Posts by phil8192

Microsoft makes it harder to avoid OneDrive during new Windows 11 installs

Re: We insist you copy all your files to Microsoft Corporation

That's why I have been gradually abandoning my Gmail accounts and migrating to another service that is unaffiliated with Google, Microsoft, etc.

I'm running a Windows 11 machine set up with a local account that (so far) does NOT have OneDrive activated for that account. The main Administrator account has a Microsoft log-in, but it is only used for software maintenance and no work requiring file storage and retrieval is ever done with it.

Re: Im oddly nostalgic

The failure of CrowdStrike on 19 July 2024 may make a number of those companies and government agencies rethink their dependence on cloud computing.

Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting Oracle users who don't think they use Oracle

Re: I haven't had Java

Under the Uniform Commercial Code, any debt that hasn't been collected within seven (7) years becomes noncollectable. If Oracle were to try to collect on Java installations prior to 2017, I'd tell them to go soak their head in a lake.

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

Firing a shotgun loaded with bird shot or similar size pellets into the air is pretty harmless. The shot pellets are unlikely to cause injury, even falling directly onto a person's uncovered head, and certainly don't have enough kinetic energy remaining to cause property damage.

I'm assuming Mr. Merideth's shotgun was loaded with bird shot, but the article doesn't reveal this detail.

Atta boy, Mr. Merideth.

Whenever the local phone company, cable television company or electric utility need to go into my back yard to access the utility pole, they ring my doorbell and ask permission first. If the drone operators had a legitimate reason for flying over William Merideth's house, such as taking aerial photos for a real estate listing, they could have politely knocked on his door and that of other residents in the neighborhood in advance, identified themselves, presented credentials, and let them know what they were doing. If they had done that, they'd still have their $1800 toy.

GOOGLE GMAIL ATE MY LINUX: Gobbled email enrages Torvalds

Monkey-wrenching Gmail

Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't provide an explicit way to disable their spam filter, something simple, like checking a box in the configuration menu that reads "disable spam filtering". However, there's a non-obvious way to throw a monkey wrench into the works to effectively disable it so ALL messages stay in the inbox or are forwarded to a destination of one's choice. This is particularly important for POP3 users, as the Junk folder on Gmail's server is inaccessible with POP. It is also important if you're using multiple Gmail accounts and want copies of messages to the various accounts to funnel into a main account that you monitor regularly.

The way to do it is set up a filter that says something like, if the message DOESN"T HAVE the string "AbeCeiw32#%x139tt3", NEVER send it to Spam. By picking a long, random string of characters for the test, the probability of ever getting a message that contains that string is essentially zero, so all messages go to the inbox.

Re: DIY

"He can write his own OS, his own version control system (Git), why can't he write his own spam filter? Or at least bother to setup his own LINUX server with a nice FOSS mail server and spam filter."

Linus Torvalds openly admits that his strength is coding the Linux kernel, and he has little time, interest or skill for other aspects of computing, such as the GNOME or KDE shells.

Pure's mass disk drive killer lays out plans for flash hegemony

The demise of rotating memory has been predicted since the 1980s, but still hasn't happened. It may happen yet, but it won't be by anything based on flash memory.

GM's cheaper-than-Tesla 'leccy car tested at batt-powered data centre

Re: Don't believe it

Those 4 million square miles aren't all pavement. There are huge areas of the United States west of the Mississippi River where the roads and population are relatively sparse, so the density of recharging stations in those areas could be lower. However, with much higher demand for charging stations in urban areas, a figure of 1,500 stations for the entire United States is ridiculously low, unless you want to get an appointment and wait in line four or five days in Los Angeles to charge your vehicle.

Re: Don't believe it

Hydrogen power has been "the coming thing" since the mid-1980s since Roger Billings demonstrated a real, working hydrogen-powered car and the "hydrogen homestead", which would have allowed people to make their own hydrogen fuel to power their vehicles and provide lighting, heating and hot water for their homes, completely independent of the grid. Thirty years later it still hasn't arrived and there's no hydrogen distribution infrastructure. In North America, where there is an abundant supply of natural gas and an existing pipeline network to distribute it, cars and trucks running on compressed natural gas (CNG) are far more likely to catch on.

Re: What a horrible paint job

A range of 80 miles would be less than a round-trip to and from the office for many people in places like Texas and the southwestern United States. Unless equipped with an internal combustion engine range extender, it would be a non-starter for many potential customers, just like its predecessor, the Chevrolet Volt. The word on the street is that General Motors subsidised the sale of every Volt they shipped; it was a huge money-loser.

Shields up! Shields up! ASTRONAUTS flying to MARS will arrive BRAIN DAMAGED, boffins claim

Re: Not really equivalent

The Apollo astronauts may have gotten some shielding from deep-space radiation by having the Moon under their feet, but since all the missions happened during daylight periods, they were exposed to particle streams from the Sun, with essentially zero protection against x-rays and gamma-rays afforded by their space suits and the tinfoil-like structure of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). The most energetic cosmic rays emanate from cataclysmic events and distant objects quite unlike the Sun, though, so, except during times of solar flares, their exposure would have been fairly benign.

Uh oh, it's Mobilegeddon! Your site may lose, well, pennies

Don't flatter yourself. The increased visits from mobile devices may simply mean that more individuals own mobile devices, not that your redesign was driving adoption of mobile devices or visitors setting aside their desktop computers and reaching for their mobile device just so they could visit your "mobile-friendly" site.

US Attorney Gen latest to roast Apple, Google mobe encryption

Re: Actually he's correct

A 10-digit passcode may not be impossible to crack, but it could slow the process down to the point that once it is cracked, the statute of limitations might have run out, making whatever evidence is gleaned from the device of no use to law enforcement.

Ex-squeeze me? Baking soda? Boffins claim it safely sucks CO₂ out of the air

Carrying coal to Newcastle

Why does the expression, "carrying coal to Newcastle" come to mind when I read articles such as this?

Watch it: It's watching you as you watch it (Your Samsung TV is)

Meh, I stopped watching television in 2007. My old cathode ray tube receiver was a nice one in its day, but it has mostly been collecting dust, except for popping in a DVD once every 18 months, or so. I get my video news by watching YouTube clips on the Web, and my desktop computer has neither a camera, nor a microphone attached to it, except when I explicitly plug them in for use with Skype. Sure, I did it, but how many people can tear themselves away from the video pacifier?

Re: "...some voice commands may be transmitted..."

Why Samsung televisions should transmit the speech anywhere for conversion to text? Their Galaxy series of smartphones and tablets do the job internally. You can dictate a note and it will appear as a jerky stream of text on-screen, even if no network connection is present.

Google unveils Windows 8.1 zero-day vuln – complete with exploit code

Par for the course. Some of you may remember the Web site and accompanying book, "Windows 95 Annoyances", and later, "Windows 98 Annoyances". The author of the sites and the books, David Karp, was a member of a select group of people who got to use Windows 95 a year before it was released to the public, with the objective of reporting back to Microsoft on problems he found. He reported several dozen problems, yet when Windows 95 was released NOT A SINGLE ONE of the problems had been corrected and some Windows 95 problems persisted in Windows 98, and beyond. That's just the way Microsoft is; it is endemic to the company culture. Either accept it or jump ship like I did. Other operating systems have their problems, too, but you might as well try to pick one that has shorter response time from the maintainers when bugs are discovered.

Apple's 16GB iPhones are a big fat lie, claims iOS 8 storage hog lawsuit

Re: The storage is there, as advertised.

Most likely, the people pushing this lawsuit, including their lawyers, are too young to remember floppy disks, let alone personal computers where "mass storage" consisted entirely of floppy disks, with no hard drive at all. (Apple II, anyone?) They also don't remember hard-wired telephones, 8-track tapes, reel-to-reel tape recorders, nor would they know what to do with a vinyl record and a phonograph.

Since a few of us actually remember using these things and may even be old enough to remember when they were "cutting-edge", we find the premise of the lawsuit patently ridiculous. Let's hope the judge is old enough, too, and simply dismisses the case before it ever gets to trial. Some lawsuits are good and bring product safety improvements to the market, but this kind of lawsuit will do nothing but increase expenses for the manufacturer, which will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices than Apple's already ridiculously high prices.

Re: CRT screen sizes and viewing area

That's the art of sales — sell 'em the sizzle, not the steak.

HALF A BILLION TERRORISTS: WhatsApp encrypts ALL its worldwide jabber

Hahaha!

To think anything to do with Facebook is "secure" is to be naïve in the extreme.

Antares apocalypse: Orbital points finger at turbopump FAIL

Re: Ha! Called it!

Watching the video of the launch last week, it appeared to me the spacecraft was doomed almost from the moment the rocket engine started up. There was an abnormal-looking flash in the exhaust whlie the rocket was still on the pad. I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint the turbopump as the cause, though.

Facebook 'manipulated' 700k users' feelings in secret experiment

Garbage In, Garbage Out

What more proof do we need that Facebook is garbage — as are the sites that use it as their commenting platform? It lives down to the lowest ideals of its founder.

Google TOO WHITE and MALE, says HR boss, looking in mirror

Stop Worrying!

The day a company starts worrying about hiring to meet ethnic and gender goals is the day it goes into decline. The best teams and companies where I've ever worked hired engineers and other staff strictly on ability to deliver the goods, with no regard to skin color or sex. The best thing technology companies like Google can do to assure their continued success is get rid of people like Laszlo Bock.

GRAV WAVE TSUNAMI boffinry BONANZA – the aftershock of the universe's Big Bang

Re: Congratulations to the team ...

I didn't mention any names ...

Congratulations to the team ...

... but nowadays one is more likely to get a Nobel Prize just for looking good on television and being able to read a ghost-written speech from a teleprompter, without actually having achieved anything.

Facebook: We want a solar sky cruiser comms net that DARPA couldn't build

Not likely to meet goals

While 65,000 feet isn't outer space, it's still a harsh environment for man or machine. At the standard lapse rate the air temperature is around -170C, too cold for batteries to work well or reliably. The likelihood of a drone and its electronics operating there unattended for months or years looks pretty slim for anyone with an engineering background. Whatever. What's it to me if Zuckerberg throws away his firm's money?

Lightning strikes USB bosses: Next-gen jacks will be REVERSIBLE

USB isn't "universal" after all

When USB was introduced, it was supposed to eliminate the plethora of different interface connectors on PCs, but the growing plethora of USB variants, some of them now incompatible with USB 1.0 and USB 2.0, is taking us back to the "bad old days".

SILENCE of the OWLS may mean real-life 'Whisper Mode' for Black Helicopters

Re: The biggest problem with flying cars

At least, the general public shouldn't be allowed access to flying cars until autopilot technology advances to the point that flights can be made point-to-point without the occupant of the car ever touching a control, except for a power button to switch the system on before takeoff and switch it off after landing.

Another DEVASTATING Chelyabinsk METEOR STRIKE: '7x as likely' as thought

Re: Instant climate change

We already have something. It's called "rain", it's automatic, and it doesn't cost the taxpayers anything at all!!

Re: More money, please

You beat me to it. Gotta keep that grant money flowing, one way or another!

Dino-boffins discover 100-million-year-old BIRD TRACKS in Australia

Re: Bah!

Right, Don Jefe. The chick looked just like the Stork!!

Re: 100 million years ago!

Not the theists. Just the literalists and those who believe Usher's silly chronology, which he concocted on the flimsiest of evidence and some very big incorrect assumptions. Theists have no problem with the Earth being billions of years old.

Clan of the Cave Bear ...

... is speculative fiction.

FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS: Microsoft faces prising XP from Big Biz

Re: Or

You automobile restyling analogy cracked me up.

Re: Stop bashing Vista

I had Vista on a Compaq Presario laptop, a warranty replacement for its immediate predecessor that came with Windows XP. I was forced to take it, although I asked HP to ship it with XP. It was absolutely horrible: It ran slow and HOT; the CPU fan ran at top speed almost constantly, so I "downgraded" the machine to XP and it's been fine. There are good reasons to bash Vista.

Why is Microsoft so determined to get people to stop using Windows XP? As Microsoft operating systems go, it's not all that bad. Heck, I'm still using Windows 98SE on a couple of machines, as well as MS-DOS 6, and I still frequently run DOS programs in the DOSBox emulator on Linux!!

Boffins find evidence Atlantic Ocean has started closing

Not so fast ...

I'm not exactly worried enough to sit down and fasten my seat belt.

Climate change set to bumpify transatlantic flights, say researchers

Re: Oceans absorb heat

Bureaucrats and "scientists" working off government grants absorb money. They'll say and do anything to get more money, and that's a demonstrable fact.

Excuse me, I need to paper the shelves in my kitchen cabinets.

More drivel from the alarmists. Most weather forecasts are 50/50 beyond three days and pretty worthless beyond that, other than to tell me "rain is on the way", something I can do for myself by stepping outside and glancing at the sky. If we can't even predict the weather for more than a few days with reasonable accuracy, why should we believe anything that these charlatans pretending to be "scientists" have to say?

It begins: Six-strikes copyright smackdown starts in US

Re: Deflating cash cow

The RIAA didn't have a clever strategy even before the world economy tanked in 2007:

"We keep suing the b*st*rds and they STILL refuse to buy our products!"

Forget fluorescents, plastic lighting strips coming out next year

Re: "The government would have banned Thomas Edison's light bulb"

No, Mr. Romney is correct. Swan's invention was and remained a laboratory curiosity. Edison's team invented the incandescent light independently, greatly improved on Swan's version, and made it mass-producible and affordable for the public. Moreover, Edison provided a complete system of electric power generation and distribution to power his new lights, which other light inventors did not.

Re: Grow Up

I dispute ALL of it. Read "Merchants of Despair" by Robert Zubrin (New Atlantis Books, 2012) and you'll understand.

Re: Michele Bachmann felt so outraged ... that she introduced the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act

Michele Bachmann isn't the problem. It's Bolshevik kooks like you who keep electing and re-electing Marxist-socialist apparatchiks to office that's the problem.

Incandescents aren't gone

Check out newcandescent.com. All the incandescents you want, now, in your old favourite wattages, for U.S. residents. Buy domestic; don't send your money to China.

Re: Rand Paul

You used the wrong icon when you posted. It should have been the "Troll" — as in "Bolshevik troll".

Re: More "efficient" but...

There's another "out" in the United States. It turns out the ban on 100W incandescent bulbs didn't include specialty bulbs, such as "rough service lamps". Larry Birnbaum, an American entrepreneur, bought up manufacturing equipment as GE and Sylvania were getting out of the incandescent business and is now shipping honest-to-goodness 100W incandescent bulbs for people who want them or need them. Rough service lamps differ from standard lamps in that they have a couple of extra filament supports, making them very slightly more expensive to manufacture. See newcandescent.com.

As an aside, Larry Birnbaum's surname is apropos: "Lichtbirne", literally "light pear", is the German word for "light bulb". Birnbaum means "pear tree". This "pear" tree is bearing a rich crop of light bulbs.

Re: Why one data point is not evidence.

Neither is the so-called "Centennial Light". One can achieve a similar effect with any contemporary incandescent light by running it at a small fraction of its rated voltage so that the filament barely glows.

Re: Grow Up

"... we cannot simply keep wasting irreplaceable fossil fuels on producing unwanted heat just for the sake of a bit of wanted light."

There are alternatives, such as clean, safe nuclear energy from thorium liquid salt reactors , but the environmentalist Luddites don't want that, either. It's been estimated that there's enough thorium in the Earth's crust to meet the needs of mankind for the next 10,000 years.

Sometimes the heat from an incandescent light is wanted, such as providing light AND heat to plants on a frosty night to keep them from freezing or keeping a pump house warm so that one's well doesn't freeze on a cold night. Try doing that with your fluorescent, electroluminescent or LED lamp.

"When ... electricity is rationed ..."

The idea of rationing is part-and-parcel of socialist governments that stifle innovation. Move away from socialism and embrace capitalism and free enterprise if you want abundance.