* Posts by TechBearMike

30 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2013

US cable subscribers are still being 'ripped off' by creeping price increases – and this lot has had enough

TechBearMike

Photo lulz

Why does Karen have two jellyfish coming out of her head???

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

TechBearMike

How about DumbDungDon, Clueless Con?

While Apple fanbois rage at Catalina, iGiant quietly drops iOS and macOS security patches

TechBearMike

Re: 10.15 Catastrophe. Just say no!

I was given a direct link to some older versions of macOS by one of Apple's support people. That link opens the App Store, where the old software still resides, though hidden. Problem I've had is that I can't get any of these old installers to download completely. There's always a "download could not be completed" error about ⅓ to ½ of the way in. And this is with a 300Mbps download cable Internet connection!

Sometimes I really miss installers that came on CD-ROMs.

Cloudflare punts far-right hate-hole 8chan off the internet after 30 slayed in US mass shootings

TechBearMike

Re: "Rational Gun Control"

And your point, should you have one, is???

We've, um, changed our password policy, says CafePress amid reports of 23m pwned accounts

TechBearMike

Tactics

While it doesn't allow for two-way communication, if you're signing up for a website mainly to get one-way newsletters, promos, etc., I use abine's email alias service (Blur). If I start getting dodgy emails from a site that I registered on with the alias, I simply turn that alias off. Any further spam to that address bounces back to the sender. You can then delete that alias completely. Problem solved. And it's free.

Second idea: if you're signing up for a commercial site and not actively engaging in buying from them, don't put in all your info unless it's required. And you could always put in bogus info (fight fire with fire). If and when you're ready to purchase something, change to your real info, order your merch, and then revert to the bogus info. Change password, too.

Yeah, sites should be more careful, but so should consumers.

GoDaddy's daddy goes: Chief exec Scott Wagner steps down as hosting biz swings into the red

TechBearMike

Side topic, I suppose, but GoDaddy does a huge amount of philanthropic work in the Phoenix area. Some of the major projects they've underwritten are truly impressive, and I'm not easily impressed by "generous" grants that amount to $500 or so. Just sayin'.

Bit barn raising Arizona: Thirsty Microsoft mounts blazing saddle, plants 3 solar-powered server farms

TechBearMike

Re: Near Phoenix

I don't remember the exact source from several years back, but a local business paper had a very brief item about Bill Gates personally investing in a huge residential development "near the White Tanks," a mountain range on the far west side of the Phoenix metroplex. Since then it's been hush-hush, since that's another slice of semi-wilderness that will be ruined by development and contribute mightily to Phoenix's sprawl problem. Now I wonder if these two projects are hand in hand. The residential area would be about halfway between the two data center sites. Ain't speculation grand?

TechBearMike

Re: Solar power may use no water to generate electricity

It barely gets cold at night in the WINTER in the Phoenix metroplex, where these facilities are going in, much less the summer. In the high country of Arizona, yes, it can cool off at night, but again, that's not in the Valley of the Sun. We're a heat island because of all the development, concrete buildings, roads, and heavy landscaping use of small plants, bushes and decorative rock instead of shade-producing vegetation (trees [not palm trees]).

The Valley used to be full of farms, trees, fields, etc. Now it's basically a giant slab of heat-reinforcing material. I've been here eight years, and I seldom put on more than a light windbreaker and a heavy t-shirt (still with my shorts) in the winter when it's 'cold' outside. The summer is a like living in a giant convection oven from May through late October. We're lucky in July, August, and early September if our low temperature at night falls below 90 degrees F.

Open-heart nerdery: Boffins suggest identifying and logging in people using ECGs

TechBearMike

Re: Bring on the stupid

Registered nurse with a lot of telemetry experience here: I agree with some of the other comments. NO ONE'S ECG is consistent enough to use as any kind of login or a password. The only perfectly consistent ECGs one ever encounters are in the lifesaving and telemetry classes, where the ECG is computer-generated. The heart is not a mechanical device, churning out identical beat after beat after beat, at least not in humans. It tries, but it's not a looping sampler. ;-)

This is one of the nuttiest ideas I've ever heard of for using medical info. Someone missed the critical thinking course on this one.

How Apple is taming the ad biz. Just don't expect Google or Zuck to follow

TechBearMike

Re: apple doing something right for a change

I visit a number of websites that are still throwing up warning dialogs because I'm not using the ‘latest technology’ or “most secure browser” when accessed through Safari. The same dialog boxes advocate using Internet Explorer or Chrome. What the hell are they smoking?

TechBearMike

On macOS, Cookie is also a very nice (paid) cookie management app, though it might be getting redundant used with Safari.

Did Donald Trump really just ask Russia to hack the US govt? Yes, he did

TechBearMike

Re: The US government set the precedent that governments can legally hack foreign computers

"Rather, when discovered it is just a case for diplomatic tit-for-tat gestures."

Unless you have special insider knowledge (in which case, why are you wasting time commenting here when you could be making bank undermining international diplomacy?), what you're saying isn't even proveable. Growing up with a parent in, ahem, national security-related business, one of the tenets I learned is that most of the most egregious cyberespionage stuff is never going to go near the light of day even to people in the business (i.e., diplomats), much less the general public. It's that whole "need to know" concept that's a bedrock principle of Spookland.

TechBearMike

Re: re: Have you considered the possibility that Trump's words...

Isn't there already an icon that represents the contents of a 'bowel'? [sic]

Why everyone* hates Salesforce's Marc Benioff

TechBearMike

Funny thing that jobs are disappearing and relocating permanently. So basically there aren't enough jobs to go around and this trend will only grow worse, regardless of the cause. So, maybe people could start thinking about not breeding an unsupportable number of offspring into this abyss? Or maybe not having offspring at all? Could there be an opening for some consciousness-raising (and some contraception) when it's irresponsible and possibly immoral to bring crowds of offspring into a hopelessly crowded world where they have no future, economically speaking? Would that not address and remedy some of this labor force mismatch?

OK, I'll watch the flames now.

TechBearMike

Re: So close

You clearly have not had experience with a car salesperson. You left that category out.

FBI tries again to get warrantless access to your browser history

TechBearMike

Re: Good luck with that

FWIW, there are only eight seniles on the SCOTUS at present, with the fate of the ninth in limbo. Also FWIW, the three female "seniles" aren't anything near what I would call senile, however jokingly. They show solid grasp of complicated issues on a regular basis. I would expect the three of them to make good calls on technology cases.

Politician claims porn tabs a malware experiment, then finds God

TechBearMike

He probably finds pictures of naked tribal people in National Geographic profoundly erotic as well.

TechBearMike

Re: Wrong shaming

He also maintains the conviction that AOL is where all the cool kiddies hang out. <retch>

Hold on a sec. When did HDDs get SSD-style workload rate limits?

TechBearMike

Re: You can never have too much disk space (or too much memory)

MacBook Pro, 15", 2015 model with SSD: blows the previous model I had out of the water, speed-wise. The SSD is warp speed, all the time. I don't want a spinning rust drive in my primary laptop again, ever. The only problem was that the maximum size offered by Apple was 500GB, which barely contains my music and photo libraries. Now that I've learned the SSD is upgradeable by the consumer, I'm upgrading to a 1TB SSD, the capacity I had in my previous MBP.

TechBearMike

Re: SSD Caching perhaps?

The Seagate consumer drives with "Flash" cache sucked, to put it mildly. I know because I had three of them, two in a RAID enclosure. They all failed within a week of one another, just before the end of the warranty period. The replacement drives were DOA or died within weeks of arrival. So three replacement drives for nothing. Thanks for the "replacement with fully tested, refurbished products," Seagate! I wasn't going back through the hassle of another replacement cycle just to get more defective, useless product.

The original drives had become severely sluggish, probably due to the RAM cache wearing out from excessive writes. I never saw the advertised significant decrease in boot times, faster application launches, etc. In concept this seems a good idea, but I wouldn't ever spend the money with Seagate again, not even for a regular HDD. Their product was crap and the "warranty replacement" process and products were complete failures. If you need more confirmation, look at the reviews on amazon.com (US). The product was trash.

I'm saving up to replace all my HDDs with SSDs; no more "hybrid" drives, ever. It frightens me that Seagate's hybrid drives were ever targeted for enterprise customers. Zip drives were more reliable back in the day, and that's not saying much, obviously.

'Bring back xHamster', North Carolina smut watchers grumble

TechBearMike

Re: as if xHamster were the only Site.

Also, ignant fapsters addicted to, er ENJOYING, free online porn doubtless are too intellectually/technologically- and financially-challenged to hook up through a VPN service. [Oh gawd. Now I probably have to explain to AC that "ignant" isn't a typo. And what a VPN service is.]

Something useful from Cupertino?! Apple sees the light – finally

TechBearMike

Re: Obviously a definition of "new" that I was previously unaware of

When I first saw the Night Shift feature in the iOS Public Beta, I figured there was much moaning, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments at f.lux. Their idea is appropriated by Apple and it's doubtless going to be incorporated into OS X as well. Another small developer gets steamrolled by Apple. Is this type of thing patentable and who had the patent, anyway?

Donald Trump promises 'such trouble' for Jeff Bezos and Amazon

TechBearMike

Re: May I ask Americans a few questions?

@CaptainDaFt

"So Americans get to waste their vote yet again this November on one of two candidates whose whole purpose is to maintain the status quo in Washington without even realising that options exist."

The damning thing about voters' options anywhere is that the "options" have to be viable, n'est-ce pas? BTW, I don't think my vote is ever "wasted."

TechBearMike

Re: Inherited Wealth

@Kumar2012

Ah, the not-so-veiled threat. So ineffective, but so Trump-like. How high is the dirt mound you're standing on? Wouldn't want you to fall off, wee one. But enjoy the view while you can.

TechBearMike

Re: Inherited Wealth

I am a Yank, and I approve this comment.

Has Switzerland cracked the net neutrality riddle?

TechBearMike

Do what a nearby city did in Louisiana.

Lafayette developed its own fiber optic network and fought tenaciously with Big Tele and Big Cable to operate it. Citizen backing for the creation and realization of the locally-operated network was tenacious. Internet-only top speeds are 1000x1000 Mbps (1 Gbps) $109.95/month. There are lesser speed tiers, all priced below cable providers' normal costs. Everyone who lives there brags about how fast their net is.

Eighteen miles north, in my small town, had to settle for Charter with max down of 35Mbps and max up of 2Mbps, and that service was overpriced. I would give some credence to the idea of starting local and working up bit by bit where networks of the locally-owned kind are concerned.

Google burns promise of 'no big banner ads'. Don't Be Evil next?

TechBearMike

Re: Let's not be dicks about this

Given the enormous pay for staffers and even interns, the bills are coming due. When you're pampered at work as if you're at a lifelong resort stay, the money for that has to come from somewhere. I'm still waiting for Google to start charging for services.

I am a bit resentful—I save people's lives every day for peanuts pay compared to someone whose job it to make Google dominate the Internet. Staffers at Google, Yahoo, etc. are spoiled rotten and in the same league as overpaid pro athletes, Wall Street crooks, and talentless pop idols.

#endrant

Dead Steve Jobs' Apple donut SPACESHIP HQ gets permission to land

TechBearMike

Re: where do you park?

I'll go for underground parking with elaborate elevators/stairs/escalators and people movers (think airport) to get employees in and out in rapid, elegant fashion.

TechBearMike

Coming from a smaller, indigent state (Louisiana) I completely understand the City Council's action and attitude. In Louisiana, state and local governments routinely prostrate themselves in the name of attracting businesses, especially large companies. Unfortunately, in Louisiana it usually ends up that they "give away the store" to get the store; it ends up costing government/taxpayers far more than the business gives back in taxes, fees, goodwill and physical presence.

The small town I used to live in made all kinds of concessions to attract a horse racing track and casino after it was outlawed in the parish (county) just to the south. Net result: some revenues, I suppose, but a marked increase in use of law enforcement to intervene with out-of-control patrons. I saw a huge increase in the number of patients involved in MVAs, slips and falls or passing out in the casino; I worked in the local Emergency Department. The track was a magnet for undesirables and compulsive gamblers. (Good for horse owners and jockeys, though!)

And the city I lived in (and the parish government) offered so many incentives to get WalMart to build a distribution center just north of the city, complete with road improvements, infrastructure buildout, etc. There were droves of unemployed people lined up to try to get work. And the parish and city coffers, while not overflowing, are definitely deriving the benefit. The distribution center, however, disrupted an undocumented Native burial site (protest was immediately quashed) and the truck traffic to and from the center had an immediately noticeable, detrimental effect on the nearby Interstate highway and other local 4-lane roads.

I would think the Apple HQ construction itself will bring mega-dollars to Cupertino (all those construction people have to eat, live somewhere, shop, etc.), definitely benefiting the local economy in the short term. And at least Cupertino will have an architectural icon associated with their city and a company presence that should last a very long time, complete with economic benefits.

I can't fault Cupertino's interests at all in this situation. It's a huge win for them.

Hypersonic MEGA METEOR pulled from lake, then Russians drop it

TechBearMike

Re: the russians

Recently heard a radio talk show panel of engineers and other scientists who uniformly said that the state of science in Russia these days is deplorably lacking and quite behind the times. I would think this is probably the case only outside the military sector, but who knows?