Posts by Gene Cash 5755 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007
Just tell them you're sorry, but you can't help them, and have them move on
Uh huh. Try dealing with *my* family that doesn't take "no" for an answer. "Don't mess me about, you know this computer stuff! Fix my [underspecced virus-ridden] machine!"
So my answer is "sure, but you lose Windows, and you don't get root."
When I am forced into basically involuntary tech servitude, then yes, I do get to impose my preference.
I love it when rich people use their money just to smack people around. Like when Peter Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan into suing Gawker out of existence. I wish Gawker was still dead. They're worse than zombies. They need to be beaten like a rented mule.
I hope Musk fires everyone, down to the janitors. That'll be revenge for screwing with my timeline and subscribing me to crap I wasn't interested in. Hit 'em again, Elon!
NASA wants two independent human rated vehicles to assure access to space
No matter how much we want to beat up on NASA, that was the smartest damn decision since the Apollo days.
Holy cow... can you imagine if we'd just gone with the "safe choice" of Boeing and not tossed any bones to SpaceX and they STILL haven't gotten to ISS, and *having* to buy Soyuz rides with the current situation with Russia?
Putin would not only charge us an arm, leg, and left nut, he'd probably be making serious political hay out of it.
Eh. I had to chuck all my Mini-B cables when I got my new Android Pixel
Which sucked because I had a couple expensive 10ft ones that could actually reach the charger. This American sh*thole does not have enough wall sockets.
I then had to track down and buy some 10ft USB-C cables, which was NOT EASY, at least when I needed them.
I think AR/VR is best thought as a location, not a thing in and of itself, and YOU NEED SOMETHING TO DO IN IT.
I played Pokemon Go until it was updated to say "your phone is rooted, f**k off" at which point I lost all interest. And I've never played any Pokemon games ever, so I wasn't a target market.
The secret there is that they did a LOT of work to set up an interesting universe. You had something non-trivial to do in it, even if it was just interacting with semi-random "animals"
I've also seen where people use AR to find issues with equipment (as in "look at the circled connectors") but that never matches YOUR piece of equipment, so it's not useful. Your equipment has an update so the connectors are now located on a different cable.
The new platform offers way more features than Mailman, including gamification
WTAF?
Why the hell is gamification something for a software bug forum?
Perhaps this explains why GNOME is crap.
Edit: is gamification what I think it is?
Google: "the application of typical elements of game playing"
Yup, OK, then.
Well, it's got 16K cuda cores, so I can imagine it being power-hungry.
Of course it's only needing the nuclear reactor feed when it's doing a serious game.
My big question is with all this power dissipation, what do the fans sound like? I remember having one card where you started a game, and it sounded like the computer was going to levitate on fan power.
If you look at modern cards, they're 70% heatsink and heatpipes, 2 or 4 fans, and all other sorts of cooling gimcrackery.
Linux has some warts and annoying habits
Yeah, but sh*t breaks on Linux, and after some effort, I fix it. It stays fixed.
Sh*t breaks on Windows. I spend a lot of effort and I fix it, and it's broken again next week.
And yes, I'm still on Windows 7 because that's the last time I bothered to set up a Windows VM. I'm certainly not PAYING for anything newer.
Or perhaps it's because, until this article, I didn't even know they made 3D printers, and I've been seriously into 3D printing for 4 years now.
If you want a good 3D printer where you'll be doing more printing than dicking around with the printer, then get yourself a Prusa MK3S+
People cheap out and get an Ender or an Anycubic then bitch that 3D printing sucks. That's like getting a 486 and complaining that Excel takes forever to load.
I've printed a ton of stuff, but then I'm also somewhat of a wizard at OpenSCAD, and the two are related. Designs for something you need don't magically appear. There's a ton of stuff on Thingiverse and Printables, but most of it is just STL files that you can't modify or adjust.
There are Grapple Fixtures (aka LEE sockets) on the mobile transporter system and other strategic places, and the ISS CanadaArm can walk from place to place on the station.
These standardized grapple fixtures are also on the Hubble Space Telescope and just about every satellite out there now.
It also picks up another robot (DEXTRE) that has a ton of fine-control agile manipulators, to be used when something doesn't have a grapple fixture on it, and it can turn bolts and stuff to a limited degree.
Sounding rockets go up and down, so it's actually supposed to land somewhere. Is it supposed to parachute somewhere near the launch pad?
Apparently it's supposed to land "downrange 27km" but there's no info on if this a relatively soft landing, and the instruments are returned, or is it just a prang into the ocean?
Or as recently happened to me, the OSS (GIMP) just stops working.
I discovered this the hard way when I couldn't print a check for my heatpump contractor. Every time I typed the info into GIMP, it either turned it to (literally) Greek or just plain segfaulted.
Turns out to actually be a problem with glibc, at which point instead of coping with it, the GIMP guys just throw up their hands and say "NOT OUR PROBLEM"
Every single major revision has broken that, and you usually have to wait for the 2nd point release for a working fix. That's what drove me to finally install & learn KVM, as I needed a working microphone for the covid era, and even before that when I first started working from home.
The extension pack "contains features like guest USB 2 support ... " but "VirtualBox is completely functional without it"
Somehow I don't see this as a true statement. A VM without USB support seems crippled, to me.
On this side of the pond, an electric blanket lasts about 2-3 months before it goes on the fritz. They're made by Sunbeam, Sunbeam, or Sunbeam, so there's no competition and it's still 1950s tech. Seriously. You open it, and it's a bimetallic strip, a screw attached to the knob to press on the strip, and an open-air uninsulated coil of metal jumpering things, so that if you drop it, the metal shorts against the bimetallic strip and explodes in a shower of sparks. I'm not kidding or exaggerating.
Cheap Chinese crap is a MAJOR step up.
The buck eventually has to stop with SOMEONE. And hopefully someone competent in the matter.
Decision-by-committee is the worst death by a thousand cuts.
However, you do know you're teh awsum when your laptop develops a problem and it's worldwide news.
Yeah, I love the "please rate our app" before it even finishes installing. That guarantees a 1-star.
I updated the Google SMS app, which installed some new app because Google changes their SMS app every Thursday. It demanded that I review it, so I said in the review "Stop asking me to rate it"
Google deleted it saying I needed to make feature requests elsewhere.
I changed it to "Giving a review as requested. Can't give the 0-star review that it deserves."
Many forums will ban you for "necroposting" if you post a reply to something that's more than a week old, to mention all the solutions are a bad idea and here is a good one.
I don't bother any more. They'll get bent over, lose some money or possibly their identity, and learn. That's known as the school of hard knocks.
Me, I really need a Raspberry Pi, because it's the perfect thing for my application, and there's not a good substitute.
So I'm willing to order it and wait, and lo, my order from Mouser went from "6 months" to me getting it in a month and a half. (got 3x 3B+)
But I see a lot of commentards going "I wanna Pi, but I'm not going to WAIT for one!" and storming off in a huff (as commentards do)
So it's NOT "rising inflation and talk of a possible global recession" - it's just people not putting up with the crap and finding something else to do.
Over here, they do the same eyedrops & inspection, and apparently it screens for glaucoma, macular degeneration, retinal detachment, and 2 or 3 other things I can't remember or pronounce.
The dilation sucks, because it means I can't drive for at least 30 minutes, even with a double layer of sunglasses and a dark visor on my helmet.
On one hand I'm all "how dare they steal this tech!!" but then on the other, I see tiny little garbage trials like the ones described in the article and think "well good on the Chinese for actually doing something with it"
"PNNL's recipe isn't being manufactured anywhere in the US ... PNNL's lead VRFB scientist Gary Yang claimed to not be able to find a US company to invest in the technology's production"
Apparently my tax dollars went toward this research, and it was basically sat on a shelf. I'm pretty angry about that.
And apparently the Chinese didn't steal this tech, they bought it fair and square. From the US Dept of Energy. And from a picture caption in the linked article: "Joanne Skievaski is the chief financial officer of Forever Energy in Bellevue, Wash. The company has been trying to get a license from the Department of Energy to make the batteries for over a year" - So if that's true, then Yang is wrong.
I guess the best part of this is it's embarrassed the US, even though they won't do anything except "investigate" and huff and puff.
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