Re: Britain Needs Us Billionaires
He might not be a billionaire now, but just wait a week or two after Brexit, then, with rampant inflation, everybody will be billionaires.
Mine's the one with deep pockets.
6775 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
The problem is, the alternative is big iron from companies like Cisco. They are renowned for backdoors in their software and firmware - one of their SoHo routers hit the news last week because of a backdoor password snafu.
And there were also reports of HP kit being intercepted by the CIA and having spyware installed.
So, who do you go with? Hauwei who has been accused of spying, but no evidence provided or Cisco who is known to have had backdoors in its equipment, or HP whose kit has been intercepted in the past and spyware installed...
Hmm, tough decision.
I gave up on content blockers. I just dropped the addresses of the tracking and advertising sites into my hosts file and made them unroutable. It also blocks Windows 10 telemetry data.
It doesn't matter what browser, no traffic.
One better would be to put it into the routers hosts table for its DNS lookup.
The MAC address is unique. The manufacturer gets alloted his "prefix", which is the first 24-bits of the address, then every card they make is then given a unique address using the prefix + a serial number from the manufacturer for the second 24-bits of the address, so there should never be a conflict - if there is and both machines are on the network at the same time, it will cause problems, because the network protocols also use the MAC address.
It sounds like the manufacturer of the cards was lazy.
@Jamie Jones, the point isn't what they use to develop on, it is what they test on!
They should have decent kit to develop on, that goes without question. But if you have a userbase running on small Celeron or Pentium based mini-PCs with 8GB and the developer is using a Core i7 or Core i9 with 32GB, testing on the Core i7/i9 isn't going to tell you whether the program will be usable on a "real" user PC.
We were still "making do" with 32 or 40MB drives on most machines. The newer ones, with the slower controllers, were getting 80MB as standard, I think.
At home, I had an Amiga with an A590 unit with an external 40MB SCSI unit (a "spare"* Apple Mac external drive from work).
* Nobody missed it, so it was spare...
I was on a training course in Reading - VAX Advance Administration.
The first day was a bit boring, so I wrote a little script... It got a listing of all logged in users and logged off everybody who wasn't me!
Worked a treat. So I added some code to submit itself as a batch job at the end of its run, so it just constantly ran in the background. It was hillarious. Until I logged myself out.
I had overseen one minor flaw in my dastardly plan: when you log onto the VAX, until it has parsed the username and password, the login attempt appears in the userlist as "<login>". Oops. Every login attempt was killed before it could be parsed, so I couldn't log back in.
Even the instructor couldn't do anything. We all trapsed into the server room, but even the console couldn't log on. In the end, we had to hard reboot the system.
At least the instructor saw the funny side of it and turned it into a learning experience for the whole class.
That is often the case, the developers and support get high end machines and the users get stuck on low-end stuff.
The worst is when the developers use their development machine (fastest money can buy/the company can afford, to keep the compile times as short as possible) for testing. The software runs fine on the dev kit, but crawls like man who has been in the desert with no water for a week on the users' machines.
We always kept a PC with the minimum spec around for testing.
We had 40MB drives on our kit at the time, although the maximum partition size was 32MB, ISTR.
I had a Compaq Deskpro 386. By the time the renewals came around, the company had switched to Viglen and a colleague received a spanking new Viglen 486. Woooho! So much power!
So we ran one of our dBASE IV databases on it, to compare it to my 386. For comparison, the 386 generated the monthly report in about 40 seconds. The Viglen 486 took 180 seconds!
We ran some benchmarks on both. It turned out that, although the 486 processor was running rings around the 386, Viglen had cut costs by using the cheapest no-name disk controller they could get their hands on, which ran at about a quarter of the speed of the old Deskpro.
I came to work on a project, where the system was written in MS BASIC for CP/M (HP 125) and for MS-DOS (HP 150) and PC-DOS (IBM PC). The problem was, it was written by FORTRAN programmers and had been maintained for 5 years by COBOL programmers.
I think I was the first person on the project who even read the programmer's manual for MS BASIC. It didn't use For...Next loops or While...Wend, but only
10 A = 1
20 ...
30 A = A+1 : IF A < 20 THEN GO TO 10
Trawling though the several thousand lines of code, "repairing" that alone speeded up the system.
Then there was the updating, it read in CSV files, validated them and encoded the data into an output file and sent it to HQ (it was a data capture front-end for the financial reporting system). The program I worked on first used to take 4 hours to generate the output textfile, before sending to HQ.
Testing it was a pain, so I went through the code again. The name of every single data-set that was being updated (several thousand) was displayed on the screen. I put a simple check in there that just put out every 100th dataset name. It dropped the processing time from 4 hours to 20 minutes!
I got a 100% raise out of that little fix!
The real nightmare of the system was that it was full of commented out code, which made the system even more unreadable. I thought I'd be clever and delete the commented out code, only for the hole thing to collapse in a heap... It was using computed gotos and jumping into the middle of a block of commented out code! Oh well, you can't have everything.
Ooh, the Lynx, I drooled over that PC. I really wanted one, but I'd just upgraded to a Memotech at the time - that was also a stonking machine, for its time; it even had solid state drives (250KB SSD, if I remember correctly), as well as 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives and a traditional hard drive unit.
Although I never managed to get the disk expansions, being a lowly student. I had to make do with a tape deck.
Living in Europe, I don't see a difference if the phone is slurping data and sending it to the USA or to China...
That said, I have disabled as much Google & Hauwei slurpage on my phone as possible (all Google services, with the exception of Play Store are deactivated and all non-essential Hauwei apps as well).
Yes, they are still full of Google bloatware. Everything apart from Play Store is deactivated and doesn't run. But what low-level stuff is still running, I'm not sure.
(E.g. GMail, Youtube, PlayMusic/Video/Games, Maps, Assistant, Duo, Chrome etc. are all disabled.) For example, I use DuckDuckGo for search and Firefox or Brave for browsing. A lot of the Hauwei services are also disabled.
"Since 2016, we have been in regular contact with the Bundeskartellamt and have responded to their requests. As we outlined publicly in 2017, we disagree with their views and the conflation of data protection laws and antitrust laws, and will continue to defend our position."
They are saying that the issue is data protection and not antitrust.
WhatsApp is already quasi illegal in Europe. If you use it and allow your contact data to be uploaded to WhatsApp, you are effectively breaking GDPR. If you don't allow WhatsApp to upload your contact data, you cannot start new conversations with friends and any friend that starts a conversation with you will only be listed with their telephone number, no names (I know, I tried it when the German DPOs declared WhatsApp in contravention of GDPR - and the previous data protection laws). We switched to Threema and Signal, which are, theoretically, compliant.
An order confirmation with price comes post-purchase.
German law says you have to know the price at the time of checkout and that you consent to that price through completing the transaction.
As the Dash-button cannot show you the current price (or even if you will receive the product you ordered and not an alternative - E.g. you press your Ariel button and get Persil delivered), it is technically illegal and no purchase contract can be consumated by pressing the button.
That you can still cancel the order after having received the confirmation email is neither here-nor-there. The law says that you have to have the information presented to you at the point of checkout. Punkt. Ende. Aus.
The RTBF isn't about refusing access to information or even getting the information taken down. Some information has to remain, because it is public record.
The RTBF tries to set a balance to the information being their, but not bein too accessible.
It is the old "chip paper" argument. In the past, information was printed in the newspaper and the "next day" the old newspaper used to wrap up portions of chips. i.e. the information disappeared from the common memory. If you really wanted to find it, you could go to a newspaper archive and manually search it for the information required.
The RTBF says that if you really want to know, there is nothing stopping you going directly to the source, but searching for information within Europe using a search engine shouldn't bring up this "irrelevant" information in its results.
So, a prospective employer won't find spent convictions that they are no longer "legally" supposed to see, but a researcher writing a book or a news article can still go directly to the source (newspapers, blogs, public records etc.) and search them directly, just like researchers have always done.
said that search engine operators should not be required to carry out delisting on all the domain names of its search engine globally.
It sounds like a misquote or he didn't understand the concept. Right to be forgotten isn't about delisting domains in search, just individual pages within a domain.
The rest seems like common sense.
Feature updates aren't that important and are a "nice to have". What is important is the monthly security updates from Google.
My Hauweis aren't too bad, but they are generally 2 months behind - i.e. Hauwei get them and by the time they've tailored, tested and released the next one from Google is already available.
That said, my Sony TV is still on the security patch from August 2018, not so good.
They seemed to lose the plot, when they diversified. I remember the Coca Cola water was first introduced and their slogan was taken direct from the USA, but it didn't work, because the word used to market the product meant male reproductive material in English...
And Smarwater won an award in Germany for false advertising this year, with the CC marketing bod claiming that it was up to consumers to decide if they wanted to be taken in by CC's marketing...