Posts by Craig 2 657 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2009
Say what you want about NASA wasting money but at least they didn't* hire a huge panel of consultants to determine a new, trendy public-friendly name** for the software. Sentry II: Job done.
*Please God, tell me they didn't hire consultants and this was what they came up with...
**Suggestions on a postcard to the usual address...
There's still one OVERWHELMING reason: It's not a Chromium based browser...
Monocultures are bad and while there's definitely been changes to Firefox that I've disliked but had to adapt to, it's still my daily browser. I'm a tab whore and I still think TreeStyleTabs is one of the best implementations of side-bar tabs. It's a no-brainer for today's widescreen displays.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely...
No doubt Google have close to the definition of absolute control of the web most people see. (In the western world anyway) I also don't doubt there are thousands of tweaks in every piece of code that promotes to their own benefit and demotes the competition. We just get to hear about the most egregious ones...
"If you have 90%+ of the market share, you have the standard. No point arguing beyond that."
That's fine as long as you don't intentionally obfuscate it, specifically to stop rivals implementing it. Which Microsoft (allegedly) did, and continue to do with the never-ending "transitional" version.
"The target model is biased towards...depictions of people that appear slim, young, of light or warm skin color and smooth skin texture, and with stereotypically feminine facial traits"
So, like most of the Western world then. No surprise another AI has the same biases as it's creators. (no matter how much they claim otherwise on social media)
Also, how do the odds drop when you take the number of devices, multiplied by the number of photos taken, multiplied by time.. sooner or later those odds are going to start getting to numbers you wouldn't want to bet your life on....
Ahh, but the population's "carbon intensity" is also reducing if you use Amazon's skewed reasoning... We are buying more stuff but getting it delivered more efficiently. Instead of millions of individual journeys to consume, we now have a single entity making the majority of those journeys for us. /s
"There still is such a thing as a network cable. If your computer doesn't have an RJ45 receptacle, it becomes more fun, but with a USB to RJ45 converter, that can be solved as well."
Great, I'll just order one from Amazon... oh wait Ok I'll go and buy one from a local shop... oh wait.
I'm sure the audience of The Register will have no problem going to one of their myriad of machines to get the patch installed. The problem is the old guy at home who turned on his laptop this morning and it blue-screens. He's not going to have any of that laying around and he's not going to be thinking "lets check out the Microsoft patch releases".
It's inexcusable to break stuff in this way, if it happened to any other piece of home tech people just wouldn't put up with it.
As somebody (occasionally) in tech support you get to see both sides of this coin. If I need to speak to somebody, I REALLY need to speak to them to sort the problem out. I've already exhausted all the `autofix` options. Conversely, almost everyone who calls me could have solved the problem with a bit of googling or looking at the help pages or even, God forbid, a bit of elementary knowledge. It's these people that make companies hide their telephone support at the end of a very long and convoluted maze. Otherwise people wouldn't even look at all the self-help ideas, they would just pick up the phone...
Definitely this, if you have your browser relatively locked down, recaptcha will ask every single time for image verification on sites you visit repeatedly. This should indicate that they can't fingerprint you so have to repeatedly verify you're not just a random bot.
Of course, the conspiracy version is that they can still track people running noscript / ublock etc just fine. They're only pretending they can't to make you feel safe....
"The passenger-bus-sized spacecraft will spin with its robotic arm extended, and NASA will measure the moment of inertia to measure the mass inside the sample head on Saturday."
Brilliant: We could put some kind of instrument to measure what we captured, but instead we'll just use the entire spacecraft and physics as an instrument!
Because number plates are 100% reliable and cloned plates aren't a huge problem with criminals....
I'm assuming the start code would work as a one time token the driver tells you before you get in? It could be anything, but something like a famous spy movie quote could add an air of mystery to every journey :)
"I used to enjoy taking photos of other companies' failures," Ben told us, "and sending [them] to my colleagues in the office to make ourselves feel better about our own."
Now there's someone who's honest with themselves! I'm sure we've all felt that little glow as we hear of competitor's tales of woe :)
