* Posts by Ivan001

9 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2021

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Ivan001

Re: To add to this...

Running the same Brother laser B&W printer for something like 9 years now. I buy third party XL tonners which last forever (2000+ pages) for 30 euros.

My mom bought an Epson Eco tank and while ink is cheaper, the printer still needs maintenance now and then which is not trivial (enjoying a disposal tank and resetting the counter) which needs to be done by a technician.

Microsoft's Surface Pro 9 requires a tedious balancing act

Ivan001

Flashy but trashy

End of last year it was time to retire my 4 years old XPS13 from work, so I requested a Surface pro 9.

I deeply regret it. I bought it thinking I would use the pen a lot, but I hardly ever do. Taking notes with the pen is counter productive and I don't have time for drawing. Pen input is not as good as a Wacom tablet for instance.

The computer is indeed akward to use on one's lap (as mentioned in the text), or handheld (too big and heavy). On a desk it's OK, but not great.

Mine decided one day not to boot anymore. According to reddit sources I found, something about booting from RAM after the first boot or something similar can make the computer unbootable and there is no fix except opening it up and disconnecting the battery to clear the RAM. Mine was replaced as it is still under warranty, but seems to be a common problem.

I regret purchasing this computer and deeply miss my XPS 13...

Goddard Space Flight Center's new boss swears in on holy Pale Blue Dot

Ivan001
Devil

Comments here are boring...

Can someone please direct me to the same story on some fundamentalist websites? That's where the fun comments must be...

US chip sanctions may push Brazil, others right into China's arms

Ivan001

Lula is serving his third term

Lula is serving his third term, he served two terms between 2003 and 2010.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Ivan001

In TV production interns would be asked to go fetch a box of colour bars.

SAP 'investigating' after viral video allegedly shows anti-mask employee coughing on shoppers

Ivan001

Re: Of course she's an idiot, but...

I agree.

If you click on the video link, the first featured comment mentions her being employed at SAP.

I would definitely fire an employee after watching a video like that since I definitely don't want such kind of person in the company, let alone inside the office. But that would be an internal decision, not a PR affair.

What bothers me is that Twitter's angry mob immediately link the person to their employer which has absolutely nothing to do with her behavior and somewhat it is expected from the company to take public action.

What happens in the video should be a matter for the police alone.

Cop drone crashes into flight instructor's airplane

Ivan001

Re: it would be fantastic ...

"York Region Police are known locally for being the most corrupt and needlessly violent force you'll ever meet."

Never been to Brazil, huh?

Exam-monitoring biz Proctorio tried to silence a critic using copyright law. Now EFF sues to put an end to this tactic

Ivan001

Re: Proctorio is trash

This was a decision taken by someone else, it was a worse decision than I made it sound like...

And believe it or not, Proctorio is GDPR compliant. GDPR in this case is about how and where data is processed and stored. Proctorio stores and processes data in Europe, lockdown browser in the States.

The bottom line is that courses need to be accredited and part of the accreditation is based on how assessments are made. This dictates how much a diploma is worth. Based on this the University sees proctoring as something to help students.

Ivan001
FAIL

Proctorio is trash

I'm an elearning specialist and one of my tasks since February is to implement Proctorio for our exams. (migrating from Lockdown Browser which doesn't comply fully to GDPR)

In education we have to deal with a lot of amateur software with poor customer service (Like Canvas for instance) but Proctorio takes the first place by far. What a piece of crap!

It's one of the worst experiences I ever had implementing a software.

It's absolutely unpredictable, stuff which worked last time might not work next time, no idea why.

The Chrome extension is a nightmare, sometimes it loads, sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes students will be asked for a password when there shouldn't be one.

If you try to open the code inspector while the extension is active, proctorio will uninstall itself immediately. If a student presses the wrong key combination in the middle of an exam, it's bye bye...

Proctorio messes with the settings of the LMS, between other things locking the exam configurations after I take the exam as a test student (which is necessary to make sure there won't be any suprises).

And don't get me started with the useless proctoring reports. We ended up hiring externals to watch the exams of our students since there is absolutely nothing useful you can get out of the reports.

All of that to pretend that webcam video and screen capture will do anything to stop cheating. I demonstrated many different manners of cheating this kind of software. If you have monitors connected via a video splitter to the computer, Proctorio will interpret that as a single monitor. Add a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to the mix and your buddy can take the exam for you from the other room. You don't even need to use a video splitter with Proctorio since it won't identify if you're running Parsec, Anydesk, etc to someone else's computer.

They are supposed to provide a full browser soon, I can't wait to see what a mess that will be.

Currently we are advising teachers to look into other methods of assessment since proctoring basically doesn't work.

/rant

I hope they don't sue me for this comment :)