Posts by big_D

Re: Can you help?

No idea what relevant means. Generally I only get shown adverts for products I've recently purchased.

Our dishwasher broke earlier this year, I bought a replacement over Amazon, and since then I get daily emails and adverts for new dishwashers! How many do they think I need?

I've now set up a Pi-Hole at home to block all major tracking sites. Advertising domains that have allowed malware to be funnelled through their sites are also blocked - E.g. Google, Facebook etc.

Re: Yeah, pull the other one

My wife isn't tech literate. She came to me a year ago and asked me to de-Google her Android phone.

As far as possible, all Google services and apps have been disabled - only the Play Store was still enabled. Chrome has been replaced by Firefox and DuckDuckGo does the searching. So far, she is very happy, although I did turn Google Maps back on for her - but disabled history.

Re: 49% have no old devices

We recycle regularly. I have one old Lumia 950 in a draw as a backup phone, in case one of our current phones dies - although how useful that will be going forward is another question...

I do have an old Kindle, but everything else has been sent to the recycling centre or is waiting to go there - I have recently decommissioned an old Sony laptop and Mac mini, I need to erase the drives before they go to the recycling centre.

Re: That's horrible.

Yeah, I use OneDrive and Carbonite for my data, synchronized and backed up automatically.

Constantly.

All my data is synced to Carbonite and OneDrive. My main PC then syncs OneDrive to a second partition and to my NAS. I double check the status of the local backups on a regular basis and I've checked Carbonite is working on several occasions. I even do test restores from Carbonite now and then to double check.

But, for most people, it isn't until you have lost information that you think about backups. My eldest daughter had 1TB of OneDrive and USB sticks, but never used OneDrive and didn't bother to tell me the USB ports on her MacBook Pro had stopped working... Until she drove home from Uni, only to find that she hadn't resealed the lid on her coffee thermos-cup and had slung it in the same bag as her Mac; queue lovely fractal patterns behind the glass of the display and a sugary syrup oozing out of the case.

When she got a new MacBook Pro, the first thing I did was install Carbonite on it for her. And when that stopped working she contacted me straight away and, after multiple attempts to get it going again, we ditched Carbonite and I put Backblaze on it instead.

Re: Natural monopolies

Very true, although one of the big problems, especially with Google, is they become big in one area and use that dominance to gain an unfair advantage in other areas - this is also very much what Microsoft was found guilty of in the 90s.

Re: Politics.

The problem is that they aren't doing enough to stem the tide of abhorrent content, at least from a non-US, no Republican view.

But that is the least of the concerns. Their blocking new technologies or using their existing monopolies to squeeze out competition in other areas is the biggest problem at the moment.

And they just make fun of the authorities at the moment, just look at Google's response to their search dominance. Their solution to accusations of abusing their monopoly on Android to squeeze out other search engines? Ok, we'll charge our competitors for placing them in a list of alternate search engines!

Or Facebook, receives a 5 milliard dollar fine and their market cap increases by 6 milliard dollars!

Absolutely brilliant, making money out of being censured. There needs to be a real shake up of the industry, at the moment they are just making a mockery of justice.

Re: Making things more complicated

That is the problem, as long as the cost of the lawyers and fines costs them less than doing business "properly", they won't change their ways until they are forced to do so.

Re: Dancing with the devil

At a previous employer, we got DOSed by a Google owned IP address. (Probably a misconfigured Google server/cloud instance sending data to the wrong IP address, but they were stuffing over 100mbps down our 10mbps line.)

Contacting them was a nightmare. No, it was impossible. Ring and you land in a telephone system that just tells you to go look at the relevant section of their website and then cuts you off - but only after you've been bounced around for 10 minutes between menus.

The problem is, I couldn't find a page on Google.com about abuse or being DOSed by Google. Googling also didn't bring up any results.

I then tried emailing their postmaster@ and abuse@ addresses, which just got the reply that they get so many emails that they don't even bother to process them, they are just ignored.

I then turned to Twitter, but their corporate account didn't reply either.

In the end, we had to pay our ISP for DOS protection from the Google IP address. Luckily we were in the process of switching to a new provider with a faster line, so we just accelerated the switch-over and disconnected the old line.

Re: Google therefore has a difficulty

They seem to ignore a lot of problems (especially legal problems), until the platform that is affected has grown so much that it isn't economical, using the current business model, to rectify the problems properly.

Instead of solving the known problems from the get-go, or when they first appear and then scaling up the resulting system, they ostrich it until it is too late and then have to come up with a half-baked solution to try and correct the problem, without adversely affecting their revenues.

If they did things properly in the first place, the revenues would be lower or the costs for users/developers higher, but they wouldn't be stuck between a rock and hard place, having to decide whether to suddenly charge more or only do half a job, to remain within budget.

I was ill once and the IT manager called up and wanted my password, because they wanted access to certain files or emails.

I told him, no, he couldn't have my password, but he could reset it to get at the data...

Re: Many moons ago ...

My mother worked at a company that had pagers in the 80s. They were located by the reception desk in a rack and employees took them out of the rack when they arrived in the morning and put them back, to recharge, when they left for the evening.

Re: What were they doing with an expensive photo capable printer in 1989?

We were using them for printing photo-IDs for election tracking in Africa.

There are legitimate uses for high quality printers in business other than printing "holiday pics".

Re: Uganda

A client I worked for in the UK ran the elections in an African country that was in the middle of a civil war in the early 90s. The election team used modems to connect to the central cc:Mail server in the UK, but the line kept dropping and they couldn't work out why...

We did some analysis and when we listened on the line as the modem was handshaking there was a sudden, loud click on the line. The kit the regime was using was so old (and loud) that it was causing the line to be dropped. This caused the project leader to write a polite letter to the government representatives asking them kindly to stop listening on this line, it was only being used for email and if they were really interested, they could come by and look at the transcripts.

Yes, if you were running an old 16-bit Sarcasm Detector, you would have had an overflow error.

Re: Just one problem with this article...

I think it works fine. Normal educated people can't miss the sarcasm, which makes all the funnier when people reference it as a source to promote their agenda of bashing non-US companies.

They point at the two engineers helping configure a piece of software, whilst quietly ignoring facts like AT&T having federal eavesdropping centers scattered across the US.

Re: Nope I'm lost

I thought it was very clear...

They were poking fun at the WSJ for ignoring the main points of focus of the story and wrapping it around a non-story to make political hay.

The sarcasm over the WSJ article just drips off the page, like blood from a fresh peck wound on their hand.

Re: Or...

And your employer would be in hot water during an audit, because that home PC doesn't belong to the company...

Re: How do people with children do it?

I can understand having to work lots of overtime coming up to a deadline - the last couple of weeks. But before that, the project manager can see he isn't going to hit the deadline and it is his responsibility to see that either the deadline gets pushed or extra people get assigned.

If you are still a couple of months from the deadline, there is no excuse for making people work weekends and excessive overtime during the week.

That said, I did work on one project where the deadline couldn't be moved and we couldn't have more people working on the project (2 man project working on Lotus 1-2-3 worksheet macros). I put in about 60 hours overtime a week for a month. But I got paid for it, my tax bill for the month was more than my normal gross. But it paid for a nice hi-fi system and holiday. After we hit the deadline, I slept for 30 hours solid.

Re: Heavy...

Correct, I was giving the definition in context.

Re: Heavy...

Jobie (slang, English) = thing / type of thing

Re: Heavy...

There was also an original Compaq Portable, which looked like a portable sewing machine in a travel case... Weighed about the same as a Singer cast iron sewing machine as well! (Around 13KG)

And road warriors complain about laptops that weigh under 2Kg. They should be forced to carry a Compaq around for a couple of weeks! 2x 5.25" 360KB floppy, 9" display, 128KB RAM.

Re: Yeah? sue us.

At a previous employer, I worked on systems for controlling cool-houses and slaughter lines. For the cool-house sorting the time between an RFID sensor read and a decision was well under 100ms - that is roundtrip network time + processing time.

Like the brewing company, it just isn't possible to outsource that to a cloud or data centre. We had a few customers with hosted SAP, but we always ended up with an on-premises production line server, which gathered information from SAP, made decisions on the production line and sent the results back to SAP. The information from SAP was a batch process before production begin with corrections being sent during the shift, the results going back to SAP weren't time critical (if it took half a second to get to SAP, it wasn't important), but all the important decision making work was done on the local server.