Posts by John Tserkezis 2242 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2007
Presently, manufacturer's make it hard to hack, and it's presently illegal.
With this act, manufacturer's will continue to make it hard to hack - but that's all right, it's legal now.
Let's face it, anyone who's going to hack anything, is going to hack it anyway.
So again I ask, What's the difference?
I have two gripes with IP phones, firstly cost, it might not seem like a big deal when you're dealing with enterprise, but when the Australian NBN finally kicks in and your only option for telephony is IP, it becomes a big deal.
Secondly, features. Smart cell phones have had this cornered from the start, but why make it so hard to manage something like contact lists with desk phones? Is it REALLY that hard?
But this is the bit that tears me, I really do want a functional desk phone, I prefer that, and it works better for me.
However, an option with the NBN will be a box that plugs into the network and supplies IP functionality, with a regular POTS interface at the other end for compatibility with existing setups.
And that's exactly what I think will overwhelmingly happen. People will get phones they really want: What they have now, which is the absolute minimim of processing power. Myself included.
But the company also feels “... PC makers should look at this data and aspire to ship PCs that perform just as well as a cleanly installed MacBook Pro.”
So they're saying that if you remove the added bloatware, you'll have a box that's as reliable as a Mac?
Or in other words, the study proved nothing other than the bloatware manufacturers include is trying to bork your box - irrespective of what colour your box is.
Why couldn't they just say that?
Firstly, yes, you lose updates, but on that size network, you're going to be running via a central router/firewall/filter whatever, enough that *direct* attacks aren't possible or at least minimised.
Indirect attacks (downloaded malware) is a serious risk in almost any environment, but there's no reason you can't lock down XP pretty much like later OSs, not to mention virus/malware scanners and such.
You lose support. Or at least free support. Big whoop. I have a real problem with the "support" supporters, (excuse the pun), namely because I've never seen anyone call support and received a *useful* answer. Not talking about stupid non-problems you can google, but real problems. Maybe I've led a sheltered life, but anyone I know who's called for real problems has hit a brick wall with Microsoft. In other words, you've lost nothing, because you didn't have it in the first place.
Software requirements. Believe it or not, sometimes *YOU* have no control over what software someone else has picked. You know the one, it ONLY works with IE v6, you're in charge of keeping it working, the Powers That Be won't let you replace it and you can't argue with the idiot who bought it - usually because he's your boss.
Sounds like you got a defective unit or there's some kind of radio interference.
As far as interference goes, I don't think so. I'm running the same USB dongle as before, AND with an M905 mouse worked faultlessly (I hate trackpads). I put the dongle at the end of a USB extender cable to bring it around to the front of the box, and that helped, but still didn't "fix" the issue. With the K800 keyboard, I moved the USB dongle to the back of the box for neatness, so now it's obscured, and it STILL works around the room at any angle, even farther than I would normally use it.
As far as faults go, I didn't think of that, namely because while many claimed distance, no-one claimed "any angle" - and that's where my primary problem was. Going on the placement of the PCB antenna, it did appear to be optimised to "facing" the receiver, and yes, providing the receiver was around the front, I did indeed get about the quoted range with the keyboard facing the front. But I don't use it like that. With mods (moving the USB dongle and re-tracing a new antenna at a better angle) improved the situation, but as above, didn't fix it.
Don't get me wrong here, this is not a "didn't work for me so it's shit" review, the weight, battery life and feature set really worked well for me, it's just the comms. I tried, really _tried_ to get this working, and through my testing had no reason to believe that interference or faults were to blame - under the "right" conditions, it did indeed function to specification. Problem was, THEIR right contitions were not MY right conditions AND the specs or reviews never disputed either one.
Oh, and FWIW, I use a K400 wireless keyboard/touchpad with my Raspberry Pi. Quite happy with it...
I can't agree.
The K400 is a piece of shit. I bought it for the media centre, and although it WOULD have worked nicely based on specs and functionality, the range and angle was so iffy that it would constantly drop out. I even moved the USB Unifying receiver around - it helped, but didn't address the issues even though I had never gone past two metres distance. I even tried extending and routing around the internal antenna - again, it improved things a bit, but it was still misbehaving. I finally settled on cracking the bloody thing in half and throwing it out, well within the warranty period - I was that pissed off with it.
I settled on moving my K800 from my desktop to the media centre, and all the problems went away, even the range is now ridiculously better. I lose the track pad, but it just pissed me off anyway (though everyone else liked it).
Logitech is a game of pot luck. All the research and user reviews won't help, sometimes you get something that works well (even with the less than stellar reviews) or sometimes you just get a piece of shit (with great reviews). The fact that I just can't tell anymore means I go for just about any OTHER brand now.
The only way to make it in politics is to be a thieving, lying, adulterous bastard. The best Assange could manage is 'sex with consent, where the women complained afterwards on encouragement from the FBI*'. It just doesn't cut it.
(*) Might not be officially documented, but we all know what really happened.
It's already been done here in Australia by the Greens political party, to push (force) increased utilisation of "green" power sources.
It increases use of otherwise unattractive (expensive) green power sources, at the "very minor" consequence of raising **EVERYONE'S** power bills two-three fold, all the while completely forgetting to mention that said green sources cannot possibly replace existing baseline coal/gas supplies, which will continue to take the brunt of the load.
Saving the world? My arse.
The only thing they're interested in saving is their financial bottom line.
The NiCad "Memory Effect" (the REAL one) can be a challenge to reproduce, and requires a good set of very repeatable conditions for you to see it. And even then, what it *actually* does is very different from what "everyone" claims. I even have great doubts as to the odds of seeing the Memory Effect (again, the real one) in a domestic environment (cellphones, torches, toys, whatever). Ditto for NiMh, which were claimed to be entirely immune.
Yet, every man and his dog saw the memory effect appearing for both. Except they didn't. Voltage depression, when coupled with the ever popular and the plethora of variations of dVdT methods of end of charge detection, meant everyone became an expert on diagnosing charge problems.
The fact that the Memory Effect (yet again, the real one) appearing in a variety of different chemical based energy storage devices is not surprising, more so when gauging on how rare it is.
So, it's not the end of the world guys, it's actually quite unlikely you're ever going to see it at all.
Seriously, if you've ever wondered why the fastest CD rate is 56x, this is why. Early in the development of computer CD drives, they marketed a 64x drive and maybe even a 72x drive. I was once sprayed with plastic shrapnel by one of the 64x drives. The manufacturers soon worked out that 56x was the safety limit of what a CD can take.
Anyone know if anyone ever suffered actual injury and/or sued?
This is a near-myth.
The speed was limited to 56x because the maxium RPM at those read rates (at the outer edge of the disk) was as high as it could get and still have a stable disk. A *bit* faster than that, needed special disk handling to ensure it didn't wobble, and faster than that - you couldn't read a disk at all because of the excessive wobble.
Drives that claim 72x, actually have a number of read lasers going at the same time (7 from memory), collates all the data, orders it correctly to make it appear that it's being sequencially read, then sent to the interface. From memory, they actually read at *native* 10x (to remain reliable), but the multiple lasers effectively give you 70-odd times. Wikipedia claims these drives were few and far between, very expensive, and offered some compatibility issues.
Drives nowadays have software sensors that forcibly reduce the read speed if the disk is cracked, distorted or otherwise can't be read for whatever reason. Driving a damaged disk to full drive speed is near impossible, and in the slim chance that it does happen AND it cracks and falls apart, the drive is enclosed, so no-one gets injured in any way. If you operate a drive without the cover, then the fault is entirely yours, you can't sue anyone for your own stupidity - for either mild "testing", or more dramatic MythBusters style testing.
"Additionally, in these days, blink is not major feature due to its [accessibility] issue," he wrote, referring to the problems that blinking text can cause for people with epilepsy and certain cognitive disabilities. "Finally, our implementation is not beautiful."
What about rotating gifs, still images rotated by java, or that #ucking scourge of the internet, flash?
Thankfully, for the time being, all of those can be obliterated by a combination of configuration changes and addons. I wonder if I can disable HTML5 video when it gets more popular?
That's nothing.
I recall a teenager who had a cellphone courtesy of M&D Finance (Mum and Dad), who had his funding pulled at the end of one month when the data charges came to some thousands of dollars.
Turned out he was watching network streamed regular football games (legally) onto his two-inch phone screen in the privacy of his bedroom instead of watching them free-to-air.
Never be shocked at what people watch, what they'll pay to watch it, or how they watch it.
If he were watching porn, we wouldn't have batted an eyelid...
You don't go scuba diving in the precise location of a fiber-optic cable to steal copper.
You don't go banging against an oil pipeline with an axe to empty the contents into a bucket either.
Yet it still happens. Oddly enough, the only ones who get caught stealing oil are the ones who generated enough sparks to light it. They're the charred bodies left behind - one over there, the other over there... You get the idea.
Been said before: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
I thought this was originally planned to be used to provide indoor GPS in shopping malls and such.
This has the *potential* to make things really easy to find in larger malls, but it also smells like an opportunity to flog off an app rather than web interface, thus has the abilty to monitor your every movement within the mall - very valuable for them.
Unless their marketing departments worked out that no-one is actually interested in shopping past the few vendors that any particular customer sees, so now they've just sold out to whoever is interested in buying.
Get rid of that stupid "You wouldn't steal a thing" notice. Your studio execs might think that its a great way to promote the fight against piracy, you fail to understand how insulting it is to be force-fed this (you can't skip it) on a DVD that has been legally purchased.
There's some sweet irony around that:
<http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/29/3678851.htm>
I've found a few links on this case, but the above is the most complete and interesting.
This situation is very similar to one that I keep bleating about security:
Generally, the less secure something is, the more convenient it is for the user to use.
The more secure something is, the less convenient is to use, to the point of pissing off the users.
You need to find a nice balance, enough security, without pissing people off so much they simply don't use it.
Likewise, if you overdo it by actively preventing people from dodging ads, they'll get pissed off.
And the number one rule of business is: Don't piss off your customers - they might not come back.
Something that's bleated to me about customers is, it's easy to keep an existing customer, but hard to get a new customer. If your actions are overly forcing the customers' hands, they leave, then good luck in finding new suckers^H^H^H customers.
Ads pay for the content to be delivered, but people only tune in to watch content.
If you overdo it with the ads, no-one watches.
If you have all content, you have impressive ratings, but you need to work out how to pay for it by other means.
If they're complaining that people aren't willing to pay as things are, how is increasing the ad:content ratio going to help things? I can only see things getting worse.
I think I can remember at least one vendor that has banned Flash content
Perhaps, but for different reasons.
In Microsoft's case, it probably because they had to concede defeat that flash is still more popular than Silverlight.
This is an important factor when you want your visited web sites to "just work".
https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/107365/CIO_who_backed_Open_Document_in_Mass._resigns?taxonomyId=070
Ah, I stand corrected, it isn't the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who's running the show, it's Microsoft, and they have Massachusetts in their back pocket.
"including but not limited to advertising purposes that benefit the cloud computing service provider,"
And THAT boys and girls, is the real reason.
The advertsing space within schools are the propery of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and no-one else is going to play there except us. So there.
Whether the action really does undo previous edits, or just slaps some Dove branding onto images and has a bit of a lash at restoring things to a more natural state, is now the subject of some online debate.
I don't see what the debate is about, it does as the article states: It does a Revert, and resets the hue, saturation and brightness to defaults - not a proper undo for all circumstances, but works for live changes. Then it draws a big box over the image stating "Don't manipulate our perceptions of real beauty" and then follows with their facebook tag.
It then invites you to undo the "undos".
And yes, there's no irony lost there...
Actually I always kinda wondered about the modern day Data Capacity of your average LP Disc, and or Cassette. Anyone have a clue about it?
It's difficult to answer because an LP and tape are on sliding scales. You not only have to cater for the quality of the medium (and there's a few options for tape), but it changes as it ages, and as it's used.
As a record is played, the saphire gouges a deeper groove than the one that is already there, not only reducing the high end pitch of the source material, but the scratches introduce noise as well. Tape stretches, the metallic layer flakes off or gets thinner with use, the record needle and tape heads are a variable, tape is open to "data" corruption through rougue magnetic fields, records warp through exposure to adverse environments - the list goes on.
Both records and tape have speed variation specifications that are virtually unheard of within the digital realm, you can't just equate that to tighter digital compression because it doesn't work that way.
Just to complicate the issue, are you limiting yourself to domestically available compact cassettes, or do you count studio grade tapes?
Within the domestic market, and with exception of some very special circumstances, you can safely say that CD beats everything before it. So, to answer your question: 44.1Khz 16 bit (stereo where applicable), less with compression.
Not against the law to display people on the street in the UK either, so why do they bother bluring them!! The only cavet I would say is drop the bloody height of the Google Cameras to that of a person walking, otherwise your basically peeking over peoples fences, which is what does annoy me!
Here's some news for you, looking over fences isn't against the law either.
You may be able to object on a particular law, but not contradict yourself on the circumstances it's applied - it's the same law. You are either for it, against it, or don't care - pick one.
Plus a criminal record, which will be a headache when it comes to getting a new job when they come out of prison.
Talk to Rodney Adler, after doing the crime, he did the time, was gutted financially (or claimed there was nothing left), returned home to his mansion and cars (which technically weren't his), was disqualified from acting as a director of any company for 20 years, so during this time, appears as an "advisor" at a number of outfits, and doing well.
When you're rorting the system to that level, a criminal record barely slows you down on your road to success.
Much like living in New Zealand is proof that you have intimate relations with farm animals.
Or not. Apparently, Australia has more sheep per capita than New Zealand.
But it's worse than that, it seems Western Australia alone holds the title.
<http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/are-west-australians-the-new-kiwis-20100128-n0nj.html>
So no more velcro jokes for you New Zealanders.
maybe the people who wanted to link to you wanted to make contact to possibly do business?
Most of the suggested contacts in the first few days were people I already knew, so kinda defeats the purpose there.
But after that, it seemed like *everyone* wanted to be my friend - even though at that stage I had a very minimalist profile set up.
I have a carefully set up filter that prunes out most of the crap that comes from LinkedIn, and boy, there's a lot of crap that comes in.
Sorta makes me wonder why I bothered to join (the second time around) when my experience was the same as the first. I was told it was good for "work", I'm just not seeing it.
@@ Anonymous Coward
@ El Presidente: You made yourself sound like a fail in your first post (jt?). Now you just look like a fool.
No, that wasn't me. I don't post as AC, mainly because I'm already a certified fool, and don't need to hide the fact just to show it. If that makes sense. Of course not. So there, I've made my point then...
Tea needs to be strong. When you bring it up for a sip it grabs you around the throat and chokes you strong.
I use a mixture of Madura (a low caff black tea available in Oz, though I don't care about the low caff thing), and a mixture of assorted teas and infusions from my local tea place. They all smell yummy.
I use honey. Never raw sugar. You can't even pretend to be serious about tea if you use raw sugar.
I have more cold soy milk than seems normal for the amount of tea for three reasons. One, it smooths it out, secondly it cools it down, and lastly, milk gives me phlem. I can't stand hot fluids and foods, they just burn my tongue and I can't taste anything for the next few days - really annoying.
Being as lazy as I am, I sort-of-brew-it with one of those strainer thingies that hangs in the mug for a while.
I used to put a lot more effort into it, but I eventually realised that I just don't care enough to do it "properly".
...more compatible with Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF)...
Even MS couldnt' get the RTF formatting right across their Office versions.
If you didn't read the RTF with the same version of MS Office on which it was created, and expected it to look the same, let's just say, good luck with that.
Even older versions of LibreOffice (as well as OpenOffice) did better than the "wrong" version of MS Office.
The stats may lend some credence to the Chinese government’s oft-heard refrain that it is a victim, not a perpetrator, of cyber crime.
Maybe, but I don't think so. From the little that I've seen, it would be the malware attached to keygens and assorted other less-than-officially-gained softwares that is causing it.
Like I said, from the little that I've seen (several corporate sites), that kind of thing is so rife, they have boxes that either can't be rebuilt, or even re-install certain software that's causing problems because they "don't have the installation files anymore".
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