Posts by Mage

after you purchased ... login compulsary

At least Personal Skype was free and MS had more or less broken it anyway by the time you could only use an MS account.

See also Minecraft, which MS bought.

When are the so called Tech companies going to be reigned in? Apple and Microsoft are Tech, but really Google, Facebook and Amazon just leverage technology.

These are shocking lists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Amazon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet (Google)

The real tech companies don't have a great look either. Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Qualcomm etc.

Re: 3 cubic meters of regolith might givee 1 litre?

Best not to be messing up this ball of rock. Besides any program could only export a few elites or maybe criminals. The moon has a harsh environment.

Re: How does it work?

Number spoofing is by design, like email spoofing. Legitimate businesses and users need both because of how phone systems and email systems are designed.

I'm baffled why a particular block-list service should be specific to a particular version of Android. The problem isn't number spoofing as such but lack of regulation and the fact that Telcos make money out of it. There should be a simple reporting mechanism to your service provider, like "The last call was:" and option for type of thing. Cold calling should be illegal everywhere, either on phone, email or the front door. One UK county region saw crime drop by 30% when doorstop cold calling was banned.

The providers should pool the info.

Same should apply to email. I was getting real Netflex spam regularly (illegal in EU) and most of the fake emails are now using Google's Blogspot.com, not even infected 3rd party sites.

I've had about equal unsolictied robo-calling from my bank (they admitted it was them) to the fake MS support calls and scam investment calls (usually using real humans). One even rang back today asking why I hung up! Do not answer with anything that can be taken as an affirmative or negative.

My numbers are not listed.

Email spam has dramatically declined since the end of tinet.ie/eircom.ie free email. I think their database got copied in the tinet days and smarter spammers realised all the same addresses were on eircom.net

Re: featuring Hollywood A-listers

Only worth while if you are selling pointless underwear or make-up. These people are mostly boring mannequins, famous for being famous and some are quite good at making money. That sort of content is free or nearly free elsewhere.

So content and CEO doomed it.

re: so that developers can test things

And what dev has a Chromebook that actually runs ChromeOS as a main machine.

I know plenty with beefy corporate laptops with Windows, with VMs for Windows and/or Linux.

Re: Shocked

At the time I expressed sceptism and said all these things are only pattern matching curated by experts.

So even if it worked, you need to keep training the experts.

So are Google trustworthy? Have they ever lied?

IBM famously misled about Watson, which wasn't even the same Watson that won Jeopardy and didn't really work for Cancer diagnosis.

AI is just hyped pattern matching using often biased and usually human curated data. If the so called "training data" (really a special kind of database) isn't expertly human curated confidence should be low.

Re: Removable disks with NTFS format, NT4.0

Indeed originally computer controlled ejection was locked (Think archive MO disks) with NTFS, only allowing eject after shutdown so you couldn't use NTFS for 3.5" MO disks, no manual eject.

Re: Skynet

Then eventually there will be "No Silver Lining" once everyone is outsourcing everything to a handful of so called Clouds.

Zero Trust is a better name than they imagine!

Re: A new bug in 2020 ...?

I suspect loads of cheap Indian Programmers are simply underpaid. The only two Indian programmers I know are brilliant.

Re: Surprised?

The main reason to buy a Mac is to run Mac OS.

Re: top tip

Never put address or car reg.

If anything a tag asking they are given to police / garda etc with a code number. NOT your phone number. The code number helps convince the authorities that they are your keys.

Media is full of stupid advice.

Re: I'll give them 1 out of 10

Or letmein, the default on Sage Line 50 that people rarely changed.

How hard is to have a 1st use screen where it explains about the address book kept in the safe that's used for passwords and prompts for a new password and then run a cracking tool rather than just count the number and types of characters?

Oh, and keep an off site copy securely too.

One company I know used a spreadsheet saved in Office 365 for ALL the company passwords!

Paper is more secure and can be more easily secured.

Re: secure cross-platform JavaScript desktop apps.

Oxymoron.

Real production applications of any kind for local execution should not be written in javascript, or indeed anything else really intended to help the functionality of a website. They should use a proper programming language, the minimum being the kind compiled to an intermediate code.

Re: if only the internet was a distributed network

It's the plot of "No Silver Lining". The world is mostly using half a dozen big service providers. Things like edge routers, DNS and Web Services are similar. Patches are released by separate groups, rushed out on a Friday night. One is for Edge Routers and one set for Web Services.

Mobile Billing, ATMs, POS, electronic payments etc and even some SCADA are outsourced to the Cloud. So no Mobile calls or data, because it can't check your credit. No sales in the shops, no cash dispensing, some power, water and gas systems go down in some countries, no online wholesale ordering.

Lasts a week.

Re: Opposite will happen

Dual Boot?

I did that from 1998 to early 2017. Then abandoned NT/Windows entirely apart from rarely spun up VMs (which are stored on an external USB HDD kept in a drawer).