Posts by Mage 9273 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
See title
Completely gone Google/Microsoft.
I've been using Waterfox for ages on the desktop because Mozilla lost the plot ages ago. So not surprised.
What do I install instead of this abomination so as to have the equivalent of Umatrix, no accidental installing of stupid apps from sites and know that 3rd party cookies are blocked?
It's opaque as to what it blocks. Changes to GUI are poor too. Tablet got this stupidity last night.
No, because Epic will not have access to iOS tools.
It's not like Android or Windows (and especially not like Linux), because on those you can build apps to latest API etc without any MS or Google support. You only need Google agreement for the Playstore distribution.
You can in theory develop for Android and let people download direct if they change the security setting on their phone or tablet.
So you can ALSO install old Android and Windows apps for products no longer on on the stores. With Apple your phone/tablet is doomed to NEVER have even an out of date VLC, epub reader or whatever UNLESS you installed it from the store while BOTH the phone/tablet was supported and the App was current.
So apart from the double dip of taking any ongoing income from an app as well as the sale, they totally control and eventually block the device you bought. In the name of "security", but it's ego and greed.
"Amazon Ring is an example" and is is a daft thing to fit.
There is no problem having a camera and intercom that is only feeding by wire inside the house. Anything "smart", i.e. connected to the Internet is a huge risk and also can be bricked by the supplier.
So called "smart" heating, security, locks, doorbells are products for the gullible or those unaware of the risks.
We had to change the lock, screw in a block of wood etc. Stupid combining letter slot and lock. The big lad was lifting up his small sister to open the door.
Also we fitted deadlocks front and back.
A common technique is to use the cheap one of 30 keys on back door, or break a rear window and simply carry everything out the front door to the large van. Neighbours just assume you are moving or redecorating.
A friend in Chubb once pointed out that extra bolts on the door doesn't help unless they go through the frame, or the frame has serious fixings into serious masonry. One decent swing with a ram or a big sledge and the entire frame falls in.
Per transaction per second the IBAN, Credit Card or PayPal is a tiny fraction of any Cryptocurrency system.
Also adding money costs almost nothing, unlike mining just Bit Coin, which is the same consumption as all of Switzerland.
It's an ecologically damaging scam. It's not even scaleable to 1% of the transactions of any one of IBAN, Credit Cards or PayPal!
Didn't the mighty RCA close in 1986?
I can't think of anything I've bought in the last 30 years that was made in the USA. The USA Brands are just that, largely brands. Even a lot of the "innovation" for "Designed in the USA" is actually bought in by major companies.
The USA is a culture fuelled marketing Behemoth. Disney, Coca-cola, Macdonald's, Levi, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Starbucks, Budweiser. A lot of the big companies run franchises, or really sell adverts. Or even do development offshore. They bank their money offshore too, sucking it out of the world economy instead of spending it. Yet for all the lack of manufacturing, that 13% of the world's population uses about 75% each of food, energy and other resources.
No, it wouldn't. It might even be deliberately shorter. There is nothing wrong with a 32 G byte iphone 4S except you can't even install the originally available apps, and it can only load MP3s via iTunes program unless a 3rd party player was ever loaded, if it was, you can copy via USB without any Apple software.
They do. And have been. It rose to fame (infamy) with Echelon. GCHQ helps the US TLAs and vice versa.
The Chinese government is horrible. But from where I'm sitting the UK & USA are hypocrites. Also I doubt as a percentage, the Chinese State is as much interested in European and North American people, their beliefs and activities as GCHQ, the London Met and the USA TLAs.
I heard about this years ago:
First thing on a new install of LibreOffice: Disable Autocorrect except for smart quotes.Doesn't fix THIS problem.
I'm actually considering turning off that too as “” those are AltGr V and AltGr B on Linux. Shift for singles.
Though the auto format recognition is due to not setting cells to text, but having the default General. No idea how to change that default on Excel, Gnumeric or LO Calc.
General is an evil default as Indicative numbers may be in a text column and never ever should be treated as numbers, except maybe on some of them to check checksums (ISBN, IBAN, credit cards).
There are four basic design stages of actual mouse, excluding non-mouse pointing such as touch pads or wobble sticks/nubs.
1) Two wheels at right angles.
2) make them shafts on the top of a ball.
3) optical using a special two colour grid on a mat
4) optical on any arbitrary surface unless it's totally featureless and smooth.
Also at some stage the middle button is a third axis roller to scroll or move on Z-axis.
Of course the ball based mouse was somewhat later than the early version with just the wheels, and even without a tracker ball, it's an obvious next step. I remember turning different models of mouse upside down to see which worked best a tracker ball.
The history of why Logitech, originally distributing a compiler did mice is interesting and possibly the Microsoft mouse was one of MS's best products. I'm using an MS Basic Optical Mouse v2.0
I used to give 3 button mice to Apple users (OS 8 and OS9 days) and enjoy their joy at disposing of the single button unergonomic hockey puck.
I still prefer one with a tail. No pesky RF to get messed up or battery to go flat. In a fictional world I've written they call the computer mouse a pointing pebble, or pebble as it has no tail and they have no mice or rats.
I'd heard from someone that worked at Xerox Parc that the ball based mouse was derived from the tracker ball and that they really wanted a pen sized one to work on a desk. However a mouse is actually less tiring to hold than say a Wacom stylus, though the stylus allows easier writing and sketching. The mouse is indeed a selection device easier to control accurately than a finger on a touch screen. Writing with a mouse is like trying to write with a potato.
The mouse is still the best GUI selection device, though I don't miss the ball. Or cleaning the rollers for people mysteriously unable to do it. The first optical mouse I had used a special grid on a mat in the mid 1980s.
A pint for the dear departed.
Android's point is the GUI for OLED/LCD and the App Engine.
There is no point on using Android on a dedicated ereader, especially eink; that suggests lazy inept developers.
Also most apps won't work well with eink. A phone or tablet is cheaper and complementary to a decent ereader. I rarely use the Browser search on the Kindle or Kobo, it's nearly as fast to wake the tablet, connect it to Wifi and browse than just for the Wikipedia or Google to start loading on eink. Then actual browsing on eink is rubbish, though the older Kindle FW that paginated the web pages worked better than scrolling.
The big Sony Digital paper models are for paperless offices. You Print PDFs to them. I think most or maybe all don't actually support ebook formats. Also they can only be loaded/managed via the computer application. Doesn't appear as mass storage like Kindle / Kobo / Nook etc.
Sony relied on their own bookstore. There are only a few niche brands today that don't, sadly. Sony customers were transferred to Kobo. Canadian Kobo's parent is Japanese Rakuten that also owns Viber, a decent alternative to Skype, Tencent's QQ and Whats App.
Apprentice Alf plugin on Calibre. Some people read Amazon ebooks on Kobo ereaders.
Also Amazon's KFX is evil. Download for "transfer via USB", never direct on the Kindle so you have a backup and don't get KFX. Amazon add DRM to KFX even when the Publisher selects "no DRM". The AZW format (KF8) is better. Also Amazon sells "Kindle" ebooks that are really like a PDF that only work on phones, tablets and PC/Mac; they don't work on a real Kindle ereader.
So called Intellectual Property. The USPTO is a big part of the problem. Many of the big multinationals have massive teams of patent lawyers creating both regular patents and "Design Patents" (what the UK calls Registered Designs, like the shape of the fluted coke bottle or a kettle). Companies like Starbucks and Apple assign these to an HQ at some Offshore tax friendly place (Like any British Overseas, or now even IOM or Jersey). Quite a few companies in Ireland (like Eircom aka Eir) have their HQ in Jersey.
Companies even "patent" or Register their Franchise, Trade marks etc and then pay "royalties" to the offshore HQ.
So it's possible that neither Apple or Ireland broke aid or tax rules. There needs to be a better definition of Intellectual Property and reform of Patents, Registered Designs etc and the possible "royalties" or this sort of legal tax evasion will continue. Apple should have been paying 10% tax, not 0.5 down to 0.005%
I can't see how the EU can win this if it's just Apple was "clever". The rules on IP creation and so called "royalties" on it need changed on a Global basis.
"The success of Facebook is based on the ability of advertisers to define an audience by location, age, sex, personal interests and more."
You mean their success is based on the fact that advertisers believe this.
1) Is it legal.
2) Is is ethical.
3) How accurate is the information?
4) Has anyone unbiased actually done meaningful measurements to prove Facebook and Google claims?
My understanding is that Facebook makes these claims because magazines, newspapers, billboards, radio and TV can't make them. They have been caught lying about video impressions.
Also fraudulent activity makes money for website owners with Google adverts.
Twitter and Facebook are full of fake accounts and bots.
Obligatory XKCD
This is the link, but might not be a rubber hose
The problem is that humans, often biased or lazy or making mistakes, in reality have to check all images. There is no AI, just human "trained" and curated pattern matching.
It's stupid and unethical to scrape websites and social media. That will decrease the quality. Apart from misuse of data.
Then another issue the lighting, angles etc. Photos taken for personal reasons are likely to have better lighting, viewing angles and framing than images from surveillance systems. We need to totally abandon automatic people identification and truly autonomous vehicles on ordinary public roads till it can be done properly. Do ships, aircraft, trains and last, trams before ordinary vehicles. Use humans to review surveillance video. Most of it shouldn't exist anyway.
"Upgrading can be painful in Linux thanks to potential dependency and configuration issues so waiting for the official guidance is a good plan."
Hugely less pain than Windows, where going NT 3.5x, NT4, Win2K, XP, Vista, Win7, Win8, Win10 is best with a fresh install.
I've tested 18.3 -> 19.3 which needs 18.3 to 19 first. Much slower than a fresh install and needs command line. But works. The 18.3 LTS maybe runs out this October, so no rush, though for existing 18.3 rather than a fresh install, likely it's 18.3 -> 19 ->19.3 -> 20.0
And then there are Mac OS upgrades. They've called all the versions since 2002 or 2003 change from Mac OS 9 version 10.<something> even though some are a greater change than Win2K to Win10 (like no 32 bit).
So rather unfair.
The UK did have their own nuke tech and close to delivery with the rockets being tested at Woomera, but USA persuaded the UK to ditch both. The UK is the only nation in the world to give up Nuke Tech and Sat / ICBM tech. The Trident is really sort of rented. It and F35 involve a subscription service.
Except when you spread the capacity over an entire county it's tiny compared to a fibre fed cabinet. But the capacity may indeed be the total capacity for the fleet / world and only a fraction of that even available in one place at one time.
There is a good reason why OneWeb has gone bust.
Satellite Internet is for users off the grid, in the wilderness, out at sea, in an aircraft. Not for British Rural. Not even these days for Africa (Mobile in rural areas, fibre in the cities).
I wondered, because hardly any of his stories have actual "aliens". I read an explanation once by him as to why this is the case. It's suggested that the people in Nightfall (the original short rather than later expanded novel) are "aliens", not humans.
Aliens of course claim we are Tellurians or Terrans (from the Classical Terra and Tellus) as all sentient, tool using creatures with a proper extendible language are humans. Don't confuse an extendible vocabulary with a language. Rooks are sentient, self aware, can use tools and have a big vocabulary, but are not humans because they don't have Language,
Certainly the phone has completely killed the market for snapshot cameras and now dedicated digital cameras are an expensive niche, but secure because a phone isn't going to have larger sensors, larger lenses (much larger anyway), a good range of interchangeable lenses, decent ergonomics (wrong shape) and a secure tripod mount for time-lapse or tracking exposures. I used to be fairly serious about photography and had a wide range of cameras (still have some), the last being an OM10 and big selection of lenses. I can't afford/justify film and processing for it, though in 1990s we had Photo CDs (not to be confused with seriously poor Picture CDs.) done at the lab from film, no prints, for our business. Yet I can't justify a decent digital camera and lenses. If the light is poor or the object needs a telephoto lens the phone camera is useless. Lack of a viewfinder on a phone also means accurate pointing in bright sunshine is impossible.
I said years ago that Apple would migrate the Mac to ARM. When it suited them. People laughed at me.
Perhaps big companies over use branding, like MS calling things "Windows" that are very different and may or may not be compatible for existing applications.
Apple "Mac" 68000, Power PC, x86 and recently x86-64 with 32 bit forbidden. Now ARM. Maybe all these families should have used different branding after the Mac 68K.
Also the Mac OSX is based on BSD via NextStep. A totally different (and better) thing to Mac OS9 and earlier. At least they didn't make the mistake with iPhone that MS made with PDAs and Phones and called the OS, iOS rather than pocket Mac OS.
If you do the sums, you'll see that the likelihood of our radio waves being detectable even at the nearest star is slim to zero. They might detect our oxygen, water, CO2, nitrogen and industrial pollution via spectroscopic analysis. SETI using radio is pointless unless Aliens arrive at the edge of the Solar system.
Let's not repeat the European exploitation of Americas, or Arabs in Africa moving south. Ethically would it be right to settle without an invite?
It's likely anywhere able to really support life would be teaming with life of its own. Likely the existing plants and animals would only be good for fats, sugars/carbohydrates and maybe protein. They'd likely lack suitable vitamins and amino acids. Even here not all plants or animals can sustain humans, you'd likely die just living on rabbit. Animals here also have differing needs of vitamins, amino acids and things that are toxic.
However, as C.S. Lewis remarked, perhaps the interstellar distances are a quarantine system. We have no evidence that any sort of interstellar travel other than a mostly coasting Generation ship is possible. We need to sort out our own problems here instead of exporting people and their associated shortcomings.
Interesting science.
Really very few people are actually billed. Their main issues is the slow progress on leaks and upgrading sewerage. I think still over 400,000 septic tanks and many treatment plants don't meet standards. They are supposed to be inspected. Maybe Captia could do it?
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