Posts by Gene Cash 5768 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007
Otherwise someone will fish it out of the bin and use it on another box that starts to mysteriously fail.
Anyone remember the horror that was active SCSI termination? Where the drive at the end of the chain had to be powered on (so it would have termination) before the server or it would all go to shit?
I remember trying to explain that "this drive needs to be turned on first" and being told I was complete rubbish.
Yes, I remember when highres game cards didn't bother to support standard VESA modes.
It's called bleeding-edge for a reason. You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.
I remember buying stuff based on if it was supported by Linux or not. There was a lot of sites that told you if a particular laptop was hostile to Linux. Remember the Sony VAIOs that had the floppy drive select line inverted just for the fuck of it?
I remember when you had to hand-calculate X11 "mode lines" for EVERYTHING, and if you screwed it up, you had a good chance of blowing up your expensive monitor.
I remember when EDID showed up and you could ASK the monitor what resolutions it supported! What a concept!
> Delivery people can get lost trying to find a flat in a tower block or navigate a large housing estate
So instead the robots won't give a shit and just drop the parcel where-ever? I think UPS has a patent on that already.
Edit: also, if that thing came trundling down the sidewalk, it'd be spare parts inside of an hour, at most. "Look! Stepper motors!"
A prop strike means the engine needs to be removed, dismantled to the crankshaft, and carefully inspected. It's usually a toss-up to if it's cheaper to buy a new engine, and insurance usually instantly totals it.
I wonder if the owner (or insurance company) has any recourse for the costs?
it's perhaps unreasonable to expect kit makers to keep providing software patches for years after they've stopped shipping a device
Why? I don't see why people should be allowed to lob shit into the market and wash their hands of things.
I think if companies were required to provide 3 years of security updates, this would stop cheap garbage marketed on a razor-thin margin.
Well, in an interview where he was walking around the new Starship build, he did say his deadlines were super optimistic, then he said "if I wasn't optimistic, then I wouldn't have tried to land boosters on barges, or build the biggest fully reusable orbital rocket. Everyone has repeatedly told me how impossible all that is."
However, I don't see how this robot "gets us to Mars"
This is usually how it goes with Wendy's and Burger King. Only McDonald's has its shit together to have the self-order kiosks functioning.
What's worse with Wendy's are the self-order kiosks are basically registers turned around, and they're at the order stalls, so you stand there in the way of people trying to queue up to order from the staff.
And people wonder why Amazon and McDonald's are doing so well. They seem to be the only companies able to handle modern technology. I tried to order a rainsuit and some mirrors for my motorcycle from a company that was not Amazon, and it was building-the-pyramids time.
The even sadder part is the food quality is in inverse proportion to the service. Wendy's burgers are actually recognizable as meat and mostly edible.
Have you ever driven in America??
Windows NT could probably drive better than 60% of the people here.
A REAL self-driving car solves all the idiot "drivers" killing people because they don't give enough of a shit to pay attention to what's going on around them.
Unfortunately, we don't have any real self-driving cars, and I don't think we will for at least a decade. It needs more than hooking a bunch of sensors and a GPS to a computer and attaching a steering wheel motor.
Edit: God, I can't type.
So we had "cash for clunkers" where we got old, polluting cars off the road. Problem is, poor people suddenly ended up having no cars to buy because A) these cars were trashed and B) prices went up because supply went down.
Also, it turned out to be worse for the environment because these cars were simply shredded or smashed without draining the fluids, so all the oil, coolant, brake fluid, etc is now seeping down through all the landfills.
I exited the app (v78 as well) moved /usr/local/thunderbird to thunderbird-old, untarred the BZ2 file, and started it. I still had my 5 or 6 Google calendars working. I'm on Devuan. It's probably systemd that broke your calendars.
It "just works" and hasn't been screwed with, or revamped, or updated, so I went back and donated $60.
> Will I even recognise the new beasty?
YES. The UI has not been Mozilla-ed at all.
These are just large sites. They're not the internet, and the internet is not "centralized" around them.
Google's a big search engine because it's superseded all the crap ones before it, and because Bing, etc just aren't very good.
If Google went bankrupt tomorrow (which isn't going to happen) then people would drop back to Bing and whatever else, until someone else replicated Google's success.
It's the same with Amazon and Facebook. They're big and popular because they happen to be the "best" at what they do at the moment, where "best' is defined as "not as shitty as the rest" -- if people get pissed off with Amazon's customer service, treatment of their employees, or bogus reviews, or what-have-you, then they'll leave and go somewhere better, if that exists.
For example, I use Amazon a lot as a "shopping search engine" then I find the actual manufacturer/vendor and buy from them.
A lot of the time I can't do that because the manufacturer has decided they don't want to actually sell their stuff "to the little people" and tries to pawn me off on some crappy distributor, and other times they just don't have a working site, in which case I fall back to Amazon.
This is why Amazon makes lots of money, because other people are incompetent at selling their stuff. They put all sorts of obstacles in the way of you giving them money.
They're big and they supply an important service, but that doesn't make them "the internet"
This is the same situation as "Orlando/Melbourne International Airport" and "Orlando/Sanford International Airport" which are 1hr 10min and 45min away respectively.
Orlando finally got the high powered lawyers involved, and now it's Melbourne Orlando International Airport, which is slightly better.
I've had a dozen people ask for rides, and then get a rude shock at the price of an Uber or taxi.
> The rubber radio volume knob on my 2017 Ford Focus has started breaking down
Wot? You need to get with the times, and buy a vehicle that has only a touchscreen, where you have to look over and search for the control instead of watching your driving! Plus when the touchscreen dies, it's an even bigger bill!
"if a bad actor was first able to successfully break into a hospital’s secure network, know and understand the pathway from there to the panel, and then leverage the vulnerabilities."
So they're saying "nobody's smart enough to do it" anyway. Nice.
Assholes. But then in that case, they fit right in with the American medical system.
On this side of the pond, that's apparently the case: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Electrical_Code
"In the United States, statutory law cannot be copyrighted and is freely accessible and copyable by anyone.[8] When a standards organization develops a new coding model and it is not yet accepted by any jurisdiction as law, it is still the private property of the standards organization and the reader may be restricted from downloading or printing the text for offline viewing. For that privilege, the coding model must still be purchased as either printed media or electronic format (e.g. PDF.) Once the coding model has been accepted as law, it loses copyright protection and may be freely obtained at no cost."
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