Posts by Stevie

Bah!

So, if I read it right, to avoid being tracked you simply have to stay out of California and Israel.

Well, I call "SAFE"!

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And speaking of man-in-the-middle hijacks I'm still trying to figure out how a movie about Edward Snowden invokes Dr Martin Luther King in any way, shape or form.

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Correct me if I'm wrong (like wild horses could stop you) but if I'm reading this right the Superfish management are claiming that their man-in-the-middle hijack is absolutely safe. Against man-in-the-middle hijacks.

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Kicked box across room again. Was wearing sneakers but assume this counts as a "reBOOT".

Checked cables. I have some.

How is this supposed to address a firmware problem?

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So, in texture it is more like a fried Mars bar then?

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I'd think the fucktard who handed down the punishment has done more to harm the reputation of the state than this formerly unknown blogger has.

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C'mon lads! It's not that bad! Eschewing wine, women and song is not nearly as hard as it seems.

When you've given up wine and women you don't feel like singing.

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The real problem with the personal cloud and indeed the vast majority of IT tech coming down the pipe for the last 10 years is not the technology, it's the willful obfuscation of what a given scenario actually encompasses by use of maddeningly imprecise marketing-friendly "clixby*" terms.

"8X performance vs (insert competitor)" - Does NOT mean "8 times the performance" or there are some horrendous misprints in the metrics on the slide being shown as this is said.

"On demand scaling" - rarely is on demand anything as it requires a negotiation of some sort in order to switch on the resources in question. That negotiation may be entirely electronic but since billing is involved look for unforeseen complications when the resource is actually needed that once in any given year.

"Vertical (anything)" - Better check your vendor's marketing bible before you buy.

"Fault tolerance". "High availability". These are terms that mean specific things to vendors. Unfortunately, the fine print is on a per vendor basis.

So is it any wonder no-one is doin' it rite? If you drive a technology by aggressive marketing you can't be upset when no-one takes it very seriously after a couple of seminars**.

* Clixby - politely uninformative The Meaning of Liff 1st edition

** Technical term for disguised high-pressure sales presentation.

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And here I thought that anyone needing an air-gapped computer would understand that the air gapping would need to be at the *computer* network level, and the said computer would still need elementary protections such as not executing code from external devices by default and firewalling them until they passed AV testing.

I mean, once upon a time all desktop computers were air-gapped and the savvy companies still had warnings about sneakernet AV practices pasted to the support columns to properly indoctrinate the workforce.

But then, I'm an old person who was once a mainframe Cobol programmer and so by default a dimwit. What do I know about the exciting world of modern IT?

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So lemme see if I have this right: The UK Government has finally gotten behind the idea of training kids to be computer programmers (we'll leave aside the wisdom behind that in the larger sense for another time) just as the local iteration of the industry is laying off and dumbing-down (anyone who thinks the state of the art AI is gonna be a replacement for human rat-dancers has spent too much time drinking the kool aid).

Wot, no strategic vision?

As for letting said AI scrape Stack Overflow et al, I predict all that will do is make the AI snotty and uncomunicative, undoing years of R&D in cognitive pattern analysis and advanced lexing.

I say go for it. I'd love to see whether the AI declares Reiser is Innocent after the first pass.

Bah!

They were lyrics? I had guessed they might be song titles, but couldn't say for sure since, and this is the important bit, I don't know who Taylor Swift is and bewilderingly that has not caused my world to collapse into quantum vacuum.

Whatever that is.

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There is a fix for this problem: Buy a different brand TV.

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Who is this "Kanye West" and why should I care?

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Who'd have thought the standard lack of transparency in Big Bank Behaviour could be turned to scammers' needs?

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Installed ghost 14 on an XP machine about five years ago to do a full disc dump to removable external disc storage. It fucked up the exsisting NAV/IS installation to the point I had to strip is all out and re-install, the ghost nagware nearly drove me round the fucking bend whining about the fact that the external hard drive was only powered up when I needed to backup (it wanted to do diferential saves, I wanted it to be satisfied with weekly full backups) and then, to top it off, when I needed it to recover my hard drive it bleated that it couldn't find an image for the recovery to use.

So, self knackering software that wouldn't play with other software - from the same company.

So, I kicked Ghost off the machine and badmouthed it whenever anyone mentioned it, and when the subscription was up I dumped NAV/IS too.

No more Norton products for me.

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Never mind Waldo, where are my #$%@ing car keys?

Beaten by a faster poster.

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Good news indeed.

I'd like to inform the court that I was doing 87 on I95 on Sunday, and would like the SC Police to return my fine monies under the same ruling.

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So the NSA have stolen data from black hat hackers instead of hacking it firsthand.

And they've paid attention to the foremost experts in the computer security business.

Er ...

Good ... ?

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I heard that toxic toads were being annihilated, but a quick glance over my garden fence showed that my neighbor was still as alive and lively as ever. Either the program isn't working or it is too slow to matter.

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" Lanier argued that by convincing users to give away valuable information about themselves in exchange for “free” services, firms such as Google and Facebook have accumulated colossal amounts of data ... "

And, as these firms are discovering even as I type, colossal amounts of data are not information. I love to use otherwise idle time at my computer allowing Google to gather more data on me as I browse myriad disconnected web sites of no interest to me in reality. I would pay real money to watch the faces of the poor git tasked with trying to make information out of all that data.

I mean, look how good they are at presenting me with targeted search results.

Exercise for the reader: Search Google for "White Slave" and glory in the flood of hits purporting to give one the lowest prices on White Slaves pasted down the right hand column of the Google results page.

"Information Age". Pft!

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Two things occur to me:

a) The GUI performance of a Raspberry Pi running tailor-made Raspbian is execrable, all but unusable. Given the shoe-horning a Pi requires, how could a terra-bloat GUI be better?

2) Wouldn't putting Windows on a Raspberry Pi simply be a way of making the device cost the same as a PC to buy?

Before the screaming and leaping commences, I own two Raspberry Pi model B machines, an original 256 meg one and a spiffy up-memoried 512 meg one. All comments about performance verified by experiment and long nights trying to make the GUI work acceptably.

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Dear Microsoft:

I've actually enjoyed using some of your products for years, generally abandoning them when the Hunt For Sales brought Unnecessary Sweeping Change.

Outlook and Word are now rendered largely unusable to the casual or occasional user who doesn't have the time or budget for formal education in the new version of what used to be a reasonably intuitive product line. True, I needed help occasionally, but I was always able to recognize when this was the case.

Now I waste time trying to use the things before once again going to Google to find out how to do something I once considered trivial (the official Microsoft help is about as much use as hiccups are to a glassblower). Guess which product line is not allowed on my personal computer equipment any more?

You need to know something: I am never, repeat: never, going to own a Microsoft tablet computer. Designing your software to the assumption I will eventually See The Light will only result in hastening my switch to non-Microsoft-originated operating systems.

I do not need touch control, nor do I applaud your drive to make everything look and feel like I should be poking it with a finger. Tiles are ugly wastes of desktop that have no utility for me whatsoever. Foisting them on me is phenomenally bad in PR terms and a dead cert sales killer.

Please pass the word to your partners. I recently tossed out a very well known anti-virus/firewall package I'd used for years because they replaced the attractive and easy to figure out user interface with a bug-ugly tiled nightmare with less functionality.

Said package vendor is still mailing me under the impression I simply "forgot" to renew - against the evidence that my system no longer pings Vendor Central using the stealth "notifier services" that stayed around after I'd run the uninstall process. Azathoth bless Sysinternals for cutting the search and destroy process to only half an hour. Now there is a package of stuff with "We Get It" design.

I write stuff using my computer. For that I need a keyboard that doesn't either consume screen real estate or come packaged in such a small form factor my hands are pressed together while typing.

I draw stuff using my computer. The single advantage of doing so is that the drawing itself is never occluded by the drawing instrument. If I had one thing to say to Mr "no stylus" Jobs it would be "YOU CAN"T SEE WHAT YOU ARE DRAWING WHEN YOUR HAND IS IN THE WAY, F*CKHEAD".

Mr Jobs is sadly no longer with us, but the point still stands. Having the drawing instrument, be it a pen-and-tablet or mouse, off to the side well clear of the work being created is such a massively useful thing I'm staggered that people honestly can't see that for themselves. Ten seconds with a tablet computer and a drawing app should demonstrate it nicely to anyone.

One can only conclude that the people still foisting a "no mouse, touchy-touchy" model on me never use these products, and the less said about the suitability of such people for designing tools for my use the better.

So, at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious I'll sum it up:

1) What people like me want from the operating system is that it look and interact with them much like Windows XP. When thousands of people are telling you that they want to use your software bugs'n'all despite your screaming that they are being dense for doing so, perhaps it's time to stop using "they're stupid" and concede that perhaps you have been. Concentrate on refitting the engine and making the door locks more secure and stop f*cking about with the knobs and dials.

2) What people like me want from an Office Suite is that it be as easy to use as possible and that the thing that are broken under the hood be fixed, not the baby out with the bathwater chop'n'channel you keep giving us. I'm already done with MS Office for my own use. Your fault.

Just think: If you'd spent all that money educating people that even though Windows Whatever looked much the same as Windows Oldhat it performed better and was much safer to use, you'd have probably maintained that fantastic market share you won with clever and timely UI design (and a fair bit of clever marketing) in the first place. Now the sand is washing out from under you and your core business is a collection of products more and more people don't want to deal with.

Me included, and I *like* Windows 7, mostly.

Bah!

Perhaps this is a natural defensive mechanism evolved to deal with resumés that have been meticulously and honestly compiled by the would-be candidate then passed through the grubby hands of a venal agent who "edited for content".

Can't count the times during my consulting years that I sat with a would-be client and had to explain that no, I can't do that and I didn't write that I could and would they please let me see what they were sent by Mr Ron Shady so I could wave the Blue Pencil of Truth at it?

Wait, yes I can. It was every f*cking time.

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"With Windows 10, we think of the operating system as 'Windows as a service'," said Terry Myerson, Microsoft's VP of operating systems. "In next few years, you could think of Windows as one of the largest internet services on the planet. The question of 'what version are you running' will cease to make sense."

I'm guessing that this is weaselspeek for "Large protions of the Windows O/S will now download from the web on boot (providing you have a paid-up subscription) and Windows No Version Necessary will not work if you have no internet connection".

I imagine this makes sense if you consider all PC users to be gamers who have to be connected to Steam etc get their games to start, or if you live in that parallel Stupid Universe.

I see the operating system as fundamental bedrock, not "a service".

Microsoft spokesweasels have a very specific meaning in mind when they talk about services, a meaning not predicated on being the most useful to me under the least helpful circumstances, which is what I require from an OS.

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Exclusive page III pictures of Lutetia Hiltonius: clumsy chariot dismount gives The Examiner's readers a chance to check for themselves the veracity of those "going Grecian" rumours with a lucky up-toga woodcut you won't want to miss. Also, Augustus's calendar changes: vital for Rome's farmers or simply a pain in the cloaca for everyone without "Caesar" in his name? Our latest poll lets YOU decide!"

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[Insert generic Linux expert "This is the user's fault" snark].

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How is this a threat, seeing as there cannot be anyone under the age of 30 who hasn't already posted photos of their not-so-privates on the web *somewhere*?

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Well, for one thing I think you'll find the phrase was trademarked several years ago in connection with an abandoned iPad commercial campaign with the working title "Oo Eeze Zis Charlie?"

At least, I'm sure that's what internal e-mails being written and back-dated even as I type will prove.

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I'm surprised anyone can hear such press announcements from Redmond, what with all the screaming of "Gah! My foot! My poor, shredded foot!"

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NASA should prioritize a rover mission to nip over and graffiti-up this UK dustbin lid by writing in the dust covering it.

I suggest "Wot, no wheels?" and the obligatory "Clean Me".