Posts by FrankeeD 20 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2013
My complaint with Google search is somewhat different. As a research librarian, I regularly use Google to look for “grey literature” - any relevant material published outside the typical academic publishing streams.
Over the past decade, it’s become more frustrating to use, as it regularly ignores specific discipline-related search terms because it would give me too few results, none of which contain anything they can sell me.
Spelling autocorrect is a related annoyance where a specialist term is “corrected” to something different, but one that can be overcome by copying and pasting search terms from a word-processing document.
I was working at a Japanese university in the late 1990s, teaching a language class. Using the internet for language teaching was still relatively new, so I was constantly on the lookout for good suggestions.
My class was in a computer lab that was set up so that the students sat in pairs with their own computers and in the middle between them was a monitor that could be used to mirror my computer.
I'd set them a research task and was using my computer to explore ideas for web design. I came across a site that had a list of award-winning web-design sites, so I clicked on one -- and was rewarded by a porn site full of images of naked bodies in various poses, all faithfully reproduced on the students' monitors. I quickly clicked the "close" button on the web browser and discovered -- pop-unders, cascading down the page faster than I could close them. I finally hit the button that shared my screen and ended the unintended show.
The students, mostly 20-year-old women, were highly amused at my obvious embarrassment, and I learned a valuable lesson.
"One gotcha that still catches people out of course is opening an attachment because it'll save a temporary copy. If you forget that, edit and don't save it to a new location then you can expect to lose the changes and that is crap to be honest."
I was an academic librarian for years and students losing temporary files was a constant problem. They would log into a library computer, download a project they were working on, spend an hour working on it, save it, and then discover that they couldn't find the edited document because they'd been working on the temporary file.
Usually, if the student could remember which computer they were working on, IT could recover the document, but it was always stressful for everyone. For many students it was their first encounter with networked computers and not always a happy one.
I was an academic librarian for years and we always got IT related questions, mainly because we were easily available and not located in a basement across campus. For a number of years we had a problem where faculty who had a laptop connected to the LAN for printing but were using wireless for internet access, couldn't access the library resources. It was a common enough problem that al the librarians knew the workaround (unplug the ethernet connection to the LAN) but not a big enough problem that IT was interested in figuring out what was happening.
One day a faculty member was in the library and stopped by to mention that he was having trouble accessing the library resources from his computer in his office. I asked him if it was a laptop or desktop computer, as it wasn't a problem with desktops. He said it was a desktop, so I told him he'd have to check with IT.
About 20 minutes later he was back to tell me that he thought perhaps he did have a laptop computer in his office. I'm assuming he thought that because it was on his desk that it was a "desktop" computer. I gave him the fix and never heard back.
Facebook's targeted ads regularly provide amusement. I liked a comment by my nephew where he was discussing racial differences and ended with something along the lines of "we all bleed the same colour of blood" which resulted in an ad from a blood donor clinic in my feed. I posted a 20-year-old photo of my son when he was 6 and promptly got an ad for a Montessori pre-school. The most bizarre ad came after I was looking at hiking boots on a local outdoor store's website, which for some reason resulted in the appearance in my feed of a product called "Go Girl - Pink", a device that allows women to pee standing up - interesting, but not so a pressing need.
What puzzles me is that many of the people propagating these allegations of election fraud are the same ones who argue that governments, and leftist/socialist/communist governments in particular, are so incompetent that they're incapable of doing anything well and should be reduced to the bare minimum.
Yet the election fraud propagators credit these same bungling "socialists" with pulling off a massive election fraud so sophisticated, i.e., involving multiple states and counties, not to mention both Republicans and Democrats, that it's impossible to find any evidence acceptable in a court of law.
My favourite part of the description of what supposedly happened was, ""A preliminary forensic examination of the thumb drive determined it contained malicious malware," the complaint said.'
Presumably, 'malicious malware' is the evil twin of the kinder, gentler 'benevolent malware.'
In his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge relates a story where reporter Ralph Barnes interviewed a man apparently fairly high up in the Soviet GPU. He asked:
"Why is it that in the USSR innocent people get arrested? The GPU man, it seems fairly shook with laughter at this, to the point that it was quite a while before he could get his answer out. Of course we arrest innocent people, he said at last in effect; otherwise, no one would be frightened. If people are only arrested for specific misdemeanours, all the others feel safe, and so are ripe for treason. . . . By making justice subjective and arbitrary, every citizen can be plausibly arrested and charged at any time, with the result that they live in a permanent state of incipient guilt and fear."
The UK seems to be moving in the same direction.
They continue to kill off the only products in which I have an interest and raise the prices to ridiculous levels on the others, so it's hard to get very excited about any of their new product offerings. The iPhone SE format - gone; iPad Mini, not gone, but there's no way I'll pay more than $400 for something containing a chip that's 4 generations old. Clearly they made a cynical calculation that they'd make as much selling old tech without any upgrade costs as they would had they given us newer internals.
Racist? No. But your editor reminds me of the organization for which I do some part-time online library reference support. They offered sensitivity training to prevent us from committing "microaggressions" against those using our service. Given that microagressions by definition can only be committed against a marginalized group and the fact that the reference service is totally anonymous, I declined their training offer.
I use a password manager, so length and complexity are no problem. However, once I did get the following message about my new password - "Password strength: Outstanding!" and then below it a password failure message saying: "Password must contain one number or symbol."
A perfect example of what he's on about.
I have a 2011 MBP with the 1680 x 1050 screen. Not retina, but still a very fine screen. I have the RAM maxed out to 16 GB and a 1 TB 7200 RPM drive. When prices drop on SSTs I'll probably add one of those, either in the optical bay or as a replacement for HDD. Other than the screens, I don't find the new retina machines appealing. I still use Ethernet when my wireless acts up, I need a security slot as I spend part of my day working in a public area, and SSTs are still to expensive for my taste.
Sure the new retina MBPs are faster, but when was the last time you found yourself waiting for you computer to do something because it was too slow? I rarely re-start, so the faster boot time isn't an attraction.
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