to force at least one persistent method of harvesting. I read somewhere that consent shaming is illegal. Where are their fines?
All day long, this! Even if it means reinventing the wheel, I try wherever possible with my sites to develop it myself and avoid using libraries. I'm not prepared to rush out features or capabilities simply because somebody else has already done it or it's trendy.
It frustrates me because it's ridiculously easy to implement from a coding perspective; Has consent been sought and given? Load the all singing, all dancing page. No consent, just load the content into the page - no ads, no social media sharing callbacks, no cookies... it's as easy as a basic if/else.
And by the way, don't make the default state of a page load as though consent has been given already. That's impossible for first time visitors.
If I can do it for the comparatively small number of clients I host and manage, and I'm a solo operator, I'm sure dedicated teams can do it in a sinch.
It might not be an uncontended line. But VMB are still marketing it as a business grade service. And while it's open for one and all to buy into, meaning not everyone using it may be a genuine business or startup (have a genuine need for greater upload speeds), those of us who sincerely rely upon it are rightly justified in complaining.
It's also worth noting that VMB have known about the underlying issues for the better part of 2 years (since inception), yet continued to sell the Voom Fibre services. What attracts people (certanly myself) to this line of services is the price point. Sure, you get what you pay for. But everyone has to start somewhere, and uncontended fibre simply isn't an immediate option for everyone (out of budget, not fully cabled in your post code yet, etc).
That said, I agree with you that it would be short-sighted to operate in such conditions without adequate fallbacks. I have two such connections to fall back on, so I haven't been as affected as customers who've claimed it's cost them thousands.
...in areas of Southampton. When I asked why the status page still shows everything is fine, she said it's because the account info can't be pulled from the routers, and the status page will only updates in the mornings. I guess their web devs haven't heard of AJAX. Apparently I was the 4th caller she'd had from the same area as of 0650.
I don't know who hosts the XBL version of Black Ops, but it's GameServers for the PC. I regularly experience harsh lag for the first 3-5 minutes on all maps. 50Mb Virgin customer here, too. Also playing Eve, which is a P2P game. The only problems I've had with Eve have been related to their recent patch and subsequent patch fixes.
Though Virgin aren't completely without fault. I'd suffered 9 disconnects in as many days in mid June, and Virgin's response was to send an engineer out to tell me that my area isn't cabled for a digital service. Nice one!
