Posts by AJ MacLeod 475 posts • joined 11 May 2006
Nobody was suggesting that it was the brain dead content of TikTok videos that was of interest to the CCP. Having malware installed on millions of powerful mobile computers with cameras, microphones and wireless network access on the other hand is the sort of thing "intelligence" agencies a just few years ago could hardly of dreamed about.
"Three more NASA 'nauts will be sat in the capsule this time"
I suppose I had better clarify, since this horrific abuse of the fine English language has become far too common. They will be SITTING in the capsule! Afterwards, they will have sat in the capsule, and at some point in the future they will sit in the capsule.
Skype was fairly revolutionary in that it was the first decent VOIP solution that could be used by granny - however that was all BEFORE Microsoft bought it. Ever since then it has been abandoned to the point that I very rarely come across a customer that still uses it ( pre-MS it was ubiquitous)
The trouble with that is it's not guaranteed to be on every machine you connect to; whereas for decades you could rely on "win-r notepad enter" and be typing away. It's like vi on any unix-like OS... you might as well learn it as no matter what you _like_ using, you can rely on "vi filename" doing what you expect.
There may be many things said against it, but something like this IS desperately needed. The reason SMS has been such a success is that for decades every mobile device has supported it. You don't need to create an account, download an app, or buy a certain overpriced brand of phone - it's just there, and you know that essentially anyone with a mobile number can receive it.
Like it or not, RCS has come closer than anything else so far to achieving this, and there definitely appears to be some gain in momentum recently. Apple supporting RCS would be the next biggest step, IMO... I'd hope that they could look at Blackberry and see the future for iMessage.
Running any kind of server is a bit of a pain of course but I'm not so sure it's all _that_ difficult. I certainly could never hope to provide the redundancy that Google supposedly have, but over a decade and a half of running various (mostly) small-scale mail servers I'm pretty sure that their total non-availability has still been less than GMail's IMAP and SMTP outage just today.
Far better to have lots of smaller providers dealing with far fewer accounts each, so that individual outages are much less widely disruptive.
Regarding putting up with Google et al's slurping... in my personal experience the vast majority of people sadly either don't know or even care, and the younger folk seem even less bothered than most.
I'd suggest that what's required is something a few decades LESS "modern" - how about ditching cancerous authoritarian providers like GMail and Outlook.com and going back to completely standards compliant email services that don't bind you to provider lock-in or intrude into your entire online life?
I have been struggling for years to convince customers that gadgets like this which require third party services to function are a waste of money... mostly unsuccessfully.
Then again, I've just been bitten by something similar myself this week - I've just had to replace my ten year old Blackberry phone as Vodafone are unable to get BIS to work since my contract changed. I was aware of and unhappy about the necessity for BIS for email to function, but it was the only smartphone available at the time which fulfilled my requirements and I suppose a decade isn't bad going for a smartphone...
(The saddest thing is that the phones now available are even less suitable than the ones around ten years ago!)
NX Client via SSH is not even nearly the same risk as a whole PC connected by VPN. You would need very specialised (and effectively worthless) malware (essentially a trojan copy of NXClient) running on the client machine in order to make any kind of use at all of the secured connection.
However, you are the one that's missed the main point of the article, which is about the licensing pitfalls and uncertainty involved with (in particular) Microsoft software and remote working. Open source software simply does not have these issues at all; use it on one desktop in your bedroom or ten thousand company laptops distributed across the world, nobody minds, nobody will come snooping about demanding an audit.
Folk using NX don't require a VPN connection and if necessary can have a thin client to take home - all it needs is any old Ethernet connection plugged in and it works exactly as if it were on their desk at work.
This is not fantasy, I have customers who have been working this way for years... it's a myth that you absolutely require Windows on the desktop to run even a medium sized business.
"so as long as you could remember "Hugh, Pugh, Barney, McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub"
The snag is that there never was a Hugh - these were all surnames aside from McGrew who got his first name mentioned too. There were two actually "Pugh"s. I wish I could recall useful knowledge as readily as this trivia!
I admit I had to do a quick search for the info but the LG Prada had a capacitive touchscreen before the iPhone was released - not very long, but it was out there nonetheless. I still hate touchscreens as much as I did back then, even if they are far less bad now!
Apple's record on actual innovation is pretty bare considering the size and history of the company... I can't recall anything at all significant that they were the inventors of. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that of course, but it's irksome when their marketing and devotees make such a big deal of how innovative they are...
Remind me what was so new and unique about the iPhone when it was released to undeserving mortals? As I recall, everything it did was already available from other manufacturers; the only difference I can think of is that Apple applied their marketing / brainwashing expertise and suddenly the great unwashed suddenly decided they needed a phone like that too.
This is one of the most bizarre comments I've seen in ages... back when AMD first made 64 bit CPUs mainstream Open Source software was practically the only software available to take advantage of them! (It had of course been running on other 64 bit architectures for years, unlike the vast majority of commercial Windows software.)
It's not clear from your comment whether or not you know this already, but UniFi networks don't require vendor cloud services, mobile apps or cloud accounts either to configure or operate.
You can just run your own controller within your network (their software runs on a commendably wide range of platforms) and that's it - if you want to manage it from outside your network you can just forward the relevant ports or use a VPN.
I am dead against devices which require ongoing vendor support or licensing just to operate normally and was wary of UniFi with all the talk of "cloud" features but overall I've been pretty impressed over the past few years.
The attraction for me personally (with a Brother all-in-one inkjet) and the third party cartridges I use is this:
1) The quality of the ink is exactly the same as the official Brother stuff as far as I can tell (which is what matters.)
2) The printer, despite being used less often than is good for an inkjet, has never gummed up, even slightly.
3) I'm not sure what your definition of "much" is, but when the official cartridges cost £53 for a colour pack and the third party cost less than £4.10, I'd say you couldn't possibly be more wrong.
Oh - one last point, the third party cartridges seem (visually/weight) to contain considerably more ink than the official ones and last what seems like double the time, although I haven't actual figures to put on it.
The "trouble" is that while valid but disposable email addresses are easily generated and confirmed, most sites that take phone numbers as 2FA require you to prove that you can receive calls/messages on that number.
(I put trouble in quotation marks as being unable to sign up to this particular site seems to me like a benefit rather than a problem.)
The right hand "convenience button" on my Blackberry broke this year. Rather disappointing, it's only been in daily use for 9 years!
(Flying off the car roof onto the tarmac at 50 MPH might have had something to do with it, fortunately the left hand button wasn't doing anything useful so the camera is still quickly activated when required)
I bet it's not as good as a Z88 in terms of battery life or typing accuracy... That thing was way ahead of its time in many ways. I personally would be happy to sacrifice screen size for a real keyboard - I just won't buy a device of this type (including phones) that doesn't have physical buttons.
At that price, I'd want something more than just a really nice keyboard! My current keyboard (Lenovo "Preferred Pro" or something) was a whole £8.95 on Amazon and it's at least an order of magnitude or two better than any Apple keyboard I've used over the past 23 years...
I'm not sure it required 4000 people to write it, but I have been consistently impressed with the PAYE-RTI software HMRC provide for small businesses. It's straightforward to use, has been very reliable and most importantly is decently cross-platform, including support for Linux. Tax money well spent for once, IMO.
Absolutely brilliant move - eliminate the one reason that any sane person may have for becoming a customer! I have a better idea for saving cash and improving efficiency... fire everyone within the top 15% of salary level and let the people who actually make things work get on with it in peace.
Interesting - the results pretty well mirror my own experience, even though I'm dealing with far fewer drives (still hundreds of them.) Overall, I won't buy a Seagate drive if I can possibly avoid it; for well over a decade they have consistently been the worst in terms of reliability for me.
Most annoying is the way they seem to avoid logging real SMART failures - even obviously knackered Seagate drives will often pass an extended SMART test.
Then again, I won't buy a spinning drive at all if I can possibly avoid it - SSDs may fail in a more brutal manner but they have been orders of magnitude more reliable in my experience, even fairly ancient ones.
As recommended above, Void is quite BSD-like in many ways (including a ports-like packaging system.) It won't hold your hand in any way though, so maybe isn't the easiest way in to Linux; the documentation is fairly minimal but other than the init system and package management there's really nothing void-specific so there's tons of useful info online. (The Arch wiki is very good for example, though I don't personally like the distro.)
PulseAudio got a bad reputation with me because despite claiming to do things I wanted it completely failed to deliver; not helped by the fact that the minuscule amount of "documentation" available was either wrong or useless. Jack works pretty well on the rare occasions I need that kind of really careful attention to audio paths and ALSA / dmix works perfectly well everywhere else.
Void wasn't always so pure and untainted... in fact I hadn't realised until a month or two back that they'd abandoned systemd ages ago and so had ignored it up until then.
Which is a shame, as it turns out to be a great distro, a huge breath of fresh air in terms of lack of bloat. I'll stick with Gentoo for my desktop, but for lower-powered machines or those random laptops lying around Void is my default choice now.
I regularly remove Candy Crush (and the ten million assorted other abominations MS force feed hapless users) from new PCs only to see it "....Installing" in the start menu a second or two later. Usually I can win the race after uninstalling it the second or third time, after which is stays out until the next Windows update of any significance.
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