Posts by ratfox 3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
I'm confused. You're happy that even though you needed a key for your individual flat, you were able to open the front door with a combination lock, without the inconvenience of having to carry a key?
Sounds to me that since you need to carry a key anyway, the most convenient would be that the key for your flat also opens the front door...
It is going to be very interesting to see how this is will be applied, enforced, and (inevitably) sidestepped by end users. I wonder how much attention this will get from the political class, though. They seem rather busy at the moment, no doubt being very productive on something more intelligent.
No popcorn icon, so beer'll have to do...
I think that claim essentially died when Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, ended up runner-up for the Republican nomination. Lawsuits were filed, and the question was settled.
If they let the government provide the free service, we all know from copious experience that it would stink so badly we'd gladly pay to get it done
I don't know why you people are so negative about government services. I fill my tax report on a government website, it is simple and efficient. I have more or less the same memories from Canada, and the other places I've lived.
Worldwide, the IT profession is getting fucked worse every year.
That's not what I see, to be honest. Nowadays, tech workers often get 6-digit salaries right out of university.
Unless you're in UK of course. In UK, tech workers are fucked. I think it's related to having past colonies with very large populations where people speak English and salaries are really low. Honestly, I would advise moving somewhere else.
It's going to be interesting to see how many people change search engines. I'm thinking the vast majority would want to stay with the Google they know, but just a small percentage of people making a mistake is going to double the number of users of some other search engines. Maybe this should be a regular exercise?
We should probably all get ready for relatives asking us to "fix their phones" after they took a random option.
Not really if you're looking for a smartphone. They've totally destroyed that market. It's apple, or google's shite spyware.
Precisely...? Apple is the number one example of a company which does most of what Google does (phones, OS, browser, email, maps, cloud services, photos sharing, etc.) except they charge you for it and respect your privacy. To the point I'm confused you are bringing them up. It sounds like "except for the companies that do everything exactly the way I want, there are only companies that don't do what I want."
Think of everything they've permanently damaged - global message boards, e-mail, news, chat, photo sharing, video sharing, and web site hosting. They're now full of spam, ads, massive down-sampling, etc.
I'm reminded of this old opinion piece of a rich guy complaining that now flights are cheap, airports are flooded with tourists wearing flip-flops. He proposes regulating airlines to force prices to go up, so that this rabble cannot afford to fly anymore.
That said, I think you are too negative. If you want to pay for quality services, I'm quite certain you will find companies willing to take your money.
I don't think the full movies are a big source of revenue for YouTube; I believe that is mostly music videos and gameplays.
I'm still waiting to hear an explanation of what exactly Google will be forced to pay for links. From what I read, the new article is derived from the 2013 German law on ancillary copyrights, and Google is paying diddly-squat to German publishers.
The problem is that it is very easy for Google to say: "We propose to pay you nothing. Is nothing good for you?" And there is basically no other options for the publishers. It is in the interest of every single publisher to accept nothing, especially when their competitors are refusing — free traffic! And even if they all band together and refuse, Google will probably just close down the service, like they did in Spain. Part of the traffic will go to other countries, and the publishers will lose again.
I don't know what the solution is, but this does not seem to me like it can work.
Actually, that would make for an interesting article: What is exactly the information that El Reg obtains out of using Google Analytics? Does it get the profile of users? Anonymized statistics? Aggregated data? Do you know how many of your users have the "specific code for eating disorders (571) and black people (547)"?
I apologize for my lack of knowledge: Who are the people who use hyperconverged infrastructure? Is this for large companies, supermarkets, banks, SMBs, tech start-ups, mom and pop shops? Is it used by companies who build their private clouds, public clouds, run on other clouds, don't run on clouds?
In 2016, there was this post complaining about an iPhone locked for 46 years. Note the comment posted in 2017, complaining about an iPhone locked for 47 years. And last year, in 2018, a news story made the rounds about an iPhone locked for 48 years...
Probably, what's going on is that a bug resets the internal time to 1970-01-01, and the time until unlock stays to present time. There's your 48 years, and toddlers are blamed for the bug.
At least, I find the explanation a lot more likely.
Again, I'd like to note this compares the salary of men and women regardless of their position. Meaning this conflates differences of salaries for the same job, and differences between different jobs within the same company.
It can be a useful statistic if you look at the evolution compared to other years within the same company, but it's not really a good absolute indicator to compare companies, let alone companies in different industries.
What has happened to the big story published by Bloomberg, claiming that a Chinese origin manufacturer was baking backdoors for the Chinese government directly into their motherboard, which was supposedly confirmed by three-letters agencies... And nobody was ever able to find anything?
Fake news indeed, Mr Trump?
Acronyms like FAANG are nice, but these companies have little in common apart from their success.
How would you break up Netflix? It's pretty much a single business of distribution. Ok, it also produces shows, but then please break up Disney before Netflix comes up for the chop. Disney, which just merged with Fox. Ahem.
Apple? You could try to break up the hardware and software parts, but they're pretty much joined at the hip. The software part pretty much only exists because of, and for, the hardware part.
Facebook would be slightly easier, if only keeping WhatsApp and Instagram separate. But after that, breaking up Facebook itself would be hard; it is after all a single website, almost a single web page.
Google would be interesting to break up. It's difficult to know how much the services depend on each other; like Maps knows which hotel you booked a room for, and knows about traffic jams from Android data, etc. Or the assistant probably knows everything about you from all the different services. Oh, and Ads, which is everywhere, and gets data from everywhere. Just knowing which parts of the business are viable on their own would be interesting to know.
In comparison, Amazon would be downright easy. Supposedly, each internal service already treats the other ones like external consumers. In fact, that is sometimes considered one of the big reasons of its current success in the cloud business...
The machines were too far away, so had the cable coming out at waist height, over the back of a chair, some disks and into the other machine. When someone complained, they wrapped it in black and yellow tape.
- What if someone trips on it?
- Who would want to do that? It sounds unpleasant.
And jailed for 14 years? Is that appropriate to the crime of video sharing?
Relax. 14 years is the maximum possible sentence, just like the maximum sentence for stealing is 7 years. Technically, if you find money in the street and you take it, it's stealing. Are you afraid of going to jail for 7 years for doing that?
I would claim it's not a good idea to have a question of the type: "Do you prefer this specific solution or any other solution". For instance, remain vs some-kind-of-Brexit. That's because people who are willing to have a certain type of Brexit do not necessarily agree to other types. For instance, somebody who would want a Norway+ Brexit might decide to vote for remain, because they are too afraid that one of the other Brexits will end up winning.
There are various ways that can work. In Switzerland, votes on two different projects are typically represented as:
1) Do you want project A?
2) Do you want project B?
3) In case both A and B are accepted, which do you prefer?
It's typically better to ask all questions at once, because it avoids forcing people to vote against their own wishes for strategical reasons.
For instance, in your proposal, people might prefer no deal to May's deal, but worry that no deal cannot get the majority in the second vote, so end up voting for May's deal in the first one. People who want to remain might vote for no deal in the first vote, hoping that it will not get a majority in the second, etc.
Then again, no multi-ways voting system is perfect; there are various paradoxes.
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