Posts by G2

Re: re:future of signage

you seem to miss the fact that this is a digital window sign, not a plain paint and wood/plastic one.

smart window signs are starting to be equipped with a built-in camera for analytics. They are deploying it for eye tracking, viewer demographics and other such statistics. Also, some of them can even do facial recognition and change what they display based on a central database with informations about what that person likes or dislikes or, as it is in China, data pulled from their official Social Credit System ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System )

That's pretty much right up the alley of GDPR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD3067JJujY

https://www.wired.com/2007/06/eye-tracking-device-lets-billboards-know-when-you-look-at-them/

Re: R.I.P. Synology

Unfortunately, in Europe companies are not consumers and are not protected by consumer protection laws at all. Only some natural persons can be considered "consumers", but not all.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02011L0083-20180701

quote: For the purpose of this Directive, the following definitions shall apply:

(1) ‘consumer’ means any natural person who, in contracts covered by this Directive, is acting for purposes which are outside his trade, business, craft or profession; /quote

This is why you can still see warranties of only 1 month or 90 days or so for some brand new products - those are never sold to consumers, only to other companies.

e.g. Allied Telesis: the default warranty for all their rackable switches sold in Europe is only 90 days. If you want longer warranty or even firmware updates then you must pay a subscription (NetCover) and renew that anually. If the subscription lapses then so does the warranty and you are not allowed to renew an expired subscription. Out of warranty devices are generally not allowed to receive firmware updates - unless it's a really bad bug with eye-bleeding CVE ratings and they already have developed some sort of a fix.

Re: Free for non-commercial use?

P.S. direct-connections via IP address or LAN only connections (if in same VPN, they are considered as "same LAN") are not subject to their licensing checks which might be why your other laptops have not been infected yet by their "commercial use" flag.

Re: Keeping Win7, can pry it out of my cold dead hands...

@ 6+ hours update....

that was not a normal update, it was most likely an 'edition' upgrade.

Visually there's not much difference between these two, but the upgrade is actually a full Win10 reinstall that migrates all applications and user data to the newly installed OS.

That slow 6+ hours surprise upgrade time is what happens when you install Win10 (and keep it unmanaged with WSUS) on a mechanical slow-as-molasses 5400rpm HDD in a computer that's really designed only for home use, or at best as an office typewriter.

if your time is so critical then please ask your company to at least consider replacing those mechanical HDDs with SSDs.

For replacements, I usually prefer to use 5-year+ warranty SSDs even if the 2-year ones are cheaper. In the long run, it's safer to use higher quality ones.

Re: Confusion due to lax use of terminology in RFC?

obligatory XKCD reference here: https://xkcd.com/221/

=)

Re: It's not CCTV

@ Anonymous Coward - you didn't even bother to search and just made a statistical dump of zero numbers on the comment form, did you?

search #1 has some (weird) results about connected circuits and tv

search #2 ...

feniva.eu (around since 2006) and cloud-tech.eu (around since 2010) have a product name tagged exactly like #2 in the extended description - Cloud Circuit TV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYlYRGSQbEc

video published on 11 Jun 2013

q.e.d.

Re: what exactly do they define as a "drone"?

p.s. hmmmmm... i see that the actual words used in the bill are "unmanned aircraft"... that means that as long as they abduct a human and hold it onboard they are not "unmanned".

Re: Phone contracts

if you as consumer don't buy directly from Europe then the minimum 2 years warranty does not apply.

Also, that minimum warranty period does not apply to goods purchased by companies, it only applies to purchases by consumers.

if Company X buys a batch of phones from China, with 1 month warranty - it's legal.

if person Y willingly buys a phone from China, with 1 month warranty - it's legal. The sale happens in China as far as the manufacturer is concerned, the fact that the phone is then moved to Europe - that's not their problem.

if person Y, in Europe, buys a phone from Company X, from Europe - then company X has to provide a minimum 2 year warranty.... but this warranty only covers the device "as is" at the time of the sale - it does not include any operating system updates. (unless explicitly included in the sale contract)

This is why many phone manufacturers don't give a crap about OS updates a few months after product release, because it's not their problem from the point of view of warranty laws.

Re: I've been there

OH GOD, we just bought in december 2017 a crap load of HPE OfficeConnect switches and some ProLiant servers... but even if we have multiple volume licenses for Server 2016 bought directly from MS and we provided them with the license info, HPE REFUSED to even send us a single damned install disk with drivers for the servers and the stupid "HPE Intelligent Provisioning" wizard built in the bios was malfunctioning with the standard MS installers (we download the ISO for Server 2016 directly from Microsoft VLSC).

HPE's "Intelligent Provisioning" was causing this dreadful message to appear when trying to install Server 2016:

"Windows Setup could not install one or more boot-critical drivers. To install Windows, make sure that the drivers are valid, and restart the installation."

NO SHIT SHERLOCK... the drivers were built into the damn BIOS and installed by the installer wizard provided by HPE, how much more "valid" do you want to get?

Re: Once, you hit F1...

just tried it now, F1 doesn't do anything in my Firefox. It's as if I didn't press anything.

according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Keyboard_shortcuts

it only works in the developer tools now, and you have to press F12 or CTRL+SHIFT+i to enable that first.

Re: Have they turned off the slupring yet

the answer to that is: somewhat.

you still get to choose only between Basic and Full.

The below-Basic, Security-level is only available for Enterprise Editions, the Enhanced setting is also available, but only via GPO because it contains Active Directory-related stuff in addition to the Basic stuff.

In 1803 (or 1804...or whatever they decide call it) they added a visualisation tool for the slurping - there's a Diagnostic Data Viewer added so you can look more easily at what data they are slurping. There's also a "Delete" button for the diagnostic data - pressing it will ask them nicely to delete the already-collected data from their servers, but only the data from the current device.

Re: So much for RESPONSIBILITY

given that IBM is dealing mostly with companies (or should i say "exclusively"?), i'd say that is standard behaviour in Europe.

You are lucky to have such a consumer law in Australia that allows companies to be considered as "consumers" because here in Europe you're generally fucked if you have a consumer-type issue and you are not a natural person. :(

Under EU law, the notion of consumer does not extend to legal persons (companies), even if they have a non-business character (e.g. non-profit associations). So, if it's not directly written in a contract then it doesn't exist. There are some minor differences from this in some EU countries but generally that's the rule.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:31993L0013

quote: ‘consumer’ means any natural person who, in contracts covered by this Directive, is acting for purposes which are outside his trade, business or profession; /quote

Not even self-employed traders or family businesses can be considered as "consumers" - but there are, again, some minor differences to this rule across EU countries.

Re: The power to cloud men's minds

try reading the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss... it's set in a binary star system that causes extremely long seasons that last for centuries. The Winter book sounds similar to your description but in Aldiss' book it's the extremely long Great Winter that affects the human civilization, not a nebula.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helliconia

(with double "L"s!)

Re: Tax on Glasses?

newsflash: DKNY is a Luxottica brand/product and their revenue ends up reported on Luxottica's balance sheet at the end of the fiscal year - so, yes it matters to shareholders and tax authorities.

http://www.luxottica.com/en/eyewear-brands/dkny

Re: Google security...is a joke

P.S.: or report it here:

https://www.google.com/appserve/security-bugs/new