Posts by ThatOne 3965 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2017
> You're getting the OS free of charge
I do not want to get the OS free of charge: You get what you pay, and I was very happy paying good money for Windows (3, 2000, XP) and all their upgrades, and getting some value for that money.
So please don't tell me they give away the OS so they just have to flood me with manure. I didn't ask for it, and for the record I've been using their products since DOS 2.
I'm afraid that there is somebody in their ivory tower marketing department who actually thinks users do like those nuisances ads exciting opportunities (cough, gag).
After all, what greater satisfaction can anybody expect from life than to improve Microsoft's bottom line...
> if you have ublock Origin enabled, product pages will frequently take an age to load
Strange, never experienced that, and I use uBlock Origin both on my laptop and on my phone. What does sometimes prevent pictures from showing, is NoScript. In which case you just need to allow scripts from the obvious domain (usually some "ourwebsite-cdn.com" or other) and all is back to normal.
> The modern web is pretty much unusable without an ad blocker
This ^
I've installed ad blockers on all my family's browsers too, because without them the "web" is unusable.
Note I didn't mind the old ad banners from yesteryear (remember those? Inert, at best animated GIFs, without those 90 MB of JavaScript code you have to load from some arthritic server on the other side of the planet?). Nowadays not only ads have become aggressive and overbearing, there are way too many of them. Too many ads kill the ads, from "information about stuff" they have become a curse on way too many levels.
If you're that concerned with precision, you can buy a cheap radio-controlled watch (mine's a CASIO), which is always utterly precise (at least precise enough for timekeeping through an eyes-brain interface).
French? No, not at all, in French UTC would be "Temps Universel Coordonné" (TUC).
To quote Wikipedia: "The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. This abbreviation comes as a result of the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union wanting to use the same abbreviation in all languages. The compromise that emerged was UTC."
Coordinated Universal Time = UTC, so Coordinated Lunar Time = LTC.
> Now an ad blocker powered by AI might be useful.....
No need for AI: Just block everything irrelevant to what you're currently doing/looking for, and 99.9% of ads will vanish. The remaining .01% might even be relevant to you (shocking, isn't it!)...
Unfortunately ad slingers don't make money by serving you ads which are relevant to you, they make (lots of) money by convincing their clients they will sling their ads to relevant victims potential customers.
> What about substituting WORDS with other WORDS?
There is a name for that, "jargon"...
Seriously now, what you are advocating here is using a constructed language. If the grammar and syntax is alien enough this could indeed be secure, after all the USA successfully used "code talkers" (native Comanche, Hopi, Meskwaki, and Navajo speakers) during WWII...
> write a cipher that takes decades and decades to crack
Well, anybody can write an incrackable substitution cipher where each letter is replaced by a random symbol never used twice. You only need to have as many variants are there are characters in your text...
Or, alternatively, a substitution cipher where all letters are substituted by the same symbol...
No failures here, updates installed just fine. Only problem is my taskbar has now become totally transparent (dark theme), and now all the right hand status icons are now white on a light gray background picture...
Jeez. What happened to "if it's not broken, don't fix it"??? Couldn't they add a "do not make the taskbar transparent" option? Guess not, the Microsoft way is the only way, and they always know what's best for us.
Grumble, grumble
> affects artists' livelihoods
But all that easy money of releasing dirt cheap impersonations of top-selling artists!... It would be a crime to let that go to waste!
The record industry is only fighting for copyright when it affects their bottom line. If it is profitable, it's "Arrr!..."...
(After checking, that was rather the Temple of Ephesus, one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, in 356 BC.)
I stand corrected.
This been said, apparently the library of Alexandria was destroyed by Julius Caesar in 48 BC, and what was left was finished off by other roman battles around 250-300 AD. I don't know how much was left for the Muslims to destroy another 3 centuries later.
> the Lib. of A. was finally destroyed by the forces of Islam
Well, everybody will accuse his favorite enemy. If you ask Russia it was the Ukrainians, for Israel it was the Hamas, and so on...
What I've heard (might be a urban legend, but it's so stupid it sounds credible) is that is was some guy who wanted his name to live forever in History (which is why his name must never be pronounced or written)...
You will, when the plane bursts open (they eventually do, apparently).
I won't fly British Library, ah sorry, Boeing, unless my life depends on it (in which case it's a fair bet).
.
A shame about the Library though, that's humanity's heritage getting lost there. I'm against death penalty, but I would make an exception for ransomware lowlife attacking hospitals and educational institutions (that includes libraries and museums).
Any in-app browser is as (un)trustworthy as the app itself, plus the caveat that it's usually a quick-and-dirty piece of borrowed code thrown in to make the app a "whole experience", prevent the suck user from leaving, and of course, last but not least, to gather some juicy "telemetry" and ad revenue.
What's not to like?...
Modern laptops don't seem to have those slots anymore. My rather expensive Dell doesn't, which annoys me since I still have a Kensington lock (with a real key!).
(Not that it was more than a deterrent to snatch the laptop while you otherwise distracted. All you needed to bypass one was a standard wire cutter.)
> The main problem [...] isn't that companies are producing too many trashy electronics [...], it's that the cost of recycling is higher than the value extracted from it
Maybe because companies make it so difficult (i.e. expensive) to disassemble their kit?...
I remember the times when, having a set of screwdrivers, you could properly disassemble and re-assemble about any tech object, from a radio to a washing machine (I know because I did it). Nowadays it's neigh impossible, because it's cheaper to glue/rivet everything together.
> The right to repair should be the obligation to repair, if we want to avoid drowning in trashed electronics
B-But, turnover?...
In other words: I'd gladly let some losers drown in trashed electronics, if it means that I (me!) am making a big juicy profit! I'm the only thing that matters to me.
I specifically know a couple living in the NE of Germany (in the state of "Niedersachsen") in a house in the middle of the fields, and yet some years ago they got fiber--despite not wanting it! They wanted to keep their old DSL line, which was enough for their needs (older people, so no streaming and such), but the utility guys still installed the fiber to the house "because we're supposed to connect all the houses. You don't need to use it, it's there".
The other three Europeans I know are in France. Two in the capital Paris (obviously fiber), but also a scientist living in a house in the boonies in southern France, several miles from any settlement. And yet he has fiber to the premises (and a very good 5G reception too...).
Long story short, I don't know many people, but not a single of them has anything less than fiber to the premises. Seems to be a case of YMMV.
Yet in Europe (most? all?) rural homes have fiber.
The difference was probably that (from what I heard, grain of salt required) many years ago European operators were gently asked to deploy fiber to everyone or else. Bonuses will be lower for a couple years, but I didn't hear that European Internet operators watch they children go to bed weeping from hunger.
"We don't care; we don't have to... We're the phone company."
> but is likely to get reimbursed
Pull the other one! Give back good money when instead you can make some more? Will never happen.
Besides I don't believe their constant sob stories about those terrible, terrible infrastructure expenses. European operators have apparently managed to do it, in what looks like a way more competitive market (which means smaller slices of the pie for everyone). I know people (admittedly living in a city) in Europe who pay around $30 a month for a 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-premises (plus a phone line and around 60 TV channels, all in the package). $30 a month!
The explanation is probably that they have a choice of 3-4 different and competing operators (and that's without considering cable offers). And yet all those operators aren't starving to death, so apparently it's commercially viable. US telecom operators monopolies are just being fed subsidies for not doing anything.
Marketing will explain that you've always wanted that, you just didn't know it yet.
It's a good thing "because AI", of course. It means it's utterly hip, the future of (wo)mankind, and having one of those will show people you're on the bleeding edge of technology. Who cares if that blood is yours.
> I'm in there somewhere !
Wikipedia says population of France is a little less than 70 millions. Given there is a percentage of inhabitants who wouldn't appear in an employment database (kids/teens, homemakers, gentle(wo)men of leisure...), that data must be about everyone having ever lived in France in the last two decades!
"Identity Theft For Dummies" will be the next bestseller I guess.
> Here they are talking it up everywhere
- Talking - Well, obviously, since AI is the best thing since sliced bread, isn't it... Some years ago everyone was talking about tablets taking over and pushing laptop computers to extinction. And all the eminent water cooler experts were agreeing, just like now about AI.
Marketing hype has nothing to do with reality or even plausibility, it only has to do with selling to the unsuspecting. But people who buy into it need desperately to convince others too, because the number of converts reassures them about their own choice. If everybody agrees it can't be wrong, can it.
> AI probably works for background processing requiring quick indepth decision making
OMG no! We're constantly hearing about AI "hallucinating", going haywire, or whatever other unscheduled malfunction it is capable of. Which obviously means that in the name of cost-cutting, we will rush to put this half-baked AI in charge of everything important/essential we can get hold of...
Well, they have been already capable of doing it for years, no need for AI here.
Besides, even if "AI" could somehow improve something, this wouldn't really require that AI to run on every individual computer. After all, all corporate computers are connected to a high speed network...
"quality of life declines when people are threatened to lose their livelihood".
What a surprise!... It is also pointless, because the bosses having drunken the "AI" Kool-Aid will push it through no matter what, there are juicy bonuses to be had. It doesn't matter if AI works or is fit for purpose, what matters is the momentary reduction of the wage bill, the resulting stock price hike, and the resulting bonus.
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