Posts by Nelbert Noggins

Re: ChatGPT - help me write

Maybe Arthur asked it how to make tea

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

I would expect it’s related to some outdated view point that may still exist in advertising companies and some look at us, aren’t we amazing nose thumbing.

I did some work at a client many years ago, who was an ad agency with contracts for global brands. Most of their workforce and actual design/production work was done 250 miles away from their small, fancy London office, but the London address was seen as vital to be taken seriously in the industry and for the sales team to schmooze their clients. They had a similar office in Switzerland.

I doubt the advertising industry has changed that much in the years since then.

Re: URIs visited

The site names themselves seem like a red flag and best avoided.

Sound more like the dodgy names used in email spam than legitimate websites to me.

Re: Leeching off a leech

Don’t understand the downvotes, maybe it’s just the wording.

If your business relies on a single supplier, whether that’s for virtual or physical goods/services, then you either have a major flaw in your business plan or accept your survival has a single point of failure outside your control

Twitterific has been around since 2007 and isn’t a charity or operating on donations and has had 9 years to ensure they have a working business that could survive a supplier loss.

If your contract with your paying clients allows them to request a refund because you aren’t providing the service/product you sold them, why shouldn’t they?

I think a large part of the explosion wasn't so much about the not believing he'd stick to employment laws, but the whole way it was done. As more details came out he's clearly got the firing in order with local laws, but as usual was a dick about how he did it.

Closing offices, ex-employee's reporting their machine was wiping before they had even received an email, waking up to find out you were fired because it happened while you were asleep, etc...

Zuk's announcement seems to show a level of empathy he's not known for, maybe he's been doing a Musk and having a smoke, or maybe Meta's PR team weren't fired and could put together a better worded announcement about the redundancies and package, highlighting they'd thought a bit first and not wanting to end up on global news broadcasts for being completely heartless dicks.

It's not good that any company needs to mention employee's will still have access to email to communicate after their remote machines are wiped, but after the way twitter handle things I expect most companies will now.

As already mentioned, the severance is above and beyond legal requirements, certainly here in the UK.

There is never a good way of announcing layoffs and in the run up to christmas with living costs spiralling nobody looks good for it, but there are ways of announcing and breaking the news which don't involve setting fire to everything you touch.

Re: PiHole

Or they'll just continue the current trend of tracking endpoints and put the ad-slinging endpoints behind the same domain name as the necessary endpoints, so trying to block ads stops the OS working.

MS aren't the only guilty party for this.

Re: Windows 11 chose not to accept me.

So far having fTPM disabled on my perfectly capable amd machine has been enough to keep MS deciding I'm not worthy or need nagging.

Even better was the recent announcement about no more 'feature' releases for W10, just security until the EOL date.

I'm hoping by then Valve's current push of steamdeck and proton means my only need for windows can finally go away :)

Re: Still surprised

For meeting use maybe look at some bone conducting headphones.

I have a pair of airshockz that have an all day battery, hang on the ear, and are all day comfortable.

No use for music listening other than as background music, but because they don't cover or obstruct the ears can listen to music using normal speaker in the room.

Unexpected side effect was even with limited hearing due to a cold can hear fine with them being bone conducting.

Re: Refresh rates

And probably something to do with Ubuntu and many games still using xwayland to run, especially if using wine/proton.

Unless you have an Nvidia card, from what I was reading Wayland, Nvidia and gaming is a bit of a mess atm. How it all changes as Nvidia used to be the goto option for 3d on Linux and amd was the mess.

I recently experimented with arch and fedora to see if I could get rid of windows on my gaming pc.

Didn't have any frame rate limiting issues or other problems with wayland, just usual level of wine/proton support and games using proprietary codecs, eg media foundation.

Next year after steamos 3 is released I'll investigate again, but for now there's too much messing around with my game libraries and the multiple stores to be able to just switch on and play.

Re: the BBC worries about these things

No idea whether it changed but the strangest part of the iPlayer account when all my devices eventually said I needed an account to view, was it wanted to create a BBC store account, not an iPlayer account.

Sorry, there is no reason my viewing habits need to be connected to the shop I never use so never signed up.

I think it was around this time I saw c4 presenting at one of the early Aws events in London.

They were talking about how Aws had helped reduce the cost and time of their c4 player data harvesting.

Back then they were talking 10 million items of data per day to analyse and that was before c4 wanted login accounts.

I'm sure the BBC will have been doing similar analysis so they have definitely enjoyed making hay while the sun shines.

Now maybe they feel public opinion is turning against the daily ransacking of data and want to get ahead of things.

Alternatively the R&D guys are just continuing to do interesting things, but it doesn't mean the organisation will care enough to implement it

Re: The real question is...

Unfortunately, shortly before release the repos holding the source code will be destroyed to make way for a new super version control system which bypasses all the short comings of the existing one.

Or at a probability of 8,767,128 to 1 against it'll suddenly turn into a bowl of petunias miles above the planet.

Re: Size?

Agree, I went from a Lenovo p2 to a ZenFone 6.

Keen retail pricing, dual SIM, SD card, so close to stock you wouldn't notice android, and kept the week long battery life. I hardy use a phone camera, nevermind the front facing one so the flip camera was better to me than the pop-up ones.

At the time it looked like it might convince Asus to expand their UK offerings.

Unfortunately the 7 and then 8 turned out to be more expensive and removed the odd feature or two.

Reminds me a little of Nokia of old. Occasionally a well spec'd sensibly priced phone would escape into the wild. That was clearly noticed because it's replacement would be a lower spec/features but higher price.

Re: WTF

That's where reopen recently closed browser window comes in handy.

I tend to have a few tabs open for things to read later, especially when it's been a bugger to find in the first place.

When the tabs get so small that it's roulette if clicking will open the tab or close it it's usually time to close a few.

So knowing how bad they are and how hacked off your clients get, why are you still using them and keep using them?

From the sounds of it you would have made your clients happier if you'd moved their systems to a reliable provider who can actually provide services and support at the level you need. Admittedly that will probably increase the costs... but happy customer or knowingly providing a service that hacks off your clients... wonder which would be better

Re: Plusnet customer service - watch out for Plusnet mobile's inability to port over your old number

Thanks for the warning, I was about to try porting my 3 number in.

I'm not sure how much will actually be down to Plusnet yet as Plusnet mobile is EE's Life Mobile MVNO. It seems unlikely they will have ported all the systems over to Plusnet yet. More like BT shuffling it's latest acquisitions around. Or maybe the EE purchase required splitting off Life Mobile, so they sold it to themselves.

Re: is it 20 years since Xerox PARC proposed "ubiquitous computing"

Will they do so with a slightly smug sounding "woosh"

I'd be more worried when the lifts that only stay on the lowest floor arrive

I find I type more accurately and faster with the Priv keyboard than any of the touchscreen only keyboards I've used on various phones over the years

I also don't lost the bottom part of the screen in slack/whatsapp/skype/email/txt messaging apps and the swipe up word completion on the Priv keyboard works really well.

Re: Nexus OK?

Just the CVE-2016-5340 remaining as outstanding on the Priv.

Whether BlackBerry will push it early or leave it until next months round-up we shall see.

Re: Hmm

If that is really the excuse provided by the sysadmins, then your first step should be fire them and hire good ones on appropriate salaries.

Permissions and security being difficult should never be a get out clause for the sysadmins

Except he did do something stupid, he had keys with the ability to spin up servers in his source. It doesn't matter whether it's a public or private repo on github, he handed the security of his keys to an external party who has no liability if they are abused.

This is after the very public announcements and warnings from both GitHub and Amazon about storing keys in code.

If the keys are for his application to do something he should either be using temporary tokens, IAM roles, or a restricted IAM account and if necessary pulling the values in from a config file/runtime insertion not storing them in code.

Given how often sites are hacked these days and both companies specifically warn not to store keys in your source, not to mention that AWS provide alternative programmatic ways and examples to use their services, it doesn't really matter if you are using a public or private repo... there is no excuse other than sloppiness or ignorance for storing keys in the repository with the code.

Re: I'm not buying this...

That sounds like the people who used to call me to discuss my expired mobile contract or who come to the door and their opening line is "Don't worry, I'm not trying to sell you anything"

Do they really expect people to believe they are just bored and fancy a chat to pass the time?

One sales drone wouldn't accept that by requiring me to pay line rental the "free internet and calls" that myself, my neighbours and others in this area were qualified to receive weren't actually free, because it required me to pay the company he was selling for some money. He insisted he wasn't trying to sell me anything because we were entitled to "free internet and calls"

Re: нет!

It's all too common unfortunately with cloud systems. A scary amount of Cloud servers have any port used by a service open to the entire internet, assuming someone has even bothered to put specific ports and not just all ports.

Too much Kool-Aid and people without any background in Ops/Architect/Security believe they can do devops without an ops person because it's just a few clicks in a browser or a cli command to get a server running.

It's only going to get worse as the number of people with a cloud ops/architect/security experience decrease. Especially amongst dev driven teams and startups who believe ops/architects/security is a roadblock and they can do it themselves because they are 'devops' experts. Until they are shown all the issues and then suddenly it's the companies fault for not hiring an ops person for their 'devops' world.

Re: The thing to remember about Smart TVs...

@jnemesh

But you will have to use them/be affected by them because AndroidTV/WebOS/FirefoxOS don't appear to be just overlays or an extra source anymore, it looks like they're running the whole thing. If they aren't then the Sony reviewed should let you watch TV regardless of whether the AndroidTV needs an update, which doesn't seem to be the case.

I realise I have requirements very different to normal buyers, which means I'll have to look at panels aimed at custom installers, the professional display market or pc monitors if they actually get priced sensibly at large sizes this time, because it will be the only way to get a quality panel without all the crap I don't want or need interfering with my normal use of the display.