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Comment Gmail ignores dots (Score 0) 565

I bet your problem is that someone else has the same email but with a dot in it somewhere. I ran into this problem a few years back-- I had also registered lastname@gmail.com, and I started getting emails for l.astname@gmail.com and a couple other variations.

There was an Asian couple in Virginia, I got their emailed Apple Store receipts. And there was someone in South Africa who was renting out an apartment, so I got all kinds of information from prospective renters like photocopies of passports and pay stubs.

I ultimately had to abandon that address and get a different one.

Comment Summaries of new technologies & techniques (Score 2) 435

Succinct summaries of new (but proven) technologies & techniques. For me it's less about how to learn, and more about what to learn. Having an idea of what new technologies & techniques have been developed (and/or are becoming popular), what problems they solve for me, what trade-offs are involved, and what alternatives exist, helps to direct my learning. In other words a trade or hobbyist magazine that focuses on focuses on technology in the 'early majority' area of the adoption curve, across programming disciplines.

Comment Re:Mac Mini (Score 1) 109

> A complete nightmare, and even if you get it working, you wind up with an unstable system.

It's not as bad as that. I built 2 back back in 2008-2009, and they were rock stable-- kernel panics were extremely rare. They also didn't require much in the way of hackery. I put the EFI boot loader on a thumb drive and kept my OS X drive as free of hacked bits as possible. I wanted to be able to hook it up to a real Mac and boot it without issue, and I achieved this goal. Still, I would never recommend them in a business setting.

One of the machines was my daily driver, and dual booted Windows. The other ran OS X Server and was the fileserver in my house. The specs on the server were enough to get the job done, but my daily driver gave me top of the line Mac Pro performance for about $1200.

The only problem was OS updates-- they usually broke something. I maintained a bootable clone of both machines' boot drives, and waited a few days for other hackintoshers to find and figure out how to fix the issues before installing those updates. Both machines ran Snow Leopard for their entire term of service, which ended last year. They were replaced with refurb Mac minis. The hackintoshing was an interesting experiment, but I wanted a new OS without more hackery, supported hardware, and worry-free updating again. As a side effect, my electric bill fell off a cliff, which was nice.

Comment Re:Don't sweep it under the rug as collateral dama (Score 1) 157

Alternatively we need a legal precedent that a false claim of ownership of Copyright in a work is tort (e.g. trespass to chattels) as the real owner is deprived of the use/benefits of the work; moreover if the claim was made dishonestly (the claimant knew it to be false) then the claim should be tantamount to theft. Such a precedent could potentially be established in any common law jurisdiction.

IBM

Apple and IBM Announce Partnership To Bring iOS + Cloud Services To Enterprises 126

jmcbain writes: According to an article on Recode, Apple and IBM have announced a major partnership to bring mobile services to enterprise customers. "The deal calls for IBM and Apple to develop more than 100 industry-specific applications that will run on the iPhone and iPad. Apple will add a new class of service to its AppleCare program and support aimed at enterprise customers. IBM will also begin to sell iPhones and iPads to its corporate customers and will devote more than 100,000 people, including consultants and software developers, to the effort. Enterprise applications will in many cases run on IBM's cloud infrastructure or on private clouds that it has built for its customers. Data for those applications will co-exist with personal data like photos and personal email that will run on Apple's iCloud and other cloud services."

Comment Re:Everybody is wrong... (Score 1) 270

That is you choosing your service provider and access level (dialup, dsl, cable, etc.), which is not a net neutrality issue. At a push it could be interpreted as protocol-specific traffic priority which is a grey area (some people consider it a net neutrality issue, others don't).

Non-neutral behaviour can only occur when two service providers interact, like so: you want to ship a parcel to Bob, but there is no courier that does door-to-door service in both your area and Bob's area. So you ship the parcel with your courier, and pay for a particular service level (overnight door-to-door). Your courier delivers the parcel to Bob's courier (and pays Bob's courier according to some inter-courier agreement), who delivers the parcel to Bob's door. Neutral behaviour occurs when Bob's courier delivers the parcel like any other they handle, even if they can't meet the service level you asked for from your courier. Non-neutral behaviour occurs when Bob's courier delays the parcel delivery because they received it from another courier rather than directly from the sender.

Notice that both Bob and you are screwed by the behaviour of Bob's courier.

The Wired article misses this by focusing on how - if you are a large company - you can send through more than one courier, selecting the one most convenient for the intended recipient. This obviously makes delivery faster because it cuts out one leg of the parcel's journey; and it would make delivery faster with or without neutrality requirements. The article ignores the actual problem of non-neutral behaviour where the parcel is actively delayed (over and above the natural journey time) by one of the couriers in order to force the sender to deal directly with them rather than having the option of sending via another courier (and accepting the naturally longer journey time).

The big weakness of this analogy is that in the real world you can readily choose between one of several courier on a per-parcel basis, but few individuals or small companies can choose between ISPs on a per-connection basis.

Comment If you don't change the default password... (Score 1) 378

...you deserve what you get, and any liability for a resulting "security breach" should be on you-- not on someone who can find a copy of a user's manual online.

Like previous commenters have said, these kids are damn lucky they're in Canada. In the US they'd have been fucking crucified.

Apple

Apple WWDC 2014: Tim Cook Unveils Yosemite 411

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has started, and OS X 10.10, officially named Yosemite, and iOS 8 have been officially unveiled. Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, also highlighted iCloud Drive. Although a little late to the party, Apple hopes to compete with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive."

Comment Re:Mind reader (Score 1) 552

This. Wikipedia has a Comparison of consumer brain–computer interfaces that covers devices from Emotiv, Neurosky and others.

Searching for Emotiv, Neurosky or "BCI" (brain-computer interface) plus keywords like "disabled" or "ALS" or "locked" produces a couple of results on improving communication with limited physical control, e.g. this and this. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Another approach is software like Dasher, which turns gestures from various sources (including eye tracking) into text. There appears to have been some work to integrate Dasher and BCI.

Comment Laser printers from the mid-late 90s (Score 1) 702

I had an Apple LaserWriter Select 360 (built around a Canon engine, IIRC) that I bought new in 1994 last me until mid 2011. HP was putting out some damned good printers back then, too, before Carly Fiorina came in and turned HP into peddlers of second-rate shit.

Honorable mention to the TV in my basement, an RCA F35751MB-- the biggest CRT TV I could find in 1994. I don't yet own a flatscreen, because I'm just letting them get better and cheaper until the RCA finally gives up the ghost.

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