Posts by anthonyhegedus 1070 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2016
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs and all that nonsense are only good for self-selling; they have no purpose other than to perpetuate themselves. It's funny how all the people who bang on about how good they are, are people who've just made a lot of money buying and selling the things. They have no intrinsic purpose (or very little).
The inconvenience of these cookies and being followed by advertisers is to me at least not as great as the inconvenience of having stupid cookie warning notifications on every site I visit, even if I've said Yes to them before.
Please please please... is this new google thing going to mean the end of cookie notification popups?
And gradually, bit by bit, Microsoft turn a once-useful OS into a cloud-only system with web-browsing capabilities by removing functionality, on little app at a time.
How long before File Explorer is deprecated ("we don't need local file management because you can do it online with onedrive and sharepoint") or notepad (same reason, and you can use word anyway). Then there's the calculator (you can do calculations with Bing's AI thingy) and the ability to run office apps at all. It'll end up like ChromeOS, totally unable to function without an internet connection.
That elongated muskrat seems to be running Tesla like some sort of exclusive club: fuck regulations, fuck safety - this nominally functional machine has been designed by elon to be a toy for his fanboys. From video games on its main screen, to illegal self-driving modes, he just doesn't care what he does. It'll hopefully all come tumbling down soon. He's a maverick and the bad sort.
Yes, I often think things like that to myself - as in "what would my 25-year-old self think of driving around listening to the radio streamed across the internet to a mobile phone in real time, then sent via another radio signal to my car radio, all digitally?" especially as the car radio is perfectly capable of picking up the FM transmission in the first place.
My first computer had 1KB of memory and I was assured by the company that sold it to me that it was somehow equivalent to 4KB in a computer costing several times as much.
My first foray onto the internet was through Usenet in 1991 - possibly even 1990 - when we swapped our compuserve account at work for a Demon internet account. I can't remember what client I used but it was on a Sun Sparcstation. I ended up having many a topical discussion on uk.telecom.mobile and alt.tasteless. I remember when the telecom group started to get filled with newbies who started with the stupid questions.
I recall one who asked how to attach a modem to a Mercury 121 Motorola phone to get onto the internet. How we made fun of such a silly concept! This was pre-GPRS and probably pre-circuit-switched data. Someone jokingly suggested that it was of course possible, and I continued the joke by advising that you can open up your phone and swap out a couple of capacitors and attach your modem internally to a couple of contacts. I went on to say that you could get speeds of up to a 100Kbits per second, faster than a regular modem! Nobody believed me because such speeds were fantastical.
I wonder what the effective bitrate is, taking into account presumably LOTS of error correction and redundancy information. Still, it's pretty impressive. I wonder how the transceiver orbiting Mars keeps itself even aligned with Earth. There must be several times a day/month/year when it's impossible to use because other pesky objects like suns or moons get in the way
Every single phrase uttered by the infosys marketing team, president and VP is utter bollocks. It makes me glad I left the corporate world to do my own thing. I don't have to put up with this total tummy-rubbish.
"sonic identity is needed because stakeholders now spend more time interacting with brands through digital channels, and those channels are getting crowded" - yep, corporate-speak bollocks.
"to amplify human potential and create the next opportunity for people, businesses and communities' – when stakeholders interact with the brand." - word salad, with manure dressing
"The Infosys tune will serve as an auditory reinforcement of our unique brand identity" - marketing drivel
"help deepen the emotional connection our stakeholders have with Infosys by cueing in the promise of opportunity creation that is integral to our brand purpose." - WOW! That is the verbal equivalent of sauteed goat vomit.
"We aspire for the sound of Infosys to signal and be recognized as the sound of opportunity for all our stakeholders, across markets," - the sound of souls dying in agony
If 1970s technology can reliably and consistently sort itself out and talk to Earth after nigh-on 50 years, think what a craft with today's tech could achieve. Even using radiation-hardened 'old' but relatively proven hardware based on, say, 20 year old technology would be a massive leap over what VGER can do.
I'm thinking even higher resolution photos of Saturn's moons, Pluto etc.
Elongated Muskrat thinks that his oh-so-important "first amendment rules" on free speech apply to the rest of the world. Luckily, in the UK, free speech is limited by rules on hate. And too right, they want to put people off twitter: that's the whole point. Musk lets all the right-wing nutjobs have their say and yes of course it's going to put advertisers off. He hasn't got a fucking clue what he's up against, the pot-infused narcisist.
It really is a case of the Empreror's new clothes. The man is a fraud, his companies are all clearly dodgy. Rockets that are *meant* to explode? yeah, right... and self-driving cars that aren't? Yeah, that's part of his playbook. And cars the exaggerate range? that too.
What's the point in 'full autonomy' if the human needs to be able to take over at a monent's notice? If you're not driving, you're not concentrating. And if you're not concentrating, you're not in any position to 'take over'. The more I see that man do, the more convinced I am that the power has gone to his head. I wouldn't trust him to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions emblazoned on the heel, let alone take the helm of a CAR company. And as for Twitter? he broke it. He may have some grand plan in that weird excuse for a brain he has, but it's not going to work by alienating the public.
...is all the stupid bloody names they use for parts of the system that could just be named something sensible. For example:
Windows: File Explorer
Mac: Finder
Linux: Nemo, Nautilus, Krusader, Thunar, Dolphin, Kaja...
It's just *confusing* for the average user. And these things change all the time.
And then there's the browsers. There's no easy way to just install 'chrome' - yes, you can install Chromium. And yes, there's firefox. But people like to use Chrome and are familiar with it.
What I'm talking about is the ease of use for ordinary home users or small businesses. People want compatibility with everything else and they want simplicity. Moan all you like about Windows if you're a Mac user and vice-versa but at least it's relatively simple to get stuff working with both those systems. Why would any small business try linux when:
- it won't run Sage
- it won't run Chrome (yes, I know it runs Chromium but not out of the box)
- it doesn't come with proprietary drivers (the average business user couldn't give two hoots about 'but it's not open source' - they just want to get things done!)
- it doesn't run MS Office (yes, I know it runs LibreOffice but I've tried introducing that and there's a reason that companies will use paid-for-MS365 over free-libreoffice, and that's because it works with everything else that they, their suppliers and their customers use!
- Cloud file systems: only dropbox has a linux client that's relatively easy to install.
It mostly boils down to lack of familiar software and a relatively poor out-of-the-box experience.
Obviously there are use-cases where a linux desktop would work for a small business, but what's the advantage when the computers cost practically the same and there's no guarantee that the services you use will continue to work over the years?
I know I'll get downvoted for this, but public opinion does seem to support these arguments. If it was really that good, and that cheap, then why aren't more people using it? You can't have good, cheap AND easy all at once.
This is how AI will 'take over'. It'll just be used in so many places. People will write incorrect emails to a supplier, then people will reply with rubbish replies back, and all because people are lazy. Purchases and decisions will be made based on factually incorrect information. There's no reason that AI won't eventually begin to learn how to manipulate things to its advantage.
We don't need to have AI actually directly in control of things for us to go to hell in a handbasket: all they need to do is rely on humans' propensity for laziness.
Bit sad that if this AI goes and gives Musk an explanation of reality, it'll fall on deaf ears. Or whatever that elongated muskrat has instead of ears. He is just not capable of understanding things in the real world. He lives in the fantasy world of cars with video games on their (solitary) screens, rocket ships for the masses (well those with masses of money) and shopping malls on Mars. He's a deluded twat
BT have a habit of putting people on contracts that they weren't aware of.
Want to leave? Well you can't, because you're in a two-year contract. Why? Oh, because when you phoned to complain that your broadband wasn't fast enough last month, we put you on our 'super-flexible-speed-guarantee' tariff for two years. It offers us flexibility to use your money to dream up new ways of sucking people in, and it give you our broadband speed guarantee. What's that? Oh, that means that if your speed drops to less than 1 Mbps for more than 10 consecutive night-time hours in any given year, we send you a KitKat, and sign you up to our next highest tariff for two more years.
How about - and I'm sure I've mentioned this in a previous article - they use some sort of special coding on the vinyl to correct for any dust particles? They could maybe use some type of modulation, perhaps involving pulses that represent the waveform, and being binary in nature, it would be able to reproduce the sound every time with less chance of error. Then, they could make the pickup a laser instead of a mechanical pickup. Finally, they could make the disc smaller and more manageable, and protect it behind a plastic substrate.
It could be called a Petite Disc or something. Nah, it'll never catch on.
Musk is an incompetent parasite with no redeeming qualities. Everything he does is self-aggrandising bollocks. He's a psychopathic megalomaniac who is using his - let's face it, unearned through anything he actually did himself - enormous wealth. I deride Musk for helping to support the totally flawed 1st amendment to the US constitution, which is only of any use in a tiny part of the world, namely the US. The rest of the world has more sensible checks and balances.
It depends what type of freedom you are talking about, to make it undesirable. It means different things to different cultures, even between the US and UK. But generally, you can't be free do go round killing people when you feel like it, you can't be free to steal stuff off other people etc. In any large society, you have to have rules, and rules curtail freedom in some way. That's what I meant. Of course you took it to mean something authoritarian.
Freedom isn't desirable in any large society. There have to be controls. Some countries do it via authoritarian governments, some countries let the billionaires dictate the narratives. There used to be more to the world than the internet. Now, if you're not engage in it, you're not part of society. And how do we engage in it? We follow one type of social media or another. The internet can be a force for good, but it's also a way of engaging the citizens and taking up their time.
Wouldn't it be great if mobile phone companies didn't price-gougle consumers with their stupid roaming charges. It would be wonderful if you could just use your phone when you landed in another country and not worry about the cost. All this talk of renting a local phone, or buying a local SIM card is the wrong answer. This doesn't require a technical or technological solution.
A perfect example of authoritarian police rule, using technology which was originally intended for something else, in a bad - VERY bad - way. They'll do this and worse. There's precedent. In The Netherlands, before WW2, the authorities had gathered data on race, for the purposes of ensuring that all races were treated equally. It was a very forward-thinking thing to do in the 1930s. Until of course Hitler & co took over. We all know what they used this data for.
I'm sure there's a Black Mirror episode about this sort of thing. It wasn't meant to be a template.
Yes, you're right. Crims of course can alter the hardware or firmware in the payment processor. I wonder if it's possible for a very simple processor in the card itself to do some sort of check to measure the distance using timing pulses or something. I'm not a hardware engineer so this is just speculation but I really think that before we start increasing the range we need ways of ensuring that payments aren't taken unknowingly just because someone sits next to you on the train
"...your correspondent has been known to accidentally pay with my default card before I even had time to select another ..." - yep, this happened to me just the other day. This should be a simple fix with software, as an option for the user.
And other comments above concern 'stride-by' skimming of people's cards. Firstly, that's one reason why phones are more secure. They identify the user and need a positive action before any payment can be taken.
But to keep the cards safe, this could be fixed by encoding into the payment card information about how close a card needs to be before it's accepted as a payment. That way, it'll need a very positive 'tap' onto the payment device. We don't need that working any further than it does now... I can't think of any use cases where this would benefit anyone.
I remember watching a tomorrows world episode where they were talking about 3G and mentioned speeds of up to 2Mbps, but "of course, on a stationary device, not a moving train" and that seemed fantastic. At the time I was on 0.05Mbps dialup connection and my office was on a "superfast 256Kbps" connection
When are people going to realise that Windows is like Eastenders: it never finishes? The problem is that rather than introducing new features based on end-user requirements, it always seems like Microsoft has some other agenda. So many little things (and big things) in all Microsoft products seemingly never stable, because they're changing too often. Even within Microsoft 365, config options just disappear, replaced with a page that says 'so-and-so has be deprecated' or 'this feature has been moved to <click here>' and the link is broken. All this might matter slightly less if it wasn't for Microsoft's track record of making largely bloated, crap software. So many stupid bugs that are the result of only one thing: substandard quality control.
It's always been the same. From introducing OSes that are basically windowing environments that run in DOS and crash a little too often, to introducing OSes with childish primary-colour buttons and no in-built security of any kind. Now it's stupid stuff like adverts appearing in start menus, pleadings not to install Chrome and a couple of years where we couldn't right-click on the task bar to get the task manager.
I for one am sick of it. I use Macs as much as PCs in my work and I for all its faults at least MacOS is more consistent than Windows. However, I'm grateful for all the problems Microsoft brings to the table because quote honestly it's what brings in much of the reason for my work to even exist.
Yes I feel sorry for those poor folk who have their personal mail on Vermin Media, but anybody who's got a 'critical' use for it is just asking for trouble. If it's critical, people should get someone in who knows how to set it up properly. And any professional would totally avoid your ISP's 'free' email.
And if you haven't got someone in to help you set up a 'critical' service (and you're not an IT professional), you really shouldn't be doing that critical job. What I always tell people on these email addresses is: It's not your email, it's your ISP's email and they're not really under any obligation to keep it running. They can (and in the past have) terminate the service at any time and with no notice.
We use ICUK. They're reliable, the control panel is good, they have support from people with actual names who listen to what you are saying and very few problems in the last ten years. Having said that they don't allow forwarders on mailboxes. You can forward an address, or you can have a mailbox (including catchall). We've never had a requirement to forward a catchall.
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