Posts by big_D 6778 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
I'd be happy with 4G or even 3G here. Currently ISDN would be faster than the "4G" I'm getting. In the city, I get 50 - 150mbps, at home 2 - 3mbps and at work 0.001mbps - so slow that Vodafone's own speed test app says there is no internet connection. My contract says 4G "up to 500mbps", to be honest, I'd be happy with 5mbps at work and 50 at home.
The Yubikeys support most of the 2FA standards that are currently in use (at least, dongle based methods). They are also programmable, so additional methods could be added.
I've been using keys for about 6-7 years for providing 2FA on LastPass and for Microsoft, Google and a few other services. Just holding the key against my smartphone to unlick LastPass is great - worked with my old Lumias and with my Android phones.
Dual boot situations, working with NTFS partitions (either native to the PC or external drives and solid state media), using Linux repair disks to repair an NTFS partition on a Windows PC. There are lots of legitimate reasons for wanting NTFS support.
There are plenty of solutions for scanning damaged NTFS partitions, but they are usually read-only, with "write support experimental", not something you want when trying to recover critical data. Having a fully featured and maintained read/write driver is a much preferred to either getting a report saying there is a boot virus, but it can't be removed or possibly damaging the NTFS partition.
The existing driver, for example, doesn't work well with highly fragmented files and does not support the creation of sparse files. If the Paragon driver provides better support for the NTFS standard than the existing drivers, why look a gift horse in the mouth?
Yes, the basic idea is good, the implementation over 10 years ago was reasonable, for set-up costs. Now it is draconian for established players and very unfair, when it comes to paying subscriptions and in-app content that don't go anywhere near the app stores (E.g. magazine subscription, where the media is delivered from the publisher's website or in-game currency, which just needs transaction processing, which doesn't cost 30%). Publishers should be given the option of using the app store for transactions or their own payment processors, if they have an established provider.
Disallowing 3rd party stores and side-loading is also wrong. Point out that the user does so at their own risk and Google/Apple can't be held responsible if you compromise the system, by all means, but they shouldn't be banned outright.
Neither is translating languages. Google's efforts, especially with English <-> German are still laughable, when not downright dangerous.
It was a few years ago now and I did submit the correct translation afterwards, so it did learn, but:
Do not open the case, high voltage inside -> Das Gehäuse öffnen, Starkstrom drinnen (Open the case, high voltage inside)
Do not open the case, no user serviceable parts inside -> Das Gehäuse öffnen, nichts drinnen (Open the case, nothing inside - not what you want to read, when you just paid 4,000€ for a new industry PC).
Google Translate hat real problems with formal English. Use "don't" and it translated correctly as "tu es nicht", but use do not, it ignored the "not" and gave out "tu es" (do it).
I did an internship at a translation company and, whilst my translations weren't anywhere near the professional standards required, they were still readable, accurate and a million times better than what Google, Bing or other translation engines could or can manage.
While telling someone to open the case, because there is high voltage inside is laughable, it can also be downright dangerous, if you have absolutely no grasp of the source language and are 100% reliant on the translation. I've tried feeding German news articles through Google Translate to post them on English forums, for speed, but I still usually have to go back end re-edit the result, because it can't cope with the subtle way a sentence can imply the negative of a situation in German, without seeming to do so at first glance - and not after analysis by their so called AI.
I've given about 30 hours of Teams training since March, but luckily, apart from that, I've probably had about 2 hours of conferences or video calls since then.
Also, my laptop has a physical slider for the camera and my keyboard has a microphone mute key. Even better, my desktop PC doesn't have a camera at all - we ordered 40 cameras back in March, the first delivery of 20 turned up 2 weeks ago and I am way down the list.
You have to have the data stored in unalterable format (i.e. once a piece of data has been added, it can't be changed or deleted, just "extended"), otherwise a corrupt official could easily just delete entries or reduce their worth, whilst packing the "goods" into a white van at the loading ramp.
That means a lot of encryption, auditing options and much more, to ensure the database can't simply be altered and any changes are accredited to the correct user, so you have full traceability.
The large part of the price is probably servers/server licenses, CALs for access to the database, then comes the development of the software and maintenance.
We had a bored night-shift op who loved MUD. He was playing over the modem and using PSS(?).
One night he came up with the "brilliant" idea of running a team through the dungeon. So he had a 4 character team running, each with a dedicated modem and using the PSS account to the Essex uni's machine...
And that for nearly all of his 12 hour shift!
The resulting phone bill and PSS invoice was "substantial", to say the least. Luckily his best mate was responsible for the modem pool and the PSS. He got an earfull from his mate, who then managed to distribute the high invoice evenly over the valid projects, so they were all a little larger that month.
Lesson learned, he didn't run a big MUD raid again, at least not as long as the company was using a modem pool for access.
Nature and environmental changes keep population in check... Only we have defied the environment with medicine, prosthetics, pacemakers etc. We have also messed up the environment to provide enough to eat and for "unnecessary" things.
We have bypassed the natural barriers to population explosion and keeping the population numbers sustainable and we produce more waste than we, or the planet, can currently deal with. We have taken the responsibility of population numbers and the balance of nature away from nature itself and it is now our responsibility to ensure we don't destroy the planet in the process.
Yes, any add that is over 50KB or uses JavaScript should be banned. A simple JPEG and an a href tag are all that's needed, or even just text.
That is why I use NoScript. They can serve me a static ad, but they can't run JavaScript or multimedia.
After all, Google also charges 30% and they don't provide any security testing.
Actually, Google does do security testing, just like Apple. And just like Apple, it isn't 100% reliable.
If you look behind the headlines, both Apple and Google are being sued by Epic for the 30% vig and both are being investigated by the EU and US governments over their practices. So, it isn't Apple being singled out here, although you do have to start somewhere, so why not with the biggest, in terms of turnover, and the most enclosed (Google at least allows side loading and there are other app stores, such as Samsung and Huawei, for example).
That is the problem, the companies build up a business, ignoring the laws and they are given a pass as a "growing company", so they never build legal compliance into their business model, until they are too big and it is no longer economical to do so.
If they were forced to comply with the law from the beginning, they would have to evolve with a business model that could be sustained whilst complying with the law. But as long as lawyers and fines are cheaper than "doing it right," they will continue to do it wrong and apologise afterwards.
For big tech, in general, as long as lawyers and fines cost less than "doing the job properly", they ignore what is right. This needs to change.
Either the fines need to really hurt - most fines were set when people and companies earned a lot less, so they are chicken feed these days - or you need to start putting executives in gaol. Maybe then they'd start taking their duties seriously.
And we are professionals...
I left one company and after a year, I noticed I still had access to the CEO's OneNote share! I wrote him an email to warn him. We had been to court over wrongful dismissal and I received a settlement, but I didn't want to endanger my situation with my new employer by doing something stupid.
I have never been comfortable that a standard deserves royalties, or even that a standard can cost you different amounts. Just imagine if different petrol stations charged you different prices per litre, based on bowser design.
Petrol stations charge you based on the time of day, the prices of other stations in the area and the "brand" of fuel they are pumping already.
I agree that standards shouldn't be encumbered, but that is practically impossible these days, it would be nice if we could have that, but companies have too much invested in patent rights. It would mean scrapping the current global patent system and starting from scratch. It just ain't going to happen.
Yes and no. The first part is correct. Isn't part of that arrangement that anybody using the technology defined in the standard will get FRAND access to the patents required? That doesn't mean a price is set in stone, just that those who want/need to use the standard can guarantee that they will pay a fair amount for the use of the patents in the standard.
I.e. if most companies pay in the 0.25c to 1.1c per unit for a patent and somebody else comes along, I can't suddenly change the $999 per unit, just because I don't like their hair cut. I don't have to give it to them for 0.25c, but I also can't be egregious.
Students are there to supposedly learn a craft, not how to use a specific piece of software.
They should learn the principles and the skills for the subject at hand at Uni and when they start work, it is the company's job to ensure they are up to speed on the specific software they use. I learnt on a disparate set of tools and that put me in good stead for industry, where I was using a different tool every other month (for example, I learnt word processing at college, at work I used MS Word for Mac, WordPerfect, DisplayWrite IV, AmiPro and later, Word for Windows, and that was just word processing, but I had learn what word processing is and how to apply that to a piece of software, so actually dropping out one piece of software for another was no hindrance to being productive).
Likewise, I switched from Lightroom & Photoshop to CaptureOne and Affinity Photo this year, I was productive in minutes on the new combination, because I learnt how photo post processing and editing worked, not how to use LR and PS.
When I was at college, we used a PET based wordprocessor, then DisplayWrite IV and MultiWrite (the same for languages, spreadsheets etc. with Visicalc and MultiPlan giving way to Lotus 1-2-3). My first job was using Microsoft Word and Excel on a Mac (as well as LightSpeed Pascal and LightSpeed C++).
But the college had taught me the principals of word processing and spreadsheets. They hadn't taught me parrot fashion to use DisplayWrite, VisiCalc or 1-2-3. That meant, I sat in from of Word and Excel on a Mac Plus and could just get on with using it, I didn't have to "relearn" everything.
Then I worked for a customer using WordPeferct on VAX and DOS. Then I worked on a contract using AmiPro. I quickly adjusted and just got on with it. Somebody who had just learnt menu or key sequences would be lost, by comparison.
Likewise, I was taught the fundamentals of programming, then PET BASIC and Prime COBOL, with RPG/II and RPG/III on a college project with a local pharma company. When I started work, I was using MS BASIC, VAX COBOL, Turbo Pascal, Intel Assembler, 4D, Clipper, Visual Basic and Visual C++, among other languages and over the years a quickly rotating toolset, from Java to PHP, to C#.
If I had just learnt to use the tools-de-jour at college, I'd never have gotten anywhere in the real world, because I never came across those tools again, the world was constantly changing and the tools I learnt to use a college were obsolete by the time I graduated. But the skills and basic principles I learnt were still valid and allowed me to pick up new tools with no training about how they worked.
Yes, I switched my photo processing process from LR + PS to CaptureOne + Affinity Photo. I am very happy with the results, even if CaptureOne isn't exactly cheap - I used the free version I got with my camera for a couple of years, but upgraded to Pro for my daughter's wedding pictures this year.
Maybe then can switch to British/European tools. I switched from PS to Affinity Photo, which was much cheaper, a perpetual license and covered everything I needed.
Obviously, a heavyweight user will probably still need add-ins or tools that only Adobe provides, but there are professional alternatives out there - I switched from Lightroom + PhotoShop to CaptureOne and Affinity Photo and I am very happy with it.
The other question is, should we be teaching students to use a tool or teaching them how something works? When I was at college, we used 2 or 3 different tools, E.g. DisplayWrite, MultiWrite and WordPerfect and we could use whatever tool we wanted privately to create course work (I used Arnor Protext). We were taught how to word process, not how to use WordPerfect, for example.
I think giving students a range of tools and teaching them how different features work, as opposed to parrot-fashion which key presses or mouse clicks are needed, is much more important.
I agree with you for the most part.
But plain text email is a decades old standard. It should be the lowest common denominator. If the email client can't generate standards conform emails, that is the email client's problem and a bug report should be raised with the developers of that software - or choose a standards compliant tool.
Microsoft is notoriously bad with its mail protocol adherence, especially anti-spam and secure email authentication, it regularly malforms the headers - I worked for a security company that was always having problems with customers using Exchange and it malforming the headers, so critical emails were being rejected by the recipient system, because they didn't adhere to the standards and were therefore classified as phishing or hoax emails. You could hear the CTO's rants about Microsoft's woeful attempts at email headers from the other end of the building!
I think that is a bigger part of the problem today. So much software ignores the established standards and does it "their" way, which is standard, but not quite standard.
The advantage of the current system is that it is free, open standards based and anyone with a (standards compliant) email client can use it and use it when they don't have a reliable internet connection. They can receive a batch of emails, read them offline, write the replies offline and then send the replies, when an internet connection is available. That is difficult to do on a system that requires a permanent internet connection.
(E.g. a builder managed to break the main line into our town, the whole town was without Internet for several days and then 1mbps for 2 weeks after that, until the provider could re-splice the fibre. Currently I know of a outage where a cable has been broken, but is laid alongside the railway track, so they have to negotiate with Die Bahn to close the stretch (main East-West arterial link, I believe), so they can dig up the cable and repair it, the cable broke last Thursday and negotiations are still going on to get access to the cable to repair it a week later! During such times, you have to fall back on either slow links or links with very limited data, so you have to work offline and send and receive changes in bursts.)
the open tabs view, I haven't noticed much difference to the old version. It looks a little cleaner, but no real major differences so far.
The two add-ons I use are still there (NoScript and uBlock Origin). If NoScript ever disappears, that will remove the reason not to move to another browser, it is the singe differentiating factor, for me.
This was a deliberate act to force the issue to be heard in the open and to gain as much publicity for the case as possible.
No matter which side you stand on, Epic orchestrated it (especially the release of the 198fortnite video) perfectly.
People have been moaning for nearly a decade that the 30% that the mobile OS makers take for their stores is too much, but it falls mainly of deaf ears. Companies have tried negotiating and there are international cases to be answered, but it is all slow and hasn't really gained much attention, outside of the developer community.
This makes it a big deal. Fortnite and Epic Unreal Engine based games have a big presence on iOS and macOS, so it is inconveniencing Apple users directly. They are now the pawns in this battle for who is right, on whether 30% is reasonable for "doing nothing" other than processing payments - in game currency doesn't need to be stored in Apple's warehouses or transferred bit-by-bit down the line, they need a credit card transaction (2-3%) and the sending of a token (a few bytes). Does that really cost $30 on a $99 transaction?
That is the question that the courts will now have to answer. Epic's hope is that its players on iOS will voice their objections to Apple and if there are enough, maybe Apple will shift...
Yes, we use shadow copies + backup + offsite backup on rotating media.
If a file becomes corrupt, we can usually go back a couple of months and if that doesn't work, we have the year-end backups as well. Not much use on a live database being updated hundred of times a second, but for files that only get changed occasionally, that is usually enough.
No, they would go to their contact to recuperate their losses, but they wouldn't sue for data loss, that would still be their problem. But they would first recover their data from backups.
I've had the situation a couple of times during my career. We just get on recovering the data, whilst the mangers worry about whether they can get compensation.
I'm not saying that Adobe are not to blame or they ballsed up, just that it is still the users responsibility to ensure that they have backups. No amount of walking or pointing fingers at Adobe is going to get their data back.
No, this is more analagous to not checking the oil in the engine of your vehicle and then blaiming the manufacturer for a faulty engine, when it ceases, because you failed to put oil in when needed.
Well, not exactly, but at least a better analogy.
And suing Adobe won't help bring back those lost photos. And any money won wouldn't help recover those photos either. Just the same as if the device is destroyed, there is no point wailing and gnashing your teeth and blaming Apple. It is your data, so it is your responsibilty to ensure that it is safe from loss.
I've worked at companies where whole servers have gone down, power surge due to a lightning strike, fire, flood etc. They didn't wail about how unfair life is, they got replacement hardware in and recovered their data.
A private user is no different, just the scale is much smaller.
Being a photo cataloguing application, it would have to have access to the photos folder...
And it is the user's responsibility to ensure files are backed up. If it wasn't Adobe, what about device theft, fire, flood, dropped or faulty device, to name just a few instances where the same thing would have occurred?
You just can't help some people. I gave my daughter 1TB of cloud storage and USB keys... She stuffed her MacBook Pro in her backpack, along with a thermos of coffee, which she forgot to seal. By the time she got home from Uni, it was displaying a lovely fractal pattern on the display and coffee was dripping out of all the openings.
She tried to power it on, which killed it and the hard drive. I tried a lot of different things, including taking the drive out and sticking it in a PC and using disk recovery tools, but sugared bearings don't rotate well.
She hadn't copied her dissertation to the cloud or backed it up to USB stick, she had to start from scratch.
She learnt her lesson and now has Backblaze on her new MBP.
My ZX81 was plugged into a 4-way socket, each individually switched. Turning the power on and off on socket 3 (empty) caused the ZX81 on socket 1 to perform an interrupt that stopped programs executing.
Great for hacking games for unlimited lives or removing collision detection from the code.
Elevators, micro waves, fridge generators turning on and off, these stories are very common among older geeks.
Explosion danger was one though, at one company, they sent some project guys to a flour mill to work and the client set them up in the main hall, which had a lot of flour dust hanging in the air, as well as causing breathing difficulties, flour dust can be very explosive. The H&S guy wandered through the hall, saw the computers under a direct flour feed pipe and dust coming out of the pipe joints (normal).
He quickly evacuated the project team and had the power to the PCs cut. Luckily, there was no explosion, but the project team were a little white faced, and that was not caused by flour dust!
Another time, I worked for a plastic producer. They had a sulphuric acid store, where tanks of acid were kept. The PC they had was playing up, so I went to look. The motherboard and the drive were both badly corroded. As company policy was no data to be stored locally, I just swapped the PC out.
That was when the user told me the network had stopped working months ago and all the data was local... I managed to recover most of the data off the pitted drive.
They seem to do this time and again. They deliberately misinterpret the proposed laws and spread FUD in the hope that nothing will change and the law will be quietly dropped.
If the law goes through, they try to deliberately ridicule the law by misapplying it, in the hope it will be quickly repealed...
Same in Germany. It saved my wife a couple of times, when her daughter tried downloading MP3s from a site that then sent invoices for a monthly subscription afterwards. A lawyers letter stating the child was under age and not capable of entering into the contract cancelled the invoices and threatened legal action.
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