
This is scary
I'm taking my code off GitHub before it's too late. I don't want to be responsible for ruining the models.
151 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2011
I have run my own private mail server for many years. It used to be fun, now it's just tedious. I wrote a big rant but deleted it. The tldr is that it sounds like AC's mail server is being flagged as spam. Gmail, Apple and Outlook, whom I'm guessing are providing mail services for quite a lot of companies, would refuse to deliver mail, often silently.
I have a small mail server running on a Linode VPS. It was up and down as to whether emails got delivered. Google, Microsoft and Apple were the most likely to refuse delivery. I traced the block to UCEPROTECTL3. I looked into their policy, as all the other blacklist sites were fine. Turned out that although MY IP address was clean, as were all other in the subnet, I still get marked as spam because I'm with Linode. They are asking for £20pm to whitelist my IP. Sounds like a protection racket to me. Thankfully, the server is so low volume I can use a reputable mail forwarder for next to nothing.
Rant over
Microsoft disabled the purchasing of physical goods but allowed unlimited digital purchases ... including digital cash? Damn. This guy got greedy/stupid, but I bet there's a few worried devs at Microsoft right now that spotted this problem and chose to exploit it a little rather than report it.
Is it a promotion of a monoculture if Microsoft are getting a seat at the Chromium table, not just Google? Just a thought. I haven't done much web development, thankfully, but getting cross-browser support was a pain and seemed really hacky. I can't imagine there's many webdevs saying "oh, no! Fewer browsers to support!"
For the record, I've never used Edge so I cannot comment on its merits.
That depends on what is meant by an iteration. No way do they do a complete redesign and build in that time. That's probably the time it takes to design, test, build and run one component or set of components.
Teams generally have (or at least used to have) a B spec car at some point in the season. The B spec is to fix any problems found in the opening races and also to copy any good ideas another team has. I wouldn't expect even Merc and Ferrari to be able to bring out a new spec car every 375 hours.
Exactly. Some people seeing domain.com in the address bar might not realise that they are looking at www.domain.com, then type domain.com next time they want that site, ending up somewhere else. Unfortunately--re the fix--for anyone who will be likely to do that it won't matter. Messing with the URL is dumb and dangerous. Are we running short on screen space for URLs now?
I teach programming at university and I'm struggling to find a suitable replacement for java as a 'learning to program' language. Python is the obvious choice, but the syntax is likely to lead to students that struggle to pick up different languages. I know I'm not alone in thinking meaningful whitespace is a dumb idea, despite the number of down votes this post might attract.
The Gnu Image Manipulation Program tells you exactly what the program is and does, unlike InkScape. It's a bit of a mouthful, though, so gets the (official?) acronym 'Gimp'.
I think the problem is there's only so many descriptive names you can have for a file browser, text editor, photo editor, etc., so a lot of names tend to be jokes or puns which get worse as they are forked. Examples: Hudson -> Jenkins, Mustache -> Handlebars, JavaScript -> CoffeeScript
1. Is Files really that bad? I've used Mac's Finder, so I know how bad things can be
2. Yes! I get to go to the sysadmins at Uni and say 'I told you so!' :-)
3. I'll be sticking with Mint and Cinnamon
Something else occurs to me (that'll probally get me a tonne of down-votes), Unity and W8 Metro were both designed to put the same interface on desktop machines and phones, right? What a stupid idea. I've also heard people say the same things about both UIs; that is, it's not so bad when you get used to it. That's not a good argument.
Perhaps it's just that I'm rapidly approaching middle-age and I don't like radical ideas anymore.
@Pompous Git
"So how come homeopathy cured the warts on my goat's teats? I find it very hard to believe that was psychological."
Really? I find it hard to believe that's NOT psychological. And anyway "homeopathy cured the warts on my goat's teats" doesn't meet any scientific rigour requirements.
@Velv
I'm new to PlusNet, but I managed to squeeze an amazing full speed fibre out of them. I worked out how much will will cost me over the life of the two year deal. When that's over I'll be looking for another great deal. That'll be with PlusNet if they are willing, or whoever has the best new offer at the time. I certainly won't be going onto 'full price' after the contract has expired.
Out of curiosity, does anyone still care about landlines anymore? We had the option to keep our old number, but we declined. The new number gets pretty much zero spam calling (and we never give it out). For me, the landline/phone is an inconvenience that comes bundled with the broadband.
@DropBear - There's more to juggling than muscle memory, although it plays an important part. It's hand-eye coordination that matters; just try juggling with your eyes closed. With very limited information about the trajectory of the balls, the brain can extrapolate the trajectories and move your hand to roughly where it needs to be. I think muscle memory is more inportant for throwing the ball on approximately the right trajectory in the first place.
I agree that our brains are just a bunch of specialised tools, but we can combine them to do things that we haven't actually evolved to do. We may not be fully general -- we can't learn everything. But we have a level of generality way beyond any current AI, and general AI is a very hot research area right now.
It's pretty darn general. The brain evolved for survival, but this gave us a brain that can learn lots of different skills at the same time. You can learn algebra, French, astophysics, poetry, origami ...
It can also do pretty amazing things without you needing to actually, ahem, *think* about it. A good example is juggling. I can juggle no problem, but if I was to try to work out the maths of juggling I would go mad.
It wasn't that long ago encryption was considered a munition, but those days are long gone.
This whole thing is a farce. Apps like WhatsApp moved over to encryption *because* of the amount of snooping governments want over their (mostly) law-abiding citizens. You reap what you sow. Don't complain when your poorly thought-out, ill-conceived and utterly ridiculous plans back-fire. And don't make things worse with a knee-jerk, even more poorly thought-out and more ridiculous reaction.
Even if you could change the laws of mathematics and they get their super-safe backdoor into otherwise (practically) unbreakable encryption, what then? I would imagine terrorists and -- worse -- copyright infringers will just use non-crippled encryption, leaving LEAs across the globe spending all their time decrypting peoples' cat pictures and messages about what they had for dinner.
fsck
ed by SHA-1 collision? Not so fast, says Linus Torvalds
"The mathematical operation should produce a unique result for any given input"
Given that "any given input" is conceptually an infinite set, always expecting a unique 160bit hash is just ludicrous. The main thing with these hashes is that small changes in the code will give hugely differing hashes, making collisions rare. We all know that it is possible to engineer (by brute force) a collision, but it's a hard problem. Doing so in such a way as to be undetectable in Git is an even harder problem. Way harder. I look forward to seeing the attempts, though :-)
I used to have a very cheap VPS hosted by a company who have since ceased trading. One day my VPS was acting up, so I raised a support ticket. The reply stated that a disk in the RAID had failed and the host had gone into read-only mode. Not to worry, the disk will soon be replaced and we'll be be back up and running in no time.
The next day the VPS was gone completely. I raised another support ticket and was told that the *wrong disk* had been replaced, losing all data.
Thankfully I take back-ups, but it was still a pain to find another provider and configure the new VPS. The offending provider did offer sincere apologies and month free, but I declined.
Like working for microsoft? (joke icon)
But seriously - the article says the appointment was made 'involuntarily'. I mean shit! Anyone actually wanting to do this job absolutely must not be allowed to do it.
And on a related note, a very good friend of mine, many years ago, managed to get the job he really wanted - a police man. That's a job you couldn't pay me enough to do, but someone's gotta do it. After a short time in the job he was a wreck. All the horrible shit he had to deal with on a daily basis was really grinding him down. I had to remind him that most people aren't all that bad, but his job is to deal with the ones that are, giving a warped sense of reality.
He got over it by becoming a tough son-of-a-bitch.
I'm not sure what you would have to become to deal with what Soto and Blauert had to deal with.
Yep. I recently read this article on the BBC regarding dark net drug dealings and the postal service:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38223838/is-your-postman-delivering-drugs
Summary: Buy/sell your drugs on the dark net. It's pretty damn safe.
Good work, BBC. I'm not sure that's what you had in mind when you published that article, but that's what it boils down to. They pretty much tell you how to do it. I'm surprised there weren't any links.
We are struggling at the moment to get machines to learn some knowledge without forgetting it when it learns something new. When (if) machines actually understand that knowledge, then things will get really interesting.
Also, in pedant mode, its "forward model", not "forward mode"
I agree that citations would help the cause, but it doesn't take anything other than common sense to see that being able to feed an addiction to nicotine without burning tobacco is definitely a step in the right direction.
I agree that vapour products should be regulated, just like other nicotine products (patches, gum, etc.), but those products are allowed to be advertised and no-one is trying to get them banned. I'm struggling to see any significant difference between nicotine gum and nicotine vapour, other than vaping _looks_ like smoking.
I made this exact comment in the preview feedback. I was hoping not to be alone in this.
Incidentally, the fscking GWT nagware has recently reappeared on my Win7 machine, despite having done all the removals/disables/regedit shit. Take the fucking hint, Microsoft. I don't want your shit - not even for free.
I used the trick on one of my servers. It was constantly being hit with login attempts over ssh. None ever succeed, but I didn't like it. I changed ssh port away from 22 and problem solved.
I tried denyhosts, but occasionally locked myself out trying to remember the right password. Not an insurmountable problem, but it's not (or wasn't, maybe) trivial to unblock an ip address.
I'm an unlimited data plan with Three, 4GB tethered. It used to be unlimited tethered, too, before 4G came along as a 'free' upgrade. I'm guessing the reason is that people could use it instead of home broadband, as it's probable a lot faster for some. This must have hammered Three's network, so they would have to choose between upgrading their 4G infrastructure, or limit tethered data. Guess which one they did (#makeitright my arse).
As a netflix customer, I'm happy to get lower quality on my mobile. It fits with my data plan an usage well. I'm not so happy that it isn't an optional thing.
As a Three customer, I'm not happy that the poor infrastructure means it has to be this way. Personally, I was much happier with a truly unlimited 3G plan and would choose that now if it was an option.
Where did the kick-bait headline get 'And kill you' from? The field notice linked in the article states that the symptoms are 'The switch fails to power on.' Also, the label shows 24v or 48v DC input. Still not seeing any risk of death here, even if no fuses were blown. There are models that can take 240v, but there's very little danger there either ... unless you are running one of these off a power circuit without ELCBs, in which case all bets are off.