This is the reason I haven't bought a single bluray yet. Once it's as broken as DVDs are, then I'm in - otherwise not so much. If I can't rip it to my Nas, then I can't watch it - I have no intention of running off to the garage to put a different bit of bit of plastic in the player each time I want to watch a film. This isn't the 1990s any more.
In my case at least, DRM didn't stop 'piracy' because I wasn't swashbuckling on the high seas to start with. It did stop consumption though.
Verizon is among dozens of the nation's leading employers
They can't be leading very much if they're only recruiting a subsection of the qualified populous. Why not just call them what they are - a big, shit employer.
Hidden features are probably the worst design mistake. I understand the aim of keeping the clutter out of the way, and so (for example) there's no need to have "move to trash" and "delete immediately" on the same right-click menu. The "delete immediately" only appears on the top-of-screen file menu if you press the right keyboard button - that (to me, at least) is a mistake.
Likewise, moving and copying files with the file manager ('finder') is pretty much core-capability. Only allowing copy without some secret knowledge is crazy (especially as the filesystem doesn't de-dupe). When I first got my mac, I honestly wanted to find a different 'file manager' because I assumed Finder was just a flawed piece of crap. Surely, I should find my mac super cool and exciting when first using it - only when I've really settled in should I find anything that I'd rather was different.
So yeah, with all their millions in the bank, spending a few K on some honest, independent and nothing-off-limits UI review would seem to be useful. Oh, and I don't mean reviewing the new set of emojis.
That's okay - the best sparkling wines now come from the UK - climate change means the best place to grow it is moving north. The way things are going, by 2039, the best will probably be Scottish, or maybe Icelandic;-)
Whilst aerodynamics aren't really a concern, an elongated shape may still prove beneficial when navigating dust, debris or indeed anything else - when travelling at 130,000 miles/hour.
Our engineering suggests the elongated shape may also be 'natural' in some cases, in so much as you may want your living spaces as far away from your engines as you can get them - that naturally stretches out your ship design.
So yes, most of these sentiments are probably from watching sci-fi, but some aspects of it aren't necessarily as fictitious as the name may suggest.
This is for the UK - some UK prisons are right in the middle of towns or residential areas. That makes singrays a considerable problem, since the likelihood is that you'll pick up passers by, local residents or whomever else.
I am wondering why they can't have more RF shielding though (although I'd imagine it's hard to put in, some of the prisons we've got were built by the Victorians). Unless that shielding is covered over by a decent brick/concrete wall, the chances are the bored inmates will find a way through it.
I'm sure there must be a 'mobile phone detector' that prisons could use. They'd get false positives for phones outside the walls, but they'd presumably be able to find them inside when they were being used. I guess though, it's possible that a call or text to a known accomplice to say "it's done" is so short that by then the phone's been passed to three other people and is busy getting buried behind a loose brick in the wall in another wing.
As for searches, much the same is true in UK prisons too - but the point is that these phones are now so small that you can shove it up your back side. A finger up there won't find it, and neither will a metal detector. An x-ray or ultrasound probably would, but having to do one of those on every inmate once a week or once a month is a bit tiresome.
That's incredible - somewhere in that program there's some code, that someone spent time writing, that specifically prevents the window moving until some other part of the program says it's okay. Methinks someone spent some time on some redundant code there:-(
I'm reminded of a UI story several years ago which headlined something like "Don't grey out menu items". The thinking there was similar - stop taking the time to write code to selectively enable and disable certain menu items. Instead, just design the thing to work right all of the time.
I'm still wondering what thinking lead to "let's stop the window moving until they've started playing something". I'd love to hear the justification - it's sort of like the answer to a riddle that you just can't figure out.
As you note, it essentially provides the features your phone should provide by default, but the operators are too slow to adapt, and so haven't got around to it yet.
However, to use Whatsapp, you have to let it have access to all your contacts. Therefore, Whatsapp (and Facebook) know the phone numbers of all the people you have in your phone. Since Facebook also asks for your phone number, they can tie your contacts to real humans pretty easily. Even without that, they can still infer much the same information by watching who you talk to, and who they talk to, etc etc.
The other thing to note about Whatsapp is that if you have it installed it of course reads your contacts whenever it wants, so any new contacts you add also get sent to the FB surveillance supercomputer. Thus, not only does facebook know who you meet, but when - even though you didn't ever log onto facebook (or even use whatsapp to talk to people).
All this stuff is pretty scary sounding (to me), but the likes of my wife don't see any sort of problem with it. I've gradually been trying to get over to Telegram for IM purposes, but I've literally got 3 contacts on there (although my doorbell is also Telegram connected). I use Signal as an SMS replacement, but have yet to be friends with anyone else who uses it.
In other news, Law enforcement were asked how it's possible for a stolen car to drive 11,000 miles around town without being spotted. Number plate recognition vendors were contacted, but none responded to our requests.
Ooh, festive SQL - I was more on the lines of "Geek Porn II - the SQL", which I saw here once many years ago, can't find it again, but it started out with "INSERT INTO orifice (SELECT toy FROM bedside_cabinet..."
I replied to someone else below you with the results of a search for "disney" on the netflix phone app. With a couple of notable exceptions, almost no disney on (my) Netflix. Some are on Amazon, but you have to pay for them there.
I'll also say I'm not too sad about that - we've inherited lots of DVDs from the family/friends, so with only a couple of exceptions, we're not giving Disney any actual money for films, either directly through sales or indirectly through streaming services.
I have to disagree - maybe it's by location. I just tried the search you suggested, and I got:
James and the giant peach strange magic tomorrow lands star wars force awakens avengers thor antman ghost patrol air buddies kate and mim mim Air bud Wild Ride Air Bud Jake's buccaneer blast Yo Kai Watch Harry Bunnie Air Bud Fangbone Walt before Mickey Air Bud
So apart from a couple of exceptions, almost none of that list is actually Disney.
I'd say "not very" - it's available here, but it hasn't really 'caught on'. We're just getting into domestic solar (that's really taking off actually, but it's still a tiny minority of people who have it). Some people have some wet solar to heat water, but that's got an even smaller penetration than electrical PV.
What we do have though, is quite a large amount of green generation into the grid (be that synthetic gas, or electricity). That industry is largely driven by consumer choice of supplier - some suppliers are now able to exclusively buy green energy to service their customers (others buy green first, then brown if they have to).
...and a large part of that gas/oil use is to heat water (either for hot water taps, or central heating systems). That can be (at least partly) achieved by wet solar, which weirdly still works when there's snow on top of it (within reason).
As noted, none of these options is a 100% solution to every problem, but they all form part of the patchwork that is our energy supply, both now and in the future.
As things stand, you can't get Disney films on Netflix (I believe there's one star wars film on there right now, possibly as a test or something). If Disney buys 21st Century, then there'll be even less on Netflix as those titles get removed as well.
One wonders if this can be seen as Disney becoming a 'better competitor' or just muscling out the opposition. Netflix offers something Disney seem incapable of - that is, what the customer actually wants, rather than what a big media company says they can have. Loss of content on Netflix doesn't seem like we're moving forwards, but knowing how US regulators are, it's probably where we're headed.
Yeah, Linkedin has it's own 'fake news' problem, it's just a lot easier to spot and a lot less corrosive than the problems Facebook's got. Like Facebook, they need to surface the good stuff and suppress the bad stuff.
While I'm here, Linkedin's 'feed' is quite probably the most brain-dead implementation possible. I posted a link to a little joke project I'd worked on for a couple of days. After I'd hit "submit", the post vanished - I had to go to My Profile -> My Posts to go find it again. Surely, they should be puffing up my ego a bit and making sure that for me at least, my post is at the top of my feed for at least a couple of hours before gradually falling down it into the oblivion such things deserve.
In reverse, one of my contacts posts some interesting stuff, which typically gets loads of likes and comments and whatnot. I have no idea how though - they don't appear in my feed, I have to search for them when they ask if I've seen it. Hopeless. Sometimes I wonder if my feed is upside down - all the shit at the top and the good stuff at the bottom, 100 clicks away.
No idea how this would fly in the US, but could you run your own cables between you and your neighbours houses (perhaps just via your gardens, so only on land you collectively own), and then have a commercial connection to the house at the end of the street? If anyone in the row isn't up for it, then microwave link over their property to the next 'friendly' one.
It wouldn't cut the ISPs out entirely, but it'd sure piss them off, even more so if the guy at the end of the street just had a microwave link to another street which had the business connection;-)
I had a similar thing ("boss knows best") on a smaller scale. I was the IT guy for a 40 person company which had been buying IBM Thinkpads since day 1. $manager asked if we could buy some Sony Vaios (there was a little clutch-bag sized one, which he liked the look of). I told him we'd struggle to support them and that the thinkpads weren't the sexiest, but were super tough and were holding up really well (as most people travelled about).
I think I was out of the office, but $manager asked my a-little-bit-junor-to-me colleague to order 3 of the Vaios. They turned up and after the "oh wow, it's really small and cute" cooing was over, we realised they were a nightmare to look after - we couldn't image them properly, all of the drivers were Sony-specific and generics didn't come from Microsoft, and so it went on. Constant pain in the arse from two of them, although $manager never really asked for anything - I guess he just struggled through whatever problems he had. Curiously, even though he had the smallest laptop in the company, he had the biggest computer bag - it was massive - probably full of dongles for every possible peripheral because the Vaio had none of it built in.
Lots of people left, and we got 2 of the Vaois back again - by now, no one even asked for them. $manager got moved around a couple of times, and never had the nerve to ask for a Thinkpad. He eventually took a step down, so got a Thinkpad for the few months until he left. The 3 Vaios got sold off on an employee 'buy a laptop' raffle we had to get rid of our old gear.
It seems to be alive and well in my local Post Office. They've got two automated machines where you can supposedly do all the necessaries to get your parcel or letter sent however you'd like it to be handled. Then they've got the traditional queue-up system with a handful of windows and a "please go to window 2" machine.
I took a look at the machines, and bearing in mind I'm a sysadmin, thought "how hard can it be?" (pff! most of the people in the line are pretty old, maybe it's too complicated for them!). Then I tried to use it... almost immediately it popped up "Help is on the way". Seeing no one around, I just joined the queue. "Help" arrived at the machine as I was getting called to my window.
The next time I went, I of course ignored the machines like everyone else. A helpful lady asked the person in front if she'd like to use the machine and a few other questions, and then said "actually, you may be better off going to the window in case it gets complicated". She then came to me, and as I just had a parcel to send first class (nothing special), we headed over to the machine. She operated it entirely - all I did was put my credit card over the reader to pay. She even stuck the label on my parcel and then took my parcel into the back room. The lady who was in front of me in the queue was stood behind me and was then assisted in sending her parcel after I left.
So... at my local post office at least, they've got the same number of 'windows', but now have an extra person to operate the automatic machines because none of the general public can do it on their own. Crap automation = more jobs:-)
I thought binary logging was a mandatory requirement of systemd. Am I wrong about that? Can I turn off binary logging and just go back to/var/log/messages on a systemd system? Got any Centos 7 instructions anywhere?
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This is the reason I haven't bought a single bluray yet. Once it's as broken as DVDs are, then I'm in - otherwise not so much. If I can't rip it to my Nas, then I can't watch it - I have no intention of running off to the garage to put a different bit of bit of plastic in the player each time I want to watch a film. This isn't the 1990s any more.
In my case at least, DRM didn't stop 'piracy' because I wasn't swashbuckling on the high seas to start with. It did stop consumption though.
Verizon is among dozens of the nation's leading employers
They can't be leading very much if they're only recruiting a subsection of the qualified populous. Why not just call them what they are - a big, shit employer.
Hidden features are probably the worst design mistake. I understand the aim of keeping the clutter out of the way, and so (for example) there's no need to have "move to trash" and "delete immediately" on the same right-click menu. The "delete immediately" only appears on the top-of-screen file menu if you press the right keyboard button - that (to me, at least) is a mistake.
Likewise, moving and copying files with the file manager ('finder') is pretty much core-capability. Only allowing copy without some secret knowledge is crazy (especially as the filesystem doesn't de-dupe). When I first got my mac, I honestly wanted to find a different 'file manager' because I assumed Finder was just a flawed piece of crap. Surely, I should find my mac super cool and exciting when first using it - only when I've really settled in should I find anything that I'd rather was different.
So yeah, with all their millions in the bank, spending a few K on some honest, independent and nothing-off-limits UI review would seem to be useful. Oh, and I don't mean reviewing the new set of emojis.
...and a brown alert when there's a health-code violation at the local curry house ;-)
That's okay - the best sparkling wines now come from the UK - climate change means the best place to grow it is moving north. The way things are going, by 2039, the best will probably be Scottish, or maybe Icelandic ;-)
Whilst aerodynamics aren't really a concern, an elongated shape may still prove beneficial when navigating dust, debris or indeed anything else - when travelling at 130,000 miles/hour.
Our engineering suggests the elongated shape may also be 'natural' in some cases, in so much as you may want your living spaces as far away from your engines as you can get them - that naturally stretches out your ship design.
So yes, most of these sentiments are probably from watching sci-fi, but some aspects of it aren't necessarily as fictitious as the name may suggest.
This is for the UK - some UK prisons are right in the middle of towns or residential areas. That makes singrays a considerable problem, since the likelihood is that you'll pick up passers by, local residents or whomever else.
I am wondering why they can't have more RF shielding though (although I'd imagine it's hard to put in, some of the prisons we've got were built by the Victorians). Unless that shielding is covered over by a decent brick/concrete wall, the chances are the bored inmates will find a way through it.
I'm sure there must be a 'mobile phone detector' that prisons could use. They'd get false positives for phones outside the walls, but they'd presumably be able to find them inside when they were being used. I guess though, it's possible that a call or text to a known accomplice to say "it's done" is so short that by then the phone's been passed to three other people and is busy getting buried behind a loose brick in the wall in another wing.
As for searches, much the same is true in UK prisons too - but the point is that these phones are now so small that you can shove it up your back side. A finger up there won't find it, and neither will a metal detector. An x-ray or ultrasound probably would, but having to do one of those on every inmate once a week or once a month is a bit tiresome.
That's incredible - somewhere in that program there's some code, that someone spent time writing, that specifically prevents the window moving until some other part of the program says it's okay. Methinks someone spent some time on some redundant code there :-(
I'm reminded of a UI story several years ago which headlined something like "Don't grey out menu items". The thinking there was similar - stop taking the time to write code to selectively enable and disable certain menu items. Instead, just design the thing to work right all of the time.
I'm still wondering what thinking lead to "let's stop the window moving until they've started playing something". I'd love to hear the justification - it's sort of like the answer to a riddle that you just can't figure out.
As you note, it essentially provides the features your phone should provide by default, but the operators are too slow to adapt, and so haven't got around to it yet.
However, to use Whatsapp, you have to let it have access to all your contacts. Therefore, Whatsapp (and Facebook) know the phone numbers of all the people you have in your phone. Since Facebook also asks for your phone number, they can tie your contacts to real humans pretty easily. Even without that, they can still infer much the same information by watching who you talk to, and who they talk to, etc etc.
The other thing to note about Whatsapp is that if you have it installed it of course reads your contacts whenever it wants, so any new contacts you add also get sent to the FB surveillance supercomputer. Thus, not only does facebook know who you meet, but when - even though you didn't ever log onto facebook (or even use whatsapp to talk to people).
All this stuff is pretty scary sounding (to me), but the likes of my wife don't see any sort of problem with it. I've gradually been trying to get over to Telegram for IM purposes, but I've literally got 3 contacts on there (although my doorbell is also Telegram connected). I use Signal as an SMS replacement, but have yet to be friends with anyone else who uses it.
In other news, Law enforcement were asked how it's possible for a stolen car to drive 11,000 miles around town without being spotted. Number plate recognition vendors were contacted, but none responded to our requests.
I'm just popping out to flush some logs, check the backend capacity and wipe my cache...
Ooh, festive SQL - I was more on the lines of "Geek Porn II - the SQL", which I saw here once many years ago, can't find it again, but it started out with "INSERT INTO orifice (SELECT toy FROM bedside_cabinet ..."
Nope - still not there. A Force Awakens, and a couple of others, but that's it from Disney. See below for a full list.
It seems it varies by region. Should have known really.
Lucky you - see above for my list - just a couple here.
I replied to someone else below you with the results of a search for "disney" on the netflix phone app. With a couple of notable exceptions, almost no disney on (my) Netflix. Some are on Amazon, but you have to pay for them there.
I'll also say I'm not too sad about that - we've inherited lots of DVDs from the family/friends, so with only a couple of exceptions, we're not giving Disney any actual money for films, either directly through sales or indirectly through streaming services.
I have to disagree - maybe it's by location. I just tried the search you suggested, and I got:
James and the giant peach
strange magic
tomorrow lands
star wars force awakens
avengers
thor
antman
ghost patrol
air buddies
kate and mim mim
Air bud
Wild Ride
Air Bud
Jake's buccaneer blast
Yo Kai Watch
Harry Bunnie
Air Bud
Fangbone
Walt before Mickey
Air Bud
So apart from a couple of exceptions, almost none of that list is actually Disney.
So what's the difference between these robots and a CCTV camera or two?
I'd say "not very" - it's available here, but it hasn't really 'caught on'. We're just getting into domestic solar (that's really taking off actually, but it's still a tiny minority of people who have it). Some people have some wet solar to heat water, but that's got an even smaller penetration than electrical PV.
What we do have though, is quite a large amount of green generation into the grid (be that synthetic gas, or electricity). That industry is largely driven by consumer choice of supplier - some suppliers are now able to exclusively buy green energy to service their customers (others buy green first, then brown if they have to).
...and a large part of that gas/oil use is to heat water (either for hot water taps, or central heating systems). That can be (at least partly) achieved by wet solar, which weirdly still works when there's snow on top of it (within reason).
As noted, none of these options is a 100% solution to every problem, but they all form part of the patchwork that is our energy supply, both now and in the future.
As things stand, you can't get Disney films on Netflix (I believe there's one star wars film on there right now, possibly as a test or something). If Disney buys 21st Century, then there'll be even less on Netflix as those titles get removed as well.
One wonders if this can be seen as Disney becoming a 'better competitor' or just muscling out the opposition. Netflix offers something Disney seem incapable of - that is, what the customer actually wants, rather than what a big media company says they can have. Loss of content on Netflix doesn't seem like we're moving forwards, but knowing how US regulators are, it's probably where we're headed.
Yeah, Linkedin has it's own 'fake news' problem, it's just a lot easier to spot and a lot less corrosive than the problems Facebook's got. Like Facebook, they need to surface the good stuff and suppress the bad stuff.
While I'm here, Linkedin's 'feed' is quite probably the most brain-dead implementation possible. I posted a link to a little joke project I'd worked on for a couple of days. After I'd hit "submit", the post vanished - I had to go to My Profile -> My Posts to go find it again. Surely, they should be puffing up my ego a bit and making sure that for me at least, my post is at the top of my feed for at least a couple of hours before gradually falling down it into the oblivion such things deserve.
In reverse, one of my contacts posts some interesting stuff, which typically gets loads of likes and comments and whatnot. I have no idea how though - they don't appear in my feed, I have to search for them when they ask if I've seen it. Hopeless. Sometimes I wonder if my feed is upside down - all the shit at the top and the good stuff at the bottom, 100 clicks away.
No idea how this would fly in the US, but could you run your own cables between you and your neighbours houses (perhaps just via your gardens, so only on land you collectively own), and then have a commercial connection to the house at the end of the street? If anyone in the row isn't up for it, then microwave link over their property to the next 'friendly' one.
It wouldn't cut the ISPs out entirely, but it'd sure piss them off, even more so if the guy at the end of the street just had a microwave link to another street which had the business connection ;-)
I had a similar thing ("boss knows best") on a smaller scale. I was the IT guy for a 40 person company which had been buying IBM Thinkpads since day 1. $manager asked if we could buy some Sony Vaios (there was a little clutch-bag sized one, which he liked the look of). I told him we'd struggle to support them and that the thinkpads weren't the sexiest, but were super tough and were holding up really well (as most people travelled about).
I think I was out of the office, but $manager asked my a-little-bit-junor-to-me colleague to order 3 of the Vaios. They turned up and after the "oh wow, it's really small and cute" cooing was over, we realised they were a nightmare to look after - we couldn't image them properly, all of the drivers were Sony-specific and generics didn't come from Microsoft, and so it went on. Constant pain in the arse from two of them, although $manager never really asked for anything - I guess he just struggled through whatever problems he had. Curiously, even though he had the smallest laptop in the company, he had the biggest computer bag - it was massive - probably full of dongles for every possible peripheral because the Vaio had none of it built in.
Lots of people left, and we got 2 of the Vaois back again - by now, no one even asked for them. $manager got moved around a couple of times, and never had the nerve to ask for a Thinkpad. He eventually took a step down, so got a Thinkpad for the few months until he left. The 3 Vaios got sold off on an employee 'buy a laptop' raffle we had to get rid of our old gear.
It seems to be alive and well in my local Post Office. They've got two automated machines where you can supposedly do all the necessaries to get your parcel or letter sent however you'd like it to be handled. Then they've got the traditional queue-up system with a handful of windows and a "please go to window 2" machine.
I took a look at the machines, and bearing in mind I'm a sysadmin, thought "how hard can it be?" (pff! most of the people in the line are pretty old, maybe it's too complicated for them!). Then I tried to use it... almost immediately it popped up "Help is on the way". Seeing no one around, I just joined the queue. "Help" arrived at the machine as I was getting called to my window.
The next time I went, I of course ignored the machines like everyone else. A helpful lady asked the person in front if she'd like to use the machine and a few other questions, and then said "actually, you may be better off going to the window in case it gets complicated". She then came to me, and as I just had a parcel to send first class (nothing special), we headed over to the machine. She operated it entirely - all I did was put my credit card over the reader to pay. She even stuck the label on my parcel and then took my parcel into the back room. The lady who was in front of me in the queue was stood behind me and was then assisted in sending her parcel after I left.
So... at my local post office at least, they've got the same number of 'windows', but now have an extra person to operate the automatic machines because none of the general public can do it on their own. Crap automation = more jobs :-)
I thought binary logging was a mandatory requirement of systemd. Am I wrong about that? Can I turn off binary logging and just go back to /var/log/messages on a systemd system? Got any Centos 7 instructions anywhere?