* Posts by Mage

9252 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Mage Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Simple

Don't use a Chrome browser, possibly not one based on Chromium.

Getting harder.

Apple appears to be charging Brits £309 to replace AirPods Max batteries, while Americans need only stump up $79

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

real website is showing £75.

Which is a rip-off caused by the fact the user can't easily change the cells.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Crazy

Something that size and price?

They should be fined 1% of turnover for not having it use standard LiPoly and replaceable with a screwdriver. Pure greed!

Facebook crushed rivals to maintain an illegal monopoly, the entire United States yells in Zuckerberg’s face

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Unsurprising

Dear USA,

If you continue to ignore protection for consumers and to allow Corporations to do what they like, allow billions to be spent on lobbying, hire Corp Giant staff into government this is what you get.

Loads of people warned that Facebook was lying about the takeover plans.

Facebook takeovers

Alphabet/Google takeovers

Amazon takeovers

Oh, and fix the totally broken USPTO, kill DMCA and outlaw DRM and roll back copyright laws to the Berne Convention treaty as it was in the 1960s or 1970s. Patents, Registered Designs/Design Patents, Trademarks and Copyright are just weapons in the arsenal of huge Corporations able to spend millions on lawyers, not about protecting real IP or ensuring income for the creator. Disney is one of the worst

Building a monopoly of visual culture and not even meeting obligations. Hypocrisy as one of the biggest lobbyists to keep increasing copyright terms.

Corporate USA got out of control at the end of the Victorian era. The Franchise parasite sucking money out of countries to offshore. Ignoring privacy. Ignoring laws, especially outside the USA. Cultural Imperialism and unconscious racism too.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: That's a pain

It's a pain for Asterisk? The VOIP phone system certainly used to include CentOS.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: I had this...

Ah, perhaps you dreamt it?

Tech Support

Tech Support (mobile)

Mage Silver badge

Re: do-not-reply@some.domain

Paypal Automatic payment Google Contact is a do not reply.

Also it's added automatically if you add paypal as a payment method on playstore. Then you have to use a Chrome based browser to delete the payment method, can't inside Playstore app. Then you have to get Paypal to remove the Google Automatic payment via chat.

Do Not Reply is TOTALLY evil. Especially when you are a customer.

Wireless screen in estate agent window just begging for someone to fill it with mischief

Mage Silver badge

Re: the Pacific Northwest

But San José?

Median price $1.1M and up 18%

The USA is a big place, but even in England there are cheap houses with > 1 acre. Usually some distance from shops, schools, mains sewerage, decent broadband etc.

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: same network

Not so if you can see the screen and have the IR remote. Though some use BT too or instead.

Depends on the model.

Same with BT keyboard pairing. If the victim goes to loo or stares at some handsome hulk / pretty person, use the opera glasses to read the 4 digits popping up on the screen when you pair. Oddly nothing needed pressed on one Android tablet I tried. The 4 digits had to be typed on the new keyboard to complete pairing.

I always have my laptop BT off, except if testing some BT device.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Peer mode

If you can see the screen and have a remote for some TVs:

You can enable Peer to peer networked WiFi. No SSID & password of WiFi Router.

You can then use that for Casting from Android. Works on some Sony TVs. It may even already be on and you only need to select ScreenCast source.

I think it's also madness to connect AndroidTV and most other Smart TVs and any IoT thing to WiFi or ethernet.

Also make sure uPNP is off on the Router and everything else.

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: It's In The Genes

I've wondered why the first thing people do isn't setting the Column type at least.

General as a format is why there are broken Gene spreadsheets.

There are two sides to every story, two ends to every cable

Mage Silver badge

CheaperNet Thin coax.

Companies were ditching coax and Token Ring to have Cat5 with hubs or better was switches.

We lived in a 3 storey house. All the kids had their own PCs. Loads of PCs. WFWG, DOS, NT3.51.

The kids learnt to play 'Hunt for the loose BNC plug". Only one PC was an actual bought one (used for Video Editing). Everything else including all the screens was junked stuff from businesses upgrading. We probably had one bought Epson ink jet as well as the 132 column junked DMP, which could do stencils for the junked rotary duplicator. Cheaper than any laser or photocopier to run as long as you needed more than about 20 copies.

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Mage Silver badge

Re: Dictation?

Ironically XP you could dictate to any application when you installed the tools. There are Linux tools too.

Not sure if Dragon Dictate was on WFWG 3.11 or 95 first. There are still versions for Windows and Mac.

Mage Silver badge

Failings in Mobile

1) Phones are too small for other than a simple GUI and text edit.

2) Android is ghastly for serious applications on a big tablet. You really need a mouse and keyboard.

Mobile works best for viewing, browsing, not serious data creation. I don't even like smaller laptops for that.

So I don't care about Office by anyone on Mobile. I've a text editor for phone, 7" tablet and 10" tablet. I've a laptop,

'We've heard the feedback...' Microsoft 365 axes per-user productivity monitoring after privacy backlash

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Katie Price

No, not Katie Price, the Gloop woman. Gwyneth Paltrow?

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Re: I don't understand

On Office 2007 you can install Classic Menu. Brings back most of the previous Office GUI. I don't know if it works on later versions. The Ribbon is pretty stupid, as are personalised menus that hide little used options (especially needed on menu) or menus that reorder by MRU. All stupidity.

Cayman Islands investment fund left entire filestore viewable by world+dog in unsecured Azure blob

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: dependent on IT it's an IT business

Not generally true. But it's partly true for banks. They seem to regard a physical branch as an inconvenience and the local manager is now really a counter operative supervisor. The Branch seems to do little other than accept lodgements. All the activity including electronic lodgements can be done online. The computer automatically disables your Credit Card on some bizarre definition of fraud, not humans.

They mostly ONLY do IT and do it badly.

Real IT business provide IT to other businesses. So this is false "dependent on IT it's an IT business".

So bye-bye, Mr Ajit Pai. You drove our policy into the levee and we still wonder why

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Mr. Pai protected the poor & disadvantaged from the rich

Cable companies were misusing QOS traffic shaping to benefit their own services.

Yes, the Net Neutrality thing in USA went from one stupid extreme to another and the issue is clouded by rich vested interests on both sides.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

FCC, Ofcom, Comreg.

They should not be serving telcos but regulating them, protecting RF spectrum in a neutral fashion rather than to who spends most on lobbing, licences and fees. Protecting vital infrastructure and consumers. Not issuing and space sector (or terrestrial spectrum licences that cross borders) spectrum licences without prior international agreement.

FCC was broken before Pai and he made it worse.

Maybe it needs split in two: Spectrum and Interference management/regulation and other infrastructure as one part and a separate part for services and content (fibre, coax, copper, point to point, mobile, satellite, streaming, broadcast etc).

The net neutrality thing has giant vested interests and lies on both sides. That would need a big article to explain.

DeepMind's latest protein-solving AI AlphaFold a step closer to cracking biology's 50-year conundrum

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: This is great news ...

Agreed.

Peer reviews, transparency, actual real world deployments not simply designed to feed Alphabet with personal information.

It's been fed a massive amount of human created and curated data, so how much is simply their resources to feed the specialist database and pattern matching coupled to some sort of folding algorithm.

So far this is PR spin.

After demonstrating a facial recognition system that works on cows, moo-chine learning pioneer seeks growth funding

Mage Silver badge

Re: Why?

Automated milking doesn't need facial recognition. This is a poorer solution than tags which are legally required.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: interesting for roaming animals

No, they can be tagged. Tags are 100% reliable. Facial recognition is rubbish in comparison.

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Madness.

WHY!

Every cow, heifer, bullock, bull etc has to have an ear tag. Unlike contactless cash cards and replacing barcodes on supermarket products*, the RFID is perfect technology for cattle, far far more reliable than so called AI facial recognition.

[* Those do have value if done securely and if product RFID has a unique serial number instead of a receipt for proof of purchase. Return to ANY branch and no doubt if stolen, fraud etc, if it's made secure.]

AWS going AWOL last week is exactly why less is more in cloud server land

Mage Silver badge
Happy

Thank You

It's good to see a Cloud article that's not PR spin.

There are applications where it's the best fit.

There are others that need solutions that are your own and where you know exactly what and where the computers are.

If you are really big, you should have your own data centres in different countries, basically your private cloud.

Mysterious Utah monolith mysteriously disappears without trace

Mage Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Monolith?

I guess, unless Fay (Sidhe, sìde, elves) installed, all the original monolith installers are dead. There is a reason why they were called the Good Neighbours.

A good point on the lithographic printing, except that's been using metal plates for over 100 years and I'd never heard anyone call a shiny metal box a monolith before last week.

:D

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Monolith?

It's a metal box. Or was.

A monolith is big single piece of stone or rock. Clue in the name.

Loads in Europe. Famous ones in Sweden, France, UK and Ireland, from about 1000 years old (Runestones) to maybe 5,000+ years old. This USA newbie structure now AWOL isn't and can't be called a monolith.

It's insulting to call it a monolith.

Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: 48 kHz sample

Telephone speech was/is about 300 to 3000, or 3500 at most. The 8 kHz sampling meant filters had to roll off between 3 kHz and 4 kHz. They found that the speech was more intelligible if you cut the bass response when treble is cut.

I think a coincidence that telecom PCM is 8 kHz and MP3 uses 48 kHz (x6).

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Nokia Communicator

The first two mono (1996 to 2000?) Communicators used a 486. They did have a form of DOS

The N9210 and better N9210i used an ARM and Symbian, but a more advanced Symbian GUI (Series 80) than later smaller screen phones. Symbain was always in two parts, the OS and the GUI. S60 was a step backwards in GUI as internally the Rot in Nokia started in 2003*. It started with CCFL backlights and later had LED backlights.

But it was functionally a pocket PC in terms of applications.

I was thinking of the N9210i which I had from 2002 to 2005.

(* Was Elop Nokia's Trojan to dump a doomed division on MS? MS got no IP and only time limited use of the Branding)

Mage Silver badge

Re: Alpha Micro...

The odd 44.1 kHz sampling rate of CDs:

1) Has to be more than twice highest audio plus a margin for a practical pre-filter to avoid aliasing.

2) Was to suit an adapter that fitted the digital audio into a video signal so that a Betamax could record the audio.

Stereo used 19 kHz for the 38 kHz DSBSC carrier pilot tone because it was deemed that an upper limit for HiFi was 15kHz to 18 kHz. The later 20 kHz HiFi spec is largely an arbitrary number and later digital audio used 48 kHz simply because it was higher and a round number.

Using 192 kHz ADC simply allows cheaper simpler filters and then DSP can easily downsample to 48 kHz. Then on playback interpolation to 192 kHz allows a cheap filter on the DAC.

Old AM audio TVs had about 10 kHz and FM Radio and FM audio TVs typically had up to 15 kHz. All of that sounded better due to decent sized speakers in decent sized wooden cabinets. The 4" satellite TV speakers are a cruel joke. A 6" driver is a minimum. Built in TV speakers are now terrible, yet few have external speaker sockets, you need a separate amp.

Mage Silver badge

Re: What I'd really like to know ...

Home cutting player/recorders used foil.

Some used a blank disk to move the cutting head to avoid the cost of a linear drive screw.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Alpha Micro...

Depends how much spectrum you have!

My backup internet runs 8 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up over almost 14 km.

My first smartphone had 14.4 kbps over GSM, 20 years ago. If you paid twice as much per second you could have 28.8 kbps too, only slightly slower than my landline. It also did faxes.

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Re: broadcast the code

Yes.

Also there were floppy cover discs on magazines. A 7" floppy to play on the record player via the cassette interface.

Back in the 1930s home 78 rpm disc recorders did exist. The 22 line TV and also fax was broadcast on UK and USA Medium Wave (Broadcast Band) transmitters after close down, which wasn't that late at night. Baird's wasn't the only mechanical TV and was obsolete even then. Some home recorded on 78s with 22 line TV survive.

Also even cover disc 78s existed, pressed shellac or plastic on one side of a thin card base.

So loading programs from record player discs and transmissions predates the launch of the IBM PC in the UK. The Act Sirius 1, aka Victor 9000 was actually released in the UK before the IBM PC and was seriously better.

Actually wasn't the floppy originally for loading microcode if the Mainframe was turned off and Gary Kiddal founded Digital Research because no big company was interested. The original DOS being a rip off, sorry re-imagining, of his 8086 version of CP/M by a small company bought by Microsoft.

HP CEO talks up HP-ink-only print hardware and higher upfront costs for machines that use other cartridges

Mage Silver badge

Re: On the other hand...

Brother.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Lockdown

Is it moral or legal to prevent a third party supplying ink or toner to a printer you own?

Or do they want the model the really big copiers and printers had since the 1950s; you only buy if you are the USA Government, otherwise you rent. Only a free printer should have a locked in consumables supply and that should be make clear in very large print, that you are not buying a printer, but taking out an overpriced service contract.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Epson and Canon

Brother

Considering the colonisation of Mars? Werner Herzog would like a word

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Re: There’s hope yet!

And why does he call an interplanetary system a Starship?

Ego and PR gone mad.

Mage Silver badge

Re: travel distance

Synthetic LPG. Made using waste carbon. Less energy loss in transit. No new infrastructure. LPG been in use for cars maybe 50 year ago.

Unless you live in Norway, or have as yet not invented fusion power, the battery vehicles are a niche for rich people.

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Re: There’s hope yet!

The Victorians had rechargable cars.

I went to school on an electric trolly bus and the milkman used an electric rechargeable truck.

Musk thinks big with other people's money and has a limitless ego.

Amazon's ad-hoc Ring, Echo mesh network can mooch off your neighbors' Wi-Fi if needed – and it's opt-out

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Eircom aka Eir

Eircom was doing it in Ireland, contrary to EU and Irish Law, without saying. Setting NOT on the Router but buried in a web page. You had to opt out.

Virgin is really UPC / Global Media. No idea why they are renting the name for Ireland after fixing the junk they took over from Chorus and to a lesser extent NTL. Spent a fortune rebranding as UPC. They were doing it too.

Also last time I was in the UK, BT was doing it.

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Absolutely EVIL

"nearby Amazon gadgets, regardless of who owns them, can automatically organize themselves into their own private wireless network mesh, communicating primarily using Bluetooth Low Energy over short distances, and 900MHz LoRa over longer ranges."

The comms method is irrelevant. It's Corporate theft.

EU says Boeing 737 Max won't fly over the Continent just yet: The US can make its own choices over pilot training

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Very wary

Ryanair has said they won't say if you are booked on a 737-8200. They claim they only decide a day before.

Apple's global security boss accused of bribing cops with 200 free iPads in exchange for concealed gun permits

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Who do these cops think they are?

Actually many senior US cops are purely politicians. Many Sheriffs are elected and need not have served in the Police. Also possibly Coroners and other top legal positions.

AMD performance plummets when relying on battery power, says Intel. Let's take a closer look at those stats

Mage Silver badge
Alert

RUGs

Strange choice

"converting a PowerPoint presentation to PDF, where AMD's chips proved 29 per cent slower when running off battery power, or performing an Outlook mail-merge"

You couldn't pay me to do those. Also, unlike a 3D render, is even a 50% slow down significant on any of their RUGs?

US Air Force deploys robot security dogs to guard base

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Drones

Unless they land, they need power.

Also a robo-dog probably can be used 1/2 a day without a charge. Standing still and sending back video and audio, or shouting orders uses a lot less power than a hovering drone. Also the base is in control of the terrain.

End-to-end encryption? In Android's default messaging app? Don't worry, nobody else noticed either

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: WhatsApp

It's Facebook.

One of the top 2 or 3 anti-privacy weasels in the world.

Study: While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Hmm, I was playing

With Eliza (it's in the version of emacs on Linux), I've used others in the past, ALICE, other more recent ones.

Mitsuku is a great bot for the loners out there who wish they had someone to talk to 24/7. And now you can! Mitsuku is the Loebner Prize winner for this year and is currently one the most smartest chatbots on the market. Mitsuku learns from human behavior and interaction, which means that as more people talk to her – the smarter she becomes. Mitsuku has been designed to chat about anything and has not been designed for specific task, but rather just human interaction.

A slight improvement on Eliza and Dr. Sbaitso, but basically rubbish. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple have voice recognition front ends to search, very badly done. As interactive chat they are pathetic. They are poor to refine a search.

https://archive.org/details/dr.sbaitsogame

See also https://blog.eduonix.com/artificial-intelligence/10-best-ai-chatbots-available-online/

Researched for "The Enscorcelled Maid". What if you add chatbot rules to a Fetch?

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Re: rules-of-grammar + random number generator + dictionary search API -->

Doomed.

Partly because all current AI is just fancy pattern matching. Decent research on language translation and understanding was ditched for the so called ML using a Rosetta stone like approach. Started with EU documents.

Also maybe an Alien Institute for Artificial Intelligence would know how to do it? I think my screen text is too small and I read Allen as AI'len and then Alien.

UK Court of Appeal rebukes Home Office for exceeding its powers with bunkum 'national security' GSM gateway ban

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Never about security

It was about protecting Revenue of Ofcom's Mobile friends and thus Treasury income. But you knew that.

Ofcom and Comreg pay lip service to Spectrum management, Consumers etc. See Ofcom submissions on Roaming charges. They get most of their income from Mobile and make massive income for Treasury. Captured regulators.

We see what you did there: First-stage booster from Rocket Lab's Return to Sender mission floats back to Earth

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Parachute.

Makes more sense than carrying extra fuel aloft and the extra pollution of Thunderbirds style rocket landing. See Rocket Equation.