Posts by youvegot tobejoking 16 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Feb 2008
I have always enjoyed his books (even the ones meant for kids) and Sir Terry Of Ankh-Morpork has a certain ring (or possibly a clang).
I was saddened to hear of his alzheimers and hope that he gets all the support he can to make his life (and his familys) as bearable as possible for as long as possible.
I dont know what the hell is wrong with these corporate muppets who think they can foist stuff like this on us and we will lap it up. I bloody hate tech lock ins like this, if they think the product will be popular enough they lock it to one network and fleece any poor sap who wants it.
They have certainly pissed off enough people that a lot of potential customers will avoid them like the plague.
No doubt the next step for the telco to do what a certain "low fares" airline does and undercut until their competitors have gone out of business and then jack up the prices.
*Meeting of head muppets at the Al Gore Centre For Dodgy Climate Change Crap Science Institute Of Failure*
/Scientesticle1
Soooo, Antartic and Artic are not melting, polar bears are not swimming for miles and we are not all drowning in meltwater...
/Scientesticle2
Well, we could bamboozle them with some stupid idea that the global warming has some kind of malicious intelligence and it got bored with the Artic and is now global warming the Sahara instead
/Scientesticle1
Yeah yeah, and we could say that all the shit weather people in northern europe are getting is caused by Global Warming's little red headed step brother, Regional Raining.
/Scientesticle2
OK, you get on the phone to Al, I'll start on the story for the new movie...
/Scientesticle1
And remember, do NOT call it "a convenient lie"
I heartily agree that EMC sales are wankers, you get the impression that you need to get everything written down because taking their word for it could be an expensive mistake. IIRC a salesman rose through the ranks and is now in charge of EMC UK, you can bet that the culture in there is "its all about the margin baby"
But later on when the kit in in use and something goes wrong, thats when you are happy that you got EMC kit.
When I said "It might have done nothing to help, but they felt it was doing something to protect them from phishers" I was thinking more along the lines of "it might not stop all the phishing sites, but it should stop a lot/most of them, which will definitely help them feel safer", and when you are dealing with my Dad (80 years old) he needs all the help he can get avoiding the pitfalls of the internet.
Yes, the smart hackers will find ways of circumventing it and infecting people with firefox with adblock plus and noscript installed, but they are not all smart.
Not everyone on the internet trawls technology sites every day and keeps up with current exploits, any help is better than none at all.
/ mines the one with the steps in it for jumping on bandwagons
"How many of these AC "Linkscanner was a GoodThingTM" comments actually come from frustrated malware writers."
Do you look under you bed every night?
Some people (my wife and my parents included) thought it was a great addition to their computer security as they are scared shitless of having their bank/card/personal information stolen and them ending up having to pay the bill. It might have done nothing to help, but they felt it was doing something to protect them from phishers.
I know people all over were complaining that they had to pay uplift on the hosting plans etc, but how much extra bandwidth was AVG8 actually taking? As far as i know it only downloaded the page without images/crap flash ads etc. How may times would that page have to be downloaded to amount to much?
As a side note, i had to change to Avast because AVG stopped updating. Runs fine on my two other computers though.
*Black helicopters because obviously Nuno is always twitching the curtains looking for them"
Sure companies have their last 20 years of business data on tapes and need to keep infrastructure around the place to read them if they need it....
But I see more and more companies installing disk libraries... Why? Speed and utility. Their backup windows shrink, sometimes by orders of magnitude. They can hive that data off to tape libraries after the data has passed a certain amount of time without being used...
My company uses disk libraries to keep all our old outlook data on .... there is a delay of about 10 seconds getting data off the disk library when I want to read a really old email.
I have VM, I think I will be moving in about two months after the 12 month contract runs out. I tried to set up a Direct Debit and they have failed to do so despite 3 attempts (telling me that my Barclays branch sort code is wrong, despite 4 other Direct Debits set up and working fine). I have had TV and Broadband service disappear for days (usually have service interruptions to broadband once a month and TV service interruptions about once every two months). Their cable boxes look like shit and their program guide looks like a fugitive from the 80's, the remote control is counterintuitive (or maybe I just got too used to the SKY remote) and my one squeaks when I press buttons.....
On the plus side they set up a Usenet server for their customers and I have managed to download movies at 2.5MB/s (20Mb service) .... but I have to say i am a bit worried about them possibly knowing exactly what it is I am downloading (but i did read somewhere that usenet servers do not record who downloads what)
I dont see many ads, if I could fix it so that I saw NO ads I would do it immediately. I turn on ads on some sites to support the website owners, I dont click the ads and almost never even look at them. I dont want my browsing/emails/whatever else picked over like carrion in any way at all, if they offered me 10p for every webpage I visited to allow them to parse my data I still wouldnt go for it.
Saying that I can get a cookie put on my computer that will stop your servers parsing my webpages DOES NOT make it alright. I dont trust my ISP (VM), why the hell should I trust some company that is piggybacking on my ISP and trying to make money off what i do online?
This 'service' they offer of protecting me from the nasty websites of the world could have been implemented by simply changing the users DNS server ip's to Opendns (and in fact I use them already, but mainly because VM's DNS servers appear to be powered by terminally ill hamsters)...
So, to recap; an untrusted company gets to see every website I visited. If I opt out, I have to take their word for it that they wont look. Fuck that.
I am stuck with VM for another 3 months, when(if?) they do go ahead with this crap I will be moving back to Zen.
Finally; what are they hoping for? enough people not caring about the issue enough to complain / turn it off / move away to another ISP? I do hope that the media handles this the right way (i.e. lets people know that some unknown american company that had some shady software in its past is looking at everything you do online unless you tell them not to .... and even if you do its a toss of a coin if they respect your wishes or if the cookie lasts) and not buy in to the happy clappy "oh the internet will be a glorious place with gorgeous ads and no nasty internet hooligans"....
So this study thinks that people are replacing disks after someone has unplugged a fibre cable or something else? Thats just daft. They are either a) idiots or b) using some cobbled together (whether by themselves or an external company) shit that is not fit for purpose. When users are pulling disks on their storage to fix a problem with connectivity or something like that, then that is obviously a "training opportunity" making itself known.
We use high end kit and disk/boards/power components are (almost) all capable of being non-disruptively replaced with no risk of data loss. We have seen that on very rare occasions the vendor cannot be 100% certain what is causing a problem on an array and will spell out what steps will be taken. They usually start with the most probable faulty part(s), then moving on to the easiest to replace ..... but never NEVER would they suggest "lets start pulling disks randomly to see if that fixes it"
Muppets and data centres dont mix well .... thats why its best to keep the damn management out of them ;)
"That's all very well if everybody had static IPs but then that would not be anonymous and it's useless targeting dynamic IPs, you'd just get ads targetted at previous users."
I'm pretty sure that they have thought of this, it would not make sense that they would constantly have to redo all their data mining every time a subscriber got his IP changed.... Simplest thing would be the ISP's giving everyone static IP's, but there are bound to be "grey area" methods of keeping people on dynamic IP's while legally being able to pass info to third parties.....
Do YOU trust VM/CW/BT not to sell you down the river to make a quick few quid?
I should certainly hope that everyone uses a proper browser with an up to date ad blocker ..... but the issue here is that some poxy company you have never heard of or trust is getting information about what you do on the internet from the twits you pay to be on the internet in the first place .....
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