Posts by heyrick

Greensleeves

Network of Beebs. Teacher who hated the tune Greensleeves.

Cue a networked program (written in assembler by a friend and stuffed into memory someplace below PAGE). Each computer played a different note. The architecture was each machine talked to each other machine to work out who plays the next note using some devious algorithm that I never got my head around.

Good point, no central control, so turning off stations would have no effect on playback until the last one was turned off. Bad point? It totally swamped the network with data.

I got five hours of detention for that, on the basis that if it wasn't me then I knew who it was. I feigned complete cluelessness and did my time while working out a plan for the data logger (described above). Don't blame a nerd for something he didn't do, there will be payback...

to an inbox they controlled, requested password resets

There's your primary weak point right there. Without good reason (and having to go via support), it should NOT be possible to directly change an email address used by an account without sending the confirmation link to the original email address.

[and, one might add, disallow password changes for a certain time after email address changes]

"Arm was faced with the choice of upping its licensing costs to make up for the low royalties, or increase its royalties."

Or take a third option - tell SoftBank to piss off. There's a reason that the costs are what they are. Don't they already think ARM has already done a lot of work in calculating the most advantageous pricing?

Sure, they could charge more. They could triple the charges overnight. And the result? A massive loss of goodwill as those using ARM technology jump ship to something else. End result? Lower income, fewer cores in use and in production, and probably kick-starting a viable competitor in the market. It worries me that something calling itself a bank can't figure that much out...

Two other things Android needs to get sorted

The mobile comms options appear to be 2G only, 3G only, everything. It would be a lot better if this was split up as Slow, Fast, Everything. Because I'd like to benefit from the 4G around, but not risk reverting to 2G.

Why? Because Edge is just bloody awful. Orange France has it set so data takes priority (and when it's trying to do data, no phone calls will come in, it can't handle both), it spends forever twiddling it's thumbs (nothing at all being sent or received, just trying trying trying), and if it should manage to work, it works at a speed that an analogue modem from the mid '90s would laugh at. 3G+4G please!

The second thing is please twiddle the QoS so that the foreground app always takes precedence, like at least 75% of the available bandwidth if it needs it. Because it's really annoying to have the app that you're wanting to use stall because a dozen background apps want to check stuff (a big offender is Google Play Services). By all means call the mothership, but they're goddamn background apps. Not a single one of them should be given any preference over data transfers of the foreground app, you know, the one the user is attempting to use.

[this last point is related to the first, because the foreground app can be blocked for minutes if the phone gets itself stuck on 2G...and everything lurking decides it wants to use this shiny new connection to call home; sodding Android seems to give them all priority]

for at least a $6m commitment

Isn't that basically just some legalese to ensure lock-in?

By requiring a certain minimum over a period of time, it makes it harder to jump ship to an alternative that can offer better, or cheaper, or both.

It's as bad as the banks

Sending emails telling you never to follow links in messages claiming to be from the bank...

...followed by a big link button to go to your account.

I kind of wonder if anybody who clicks the link has some sort of "UserIsATwat" flag set on their account?

selling the discount codes for between £200 and £750

Wait, what?

They were selling them for their face value? What the hell is the point of that?!?

RTB is fascinating

Advertising is the art of making money through bullshit. Reduces the signs of aging, nine out of ten budgerigars prefer it, clinically proven...

Now along comes RTB which is a whole new way to make money out of bullshit, but what is being sold is somebody else's bullshit. It's like double plus bullshit equals kerching. [*]

It's fascinating, all this money being created out of hot air and waffle, that ultimately makes products cost more, a price that we end up paying unless we take the attitude that companies that advertise aggressively have to overcharge for their product in order to cover costs, and thus refuse to buy from aggressive advertisers.

* - My phone's swipe-type autocorrect wanted to replace "kerching" with "leeching". My phone understands. That is all.

he criticized the slow enforcement of Europe’s GDPR

Funny, given that it's his country's (frequently his state's) megacorps that are the problem, that hide behind bullshit privacy shields and of course the "we're in a different country they doesn't follow your laws (you follow ours)" issue.

And what's this with being "sold"? There's a vast gaping chasm between collecting and processing personal data, and selling it. Probably a chasm large enough to create plenty of loopholes to keep lawyers busy, and we're not all Max Schrems. Most of us, faced with that, won't bother.

other APIs that can be abused

Browsers really ought to put toggle switches on all of these, so the end users can decide whether or not they are available.

The amount of secret sauce being hidden in a piece of software that is then routinely used by god knows how many third party scripts is... disturbing.