Posts by jake 26674 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"people neither need or use these items once they or on the nth ‘upgrade’ cycle."
MeDearOldMum (and other technologically incompetent people I know) refuse to plug their kit into anything that didn't come with that kit out of fear of breaking it. A phone that doesn't come with a charger is not a phone that they will purchase, period.
Just for the record, although I test out most other browsers[0], I use Firefox ESR exclusively for actual web browsing. It's the only one that always works, every time, for the things I need a browser for.
Obviously advice is worth what you pay for it, and YMMV. Have a beer anyway.
[0] Can't convince a client that their marketing driven choice is a piece of crap unless you know exactly why it is a marketing driven piece of crap.
Can I take a guess at the inevitable answer? Something along the lines of:
"It was test code that was never supposed to be released to the public. We have no idea why it was left in the released code, but we are looking into it in order to see that it never happens again."
Hey, it's worked for them all the other times!
Shun go ogle and everything else under Alphabet. They are a disastrous societal accident in progress.
... because I'm a beer/ale purest. However, Rogue Brewing's Chocolate Stout is actually a pretty good, well balanced brew (if a hair on the sweet side for my taste). Worth a try, if you can find it.
Xmas is in 12 days! Enjoy.
If you re-read mine, you'll notice that the people at work who I was referring to were middle to upper management. In other words, the people in charge.
In the case of the interviewee, "Damn kids!" ... pretty much covers anything when it comes to a take-home computer, be it a personal machine (BYOD[0]) or company issued. Only works once per given company, though.
[0] Break You Own Defenses
... from consulting jobs several times after accidentally running across pR0n on C-level computers. Here's a re-write of a post I made here on ElReg about ten years ago:
I know for an absolute fact that EVERY male college student's computer that I've worked on over the last 35 years or so has contained traces of porn. The coeds didn't start picking up on Internet porn in college until just over 20 years ago ... and now, they are nearly equal to the boys.
In business, over the last two and a half decades or so, probably 80% (or thereabouts) of all male middle to upper management PCs contain traces of Internet porn (in my experience). Female management started surfing porn just over a decade and a half ago, and are now equal to the men.
Not trying to justify it, nor vilify it, and likewise not drawing conclusions, just stating my observations. Do with them what you will.
Engine blocks don't survive long in Wisconsin winters without block heaters. Most hardware hates the concept of 40 below (C or F, I'm not picky ...). Most wetware hates it even more.
If you have to wrestle anything while driving your car you're doing it wrong.
You'd be crowing about it if it weren't pure graft, and you know it.
ElReg would be the first to report on it if it were real instead of a boondogle, and you know that too.
Instead of whining about ElReg's so-called politics, how about trying to find holes in the story to gripe about instead?
A lot of people claim this one was an Australian invention, but I remember it as part of the surfing slang in Northern California in the early/mid 1960s ... Maybe the surfers brought it back from, or over to, Australia? There was a lot of cross-culture stuff going on in that world back then.
That phrase existed long before Alan Jackson was an itch in his daddy's pants ... He didn't write the song anyway, it was written by Jim Brown (no, not that one) and Don Rollins (also not that one).
It was a popular enough phrase for both Herb Caen and Stan Delaplane to use it in their columns in the San Francisco Chronicle at least as early as the late 1940s.
After the festivities in Korea in 1953, my Uncle was mustered out and passed through Pearl Harbo(u)r on the way home. While there, he purchased a rather tacky ceramic statue of a drunk leaning on a lamp post, with the phrase "It's 5 o'clock somewhere!" on the base. He intended it for the bar he was going to build when he got home ... but my Aunt, who was never convinced that the '50s cocktail culture was a good thing, said something resembling "over my dead body!" ... so the statue sat on a shelf over the workbench in his garage for many decades. I asked my cousins for it as a memento when he passed, and it's still sitting on a shelf here in the office.
That's odd ... I didn't notice an improvement in the Usenet signal to noise ratio 16 years ago. Nor that of The Internet in general. In fact, I'd say it has been getting steadily worse Internet wide as time goes on.
So no, I completely disagree. It's still September.
"How would Twitter know material was hacked"
They didn't say it was "hacked", the salient part of what they said was "it violated its rules on distributing private information". Which you know very well, seeing as you included it in your post.
"how would Facebook know it's misinformation?"
Because anybody reviewing it objectively can plainly see that it's nonsense. A plant. Designed to get people like you ranting and raving all over TehIntraWebTubes. Seems that it worked. Is it nice to be used like that? Do you enjoy it?
"How would they have done that given the time"
Because a cursory glance at the facts (and lack thereof) takes practically no time at all, and shows it to be a non-story invented out of the whole-cloth by somebody with an agenda. Can I help you with any more easy to answer questions?
"Please, don't post Snopes links."
Translation: "Snopes are evil meany poo-poo heads who poke massive holes in all my pet conspiracy theories, making it look like I am actually stupider than I really am. If you don't stop enabling this, I'm going to hold my breath until I turn blue and puke all over everything."
Who cares what the Idjit "Tweety" Pai has to say at this stage of the game? He's going to be one of the first replacements come January, and pretty much everything he's fucked up will be reversed before the end of February.
Sadly, when the sniveling, brown-nosing little shit is inevitably removed from office, he'll likely be given several high paying Board seats in the industry, as a thank you from his lords & masters for services rendered. There ought to be a law ...
Up until about two years ago I could drop a card in the mail before noon at the Post Office in Fort Bragg, CA and it would be delivered to MeDearOldMum in Palo Alto the following afternoon, without fail. Just standard postage rates, no first class needed. About 200 road miles. Today it can take over a week.
About a billion years ago (in Internet years, say roughly late 1989) I talked a guy through compiling, installing and setting up IRC client and server software. We used email as a close to real-time communications method during this process. He was in New Zealand, I was in California. When we were nearly done, and using IRC to wrap up the installation, he commented that email was just as useful in some ways ... and more useful in others. Still is, IMO.
"So I'm a muck stirrer or a simpleton now?"
If you try to call me a racist because I truly believe that "All Lives Matter" trumps "Black Lives Matter", then yes. That is exactly what you are.
I have personally seen people proudly holding BLM signs in mass protests try to convince other people (on television camera, no less) that white lives do NOT matter, because black lives don't matter ... This is not a random event, it happens multiple times every time there is a largish protest. I've heard the same exact thing from sports stars, musicians, and other so-called 'heros". Again, shooting one's self in the foot is contraindicated when trying to get one's point across.
"Evaristo"
I had never even heard of this person until this thread. I still only have a vague idea who she is, and frankly not much interest in finding out more. Life's short, and there are only so many hours in a day.
"Facebook, Google, Amazon and Youtube are monopolies."
Oh, bullshit. I do not use a single thing that they provide, and yet I do everything that they provide without them. This is not a monopoly, no matter how your squint at it.
"They are utilities."
I categorically reject this. The world would not even blink, much less suffer long-term, if they were all to disappear today.
"How would you like your privatised electric supplier cutting off your power because it is a "business choice"?"
PG&E is doing that very thing over parts of Northern California as I type[0]. This is ACTUALLY affecting tens of thousands of people, unlike the otage at twitter yesterday.
[0] They find it cheaper in the long haul to defer maintenance and kill the power during high-wind events than it is to properly maintain their kit and keep the power on. Their excuse is that it prevents wildfires ... Which were extremely rare back when they were actually maintaining their equipment properly. Go figure.
LEO was a cool machine for its time, but IBM's tabulating machines (which were, in fact, computers) existed long before even Colossus or Turing's Bombe.
I'll be nice and not mention the Polish Bomba, much less Hollerith's tabulating machines that were used in the 1890 US Census.
That's not to take anything away from the British contributions to computing, far from it, I'm just trying to open a few rather blinkered eyes to the wider world ...
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." —Isaac Newton, 1675
I think you'll discover that Welshman Donald Davies (the inventor of the term "packet switching") based his work on that of Yank Paul Baran. They are usually listed as "independant inventors", but I think the evidence shows that Davies was fully aware of the prior work of Baran.
"using technology built upon ARPANET that was built by {drum roll please......} the US government."
No, it was not built by the US government. It was built by grad students and professors at several US Universities. Yes, they had (D)ARPA money, but there was no (D)ARPA oversight.
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