* Posts by Marty McFly

1025 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2008

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Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Marty McFly Silver badge
Pint

Mac Mini Servers

I had an 'other duties as assigned' side gig about a decade back, helping the company events staff put on tech trade shows. We used to ship around a big rack with Dell servers, lots of money. I acquired 4x Mac Mini servers with maxed out CPU, RAM, and added Thunderbolt external disks. Virtualized all the physical servers and loaded them up on Fusion. Our 6 foot tall hard side shippable equipment rack transformed in to a luggable suitcase and a hand truck.

One of the classroom labs demonstrated a web gateway product, which meant I needed extra NICs. The Thunderbolt drives had a daisy-chain port, so I added an ethernet adapter. Ended up with all the event traffic running through that external hard drive & Thunderbolt cable (we hosted our own WiFi, cheaper than using the convention center's system). The Mac Mini never missed a beat and no one realized the diminutive nature of the infrastructure we were using. Worked great!

Cheers to Apple's little power-house PC!

FCC ups broadband benchmark speeds, says rural areas still underserved

Marty McFly Silver badge

Re: Still the same Bravo-Sierra game

>"They're getting rid of the copper now. 2 of the 4 big ISPs in my town ..."

Glad you live in town and have plenty of options. The title of the article is "...rural areas still underserved". No fiber upgrades coming to my area any time soon. No cell service either. Only one ISP to choose from.

The other problem is governments require like-for-like. So it is easy to string new fiber over poles where existing copper hangs. But the world has changed since the copper went in the ground 50-years ago. Back then it was trivial to take a trencher where they needed it, drop in the copper, and push the dirt back. Nowadays they can't dig a hole without an "earth disturbance permit", which makes replacing copper with fiber enormously expensive in rural locations.

Run 300 feet of underground fiber in the suburbs and that can feed 30 apartments, condos, townhomes and other sardine-can living arrangements. Makes it easy to spread the costs around. Run 300 feet in rural America, do it a few more times, and maybe get one house. Difficult to pass along that expense to a single customer.

Marty McFly Silver badge
Boffin

Still the same Bravo-Sierra game

The big shiny telco phone box down the street is where the service is coming from. Because signals degrade over distance, the further you are from to box, the worse the signal. However, live with the phone box in your back yard and get pretty darn good service. My sister lived on a rural property with the box at the bottom of her driveway and pulled down 60-70 Mbps on DSL no problem. I am 11k wire feet from my phone box and get 6 Mbps on a good day on DSL.

The dirty secret... If just one subscriber gets over 25 Mbps off that phone box, then the telco gets to count the ENTIRE AREA as having that level of service. So under the regulations my 6 Mbps counts as having broadband and meeting the FCC's requirements.

So what will the Telco's do....? A bit of wiring upgrades for the customers closest to the phone box, and get them over the 100 Mbps mark. Then take credit for providing that service to everyone else coming from the box.

That said... How much bandwidth do we really need?? 6 Mbps can stream 1080p video just fine, but it fails for 4k. Yes, if I have a massive download it takes a while. Right now my little geeky household has 22 WiFi devices and 69 Wired devices on the network. Sure the 6 Mbps struggles, but it doesn't fall over.

All 100 Mbps would do is allow more undesired activity to occur - smart devices monitoring all audio, constant telemetry from everything, a continual stream of advertisements to every device. Yuck.

Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry

Marty McFly Silver badge
Thumb Up

So....Bitcoin is confirmed to be money

Pretty tough to get convicted of "Money Laundering" without any money involved. I am glad we got this question settled, and in a Federal court too!

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Marty McFly Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Total confusion

>"It really seems as if Microsoft is a set of disparate groups of people, some with designers, some without, whose job it is to just keep writing code, adding features and changing stuff. These groups/teams don't talk to each other. Ever.

I suspect if they left stuff alone many of these groups would find themselves 'redundant'. Therefore there is a self-serving interest to continually muck with things. Break it so they can make a fix, both of which are worst than the original design.

The problem is the original designers made it too good and there is little room for functionality improvement. The result is a failure to innovate.

Marty McFly Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Microsoft

This is completely different than ransomware!

Ransomware sneaks in through the back door and extorts money from you for your data.

Microsoft boldly walks through the front door and extorts money from you for your data.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

Marty McFly Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Looks like Curiosity did it again

Really buggers me when human incompetence costs lives of innocent quadrupeds. This was just a cat being a cat and doing cat things.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

Marty McFly Silver badge
Thumb Up

Thank you Reg...

"We must reluctantly assume that Oracle acts in the name of shareholder value."

...for honestly stating that. So often we demonize the company for their strategy. However, it is really the shareholders* who are driving the behavior. They don't invest in a company for charitable good, they expect their investment to grow and return money.

(* Regular people like us with 401k's and other retirement plans, often using mutual funds which are invested in companies like Oracle.)

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

Marty McFly Silver badge
Pint

First in, first out!

1988. I proudly was one of the first three students on campus to get Internet access. Sure, it was only a 2400 baud modem or a walk over to the computer lab and use one of the dumb terminals. Gopher, Pine, Telnet & FTP were how things were done. User: "anonymous", Password: Your email address - which meant someone could see it as clear text. In hindsight, there was a glorious lack of security and immense freedom.

I discovered a fakemail script. It allowed me to send email from a false email address. Of course I promptly sent one to my favorite professor who I had just noticed was on-line with the mainframe. The email happened to arrive precisely when that professor was getting 1:1 instruction from the senior administrator. Ooops.

Shortly thereafter I learned that the contents stored in my home directory, including this spiffy fakemail script, were available for administrators to see. And that is how I not-so-proudly was one of the first two students to have Internet access revoked.

Back then "electronic mail" was a novelty and not the mainstream communications medium it is today, so it was written off as a harmless prank. They let me back in a month later with a promise to be good. The fakemail script had been helpfully deleted from my home directory. The Internet was not commercialized then, so the idea of using this script to be a spammer/scammer never occurred to me or anyone else.

Cheers for lessons learned early in life!

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

Marty McFly Silver badge
Thumb Up

This is great!

It is about time people woke up to the price paid for the manipulation of their eyeballs. I think a lot of people will be shocked to see how much their identity has been monetized.

Imagine the permutations this could have... Let's say a user is financially well-off. As a target for advertisers, their advertising investment has a greater pay-off potential than if the ad appears for a broke person. Will Facebook charge more for advertising to that user? Do they do it already?

And therefore... Will Facebook charge rich people more to opt-out of advertisements versus poor people?

Even better.... It is logical people who can afford to pay for an opt-out will do so more often than those who cannot afford it. Therefore, Facebook advertisements will be primarily targeted at people without money. Does that lead to where Facebook is unable to sell advertisements? Sure millions of eyeballs saw the advertisement and want to buy, but if they are broke in the first place...

Yeah, this is going to be fun!

Is Russia using Starlink in Ukraine? Congress demands answers

Marty McFly Silver badge
Boffin

Ground stations

As I understand it, Starlink satellites communicate with ground base stations. Those base stations & the user stations need to both be visible to the satellite. Some of the newer Starlink satellites have some sort of satellite-to-satellite laser linking for when there isn't a base station in range.

It occurs to me that creates a choke point where Internet based communications can be intercepted. Reaching the conclusion that stopping Russia from using Starlink is not going to happen, it seems that monitoring traffic from the ground base stations would have significant military value. Even with encryption, signal intelligence can see who is talking to who.

Dare we go even further and get in to their networks? Remember, Starlink has a sleek router & wifi on-site. How many of them are then attached to a firewall WAN port, and how many of them are operating the local network? We have all heard the stories of how ISPs controlling the router have full access to consumer's networks.

It wouldn't surprise me if there is a different part to this story where Starlink is "helping" both sides of the conflict.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Marty McFly Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: I hope they get sued out of existance

"A European consumer of a company with a large EU presence remains their customer regardless of their location.

Uhhh.... No.

Citizens of a given country are only protected / subjected to the laws of that country while they are within its borders. Travel to a foreign country and their laws apply. For example, Americans love their guns and are permitted to own & carry them compliant to the laws of their various states. That does not, however, entitle American citizens to legally possess or carry firearms while traveling to the European Union.

The same thing applies here. Just because an EU citizen has a certain right within the geographic boundaries of the EU, does not mean they are entitled to the same right when visiting a foreign country.

Apple is actually being quite flexible and accommodating. Laws of the EU do not apply in other countries and they would be well within their rights to be more aggressive.

Take a gun to the EU, go immediately to jail. By that standard, bring an EU iPhone to the US, and the 3rd party app store & associated apps get immediately deleted. It would be trivial for Apple to implement that logic based off an iPhone's GPS location. Land in JFK, turn off Airplane mode, and the apps disappear.

Ransomware ban backers insist thugs must be cut off from payday

Marty McFly Silver badge
Black Helicopters

They answer is Psyops

Go ahead and pay the ransom. Get the key. Decrypt your data.

However, announce publicly that the key did NOT work. The ransomware attackers failed to hold up their end of the deal. Data was lost. Money was wasted. The decryption tools do not work, don't bother paying for them. Explain the quick return to productivity as recovered backup data the attackers missed. Then keep your mouth shut.

Heck, they don't even need to be attacked. A few conniving CISOs could put together a secret plan before the 2nd round of drinks hits the table. Stage a few outages to non-mission critical systems and do some press releases over the period of a few weeks. The minute the rest of the world believes the payments don't work, the market will dry up.

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

Marty McFly Silver badge
Pint

"Soft lunar landings are notoriously difficult..."

That should be appended to read 'for a robot'.

Apollo landed on the moon over 50 years ago. Using 50% less lander legs. But had a human at the controls every time. Cheers to the real men of that era!

Vietnam may ban virtual assets to fix its bad rep for money laundering

Marty McFly Silver badge
Boffin

Re: "Government officials have been urging action to regulate crypto..."

Wow. Attacking the person rather than the argument is always a sure sign of a losing position.

Actually cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin, is a hard asset secured with mathematics. There is a limited supply, there cannot be more. It cannot be inflated like government controlled money supplies. Even traditional hard assets like gold and silver can have their supply manipulated and more can be dug out of the ground.

Just how would someone get 'caught' with cryptocurrency? Memorize your seed phrase. No one can compel you to produce it, and with it you can access your cryptocurrency anywhere.

Marty McFly Silver badge
Holmes

"Government officials have been urging action to regulate crypto..."

That really shows the ignorance of government officials. Crypto currency cannot be regulated by its very design. The only thing a government can do is regulate the on & off ramps. Vietnam can control the dong (Vietnamese currency) being used to buy/sell crypto currency. But they cannot control crypto currency itself.

The largest bill available is a 500,000 dong note, which is worth around $20 USD. No surprise citizens of a country with such highly inflated currency are interested in hard assets, like cryptocurrency, for the retention of personal wealth.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Marty McFly Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Plus ça change

My (now former) bank could have used your services.

Around 10 years ago they migrated their back end to a new infrastructure. Sort of a one-way ticket the day they went live. Somewhere along the line they lost their unique identifiers and presumed firstname lastname were sufficient. My wife matched someone with the same name and she had full access to their bank account. Ooops.

Took the bank three weeks of all-hands-on-deck to manually scrub the database and fix the problems. I moved my banking elsewhere. The only commodity a bank has is the trust and faith of their depositors, and they lost that from me.

The ironic part... This was at a "Tech" credit union.

Turns out cops are super interested in subpoenaing suspects' push notifications

Marty McFly Silver badge
Facepalm

Encrypted messages

"The poor state of mobile device privacy has provided US state and federal investigators with valuable information in criminal investigations ...even when suspects have tried to hide their communications using encrypted messaging."

Great! That is good to know.

Keep this information in mind the next time there is a push to outlaw encrypted messaging. The government already has access, therefore there is no need to outlaw it.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Marty McFly Silver badge
Big Brother

OId man yells at cloud

"In a statement this morning, the US President said the fact that most modern automobiles are "like smartphones on wheels" meant cars made in China and sold in the US could collect sensitive data, transmit it overseas and even be remotely accessed or disabled."

As opposed to domestic made cars which collect sensitive data, and transmit it overs seas and can be remotely accessed in disabled.

Marty McFly Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: Who Is Listening In To Cars Phoning Home???......

I bought a Samsung TV and I refuse to agree to the Terms & Conditions. Every time it powers on, it prompts me to 'Approve'. Eventually it goes away and just displays HDMI 1 like it is supposed to.

I am so turned off by this presumed privacy data slurp that all the rest of the TVs are LG. Still only connected to HDMI 1 and no "Smart" garbage enabled, and they sure the heck are NOT on my network.

Hold up world, HP's all-in-one print subscription's about to land, and don't forget AI PCs

Marty McFly Silver badge
FAIL

Just print, damnit!

My elderly neighbor bought an HP printer thinking it was a good deal. Refused to print, so RTFM and called me.

Step 1: Download & install bloat ware

Step 2: Give your network wifi credentials to HP.

Step 3: Go brain dead and dumbly give them your credit card info too, as a requirement for the 'Next' button.

Step 4: Connect printer to your now compromised wifi credentials.

Step 5: Use the crapware to turn on the USB port.

Step 6: Print out your bank statements to watch your accounts get drained for unwanted ink cartridges.

Palo Alto investor sues over 28% share tumble

Marty McFly Silver badge
Facepalm

What lawsuit??

"Proposed" lawsuit. Nothing has happened yet. But they did get at 28% stock price haircut.

Makes me wonder who sold short and who is buying at a discount today.

Boffins caution against allowing robots to run on AI models

Marty McFly Silver badge
Terminator

Robots with AI

What could possibly go wrong?

AT&T's apology for Thursday's outage should stretch to a cup of coffee

Marty McFly Silver badge
Alert

Unable to do banking - text message MFA

By random chance I was working through my taxes last week when the outage landed. I needed to access a number of financial institutions to get the correct data.

Many of them have the half-arsed attempt at MFA - they send a text message for verification. Pretty tough to get a text message when AT&T is knackered. As a result I could not access my banking for the majority of my finances.

I know text message MFA is craptastic at best for security. Targeted attack, cloned phone, and game over. However, I did not realize how fragile it is when dependent on large Telcos to deliver the access code.

Needless to say, I called their help lines and requested real MFA. Surprisingly most front end helpdesk people knew exactly what I was asking for, why I was asking, and then apologized for not being able to deliver proper MFA security. So clearly they had been called about it before....but their InfoSec either doesn't get it, or isn't listening.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Marty McFly Silver badge
Pint

It is a tough decision...

I got the call after the RIF, from the already over-worked fellow who inherited all my responsibilities. Needed a password or something like that. While he was a former co-worker, he was not a former friend, and was just as much a victim of this situation as I was. I gave him the password.

Unfortunately my friend had untreated hypertension and the stress caused a catastrophic blow-out shortly thereafter. He was in his early 30's, RIP, and here is a beer in token of remembrance.

While Justice is not vindictive, it is exacting. The company and their ignorant management was gone less than a year later. I like to think my friend took that password and other critical information with him, and that contributed to their downfall.

Avast shells out $17M to shoo away claims it peddled people's personal data

Marty McFly Silver badge
Mushroom

Always a money grab...

A company screws up. The government goes after them financially. Rather than compensating the affected consumers, the government keeps the money.

The plaintiff is also the judge and the jury. It just screams conflict on interest to me. This one fine probably justified the existence paid the salary of a dozen bureaucrats this year. I am tired of watching the government claiming they are protecting people, but all they doing is protecting their own self-interests.

Don't get me wrong... A company screws up, and they should be penalized. But the money should go to the victims, not the government coffers.

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

Marty McFly Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: COULD ALLOW SMALL PARTICLES OF RICE TO DAMAGE YOUR IPHONE

That's no joke. Had a side gig back in the 1990's revamping old 386-era kit from pizza restaurants. Grease, flour, all manner of crap would get sucked in to those old AT cases. I would toss components in the break room dishwasher on a regular basis. Usually they worked fine after they were thoroughly dried. And if they didn't...well they were up for replacement anyway.

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

Marty McFly Silver badge
Holmes

Re: A bit more precision required

"The chances are that the surviving remnants of the satellite will end up in the ocean."

Since the earth is over 70% covered in water..... a perfect statement for Sherlock!

In pursuit of artificial general intelligence, Meta adds Broadcom boss Hock Tan to its board

Marty McFly Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Oops ... another misstep on the way to nowhere good and great

Nice re-swizzle on the quotes, misconstruing El Reg's article.

John Arnold is the former Enron exec. Not Hock Tan.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Marty McFly Silver badge
Flame

Foxtrot Oscar

Paid for streaming services were a wonderful thing. I have NO PROBLEM paying for ad-free content.

Then Paramount pulled all their content from Netflix and Amazon Prime. So I loaded up Paramount Plus. I am a techie, so yeah, I like Star Trek.

Netflix went woke with their content. Fine by me, and I wish them no ill will. However, I am not their target market. I do have a choice in what content I wish to consume, and their content no longer appealed to me. So bye-bye.

Then Paramount Plus took their ad-free from $50/yr to $120/yr. Yeah, they tossed Showtime in the package, but I don't want Showtime. Not going to pay for it, so bye-bye there too.

Amazon Prime?? I live a long way from town, so the "free" shipping actually makes financial sense for me versus the time & gas to go shopping. Their content has always been third tier though. It really is in last place. We rarely even browse it. So who gives a crap if it goes ad-supported. That just means it sucks worse.

Streaming services are really beginning to 'Jump the Shark'. They had a good thing, but got greedy and ruined it. They can all Foxtrot Oscar.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Marty McFly Silver badge
Mushroom

"Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!"

Or not. To both.

Marty McFly Silver badge
Pint

Re: cool beans!

Planned obsolescence. Isn't it obvious?

Someday, in the far distant future, when Windows is a curious museum piece, the source code will be examined by computing archeologists. My money says they find evidence of intentional slow down as the OS and the install ages. Look me up on that day, and I will pay up with a malty beverage.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Marty McFly Silver badge
FAIL

This is actually a common problem

I come across this same problem all the time dealing with my client base. The problem is not "We don't allow reboots".

The problem is "We did not architect our environment with high-availability and automatic failover of mission critical services."

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Marty McFly Silver badge
Go

ValiDrive

Run, don't walk, over to Steve Gibson's website and get ValiDrive.

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

You need this to detect deliberately misleading USB storage.

US starts 'emergency' checks on cryptocurrency power use, citing winter power demands

Marty McFly Silver badge

Does no one understand basic mathematics any more?

Cryptocurrency mining only makes sense to the miners when the price is right. They don't buy electricity when the price is high, they buy it when it is surplus and low. Surplus electricity? Yes, green energy cannot be stored - when the wind is blowing & the sun is shining, the power needs to be used at that time. So rather than let the surplus go to ground, spin up a miner and put it to work. Get a hard winter and consumer consumption spikes the rates, shut off the mining because the energy costs too much. It is that simple.

As for the price of bitcoin going up.... Look up "bitcoin halving". Sometime mid-2024, the miners will lose 50% of their rewards. Factor that in to the math problem. That means miners have to spend twice as much electricity to get the same amount of bitcoin. Bitcoin either needs to double in price, or the price of electricity will need to fall 50% for the miners to get the same net financial rewards at the end of 2024 as they get today.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Marty McFly Silver badge

Re: Questionable resolution

>Perhaps you work with equipment that doesn't have quite so many fiddly bits dangling from all the holes though.

Since we are making it personal... Perhaps you work in a place where it is considered a wasted effort to fix underlying problems because collecting copious overtime to do a weekend power-cycle is personally beneficial.

Marty McFly Silver badge
Facepalm

Questionable resolution

Yeah, doing a power cycle fixed the symptom, but how did it end up there in the first place?

Without a reasonable answer to that question, it might have been prudent to swap the kit given the remote location, critical infrastructure, and the fact that a tech was already on-site with replacement gear.

SolarWinds slams SEC lawsuit against it as 'unprecedented' victim blaming

Marty McFly Silver badge
Facepalm

Sunburst timeline

This was a supply chain attack, by threat actors who took a low & slow approach. They first gained access in September 2019, and the attack was not uncovered until December 2020. Was the CISO begging for more funding for security back in 2018? Yes! That doesn't he was aware of problems. Every CISO begs for more security funding. It is up to the board whether they approve the budget.

CISO in 2018: We need more money or the world could catch on fire.

Board: No. Make do with what you have.

World catches on fire.

CISO: I warned you!

Board: Hello, SEC? Yes, we would like to offer a C-suite executive for ritual sacrifice to atone for our sins...

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

Marty McFly Silver badge
Pint

Read the stories

Head over to https://folklore.org/

Be prepared for a lot of first-hand history reports on the genesis of Macintosh. Someone had the foresight to record the stories before they were lost to the ages. Good stuff.

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

Marty McFly Silver badge
Meh

Redundant

Modern aircraft are full of redundant systems, and logic flow charts determine operational functionality & availability of systems. It should be trivial to detect whether a current GPS reading is trustworthy or not. For example...

- Compass points north, thus it shows the general direction of the aircraft travel. Are GPS coordinates changing in a similar fashion?

- Engines are at cruise speed, which means the aircraft should be moving along 400-600mph depending on head/tail winds. GPS should not show a speed less than 300 or more than 800.

- Etc.

If the GPS data is deemed to inaccurate, that would just mean the pilots need to do more work navigating the aircraft manually. Some automated systems would become unavailable. But hardly a 'major flight safety concern', at least as long as there are humans in both front seats.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

Marty McFly Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: click bait

"Airframe" is an entertaining novel, and a quick page-turner. A bit dated in 2024 - the executives have pagers instead of cell phones - BTOYA. While a work of fiction, I have a suspicion it is closer to reality than we would otherwise be comfortable with.

Yes, there is a strong story line about the engines not being made by the manufacturer, and the fuselage actually protects the passengers during an uncontained engine failure. Because the engines hang on a "Norton" airframe, they get the public black eye.

Has Boeing earned their black eye with the Max debacles? Yes, absolutely. However, it seems everyone wants to pile on and land a punch every time something routine happens. When one tire/wheel came off a 32-year old 757, the second wheel & tire was able to safely handle the load. The redundancy is good. Boeing should be getting credit for a good design. Nope, every news outlet has to jump on the anti-Boeing bandwagon and blather about things they don't understand.

What Microsoft's latest email breach says about this IT security heavyweight

Marty McFly Silver badge
FAIL

Article title

"What Microsoft's latest email breach says about this IT security heavyweight"

Have you read the article you published before assigning this title?

Microsoft is a "security heavyweight" like concrete shoes are to swim flippers.

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

Marty McFly Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: More Windows on ARM is good

" but the only reason that Windows still exists is that people want to run their x86 programs (even if they don't understand that's what they mean) unchanged. Until that assumption - which was also the argument that regularly killed Linux desktops - changes, nothing will change."

Damn straight.

Have you seen some of the garbage application software being produced recently? Loaded with bloat & unwanted advertising. Built in tracking via 'telemetry'. Monetizing the user after the sale. Dare I mention a convenient subscription license permanently attached to your credit card? All while simultaneously offering absolutely zero new value over the previous version.

Really, I can do 99% of my job with the feature set of OfficeXP. Yeah, it was buggy as a swamp which is why people were forced to upgrade. But there really hasn't been anything revolutionary or innovative added since then.

I don't blame people for wanting to stay with what works and is already paid for.

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

Marty McFly Silver badge
Gimp

Re: No real surprise

The entire smartphone industry continues to be evolutionary. Faster CPU, more storage, more pixels. The industry hasn't been revolutionary for a long time. No big & compelling WOW to get people to buy a new device.

Not to mention iPhone prices range from $429 to $1599. That is more than I paid for my first car, and I got 10 years service out of it. As the prices have gone up, the expectation for a longer life span makes more sense. Dropping that much money on a top line phone, I should get at least 5+ years life out of it (assuming unexpected damage is avoided).

Icon is for the customers with disposable income who must have the latest status symbols models.

Florida man slams 'tyranny' of central bank digital currencies in re-election bid

Marty McFly Silver badge
Flame

He is not exactly correct, but he is not wrong

Don't worry, you can trust the government. They will NOT take your CBDC. It is your "money", it is protected, they cannot take it. However, they WILL keep you from spending it. Did 2020/2021 and the restrictions teach us nothing?

"For public safety, only people who have voluntarily taken the shot are permitted to spend money at this grocery store. And, since all CBDC transactions are monitored by the government, you won't be able to use it for any sort of person-to-person transactions either. This is to protect other people from you."

Don't think the government won't do it if they have the opportunity. CBDC is all about control of our personal finances, who we can and cannot do business with.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Marty McFly Silver badge
FAIL

Hard-assed the wrong person

I've deployed some brand new server racks in my day. Every one of them came with an anti-tip mechanism. Either the ability to bolt them directly to the floor, or a big lip to bolt on the front of the rack. I totally admit to not installing the anti-tip mechanisms and just remembering to be cautious about where I put the weight.

It sounds to me like the senior admins failed to build out the server room properly in the first place.

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

Marty McFly Silver badge
Mushroom

Lesson learned!

Expose the problem, and face legal issues. Not an atta-boy. Not a bonus. Not even a Thank You. Next time... Dark web and here is my cryptocurrency address to the highest bidder.

Snarky attitude aside, this type of vindictive approach will drive the wrong behavior in the future.

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

Marty McFly Silver badge
Thumb Up

I'll take that deal!!

"In November 2023, the Google-owned vid-streaming site confirmed to The Register that it intentionally imposed a page-loading delay for those browsing YouTube while running ad-blocking extensions.

Let's see... A delay loading the video. Versus forced to watch an annoying advertisement targeted at a demographic which I am not a part of. That sounds like a deal to me!

Seriously Google/YouTube, with all your tracking you haven't figured out my basic demographics yet? I make no apologies for being a heterosexual male with a normal sex drive. I admit it, show me advertisements of hot women in bikini's selling lite beer and I will probably watch them.

Showing me advertisements targeted at a demographic I am not even remotely part of is just a waste of everyone's time. Advertisers should not be paying Google/YouTube for those ads.

John Deere tractors get connectivity boost with Starlink deal

Marty McFly Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Who does this benefit ?

Or how the government can run the equipment without a farmer. Precursor to robotic farming.

John Deere really needs to have their brand associated with other big-tech companies that appear benevolent up front, but are secretively evil and manipulative.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Marty McFly Silver badge
Flame

"Preconditioning" takes too long

My understanding is shoving a screwdriver or knife through a lithium-ion battery will solve the cold battery problem, quickly.

Icon for the end result.

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