Posts by Trigun 352 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jan 2013
After it became obvious that MS weren't going to fix it soon, I would have created a temp mail box elsewhere, logged into my DNS portal and redircted the MX, SPF etc to that - just so that I could function.
I'd then use the onmicrosoft email to test the old account.
That said, this gentleman might not have the knowledge to do this.
If the average age is 50-55 instead of 35, then I can see why a company would be worried about that: You need younger people to be coming up through the system and no to have all upper positions clogged up. However.
If you're going to ask people to step aside, then be up front, honest and make it both voluntary and lucrative for older people to exit and perhaps retire.
Don't simply dump people on the heap of obselence once you've used up thier younger years.
Those are certainly positives, but you've completely skipped the (very) bad bits: echo chambers, political and social extremism of all sorts, intolerance (by all sides), "othering" particular groups (and I don't just mean minorities). The list goes on.
Also, girls are suspected to be more susceptable to the negatives of social media, making them feel more anxiety and feeling attacked (this a generalisation, of course).
A large part of why people are as crazy as sometimes they are online is down to the above and it's wide spread and seemingly getting worse. It's also affecting institutions and certainly the media, who have behaved like activists rather than (at much as they can be) neutral parties trying to bring us the news.
That last part made you sound pretty bad. We're trying to push past judging people on the colour of their skin, but clearly we have a way to go. Just dump the race stiring and racism please.
The rest of what you said: Some truth there, although if you put Labour in charge you will get something quite similar with regards outcome, just via a different route.
Here's the truth as I see it:
No matter the skin colour, no matter the party: With a some exceptions, our politicians don't have the populace's best interest at heart because they pursue their fecking ideologies FIRST and what's good for the populace a distant second.
I get your sentiment, but the US, from what I've observed, is far from what China presently is. I would say the UK (my own country) is closer to China on that score but, again, definitely not anywhere near it (China) - yet. I think all of the five eyes countries need to re-evaluate their laws with regards privacy and authoritarianism as things have slipped quite a bit in the last decade.
I tend to agree. There are some strange rules in the US, depending on the state, and I have heard some similar stories of people being charged costs for being in prison/jail.
Personally, I'm not sure that making the accused pay for such is enitrely just, although I suppose that he (the accused) could chose not to be released on bail. I would at least expect that such costs would be refunded/not charged if he is found not guilty.
I will admit that I've not tried any recently, but when I used such an app with windows 8 (heaven help me) back in the day, it was quite flawed due to the way it wasn't (possibly couldn't be) integrated into the OS, so a crashing app might lock or crash it. As I say, been a while, so things may have changed. I might hunt one down, although it might not be worth it as I'm starting to lean into linux (Mint) a bit more as I don't like where Microsoft is headed with windows.
I'm pretty free speech minded, but even I can see a need sometimes to have restrictions.
However, (normal) porn sites are not THE most harmful things on the internet. Social media is probably one of the most harmful (and biased) things that I have ever encountered in person.
As for wikipeida. While they are there "doing the right thing", maybe they could also "do the right thing" and fix the collosal bias in any page which is remotely political or cultural.
They could also implement a system to prevent malicious arsecannons from rewriting someone's personal pages just because they disagree with them, etc.
Sadly, I have to agree with what you say. I do use SMT, but it's useful to be able to easily swap ICs if you blow the living daylights out your pet poject. Also, 5V stuff is also going the way of the dinosaurs.
As for resistor/capacitor sizes: 0805. My aging eyeballs aren't as old as they used to be :).
Yep. Try buying a regular microcontroller for an electonics project: Your choices will be quite limited by the type and by the number availble. Also, the availability of many discrete logic ICs is way down and the prices way up, along with many DIP parts seemingly being withdrawn, leaving only SMD. That last bit may just be my imagination, but I've hit that wall a few times too often recently (SRAMs and some logic).
Bad time to be an electreonics hobbyist and it must be way worse if you have a business based off of that industry.
Well, not seen that Twitter has broken the law as yet. I.e Yet to be determined.
On another note (and this is not aimed specifically at you):
I find it genuinely bewildering at the almost foam-at-the-mouth reactions to the Twitter and Elon Musk situation. It's almost as if people miss Trump and have found another thing to scream and rage at because social media has wound them up so much for so long. It's incredibly depressing.
It sucks mightily to lose your job (had it happen a few times to me), but sometimes businesses change and you cannot say that twitter hasn't changed under Elon Musk (whether you like those changes or not). However, Elon Musk needs to follow the law like everyone else, although if he hasn't then he won't be the first.
That being said; Practically speaking, I'm not sure what else those laid off expect to get if their jobs no longer exist - unless they've been cheated out of money or something similar (beyond the proper process).
But maybe I've missed something (which is entirely possible).
There are some terrible plunders which do deserve firing, but beyond that I completely agree with you.
Where I work you're far more likely to get a bad outcome if you lie or cover up what you have done wrong. In IT, not knowing the source of an problem can slow a fix down considerably.
I don't think trading with china is bad, but we shouldn't sleep walk into the CCP* (via it's puppet companies) digging it's claws further into western companies and/or infrastructure. Like many governments, the CCP isn't "nice" - they feel that they want to be top dog in the world (they deny it, but their actions say otherwise), and if they have to ruin other countries in the process then they'll happily do it and with few scrupples. A good example is the belt & road initiative and the dept that has incurred to various nations.
We (the west) need to accept the CCP for what it is and act accordingly to protect ourselves and our interests in an effective and balanced (trade-wise) way.
Elon Musk (like him or hate him) has just purchased Twitter for an enourmous amount of money - waaaay more than it's worth, imo.
As such, he's still going to be mostly in control and after paying such an amount, one can argue that should be the case. So you could argue "why bother?".
Beyond the pressure from investors from his other companies, this will hopefully give a buffer so that there is less knee jerk/arbitrary-seeming decision-making which can be Elon Musk's style.
A style which, it has to be noted, has got him to where he is. However, social media/forums/etc really need calm, measured policy-making and a measure of pursuasion, not stick.
As such, having someone sit between Elon Musk and policy might be a good thing, depending on the individual, as they will need a backbone and be able to tell truth to power.
They pay should be nice though.
I tend to agree with some of what you say, but it *may* point to political corruption and so it should be examined in a fair, non-partisan, non-histrionic and transparent way. It also has to be mentioned that it's not like these kind of events are the bag of just one side: Any ideology or poltiical party can have such a scandal.
The only thing for me which is alarming is the media's reaction and the deep politicalisation (and resulting polarisation) surrounding it. You can't mention the bl**dy thing without people assuming that you're on one side of US politics or the other and then watching them go thermonuclear.
I have no issue with him stepping aside (let's be real, it probably won't be down).
What I want to see (and I've said this before) is that everyone be treated equally, transparently and consistently - no vague, arbitrary rules. That is what most people ultimately want, I think. Who wants a world where an activist or journalist can doxx someone, get away with it because they are part of some special group or club, then when you do it (which you shoudn't), you get the banhammer?
I'm going by what I've read and guess what? No one from the media is calling it out that I can see - probably because they're not commenting at all for the most part. However, I might have missed some articles, so if you have something that goes against this then I'll happily look into it.
Step back from cliff face of the "out-rage internet" and look at how various players are reacting to what is going on.
Elon Musk:
Elon Musk does tend to generate attention and controversy and I'm really not sure that I'd like to work for him. However, I'm not super worried about how he's handling twitter, but we'll we need time to see how it goes. *If* his intentions of having something more balanced, but with some censorship for bad stuff (genuine hate speech, CP, pile-ons, etc) are true, then I think the changes will ultimately be good for the everyone.
U.S. Government:
I'm not entirely surprised that they've reacted badly, because they've been caught asking for people to be censored. I expect that from my own government (UK) as they think over-censorship is good because they view us all as children.
This is far more serious for the U.S. from a stated-aims/cultural perspective, i.e. freedom of speech and all that. Although this seems to have primarily been Democrat (because of the political slant of twiter emplyees), the Repulicans did this as well. As such, both sides need public condemnation, even if they've skirted breaking U.S. law. Perhaps a new law is needed to make political censorship on "public space" platforms illegal. Something for discussion.
Media:
This is the worrying one. Most media have slammed Elon Musk with what can only be described as hit pieces. That's not to say that some points made aren't valid - some are very valid - but they also don't make any effort to try and present (steel man) Elon Musk's perspective. I'm not a conspiracy guy, but to me it's very, very plain that there is some consensus going on between media companies of how this is covered. Even to people who really dislike Elon Musk, that should be concerning. This is particularly true of the "Twitter Files", for which there seems to be a stunning silence from media companies about - even if it's just to rip it apart.
Those working at media companies need to make up their minds if they want to be journalists or activists - and I include the right side of the isle in that as well.
"...it paid CEO Philip Jansen a 30-plus percent pay rise to £3.46 million."
And this here is the issue. In bad times particularly, the percentge payrise should match across the board and even then the CEO will have more actual money out of it due to a much higher salary. As my father used to put it "Pigs at the trough"
There's a confidence that seems to go with high drive & ambition, and I think that confidence goes hyper and blinds people. It's not that they don't think that it could all go wrong, but they are confident that they can make it work before things go south. That mindset seems to stay in place right up until things fall to bits. Kind of like driving off a cliff.
I worked at a small computer shop at the time when ME came out, offering new builds and repairing 3rd party builds.
The percentage of issues (mostly BSODs) was quite high with ME, to the point that we stopped offering it as an install option and just leapt to XP when that came out. Our builds were varied, with different manufacturers - they all seemed to have issues.
I'm sure there were some machines with ME which worked (I've heard the rumours), but our experience was quite negative.
Out of interest: I'm interested in knowing which version of free speech which would be acceptable and who people think should be the arbiter?
I.e. Who gets to decide when something is a joke or not, whether something is hate speech or not and who protects us from censorship along political partisan lines? Because clearly people seem to feel that someone must decide, but who in this incredibly (and depresingly) toxic, tribalised world that we now find ourselves is even-handed enough to do this?
If many feel that the current version of twitter isn't good and an equal number of people think that the previous one wasn't good either, then who/what should be and how do you guard against corruption - particularly from your own biases?
Or should we turn off the servers & wipe the backups (and do the same for facebook et al)?
It really depends on how powerful the people who have lost money are. I'm concerned that he and those involved and those who were aware of all of this will walk away with little or no ramifications. I'm also cocnerned that, Sam Bankman Fried at least, will get Epstein'd. Neither is palatable.
Not just Republicans, but the Democrats as well.
The take from this is not to go tribal, but to look at the fact that he was buying your politicians. *That* is the issue here.
Perhaps follow the money and hold all of them to account, ask uncomfortable questions and drive the obviously corrupt officials - no matter the party - out of office.
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