* Posts by big_D

6775 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009

Straight outta Blighty: Readers, if you were a tech billionaire, what would you do?

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Coat

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.

OK Google, er, Siri, um, Alexa, can you invalidate these digital assistant patents, please?

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Re: And here magic happens

I like the EU attitude, software patents? Nah, that's copyright, now, bugger off and let us screw up some physical patents.

Senior UK.gov ministers asked: So, are we going to ban Huawei or what?

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Re: Would other countries shun a Huawei-toting UK ?

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.

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

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Hosts

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.

Remember Woolworths? Well there's a different* one that still exists in Oz. Telstra wants NBN Co to help shove fibre in it

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OT Woolworths

Is still going strong in Germany as well. As are C&A.

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

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We had a manager who would take his desktop with him, when he did a training course, T-adapter and all, which meant nobody could work until a spare was found.

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Re: Silly NIC games ...

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.

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@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.

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Facepalm

Re: A little different...

Oops, coding error... That should be

30 IF A < 20 THEN GO TO 20

Goto 10 would be an infinite loop! :-D

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Re: Cat-5?

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...

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Re: Cat-5?

I had an IT director in 2012 who still insisted on calling switches hubs!

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Re: Oooops

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.

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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.

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Re: Cat-5?

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.

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A little different...

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.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

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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.

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Multi-tasking

And Mac users had to wait until 1987 for multi-tasking, in the form of MultiFinder. This replaced Andy Hertzfeld's Switcher, which allowed task switching (multiple tasks open, but only the one in the foreground "ran").

I used to be a dull John Doe. Thanks to Huawei, I'm now James Bond!

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Re: google playstore

Because I still need to install third party apps and get updates for them.

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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).

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I just go into the settings and deinstall it or deactivate it.

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Black Helicopters

Both my wife and youngest daughter have Wha-Heys. And I have 2.

Ooh, Matron!

Most munificent Apple killed itself with kindness. Oh. Really?

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Re: My tuppence worth

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.

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Re: My tuppence worth

As opposed to factiry Google spyware sending data right back to Google in the USA?

Not sure your hypothesis is worse, but at least it is only hypothetical.

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Re: Re-Use where possible

I have no input in the decision, that lays wholly by my daughter.

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Yeah, my Hauwei was a little overkill, spec wise, replacing a dog-slow Nexus 5x. The nice thing with that is, that Hauwei deliver it with a factory fitted screen protector and a silicon bumper case in the box.

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Re: Re-Use where possible

I have one prospective son-in-law, he is still using an iPhone 4S, he is looking to upgrade it this year (student, so limited funds).

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I think you missed that this was a comment piece of the comment piece by Gruber.

Do you feel 'lucky', well, do you, punk? Google faces down magic button patent claim

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I'm so glad...

that the government here decided that software patents were spurious and software was already covered by copyright and threw out the idea.

German competition watchdog toys with ban on some Facebook data-slurps

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Re: Wow...

"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.

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Re: Go on Germany, just ban FB outright

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.

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Re: Quite sad

Schrems logdged a complaint against Facebook on day 1 of GDPR. But it takes time for the investigation and the follow-up court cases.

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Re: About time

Agreed, I have Facebook blocked in my hosts file, currently it contains nearly 1,500 blocked Facebook tracking domains! That covers the like button, but also advertising and various tracking cookies and scripts.

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Facepalm

Wow...

Did Facebook just admit to breaking GDPR/ DSVGO as a defence against being a monopoly?

That must be the DPO's best day of the year, Facebook incriminates itself in a public statement!

Germany has a problem with the entire point of Amazon's daft Dash buttons – and bans them

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That would probably work, but would probably make the buttons too expensive for Amazon to bother with.

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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.

Alphabet board smacked with sueball for paying off Google execs accused of sexual harassment

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Re: PR stunt

There is a difference between being marched out the door and landing on your rear and being bribed to leave quietly to avoid a scandal...

Americans are just fine with facial recognition technology – as long as they get shorter queues

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Re: Something Ben Franklin Said

J.J. Blodgett: Franklin? Oh, oh yes, Ben Franklin... Well, good man for his time. Of course, today, I'm not sure he could pass the security check

From one of my favourite films.

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Re: Something Ben Franklin Said

+1

It is amazing how many Americans are ignorant of their own history. They seem doomed to repeat it, as Santayana predicted.

Two out of five Silicon Valley techies complain Trump's H-1B crackdown has hit 'em hard

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Re: Great news

Pay them less? I would want a darned sight more money to have to work in the USA.

Just for EU, just for EU, just for EU: Forget about enforcing Right To Be Forgotten outside member states

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Re: Right to NOT be forgotten?

In Germany they can't even show the faces of the accused (or wanted suspects) on TV or in the press, unless it falls under very limited circumstances and has been approved by a judge.

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Re: Delisting domain names?

Thanks, I misread the quote. My bad.

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Re: Right to NOT be forgotten?

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.

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Delisting domain names?

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.

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

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Re: Durability?

It is connected to a satellite dish for freeview TV, but Amazon Prime, Netflix and the libraries for the different stations aren't available over satellite or terrestrial...

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Re: Durability?

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.

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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...

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Re: Durability?

But the problem is, if you have to replace your 200€ Android phone every 2 years, instead of your 1100€ iPhone XS 64GB every 4 years, the Android still works out a lot cheaper.

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Pint

Invoice for a new keyboard inbound.

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Holmes

Re: Too late

What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone. Well, apart from the iCloud stuff, and iMessenger, oh and the stuff that goes to Google. Oh, and don't forget all those apps you installed also taking their information for themselves.

Google Play Store spews malware onto 9 million 'Droids

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Re: Do phones still have an IR port?

3 of my last 4 phones had IR.

Both of my current Hauwei phones come with IR transmitters and built in remote software.