Posts by Havin_it 1227 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2008
>I suspect that Adobe is really just dependent on undocumented and unsupported API calls that are intended only for internal OS components.
If that's true (seeming to validate Dan Paul's suggestion above), have they always had the privileged access to these APIs that this would require? (Unless they are actually shit-hot reverse-engineers of binary code, which ... nah.)
And if *that's* true, then how come practically all their software runs like complete turd after the first 10 minutes (max)?
This was largely my take too. Canute would have a thing or two to say about the cabbies' (and their cheerleaders') opposition to Uber. When PHVs came along, a 2-tier system was forced into being when the contemporary state of technology meant there were two reasonably distinct customer bases/use-cases, each with their own pros and cons for the consumer. That's arguably no longer the case, and the most efficient model for legislators and customers alike at this point might be for the best business model to be supported in law. And I'm sorry, but the Hackney Cab is no longer it for an overwhelming majority, as far as I can tell.
You can make a lot of cheese in "a few" years. Or, at minimum, a good sales pitch for some gullible idiots like Yahoo or Justin Timberlake...
Besides, self-driving cabs are likely to have a human at the where-the-wheel-used-to-be for a good while thereafter, what with labour protectionism, safety concerns and such. They just won't be paid as much.
"Hi! I'm Johnny Cab. Please say your destination, not that I give a monkey's since you already told SiriNowCortana before you got in. Do you mind if we stop at the charging-station for a pasty and some haemorrhoid cream?"
Thank you for being needlessly rude. I've no doubt that the link "cunningly concealed" in the second paragraph would have answered my question, but I have this quaint notion that an article should adequately explain the meaning of its headline within its own rubric, not require the reader to traipse off elsewhere to reach understanding. It might be called journalistic courtesy, if you will.
Now, you may argue (and I might myself, with respect to other articles on this very site) that there is an exemption to this convention where topics upon which the paper's baseline readership may be considered more knowledgeable than the lay-person are concerned. However, it seems to me that this particular nugget is more likely to be well-known by regular users of taxis and/or private cabs, which hasn't to date struck me as a precondition of Reg readership, though I don't doubt it intersects somewhat. Personally, I ride the bus or my bike because cabs of any species are a luxury to me.
Thanks to you and other commentards for doing the reporter's job for them, though. You are awfully good. :)
I certainly wouldn't bet the farm on Warman: news to me he'd become an MP, but he strikes me as eminently "suitable" for this committee. I'd love to believe the anodyne nature of his DT "tech" articles was down to overzealous "dumbing-down" by sub-editors, and he understood more and was less credulous (OMG NEW IPHONE MAGICAL UNICORN SHIT ETC.) than the copy betrayed ... but I don't.
He's got.Government Technology Czar written all over him :(
(and on an entirely personal note, a face I would never tire of slapping, were I not a pacifist type.)
Sounds like your blocker's working. I uncorked WinUpdate today and found SEVEN items that I wouldn't touch with yours. That GWX-blocking reg hack that appeared last month must have been nuked :(
KB3035583 - GWX itself.
KB2952664
KB2999226
KB3021917
KB3068708
KB3075249
KB3080149 - All mention telemetry and/or "compatibility with the next version of Windows".
Oddly, another W7 box on auto-update hadn't received any of these and didn't seem to want them upon checking. It's a little less beefy and hasn't had the same update diet, mind.
Note: There is NOTHING authoritative about the above list; it's just the obvious dangleberries I identified from the KB notes.
Thanks for this. I often self-identify with some of what is written here about "aspies" traits (to a mild degree) but do consider myself quite "extrovert" in the ways you describe at the same time, which I always found odd up until now. I suppose what I thought about it was that I was just NT with some form of self-inspired bias. Your comment on top of some others above gives some invalidation to that self-assessment yet eases the desire for a label. Freeing up some cycles for more pressing shit :)
Just because it's a single binary doesn't make it any more inherently trustworthy, which I think is the point being made (as a precautionary disclaimer, if nothing else). It could be doing anything when you run it. In that context, being updated regularly isn't necessarily a plus point: after all, that's a big part of the beef this thread is about.
When the source code is available for scrutiny, has actually *been* scrutinised, and I've compiled it with a compiler I trust, or the binary I receive is signed by a globally-trusted authority (hard these days, I know) and a few hundred thousand people have been using it for months without losing their bank details ... then I'll trust it around shit I value. Of course, Windows itself doesn't meet that standard in my book, so it's a bit moot, but others will differ.
Just sayin'.
>Epson A3 inkjet
That a recent WorkForce range one? *WANT*. My place only needs A4, but the WF we got 2 years ago is a great bit of kit, ink goes on for yooooonks (and even the OEM carts are ludicrously good value). Not sullied it with jazz carts yet, but good to know that won't be a problem. An A3 at home would be tempting, but not looked into Linux drivers yet. Have you?
>I'd particularly like a crack addled Dabsy to live report on the issue as the clocks tick past 12. Something I'd pay for, in fact.
Very clever, Dabbsy. Seriously, how many job-security 'bots are you running in here? If you laid off the Doncaster Coke a wee bit you'd maybe not need to bother!
Bought a 2015 model Sammy smarty a month ago, and found that its official *android* app is no longer a remote (functionality withdrawn) . It in fact does nothing I give the slightest toss about (some casting bollocks remains, from my S3 that has shitter wifi than the telly; hmm, useful).
So don't feel too peeved, fruitsters: you're just late to the upsell party. Thank heaven for third party controller apps (until a telly update nukes those).
...That photo's of a nurse fellating a grandpa, yeah? Everyone else seeing this?
I mean, that's my interpretation. I did consider that it was a prostrate weeping relative, but gramps seems a little too happy for that.
Doesn't seem all that germane, is all. We all know y'all have a nice big bucket of Playmobil to play with, so why recycle? And where's Optimus Prime?
Ulysses and DnD have both had a DVD release; I own both (and MSoG), though I forget where it was obtained. Possibly [lately Rakuten's] Play.com?
Don't despair! Unless you find yourself in a crisis situation with only NonoYumi, Tal and Uni to help you ;)
Edited for correction: Nono was actually pretty resourceful at times; I forgot that the "crap comic-relief sidekick" role was shared in U31, with Nono handling the "comic" and Yumi the "crap" parts. Innovative!
>[...]or better still for Amazon buy one of their horribly locked down FireTV dongles?
Horribly? Dunno about that. I've had an FTV stick about a month (and yes, my trial has morphed into paid sub with my approval), and I've side-loaded Kodi onto it for my locally-served-media needs, which was trivial. So, I'm reliably informed, is rooting it (if you have any reason to). With the app availability it seems a pretty useful bit of kit to me, and would still be even if I'd not subscribed.
Only significant fly in the ointment so far has been that Netflix plays like ass on it: lots of "disjoint buffering" (where the picture freezes but the audio continues, until suddenly you get a speeded-up enactment of the scene you just heard, until it all syncs up again). It's either my broadband, which is not awesome-tier but does fine for Amazon viewing (making it NF's fault for not adapting the bitrate to something manageable), or the fact that the NF app is sandboxed and kept away from native resources the Amazon app can draw on (which would be Amazon's and/or Google's fault).
This lark's all a bit new to me (long-suffering CRT telly dying has been the catalyst), but I'm pretty pleased with the Amazon offering all in all. My SO, who is far more wedded to the whole broadcast telly paradigm, has also been seduced like never before by the possibilities.
>You can then make IE "internal apps only" and FF/Chrome etc "internet access". You could even dump three preconfigured icons on their desktops: App1, App2, Internet. The third one could be labelled "Facebook and kitty pictures" if you need to spell out it's real use.
Hear hear, and not limited to different browsers either. I got IE hidden away as soon as my place let me, but we had a financial portal that I thought best to insulate from any potentially risky everyday-browsing activity. So I just created a second Firefox profile, set its homepage to the portal URL, and nobbled the UI with userChrome.css so it was basically kiosk-like with just the viewport showing. I slapped a shortcut to it on the desktop; with a custom icon people probably don't even realise it's a browser.
I haven't enforced anything with a proxy as you suggest, and I suppose a user could visit the portal in the non-gimped browser instance and open it up to XSS risks etc... but they'd have to actually know the URL, which they never have and would be unlikely to stumble on.
Profiles are an oft-overlooked and very handy feature of Firefox, as is userChrome.css. Shame that when Gecko/XUL bites the dust, all that UI customisability most likely goes with it :(
Mm. It's almost as if the PC industry *wanted* your box to die of heatstroke long before it would otherwise have needed replacing ...
Also consider the Dell et al will sell you a "shitty-environment-proof ruggedised enterprise workstation" jobbie for a hefty premium if you're so inclined.
I think you need a primer on the definition of the word "consumer" (especially in its sales-speak adjectival form).
People like you are not the topic of the article, but feel free to keep pointlessly self-aggrandising if your ego really needs it.
>I think that the, "IT people have no social skills", concept went out of fashion around the same time as the Pentium-Pro.
If by that you mean earlier this week, then ... well, I still disagree.
>I know that I turn away from any kind of social networking.
You're not building a winning case here, you know that don't you?
>Yes, I am in a long distance relationship with my girlfriend via email, SMS and VoIP
Cool. What's she in?
>you couldnt click on the sides to scroll down
Now this is the sort of thing that really gets my goat. Anything that interferes with the conventional and most basic methods of navigating around the page (arrow keys, mousewheel/touchpad scrolling, tabbing -- I've even had Home/End/PgUp/PgDn fucked with on occasion) is bad enough when the site's *own* webmonkeys do it, but when piped-in ads are responsible my contempt-o-meter crosses the red line. You come away with the feeling that they aren't all that bothered whether you actually, I dunno, *read* what's on the page or anything wacky like that.
From a dev POV I won't even use jQuery if the efficiency gained doesn't justify the bloat added. Dear ghod, I'm glad they made it modular - if it was monolithic I think I'd never use it.
For those hankering for an FF addon that profiles power usage, it's worth looking at YSlow (dependent on Firebug, which has a couple of its own profiling widgets to boot) as the reasons for a page loading slowly are oftentimes not entirely unrelated to the reasons for your computer shitting its lungs out of its ear in the process.
(However it should be noted that those addons themselves, when activated, do exacerbate such problems a bit in their own right.)
VPN into a box you control, where you can provide any DNS/DHCP/proxying goodness required for an ongoing connection. Bit more work, but no rooting required (on Android, at any rate; IIRC IOS has an unprivileged VPN API too, but not really my area).
I do this already just for privacy on the data network, and so my client IP address doesn't keep changing every few minutes breaking sessions with many sites. Never thought of employing it for ad-blocking as well, but should work. Only issue I can see is if some of the adserver IPs are hardcoded in Android, which would not surprise me :(
What AV's that then?
You surely must realise that 99.9% of mobes and f-slabs are blithely ambling around naked as the day they were imaged. It's like the desktop circa the turn of the Century (or sex around 1967) out there. It'd be beautiful but for all the snakes in the garden ...
Very good post for 99%, but it feels like you kinda betray the equanimity of your conclusion by the reference to "'ignorant' racism". Racism is, in my book (don't own a dictionary, among my sins), an inclination to, with malice aforethought, *act* in a manner prejudicial to those of another racial grouping.
I can't grok therefore how it could possibly be "ignorant": the concept described is absolute, not defined by the opinions or feelings of the grouping who are its object.
>The entire PC concept hadn't been thought of [...]
Horse puckey. It has been known by many names -- "blasphemy", "obscenity", "offensive", "decency", "decorum" are a grab-bag of the For & Against over the years -- but there's nothing new about people feeling offended by words above deeds (particularly on behalf of putative others, aka "white knighting"), nor about them abusing the offices of government and legislature to censor (and censure) the "offenders".
"Political correctness" (which, let's be honest, cannot literally describe anything other than an oxymoron) is simply the latter-day rebranding. I actually kinda like it, not least for what it says about whoever dreamed it up: although there may not be (and rarely is) any political inflection to that which is deemed to have transgressed, it not-so-subtly acknowledges that the "consequences" are likely to come backed-up by political clout.
(Note to future historians: Yes, I'm not trolling you, this is really how it worked in our time.)
The enemy has always been with us, because the enemy has always been within us.
Signed: Somebody who likes telling "dirty" jokes and hopes he never gets machine-gunned for it.
No. Just no.
Why should I pay a surcharge on the price of the tele, for added complexity and annoyance I don't want, won't use and would be obsolete before the box went "phut" anyway? That's just wasteful.
Unfortunately, folk like you will buy the pitch that you "need" this crap, that models without it are "poor", etc. So the prophecy will fulfil itself and eventually there'll be nothing BUT crap models left for the rest of us.
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