If Appledystopia is right in its 2020 article, Microsoft loses US$1·5 milliard per annum on Bing. So maybe that explains why itâs worsened so much. Microsoft might well be finding ways to cut its losses, and servers cost money. Pity that none of the Bing clones are saying anything, not even Duck Duck Goâs usually vocal CEO.
Iâm glad I discovered Mojeek when I did. We lost some traffic with Duck Duck Goâs near-dead internal search on Lucire, and overall I suspect everyone has lost traffic with Bing dying. With Google now also faltering (they still make plenty from the human farms, but you have to wonder just why it has worsened, even for existing sites), then itâs important that alternative, growing search enginesâthatâs engines, not services (so you can discount Ecosia, Neeva, Qwant, Duck Duck Go, and many others)âget our support.
Thereâs really only Mojeek in the occident with a growing index, regularly requiring new servers. If you arenât anti-Russian, thereâs Yandex; and China of course has Baidu. Brave and Yep are making great efforts but their indices are still small, though Yep can do better than Bing on some sites.
Shared by a family member. Hear out Dr Graham Conway, principal engineer in the Automotive Division at Southwest Research Institute, and why zero-emission vehicles are not truly zero-emission. Itâs a point Iâve made way, way back (in the 2000s) when I cited a study which showed the Ford Fiesta Econetic, a diesel car, was the best vehicle for the environment over its lifetime.
This TEDx talk is from 2020, and Conway believes hybrids are a better bet for the environment than full EVs. Have a watch as he explains why.
TED has flagged Conway’s talk with the following statement: ‘This talk only reflects the speaker’s personal views and interpretation. Several claims in this talk lack scientific support.’ I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t quote this. It’s also worth having a read of this from 2021 and this from 2020. Here’s one more link from Green Car Reports in 2020, titled ‘Lifetime carbon emissions of electric cars are much lower than previously suggested’. All of these suggest that newer production processes and decarbonization may be helping EVs rank better when their lifetime (including production) emissions are counted.
Itâs worth having a read, especially about the BS behind behavioural advertising (i.e. surveillance advertising) and the âreal-time biddingâ that so many ad networks have been trying to sell to me but which none of them can explain.
If it smells like BS, it probably is.
I tell each one: we sell ads, give us some banner code, and weâll stick it up. They perform well, we increase their share. They perform badly, we decrease them.
They usually go on about the superiority of their systems but if I donât understand them, then Iâm not going to make the switch.
I wonât cite what Cory says on that as the real gems are later in the entry.
Hereâs the one, which agrees fully with something Iâve been saying, though my experience is anecdotal and not backed up by proper, quantitative research: âContextual advertising converts at very nearly the same rate as behavioral advertising, and just as well as behavioral ads for some categories of goods and servicesâ.
He notes that in 2019, The New York Times âditched most of its programmatic behavioral adsâ and that the Dutch public broadcaster, NPO, has followed suit, âditching Google Ad Manager for a new custom contextual ad system it commissionedâ.
âThey’ve since experimented with major advertisers like Amex and found little to no difference between context ads and behavioral ads when it comes to conversions.â
Thereâs also greater reach because of GDPR requiring that people opt in to behavioural ads.
My emphasis here: âAnd theyâre keeping that money, rather than giving a 50% vig to useless, creepy, spying ad-tech middlemen.â
I knew there was a reason I kept rejecting those people.
My Meizu M6 Note has had to be retired, due to an expanding battery, something which I probably shouldnât have tolerated for so long (it began happening months ago). I only made the call to stop using it last week after the volume buttons could no longer function, and I probably should have stopped earlier still* as it would have been easier to get the SIM and micro SD cards out!
My original plan was to go slightly newer and opt for a Note 9, and I had located a vendor on Aliexpress who was prepared to send it to me with the Chinese Flyme OS installed. But my sense is that Meizu is now past its prime, and everything seems to be shutting down.
I had been logging into the app store daily for over a year to earn points, but Meizu informed us that it would cease to record log-ins, and we had to redeem what we could by January. Its now-useless default music app Iâve already blogged about. No one answers international queries any more and from what I can tell, official Meizu reps seldom frequent the Chinese forumsâwhile the international forums consist of frustrated users talking among themselves.
And this is coming from a self-confessed Meizu fan. I chose the M2 Note back in 2015â16 and if it werenât for the damaged screen, I might never have bought the M6 Note. For now, Iâm back to using the M2, which is slower, and the battery doesnât hold its charge quite as well any more, but at least everything from the M6 Note has synced to it. With my app usage lower than it was in 2012, I donât notice any real lags in performance within the programs I do use, something that I couldnât say even two years ago when I was still popping into Instagram daily. Only the camera gets annoying with its slowness. I have gone away from the Swype keyboard though, as Swype no longer sends verification codes to your email to sync your custom word dictionary. Iâm muddling my way through Microsoftâs Swiftkey, which has proved a tolerable successor (the chief gains are the ability to access en and em dashes and ellipses from the keyboard without switching languages). It seems to forget that youâve pressed shift in order to write a proper noun (you have to do this twice for it to stick!) but it is learning words like Lucire and Autocade as well as my email address.
Readers may recall that after I had the M2 Noteâs screen repaired, it would no longer charge, except at the store in Johnsonville (Repair Plus) that fixed it! The lads there would never tell me why they could charge it and I couldnât and just grinned, while I told them how patently ridiculous the situation was, that even a new charging cable could not work; in fact none of my chargers did. They didnât seem to care that this was the predicament they put me in. The issueâand I donât know if they are to blameâis that the charging port is looser than it was, and it needs a very decent micro USB connector. That was thanks to PB Tech for telling me the truthâand a thumbs-down to Repair Plus for not even trying to sell me a better cable! Moral of the story: use people for the one thing that can do, but donât expect much more from them, not even basic after-sales service.
With its âfaultâ remedied about a year and a half ago, I had a phone to use once I put the micro SD and SIM cards back in, though Amanda isnât able to hear me that clearly on it when Iâm at the office, and Iâm sure Iâve missed calls and SMSs probably due to limits with the frequencies it uses (though I had checked six years ago it would handle the Vodafone 3G and 4G frequencies).
So a new phone is needed because the “phone” function of the M2 isn’t up to par. I donât need the latest and greatest, and thanks to the pace of development, a phone launched in 2020 is already obsolete in China. It seems that if Meizu is on the way down that I should go to its arch-rival, Xiaomi, and get the Note 9âs competitor, which roughly has the same name: the Redmi Note 9.
The Xiaomi names are all confusing and the Indian market has different phones with the same names, to add to the confusion already out there. I donât profess to know where the S, T, Note, Pro, and the rest fit, but letâs just say Iâve been led to get a Redmi Note 9.
PB had first dibs but as the salesâ rep could not tell me whether I could easily put the Chinese version of MIUI on it, in order to rid myself of the Google bloatware, then I couldnât safely buy one. I wasted enough time on the M6 Note on that front, and my installation of its Chinese OS could well have been down to a fluke. He also refused to tell me the price difference between the sale units and the shop-soiled demo ones other than it was small, and, âYou may as well buy a new one.â
Thereâs no irony here with privacy: Chinese apps at least tell you what legislation covers their usage, unlike western apps which donât mention US Government snooping yet Google passes on stuff anyway. In all the years Iâve used the Meizus there has been nothing dodgy in terms of the data received and sent, as far as I know, and thereâs nothing questionable constantly running such as Google Services that transmits and drains your battery.
There are some great sites, a number of which are in India, that teach you how to turn off some of Xiaomiâs bloatwareâs notifications, but they seldom annoyed me on the Meizu. Iâll soon find out first-hand how good they are.
Why the Redmi Note 9? It was one of the few on Aliexpress that I could find with the Chinese ROM installed, saving me a lot of effort. I wonât have to root it, for a start. When your choice is down to about half a dozen phonesâAliexpress and Ebay vendors are so keen to get export sales they make it a point not to sell Chineseâyouâre guided on price and your daily usage. Iâm a firm believer that a phone should not cost the same as a used car. Bonuses: the big battery and the fact it isnât too bright (thatâs just me); detriments: 199 g in weight and a humongous screen.
The vendor (YouGeek) was conscientious enough to send me a message (along the lines of âAre you absolutely sure you want the Chinese version?â) which cost me a couple of days since I donât always pop back to the site (and you canât read messages on the phone browser version anyway). Now weâre on the same page, theyâve dispatched the phone. Weâll see how things look in a couple of weeks. Thereâs no turning back now.
* PS.:From How to Geek: ‘Once you notice the battery is swollen or compromised in any way, you should immediately stop using the device. Turn the power off, and above all else, do not charge the device. Once the battery has reached such a point of failure that the battery is swollen, you must assume that all safety mechanisms in the battery are offline. Charging a swollen battery is literally asking for it to turn into an exploding ball of noxious flammable gas right in your living room.’ I wish I was told this when I first went to PB months ago when the battery began expanding and I enquired about phones.
Itâs bittersweet to get news of the Chevrolet Corvette from whatâs left of GM here in New Zealand, now a specialist importer of cars that are unlikely to sell in any great number. And weâre not unique, as the Sino-American firm pulls out of entire regions, and manufactures basically in China, North America, and South America. Peter Hanenbergerâs prediction that there wonât be a GM in the near future appears to be coming true. Whatâs the bet that the South American ranges will eventually be superseded by Chinese product? Ford is already heading that way.
Inconceivable? If we go back to 1960, BMC was in the top 10 manufacturers in the world.
Out of interest, I decided to take four yearsâ1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020âto see who the top 10 car manufacturers were. I havenât confirmed 1990âs numbers with printed sources (theyâre off YouTube) and I donât know exactly what their measurement criteria are. Auto Katalog 1991â2 only gives country, not world manufacturer, totals and that was my most ready source.
Tables for 2000 and 2010 come from OICA, when they could be bothered compiling them. The last is from Daily Kanban and the very reliable Bertel Schmitt, though he concedes these are based on units sold, not units produced, due to the lack of data on the latter.
2000
1 GM
2 Ford
3 Toyota
4 Volkswagen
5 DaimlerChrysler
6 PSA
7 Fiat
8 Nissan
9 Renault
10 Honda
2010
1 Toyota
2 GM
3 Volkswagen (7,341,065)
4 Hyundai (5,764,918)
5 Ford
6 Nissan (3,982,162)
7 Honda
8 PSA
9 Suzuki
10 Renault (2,716,286)
If Renaultâs and Nissanâs numbers were combined, and they probably should be at this point, then they would form the fourth largest grouping.
2020
1 Toyota
2 Volkswagen
3 Renault Nissan Mitsubishi
4 GM
5 Hyundai
6 Stellantis
7 Honda
8 Ford
9 Daimler
10 Suzuki
For years we could predict the GMâFordâToyota ordering but I still remember the headlines when Toyota edged GM out. GM disputed the figures because it wanted to be seen as the worldâs number one. But by 2010 Toyota is firmly in number one and GM makes do with second place. Ford has plummeted to fifth as Volkswagen and Hyundaiâby this point having made its own designs for just three and a half decadesâovertake it.
Come 2020, with the American firmsâ expertise lying in segment-quitting ahead of competing, theyâve sunk even further: GM in fourth and Ford in eighth.
Itâs quite remarkable to me that Hyundai (presumably including Kia and Genesis) and Honda (including Acura) are in these tables with only a few brands, ditto with Daimler AG. Suzuki has its one brand, and thatâs it (if you want to split hairs, of course thereâs Maruti).
Toyota has Lexus and Daihatsu and a holding in Subaru, but given its broad range and international salesâ strength, it didnât surprise me that it has managed to have podium finishes for the last three decades. Itâs primarily used its own brand to do all its work, and thatâs no mean feat.
Iâm surprised we donât see the Chinese groups in these tables but many are being included in the othersâ totals. For instance, SAIC managed to shift 5,600,482 units sold in 2020 but some of those would have been counted in the Volkswagen and GM totals.
I wonât go into the reasons for the US manufacturersâ decline here, but things will need to change if they donât want to keep falling down these tables. Right now, it seems they will continue to decline.
I came across an old post of mine on Euston Films remakes, at the time the American version of Widows hit the big screen. My last question, after going through Minder, The Sweeney and Widows reboots, sequels and remakes: âNow, whoâll star in a new Van der Valk?â
Since local TV programmers and I have entirely different tastes, I only happened across the new Van der Valk from 2020 recently thanks to a French reviewer on Twitter. I wish I knew earlier: I rate Marc Warren as an actor, it has a great ensemble cast, and for those of us who are older, the theme tune is based on the original (Jack Trombey still gets a credit in each episode, though it should be noted that itâs a pseudonym for the Dutch composer Jan Stoeckart).
As far as I know, few (if any?) of the Van der Valk episodes with Barry Foster were based on the Nicolas Freeling stories, so I didnât really mind the absence of Samson and Arlette. Mentally I treated it as a prequel, pre-Arlette, till I found out that showrunner Chris Murray had killed her off in a flashback sequence in episode 3 (giving stuntwoman Wendy Vrijenhoek the least screen time of the four actresses who have played her in the British versions). Which is, of course, the opposite to how Freeling had it, since he had killed off van der Valk and had Arlette star in two novels.
I read that one reviewer noted that the stories werenât particularly Dutch, but then, were they ever? I didnât really get into Broen or Wallander because of how Scandinavian the storylines were (though it must be said, I enjoyed Zen for its Italianness). I do, however, appreciate the change of scene from London or Los Angeles, which seem to be the home of so many cop shows. I even welcomed Brighton with Grace, starring John Simm, and produced by Kieran Murray-Smith (of the Murray-Smiths), or, for that matter, Sheffield with Doctor Who.
But a Van der Valk sans Arlette does mean the heart of the old stories is gone, and we have yet another emotionally broken TV detective, a ploy that weâve all seen before. But the casting is solid, and the very likeable Marc Warren shows he can lead a series ably.
Of the Euston Films shows I followed as a youngster, it does appear they have all now been revisited in my lifetime, except for one: Special Branch. Bring back Craven!
We all know what will happen. This is one of two fakes who have sent me a Facebook friend request this week. The first was given the all-clear despite having spam links; and no doubt this will be judged to be perfectly acceptable by Facebook. (In the meantime, a post from Lucire that featured the latest PETA âwould rather go nakedâ campaign was instantly removed.)
What isnât acceptable, is, of course, criticizing them. Bob Hoffman writes (original emphases):
According to Vice, recently the Cybersecurity for Democracy project âhas revealed major flaws in Facebook political ad transparency tools and highlighted how Facebookâs algorithms were amplifying (COVID vaccine) misinformation.â This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been conscious for the past few years âŠ
This week Facebook, in an act of abject unscrupulousness, suspended the accounts of several of the researchers from NYU who are leading the Cybersecurity for Democracy project and need to access Facebook to do their work. One of the researchers called Facebookâs action ââdisgracefulâ at a time when the disinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines is literally costing lives.â
This is how weak and pathetic Facebook is. Instead of doing better (which they claim they try to do), theyâd rather shut down criticism. A bit like a dictatorship.
Theyâre not alone, of course. In the news recently were the snowflakes of Ebay, who also canât take a bit of criticism.
Ina and David Steiner publish a news website about ecommerce and were critical of Ebay in its latest incarnation. The CEO wasnât happy, nor was Ebayâs head of global security, James Baugh, who began a campaign to terrorize the Steiners.
The Steiners found their fence tagged, then Ebayâs staff began sending ordering items to be sent to them, including a fĆtal pig, a mask of a bloody pig face (witnessed by a police officer), a book on surviving the death of a spouse, a package of live spiders and fly larvĂŠ, and a sympathy wreath, among others. Then Ebayâs employees went to Boston, near where the Steiners lived, and planned to plant a tracking device on their car. The Steiners spotted the rental vehicles stalking them. Understandably, they couldnât sleep properly, and even slept separately fearing they would be physically attacked.
It was thanks to the Steinersâ own efforts that they managed to get the number plate of one of the vehicles tailing them, which was then referred to police, who finally managed to figure out what was going on.
One person has been sentenced in all this mess to 18 months in prison, and there have been other arrests, though as this is the US, the CEO gets off scot free with a US$57 million golden handshake.
This isnât that out of the ordinary, and entirely predictable for anyone who has followed this blog. Or the news, for that matter.
A few years ago, I blogged about how Elon Musk and Tesla tried to get one of its whistleblowing employees killed by telling the police that he was planning a mass shooting. According to Bloomberg Businessweek:
Many chief executive officers would try to ignore somebody like Tripp. Instead, as accounts from police, former employees, and documents produced by Teslaâs own internal investigation reveal, Musk set out to destroy him.
The employee, Martin Tripp, allegedly was hacked and followed before the attempt to have him swatted.
Former Gigafactory security manager, Sean Gouthro, said Tripp never sabotaged Tesla or hacked anything, and Musk knew this, but still wanted to damage Trippâs reputation. You can read more directly at the source.
My negative encounters with Big Tech, which I put down more to shoddy programming or incompetence than malice, are pretty tame.
Put together, the pattern of IP theft, censorship, inciting genocide and misinformation, and targeting individuals, is very obvious. Itâs part of their culture these days, since the US keeps letting these companies do what they wish with impunity, and to heck with what anyone would reasonably think the laws actually say. And itâs not just the US: when has our Blairite government or its predecessor moved against Big Tech in any meaningful way, on taxation, or on apportioning some responsibility for their part in COVID-19 misinformation?
Meanwhile, I was amused to see this under Arthur Turnure’s entry in Wikipedia:
So Turnure starts Vogue but decides to work under an 18-year-old in another city.
The reference linked doesn’t back this up at all.
I know Wikipedia is full of crap that we can all go and correct, but as we’ve seen, shit sticks and on the internet, bullshit sticks, including one item that I’ve blogged about before that remained for over a decade.
What gets me is why someone who doesn’t know a subject would deem themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to write about it. Because I just wouldn’t dare.
As detailed before, you don’t see as many inaccuracies in the Japanese or German versions of Wikipedia, and you have to conclude, especially now with politicians doing the same thing, that the Anglosphere is increasingly an anti-intellectual place to be. ‘The fundamental problem with the English-speaking world is that ignorance is not considered a vice,’ said the brother of my friend, Prof Catherine Churchman. My earlier post from 2018 stands now more than ever.
It does seem the sun is setting, after 25 years, on Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei on RTL.
Last week, the network released three episodes from 8.15 p.m., and to heck with the low ratings of the last episode which would be far too late for younger viewers. Theyâre doing the same this week, and finishing up the season next week with the two last ones made.
Itâs no secret that the viewer numbers have been falling year after year, especially after the departure of Tom Beck, and the long-running actioner costs a lot to makeâtoo much for a show that now nets around the 2 million mark each week, with increased competition from other networks and forms of entertainment.
Last year, the show was revamped again, but unlike previous efforts, this was a very bumpy and massive reset. Shows donât always do well after this, especially a revamp that was bigger than Martial Law abandoning most of its original cast in season 2 as well as not resolving the season 1 cliffhanger. Or each of the incarnations of Blackadder. Cobra 11 survived most earlier revamps, such as the seasons with Vinzenz Kiefer, because it maintained some continuity. We didnât mind the anachronisms and the inconsistencies as long as the heart of the show was there. Over the first two decades, there was a humanity to the show, regardless of how much haters think it was a shallow actioner, and by that I refer to the home life of the main character, Semir Gerkhan, portrayed by ErdoÄan Atalay.
Viewers invested a lot into Semir and Andrea, and even with the 2014â15 seasons, we could count on that behind the emotional core of the series. It didnât matter that the bright, cheerful years of Beck had become a sombre-keyed drama, with the happy coupleâs marriage on the rocks, Semir sporting a full beard and not his goatee, and a major story arc. It was a return to the actionâcomedy tradition in 2016 with Daniel Roesner taking over from Kiefer, who I was surprised to see later in Bulletproof.
Semir and Andrea: the emotional heart of Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11.
With Roesnerâs departure, producers sought to get rid of everyone else on the show, wrapping up their storylines, so that 2020 would begin with only Atalay and Gizem Emre, who joined the cast in 2014, reprising their roles. We can deal with Semir pairing up with a female partner for the first time in 24 years (Vicky Reisinger, played by Pia Stutzenstein), having a new boss (a disabled character played by an able-bodied actor, Patrick Kalupa; and since we never had an episode about how the character became disabled, it seems a slap in the face to not cast a disabled actor), and an irritatingly dark set. But Andrea and the kids have been written out, not mentioned again; enter Semirâs estranged mother, who only became estranged a couple of seasons ago, since the character said previously that he called her every Christmas. To all intents and purposes, this was a new show with little connection to the old. And I think they may have gone one step too far in their efforts to present something new to viewers.
There is a slight return to the structures of the older scripts in this second block of season 25, with an emphasis on the stories over the action (as there had been at the start). There are moments where you even recognize the show. But if the first half of the season had put you off, you never would have found out, especially since RTL hasnât even bothered to show the action scenes in many of the press photos.
The scheduling is exactly what youâd expect a network to do in order to kill a show, to say that the average viewer numbers had dropped again, too far to be viable. Itâs the sort of show that might have a TV movie or two later on, but for now, Iâm not that surprised there are statements that this 25th season (28th, if you believe the network) is the last âsein wirdâ (for now). Another retooling for the 26th so it could return? Or time to wrap it all up?
I donât think it bodes well for us fans, unless they can tap into the Zeitgeist again for something that modern viewers are going to love.
I thought if we were serious about stopping tailgating, then the solution in the form of public service announcements would be remarkably simple, as far as the men are concerned. My concept, but not my photos. Since we’re talking lives here, one hopes the photos’ copyright owners will allow me to make these proposals.
You’d end tailgating overnight among half the population, and arguably more than half the culprits.
I havenât been able to find anything on this bug online, but itâs very common.
As far as I can recall, all of our online publications that use Wordpress have themes designed or modified by yours truly. However, Lucire Rouge has a mostly bought-in theme, where my changes have been limited to a couple of CSS rules. The theme developer actually came in and helped us with a few modifications, which shows the extent to which he does follow-up for paying customers.
But there was one thing he was never able to crack, and I donât think itâs his fault, since it happens on a lot of websites, including Medinge Groupâs (also a theme I did not design, though I did earlier ones). On both these sites, there were no bolds and italics. There still arenât on Medingeâs.
There are <strong> and <em> codes in there, but the bolding and obliquing are done by the browser. The font files actually arenât loaded, so what we see are false bolds (the browser attempts to âoverprintâ the roman, duplicating the outline and shifting it marginally to give the illusion of a heavier typeface) and obliques, not italics (itâs the roman file pushed over 15 degrees or so). The former is particularly bad, as the outlines clash, and the result can be hollow glyphs, something that any font developer will know when one outline winds up accidentally on top of another in Fontographer or Fontlab.
These Wordpress themes rely on Google Fonts (another sin, in my opinion) so I donât know if the fault lies with Google or Wordpress, or the developer. If Wordpress does indeed power 70 per cent of websites, then I have to say the bug is awfully common, and I probably do see it on a very high percentage of visited sites.
The themes allow us to select the font family, but the selection only calls a single font file from the family.
Above: A graphic clipping text from Lucire Rouge that I sent to the developer.
The solution, as I discovered after months of toing and froing with Lucire Rougeâs theme dev, was to do your own font-linking rules in the CSS file and upload the fonts themselves to the relevant directory on the server. I must note publicly the âmonthsâ were not his fault, but due to my own delay. I should not expect computer programmers to be typographers, either.
It is something that one needs to watch out for, as the fake bolds and italics are horrible to look at, and must look amateur, even to the non-professional.
