Posts by luminous 111 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2016
Plenty of use cases.... I mean SO many. There are 100s of millions of users who just have a free account and search or ask for stuff. We are actually selling packages to clients right now to target people in LLMs. Just because you use ChatGPT with a free account doesn't mean you don't have $10,000 to drop on a holiday for example.
The only reason people use their software... is NOT employers demanding of applicants... I use it in my business. For the $56 a month, honestly that's a bargain. You get everything they do and it comes out at way cheaper than what they used to charge for buying the software previously in version cycles, without all the extras that you get today. That $56 a month enables my business to generate revenue of $10,000s per month.
These prices are for yanks only, although I'm not naive to know that I will see them down the line, but the Adobe bashing is tiring.
The only people I communicated with on Skype are old people.... I'm so glad to be finally rid of it. Deleted 11 years of chats today and uninstalled the app. Yayay!
I used VoipStunt https://voipstunt.com for 20 years but they don't issue numbers anymore (I still have my 020 London number).
One client asked me today how he can call landlines (like many others above). I recommended an Australian company to him called Aatrox https://aatroxcommunications.com.au/ - I pay a small monthly fee and get charged almost nothing for calls and I get an Australian number. I then use a Cisco VOIP box and a Panasonic cordless phone. Very nice. You can also just use the MobileVOIP app so no need for hardware. They can get you numbers in many countries. And can't recommend the customer service enough... I had a problem configuring the box and one of their guys called me up, did a screen share and helped me get it working.
When your company is owned by shareholders and thus you are investing heavily in AI to supposedly not get left behind your competitors; you either enable these services by default or without the ability to disable them, so you can then show off how many people are using them (and that they are not a complete waste of money).
I don't want any of these new "features" and for now I'll keep any devices that are not "compatible". In the future, I guess we have no choice but to just not use them? It's this decade's version of Clippy...
"Today, we announced that passkeys have been used to authenticate users more than 1 billion times across over 400 million Google Accounts," project managers Sriram Karra and Christiaan Brand said.
So each person has done it on average 2.5 times. Is this even impressive? And only 20% of gmail users have taken part.
Again I don't really understand how a passkey is better than a password. Just use a password manager. There are plenty that are free, if like me, I don't need the premium features.
Frankly he's just plain naive if he thinks no-one has lost their job yet. I know of someone who lost their job a month ago at a call center. They had been there a long time and when they asked why they where being let go, they were plainly told that automation had replaced them. I hear the term "AI" so much and most of the time it just means automation. There is no "intelligence" about it.
A chat forum is not social media.
Why do people confuse the two so easily?
Social media apps are where you have a profile full of photos and/or videos, you add "friends", you can post on your own wall, others can follow you etc etc. Algorithms suggest you content and try to keep you on the app as long as possible. You get dopamine hits from "likes" and more and more "followers".
A discussion forum on a website is not this, nor is it a "platform".
"The browser is a connective tissue between our professional and personal lives and the larger world, as more and more facets of it become digital-first," the Firefox maker wrote.
Nonsense. The browser is a tissue between my professional and personal life - what is he talking about? And what is digital-first? So what is second?
You might think this is just Mozilla being bitter and crying over the fact that Firefox has fallen out of fashion. No one's forcing you to install or run Chrome on your non-ChromeOS desktop, for instance, so we surely must do it under our own free will.
It was nothing about free will. Google strong armed its installation through bundling with other programs, particularly antivirus. It also completely disrespected the way programs should be installed, by circumventing the Program Files directory on windows which in corporate worlds usually is protected via admin passwords. It was all about getting the user "used" to Chrome and thus any new device, it would be installed almost immediately. Google wanted Chrome to be synonymous with the web like the Internet Explorer 'e' icon used to be, and has basically achieved this now.
It also pushed its own browser when you used Google services. Rather than making their products truly cross-platform, they were just lazy/evil and didn't bother to make them work as well in competitor's browsers. Then also developers got lazy and only wanted to bother making things work in one browser (and so many of them are married to Google). Even today, there are some sites where I just can't get them to work properly without going to Chrome.
Yeah... but hang on... Spamhaus' policy is that if there is one bad restaurant in the whole city, then the whole city is dangerous... no... I can avoid the red light district or port areas at night quite easily and go to the safe areas instead. Why not just block the bad areas? Too many good places get caught in the crossfire. And some of these are businesses that suffer real damage with a Spamhaus block, like lost sales and customers. The emails don't work and they just get frustrated and go elsewhere.
It wasn't C4 that was blocked, it was our server. We had a dedicated server with a dedicated IP. Spamhaus' systems, at least back then, do not allow a whitelisting of an IP if it is within a subnet mask that has been blocked. This is an innocent user being blocked because of other people's actions on other IP addresses. We were with Aplus.net in 2003 (I know, my early days of experience with hosting), but still, this system seems too draconian.
The twitter user in the article seems to have Google as his email provider. His website is hosted elsewhere, the domain has been blocked by Spamhaus because the server or subnet it is on has some bad actors, and now his emails are blocked because his domain is in the email headers. This seems just too much...
Dunno what it's worth but I use Vivaldi (which I know is based on Chromium), and then the extension ScriptBlock. I don't see any ads. Scripts are blocked unless I allow them on the site I want. I don't need anything else to have that ad free experience. Pages render correctly for me.
I rarely, on occasion, encounter a browser without any blocking and good grief... it's a totally different world that I'm glad I don't live in.
Yeah, I am aware you can get it more than once. If your body did fine fending it off the first time (let's say if you had no symptoms), most likely it's going to be fine the second time too surely?
And why would a jab be better than your own immune system? It makes zero scientific sense. It makes perfect profit sense.
What stops Apple from updating their terms to make sure that every in-app purchase is reported back to Apple. They can they bill the developer 30% commission for hosting and app vetting on a monthly basis. Failure to pay, suspends the app from the store and on all phones.
There is your "non anti competitive" payment solution, who will also charge you a few percent. The developer got what they wanted but now they have even less revenue.
And make that a double. El Reg took up my suggestion of slanting the exclamation points too. It's a jab at Yahoo!'s branding.
I still have an account, which I opened in 2003. I don't really use it anymore, it's okay for the occasional test message.
How many years before it's closing everywhere not just in China. From what I know, a lot of people in the US still use it for news, but maybe that's an old stat.
I'm using the Magic keyboard with numeric keypad from Apple and it's the best keyboard I've owned. I used to have the Logitech K750 solar keyboard which was gorgeous... unfortunately when the battery died... the keyboard did also (non replaceable).
The Magic keyboard charges through USB-C and probably have to do this about once a month while using it several hours every day. It's a bit pricey but it's been worth every penny for me.
But many of those people DO pay Google for G Suite. So it's not like they are whining about not getting service for a free product.
Personally I only use my Gmail for Google services (analytics, console etc). The Gmail interface feels like I'm back at nursery school. It's just horrible, good that they still allow IMAP access.
I've just today moved one of my primary email accounts to my server provider who has just rolled out their own cloud email service using Axigen https://www.axigen.com
The pricing is very competitive, it includes mobile sync, calendar, todo lists etc, and the web interface is very grown up (Apple mail/ thunderbird like).
Now try sending that text abroad. Won't be so "free" anymore.
Look, WhatsApp has become a necessary evil. Even more so now that Facebook own it, but I'm not going to force a client to use a communication service of MY choice, it's always their choice. Otherwise, you know, they will find another service provider.
This story is more about how lazy people are to add a number to their phone. Is it really that hard to type in someone's phone number.
I miss Pidgin..... but can't use it anymore because all these modern communication apps are proprietary.
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