Re: Oh no...
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who masturbate and those who lie to themselves about not masturbating.
4343 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009
Unless you're on the end of an horrifically bad bit of copper, with error correction and interleaving working overtime to maintain stability, this is not really an issue.
Bobbins. My old man, who lives in deepest rural Suffolk has an entirely typical rural BT line (aka, its quite long). He made the jump to "fibre", he gets pings of ~35ms and download speeds of ~25 Mbps, and can't understand why it doesn't match up to my Gbit FTTP in London, where I get pings of 0.1ms and gigabit downloads and uploads.
OK, he also doesn't fully understand pings, but he certainly understands "why does it keep hanging and take ages to load the pages at home, but when I'm at yours it just comes up immediately".
See, the argument is why BT get to call what he has "fibre", when it is not.
Data in/out is common for cloud providers. Amazon talking about lock in however... the entirety of AWS (apart from EC2 and S3) is one giant lock in scheme. No you don't have to use their XYZ service for doing whatever feature, but eventually you do, and you end up with a "cloud" solution that only really works with AWS. Sure, you can get it running on GCP or OpenStack, but only once you replace that single click AWS feature with a different feature.
In our office refurb, we added some handy accessible outlets on the desks, with low amp fuses in them, for people to power simple things like phone chargers etc. The cleaners were under specific instructions to continue using the floor sockets, which were on a different circuit and could handle a much higher draw.
Guess which sockets they use. Guess how many "desk outlet not working" tickets we had to deal with.
Meet Tom Davies, who makes spectacles that cost up to £10,000.
I'm sure they are OK, personally I have a quite nice pair from Specsavers that do me.
Though curiously and I'm sure someone could help me out here but if it's in the cloud is it not backed up anyway by the cloud provider in case of problems with them?
To take AWS as an example, instance storage doesn't even survive a reboot. S3 storage is redundantly stored, and you can even version things stored in the bucket so that you can roll them back to previous versions, however if you deliberately erase the bucket, there isn't a backup of it that they can restore for you. You can backup S3 buckets to Glacier for archival/backup, but again, you can also destroy those backups.
You can also apply different security policies to stop admin credentials being used to perform these sorts of disasters, but many firms don't bother and just have virtually no restrictions at all on their admins.
Its not about the chlorination, its about that chlorination in abattoirs is thought to replace the EU practices of keeping the place actually clean of bacteria in the first place. US believes that chlorine washing can compensate for poor hygiene standards, and has a 0.4% population incidence rate of both campylobacter and salmonella infections (estimated), whilst the UK currently has 0.1% incidence of campylobacter and 0.01% of salmonella (actual).
PS: Only "pre-washed" lettuce has the chlorine rinse.
I think "scrum" is an amazing analogy for that type of "agile working". You have two teams of people who push constantly against each other, 4 out of 5 times it collapses in upon itself, no-one has a clue why it fails, someone always has the people propping it up by the balls and there is always one or two snarky little gobshites who have nothing to do with the scrum arguing with the ref about why its not their teams fault it went down.
Anything mechanical will break. If it hinges, its going to break at the hinge. Screen on the outside (Huawei), yeah, that's not going to scratch or fracture within a month. Roller blind phone? Will we get special trousers to take these extra thick slabs around included in the purchase price (50% thicker than the original iphone, which was pretty thick)? Or we don't use it like a phone, in which case wtf is the fucking point..
Might as well just call them fancy rich people tablets, thats the only niche they're going to fill.
Not as long as I'm paying for the hardware and power.
Bit small minded. You aren't paying for the server that has produced the content, or the electricity running that server, or the internet connection used to deliver it to you. The ads are the cost of getting the content; not displaying the ads is like watching cable TV without a subscription - hey its your electricity running the TV, that must be fine.
I dislike ads just as much as anyone else does, the way things are currently makes most websites tediously slow to load and use way more resources than it should be to just display an ad.
Which is why almost all the cloud providers immediately try to lock you in with their added features. Sure, you can run your regular servers on AWS, but why don't you use this little feature instead of doing that bit yourself, it will be much cheaper. OK, now how about this feature, now this feature...
Before long, your "cloud" systems are something that have really become AWS-only systems, because to move all those services to GCloud, or Azure will require redoing all those specific AWS features either yourself or using GCloud features. To be truly cloud agnostic is difficult, not because its difficult to do stuff in cloud, but because it is too tempting to take the quick win and lock yourself in.
Even ML isn't really right. The machines aren't learning, we're aren't "teaching" them to do anything. All we are doing is using datasets to produce statistical predictions on future data. Model wrong? Bad data? Start again from scratch, because the prediction outcomes will be wrong - the machine doesn't learn anything from the previous incarnation.
Hackney Wick is about as peak hipster as you can get. There are art collectives operating out of disused warehouses, bookshops on canal boats, microbreweries, food trucks, street art, artisanal pizzas and more beards and piercings than you can count. Still, £4 for a large gin and ginger beer isn't bad.
The generator was running on petrol, pretty sure from the racket.
PS if you like the street art stuff, hurry up. When I moved to Stratford in 2014, I'd guess 90% of Hackney Wick was disused warehouses covered with street art, nowadays its about 20%; the rest has already been converted to obscenely expensive executive flats.
I'd take any tech that means that the local shops using iZettle can still take payments when the London Stadium is full of whatever football fans are in there that day, instead of 5 minutes of the bearded ones turning it on and off before finally accepting the notes I'm waving in front of them.
When SyFy started showing it again on their channels, they had a launch party at the Prince Charles theatre, and I bagged two tickets in the prize draw. Sing-a-long version of "Once more with feeling" and "Chosen", plus goody bags and an open bar. The missus, who is Bulgarian and has no concept of Buffy, was most amused by all us 30-40yr old geeks singing along (the open bar helped in that aspect).
Pledgemusic is/was a site for crowdfunding music production, with most of the money going directly to the actual band themselves. My Danish friend, who is 24 and for some reason a huge Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark fan, got me to purchase, collect and then send on to her their latest vinyl release because they wouldn't ship to Denmark.
The idea was that bands would set a fundraising goal, when enough people signed up for it, the band would then produce the music, Pledgemusic would create the physical media and distribute it and pay the band. Unfortunately, just after Christmas, apparently Pledgemusic ran out of money, and stopped paying the bands what they were due and fulfilling pledged music. Currently they are saying that everyone will get paid as long as someone buys the company, which isn't that promising.
Some people seem to leave their nice booze until the end of the evening, which is totally the wrong way around.
Its to do with drinking booze all night, until the bell rings at 11. If you start on the strong stuff immediately, you could drink too much too soon, and then you won't make 11. If you start with the beer and only switch to the strong stuff from 10:30 onwards, good chance you will see 11 (and then maybe pass out in the street instead, or drop your kebab, or many other long standing British traditions).
This also explains our national drink related problems, get as much beer in until you're very drunk, then slam as many strong drinks until the bell rings, and then wander out of the pub at the same time as everyone else and compete for taxis, buses and takeaways. The town I grew up in had 7000 people, 27 pubs, no night buses, 1 taxi firm and 2 takeaways. 11:15pm on a Friday was a jungle.
Absence of evidence does make us innocent. "We knows it was you, you dirty thievin scum" is not evidence, only evidence is evidence. No evidence, no guilt.
The real disgusting thing here is that this guy has experienced a crime, the cops won't investigate that crime, but are quite happy to try and entrap him somehow for something else. If they want people to stop treating them with suspicion and thinking they act like a licensed gang, this sort of thing has to stop.
Really, for an IoT home, there should be one device that talks to all the other IoT devices in your house, from all the different manufacturers, and provides command and control services for those devices. This should be the only thing they talk to, and it should only talk to approved (by you) apps that communicate securely with it over any medium - LAN/WAN/WiFi/BT, whatever. The apps should talk a common protocol with this device, so that you can replace the apps with anything compliant that you pair with the house controller.
Of course, this will never happen. Consumers wouldn't buy it, they will opt for the version that talks directly to cloud servers because it is cheaper (you don't need an extra device), and manufacturers wouldn't make it, because a) they won't get your lovely data and b) it doesn't lock you in to buying things from them.
I've gone for a mix of old school and new tech, eyeballs and knives for checking when stuff on the hob is done, and digital temperature probes for the meat - pulling the bird out when it hits 75°C on the thigh and letting it rest gives a much better roast than oven thermometer + timer, and steaks are trivial to get right, 55°C for medium rare, 60°C for medium and 65°C for medium well. If anyone wants more well done than that, I have an old boot they can chew.
Setting multiple timers and controlling the tunes hands free sounds appealing, its just the decidedly creepy other side that means they are never coming in here.
We went round to a friend of the missus a few months ago where the guy spent half the evening extolling the virtues of his many Echos, even explaining what you can do with them. It was infuriating that I don't know him well enough to a) correct him b) pull a xkcd blackhat move without also infuriating my lady friend, so I just had to sit there and nod as he explained how, wow, we can also play the music in the living room? Who'd have thought!
A better analogy would be a hire car company renting out a fleet of cars, finding out that the company leasing the cars is deliberately using 10% of the cars for couriering drugs, and cancelling the whole contract. You can't cry about being deprived of the 90% of cars that weren't being used illegally.
And yes, they clearly knew this was against the T&C, which is why they didn't submit the app to the app store.
I'm now waiting for regulatory action: if both Google and Facebook did not make it 100% crystal clear that every action was visible when using this app (and in a VPN that really means a LOT), I think they deserve the maximum fine possible in Europe - especially since they explicitly sought to bypass limitations that made this difficult, had prior warning and had no problem going after kids with this.
The thing which interested me in Facebook's initial statement was that it was "unclear whether any EU citizens were impacted" - really? You're tracking everything a user does on the phone, and you haven't figured out their location. Riiight.