The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting the same treatment as more faceless, distant big businesses.
I have a friend that says Google's decline came when they bought DoubleClick in 2008 and suffered a reverse-takeover: their customers shifted from being Internet users and became other, matchingly-sized corporations.
Mount a Windows 11 ISO. Open an administrative command window. Navigate to the new drive letter. Enter this command:
.\setup.exe /product server /auto upgrade /EULA accept /migratedrivers all /ShowOOBE none /Compat IgnoreWarning /Telemetry Disable
I've used this to upgrade 10 to 11 on non approved hardware, going back to at least 2nd gen Intel CPUs. I've used it to upgrade existing Pro, EDU and IOT that didn't want to upgrade.
This is insane, there is a Reddit, of course there is, of almost 500K people, https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ , who discuss all of the strategies to do this.
Just imagine being one of the people who legit joins a startup, is passionate, working long hours, earning your vest, to have your coworker pretending to be working.
1. Looks like the cost of this project so far is already ~€1M. Does it really take you a million Euros to set up a DNS server?
(Just did a quick research in the EU's financial transparency system [1], I entered "dns4eu" in the subject field. €3m budgeted, €1M used already, most of it going to a company named "Whalebone sro" (?))
2. Why does every EU-funded software project have such a terrible website? As a visitor, you get the impression that the designers took great care to obfuscate the actual product as much as possible, while throwing in random text blurbs, useless buttons and boxes.
Stuff like:
> Looking for a fast, secure, and privacy-focused way to browse the internet? You're in the right place.
Yeah, sure.. just give me the product?
Reading on..
> Learn everything you need to know about DNS4EU Public Service – including where it's located, how to easily set it up on your device, and what configuration options are available to best suit your needs.
Yeah, sure.. just give me the product?
Compare this with the UI of Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 [2] which gives visitors exactly what they need. It's awesome.
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It's hard not to be cynical about EU projects, this one included. I've had the questionable pleasure of diving deep into EU software projects and their funding when analyzing and rebuilding [3] the EU medical device database [4], a simple database with ~500k entries (~10GB on disk), which has burned €45M (!) so far and employs a team of ~50 people. Link to website with budget tracker [5].
The second version of https://www.physician.fyi/ , a database of doctors and other medical practitioners with their disciplinary actions for patients to check. In this version, I’m expanding it to include all 6.5 million practitioners in the US, and integrating more data like how much doctors have been paid by drug/device companies. I’m planning on adding patient reviews/complaints too.
It’s the biggest and dirtiest dataset I’ve ever worked with, so it’s been interesting to figure out practical solutions to run things fast and generalize cleaning tasks. Of course it’ll be impossible to get every case (I can only match about half of the state licenses to national records at the moment), so I’ll have to figure out a user-edit/consensus system for the rest.
Been building Namekit [1] — a simple tool that uses AI + a small proprietary model to generate domain name ideas and surface only the ones that are immediately available. I got tired of bloated name generators with useless suggestions, so I built something fast, clean, and actually useful — mostly for myself, but now for others too.
This is what happens when Google isn't sue-able by private entities.
In Germany, lieferando (subsidiary of takeaway.com) registers domains in the form of restaurantname-city.de, points them to their lieferando cloudflare account, and claims ownership for the google business entry where they set the phone number to their own call center.
Then they call the business owner and _force them_ to sign the contract with them, because effectively the owner knows they cannot be found anymore via google, and everyone that wants to order something will reach the call center hotline and leave a negative review after the hotline tells them wrong number, effectively destroying their business. And the people working for lieferando via Zeitarbeitsfirmen know this, and mention this in the call to pressure the restaurant owners to get their sales provision.
Crimeflare before it got taken down had around 130k domains that were pointing to the lieferando website using this kind of scheme, I helped provide the dataset for a couple of local business owners that were extorted this way and refused to abide by that scheme.
Guess what happened, nobody could be sued and the financial damages were too small to escalate it on the European court level. Sadly, class-action lawsuits don't work the same way as in the US, apparently.
Effectively Google does not abide by the laws and gets away with it due to their financial structures of their holding companies.
And they certainly know about this, they just don't give a single fvck.
At some point organizations get taken over by the 9-5 crowd who just want to collect a paycheck and live a nice life. This also leads to the hard-driving talent to leave for more aggressive organizations, leaving behind a more average team. What leaders remain will come up with not so great ideas, and the rank and file will follow along because there won't be a critical mass of passionate thought leaders to find a better way.
I don't mean to look down on this kind of group, I am probably one of them. There is nothing wrong with people enjoying a good work life balance at a decent paying job. However, I think there is a reality that if one wants a world-best company creating world-best products this is simply not good enough. Just like a team of weekend warriors would not be able to win the Superbowl (or even ever make it anywhere close to a NFL team) - which is perfectly fine! - the same way it's not fair to expect an average organization to perform world champion feats.
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
> At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world.
[...]
> Meanwhile, Zuck is relentlessly pursuing Facebook's largest conceivable growth market: China. The only problem: China doesn't want Facebook. Zuck repeatedly tries to engineer meetings with Xi Jinping so he can plead his case in person. Xi is monumentally hostile to this idea. Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
> After years of persistent nagging, lobbying, and groveling, Facebook's China execs start to make progress with a state apparatchik who dangles the possibility of Facebook entering China. Facebook promises this factotum the world – all the surveillance and censorship the Chinese state wants and more.
[...]
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
[...]
> Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Laplink had a really neat feature for when you didn't have your laplink install disk with you (or had the wrong size laplink install disk).
You could connect the two computers with a RS232 null modem cable, then type something like the following on the target computer:
mode COM1:2400,n,8,1,p
ctty COM1
This redirected the input/output for the terminal to the serial port.
Laplink on the source computer would then 'type' a series of console commands to create a simple transfer program on the target computer. It would use this simple transfer program to transfer the full laplink.
IIRC it used the msdos DEBUG.COM to build the transfer program on the target computer (but this is an old memory, so could easily be a reconstruction).
Composing this message is bringing back lots of weird memories about how we used to compute before the internet.
If you just want to rip audio CDs, pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine. If you want a drive that can do everything up to and including UHD BD, try a Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD if you like slot loading or a Pioneer BDR-XD07B if you need a top-loader with snap-spindle for mini CDs or oddly-shaped CDs. These will cost way more than an old USB2-era drive but will be brand new.
You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails lubricated with some PTFE grease: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO
The Citrix/Microsoft relationship is a bonkers story. The world didn't yet know that licensing your tech to Microsoft meant you were going to grab your ankles.
> To get the big picture of performance evolution over time, I downloaded all 52 releases of fastDOOM, PCDOOMv2, and the original DOOM.EXE, wrote a go program to generate a RUN.BAT running -timedemo demo1 on all of them, and mounted it all with mTCP's NETDRIVE.
I'm probably not the real target audience here, but that looked interesting; I didn't think there were good storage-over-network options that far back.
A little searching turns up https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_NetDrive.html - that's really cool:)
> NetDrive is a DOS device driver that allows you to access a remote disk image hosted by another machine as though it was a local device with an assigned drive letter. The remote disk image can be a floppy disk image or a hard drive image.
The complete game was released as freeware by EA over 15 years ago. It was freely available for download from EA's servers for many years and has been redistributed by many third party sites as well. So getting the art and other assets to use with this code should be no problem.
I have ollama responding to SMS spam texts. I told it to feign interest in whatever the spammer is selling/buying. Each number gets its own persona, like a millennial gymbro or 19th century British gentleman.
the same group of consumers has an outsized tendency to purchase all kinds of failed products, time after time, flop after flop
You really don't want these people as customers:
In a key part of the study, the researchers studied consumers whose purchases flop at least 50 percent of the time, and saw pronounced effects when these harbingers of failure buy products. When the percentage of total sales of a product accounted for by these consumers increases from 25 to 50 percent, the probability of success for that product decreases by 31 percent. And when the harbingers buy a product at least three times, it’s really bad news: The probability of success for that product drops 56 percent
they could pull the plug on their access to cloud service
It's happened to me twice.
The first time was about seven years ago, when Fiet Electric sent out a software update that deliberately bricked all of its home hubs, and consequentially turned all of the connected smart light bulbs into dumb light bulbs. Speculation on IoT forums at the time was that Fiet failed to properly license some piece of code that was critical to its system; but that was all speculation. I seem to recall that Fiet put out an e-mail long after the fact letting people know they could no longer use their "smart" devices.
The second time was earlier this year, when Sylvania ended its cloud service, and turned its smart bulbs into merely clever bulbs. They'll still work with the stand-alone Sylvania app, but new bulbs can no longer be added to Apple HomeKit setups. So you need to use two apps (Home and Sylvania) to control the devices in your home. That is, until the Sylvania app is no longer available in the App Store, or compatible with modern devices.
Avoiding Fiet Electric products was easy. But I thought I'd be safe with a big name like Sylvania.
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