Posts by ben edwards

'$5bn for Slack?! I refuse to pay!' You don't pay – and that's its biggest problem

Slack is huge in my office (50~ people). Email is relegated to things like Calendar invites and formal requests; Slack covers everything else. According to our stats, we send 2-3k messages per day - I would hate to see what that looks like as email.

Zero. Zilch. Nada. That's how much Netflix uses its own data centres now

Re: Netfix is at the mercy of Amazon

Please. Netflix is a large-scale internet company full of millenials.

Just look for a post-it on the ex-staffer's monitor with MASTER PASSWORD as the title.

Typo in case-sensitive variable name cooked Google's cloud

Re: @ ben edwards

Guys,

When you're calling variables "getSome" and "getsome", and their content is spectacularly similar, how is the compiler or another developer supposed to know if you made a mistake? This is what I was hinting at in my original post, not some drawn-out argument over which OS is best or character-sets.

The real question is why would case sensitivity take down anything when it's not a password.

Doctor Who: Oh, look! There's a restaurant at the end of the universe in Hell Bent

Re: Who moved my cheese

The Tardis translates.

Google snoops on kids via Chromebooks, claims EFF in FTC filing

I thought the idea was syncing back to the server allows the admin/google to see how kids got to unfiltered porn and other not-safe-for-work material.

Cartoon brings proper tech-talk to telly

At least..

At least it took only one character to say while using the keyboard all by herself. And she doesn't have all the top scores in all the big MMOs either...

Hold on, France and Russia. Anonymous is here to kick ISIS butt

Good intentions, bad outcome

Shutting down publicly accessible sites used by ISIS will only make it harder for the people paid to do this to do their jobs...

We suck? No, James Dyson. It is you who suck – Bosch and Siemens

Re: Digital motors?

It's powered by fingers exploring places they should not be. Digital.

Verisign warns new dot-word domains could make internet unstable

Didn't Verisign try to sell adspace on fat-fingered URLs for a while there? They have no rights to be whining about gTLDs.

WATER SURPRISE: Liquid found on Mars, says NASA

Re: Pure water can exist only between zero and 10 degrees centigrade???

The whole schtick is "liquid" water, not frozen. Frozen water can be found anywhere.

NASA rover coders at Intel's Wind River biz axed – sources

Staff who worked from home were targeted? It could be that the guys were being lazy and really not working when at home - you know, an open secret. You can always tell who works from home and who doesn't.

Hate noisy jets above you? What if they were charging your phone?

Reminds me of the theory behind installing wind catchers along highways to collect the slipstreams generated by speeding cars.

Popcorn time at Popcorn Time: More vid slurpers hauled into court

Causation/correlation?

Is it feasible that popcorn time users are unaware that their stream is pirated?

Aussie bloaters gorging on junk food 'each and every day'

Re: I'm conflicted...

Eh, the pie looks disgusting. It's mouldy inside. Must be a UK thing. "Hey look, it's not mould. It's peas. Yeah."

And ketchup? That stuff is feral. It's tamada sorce, mate.

Google bows to inevitable, stops forcing Google+ logins on YouTubers

Took too long

For those of us using personal domains on Google, it just took too long for our domains to be activated for g+. By the time I could log in using my custom email, the masses had already decided it was game over.

Get root on an OS X 10.10 Mac: The exploit is so trivial it fits in a tweet

Re: Congratulations on repeating exploits before they can be fixed

Considering the "fix" is to adopt a beta and not a public patch, your logic is flawed.

Betas are not supposed to be installed on production-level machines. The family laptop with all your non-backed up pictures counts as a production-level machine.

Grooveshark cofounder Josh Greenberg dead at 28

One more year and he could have joined the infamous "29 club" that the industry loves to maintain.

I'll see myself out.

mSpy: We haven't been breached. Customers: Oh yes you have

Seems odd that mSpy's data is readable. Shouldn't it be encrypted? Can mSpy assure its userbase that only "parents and managers" can see the data? Who's to say an mSpy employee hasn't read the texts during a slow news day?

And why is a reporter announcing that the data haul is in fact genuine? Seems like he's only going to encourage people who have the ability to get the dump to pay up for it. You know, the crowd who likes verified data dumps for phishing et al?

Silicon Valley gets its first 1Gbps home bro– oh, there's a big catch

Close, but no cigar

Going to Cupertino sounds like they want the business customers first, but any business worth its salt won't just replace existing infrastructure just for AT&T's benefit. You target the home users so they harass IT enough to do it, cuz otherwise people will just torrent at work on someone else's dime.

Don't put that duffel bag full of cash in the hotel room safe

Re: Taking you to the cleaners

Those are from the hotel's main safe, hidden securely behind the front desk where nobody would ever see it except when being loaded.

'Two-speed internet' storm turns FCC.gov into zero-speed website

Re: When I was involved....

Netflix has caching servers for ISPs to place inside their network to reduce bandwidth cost. I believe they even pay for it. The big players are choosing to not take advantage of this, as it would likely demonstrate their infrastructure isn't as sound as it should be.

Sorry, chaps! We didn't mean to steamroller legit No-IP users – Microsoft

If No-IP had been pro-active instead of re-active, MS wouldn't have had to take them to court in the first place. Those guys aren't innocent in all of this, remember.

Latest casualties of Iraq fighting: Facebook and Twitter

Am I the only one wondering how on earth ISIS is capable of running anything? I mean, c'mon, we've all seen Archer.

Japanese finally produce a ROBOT which isn't DEAD INSIDE

To quote the great Seth Green,

Can you fark it?

Apple Fanbois are the biggest pervs, say people who know

Well, it can also mean that Android users just can't get it up.

"It" being a video that finishes before the battery does.

Google's driverless car: It'll just block our roads. It's the worst

The 1-second buffer is almost TOO short in the SF bay area. There's too many intersections where people flaunt their red light at the left turn for up to 5 seconds and roll through regardless.

Comcast exec says wired broadband customers should pay-as-they-go

Re: Case matters

There's stuff all difference between 3GB, 3Gb, 3gb, and 3 gibbi bytes when you're talking about users who can swallow the entire amount (at any scale) within a day just by loading any webpage.

300gb? For real? A long, long time ago, when Australia's Bigpond cable network installed its new plans (from unlimited to quota), the cap was 3gb for the month. That's not a typo. It's been a long time since I moved from Australia to California, so perhaps things have become a bit more reasonable. But I doubt it.

I don't see something like 300gb coming from Comcast unless a healthy portion of users were actually hitting that close enough to make them pay more. Low-capacity users would have to be healthily below that, too. But given that on my phone alone I can pull down 15gb just via Apple, I have huge doubts.

'I was like, yea!' 5-year-old found his Xbox so easy to use, he hacked it

I think the xbox kid got screwed out of a bigger bounty. Bypassing age restrictions? Password spoofing? Is COPPA applicable on xbox? Could he have bought stuff? How does it affect ESRB?

Seems like a "professional" security guy would have been given a few grand for this discovery.

Oscars backer Samsung can't catch a break: Host Ellen snaps stars on iOS

It seems utterly insane that just giving a check to an organization voluntarily - for advertising - allows a vendor to dictate what happens front and backstage.

Of course, I also think it's bloody stupid that a vendor can buy the naming rights to an arena they had no hand in building. Like the HP's Pavillion in San Jose or Oracle's arena.

The Sun ERUCTATES huge ball of GAS at 4 MILLION MPH

Why worry?

If it really can burn us, what is there to really worry about? I'd rather go in the first attack than hang around waiting to be eaten by the "survivors".

Sony's PlayStation 4 pwns Xbox in the United States

Re: Popcorn

So what you're saying is, sit down and have some popcorn because Chris Hansen is on his way?

Larry Ellison: Technology has 'negatively impacted' children

Wow; the lack of cynicism here shows how right he is.

Not. With the rise of helicopter parenting, the coddling of the children's activity and choices, the denounciation of children actually learning anything at school (OMG THEY CAN'T TEACH MY SNOWFLAKE ABOUT TITS!!!), it's no wonder that kids are turning to one of the few approved channels of entertainment.

You know how I know it's approved? The parents provide the kit.

/causation, correlation, et al.

Coca Cola slurps millions of MAC addresses

Thirsty!

It could be for a regional campaign, too. Maybe one of the smaller markets where the competitor rules supreme.

Sweet murmuring Siri opens stalker vulnerability hole in iOS 7

Re: Siri.....find...Chinese...restaurant....

That's really the best you can do? The original has "are belong to us." If you just changed the casing from "us" to "US", you'd have a much more apt line of text. It could be improved in other areas too, but this is a glaring point.

Beam me up? Not in the life of this universe

Calling it a teleporter would be a misnomer. Since they're talking about copying/mapping, it would be a cloning system so there's bugger all impact on the original victim. Teleportation would require the literal deconstruction of the source.

And isn't DNA in itself highly compressed like a zipfile?

Netflix names Google Fiber the fastest ISP in the US

Re-read

You guys are misreading sustained service levels across a site for a month, not bursts obtained through speedtest.net. The report is netflix bragging about how much data they can deliver per user, more than how connected the user is to their isp or to netflix's CDNs.

Accidental discounts land Apple in NZ's Disputes Tribunal

Huh.

I had always thought that the charge on the credit card was the accepted price and cannot be cancelled easily by either party without triggering all kinds of interesting processes. I doubt it matters if he contacted Apple; the big question is was he already dinged on his credit card or not before the order cancelled. (He obviously was or they wouldn't have shipped.)

Google loses battle for goggle.com

"Win?"

That landing page doesn't say "Win." It says "get," which is devious-speak for "you can buy one from us."

CPU cycles for stars: theSkyNet wants your sandbox

Seti@home

How will this be truly different than seti@home? A rose by any other name..

Google+ offers new 'Ignore' feature

On the wane?

Of course it's on the wane. They have yet again neglected to enable profiles for Google Apps users, just like they did for Wave and Buzz. On top of that, I'm sick of having to opt-out of email chains from enthusiastic beta testers who don't seem to care if I've expressed interest in it or not. This should be opt-in, not opt-out.

Tilera routs Intel, AMD in Facebook bakeoff

Mettle?

Pretty sure mettle is correct here...

Cloud iTunes DESTROYS music business FOREVER!

Same old...

The subscription fee, even divided among Apple and the labels, is still more money than would have been earned if the service didn't exist. We can all see the way Netflix is changing the video market, and now Apple is doing an equivalent (perhaps better?) version for music.

I'm surprised to see that few people realize that it's another step closer to a Star Trek era where everything you want is everywhere there's a signal.

Apple pilfers rips off student's rejected iPhone app

Ripped off? More like took an idea already in the pipeline and pre-empted...

He ripped off the wifi+sync logos and trademarked names and threw them together... Shouldn't he have to pay a royalty for that? He certainly has the income for it, with 50,000 sales at an average of $7/pop.

Apple stuns Wall Street with 95% earnings surge

Expectations

Just how much profit did they expect to make? $5 on revenue of $20b?

Documents in Assange rape probe leak onto the net

Hm

It's not an attack on his WL deals, it's an attack on his masculinity (performance, hygiene). They can't hurt him through his social behavior, but the bedroom behavior is a good way to kneecap anybody.

Google gins search formula to favor its own services

If you expected otherwise...

Pimping their own products? Who would have seen THAT coming? I'm surprised Microsoft doesn't do it on the same scale as Yahoo! or Google.

Facebook: Why our 'next-gen' comms ditched MySQL

Multiple copies of same message

Am I the only one confused on why they're sending a clone of a message to the recipients? Cloning a 200kb message to 6 people, along with the backend to shard it out, takes way more resources over just letting those 6 people reference the original. If the reader "deletes" it, they'd simply be removing their link to the post, while still letting the 5 other readers get it...

BOFH: The PFY Chronicles Part The Third

The end?

Looks suspiciously like the BofH is about to meet his ultimate demise.

End of an awesome series perhaps?