Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Tossed mine today

Google? The company where almost every service or app is in perpetual beta and subject to being shutdown at a whim? That Google? The same one who bricked the Revolv kit?

Re: Let's start a new fad

But for the vast majority of people, the convenience factor is being able to instantly adjust the lighting or heating as you walk in or out of a room far more conveniently than checking where your mobile phone is, waking it up (swipe/face/finger swipe/print recognition/PIN code), activating the app, logging in, finding the function you need.

You could use a dedicated phone or tablet just for this one job, no screen locking since it never leaves the house, so long as the entire household has the self-discipline to not allow feature-creep and install other apps, and to always, ALWAYS put it back in its "proper" place so it can always be found.

For anyone with a mobility disability, I can quite see how this stuff is a godsend, but does it really have to rely on a server in silly-con valley and/or a subscription?

Re: Let's start a new fad

Ah, yes, "cluster" switches @-)

Re: Cue the lawsuits in 3, 2, 1...

...and if they do fold, the users are in exactly the same position as if the chose not to subscribe, ie everything stops working/

Re: Seems like a losing battle, and there's an elephant in the room

"And the prices that Softmaker charge are around the same as a personal MS Office subscription,"

Personally, that's what I see as the biggest problem. Why can't I just outright buy a version and keep it? Why should I have to rent it? Yes, it's not a lot per month. But everything is heading to "....as a Service" these days and all those "small" monthly rental charges add up quickly and I still don't own anything at the end of it. Like all the new streaming services. You just know that in a few years, some will fall by the wayside or be bought up and we'll end up with a couple of big players who will charge what they like and lock you in with a choice of take it or leave it.

Nail, meet head.

And from the article, there is no such thing as a complex, tightly formatted test document you can use to compare word processors. All it tests is the design of one specific release of one specific word processor and then demonstrates how that one is different to every other one. I'm sure I could create a "perfect" document in LibreWriter and then "demonstrate" how MSWord is incapable of displaying it "correctly. And that's not even taking into account of the fact that no one had the exact same selection of fonts to choose from unless they running a bog standard plain vanilla OS/Office app combo. Not only to people add extra fonts because they like them, but companies often mandate specific fonts for outgoing correspondence which others may not have at their end.

Re: I'll give it a go...

Purveyor of BSODs?

"In the US add in “display adverts to customer”."

Shell in the UK are doing this now. At at least one filling station the noise is blaring and they all seem to play the same advert at the same time but a bit out of sync with each other. I complained to the staff but they just shrugged, so I assume either they have no control over the sound volume or someone higher up is in charge of that setting. Either way, I don't care. I just never go there any more.

For reference, it's the new Shell "services" at Leeming on the A1, Nth Yorks on the southbound side, not the long established Leeming Services on the northbound side (You can get to either from north or southbound direction.) I can only use Shell as the company fuel card is a Shell card, but there are many other Shell filling stations I can use.

Re: How far away is home?

"When we went back to the UK a few years ago, we stayed in the Lake District. We then drove down to London to visit a relative. I lost count of the number of people who were very surprised at this asking how we travelled so far in a day. This was very puzzling to me."

To a Londoner, anything outside the M25 is "long way" :-)

Having said that, I know people locally here in the Grim North of England who would get lost if more than 15 miles from home but can tell you where all the best pubs are in there regualarTurkish or Spanish holiday resorts!

Re: Just wear the mask

"They have lots of cheap labor and use that, not the robots."

Yes, this. There's almost if not actually no situations where a fully mobile robot is cheaper or safer than just using a meat-sack. Those specialised situations where a "robot" is useful, it's rarely ever actually a robot. It's a remote controlled device with little to no autonomy.

In the instance in the article, the cost of that one remote controlled toy could probably employ a small army of real people with PPE.

Re: Schneier posted a thorough takedown of contact tracing apps

"So why bother at all?"

You are forgetting "if it saves just one life"

"so you license it on how many cores it has, like a VM."

Why? I can understand licencing per instance, but licensing per core? All that does is make things run faster and more efficiently. Next thing we know, they'll be increasing licensing based on the speed of each core. The entire concept of charging ever greater licensing fees based on the number of cores is just wrong. Why should my software cost more run per user when I spend more on faster and better hardware? Or be artificially limited to 2 cores on my 64 core beats?

Re: combined 46 million subscribers ...?

Not only that but not all VM mobile customers have their mobile accounts on the TV/BB accounts. Virgin Mobile was a separate company back in the day.

Re: Ha ha

"As much as I'm not Vodafone's biggest fan the network is very good, especially for data and the issues we've had with broadband (caused by BT cutting through a cable) we're dealt with reasonably well."

And that pretty much describes my experience win VM. I rarely have issues and customer support have almost always been useful and helpful on the very few occasions I've had reason to call them. From what I can gather, it depends where you live and if that part of their network has been oversold.

I've been with them since the United Artists/Telewest/Blueyonder/Virgin Media days, before broadband, before even the unmetered dial-up service. IIRC there has been two major outages affecting me (New Years Eve flooding at Knowesly being a memorable one), one failed cable modem that got replaced in 48 hours and one TV box that failed and was replaced in 24 hours.

Re: It also highlighted that Australia Government doesn't have control over National Data Soverienty

The US Cloud Act means that the US Federal Government can get access to any data stored on any "US Cloud provider in any country."

Well, yes and no. It depends on whether said US company is prepared to break local laws regarding locally stored or exporting of locally stored data. It could end up with Amazon execs suddenly finding they can no longer travel to countries which used to have Amazon bitbarns for fear of arrest. But probably not.

"I fear that a lot of the lemmings rushing to download it have no idea of the implications for their privacy and security."

So, no different to every other app they download which massively breaches and/or slurps their personal data security. The vast majority don't read Ts&Cs and grant any and all permissions asked for.

"An attempt at humour, I suppose?"

Clearly a rare bit in your case. Are you Welsh?

Re: Remodelling

..and the occasional boxes of bullets and first aid kits in random locations.

Re: Remodelling

Ok, so I looked it up and now I know what NRHO is. It seems the lunar gateway is going to spend a lot of time a long way from the moon. I'm sure there must be a good reason for that.