Unfortunately the latest revision of reCAPTCHA has become such a pain that I've come very close to just giving up on signing up for whatever service it is I'm trying to use that has it implemented.
I have to go through several attempts to verify myself because Google didn't like that I missed one box with a car in it and have to start all over looking for street signs.
I often use a VPN and browser extensions that make the new one always asks me to verify. The new tests are just terrible (choose all photos with an apartment building??). It will sometimes take me a few minutes to complete the test when it asks me to check all boxes with a car and the slow fade animation that takes 5 seconds starts. Then it decides that I didn't choose them well enough and starts over again. The old CAPTCHA was much better and I didn't feel like I was just feeding Google's street view.
Yeah, it frustrates me a lot too. If I need to pick the squares with street signs about half the time they want me to choose the squares that have the pole and half not! Ditto with the square with the tiny corner of the sign.
I became really good (or really bad) at them, that once I had to go through >8< rounds of reCAPTCHA to get through....I seriously was thinking it was never going to end!
And sadly it seems the bots have improved even more then the CAPTCHA's. Googles latest variation of "Click on all boxes that contain X until none are shown" takes a significant amount of time to complete. It also seems that the faster you are in clicking the images the longer the next image takes to load, often leading to me hitting submit only to have to start all over again since the next image still contained what Google was looking for.
Sometimes I think it might be easier to just run a ML algorithm to complete them for me...
Yes, on x86 systems it mimics a DS3615. I've seen it installed on cheap dell desktops, like an optiplex 755.
Works well, with some limitations. I dont think their automatic port forwarding service (quickconnect) works well - since that service checks for a valid Synology MAC address.
Additionally - you can't do the automatic system updates as it might break certain portions that XPEnology overrides.
The biggest thing that's missing from this article to me is there's no explanation at all why the game was rebranded to Infestation. He wrote the article out as "we made mistakes, we learned" but if you learned and adopted why did the name have to change?
That said, The War Z was a terrible choice of name, as it naturally invited comparisons between our game and DayZ. In the run-up to launch, we thought we hit all of the important PR milestones: early demos, a press tour, regular asset reveals, hands-on previews, etc. Even so, we made a big mistake in not listening to the vocal minority of our community who thought the name was terrible. Handling our community communications differently would have alerted us to the major mistake we were making in choosing a name that was so close to our main competitor’s game.
Since a lot of people are saying it shouldn't have taken that long for your VP to set up an irc server (which I agree with), I'd like to argue a case I haven't seen made here. What were your specific needs? Was he setting the server up for just those needs, or what "might be needed"? Both a IRC server and ZNC do not take much to configure for basic needs.
When you start adding features you don't need but think are cool or may one day get used, setting up these things becomes a whole other thing. A IRC server with simple nick auth and chanserv I'm sure would've been enough. What else did your VP implement? A egg drop not? Some other features? There has to be more to this story then you've said.
It seems like it is both a font issue and a Safari issue. Here’s a screenshot¹ of all the characters in the string along with their Unicode codepoints:
Note that other than U+0020 (SPACE), U+1F146 (SQUARED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER W), U+1F137 (SQUARED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H), and U+1F148 (SQUARED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y), iOS doesn’t have any fonts containing glyphs for any of the characters. (The squared letter characters are covered (on iOS 7 at least) by the fonts Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN and Hiragino Mincho ProN²). However, for some reason, Safari on iOS is not performing font substitution in this situation and using one of the Hiragino fonts to display them. As you noted, this font substitution seems to be working fine in other iOS apps, as these squared letters are displaying there.
As an aside, on iOS 7, it is finally possible to install custom fonts yourself³ via a configuration profile⁴. I’ve installed a few fonts I’ve needed in this way⁵, and while they work perfectly in apps like Pages (for iOS), Safari seems to completely ignore their existence. Even after installing them and rebooting, Safari still shows the entire string as boxes⁶. (Symbola alone has a glyph for every character in the above string, so every character should certainly be displayable). However, copying and pasting the string of boxes into an app like Pages shows all the characters just fine⁷.
This seems to be a very unscientific approach. It doesn't appear that the tests were run on a multitude of machines. The digital ocean machine could've had malfunctioning hardware, or been a rare occurrence of a overloaded server. While I'd say this may not likely be the case, but you'd have to be a fool to make a decision based on just one machine from each provider.
This is the exact same problem I had. I ultimately uninstalled the app because I didn't want to see the "BBM Connected" notification, particularly since I haven't even created an account yet.
I have to go through several attempts to verify myself because Google didn't like that I missed one box with a car in it and have to start all over looking for street signs.