Posts by FirstTangoInParis 710 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2021
You jest, but my keyless ignition car needs me to press the Start button to turn the engine off.
Meanwhile the in car entertainment crashes now and then needing me to long press the screen heater button to reboot it. While this is going on you realise the indicator sound is electronically generated as it’s awful quiet during the reboot.
And an OTA software update requires I lock the car and hope I can unlock it afterwards.
It will also have an impenetrable configuration backend with an infinite number of items that you can assign arbitrary values to, and which can completely screw up your car. Trouble is, you have to do this to overcome the random cough that the engine has at 78.3 mph on a cold Saturday in February. After you’ve done it though, you have to remove and reinstall the engine and three of the six doors, but then you can only drive with the windows half way up on said doors. After a few months of this you decide to scrap it and get an Apple Car, which is more expensive than your house but at least it gets the job done.
In the UK the banks are getting proper paranoid. To set up a new payee, you need to match the account holders name as well as the sort code and account number. And doing something like changing bank details on payroll should at least trigger an email to the real holder confirming the change.
But then they use offshore call centres to inform me of “fraud” on my account, how dare I pay someone I’ve paid many times before. So I hang up and call the bank and they say oh yeah we do actually do that!
I’ve been seriously considering moving my elderly dad of Windows 11. I’m pretty sure I have to set the same settings every time he asks me to take a look. He doesn’t change them. Windows Update are you looking guilty? I’ve actually thought about joining him to my 365 domain so I can GPO his machine, but I’d need a W11 Pro license.
On TV this morning some c suite nob from Starbucks was talking about adding AI to their coffee. It was a proper buzzword bingo interview where he riffed on leveraging headwinds to up the customer experience on tariff-free green coffee or some such bollards. I’d just like some coffee, thanks. I don’t want to pay for their massive splurge on AI that nobody wants and will have no measurable positive impact on their profits.
The proliferation of apps is a pain since smartphone users need ever increasing amounts of memory to install them all. However for quick action you can’t beat an app especially with the biometric authentication. Trying to log in to some bank websites requires card readers and backflips, and sometimes selected characters from the required very long passwords.
TBH it's down to the amount of IT you want to be lugging about. If you have a company mobile then that likely means you travel a fair bit so you have to carry the extra phone. Plus if it's the other sort from what you're used to (own Android, company iPhone or vice versa) the UI differences can drive you mad (less of a problem now, they seem to have agreed on UI interaction). The rules corp would apply are what you would expect to use anyway, and corp can only see select apps and nothing else if it's been set up properly. The advantages being you get to manage your calendars all on one device and it only takes up one pocket.
Enterprises who value their commercial or customer secrets take their IT very seriously. If it doesn't need something in a laptop, it will come without that or it won't come at all. Don't want a webcam? Gone. Want a built in screen protector? Got it. I can see a neural processor being an option that these sorts of companies will say 'no thanks'.
So you've just described the base model of a recent (M3 or M4) MacBook Air. The irony is it does come with a neural processor, but at least the big beefy Mac apps are actually using them. And yes it will actually last 18 hours.
Scrub it and run Linux if you want. But it already runs BSD. And it really is bloody fast; it runs Ubuntu on ARM VMs way faster than any PC I have at my disposal.
I wonder if the word “transformative” is over egging these Emperor’s New Clothes. It would be transformative if it brought a whole new way to evaluate all the little different pros and cons of all the different offers and policies. But no, it appears to be a slightly different hamster wheel that yields untrusted results that still need checking by the broker and evaluation by the prospective customer.
The paper is shoving AI down the reader’s throat and attempting to justify it with highly suspect presentation of marginal gains at best.
Many years back I accidentally poured coffee into the keyboard of a very expensive Cadnetix workstation. Fortunately my wife knew a lot about materials including substances that dissolved other substances. Just take it apart, wash it under a warm tap and then leave it to dry over the weekend, she said. Worked a treat.
First, plaudits. If you worked the Solaris Gold support line (or indeed the others), I doff my cap to you.
Then the bad, number 1. Trying to fix Mrs Tango’s Acer laptop with the Windows Update From Hell. “You’ll have to reinstall Windows. Look for the license key on the bottom of the laptop.” Hmm. This one came with W8, so no it doesn’t have a printed license key. I’m clearly on my own here.
Number 2, migrating from Tiscali to Talk Talk following the takeover. Tiscali had no download limits. TT tells me I’m now limited to 40 GB a month. I ask how I can monitor that. Turns out I couldn’t. The conversation spanning several sessions finally ends with “ok we’re not even monitoring you. Have you any idea how we can do that??????”
> A browser shouldn't be able to tell what is installed on your pc
I agree but have you seen the stuff that browsers are allowed to do in the settings tab these days? Most of these are set by default to Ask, so for the average user they just click Yes and allow all sorts to occur. My least fave is an Indian website that constantly tells the user through web notifications that Norton has expired and you need to renew it by clicking here, even if Norton has never been near your PC. Malware Bytes is good at silencing that one with its browser guard.
So you stop using your computer for a bit and it does power saving things. Didn’t even W95 or earlier do that? I would put money on the refresh rate never making it into the fast zone on the vast majority of laptops that will ever be sold with this chip family. Gamers I guess will go buy a decent graphics card.
And by the way MS can’t you learn to schedule a virus scanner task so it doesn’t knacker the entire machine? Hmm?
A JVC Fire TV insists on an Amazon account, even if you only want to watch Netflix. It’s likely as lethal to your wallet as a Fire tablet which insists on you turning on one click purchases and that you hand over card details even if you only ever want to install free apps and content.
The same Amazon that offers you free slow delivery on the product page and then only paid for delivery on the checkout page.
Their PR is working through their long lunch to come up with ways to blame everyone and everything except the managers on point to deliver. It may well have gone live on the day the contract said but it was woefully incomplete and should never been allowed to go anywhere. But of course there are bonuses at stake so it went live.
Ah yes, “computer is broken” covers a multitude of sins, some of them down to the users; my W95 laptop was a disaster waiting to happen in that respect. And I’ve also been on the receiving end of “system broke but nobody did anything” a few times, followed by me having to fly thousands of miles only to discover it really was Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick (logs don’t lie, people).
The additional v6 address(es) are link local and are likely down to MacOS playing with WiFi privacy by rotating MAC addresses every now and then and confusing the heck out of my DHCP server.
> Customers aren’t asking for it
I had a requirement on a network project in 2000 to support IPv6. IIRC we declined on that requirement because we couldn’t verify an application service using v6 because there weren’t any.
Fast forward to today, my ISP router supports v6 and hands out a v6 block for my own network, and it all works even if the v4 bit packs up like it does now and again. I grew up with this yet I’m still puzzled why each device gets 3 v6 addresses. Public and link-local, yeah I get that, but what’s the third for?
I’ve likely told this before, but in the Bronx homeless people used to rip out small street telephone exchanges and use the space to live in. So the phone company strung said exchanges between telegraph poles instead, and the locals used them for target practice.
> I'm running an increasingly outdated bunch of laptops at home, I don't think any of them are less than 4 years old and some significantly older.
So they’ll still be good for running your fave Linux distribution or Chrome FlexOS for some time to come.
As an aside, I did some housekeeping on my Mac the other day and noticed the Outlook app is a whopping 2.6 GB. Compare that with native MacOS Mail app at a mere 30 MB. It’s possible that Outlook is running all kinds of database stuff behind the scenes but this is really out of hand and needs a good looking at.
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