1) I buy a id card reader one [nl.fnac.be] for 19EUR (Some places sell them for less, I have one that costed 10 EUR
ID card? There's your problem. That's COMMUNISM. Or something. Seriously, a lot of people in the USA have a major problem with the entire concept of a national ID card. No, don't ask me to explain, I have no idea why. I doubt most of the people who oppose it know why, either. It's just anti-American somehow.
Chuck out the gTLDs. Yes, all of them. Go to using ccTLDs only. This very clearly defines jurisdictions in which to settle disputes. Countries can manage their TLDs any way they like. Tuvalu wants to make a buck selling *.tv to all comers? Let 'em. North Korea wants to limit *.kp to only government-approved outlets? More power to them. Some huge megacorp wants to flaunt a global online presence? They can jolly well negotiate for a name with each individual country's TLD.
Works out for everyone. Well, except ICANN, who can't squeeze money from people for vanity TLDs any more. Sucks to be them.
You know, I agree with their complaint. Without an audit trail you can't even come close to being able to check for fraud, cheating, bugs, or anything else. But, unlike the Senators, I'm not in a position to do much about it.
You want to know why they're still selling them? Because people are still buying them! You want them to stop? Pass some fucking laws regulating elections! There's nothing to investigate here, no answers to be demanded. Other than of our lawmakers who could put an end to this if they damned well wanted to. Calling the manufacturers in to the principal's office is just posturing.
Yes, elections are the domain of the States, not the Federal government. So go beat up the States about it. Don't give manufacturers grief for selling a product in compliance with the laws, don't expect them to change out of the goodness of their hearts. Work to change the laws. Like a legislator is supposed to.
Clippy was around just long enough to rally old fans,
There are no "old fans" of Clippy. The only people who might be "fans" barely remember him from back when they were still in diapers, seeing him on mommy & daddy's computers. No one old enough to have actually used MS Office in those years is a "fan" of the little bastard, just neo-hipsters looking at it as retro kitsch.
I only wish I could do this. However, my job required me to be on-call for a week at a time; it would be pretty impossible to program the phone with all the phone numbers of all potentials.
Here's my solution: Set up a Google Voice number as your on-call number. Have it ring your mobile, your house phone, wherever you expect to be. Then set it up to report your Google Voice number as the originating number instead of the actual caller. Bingo, all calls to your on-call number show up as being from one single number. Whitelist that number, set a klaxon ring tone or something, and go on ignoring every number you don't recognize.
I'm in the Nvidia GeForce NOW beta, which is a similar service. The games run on their servers and the display is streamed back to you. I must say that it works much, much better than I ever expected. I'm in a fairly rural area but I have a decent connection at about 110 Mbps down, 8 Mbps up. It's usually quite playable, even over wifi. It does chew through a lot of bandwidth and latency can be an issue. The biggest caveat is that I like single player turn-based games. Even when I play real-time first-person games they tend to be Tomb Raider-ish, with more of a stealth and exploration focus rather than reaction time and precision. But it lets me play games with higher minimum requirements than my old-ish laptop meets, and lets me play a world of PC games that have never been ported to my Mac.
This kind of technology can work reasonably well for a lot of people. It's definitely not ready yet for the super competitive players, and I doubt it ever will be (barring some great revolution in subspace communications...) But I think there's a market for it and I'm glad to see competitors in the space.
That's pretty much Slashdot in a nutshell. Shoot, say something like systemd, wayland, Java performance, IPv6 deployment, or cloud computing and you're likely to get a stack of punch cards thrown at you for being a heretic.
Punch cards? Damned whippersnappers. Paper tape is all you need you little snots! Now, get off my lawn!
Ha! I still have DB25 RS232 cables lying around, and I'm pretty sure I could dig up a null modem to go with them. Like I'm not going to eventually end up with every generation USB cable ever made...
I've been using MacBook Pros for a decade now. I got one of the new ones a few weeks ago. My experience...
I actually like the feel of the new keyboard. The key travel is a slight bit too shallow for my taste, but it feels crisp. I haven't had it long enough to know if it's reliable over time.
The arrow keys blow. The previous machines had an inverted-T pattern with all the keys half-height. You could easily find them by feel. The new one has the left/right keys full height, and the up/down keys half-height between them. It's almost impossible to differentiate them by touch. Yeah, yeah, I know, real programmers don't use the arrow keys...
The touchbar is a major WTF. It would have been an innocuous addition to the function keys. It's a horrible replacement for them. No tactile feedback and the need to look down from the screen make it difficult to use. Worse, things that were a single keypress (volume control, expose, brightness) are now multiple presses and waiting for the damned thing to finish its transition animations between them. Who is this designed for? What workflow could this possibly improve?
I'm constantly brushing against the oversized trackpad with my palms. It does a reasonable job detecting this and ignoring false touches, but if my left palm is near it and I use my right hand to try to use the mouse the trackpad will often decide that both are unintentional. And on previous models I'd do a click-drag by moving the pointer with my index finger, then clicking and holding with my thumb while I continue to drag with my index finger. Can't do that any more, the click-hold is apparently triggering the palm rejection.
Lack of magsafe. Magsafe saved me so many times. I can't wait until I damage a USB cable or the port itself because somebody trips over my power cord.
All USB-C. Okay, maybe it is the future, but it's *NOT* the present. How about a couple legacy ports so I don't have to lug around an entire bag of adapters?
I've been very happy with Apple's hardware for a long time, and I like the OS better than any of the alternatives for daily desktop use. I gave them the benefit of the doubt this time around and I'm not happy with how it worked out. My next machine won't be a Mac unless these issues get fixed.
Correct. And it will have USB-C connectors so it will look identical to a USB 3.2 cable next to it in your parts drawer. And since the 3.2 cable will probably work, albeit at a lower speed, good luck ever figuring out which is which. Yay standards?
2. When they exceed their data allowance, for example due to an emergency, the bill for that is sorted out later
This suggestion co-sponsored by the Full Employment For Lawyers political action committee, who are more than willing to help sort it out later in court. Ambiguous Laws Are Our Speciality (tm)
Without disassembling the device there's really no way to tell. The best you can do is check if the case has a hole that looks suspiciously like a microphone hole, but that's going to be pretty error prone. It's still easy to put a mic somewhere that doesn't have an obvious hole, or have what looks like a mic hole that doesn't actually have a mic mounted.
It's trivial to configure a router to not pass upstream traffic from a particular device, but that's pretty much the same as not having it on the network at all. That's really pointless for a Google Home type of device. It has almost no local capability other than to listen for its keyword. Everything else it does is cloud-based. I don't know if Nest Secure can function disconnected from the net or not, but even if it can it's going to be well and truly hobbled.
If I can't pay my electric bill I'm not going to go out and buy a perpetual motion machine.
You might if you have a somewhat weak understanding of physics and the person selling the perpetual motion machine promises that for about the price of one electric bill you can be free of the power company forever! And after all, Big Power exists solely to perpetuate itself. It quashes all the free-energy machines because they're not profitable. Don't be a rube! Buy our perpetual motion machine and stick it to the man! This is exactly the rhetoric charlatans use against "big medical" stomping on the cheap and natural homeopathic treatments that Doctors Don't Want You To Know About!
The problem isn't money; it's ignorance.
It's both, plus a large serving of deep-seated resentment for experts and authority.
Perhaps it might be a good idea to figure out (and fix) the underlying reasons prompting developers to swear in comments.
And sometimes the underlying reasons are dictated by product management. Like the ridiculous feature they required a whole alternative firmware build for. Ah, such fond memories of #ifdef CLUSTERFUCK.
So... Porn sites are analyzing my viewing habits so they can make new porn that I'll enjoy more? Um... Damn them? How dare they? Somebody help me out, I'm having a really hard time getting outraged here.
The same fucking idiots that think the first thing on the first menu of every application has to be "About this...software", which is the most useless and least needed menu item ever. But Apple says it has to be the first menu item on the first menu, always. It doesn't make any sense, and it never did.
Makes great sense to me. You mean you've never wondered what version you're running, or where to contact the vendor? It's not used all that frequently, just often enough that I'm happy it's in a predictable location in every program. Yeah, it could be on the Help menu instead, or the last item instead of the first, or whatever. Just as long as it's consistent. Saying that the entry needs to exist in a specific location is a good thing.
If you want to talk about dumb HIG things Apple's done, I'd start with the convention that half the menu options change if you hold the "option" key, essentially making you have to search through a second set of menus to find a particular feature.
I was going to say... It's fine if you want to sue because the device breaks. It's fine if you want to sue because it degrades over time. But you don't get to sue because it doesn't have the exact mitigation for these problems that you think it should. Let the engineers do the engineering. Sue about the problem not the solution.
ObCarAnalogy: When your car is overheating, you don't take it to the mechanic and tell them to replace the thermostat. You take it to them and say, "It's overheating, fix it". You don't really care if the thermostat gets replaced, you want the problem fixed regardless of what's causing it.
The only condition was that the printer was connected to the Internet, used old firmware, and had "printing" ports left exposed online.
So in other words... he printed to printers.
Not just that, but the firmware doesn't even have to be old. There's newer printers with LPD support. Naturally, you should disable it.
That doesn't follow. LPD is a perfectly cromulent printing protocol. What you should do is the same as for all other services on your LAN -- firewall them off from the outside world.
I'm not the original poster but I do the same thing. The hospital (or anyone else who has a legitimate need to contact me) will leave voicemail. My phone tells me I have voicemail and shows me a transcript. I call them back. Easy.
You're either full of shit or an idiot. Which is it?
You tell me. On the whole I feel pretty decent about it, but I'm starting to feel a Sisyphean futility to it all. Spammers know no one will bother tracking them down, so they're starting to leave voicemail much more often. So, I'm still being somewhat annoyed, but less so than if I'd had to listen to "Rachel from Card Services" blather at me yet again.
Currently one of the spammers' favorite tricks is to spoof their phone number so it looks like it's coming from the same area code and exchange as your number. My phone is from a different area code, so if I get a call from one of those numbers that isn't in my contacts it's guaranteed to be someone I don't want to talk to. It's pretty damned unlikely that I'm going to get an actual emergency call from a number I don't know 500 miles away.
One of my former jobs was at a videogame company. My manager noticed I was leaving at 5 every day and told me I needed to work more or I'd never get very far in the company. I was the one who was actually on schedule. One of the other programmers literally slept under his desk, going home every few days to shower. Shitty programmer, though. The long hours were spent debugging his own crummy code and getting it to just barely run. He was constantly behind. But, he's the one who got commendations from management for being so dedicated.
I quit not too long afterwards. Toxic, toxic atmosphere.
Another old guy here. Guess what? You can turn the phones *OFF*. Or put them in do-not-disturb mode. Or even (get this!) just plain *ignore* them when they buzz! Finish your lunch. Relax on vacation. Sleep soundly. *You* are in control of when your phone rings.
"But other people get annoyed when I do that." Not your problem. Seriously, man. Unless you've undertaken some obligation (such as agreeing to be on-call for work) let them just piss off and leave a message. They need to learn boundaries. Give your friends and family crap right back. You can get away with it. You're old.
Now, get off my lawn! I'm trying to take a nap. With my phone off, of course.
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ID card? There's your problem. That's COMMUNISM. Or something. Seriously, a lot of people in the USA have a major problem with the entire concept of a national ID card. No, don't ask me to explain, I have no idea why. I doubt most of the people who oppose it know why, either. It's just anti-American somehow.
Chuck out the gTLDs. Yes, all of them. Go to using ccTLDs only. This very clearly defines jurisdictions in which to settle disputes. Countries can manage their TLDs any way they like. Tuvalu wants to make a buck selling *.tv to all comers? Let 'em. North Korea wants to limit *.kp to only government-approved outlets? More power to them. Some huge megacorp wants to flaunt a global online presence? They can jolly well negotiate for a name with each individual country's TLD.
Works out for everyone. Well, except ICANN, who can't squeeze money from people for vanity TLDs any more. Sucks to be them.
You know, I agree with their complaint. Without an audit trail you can't even come close to being able to check for fraud, cheating, bugs, or anything else. But, unlike the Senators, I'm not in a position to do much about it.
You want to know why they're still selling them? Because people are still buying them! You want them to stop? Pass some fucking laws regulating elections! There's nothing to investigate here, no answers to be demanded. Other than of our lawmakers who could put an end to this if they damned well wanted to. Calling the manufacturers in to the principal's office is just posturing.
Yes, elections are the domain of the States, not the Federal government. So go beat up the States about it. Don't give manufacturers grief for selling a product in compliance with the laws, don't expect them to change out of the goodness of their hearts. Work to change the laws. Like a legislator is supposed to.
There are no "old fans" of Clippy. The only people who might be "fans" barely remember him from back when they were still in diapers, seeing him on mommy & daddy's computers. No one old enough to have actually used MS Office in those years is a "fan" of the little bastard, just neo-hipsters looking at it as retro kitsch.
Here's my solution: Set up a Google Voice number as your on-call number. Have it ring your mobile, your house phone, wherever you expect to be. Then set it up to report your Google Voice number as the originating number instead of the actual caller. Bingo, all calls to your on-call number show up as being from one single number. Whitelist that number, set a klaxon ring tone or something, and go on ignoring every number you don't recognize.
I'm in the Nvidia GeForce NOW beta, which is a similar service. The games run on their servers and the display is streamed back to you. I must say that it works much, much better than I ever expected. I'm in a fairly rural area but I have a decent connection at about 110 Mbps down, 8 Mbps up. It's usually quite playable, even over wifi. It does chew through a lot of bandwidth and latency can be an issue. The biggest caveat is that I like single player turn-based games. Even when I play real-time first-person games they tend to be Tomb Raider-ish, with more of a stealth and exploration focus rather than reaction time and precision. But it lets me play games with higher minimum requirements than my old-ish laptop meets, and lets me play a world of PC games that have never been ported to my Mac.
This kind of technology can work reasonably well for a lot of people. It's definitely not ready yet for the super competitive players, and I doubt it ever will be (barring some great revolution in subspace communications...) But I think there's a market for it and I'm glad to see competitors in the space.
Punch cards? Damned whippersnappers. Paper tape is all you need you little snots! Now, get off my lawn!
Ha! I still have DB25 RS232 cables lying around, and I'm pretty sure I could dig up a null modem to go with them. Like I'm not going to eventually end up with every generation USB cable ever made...
I've been using MacBook Pros for a decade now. I got one of the new ones a few weeks ago. My experience...
I've been very happy with Apple's hardware for a long time, and I like the OS better than any of the alternatives for daily desktop use. I gave them the benefit of the doubt this time around and I'm not happy with how it worked out. My next machine won't be a Mac unless these issues get fixed.
Correct. And it will have USB-C connectors so it will look identical to a USB 3.2 cable next to it in your parts drawer. And since the 3.2 cable will probably work, albeit at a lower speed, good luck ever figuring out which is which. Yay standards?
Where I work they send out fake phishing emails which include an X-PHISHTEST header, making it trivial to write a filter to bin them automatically.
It needs more blockchain.
This suggestion co-sponsored by the Full Employment For Lawyers political action committee, who are more than willing to help sort it out later in court. Ambiguous Laws Are Our Speciality (tm)
Without disassembling the device there's really no way to tell. The best you can do is check if the case has a hole that looks suspiciously like a microphone hole, but that's going to be pretty error prone. It's still easy to put a mic somewhere that doesn't have an obvious hole, or have what looks like a mic hole that doesn't actually have a mic mounted.
It's trivial to configure a router to not pass upstream traffic from a particular device, but that's pretty much the same as not having it on the network at all. That's really pointless for a Google Home type of device. It has almost no local capability other than to listen for its keyword. Everything else it does is cloud-based. I don't know if Nest Secure can function disconnected from the net or not, but even if it can it's going to be well and truly hobbled.
You might if you have a somewhat weak understanding of physics and the person selling the perpetual motion machine promises that for about the price of one electric bill you can be free of the power company forever! And after all, Big Power exists solely to perpetuate itself. It quashes all the free-energy machines because they're not profitable. Don't be a rube! Buy our perpetual motion machine and stick it to the man! This is exactly the rhetoric charlatans use against "big medical" stomping on the cheap and natural homeopathic treatments that Doctors Don't Want You To Know About!
It's both, plus a large serving of deep-seated resentment for experts and authority.
And sometimes the underlying reasons are dictated by product management. Like the ridiculous feature they required a whole alternative firmware build for. Ah, such fond memories of #ifdef CLUSTERFUCK.
Hey, now. Lie detectors are every bit as real as "vitamin" water.
So... Porn sites are analyzing my viewing habits so they can make new porn that I'll enjoy more? Um... Damn them? How dare they? Somebody help me out, I'm having a really hard time getting outraged here.
Makes great sense to me. You mean you've never wondered what version you're running, or where to contact the vendor? It's not used all that frequently, just often enough that I'm happy it's in a predictable location in every program. Yeah, it could be on the Help menu instead, or the last item instead of the first, or whatever. Just as long as it's consistent. Saying that the entry needs to exist in a specific location is a good thing.
If you want to talk about dumb HIG things Apple's done, I'd start with the convention that half the menu options change if you hold the "option" key, essentially making you have to search through a second set of menus to find a particular feature.
Good thing you clarified. I was thinking Chelsea, MI, home of Jiffy Mix. Sounded like a clear case of one too many corn muffins.
I was going to say... It's fine if you want to sue because the device breaks. It's fine if you want to sue because it degrades over time. But you don't get to sue because it doesn't have the exact mitigation for these problems that you think it should. Let the engineers do the engineering. Sue about the problem not the solution.
ObCarAnalogy: When your car is overheating, you don't take it to the mechanic and tell them to replace the thermostat. You take it to them and say, "It's overheating, fix it". You don't really care if the thermostat gets replaced, you want the problem fixed regardless of what's causing it.
That doesn't follow. LPD is a perfectly cromulent printing protocol. What you should do is the same as for all other services on your LAN -- firewall them off from the outside world.
I'm not the original poster but I do the same thing. The hospital (or anyone else who has a legitimate need to contact me) will leave voicemail. My phone tells me I have voicemail and shows me a transcript. I call them back. Easy.
You tell me. On the whole I feel pretty decent about it, but I'm starting to feel a Sisyphean futility to it all. Spammers know no one will bother tracking them down, so they're starting to leave voicemail much more often. So, I'm still being somewhat annoyed, but less so than if I'd had to listen to "Rachel from Card Services" blather at me yet again.
Currently one of the spammers' favorite tricks is to spoof their phone number so it looks like it's coming from the same area code and exchange as your number. My phone is from a different area code, so if I get a call from one of those numbers that isn't in my contacts it's guaranteed to be someone I don't want to talk to. It's pretty damned unlikely that I'm going to get an actual emergency call from a number I don't know 500 miles away.
One of my former jobs was at a videogame company. My manager noticed I was leaving at 5 every day and told me I needed to work more or I'd never get very far in the company. I was the one who was actually on schedule. One of the other programmers literally slept under his desk, going home every few days to shower. Shitty programmer, though. The long hours were spent debugging his own crummy code and getting it to just barely run. He was constantly behind. But, he's the one who got commendations from management for being so dedicated.
I quit not too long afterwards. Toxic, toxic atmosphere.
Another old guy here. Guess what? You can turn the phones *OFF*. Or put them in do-not-disturb mode. Or even (get this!) just plain *ignore* them when they buzz! Finish your lunch. Relax on vacation. Sleep soundly. *You* are in control of when your phone rings.
"But other people get annoyed when I do that." Not your problem. Seriously, man. Unless you've undertaken some obligation (such as agreeing to be on-call for work) let them just piss off and leave a message. They need to learn boundaries. Give your friends and family crap right back. You can get away with it. You're old.
Now, get off my lawn! I'm trying to take a nap. With my phone off, of course.