Posts by ColonelClaw 431 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2010
It's been a long time since I last looked into which Ad blocker is the best. Many years ago I installed UBlock Origin on my Firefox, and I've been using it ever since. Is it still any good? Is there a better alternative that people here can recommend?
I'd also be interested to know if there are any decent Ad Blockers for iOS and iPadOS. Didn't Apple do something to reduce their effectiveness a while back?
Putting aside politics, what do people here think are the chances that Chinese-made CCTV cameras have a built-in government-mandated backdoor? I'm asking from a purely technical point of view.
Personally I think it's obviously possible, but I suspect keeping it from being discovered would be extremely hard. Given enough time, I feel it would be found, sooner or later. And then there's the human point of view i.e. you have to keep everyone involved sworn to silence for the rest of their lives. It's a tough ask.
As for exploiting the security of the absolutly shite software they tend to ship with (I have plenty of painful experience as an end-user here), I would say that would be by far the easiest attack vector for any government to exploit. So why bother with a backdoor at all? If it was discovered the ramifications would be enourmous.
At the height of the Covid lockdown I purchased one of their web cams for 90 quid. It was the only one available pretty much anywhere. You can now buy the exact same model for 30 quid, along with about a million other different web cams. You'll forgive me if I don't shed a tear for their current predicament.
Having travelled, and even lived, in Western, Eastern, Central and Southern Africa, if I'm being honest, I'm not sure that Kenya would be top of my list of places to live on this incredible continent. Mind-you I'm probably slightly prejudiced, having been robbed on two occasions within the space of three weeks there!
On second thoughts, this is Meg Whitman we're talking about...
So, if Win11 doesn't support PCs older than 2015 (or whatever the year is, I have no idea), then does that mean that MS has taken the opportunity to strip out all of the old legacy code and drivers, thus slimming the OS down to a lean and mean athlete? That would be an actual positive!
I'm not holding my breath...
Ah, the memories. The ZX-81 was also my first encounter with a computer, my grandfather bought one soon after they first came out. He was a former codebreaker for the Admiralty during WW2, and university professor at Manchester where they had a machine he described as being as large as a room. I still feel particularly sad that he never got to see how modern computing turned out, as he died in 1987.
The one thing that sticks in my mind with the ZX-81 was typing in and running the code for something called "Life", which generated some really interesting (blocky) patterns that evolved over time. It left a huge impression on me, and helped make me into the geek I am today!
I don't know if it's important, but as well as all the points mentioned here already, I notice that Mars is much larger than the Moon, and must therefore have considerably more gravity. Add to that the 899kg weight of the rover itself (nuclear-powered craft can't be lightweight) vs the lightweight 209kg moon rover, and we're dealing with quite a different proposition.
Sorry to be a pedantic git, but as someone who uses Photoshop and After Effects for a living, I thought I'd point out "And what would you use instead of After Effects?" is actually incorrect; it's the one part of the CC suite that actually has decent professional competition. Key rivals are Nuke and Fusion, two packages that are highly regarded by their user base.
But yes, in the case of Photoshop, for how I use it at least, there's nothing that comes even close. Alas.
I think what you all have in common is the randomness of, er, randomness.
I've bought about 15 MyPassports, and 2 or maybe 3 have failed, so I guess you can add that to the sample.
If you want to talk about proper fail, ALL 8 of the 2TB hard drives in my SAS RAID enclosure for video editing have failed over the years! But then again, they do get properly pounded 24/7
Aparently the move to Mac has saved them money. In Slashdot's coverage of this story they quote an IBM person thusly: "IBM is saving a minimum of $265 (up to $535 depending on model) per Mac compared to a PC, over a 4-year lifespan. While the upfront workstation investment is lower for PCs, the residual value for Mac is higher The program's success has improved IBM's ability to attract and retain top talent -- a key advantage in today's competitive market."
Link here: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/10/23/2052227/ibm-open-sources-macibm-code
If that's true, then that strikes me as one of the more interesting details of this story.
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