Posts by John Tserkezis 2242 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2007
"your Microsoft account"
I've been out of the Win10 loop for a little while and haven't kept up. Does this imply we've lost the ability to log in using standalone login names (like now and win8.1) or are we really forced to create an (erk) microsoft account let us log in? (blech - that leaves a bad taste in my mouth every time I say it.)
"They should do the same over here for Omega 3 claims"
'Round here, the craze is with Krill oil. Even though studies have shown that Krill oil is equal to generic omega 3's, as far as advertising goes, you just don't see Omega3 anymore - just huge banners selling Krill.
I bet the fact it costs more has nothing to do with it...
And for those who care, I was on 20-25 (equivalent) capusules a day of omega3 (no krill in those days) with absolutely no results, and a friend on one a day with good results.
Who can spell p.l.a.c.e.b.o?
"Windows 7 doesn’t work with Microsoft app-store apps."
This is a good thing.
From the casual browsing I've done, the Microsoft app store looks much like the Apple app store or even Google play. Aside from a few useful programs, it's just pages and pages and pages of string-attached "pseudo free" crap.
It's a sign of the times, and I don't like it.
"Actually anyone should create no less than a OS partition recovery image every month if not every week. Or even every day or couple of days."
You overestimate "anyone", in that "anyone" has more important things to do than backup their computer every day. Or every other day. Or every month for that matter.
Heck, I have enough trouble trying to convince "anyone" to backup AT ALL.
"New versions of Windows and sales of new PCs go hand in hand"
"If I'm wrong, and you can prove it, I'll gladly put my hands up and say I'm wrong... but until then I am, as I said, calling bullshit."
You're right, but I think the original poster meant different, in that, (regardless if you're buying new or upgrading or otherwise) with any purchase of a new computer, it is generally accepted you're going to get some version of windows with it at the same time, that is, the sticker price already includes the price of that windows.
This is certainly not an exclusive rule: By far most people are not computer heads, and are not able or willing to change things once it's out of the box. Corporates and home-geeks are not in the same league though, and ARE able and willing to make forced changes either due to requirements, or pure preference. But I'm not quite sure if I want to call them the majority either.
As far as buying a new version of windows goes, agreed, outside of those few oddballs, or perhaps some that have strict software requirements, this is not Apple, people don't line up overnight to buy a new boxed windows version, nor download and install the newest and greatest version of windows "just because". It just doesn't happen.
"Where the hell are you above getting the sbscription / its only free for a year idea from?"
As Dr Phil says, a good indicator of future behaivour, is relative past behaivour. It just doesnt' make any sense at all their current business plan goes along the lines of: "screw customers, screw customers, be nice, screw customers".
I don't see it happening.
"It means that if you hit the download button from a Windows 7/8/8.1 machine and the date is between the launch date and the launch date + 12 months then it the cost is $0. Otherwise there will be a price attached."
Whoa, whoa there. If this means yet another 3Gb+ download for the upgrade for each and every machine, they can get stuffed.
"In short, if you DON'T have travel insurance, your a dead set idiot and I will be PMSL when I hear on the news that an aussie traveller is stuck in Thailand or US or wherever with a $40k hotel bill and no way to pay."
Downvote for you - you take your health for granted.
Pray to whatever diety you or anyone in your travelling party doesn't have one of a number of health conditions some insurance agents won't cover for. Some bastards go even so far as saying "if you or anyone in your travelling party has condition [X], you will not be covered". (Yep, actually read that in black and white!) Don't like that? Screw you, it's legal and in the fine print. (Seen that in an Queensland travel insurance agent's fine print).
In some cases, for certain conditions, any insurance will cover you for some obscene premium like $8K a pop. (A number of family friends came across this) I'm guessing you'll probably go without too.
I would go so far as handling insurance at least two months before you go (in some cases it'll take about a month of paperwork to handle it), make sure you're healthy (screw you if you're not), and again, for whatever diety you believe in, MAKE SURE YOU READ THE FINE PRINT.
"This device has no reason what so ever to be transmitting on the CAN bus and the transceiver should be configured so that it is impossible for it to do so:"
I can see a market for the "old school" hidden lockout switches. You know, the ones that prevent the engine from running till you flip the obscure switch?
This is the same, but disables the USB port on the dash (or whereever it is) except if you're taking it to the mechanics or such (and they'd probably have access to other ports anyway).
"And it's actually legal for an insurance company to foist something like that onto their customers."
"Isn't there a law against that somewhere,"
It is legal as long as they state they're doing it. A car hire company got into the shit a couple of years ago when they started issuing speeding "fines" by reading the GPS logs when the vehicle was returned. Never mind the fact a "fine" is a goverment legislated thing with tight restrictions that retard private car hire companies don't have the luxury to hoist on their customers anyway.
They "fixed" it by burying it in their fine print, and calling a "fee" instead.
Ahh, the fine print, does it know no limits?
"I don't object to El Reg including a headline picture with its articles. But some of them really do make the site look tacky."
Couple of clicks through Adblock Plus removes them. Initially during the el reg changeover, I had left them in, but found too many wheren't really applicable to the story - so out they went.
We were told we couldn't have any more than 2 weeks unaccounted for leave, so we had to eat up anything we had left over so far. Didn't matter that this was standard practice in other firms, and who cares about 5 weeks of holiday anyway?
Found out later, some employees, had collected several months worth of holidays, and left the employer in the lurch for three months in a row while they were froliciking somewhere.
"The solution is to glue laptops do desks :P"
Ahem. A place I used to work at, had various cards go missing from my testbed computer.
I finally superglued (in the form of a threadlocker) the hex nuts into place, as well as the VGA cable fastening screws. For good measure, I got in and superglued the videocard fastening screw in place.
Then I waited for every bastard to ask me why I did that. (they had to try to pinch it to realise it was stuck, because I didn't tell anyone).
Turns out, most of the people in the department were the thieves. Not that is was hard to get the cards, you sign the paperwork and you get it. But handwriting was too hard you see.
"Wow, where do you get the authority to deny your office workers USB flash drives?"
We are the IT deptartmet. We ARE the authority. We have been charged with ensuring the securty of our network from various intrusions, one of which is malware-infected USB drives, which we've shown again and again, idiot users, much like yourself, like to poke into any and every computer out there. But not ours.
Don't like the way we do things? No problem, fuck off and work somewhere else that does let unfettered USB drive use, like Sony for instance. As an example.
I have some head issues that don't deal with distracting unrelated content on the side, but I can take those out.
To be constructive, the menu bar is a pain. Sure, if it's something that I'm going to use all the time to help navigate around the site - great - but it isn't, it's only taking up screen real estate. I'm quite happy to scroll to the top on the odd instance I want to use it. My laptop has only 600 pixels from top to bottom, so it occupies a large amount of screen space. 600 pixels man! I can get rid of that too, but the cost is I lose it completely - which I don't want to do.
Pictures. They're huge. They're fucking huge. Worse still, having top pictures in "most" of your stories doesn't help, they're unrelated, and fucking huge. It's like you took a leaf out of the annoying marketing manual and thought since a moderate image is good, a fucking huge and unrelated image MUST be better. I don't want to turn off all pictures, and in fact the Win7 version of the reg I had most that were related, were also visible to me. But now that they're not, I'm >< THAT close to wiping out images completely.
Social links. Really? Do you not read your own forums? You probably only have 18 readers that follow the networks to any degree, and all of them claim they DON'T use it for sharing cat photos. But they secretly do. Oh fine, leave them in, but I'll be scrubbing them out at this end anyway.
"You order a ride from your house to restaurant, some unchecked driver turns up who now knows your home is empty for the next couple of hours."
And when you leave a bad review because you find your house ransacked after you get home, next day you have three big boofy blokes at your doorstep dressed in suits who wish to have a "chat" with you.
"Imagine buying a car which, by factory default, gives you about 5 mpg"
That analogy doesn't work. What might be more accurate, is to say you buy a car, and in the fine print you didn't read, allows random strangers to temporarily sit in for a ride. That is, you notice people randomly come in for a ride, and randomly leave again.
Additional fuel consumption might be a bit hard to claim, because as I understand it, they don't count that additional bandwidth towards your own plan. Additional power? As above, good luck with that, you're talking fractions of cents.
But what you WILL notice is there is less space, thus carrying capacity in your car - at random intervals. I don't know how or IF the Comcast hardware prioritises the traffic to the actual owner rather than the "borrower".
I don't remember about Comcast, but I do remember this similar thing happening with a number of carriers. I'm quite sure it's in the contract somewhere - even if the bastards had to bury it in a sub-section translated from Swahilii.
"And just like a whack-a-mole game, the moles just pop up elsewhere."
Read another report where they were up again a few days later - albeit in a limited fashion.
I predict that in another few days, they'll be up properly, and if you had blinked, you wouldn't have noticed they were gone at all.
Just like every other time...
Perhaps they can give some clues to Sony on how to keep their little system up and running. <cough>.
"Geolocation blocking is a legitimate way of maximising the property rights of the owners, in exactly the same way that luxury goods makers are legally allowed to block grey imports"
They're not the same at all. Blocked grey imports mean only that you have a lesser choice of which vendor to buy shit from - but you can still buy it.
Geolocation blocking is a case of "fuck you Charlie, you ain't getting shit".
"That's why they tell you to back up the settings before applying an upgrade."
I've just upgraded the firmware on a box that warned me if I had a stored setup file that was created with an earlier firmware version, it won't be accepted now, due to certain security change requirements.
So, you write things down, resulting in a long winded and painful restore - worse still if you didn't read the firmware revision notes beforehand. Ironicaly, that's what the stored setup file was supposed to cure.
A forehead slap moment if there ever was one.
"This makes it trivial to send commands to the routers from a web page from the User's own PC from within the LAN."
I'll give you a hint, it doesn't matter. If someone has physical access to your equipment, they already own it.
This is why corporates lock up their servers from all but the few key personel. If your only option is to break in via the network, it's much harder.
"Or alternatively DD-WRT or OpenWRT."
Honestly, I've never seen them as options. Any and all firmwares they have available are for hardware revisions that are no longer available, or if you're *really* lucky, there might be a highly expermental version.
Don't get me wrong, they all do bloody good work, all very worthy and valuable, but, I'm not buying second hand gear with the risk of the hardware revision being one sub-number off, just to get a feature I might be able to get elsewhere anyway.
"The comedy movie in question is The Interview"
I'm going to find and watch "The Interview" just to piss off his supreme leadership king kong (or whatever his name is).
No wait, Sony has has a significant part in this film, so I won't be watching it after all.
Bugger. But bide your time king bong, soon will be a film that makes fun of you and ISN'T produced by Sony, and you can rest assured I'll be watching THAT.
"that rant smells of someone recently fired from the company and wanting to take his revenge"
Well, it certainly wasn't his exemplary command of the English language that kept him employed there....
Or "her", hey, I'm not judging.
"Any takers on the whole thing is an inside job because a former employee knew how crappy the IT security was ?"
I'm not so sure, aside from there being other evidence, you don't need to be a Sony employee to see how slack their security was.
"It's not often a vendor would celebrate losing 43 per cent of its users in two months, but Microsoft is probably chuffed that's the fate of Windows XP in October and November."
Microsoft killed XP, and it only took them 13 years to do it.
Unless Microsoft can pull a rabit out of its hat with Win10, I expect it'll take them another 13 years to kill win7 too.
With that Uber executive vowing to release the hounds, er, private eyes to track and stalk anyone and everyone who's critical of Uber, they might not need to.
See, some Uber drivers in Melbourne and Sydney Australia aren't compliant with all the rules and regulations required of them, and not only have they been fined (which they should have), the media has come to the party and carefully reported ONLY those who have been fined. So, since the only mention of Uber has been drivers who have been fined, that means, ALL Uber drivers are >that< far away from being fined too.
Because as we all know, the papers are properly neutral, and give a correct well-rounded review of whatever is happening in our cities.
"Pop it in the microwave for a few seconds."
As others have mentioned here (including other places), that would likely fry all the electroncs in your card, and depending, it could also damage your magnetic strip.
I'll give you a clue - no-one does physical imprint credit card transactions anymore. May as well give them your cardboard business card for all the good it'll do.
The Government offficials at Fort Lauderdale, worked out since everyone kept feeding the homeless, they've been multiplying, over-running the city. By that reasoning, if you starve them, they'll eventually die out, or leave to ajoining areas, as long as they're outside the Fort Lauderdale political bounderies, who gives a crap, right?
Perfectly logical reasoning for your typical public official.
As an average Joe (at least nowadays) I use the ever-reliable "suck it and see" test method. Ignore the marketing data, take the tested reviews with a bucket of salt, and only trust how fast it's going to go in your actual rig. Sometimes I've shuffled things around using spares I have lying around, just to see if and what difference it's going to make.
Or sometimes I don't bother testing speed at all in cost-sensetive applications. Heck, if they want the thing to go fast, they should have opened their wallets more.
"And somehow it calculates its height above some object below it? How, just HOW?"
Easy. If my name happened to registered on that phone (*), it knows, the freefall trajectory is actually a higher velocity arc thrown over some distance, and first impact will be some brick wall. Second impact would be a concrete floor a certain distance above the first impact (calculated by my height, throwing arm, velocity detected leaving my hand, time in the air etc. It would even be in the air for long enough to call up the weather service and calculate for windspeed.
Of course, all of this requires significant firmware, possibly not leaving room for other things, like phone functionality, or less so, a calendar, or other non-important things like apps and such, OK, may be one farting app (so choose wisely!).
(*) Chuckle, I would never put my name to any Apple device. I was done with that many years ago.
Don't forget drivers.
Pretty much any more recent internal peripheral (*) now only has drivers for v8.x, and 8 only.
You can't even buy new hardware and expect to shoehorn Win7 onto it - there are simply no drivers.
In contrast, you used to be able to get drivers for whatever is current, going back two versions in some cases, but nope, now you're stuck with 8.
And for THAT reason, they can all get screwed. I'm keeping my current hardware till they either pry it from cold dead hands, or it dies, whichever comes first.
They could give us choice, which would break that stalemate, but I won't be holding my breath.
(*) I should mention the problem is firmly steered toward the direction of laptops and tablets, quite less so for desktop peripherals. When the majority of your market has existing sometimes expensive cards, you either supply "legacy" drivers or you go out of business. Looks like they DO understand general economics after all, let's see how long it takes Microsoft to get it.
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