Posts by xeroks 351 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2010
I'll disagree: while the implementation had issues, it's possible some elements were better.
The team should have brought up their changes with 'Antonio' before implementing them. He or someone else likely would have noticed the issues and explained them. The implementation team would have gained a better understanding of the problem being solved.
Of all the stories to say 'doubt it happened' i don't think this one raises an eyebrow.
Unlike most, there is a named, presumably identifiable witness. But more, we live in a timeline where a stoned guy in England was able to hack onto US military servers simply by using the default admin password. The chances of a dev and CAB members not realising the consequence of a network change are pretty high.
When plusnet did this last year i moved my email service to Proton. I've used my own domain for decades, so the move was relatively simple.
Tbh I'd have done this years ago if I'd realised how much better a dedicated service is. Connectivity was always an issue with plusnet, especially using mobile devices. It was fine when using the plusnet connection at home, but sending emails when using mobile internet was always problematic. Also, i found my domain got blacklisted occasionally because the service i used for forwarding emails was also used by miscreants.
With proton, the domain is registered directly to their servers, allowing more secure messaging. Total win win.
Or at least it would have been if plusnet had dropped their prices, at least by a nominal amount.
*This* is a comment from someone who has not faced visual impairment issues. It's not a problem for him, therefore it's not a problem. Compassion for other people? Seeing things from their point of view? Accepting that some groups of people will have had different experiences? Of course not, people with a nuanced opinion of smart glasses are just overemotional and demand change.
For the last decade or so, the streaming services have been funded by VC cash. We're coming to the end of that now, so you will have to pay a subscription and *still* have to watch ads. In future that sub will be bigger. So between that, and all the services the BBC currently provides, I'd say it does pretty well.
I don't see the TV licence being around for long though, it isn't sustainable. I see a hybrid ad/subscription model working for the broadcasting side of things: broadcast tv and radio will have ads, which internet based video and audio will have a paid ad-free option.
I imagine the BBC websites will be funded though. possibly in the same way: a paid ad-free version.
I suspect the funding from these sources will be insufficient to maintain the quality of the current services.
Who knows. Maybe Radio 4 & Newsnight current affairs will go it alone, or merge with GB news.
Yes, the videophone thing... yes it kind of works, but when you have parents in their 80s... less so.
the reality of video call in our household is that I always get my parents in portrait mode, regardless of which way they or I have our devices. I usually only see the top of one of their heads, and even that shakes around, fall over. The sound doesn't work. Usually we spend the initial 10 mins trying to get the call to work, preferably on tablet, but that only works occasionally.
Discovering a suitable application is usually painful: in the early days I tried them with more professional apps like BlueJeans and webex, but everyone has a range of different social situations and each has its own platform. Nobody likes a multiude of apps, which inevitably resulted in another 10 minutes of "how do you log in?".
Webex managed to shoot themselves in the foot at one point by releasing a new, even more complicated version which had a separate app and a different login process and dammit, let's just use Whatsapp.
Had that when I got my first PC. It was huge, to be fair. After I'd set it up, I was showing it to my mate - who's demonstrably cleverer than me - and he said, "so when can you get rid of the big box?"
Mate - that *is* the computer.
Having said that, he's the one who was building computer-based lesson plans. I asked him which software he was using, he answered "Microsoft". Not "Microsoft Powerpoint" or whatever niche application he needed. Just "Microsoft," and refused to accept there could possibly be any further clarification required. I can see that perhaps in his organisation/peer group, calling the software "Microsoft" was sufficient. Or maybe it was called "Microsomethingelse" and he got it wrong.
My understanding is that they went to investigate why a customer's internet access was poor.
While doing so, "Caleb" spotted a setting in the - customer owned - routers which was perhaps incorrect. He tweaked it and it rebooted. Unfortunately the routers had a bug which caused the rest of their configuration to be reset.
Caleb set the router up from scratch, and suddenly the customer internet connection was working properly.
I call this the "Serve with rice" documentation bug.
ie you spend an hour following a recipe, all the constituent parts are cooked and at the correct temperature, then the recipe finishes with "serve with rice," an element that will take 10 minutes to make and hasn't been mentioned in the instructions until now.
My understanding (not verified, I've not even looked at the project 2025 manifesto) is it's going to happen within the next couple of weeks. There will be no mid-terms, or if there are, many thumbs will be on the scales to prevent any significant dem wins.
Would love to be wrong.
to me, the prime outcome of this is likely to be an angry US public: they are - at this point the biggest losers worldwide.
Unfortunately this ties in with what I understand is the one of the goals of Project 2025: invoking Martial law later this month.
I can't describe how sad it is so see this nation be pushed through this metamorphosis to authoritarian regime. There is opposition to it, but no plan. When up against a well funded organisation which has been on a war footing for one-and-a-half, two decades, you need a plan.
We previously used Blue Jeans (with its amusing abbreviation) at work. It was actually pretty good. The audio in particular was (in later iterations) awesome, particularly when wearing stereo headphones. They'd really sorted out cleaning up the sound from all the attendee's mics, and had the tech to place them precisely in audio space. It was really impressive.
The thing that intrigues me about this is that it all appears to be the work of one person (plus a couple of contractors) who managed to grab a big bunch of IP addresses, and is doing his best to monetise them.
I doubt he's actually raking in the $14m-$21m revenues the figures suggest, but, presuming he has few if any employees, he's likely to be nicely well off.
The only advantage I can see for blockchain here is that it makes transactions less modifyable than simple entries in a table.
With table entries, someone with suitable access can edit that record however they wish. With blockchain - as i understand it - you'd have to roll that change right through all subsequent transactions.
The Creative music player was rust based, and predated the ipod.
The UI was clunky though, not a patch on the ipod's wheel (which _was_ a great innovation).
The Creative player was bulkier and awkward. It looked like consumer devices of the time, like portable CD players.
The look of the iPod was its other big innovation - it blew most other consumer products away.
the whole import & export of hardware can be fraught with entirely legal difficulties, never mind illegal ones. I've heard of servers & laptops being confiscated -legally - by governments. And we're not talking third world governments here: I'm sure the US was one of the worst culprits.
I had a dk tronics keyboard too, mostly because i'd hammered the grey one to death. The "real" keyboard was significantly better.
The peripherals not plugging in was a problem easily solved. Anytime I wanted to use my mate's specdrum, I just took the keyboard part of it off. By design (or fluke) the cable was long enough for the keyboard to be plugged in and usable but not actually in its proper place.
One of the nice things about the dktronics one was the power brick could be fitted inside the unit, which was much neater than having it on the floor.
If I want to use outlook or teams with my work account on my phone I must give my employer the authority to wipe my entire phone.
I imagine the same would apply to pcs, laptops. It's a data security measure. If the device were ever to be stolen or lost, someone else could access files or messages on it ( I think it's files they're most concerned about). Mostly it's to minimise the chances of sensitive data getting into the wrong hands. It's simpler applying the same rules to everyone in the organisation and not just people who might have sensitive data sent to them.
Not sure the mechanism: like many on here, I'm not going to give anyone that access thanks.
how much bitcoinSV does he claim ownership of? Is it £16m worth or $4.5b worth? or are these valuations for different things?
And does he claim ownership over any BTC? Or do the coins he claims ownership of predate BTC?
The odd thing is that I'd have expected the inventor of crypto currency to have a working knowledge of the downsides of their design, e.g. keeping your keys and wallet secure is quite important.
