memzer - Slashdot User

Comment 36month / 3 year plans. (Score 5, Insightful) 82

by memzer on Thursday January 26, 2023 @09:42PM (#63243739) Attached to: Q4 2022 Was a Disaster For Smartphone Sales, Sees the Largest-Ever Drop

Not sure how it is in other countries but a 40 month cycle sounds about right when most plans for new phones have moved from 2 to 3 year payment plans. Most just upgrade at the end of a contract (newest flagship) or if their phone is damaged. Beyond that, the incentive to upgrade isn't as strong - newer flagships really just boast bigger screen sizes and better cameras for most of the last few generations - battery life isn't significantly improved, neither is performance for the most part; at least to the typical user browsing Youtube, Facebook or Tiktok.

Comment Re:I've done the same for years (Score 2) 227

by memzer on Thursday August 29, 2013 @06:16AM (#44704697) Attached to: How One Man Turns Annoying Cold Calls Into Cash

I have a second prepaid mobile sim card for this purpose. It costs ~$30 for a year (au) and it's worth every cent.

Did the Spamhaus DDoS Really Slow Down Global Internet Access? 70

Posted by samzenpus on Friday March 29, 2013 @08:55AM from the what's-to-blame dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Despite the headlines, the big denial of service attack may not have slowed the Internet after all. The argument against the original claim include the fact that reports of Internet users seeing slowdowns came not from service providers, but the DDoS mitigation service CloudFlare, which signed up Spamhaus as a customer last week. Also, multiple service providers and Internet watchers have now publicly stated that while the DDoS attacks against Spamhaus could theoretically have led to slowdowns, they've seen no evidence that this occurred for general Internet users. And while some users may have noticed a slowdown, the undersea cable cuts discovered by Egyptian sailors had more of an impact than the DDoS."

Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage 43

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 28, 2013 @10:01PM from the who's-to-blame dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"

Comment Re:What about XP mode in Windows 7 (Score 5, Informative) 646

by memzer on Thursday April 12, 2012 @03:45AM (#39654787) Attached to: End of Windows XP Support Era Signals Beginning of Security Nightmare

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/support/faq.aspx

Is Windows XP Mode supported throughout the lifecycle of Windows 7?
No. Windows XP Mode is a full virtual version of Windows XP and follows the same support lifecycle as Windows XP. Windows XP extended support phase ends in 2014.

Unfortunately IE6/7/8 will live on and I have nightmares that we will be supporting them until 2038...

Submission + - Samsung says their TV aren't really spying on you (msn.com) 1

Submitted by lightbox32 on Friday March 30, 2012 @11:23PM

lightbox32 writes: Samsung has finally responded to an article recently published by HD Guru titled "Is your TV watching you?" which discussed the fact that new features in Samsung's top 2012 models — including built-in microphones, HDTV camera, wireless and wired Internet connection, built-in browser with voice to text conversion, face recognition and more — could be used to collect unprecedented personal information and invade our privacy. Samsung has now provided their privacy policy, which may or may not lay the issue to rest.

Comment Re:Passing on Viruses (Score 4, Informative) 396

by memzer on Monday May 02, 2011 @07:14AM (#35998414) Attached to: Tasmanian Dept. of Education Wants Anti-Virus for Linux, OS X

Link to the Ubuntu Community Guide for scanning email using Thunderbird and ClamAV for those interested:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ScanningEmail

Comment Re:Passing on Viruses (Score 4, Informative) 396

by memzer on Monday May 02, 2011 @07:07AM (#35998380) Attached to: Tasmanian Dept. of Education Wants Anti-Virus for Linux, OS X

I'm guessing this was meant to be a troll but really things aren't as bad as you make them out to be these days...

If you're setting up a mail server there are packages available which integrate all of the things you mentioned above into easier to manage / maintain systems. For example one popular one is iRedMail http://www.iredmail.org/features.html which can be set up by an intermediate user in around 1 Minute [Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi8CF3RKRm4%5D.

If you are implying it's much more complicated for the end user then you're kidding yourself as well. These days there are guides for most popular distributions and usually it's not much more difficult than installing the software and/or configuring an addon. For example, the Ubuntu community guide has easy to follow instructions for configuring Thunderbird with ClamAV. The process is by no means difficut (install, set ports, install addon) and takes less than a minute to complete for a novice user capable of following some instructions.

There are of course users who would find following such a guide too difficult but really these users simply lack the experience, confidence, patience or time to do so anway. They're likely the same users who pay somebody else (or come to you, their friend / relative) to install the software for them ;)

Point I'm trying to make for people thinking of giving it a try is that it is a lot easier to do than the parent implies - even for novice-intermediate users.

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