Posts by TheFifth 227 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jul 2010
Affinity Designer is an alternative. It's more basic than Illustrator, but has all the features many people need. If you were OK with older versions of Illustrator, I'm sure you would be OK with Affinity Designer.
I switched fully away from Adobe when Affinity Photo was released in 2015. Now I use Affinity Photo / Designer for graphics work and DaVinci Resolve / FCPX for video. Never looked back.
Apple increases profits and income by 5% and lays out what it's doing to counter the threat of tariffs. Stock falls 4%.
Tesla's net income takes a massive hit, sales plunge across the world and profit is down 71%. Musk details how they will be screwed over by tariffs when manufacturing Optimus, but gives no details on what they will do about it. Stock increases by 5%.
Please make it make sense.
Me too. DVD-R and CD-R are useless as a long term backup solution. I have a bunch of backup discs ranging from 10 to 15 years old and half of them are only just readable (with many retries) and some are not readable at all. On the other hand I own an old spinning rust backup drive (120GB) that is over 20 years old and still works perfectly (it only gets plugged in now and then). I do have other copies of the data that is on that drive as I don't expect it to last forever, but it always amazes me that whenever I plug it in it jumps into life and is no noisier than the day I bought it.
I had a 486 IBM PS/1 back in the day. On those machines it was very possible to kill a PS/2 port by plugging in something when the power was on. I knew this and was super careful (although I probably did do it a few times by mistake), but I was working in Dixons over the uni holidays and we did see a fair few come back with this issue. The engineers told me it was a tiny surface mount component that would blow. A capacitor if my memory serves me correctly (although it is 30+ years ago, so I could be wrong).
It's only Linux that has this much trouble going through puberty
I think Telsa and anything Musk related has an even bigger issue. There's a reason why the Tesla model names are S, 3, X, Y, SpaceX has a thing named Mechazilla and Musk constantly makes reference to the numbers 69 and 420. It's that he's an overgrown, edge-lord child.
I used OS/2 3 on my 486DX33 for a little while. The computer came with Win 3.1 but I acquired an OS/2 disk from a friend, so gave it a try. I liked it and with it's ability to run 16 bit Windows apps, I could do everything I needed to in a far more stable way than Windows 3.1 ever could.
But as you say, "people use applications not operating systems".
By the time I started university in late 95, I had switched to Windows 95. All the computers at uni ran either Win 3.1 or 95, with most on 95, so if I wanted to use the same apps on my machine I'd have to use 95.
It was a fun few months messing with OS/2 but ultimately I had to use what the uni was using if I wanted an easy life.
A couple of years later I did install Warp 4 during a uni holiday, just for a bit of fun. It was given away for free on a magazine cover disk, which I guess was IBM's last ditch effort to gain some market share. Again, it was good to use, but there were things I needed that were Windows only, so it was again replaced by Windows.
I got a B at A level Physics some 35 years ago, but the closest I come to doing anything relevant now is watching Brian Cox on the TV. I don't really remember any of it!
All this quantum stuff is so ridiculously beyond me I can't even see it with a telescope. Interesting though!
Yup. Soft power is generally considered excellent value for money, which is why relatively small countries can project power far great than their size (Sweden is a good example). China isn't building roads and infrastructure throughout the developing world out of the goodness of its heart, anyone with half a brain in their head knows this.
By most measures, the US is currently number one for soft power, however I'd bet that position is fast eroding. Trump and Doge are handing influence to China and Russia. They must think all their birthdays have come at once.
I always thought the claim that Trump is a Russian plant was hyperbole, but I'm beginning to wonder now.
You didn't mention the "public interest test" in your original post, which is what I was replying to. You didn't even allude to it. Adding that argument in a later reply won't change what my understanding of your original post was. Your original post was just about how the SEC is partly wrong because the consensus is Musk overpaid for Twitter (no idea how any of that matters or how it's related to a public interest test or blind justice in any way). You seem to be completely changing tack.
Maybe you need to learn to express yourself a little better the first time? Keep at it Champ, you'll get there.
"More paranoia I think. In no way could, or should you think my comment made Musk look better."
Maybe I am just paranoid, but starting your post with "I think this is a strange case because the SEC is both right, and wrong" seems to indicate that you think the SEC is at least partly in the wrong by going after Musk for breaking the law. Certainly seems like you are lessening the wrongdoing of Musk and suggesting some level of wrongdoing by the SEC. Hence my comment "make Musk look better and the SEC look worse".
You can disagree (and you will), but that's what I got from what you wrote. You seemed to be shifting some level of blame to the SEC for something that Musk entirely did to himself. The SEC are just doing their job.
When he disclosed his purchase, the stock price jumped nearly 30%. If he had disclosed this on March 24th, as he should have done, the stock price would have likely jumped on that day. The problem is that he bought $500 million worth of shares between March 24th and April 4th (when he did finally disclose), so these shares were likely priced at 30% less than they should have been. This is where he should have paid more, not in the final purchase price he paid.
The fact that he ultimately overpaid when he bought the rest of Twitter is irrelevant, which you likely know, but for some reason you want to make Musk look better and the SEC look worse.
What these "it's an echo chamber!!!!!1111" idiots don't seem to understand is that not everyone wants to be bombarded with politics and polarised views every time they view their timeline.
I want to read about science, development, retro-tech, guitar, music and maybe a bit of history too. I don't want people shoving their political views down my throat all the time, no matter the stripe. I don't want any politics at all. I don't use social media as my source for political news (and I advise others not to either!), so when I'm using it, I don't want to see any.
With Twitter I don't seem to have that option. Politics, especially of the right-wing American flavour, will be forced on me at every opportunity. It's why I left. With Mastodon I can read about what I want and avoid all the shouting. It's pleasant and it's what I want to use social media for.
I am just about able to put up with arguments over the use of Hungarian notation and tabs vs. spaces.
I use an older version of the YouTube app on iPad, it's uYou+ with Adblock and Sponsor block enabled, so I don't want to upgrade.
My iPad is set to en-gb and the YouTube app seems to select a random auto-translation for all videos I watch. One is playing in Spanish, another in French and another could be Italian, even though the original language is English. My guess is that the default English language is defined as en-us (that's what the language dropdown seems to indicate anyway) and the YouTube app doesn't seem to realise that en-gb will likely want that language, so it just picks a random one. You can set the region in the YouTube app, but it's ignored for video translations and only seems to set the region for the 'recommendations' page. From what I read, the iPadOS language is checked for video translations.
Obviously I don't want to set the locale of my entire iPad to be the US just for YouTube. It's annoying, but not annoying enough to force me to upgrade and no longer have Sponsor and ad blocking.
This is what I found after Musk took over.
My Twitter feed used to be relevant to what I follow (retro and modern tech, development, music, comedy). I didn't follow politics and I never saw any. I used to enjoy reading through my Twitter feed in bed each morning and some of the recommendations I received were actually interesting. I never saw any of the hateful side of Twitter because it used to be possible to avoid it if you didn't follow anything contentious.
Within a few days of Musk taking over my feed was full of right wing US politicians (MTG and the like), tonnes of US politics and of course Musk himself. I'm in the UK, why would I care about the latest nonsense MTG has just spouted? It went from a fun morning read to a depressing slog through irrelevant, hateful crap to find something I actually follow. I left within a few weeks.
I joined Mastodon, which I do like, although I miss some of the larger accounts I used to follow. If it's possible to only see what I actually want and any recommendations are actually relevant, maybe I'll give BlueSky a go.
I think that's what a lot of these people screeching about 'echo chambers' are missing. Not all of us want to see a feed full of political arguments or even polite political discussions. We don't want any politics. Some of us just want to read through fun posts about topics we are actually interested in without politics polluting our feed. I used to be able to do that with Twitter, but the second Musk took over, that became impossible.
Buckle up, this is a long one!
“No. I don't agree, sorry. Though for the record, I upvoted you because at least you were polite.”
It’s fine to disagree. The world would be a dull place if we all agreed on everything.
“I’ll see your Aleksandr Dugin's 1997 book 'Foundations of Geopolitics' and raise you Zbigniew Brzezinski's 'The Grand Chessboard' (1997). “
I’ve not read the book, but it is on my list, so I’m not sure I can fully respond to this fairly. I have however read many discussions and reviews of the ideas in the book (which is why it’s on my list to read), so I can perhaps talk about my understanding of it (with the caveat that I’m talking about the ideas in the book from the perspective of what I thought about what other people thought about them).
From my understanding, Brzezinski himself has said the book is very much about the US geo-strategy of the last decade of the 20th century. Obviously, what happened in the 90s has an impact today (as I said with the perceived embarrassment about the fall of the USSR in the Russian psyche) and some policies may still carry over, but how many of the strategies in the book are still current policy is open to debate. Dugin's work was very much a roadmap for the future, one that can be seen to be have been followed pretty closely up to now. He is also still active in Putin's ear and is cited as Putin's favourite 'thinker'.
Obama for example had his famous ‘reset’ of US relations with Russia in 2010. This involved the scrapping of plans to build military bases in Eastern Europe and the reduction of deployed warheads with the new START treaty. The US even helped speed along Russia’s WTO accession. They had agreements and discussions on everything from culture, education, sports, dealing with the financial crisis, ‘universal values’ (whatever they are) and much more. It really seemed to be an attempt to find common ground across all areas. Obviously you can claim this was all a ruse, but most of what I have read doesn’t think it was and see it as a genuine attempt to put old differences behind them.
Some in the intelligence community cite this reset, and later the lack of any real action against 2014’s annexation of Crimea, as the reason for Putin’s renewed confidence on the world stage.
It is also evident that the US has pulled back from its many international adventures during the 90s, and is now far more insular. It’s hard to argue that the US of today is as globally adventurous as the US of the 90s.
Moving outside of the US, Europe also had a reset of relations with Russia, with a policy of trying to bring Russia into the European community. This was strongly pushed by Angela Merkel and Germany as a whole, with many now thinking she was taken for a fool by Putin.
Obviously the book cannot be dismissed (the guy was an advisor to US government in the 80s after all) and I’m sure that the content has relevance today, but I’m not sure you can cut and paste the US policy of the 90s over the 2010s onward.
Perhaps my biggest criticism, and from what I understand is one of the main criticisms levelled at the book, is that it’s from a very one sided, US centric view. This is exactly what I see from everyone who says that everything in the world is the fault of the West, they don’t allow for the autonomy of any other country.
You back up my view when you say:
“The Ukrainians are nothing more than pawns on the chessboard, same as the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, and the Libyans.”
Ukraine is a nation state that has autonomy and its own ideas and wants. Diminishing a country of 40 million people down to a pawn in a US political game is insulting. I would think the fact that the Ukrainian people have multiple times risen up against their Government shows that they are not merely pawns. Even all the way back in 1990 with the Revolution on Granite, the Ukrainian people have been showing their autonomy and a strong will to be in control of their own destiny. Just because that desire looks West does not mean it’s all a CIA plot.
“I’ve also heard Putin talk of Peter the Great and reclaiming Russian lands, but only in the context of Crimea, the gifting of which to Ukraine by Brezhnev in 1954 was controversial (from the Russian standpoint).”
Putin has talked about reclaiming Russian lands multiple times, most recently that I have heard in 2022. He again likened himself to Peter the Great and discussed how Peter had retaken lands from Sweden. He was justifying the war in Ukraine in general and a wider desire to reclaim Slavic lands for Russia, not only Crimea.
“Sending countless thousands of Russian male conscripts to their death over such an old issue is political suicide. No, I think his actions are solely pragmatic, based on current geopolitical events as he sees them.”
I agree some of the reasons are pragmatic, I never said these were the only reasons, I was simply pushing back against your claim that the war only started because of NATO expansion.
Crimea for example was largely about access to the deep water port in Sevastopol, the lease of which was up for renewal. However, Putin soon found out that supplying Crimea with essentials like food, water and power was very costly and not at all easy, even with the new Kerch Bridge. This is one reason why a land bridge between Russia and Crimea is so important now. The reason Brezhnev gifted Crimea to Ukraine wasn’t just from the kindness of his heart. It was also because of the cold, hard realities of maintaining infrastructure in, and supplying essentials to a separate enclave. Ukraine is attached to Crimea, so it’s far more cost effective to run power, water and supply lines from Ukraine. As you say, this wasn’t much of an issue when the USSR still existed.
As for the thousands of conscripts, this is currently a major issue for Putin. He desperately needs to mobilise more manpower, however politically he cannot for the reasons you state. Politically he also cannot withdrawal from Ukraine as it would be the end of his rein. He (and his advisors) believed Ukraine would fail within three days and Ukrainians would welcome Russia with open arms. He believed his own hype about ‘one Slavic people’ and now has a mess that is all of his own making.
I don’t know where you are from. Are you Russian or from another Slavic nation, or are you from a Western country? Just to explain my interest in this, I am a British / Irish national, married to a Russian woman. She lived in Ukraine in her early life and has relations who are Ukrainian and live in Eastern Ukraine. I have spent a lot of time in Russia and, as I married into a Slavic family, I felt I should understand the history of the region and the culture. I have spoken extensively to both Russians and Ukrainians in my extended family and have probably annoyed them all by asking many questions about how things were and are for them. My wife still has family and friends in Russia, so we are keeping up to speed with how things are there now.
My Wife reads much of the current thinking on Putin from Russian political figures (mostly those exiled for wrong think) and the general consensus is that there is a strong ideological and legacy building element to Putin’s current actions.
"The conflict only started in the first place because of the NATO states proposing to bring Ukraine into NATO"
Absolute nonsense. To think that you need to ignore so much history and much of what Putin himself has said. Sure, it's a great justification that Putin can spout when he wants to redirect from his empire building desires, but to think it's the only reason this war started is simplistic and lazy.
Putin is enacting a plan that has been in the works since the 90s. Just take a look at Aleksandr Dugin's 1997 book 'Foundations of Geopolitics'. It reads like a playbook of what Putin has been up to since 1999, including making Western nations reliant on your resources, pouring money into Western financial markets to gain power and influence, sowing dissent in Western democracies and separating the UK politically from Europe (again by sowing dissent). Subsuming Ukraine into Russia was the next step on the list, a list which also includes reclaiming all of the Slavic countries. Dugin has been in Putin's ear for years. There's a reason why he's known as "Putin's Rasputin".
Putin also openly says he wants to rebuild the Russian Empire and make Russia a world power again. He often likens himself to Peter the Great and talks of 'reclaiming and strengthening Russian lands'. Talk which rattled the Baltic states long before 2022. For Putin this is almost a religious war and a battle for geopolitical dominance. Talk of NATO and de-nazifying Ukraine are useful distractions when you need to justify your actions on the global stage, but if you listen to what he says to his home audience, it's all about how Ukraine is not really a country, how Russia needs to reclaim its lands, how Russia is the Mother of all Slavs, and how all Slavic people should be living together as a single nation. It's entirely ideologically based.
It's been deeply imprinted in Russian culture that Russia is the Mother of all Slavs since the time of the Tsars, which is ironic when you consider that if any state can claim that name it would be Kievan Rus', which was centred in Kiev. Muscovy, from which Russia grew, was merely a region of Kievan Rus'. It was when Ivan IV was crowned Prince of Muscovy in 1547 and declared “Tsar of All the Russias” that a unified Russian state first began to claim the heritage of Kievan Rus’. I wonder why Putin is so desperate to say Ukraine is not a real country and is just part of Russia? (side note: The first usage of the word Ukraine to mean the region where Ukraine now sits dates back to 1187 in the Hypatian Codex, long before Russia existed as a nation - this is tricky for Putin).
A lot of this talk of pan-Slavism is also to boost Putin's popularity at home. Nothing boosts an authoritarian ruler's popularity like increasing your country's status on the world stage. His strongman image is very much tailored to play well at home. Russian culture loves a strong ruler.
We could also touch on the feeling within Russia that the nation was deeply embarrassed by the West when the USSR fell and a desire to regain lost glory, but this would take several thousand more words to pick apart.
Anyway, these are just a fraction of the reasons why this war started. It's deeply ingrained in an almost religious belief that Russia is the rightful leader of all Slavic people, hundreds of years of Russian history, and the desire of an authoritarian leader to leave a legacy, as well as protect his current position.
So saying "The conflict only started in the first place because of the NATO states proposing to bring Ukraine into NATO" is really sloppy thinking. This was always going to happen in one form or another, the NATO line is just a useful excuse.
I think I followed a similar Linux journey to the author. I remember around 2002 I was becoming more and more fed up with Windows XP, so was trying out various Linux distros. I'd tried Red Hat 8 and also whatever the current Mandrake release was at the time and found them OK, however I picked up a copy of SUSE through work and finally settled on that for a couple of years. As you say, rpm-hell was a real thing, but I found that SUSE mostly worked for me.
Come 2004, I saw a magazine with a CD of Ubuntu on the cover, so thought I'd give it a go. It was a revelation! Small, fast and apt was (comparatively) amazing. Gnome 2 was a breath of fresh air too.
That machine was upgraded all the way to Gutsy in 2007 when I bought a new computer. Happy times!
I still have a Surface machine running the latest Ubuntu to this day. It's not as revolutionary as it was back in the day, but it's still fine for me.
I even had that Alcatel modem, although I think I was running at 256kbps.
I've just been through this with my Mum a few weeks ago. She had two major strokes within an hour and lost the ability to swallow. She already had dementia and wasn't able to communicate that well anyway, so the stroke on top of it made her only able to open her eyes (with trouble fixing on anything) and hold your hand.
We were given the choice to take her into hospital and pump her full of fluids, but that would only delay the inevitable. She was never going to recover from the stroke and even if she did, the rapid progression of the dementia would have taken her within a year or so anyway. We decided to let her stay in the nursing home she was in and familiar with. After watching her Mother (my Gran) die with dementia, she had always expressed how much she didn't want to live like that. Her biggest fear was being incapacitated in exactly this way, so we didn't want to extend it in any way. We sat beside her bed for five days as she slowly slipped away. Within a day or so she was pretty much in a vegetive state and no longer reacting to stimuli, but her body held on for a few days more.
It was a horrific thing to watch, we honestly treat animals with more dignity. In a no hope situation like this, I would think it reasonable that, if a team of doctors all agree, medical professionals should be able to help speed things along. Watching her suffer for five days was terrible.
My YouTube recommendation feed did start to become infected with right wing dog whistles recently. One or two started to creep in initially, but it picked up pretty quickly. The judicial use of the 'Not interested' and 'Don't recommend this channel' options seems to have calmed it down again. Still the odd one creeping in though.
I mainly follow retro-tech, electronics, development, guitar and science stuff, with some philosophy thrown in here and there. I do follow a couple of political scientists who discuss the war in Ukraine, so I wonder if the dumb YouTube algorithm is assuming that as I follow a political scientist, I must be interested in extreme right wing politics. Weird.
I picked up an Amazon replacement MagSafe charger a few years ago as I wanted to have one permanently plugged in at my desk whilst the original was in my laptop bag.
When charging, the cable between the block and the MacBook would get really hot. Also, if it was plugged in the trackpad on the MacBook would play up, with the mouse pointer stuttering and jumping all over the place. I didn't notice this as first as I had an external mouse and keyboard plugged in at my desk, but needless to say the thing went back as soon as I spotted it.
I'll only buy original chargers now, or if it's a generic USB C type thing, I ensure it's from a trusted brand. It's just not worth the risk (as Mark Fixes Stuff from YouTube can attest).
I'd put my money on it being a QC/QA issue, either due to a change in process in the name of efficiency or pressure on the workforce to work harder and faster. Likely in the name of keeping up with the increased cadence of launches. Obviously I have no way of knowing this, but it was the first thing that jumped into my head when I saw the launch.
The Falcon 9 has an incredible success record, so either they've bumped into an edge case, or something has changed. I'm betting on the latter, but happy to be proved wrong.
Just look at Boeing for an example of how easily QC/QA can slip.
My car has both cruise control and a speed limiter (optional). I can switch it to either CC or limiter, so the limiter doesn't operate in CC mode.
I have never used the limiter and only ever use cruise control. I don't drive like a maniac and have been driving for over twenty years without ever getting a ticket. I have never felt the need for a limiter.
However, after reading through these posts, I'm thinking I may have misjudged the usefulness of the limiter. When I first got the car and turned it on it defaulted to 70mph. I always use CC on the motorway set to 70mph as that gives me the option to creep above 70 if I need to pass one of those wonderful people who drives slowly, but accelerates as you try to pass them. I can also just press the pause button if I need to let the car gently slow down without braking. I couldn't understand why I would want the limiter to be on at 70mph as it seems less useful than CC. So I kinda dismissed it from that point onwards.
However, reading the above I can actually see that it could be useful on lower speed limit roads rather than motorways. I don't generally have an issue keeping to the speed limit, but I have to admit that from time to time, especially if traffic is stop and start, it is possible to creep above a low speed limit when you finally get going. Especially on several roads near me where the local council have decided to lower the speed limit of some large out of town roads, in the middle of nowhere, far from any houses to 30mph from 40 or 50. It's so easy to forget the change.
Thank you fellow commentaries, perhaps I'll give the limiter a try. My only reservation is I don't want it to make me complacent about keeping an eye on my speed.
I also used Trillian and was in their tester group for a while during one of their major rewrites. Used to hang out on their forum and in their IRC channel too. Fun times.
I see they're still around but have pivoted away from multi-network support to using their own protocol. They had just introduced their own service as an additional network on top of the other providers when I stopped using it. Looks like they're targeting business and healthcare now with HIPAA compliance being a major selling point. https://trillian.im
When I was at school, we had a network of BBC Bs (initially E-Net and then 'upgraded' to Econet). There was one machine (2C if I remember correctly!) that would never turn on correctly in the morning. On initial power up, rather than being greeted with the iconic dual beep of the BBC Micro, instead the first tone would go on forever. If whilst the first beep was sounding continuously you lifted the front of the machine by around two inches and let it drop, the second beep would then sound and the machine would work perfectly.
You could switch it on and off as many times as you wanted and it would run all day perfectly. However, the following morning when it had been off overnight it would need percussive maintenance again to get beyond the first startup beep. It worked like that for years right up until the day I left school. Now and then I do wonder if it was ever fixed or if it was simply retired when the BBCs were replaced with (probably) PCs.
Timing seems to be squarely aimed at freelance workers and not big companies tracking all of their employees. It even allows you to overwrite chunks of time with 'Tasks', so no matter what you were doing, it will mark it down against whatever project you say. It also allows you to start and stop time trackers manually, so you can manually add time to projects whenever you want. The data is only on your machines unless you share a timesheet, so it's not a lot of good for nefariously spying on someone's work.
So whilst I agree that there will be software out there that is designed to track every second of a worker's time, which is oppressive, I don't think Timing is that software. I'm sure it will be possible to use MS Recall in an oppressive way, but the whole reason I brought up Timing was to point out that tracking, if done right, can be a very useful thing for freelance workers.
Not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.
Not in prison here! As I say, I work for myself so have complete control over when I do or don't work. I also give myself a generous amount of time off each year.
This is all about ensuring I charge for every minute of my time. It's not about being beholden to my clients. I was amazed how much more time I was invoicing for when I started using Timing. All those little 10 to 20 minute jobs that would be forgotten come monthly invoicing can really add up.
I'm sure my clients wish I didn't track my time like this and instead went back to my old way of "perhaps I'll remember to start a timer, perhaps I won't".
I'd agree with this and the OP's comment. Everyone's use case is different, so blanket statements are just silly.
Personally for what I do, Linux fits my bill perfectly. I need to run local dev environments and web / database servers to get work done. Everything I need is available on Linux, although day to day I do use a Mac as I also need to develop iOS apps for clients.
Linux was also perfect for my parents. All they did was light browsing, email and solitaire, plus maybe the odd document to print. The day I replaced Windows with Linux on their laptop, the support calls stopped as it all 'just worked' for their use case.
However I have regularly experienced the reverse argument when I say I want the option of MacOS on the iPad (note I say option, not to force it on everyone). I receive a barrage of abuse about how the iPad is perfectly capable of being a full laptop replacement and I'm just not using it right. They don't seem to grasp that unless I can run a local web stack, it's doesn't work for me.
I love the iPad's form factor and portability, and it has more than enough power to do what I need it to do, but it's hamstrung by the OS. I ended up buying a Surface Go and put Linux on it (for which everything but the camera worked out of the box), just to minimise what I carry around when travelling. It's a slow device and has crappy battery life, but at times when portability is needed, it wins out.
So for me the iPadOS vs. MacOS debate is equally as frustrating as the Windows vs. Linux debate. Maybe it's just people that are frustrating? ;)
I use an app called Timing for Mac. It works by using the MacOS accessibility functions to read what the current active app and open document is. It also tracks the website you're currently viewing, however it doesn't track private browsing in all the browsers I've tried it with.
It allows you to setup projects where you define what folders the content for that project is in and what websites you use for it. You can also setup keywords that are relevant to that project. Then when tracking, any time you open a file in those folders, browse a website on the project's site list, or have a window title that uses the defined keywords, the time is automatically assigned to that project.
As a freelancer who often bounces between multiple clients each day, it's been immensely useful for me to ensure I charge fully for my time. I've used all sorts of manual time trackers and I always forget to start and stop timers. This just times everything and assigns it to the correct project without any interaction beyond initial setup. It's really helps to ensure I charge for all those little 'can you just' jobs that clients ask for that can often slip between the cracks come monthly invoicing.
Now... I completely understand what an absolute privacy nightmare this could be. Many of the same criticisms of MS Recall can also be levelled against Timing. However, I have it installed on a Mac Mini I use exclusively for work, I'm the only one who uses that computer, it respects private browsing and, probably most importantly, it doesn't take constant screenshots of everything. It only logs the active app, document path, window title and website. Also, that data never leaves my machine. Timing do offer a cloud syncing feature, but I do not use it. All this obviously could still be a problem, but for me the pros outweigh the cons.
I think that many of the issues MS has here could be alleviated if they weren't taking constant screenshots. Surely MS can get most of the required info from APIs like Timing does? I guess that means they wouldn't be able to assess things with 'AI', which just isn't cool at the moment. On a strictly work machine, I'm happy to live with the privacy compromises of Timing, but I don't think I'd ever be happy with software that was taking constant screenshots of what's going on on my computer. What about all those passwords I enter into config files? API keys etc.? Too risky for me.
Personally, I don't remember the last time I rebooted my phone, tablet or laptop (it was probably for a system update). They are just put to sleep after use.
The point I think you're missing is that this isn't the only bit of info they use and it will be combined with perhaps hundreds of other small bits of data. It was likely picked as an example as it's something everyone will understand.
Individually these small items of data seem harmless, but when you combine them they produce a remarkably accurate fingerprint of a specific device. The thing with producing the fingerprint from so many items of data is that it doesn't matter if one changes. If the rest still match, that's likely still a unique combination (or near as damn it). Frankly, for marketing purposes, if you get a 75% plus match, it's enough. Knowing this person is a 95% match for someone who's just browsed 'widgets' on another website still makes it worth showing you a 'widget' advert. It doesn't need to be exact. Each time a bit of data changes, that's just amalgamated into the whole and the fingerprint is updated.
As an example, taking a look at https://amiunique.org/fingerprint, my web browser fingerprint is completely unique among the 2.5 million+ fingerprints they have taken. If someone takes that as a baseline, even if I reboot my device or change another of those items of data, they can still be 99.9999% sure that it's the same device based on everything else.
I once did some work for a company that had hired a marketing specialist to help with their web analytics. Seeing the kind of data he could glean from fingerprinting was frankly scary. Even to the point where, if a user had entered their personal details into one of the websites in their network, they could put a name and address to that random person browsing your website. This was all pre-GDPR, so it would be illegal to do so now, but that doesn't mean an unscrupulous developer can't still use the same tricks. So a company with Google's reach definitely can and I wouldn't be surprised if internally they are linking these data sets.
You really should. It definitely took them some time, but Apple Maps is now better than Google Maps
It was only about 8 months ago I last tried it and it was useless at finding things in Devon / Cornwall (which is where I need it 99% of the time).
As I said in my original comment, I do like the uncluttered look and the way it guides you, but if it can't get me to the right address, it's useless to me.
I guess it heavily depends on where you live, but as with everything in the UK, if you're outside of London or a few other large cities, things get patchy (especially in the wilds of Devon and Cornwall).
I completely agree. When I bought a new car it came with CarPlay (which I love). As it was the default, I thought I'd try out Apple Maps.
I think it looks nice as you drive around and is clear and simple to read. The first time I tried to use it to actually get somewhere was to a farm in Devon that had been converted to a wedding venue. It took me to completely the wrong farm and several miles out of my way. Switched to Google Maps and it directed me straight to where I needed to go.
Haven't tried it since.
I also have an M2 Mac Mini that I use for development. I'd love to be able to use an iPad for work whilst away from home. I take the iPad with me wherever I go anyway for media consumption, so it's a pain also having to lug around a laptop just in case I need to do any client support. I actually bought a Surface Go (which is running Linux) simply to lower the amount of crap I cart around when going abroad. I leave the iPad and laptop at home and take the Surface with me. It's just about passable as a media consumption device (using Gnome for a better touch UI) and it's also a real computer if and when I need it. Battery life sucks though.
I watched the announcement yesterday with interest, but little hope of there being anything worth buying. If they lifted some of the iPadOS restrictions so I could run MySQL and Apache locally, I'd seriously consider one of the Pros. As it is, I think I'll just pick up the base model to replace my seven year old iPad (again, base model). It's getting very tired now and stutters and freezes every now and then, so it's due replacing. Thanks for lowering the price Apple, glad I held off on buying! The idea of a macOS app is interesting. The hardware is more than capable.
As it stands, Apple have lost a big chunk of cash they could have had from me.
I think that there are more than one, and I think they are paying to keep the OS alive and maintained on hundreds to thousands of machines in production use.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I bet there are many machines still chugging away in important roles. I know the BBC used to use Optima for offline editing back in the day, but I’m pretty sure they went all in with Avid in the late 90s. It’s a shame there’s no-one keeping Optima alive out there, although it wouldn’t have clue what to do with widescreen, no matter HD footage.
I must admit, I do miss the stability of modern memory-managed fully-pre-emptive OSes, but it's amazing that it works so well.
One thing that always amazed me with Optima running on RISC OS was how stable it was. It hardly ever crashed and if it did, when you restarted it just picked up again where you left off.
I remember when we moved over to Premiere and Avid on Windows 2000 (removing the need to online after initial editing). The number of days I lost to Premiere when it crashed and hosed yet another project I dread to think. Avid was better thankfully, but Windows and the drivers for the pro-level capture cards were an ever present issue. I remember the Pinnacle DC2000 being a particular problem (anything Pinnacle in fact!).
In the day when computerised audio editing ("SADIE" being the name which springs to mind) meant the latest '486 with as much memory as you could afford
I also used to use SADiE back in the 90s. I was always amazed at the price of it when there were free or very cheap alternatives out there that could do most of what it did (well, what we needed it to do anyway).
When I worked as a TV editor back in the late 90s, I used RISC OS everyday. For offline editing I worked on an Eidos (yes, from Tomb Raider fame) Optima Video Editing system. It was a RISC OS based editing system (think Premiere, Avid etc.) that was super simple and super fast to use. We had a RISC PC with a stack of external SCSI drives sat on top and a Jazz drive for backup. Picture quality was crap, but being an offline system, it could spit out an EDL file onto floppy that could be used in an online system. From that one file you could conform from the original tapes. I've used just about every editing system out there and I'm particularly fond of Avid, but Optima still holds a place in my heart. It was without a doubt the fastest system for editing I've ever used (in workflow terms). This is exactly what I used to use https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8337. Ah the good old days!
I did try RISC OS on RPi a few years ago and all my RISC OS knowledge came flooding back (even the weird drag to save stuff). I never went too far with it as I didn't have access to a network socket in my office, so without Wifi it was just a standalone oddity that was too much of a pain to do anything useful with. It's amazing how much we rely on networking to do anything these days. I think it's time to break out the Pi 400 again and load up the new release. Exciting!
Side note: I've been looking online for info about the Optima NLE and apart from a few mentions here and there, the info seems to not exist. Not even a grainy image of the UI, let alone a video. I did see a RISC PC with an Optima card come up for sale on eBay a few years back, but it was a ridiculous amount of money. Way out of my price range for something with no real used beyond a nostalgia journey.
I remember driving in Swindon back in the 90s and panicking as I saw the signpost for the Magic Roundabout up ahead with no way to turn off.
After driving through it I couldn't work out what all the fuss was about. Follow the same rules as any roundabout and it works perfectly. I found it really simple to navigate. I'm sure the reputation comes from people over thinking rather than any inherent trickiness.
I was flicking through a CPC 464 manual the other day and had lots of "oh, yeah!" moments as I remembered all the programming I used to do using Locomotive Basic. Definitely one of the best basics available on any 8-bit micro. I know everyone raves about BBC Basic, and it is really great, but I don't think the CPC's basic was far behind (and possibly ahead in some areas). The timers were something that really stood out to me when rereading. I had forgotten all about them.
I remember I wrote a poker game in basic on my 464. It had an 'AI' (not really) computer opponent and everything. OK, graphically it was simple, but I remember 13 year old me being very pleased with it. I really wish I had held on to those tapes and disks, however they were sent to the tip when my parent's moved house whilst I was at uni. Didn't think to ask for them to be saved. I was more worried that my Mum had given all of my Star Wars toys (a Millennium Falcon, an At At and loads of figures) to my cousin!
Businesses who advertised there won't have cared much about the motives behind the research. They would purely have looked at the facts.
Were their ads being shown next to hate speech? Yes.
That's all they care about. They were told it wouldn't happen, it did happen, so bye bye Twitter. Their only consideration would be brand safety and is the platform a good place to advertise that won't tarnish their image. Twitter has no one else to blame.
So throw all the lazy buzz words you like at the motivations of those doing the research, but the fact is they just revealed what was already happening. Twitter was and likely still is not a safe place to advertise if you value your brand image.
why bother, why not just shup up and get on with life
Honesty, from my experience in Russia, this is what most people do. They just want a quiet life so they keep their head down and don't rock the boat. Even at a local level corruption is rampant, so you don't want to get noticed even there, no matter on a national level.
From what my Wife says, certainly in small towns and rural villages, many don't bother voting. As you say, why bother? Although it may be different in cities. When she was at uni in a city, they actually took everyone out of lectures, put them on a bus and marched them into the voting offices. Don't know if that is common elsewhere. Certainly when Putin has a rally, it's part of someone's work day to go. So their work will take them to the rally. Who wouldn't cheer if you're given a paid day off?
This year will be interesting though. There's a plan for people to all turn up at the polling stations at midday in memory or Navalny. The hope is to get thousands of people outside each one at exactly the same time, all across the country. It's a way of having a protest without having a protest. "I'm just here to vote, honest!".
There's a saying in Russia that essentially boils down to "even if they're corrupt, you're better off voting for the current guy as he's already stolen everything he wants. A new guy will make things worse by stealing more stuff" (that's how my Wife summarises it anyway). I guess it's the Russian equivalent of 'better the devil you know'.
My Wife spoke to her mother (who is in Russia) on the phone yesterday. She said the above reason is why most people she knows will vote for Putin. So I guess he will still get a lot of votes anyway.
I had exactly the same experience when I logged in for the first time in over a year a couple of weeks back. I had the pleasure of a video of a drug lord being murdered, a dad beating the crap out of his daughter for having an OnlyFans account and a fight on the Tube. I follow tech news, science news, retro tech and some comedians. Don't know how anyone can cope with Twitter anymore.
Annoyingly, we missed the 2 year route by less than a year if I remember rightly.
The newer five and ten year routes are far more complex though. There were a tonne of new requirement added, like income thresholds, 'Life in the UK' exam, healthcare supplements and several English tests, among a myriad of other little bureaucratic tweaks. When we started our route, there was a lot of fuss about how much more complex it had become. Even phoning the immigration helpline was no help at all. No one wanted to take any responsibility for giving advice and their stock answer was "you need to provide whatever it asks for in the question". As I am freelance, I needed to provide accounts. They insisted that you have accounts drawn up by a qualified accountant with a professional accreditation, but didn't say which accreditations they accepted. There were horror stories online of applications being refused for the accountant having the wrong accreditation. So I called to ask which were accepted and they just said "whatever is asked for in the question". Useless.
The English tests were a joke. My wife is a qualified English teacher and she still had to take them. The questions were of the level "can you point to five on this list of numbers?". The English exam cost hundred of pounds and was valid for two years. The Visas were valid for 2.5 years, so it was all designed to ensure you needed a new one for every visa (because when you're living in the UK, you're definitely going to forget how to speak English). You also had to show progress with your English, so each time you had to take a more advanced exam, which was obviously more expensive each time. It was ridiculous considering my wife has advanced qualifications in English, but they'd only accept the Micky Mouse ones that they wrote especially for the visa route. It's a scam.
The worst bit was that if you failed a visa application, even if you just forgot to provide a document, they could send her home. If you appealed and they accepted that appeal, they would move you onto the 10 year route (basically a punishment). If they didn't accept the appeal, tough. Thankfully we got through OK and always provided an excess of documents to them.
This 'they should have spent the money on legal immigration' line always makes me laugh. It shows how utterly ignorant most people are of how difficult and expensive the UK (and most other western countries') immigration system really is.
When I got married to a non-UK native, all of my family were shocked that she wasn't just allowed to live here. They were gobsmacked at the five year process that cost over £14k, with the constant threat of her being sent home if we didn't dot every i and cross every t to perfection during those five years. That was 10 years ago now. Looking at the way the prices have gone up, it must be well over £25k these days. The FLR and IFR visas are almost double what we paid at around £3k (you'll need four+ of these dependant on the immigration route), and that's excluding additional fees like the Healthcare Surcharge charge (£1,035 per year). Note these fees are per person, not for a family.
And if you are not the spouse of a UK citizen and have no work place to sponsor you, then you're gonna need tens of thousands of pounds in the bank as collateral and the entire process is going to take 5 to 10 years and cost a further tens of thousands of pounds. And note, you can't just use the money in the bank to pay for the visas as you must have said collateral available each time you renew your visa (every 2.5 years). As soon as the cash in the bank drops below the required level, your visa will be denied.
So yeah, that family that have sold absolutely everything they've ever owned to scrape together £1k to pay people traffickers should definitely have used the money to pay for legal immigration. It wouldn't even cover the first meeting with an immigration specialist.
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