* Posts by kschrock

20 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jul 2016

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

kschrock

Alexa

She is great, and I use her often. However, 90% of the usage are things like "set a timer for 30 minutes" and "what is the square root of 396" or "set a reminder for 10 pm every day to take my medication". These work great, and and they don't give Amazon any useful advertising data. As far as food, Borscht gives you a list of 274 Borscht recipes, which is not handy. Worst, if you choose a recipe, she reads it to you in a clumsy fashion that is not handy. Alexa should have had a screen from day one. On top of all that. none of these things makes Amazon any money. Where you make money is selling product. That part of her has been turned up to 9.9. This has been the ruination of Alexa. She has become Danny Davito in Tin Men. A drunken, pushy, obnoxious New Jersey used car salesman on meth.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

kschrock

In my opinion...

I don't think y'all deserve the monarchy. I just read a "down with the monarchy" article.

Why should the people tear down the monarchy? "The monarchy has $28 billion in assets."

These are the people that built and rebuilt and maintained all that is great about the United Kingdom. 800 of them.

How about the wealth and power of the thousands of eastern European gangsters pulling the strings there? That ok?

The Royals, all of them, are worth $28 Billion dollars. Doing the math, this is about $35 million per peer.

Elon Musk, just one man, is worth $241 Billion dollars.

Jeff Bezos, just one man, is worth $114 Billion dollars.

Surgey Brin, just one man, is worth $95 Billion dollars.

People are running the streets, raping and killing others.

But, It is all the Royals fault? ... You think so? Really?

We have no Royals, but more rape and murder.

Perhaps there is some correlation there?

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

kschrock

Wow. Ego overload.

The IT geeks are running the world and creating utopia.

Jeff and Elon and Sergey and Mark and Xi and Vlad are just your pawns.

I'm impressed.

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

kschrock

Bravo

Speaking about value... Whatever the value of the Reg is, 90% of it comes from the user comments on articles like this.

Vaccinations

kschrock

Vaccinations

Something very strange here... Tracking vaccinations, on the website - ourworldindata.org (which appears to be managed by Oxford) on 12/22/2020 the UK had done 800,000 vaccinations. On 12/31/2020 the number of vaccinations served in the UK was --- 800,000. ??? No vaccinations in almost 10 days? Wazzup?

Skype for Windows 10 and Skype for Desktop duke it out: Only Electron left standing

kschrock

Bull

On consumer Skype I do text, calls, video, etc from my Linux machine to Android phones, Fire tablets, Win10 boxes and everything else, and get messages from all varieties. I put $10 on it 5 years ago and still have a $4.19 balance. I haven't had a single problem with it ever.

You need to look elsewhere for your problem.

Microsoft: 14 January patch was the last for Windows 7. Also Microsoft: Actually...

kschrock

To each their own.

I've been on Windows since there has been Windows. As Microsoft has gotten weirder, Linux (particularly Mint) has gotten better and better. I am down to 2 programs I need occasionally that run on Windows. One is Sea Clear 2 (written in 2010) that I use to navigate my boats. The other is Visual Studio 2010 Express. They will continue to run, on Windows 7, on an old IBM with no connection to the internet. I've had 2 Win 8 boxes, a Surface RT and an Asus 202. They are now in the junk pile downstairs with the Atari 800 and ST, the blue Ice Cube iMac, a DX66 tower, and various Dell, Toshiba, and HP laptops.

I tried Win 10 on three of my computers. I tried to like it, but couldn't. This was about the same general time frame that I had tried to like Ubuntu Unity, but again, I couldn't. I found Mint. The polish and simplicity of it was immediately clear. However, there were software holes in the programs available.

Today, there are no holes, at least for me. Surprisingly, much of that is because of Microsoft. Not only can I now watch Netflix and Amazon Video, I have Skype, Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, etc.

I'm not a MS hater, I love VS, but the OSs have been a PIMA for nearly 40 years now.

I'm done with it.

Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages

kschrock

A historic day in every way.

God bless England, Her Majesty, and above all, the fine people of England, who finally gave the world what so many folks had been asking for, a second referendum on Brexit.

Well played Mr. Johnson.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

kschrock

Transitions

Interesting OS choice discussion. I see a lot of "I'd try Linux but I need ..." comments. I switched fully to Linux (Mint 17) over 4 years ago and had the same problem, but it was easily fixed by running Win 7 in Virtualbox. Visual Studio, Sea Clear, Photo Sketcher? No problem. Photoshop? Why not? A nice thing about all this is portability. When I installed Mint 19, I used it to install Virtualbox, then copied over the 7Pro.vbox file and fired it up. OS, apps and data, all there, all ready to go.

Virtualbox supports OS X.

Just how rigged is America's broadband world? A deep dive into one US city reveals all

kschrock

When I read articles like this...

I wonder about drug usage.

I live on a boat, in a marina, in a swamp. My internet provider is the lowest rated of the top 24 or 25 in the entire US. I pay $50 a month for 50/10, which speed-test always shows 60/12 or 65/15.

The management at this marina (unlike most) provides no free internet, wired or wi-fi. I therefore let 7 boats close to me, some with multiple people, all with multiple devices, share my router. Works fine.

For what possible reason would "everybody" need 100 to their home?

USA needs law 'a lot like GDPR' – says Salesforce supremo Marc Benioff

kschrock

Re: Privacy policy law

So the ethical, noble, enlightened politicians of Europe, (unlike their despicable counterparts in the US), will pass some wonderful regulations, and Zuc, Serg, Bezos, etc, and all the spy agencies around the world will just simply stop gathering our information? You must have some good drugs over there.

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

kschrock

Re: Academics

Really? If you actually believe that this event did not inspired people, you are detached from reality.

Destroying the city to save the robocar

kschrock

Does it bother anyone else...

That this brave new world our young mega-moguls are rushing us into looks a lot like B grade 50s and 60s sci-fi movies? Conversations with computers? Robot electric cars? Wow, I've never heard that before.

How innovative. These people should be richly rewarded.

Munich council finds €49.3m for Windows 10 embrace

kschrock

Re: "They'll be back."

Some horse manure arguments here.

I also write from a Linux machine. I haven't booted back to Windows in two years now, but I occasionally uses a Virtual box to run some nice small, simple, handy win apps, like Easy GPS or SeaClear II.

All such apps are things that were written by 1 person in a very short time (many of them me, Visual Studio, and apps created with it, work great on Virtual box). They would be a piece of cake.

At the other end of the spectrum...

Civil servants in Munich use Autocad and Photoshop? Really? In 27 years of civil service, I have never seen either used in governmental service. Munich has architects, engineers, and graphics artists?

In detail: How we are all pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered – by online biz all day

kschrock

It is easy to avoid this...

Make less money. The path I have taken since my retirement.

The people who spend so much money on this type of spying either...

A. Already have huge amounts of money or

B. Expect to make huge amounts of money

They have or expect this much money because they do or will make outrageous profit margins.

Big Brother knows how much money I make (very little), and they know I can't buy a $200,000 personal quadcopter, a $30,000 Prius, or a $1,000 iPhone. Therefore they are not interested in me.

Problem solved.

Donald Trumped: Comey says Prez is a liar – and admits he's a leaker

kschrock

Comey: Weird, but it doesn't matter.

Weird first. I was a liberal for 31 years and have been a conservative for 37 years. When Dianne Feinstein, the most liberal Democrat in the US Senate (who strangely has a scary relationship with the spy guys) gave Comey the best bitch slap of the day, I wanted to get up and give her a high five. That impulse made me feel sick, and I had to go take a nap.

The bottom line is that Comey is a normal public servant, an ass kisser, a back stabber, and a coward. When Lynch said something that made him "uncomfortable", he didn't refuse, contradict her, ask for clarification of what she meant, or how she came to her conclusion. He just smiled and nodded his head. He then went behind her back and screwed her. Exact same thing with Trump.

He is just one frog in the swamp.

None of this will make any difference to anything important now, or 10 years from now. If you liked Trump you will still like him. If you hated Trump you will still hate him. It's da show. You're fired.

What's driving people out of tech biz? Unfair treatment, harassment, funnily enough – study

kschrock

"I'm being treated unfairly... Means..."

When I was growing up Mum and Dad always said I was wonderful and talented and great and bought me anything I wanted and allowed me to do whatever I wanted. When I went out and got a job, the people who hired me don't treat me like that at all. I am being treated unfairly.

Stanford Uni's intro to CompSci course adopts JavaScript, bins Java

kschrock

Re: Is there any correlation between "popularity" and

I love articles like these. The comments show religion is not dead.

Linux-using mates gone AWOL? Netflix just added Linux support

kschrock

I will be happy.

I have watched Netflix on Linux for some time now, however, to do so, I have had to buy a machine with a quad core processor, 16 gig of memory, etc., and run Firefox on Windows 7 in a Virtual-box.

Netflix was, for YEARS now, the ONLY reason I ever booted Windows from the hard drive. Since I have had this setup (about a year) native Windows has not run.

To run Netflix natively on Linux will make me very happy, even if I am the only one doing so.

BTW... As of right now, 10 pm on March 22nd, this is vaporware and smoke and mirrors. Netflix does NOT at THIS TIME, run natively on Linux using Firefox.

Not that I care a lot, I am Windows free either way.

Brit chip biz ARM legs it to Softbank for $32bn

kschrock

Why not...

Brexit was mostly about sovereignty. Arm is a crown jewel of the empire.

Is there not anyone in the UK that can simply tell these folks to piss off?

I am a yank...

Budweiser spent its life talking about "we are THE American beer"

When the Belgian's came, they were ready to crawl in bed with them.

If I were an American politician I would tell them (see above)

You have lost Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mini, ad nausea-ism...

Take a stand. This is an English company, and so should it stay.