Jolt Country

I am genuinely curious as to what the rest of you think about the following:

I was on the maps app Waze forever. My wife said Google Maps was better. She knows her way around places and I don't, so I uninstalled Waze and tried Google Maps for the last two weeks.

It has a bug where it thinks that I am in a different time zone than I am in. So it will say "7 minutes to get to location" and then put the arrival time at an hour and seven minutes. Sloppy.

But it does something else, and this is my question:

I know my way around Colorado, to the extent that I do, by what exit things are on. So I'd be like, oh, Shitburger Drive is exit 272. Fanny Street is exit 5B, and Tommy Dumpydrawers Memorial Highway is exit 2.

Google Maps CHANGES ITS UI when it comes to exits.

They CHANGE THEIR UI.

I'll put an address in and be on the highway I need to be on, and Google Maps won't tell me the exit. But when I get close... when I am less than 2 miles to it... it will tell me the exit. It will change the UI at 70 MPH.

There's no reason for it to not tell me the exit number once I am on a highway where I need to take an exit with a number. It just... doesn't. This makes it unusable for me. It also enrages me, because how goddamn stupid do you have to be to hide information when it comes to drive? What's the point? It was probably a lot of fun to program! Dynamic exit numbers! Ha ha! It makes me want to kill them though.

But I ask you, would this bother any of the rest of you? I assume not.

Tdarcos wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:55 am

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 8:43 am

1. Fire up the Run command ( Win + R ). Type in “services. msc” and hit Enter.

Huh, that's weird, I don't have a “services. msc”.

I have services.msc with no space between the file name and the extension. Could it be that one?

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 10:10 am

Tdarcos wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:55 am

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 8:43 am

1. Fire up the Run command ( Win + R ). Type in “services. msc” and hit Enter.

Huh, that's weird, I don't have a “services. msc”.

I have services.msc with no space between the file name and the extension. Could it be that one?

I am just teasing. Thank you, Commander. I honestly thought there was no way to turn auto-updates off. I hate it so much and now hopefully I'll never wake up to find that these things reset my computer ever again.

Appreciated!!

I use G maps exclusively, especially these next two weeks. Never had the abovementioned problem. I want to know how Gmaps knows about upcoming speed traps and stalled cars on the road ahead.

I use Apple Maps on my phone with Japanese Siri chick voice. The only problem I've ever had was recently for some reason the UI of the actual map zoomed out far, showing the entire route, and kept telling me turns were like 100 feet away when they more like 25-50 feet away. Would have tried to recalibrate or whatever but I was driving and didn't want to be distracted.

A year ago at work I was asked to evaluate a data reporting product. I submitted a work order to have the client software installed on my laptop and spent a month watching tutorials and working with the product. When I asked what data management wanted included in a report, they asked for two or three things that I already gather from Active Directory on a daily basis. Based on that, I wrote a script that compiles and emails the data to a mailing list every morning. No need for the product; problem solved.

Two weeks ago I began receiving six emails a week regarding the product -- three informing me no one has logged into the three test sites I set up, and three informing me no on e has accessed the three test sites I set up. The emails instructed me to either log into the sites, delete the sites, or open a trouble ticket regarding the sites. The client license I had for the software expired six months ago which prevents me from options one or two... so, I opened a trouble ticket.

Along with another six automated notifications, I received a few more as my request bounced around. Today I received a response from a human who said that although the help desk has the ability to remove the data, that is outside their scope. If I am unable to remove the sites (which I am), I should contact the site owner... which is also me.

I sent one final email informing the helpdesk that I do not have rights to the software or the site. I followed that by explaining that I really have no vested interest in whether or not the sites are deleted or not -- my only personal interest is no longer seeing responses from them, which I have handled with an email rule. Any email containing the name of this product (a) goes right to the trash, and (b) receives a draft response that I no longer deal with the software; any questions about it should go to their helpdesk.

I may not have thought this through. A few minutes ago I received my six weekly messages, which my email client responded to. I believe their side also automatically responds. I guess tomorrow we'll see what everyone's inbox looks like and just how many responses the mail server can handle. Albeit morbid, I kind of enjoy the idea of an email traffic storm that outlives the people who set it up.

Huh, imagine the mounting avalanche of two respond-only email servers bouncing back and forth.

Has anyone tried this out as an experiment?

AArdvark wrote: Mon Aug 29, 2022 4:25 pm Huh, imagine the mounting avalanche of two respond-only email servers bouncing back and forth.

Has anyone tried this out as an experiment?

Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft employee from the MS-Dos through Windows 95 days. He invented Task Manager, and if you're using it now, it's merely an enhancement of what he wrote.

On October 14, 1997, Microsoft's internal network was locked up due to a single e-mail. Back then, MS had about 100,000 mailboxes, although some were aliases to internal mailing lists. The IT group was splitting the list in half, then half again, creating four partitions. Each partition was assigned a mailing list, Bedlam1 through Bedlam4. Thus, every employee was on one of these lists, and they were strictly to organize users, not to actually deliver any email. No one would actually send e-mail to these lists, but if you checked what list your e-mail address was on, it would be listed..And that's what happened on October 14th.

Someone saw they were on one of these lists, and sent a message to the list itself, (BedkamDL3) asking why he was on it, and what was it for. That message went out to all 25,000 users on that e-mail partition. Some of the recipients had delivery receipts, or "out of office" notices turned on, so the actual number of messages create3sd was even greater. That was the fuel. The 25,000 employees on that list were the waiting oxygen. The spark was some unknowing user responding "Me too." More people also responded, or with "Why am I on this alias?" or "Take me off this list immediately." The servers were soon overloaded. Some people pedantically sending e-mails to stop sending e-mails made things worse.

Email was new, and maybe 1 in a couple dozen sent a reply. That's 1,000 new messages going to 25,000 recipients, or 25 million e-mails. Then read receipts and delivery receipts kicked in. Each one of these generated yet another e-mail. If only 10% of the users have those, that's several million more. Call it an even 30 million.

While the network and Exchange could have handled the load. There was a bug in the mail transfer agent (MTA), if you sent a message to a list that has a lot of recipients, like 10,000 the MTA would crash on the 8,192nd message. Unfortunately, it would come back up. and restart the mailing list - at the first message. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This shut down the network because packets kept being sent, but no useful traffic could get through. It took 2 days to empty the queues and reset the servers. Since the company runs on e-mail, this meant nobody could get anything done for 2 1/2 days.

This sub does not accept YouTube links from me as inline video, nor will it allow me to use the BBcode MEDIA tag, i.e. [ followed by media followed by ] and the link, then the closing tag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBmuY6qFMPQ

AArdvark wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 5:39 pm I use G maps exclusively, especially these next two weeks. Never had the abovementioned problem. I want to know how Gmaps knows about upcoming speed traps and stalled cars on the road ahead.

Does Google Maps tell you when a cop is out with radar? Waze does, but I have never heard that from Google. I'm sure they are gurgling with pleasure at the idea of supporting those pigs.

Gmaps told us about speed traps, construction and general congestion on our trip. Perhaps there's a way to tell the software about these things but I haven't seen it yet. Or even looked for it

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Sep 08, 2022 9:32 am

AArdvark wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 5:39 pm I use G maps exclusively, especially these next two weeks. Never had the abovementioned problem. I want to know how Gmaps knows about upcoming speed traps and stalled cars on the road ahead.

Does Google Maps tell you when a cop is out with radar? Waze does, but I have never heard that from Google. I'm sure they are gurgling with pleasure at the idea of supporting those pigs.

Google bought Waze and is using the user inputs from that interface, which they seem to be slowly integrating. They've got the multiple voices now which I assume came from Waze too.

Casual Observer wrote: Thu Sep 08, 2022 9:30 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Sep 08, 2022 9:32 am

AArdvark wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 5:39 pm I use G maps exclusively, especially these next two weeks. Never had the abovementioned problem. I want to know how Gmaps knows about upcoming speed traps and stalled cars on the road ahead.

Does Google Maps tell you when a cop is out with radar? Waze does, but I have never heard that from Google. I'm sure they are gurgling with pleasure at the idea of supporting those pigs.

Google bought Waze and is using the user inputs from that interface, which they seem to be slowly integrating. They've got the multiple voices now which I assume came from Waze too.

I don't like this.... I don't want this!

CO!

I do not want this!

Saw an ad for a service that has a lot of features. Then I discover it's free. It's https://groove.cm , offering a bunch of tools that I think I can use (lots of marketing-related tools), and it claims it's free, no credit card required, so, based on what the ad showed, I decided to check it out.

One of the things going through my head - which you should always keep in mind when examining/checking out a free offer - is, "how are they going to monetize this?" Or more simply, how can they make money from something free? Because if they can't make money from somewhere, they aren't going to be around long. Very few things are subsidized in a way that someone else isn't paying, usually involuntarily, such as through taxes. Well, I discover they do have and are offering is a free tier, with a number of nice looking features available, but, they have paid tiers as well. This, I don't have a problem with. Since there are only two industries where the people who consume their products "users" - software developers and drug dealers - it is appropriate in both industries to offer a free sample of your wares to get users hooked, then offer them the pricey stuff. It also mentions that the prices on these are reduced, if you don't take them at sign up, they will be more expensive later. This is also not unreasonable; getting people to take an offering on the expectation that it's a limited-time offer is a common marketing tactic. Nothing that they are offering in any of the paid tiers is anything that I would need, the free tier appears to be more than enough, so I can decline all of them and take the "free forever" tier. So, it asks for first name, last name, email address, username, password, and verify password. Nothing unusual here.

Well, anyway, I give the first four items, and am on the "password" field. Accepting Firefox's suggestion to use a randomly-generated password it creates for this occasion, I do, and I fill both fields with the same long string of characters. I click on the submit button - labeled "Register" I think - and it "bangs back" with an angry, red error message, saying all fields must be filled in. I'm looking to see if there's any other fields. Nope, only then I discover both password fields are blanked out. I must have done something wrong, so I have Firefox insert the random password in both places and try again. Same problem.

At this point, it kind of dawns on me that maybe the password is too long! I try
using a shorter password, and, as too many people do, a password I've used elsewhere. This, it accepts. Bad practice. Shorter passwords are easier to crack, and there are not really difficult ways to add tremendous levels of security, (see https://xkcd.com/936/ for an example on how to increase password strength exponentially) especially since any conscientious website does not store passwords, only the hashes of passwords

If you think this is only what I'm complaining about, "just wait, there's more!"

It turns out it's a good idea that I used a password I can remember, because I'm going to need to use it again, because the screen changes to a blank page with a black stripe across the top, and the message, "Our app is only optimized for use in Chrome. Please download it from here" with the last word being a link that I presume is to Google's download site.

First, it might have been a good idea to tell me this before I registered. Second, if this is what people who will connect to it to see/use whatever I have used with them - one of the offerings is a free blog system as an alternative to Wordpress - will be told, that is going to cut off a large part of the potential audience. Third, the World Wide Web - and the Internet of which the web is just one of hundreds of services it can offer - are built on open standards that are not supposed to be proprietary. (Yes, I know Chrome is open sourcem but if you mandate one specific browser, you've made your site proprietary to whatever features it offers and others don't.) It is this sort of fucking shit that damn near balkanized the early web, when people had to implement two versions of their site, one for Internet Explorer browser users, and one for everyone else. For a lot of people, this was too much, and if you weren't using IE, you'd be told to download it. Just like now.

I can see no reason to restrict sites to one browser, and a lot of reasons not to. First, is common practice. Huge, popular sites: Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of millions of others - all work satisfactorily on all browsers.

This is bad practice, and just pure laziness, an unwillingness to go along with the common standards that provide good experiences for website users. Regressing back to the days of web Balkanization where if you were on the wrong browser, you got the equivalent treatment to someone from the ghetto trying to better themselves, and being discriminated against.

This is wrong. Groove, fix your broken website, don't penalize people for using "the wrong browser," and "play nice with others" by sticking with the huge number of non-proprietary technical standards that work on all browsers.

The last time I got my hair cut, the stylist suggested I use their online system to make an appointment/check-in prior to my next visit.

Today was a good day for a haircut, so last night I logged on to their website to check-in. It said I could not make an appointment because they were not open. (Imagine a world where websites only operated during business hours...)

I logged on to the website this morning at 9am. The website said you can't check-in until five minutes after they open. This is like not being able to figure out that many/most computer counters begin at 0 and instead of adding 1 to the results just asking users to manually add a one to any result in their head.

At 9:05am, I checked in. The website told me there was a slight wait, but my scheduled check-in time was 9:42am. It takes like 20 minutes to get a haircut at this place and there are always two people working so somehow four people got in before me but whatever.

I left the house at 9:20am and arrived around 9:30am. All the lights were off and there was a sign taped to the door that said "NEW HOURS OPEN AT 11".

I drove back home. At 9:42am the system texted me and said it was time for my appointment. At 9:57 they texted me again and said it was 15 minutes past my check-in time and so my appointment had been cancelled.

I drove back and walked in at 11am. The first thing the woman asked me was if I had checked-in online.

Christ....

Flack wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 12:30 pm I drove back and walked in at 11am. The first thing the woman asked me was if I had checked-in online.

I get this picture in my head of someone saying "I tried to. Your system wouldn't let me make an appointment until 5 minutes before opening, Then, it gives me an appointment for 90 minutes ago. I get here and you're not open till eleven. To add insult to injury, when I didn't "show up" for my appointment, the website texted me a message that it was cancelled, But it really doesn't matter that I tried to check in. You're checking out." Blam!

People have been killed for sillier reasons. In this day and age, it's not a good idea to aggravate people unnecessarily. Especially for stupidity. They might decide people with your level of moronity need to be removed from the gene pool.

I tried to schedule an appointment to kill her later in the day but the website said all slots were full.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 8:43 am Anyone know if there is a way to completely turn off Microsoft's forced updates and restarts permanently?

Not sure about restarts, but there is a way to stay on the current version of Windows 10 and disable those "feature updates". With Windows 10 Enterprise or Education, you can do that in the group policy editor. Start the "Local Group Policy Editor", and go to:

Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update -> Windows Update for Business

Double-click "Select the target Feature Update version". Set it to "Enabled" and enter "Windows 10" in the first field, and then the version you want to stay with or update to. In my case, that's "20H2" which for Windows 10 Educacation (it's what I use) is supported until May 2023:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifec ... -education

If you don't have Windows 10 Enterprise or Education, then the end-of-life dates are shown here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifec ... me-and-pro

But I'm not sure if the policy editor actually works with Windows 10 Pro. If it doesn't work (you should reboot after you changed the settings and also wait a day or two because Windows Update is crap,) you might have to use the registry:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3 ... ninfo.html

I've been using this for two years now, and windows update only offers me normal patches and updates. It doesn't force me anymore to update to a new Windows 10 version. I updated in 2020, and the next update will be in 2023. Three years of peace of mind.

The EOL of Windows 10 Pro versions is one year shorter, so you'll have to update every two years. If you update now to 21H2 by setting the TargetReleaseVersionInfo registry key to 21H2, windows update will not ask you again to update to a new version until Summer 2023. And apparently, "H2" versions are better than "H1" (they're more like service packs for H1,) so you might want to target 22H2 which will update you once it comes out this year. Then you'll only have to update again in 2024 when 24H2 comes out.

If you're on Windows 10 Home, you're apparently completely out of luck, I think. Not sure.

Oh, and apparently disabling restarts is possible and I actually had them disabled and forgot about it. It's in the group policy editor:

Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update

"No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installation"

Just set that to "enabled". Works here.

Trying to order groceries for my mom and brother, who are sick, back in NY via Instacart.

Spend 10 minutes loading the online cart up with stuff, go to pay, use the card that was already in there.... denied! Well, accepted and then reversed. Because of "suspicious activity."

They want me to take a picture of my credit card and scan it. That will never, ever happen. Frig off and die forever, Instacart.