dgriffith

dgriffith , 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Did they give you a very funny reason for this requirement, or is it just some windows exclusive garbage that doesn't work in wine?

Why do people always ask this kind of crap?

If you have a corporate laptop, it will likely have a suite of software centrally managed by your company's IT department.

It will contain software that is also centrally licenced so that your boss doesn't have to figure out how to pay for thousands of dollars of software, they can just tell IT to bill a licence for software X to your cost centre at $13.75 a month.

It will have a domain login that is your corporate identity which will usually require multi factor authentication.

It will have some corporate VPN solution which operates mostly transparently and requires zero setup on your part.

It will contain company sensitive data which will usually be encrypted by bitlocker, whose keys are stored with your domain account.

It will have the usual Teams/Outlook/SharePoint stuff with a centralised calendar and contacts for your company, and likely security classifications for all the communications you do through it, allowing you to join groups, accept invites to restricted groups, and limit access, all linked to your domain account.

It will have mapped drives to your corporate file storage , again, all linked to your domain account.

It will probably have OneDrive, synced to a corporate server, again, linked to your domain account.

It will have a printing solution that is linked to your domain account so that your printers follow you wherever you go and you can easily find and print to the secure print queue on some random printer you happen to walk past in one of your offices, so you can enter your PIN or swipe your access card and have that IMPORTANT_SECRET_RESEARCH.DOC file print while you're standing in front of the printer.

And finally, your work laptop does not belong to you. Wiping it and installing Linux plus Wine and keeping company sensitive data on an unmanaged device will attract the ire of HR.

Your IT department won't give a crap. But they also won't help if anything doesn't work, such as trying to join a domain to access allllll those domain-linked features with an unauthorised device.

They will simply re-image your laptop to bring it back to a known state that they can deal with, because they are dealing with thousands of devices. They need everything to be homogeneous simply because they don't have the manpower to manage anything else or to audit a million different configurations for security issues or data leaks.

So no, suggesting Linux + Wine to run some "windows exclusive garbage" isn't an answer here.

dgriffith , 10 days ago

"I think there's something wrong with the door switch on my old microwave oven. I've been testing it outside for safety, that's why it's out in the back yard pointing upwards with the door open."

dgriffith , 9 days ago

Precisely.

A 1200 watt microwave is essentially like a 1200 watt bar heater if you're outside the oven cavity. To a person, it will feel pretty warm at a distance of a few feet as the energy is basically unfocused as it exits through the open door.

But to a drone, it's 1200 watts of RF noise near a receiving device that's tuned to listen for signals that are typically around 0.00000001 watts. It would be like trying to hear a pin drop at a rock concert.

Do need to make sure you point it upwards though as it will cause havoc with microwave motion sensors and a bunch of other sensitive listening stuff. Also, good luck getting wifi within a hundred metres of it.

dgriffith , 10 days ago

Pretty much.

Capable employees don't raise a huge stink.

They quietly put the word out to a few people they know and play along until something interesting appears on the horizon.

Then when they're good and ready they just "suddenly" fuck off to somewhere nicer for them.

dgriffith , 17 days ago

Eh.....Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, XP, and 7 were all pretty great.

From a user interface perspective, they were okay, perhaps because by the time people got to XP they'd had a decade of a consistent interface and were just used to its quirks.

From a security context they were not ok. Not ok at all.

dgriffith , 1 month ago

You need silicon.

The earth's crust is about 25 percent silicon. Sand made out of quartz like desert sand is about 50 percent silicon. Beach sand is usually mainly calcium carbonate from shells and it doesn't contain much silicon at all. Volcanic beach sand is more likely the same as the earth's crust so 25-50 percent.

So as long as you refine your sand/gravel/rocks/lava so that you're left with pretty much pure silicon, you're good to go.

dgriffith , 1 month ago

Also, things not designed for food use or human consumption don't have to follow strict rules regarding their composition, and they're not monitored.

Nobody is checking PVA glue for heavy metals or melamine or pesticides or any other number of things that will give your insides a bad day.

Nobody is issuing a recall if your bottle of glue ends up with ground up glass in it.

Because it's not food, and it doesn't matter, until you put half a cup of it in your pizza because Google told you it was a good idea.

dgriffith , 1 month ago

I would like to hear your opinion on crumbed, deep fried, pineapple rings. 🤔

For example :
https://www.redrooster.com.au/menu/sides-kids-meals/pineapple-fritter/

dgriffith , 1 month ago

Mmm I'd take Common Sense Skeptic's spaceX videos with about a ton of salt. They've got a real big bug up their ass about spaceX for some reason.

dgriffith , 2 months ago

I don't know about you, but I just swiped my way through the first sentence off this reply with Google's keyboard and all I had to do was select swiped instead of the suggested settled.

They do remember common words that you use, so if you have accidentally "approved" a few misspellings they'll be suggested/given to you more often so a drastic solution to that is to clear your personalised data from the keyboard.

dgriffith , 2 months ago

I can't speak for the popularity of TurboVPN, or the probable ease in which companies can manipulate download numbers, but note the "+" on the end of each number.

NordVPN could have 99,999,995 downloads, TurboVPN can have 100,000,002 downloads, but one would be 50M+ and the other would be 100M+.

dgriffith , 3 months ago

This appears to be more the angle of the person being fed an endless stream of hate on social media and thus becoming radicalised.

What causes them to be fed an endless stream of hate? Algorithms. Who provides those algorithms? Social media companies. Why do they do this? To maintain engagement with their sites so they can make money via advertising.

And so here we are, with sites that see you viewed 65 percent of a stream showing an angry mob, therefore you would like to see more angry mobs in your feed. Is it any wonder that shit like this happens?

dgriffith , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps"

Hello, my name's dgriffith. I'm a Fediverse Support community member, and I'm here to help.

Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.

If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.

Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.

Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it's probably more a case of "why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?".

That is, it used to be the case that you'd put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now 80 percent of it seems to be variations of my "helpful" text above, SEO'd recipe sites, or just AI hallucinations of stuff scraped from other sites.

dgriffith , 3 months ago

It's a similar data point to those people who accidentally got a single 10x or 100x dose. We know from those people that very large doses don't seem to have any major negative effects, we now also know that a long term "continuous" dose doesn't have much of a negative effect.

dgriffith , 3 months ago

but the only green hydrogen is from renewable energy powered electrolysis.

Clean until you use a bunch of equipment to get it. ¯⁠\⁠⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠⁠/⁠¯

dgriffith , 3 months ago

Send them a letter via registered mail stating that upon receipt of said letter they waive their right to waive your rights.

dgriffith , 3 months ago

Similar things have worked in countries that aren't so under the thrall of the mighty corporation. I recall some guy in ... Russia? who struck out and reworded a bunch of penalty clauses for a credit card offer he got and mailed it back to the bank, which accepted it and issued the card. Cue much hilarity as he racked up a bunch of charges and then got it thrown out in court. (Actually, here's a link.. They eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.)

Anyway, I live in Australia so my response to all these kinds of attempts at removal of my consumer rights is a drawn out "yeah, nahhhh"

dgriffith , 4 months ago

I have an Oki laser printer that I bought for $129. I've had it so long I gave it to my kids for university. Duplex, wifi, and I've bought two toner cartridges for it in the 8 years we've had it.

(Side note: If you go to an airport, you'll find that the dot matrix printer spewing out the passenger manifest at the gate is often a Okidata Microline-series printer, an updated version of the printer I had in 1992)

Basically, don't buy an inkjet printer, and don't buy HP.

dgriffith , 4 months ago

As soon as they mentioned "algorithmic feeds and viral content", not interested.

You get "viral content" because of algorithmic feeds, which are there to 1) keep you engaged on the platform, and 2) allow them to push sponsored content to you for profit.

Even the word "feed" in this kind of context just reminds me of cows at a feedlot, mindlessly munching down on whatever garbage is piped into the trough, slowly being fattened up to be sold off to the highest bidder.

There are days when I get on here and there's not much of anything interesting in my communities and you know what? I'm fine with that. I put the phone down and do something else. I don't need an endless torrent of "content" to surf courtesy of an algorithmic feed that doesn't have my best interests at heart.

dgriffith , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

For the user mostly it's just slow. It can literally take ten seconds just to check if there's any mail and that's if there are no new messages. When there are messages it takes much longer.

I have my own IMAP server (Dovecot)with 20 years of messages on it. It's on a linode instance in Hong Kong, I'm in Australia.

When I open my Thunderbird on my laptop, it takes less than a second to authenticate and grab a dozen headers. If I pop open the Gmail app on my phone and select that account, again, it connects and refreshes in the same amount of time. Manually doing the drag-down-to-refresh motion gives me one spin of the spinner at the top of the page, possibly 1.5 seconds.

So my question to you is, what's wrong with your IMAP server?

Small edit: Did a totally unprofessional test with Wireshark and a cold start of Thunderbird and my laptop at 5 percent battery and heavily throttled. It takes 1.3 seconds for it to connect to my IMAP server, authenticate, and then check for unread messages. To grab the headers for 9 unread messages in my 2023-2024 inbox (containing about 3500 messages) takes another 3.5 seconds. To transfer approximately 5MB of data for the message bodies takes another 6 seconds on my wifi at home. For an application that lives in my system tray 90 percent of the time with a persistent connection, this seems fine.

dgriffith , 4 months ago

They are point to point communication devices with no intermediate storage along the way.

So from a point of view of "don't store copies of this data except at the sender's and receiver's locations, which are already set up to handle sensitive data", they meet requirements in a simple to implement manner.

dgriffith , 4 months ago

Honestly, I don't know how the BE200 works

My guess after skimming this thread:

Bare bones radio interface with all the smarts being done by CPU extensions and coprocessors in your existing chipset. If you don't have the extensions/coprocessors, no deal.

Very similar to Intel's video decoding enhancements where they stack a bunch of special instructions and hardware in the CPU to take the load off software video decoding.

dgriffith , 4 months ago

I buy a washing machine after a 20 minute search and going to a click and collect website to place an order with a local big brand store.

For the next 6 months:

"HEY CHECK OUT THESE WASHING MACHINES LOOK AT THESE REVIEWS WASHING MACHINES ON SPECIAL CLIIIICK MEEEEEE"

dgriffith , 4 months ago

It's less impressive when you convert back to petabytes. When you do that starlink is "only" about 20 times slower than that single trans-atlantic cable.

Interestingly, it's possible that starlink routed ping times could be less, as propagation speed on fiber is only around 2/3rds the speed of light. So if the end to end path length is roughly equivalent between the two (and LEO radius is a relatively small addition to the radius of the earth) it could be faster.

Certain companies would pay a lot of money to be a few milliseconds faster than their competitors if they need to react quickly to foreign stock market fluctuations.

dgriffith , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Speaking from my experience in Australia, Prime is quite good for ad-hoc ordering.

For AUD6.99 a month I can order something that will usually turn up tomorrow morning, meaning that if I need a light bulb or a dishcloth or weed killer it's just a 30 second search with the app on my phone and I can get on with my day.

Compare that to:

eBay - free shipping, a week or so, "express" , 3 days and AUD12-18 per purchase.

Small online retailers - generally no free shipping, usually an Australia Post option at AUD12 or so that takes about 4-5 days, "express" via various couriers that takes that to 2-3 days for AUD18-30.

Large retailers - a week or more for delivery, AUD10-40 depending on size.

Me going down the shops and buying it myself - AUD60/hour labour and consumables, 30 minutes to an hour depending on what I'm buying and where from, AUD30-60.

Say what you want about their treatment of workers, from a consumer point of view Amazon's warehousing and delivery logistics are pretty effective.

Added edit: I don't live in a "rural" area (of which there are plenty in Australia), but I've sent stuff there using Prime and even then it's only an extra day or two on top.

Oh and there's Prime Video, and I've watched a few shows on it but it's not something that I particularly need or desire.

And sure , I could do without Prime. Just like I could do without brunch at a cafe once a week, or I could do without Netflix. But it provides a service that is generally cheaper and more convenient than the other options I have so..... I'll just continue to use it until it doesn't.

dgriffith , 5 months ago

Dreams of a cyberpunk future where the sum total of the world's knowledge of any subject can be just a thought away

Most likely reality:

Popup ads are now intrusive thoughts. 40 percent of your implant's processing power is spent looking for cues in your environment to better serve you "curated content" (i.e. advertising). Knowledge is still somewhat freely available but just after this quick shout out to our sponsors.

When you're looking for something specific it's a coin toss whether you get actual knowledge or an AI hallucination and you can't tell the difference. You can pay $279.99/mo for premium access to verified sources, but if your licence expires you forget everything.

dgriffith , 5 months ago

It's a perfectly cromulent word that describes the process that happens across nearly all consumer corporate endeavours, online included.

dgriffith , 5 months ago

Small ISPs at the start of the internet used to provide you with space that you could ftp a few html files to and they'd be visible on the internet at myisp/~yourusername.

Of course that cost them a little bit of money and storage space so when they all got absorbed into megaISPs that kind of thing got dropped. Then it was all up to Geocities and friends or you had to go buy hosting from your ISP, both of which was enough of a hurdle to stop the average person from playing with it.

dgriffith , 5 months ago

I thought Thunderbird was getting increasingly shitty and slower/clunky, until I realised it was actually my ISP's mail server getting increasingly shit. This became immediately obvious the day that emails started taking 12-18 hours to land in my inbox. Reallllll handy for those time limited account reset emails. Funnily enough, they were planning real soon to outsource their email to another company for the low, low cost of just a few extra dollars a month, opt in now!

Transferred my IMAP inbox to my own domain, everything is now awesome again.