Posts by Ben 56 60 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2009
BT's own page stated the PSTN was being turned off I. 2025... https://business.bt.com/why-choose-bt/insights/ip-technology/big-ptsn-switch-off-2025/#:~:text=difficult%20to%20maintain.-,By%20the%20end%20of%202025%20PSTN%20will%20be%20switched%20off,via%20broadband%20or%20mobile%20data.
BT who own the network, wants to turn off all copper phone lines (PSTN) by 2025. ISPs that use the lines will instead be providing VoIP only calls over fibre.
Advocacy groups are calling it a shambles because of outages like this, where people are unable to call emergency services nor able to get a mobile signal as a backup, because of another shambles that is our mobile networks.
Deaths caused by outages in 2025 should be corporate manslaughter, do you think ISPs will be held to account for BT's decision and Ofcom waving it through?
I went to renew a subscription for my copy of Webstorm a fortnight ago, looked for any discount codes or promotions in the forum, came across those massive threads about privacy leak, accidentally consenting (like just clicking update on the IDE) and so forth.
I'm specifically not renewing until the baked AI is removed, not disabled, by default, including the shitty annoying trial dialogs that pop up in the code (would you believe that bug was a thing and not intentional)?!
Almost sounds like that shitty Microsoft Edge bug that sucks all the tabs from Chrome even when you tell it not to? https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/30/microsoft_edge_tabs/
Anybody seeing a pattern here on what companies are doing?
They put legally dubious code out for a few months and call it a bug which is then fixed a few months later after a marketing push usually, because of the risk of legal issues. The most famous of these is the Microsoft Windows 7/8 forced upgrades.
Of course none of this can be proven but it does look very convenient and a benefit of having "bugs"
No surprise Zoom is now failing.
If they're not eating their own dogfood, and maintaining buildings they don't really need, then there's something seriously wrong with that remote conferencing company.
Why should a customer buy Zoom's software if they themselves don't practice what they preach and invest 100% into the remote way?
If it's management-employee trust issues, then there's a gap in the remote market right there, that Zoom aren't covering in their own area of expertise, which again suggests poor management.
As they are proud of always hiring the best, the best can easily walk.
I suspect they will have a massive uphill struggle that will result in the $99 being waived and a pay increase for many behind the scenes in hush hush pay deals.
If it was me, I'd refuse point blank because this is dictat caused by the same thinking that made bricks and mortar stores close by not adapting to online quick enough.
Who'd want to work for a has-been company like that now, if you can just as easily walk into a better higher paid remote job?
Will the SMS pay this money to the companies forced out?
Perhaps they'll use them for grants for startups in the same field as the giants?
Sorry, I think I misheard, did you say SMS actually has no designated use, and adding this tax will only cause quid pro quo trade wars, of which no public body is a winner?
Perhaps they are hoping the giants will remove themselves from the competition, thereby improving competition, by taking their bases and rehousing then in countries that have lower taxes, but still provide some of the services they do.
Let's label this correctly, it's a cash grab because the government has been watching the money with glee and has undermined every possible domestic competitor by anti tech policies, such as allowing ARM to be sold off, or lack of investment in the industry. So protectionism now is the only way to "fix" the problem.
What if I install Linux and accidentally nuke my Windows partition and all the data - should I sue the devs?
The creator of the tool is not responsible for the usage.
The car Vs distribution example is a poor analogy since when you distribute software you are not driving, you are selling (or rather giving) the car.
Any reasonable person would sandbox, have antivirus, and backups just like a driver should have a licence and insurance to guard against negligence and accidents.
GPL is copyleft, that is, if you integrate software source licenced under it, you have to provide your own software's source that linked to it.
Most but not all Linux uses this licence, not all free software uses this licence (I would say most does not). The bits they have used however do.
Just using GPL software, or bundling unmodified binaries alongside your own software, but crucially not linking to it at a source code level, has no restrictions, you do *not* have to provide access to the source for your own software in this case.
Code that takes a personal MP3 collection and builds a model.
The devil is in detail, can't have singing (you've seen stable diffusion fingers right?), analysis of waveforms will need normalising to a standard sampling frequency etc etc.
Concept easy enough though.
Kids have learnt not to question.
I was pre camera phone too, but I questioned my university lecturers/professors of many years experience and book writing when I knew they had stuff wrong (e.g. waterfall modelling problematic compared to the upcoming agile, programming mistakes, and missing use of UML diagrams in designs). Ultimately I ended up with lower marks for the pain of it.
I learnt only after my degree not to question their ego, because that's what it was doing, shame I didn't learn earlier like these kids I might have had better grades (my career went on to be Lead Dev for some massive companies and I'm now on executive level pay doing dev work, so clearly I did something right by no longer questioning).
The short is; don't question, ignore their mistakes and do it your way anyway. They learn from seeing your doing.
So in the 2 trials I had access to I attempted to get an illustration of "Boris Johnson waving a British flag leaning out of a Delorean Time Machine" for a post I wanted to write regarding him leaving office.
Not a single one was a Delorean, just a great box, flags were often in the background, and the cartoon likeness of Boris was usually melded with an abstract grey car body.
The nature of Midjourney running on Discord means they have user limits, meaning they're going to start removing accounts, plus they have no other payment options yet.
I'm holding hope that DallE will be better with regards to image generation, but their t&c won't allow me to specify Boris Johnson, so I'd have to add "male blonde prime minister" or something to get an abstraction for my post - which I never ended up writing but at least it became a good benchmark into the tech.
I was tasked as a junior dev going to one of these "Linux is evil" shows Microsoft did, showing TCO was indeed greater with Linux, especially staff training and pre existing integration (no surprise incumbent needs less work there then). It also mentioned patent breach exposure as a risk (and MS was threatening people, SUSE paid MS for patent protection).
However during one of the Q&A sessions I blurted out "why does the TCO not contain the an estimate for the amount of time needed to patch or fix CVEs?" of which Microsoft at that time had recently had a very large ring 0 worm shortly after the sessions started. I also asked if the cost of repairing said breaches was in there too. Petulant maybe as a junior dev, but I hated people being misled by lies, damn lies and statistics.
Unsurprisingly, the questions were glossed over and the answer not given, just re-iterating what was in the TCO summary of training costs etc.
I've never looked at MS the same again, and proof they still haven't changed is evident by them never letting go of their clasp of the old crown jewels.
IMHO you have as much chance of getting the NTFS driver as getting Windows >9x open sourced.
Having said that I own an XBox...
when you said:
"First, Linux is far more secure than Windows"
without evidence.
IMHO It's only more secure because it's user base is smaller so it's targeted less, fewer Muppets to download virus laden executables, and because intrusions can go noticed due to lack of standard antivirus.
Just look at the number of Android and embedded Linux exploits - systems that don't get updated, to see which systems are ultimately more secure.
No patch Tuesday for those.
Disclaimer: Regular Windows/Linux/MacOs user here - cut my teeth on Sun Solaris.
"As far as we are aware, it has never suffered a system-wide failure"
That's bull. It happened 2 months ago for about 8 to 12 hours across the UK and parts of the US caused by a larger AWS authentication outage that hit other services.
I made the Reg aware via submit news and I know other people did in comments on an unrelated/promo Amazon/Ring news item during the day
Lol at that one.
How can anyone take the claims seriously with allegations like that?
Espionage in the US used to be stealing F35 blueprints from servers, or copying designs for space shuttles. Now it's taking photos of robot arms like it's technology that hasn't been around for the last 60 years, and most of it made in China for the last 40.
Actually I had an idea and posted this on the earlier article:
Officially it's been stated the clock was 11 hours out, this discounts the UTC - EST difference theory but not yours.
Perhaps it went like this:
After take off, the clock would have counted 36 minutes, i.e. 00:36 if written as a timer, but this was actually assumed to be "12:36" when written as an AM/PM clock or date time type that held timezone (which was subsequently ignored or somebody stupidly used a toString parser) as the value was taken from an onboard RTC, an API to retrieve the value used this value type (as opposed to the engineer using the epoch milliseconds calculation).
The onboard clock correction/precision/sync software was likely expecting 00:36 minutes but told when attempting to be sync'd with "hey my booster clock says it's been a little over 12 hours from launch, not 36 minutes", i.e. exact time correction cannot be applied as the difference is too great and the validity range was meant to be within 1 hour, or within the first hour of takeoff, thus any value 11 hours previous to the one given would have worked.
The 1 hour validity range is (IIRC) exactly how Microsoft's Windows NTP updates used to work, e.g. when correcting time from a default dead CMOS battery value it would fail due to significant difference.
Officially it's been stated the clock was 11 hours out, this discounts the UTC - EST difference theory but not yours.
Perhaps it went like this:
After take off, the clock would have counted 36 minutes, i.e. 00:36 if written as a timer, but this was actually assumed to be "12:36" when written as an AM/PM clock or date time type that held timezone (which was subsequently ignored or somebody stupidly used a toString parser) as the value was taken from an onboard RTC, an API to retrieve the value used this value type (as opposed to the engineer using the epoch milliseconds calculation).
The onboard clock correction/precision/sync software was likely expecting 00:36 minutes but told when attempting to be sync'd with "hey my booster clock says it's been a little over 12 hours from launch, not 36 minutes", i.e. exact time correction cannot be applied as the difference is too great and the validity range was meant to be within 1 hour, or within the first hour of takeoff, thus any value 11 hours previous to the one given would have worked.
The 1 hour validity range is (IIRC) exactly how Microsoft's Windows NTP updates used to work when correcting time from a manual/default dead CMOS battery value.
I told him to make sure he made the DST adjustment, but the berk just left it to go home early that evening, now 24 hours have passed we'll have to wait until end of Summertime next year.
With the bureaucratic decision to remove DST in the EU altogether from March the whole project is royally f'ed and all the satellites will not be allowed to resync at all.
We all hate Phil and his croissant stuffing face, he had one job in the time sync department, but all he does is bloody clock watch.
Everyone except Microsoft knows the four reasons why Slack is better than Teams:
1) Slack's Giphy integration.
2) Slack's lightning startup speed.
3) Teams' lack of Giphy integration.
4) Their names. "Slack" hints at a respite from work, but "Teams" has work and managerial interference written all over it.
WHSmith did this for many years in the late 80s early 90s - the system was called EDOS and you chose from a (regularly published in-store) catalogue the game you wanted, on Amiga, Atari, C64 Spectrum, disks or tapes it didn't matter. There was a big duplicator machine in the back that would have all of these games on a CD it used to burn from. Obviously it never took off and the material looks a lot like pirate blanks (albeit with an official box). Obviously there would be even less differentiation these days!
Here's the best article I could find on EDOS, sadly there isn't too much info on the (once reasonably popular) system.
http://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?t=815&p=7319
"but because of a decade's worth of people who still haven't figured out how to use it as designed"
Perhaps if they'd stayed on at university to actually complete the course "to figure it out" they'd use it as designed? Now I've got to put up with "have a go coders" thinking they know Java and botching the job because they couldn't be bothered to learn enough.
Is one virus on any of the machines reading that email and instantly all of those addresses will be spammed and harvested.
I speak from experience of course when I was wished happy Christmas by some muppet I barely knew one year who addressed a seasons greetings email to some 100+ people on his address book years ago.
Here's what the now offline site says:
"
HM Government
Sorry, e-petitions is temporarily unavailable.
The e-petitions site is having problems at the moment. We need to temporarily suspend the creation and signing of e-petitions to allow us to make sure everything is working properly for you.
We aim to re-open the e-petitions site by Friday morning (12th August).
We're very sorry for the inconvenience this causes you.
The e-petition entitled “Convicted London rioters should loose all benefits” has now passed the threshold of 100,000 signatures and has been passed to the Backbench Business Committee to consider for debate. It will continue to be available for signature once the site is re-opened.
"
uninstall Microsoft .Net - just like Java, except its updates are forced with Windows updates so you don't see them, didn't you know that? Perhaps you should also suggest Adobe products or even Windows itself
Stop scare mongering. Chances are if people have it installed already it's because an app on their system needs it.
Buy company, get rid of highly skilled staff by annoying them (cheaper than redundancy payments), set attack lawyers on those companies allegedly infinging the newly purchased IP. This will help claw back costs of buying said company whilst putting competitors at a disadvantage even if that is just FUD over the IP.
Fact of the matter is that whilst Android is fragmented due to platform, Sun did that by design with Personal Java, sorry J2ME, no wait.. sorry JavaME (or should I refer to it by technical standards CDC, CLDC, personal profile...), and Android at least for me appears to be the better and open of the two "standards" if you can call it that. No wonder Oracle wants to squash Google's platform. I still hate JavaME's signing certificate malarky preventing hobby developers getting their stuff out there.
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