Re: Tesla has the same stability as bitcoin.
At nine years and 132,000 miles, I need some spares, yes.
GJC
Posts by Geoff Campbell
1879 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2008
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Musk, Tesla win securities fraud battle over that 'funding secured' tweet
Monday 6th February 2023 13:50 GMT 
Re: Tesla has the same stability as bitcoin.
Where on earth does this "not selling spares" nonsense come from? You can look up the full parts list online at service.tesla.com, for free, and walk into any Tesla service centre or any one of a bunch of third party resellers and order pretty much anything on the list. I do so regularly.
GJC
helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD
Thursday 2nd February 2023 11:49 GMT
Re: Don't get this MAC is simple thing
No, this isn't a familiarity thing. I have been using MacOS off and on for 37 years, albeit in a very sporadic way. My main gripe with it is discoverability, but the top-of-screen menu is a very close second. It just doesn't gel with how my mind maps out the screen, I don't want to have to select the application before selecting a menu item. Each window should have its own menu bar.
(And don't give me the mouse-pointer-landing-space lecture, I've heard it all before, *far* too many times. I understand the concept, but it is a very, very minor concern compared to the major cognitive dissonance caused to me by having one menu bar displayed with multiple open windows.)
GJC
Wednesday 1st February 2023 08:38 GMT
Re: Don't get this MAC is simple thing
I have just been given a MacBook to use for a particular customer. It is quite simply dreadful to use, with no discoverability and some *really* boneheaded UI design decisions. And I still hate top-screen menus, for all the reasons I've hated them since I first used a Mac in about 1986, but now with added bile as the menu bar is about three feet away from the application on a decent 4K screen.
GJC
SpaceX tells astronomers: Fine, we'll try to stop Starlink spoiling stargazing sessions
Friday 13th January 2023 21:07 GMT 
LEO is a very valuable space
I know it's fashionable to rag on Musk at every opportunity these days, so let's ignore Starlink for the moment, and consider the wider picture.
LEO is very valuable real-estate. It will relatively soon be extremely crowded indeed, for all sorts of reasons, now that orbital launches have come down in price to merely eye-watering rather than kings-ransom levels.
So, I'm sorry, but surface-based astronomy is not going to be viable for much longer. Not my fault, no point yelling at me, I'm just the messenger.
The good news is that orbital launches are now getting much cheaper, not least due to the same company that runs Starlink. So space-based astronomy is the way to go.
GJC
Microsoft’s Nadella: Tech is in for a rough two years
Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher
Apple preps for 'third-party iOS app stores' in Europe
Thursday 15th December 2022 19:15 GMT
Re: Tesla spares
Also nonsense. I just upgraded my driver's seat to a later type, bought from a breakers yard and using cheap additional wiring harnesses bought from Tesla.
I had to take the completed job into a Tesla service centre for them to upgrade the software to support the new features, the techie there was very interested in what I had done, went and did a bit of research, fiddled with his laptop for a while, and sorted it all out. He then thanked me for bringing him an interesting problem, and charged me half an hour labour for the 90 minutes he'd spent on it.
GJC
Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones
Equinix to cut costs by cranking up the heat in its datacenters
Wednesday 7th December 2022 15:02 GMT
Re: rent you space by the rack
That's always been the case. Each cabinet will have a power allowance.
I was doing datacentre stuff around the advent of blade systems, which could get huge compute density (by the standards of the day), along with equally huge power consumption. I recall some deals where customers were having to rent 10 full-height racks, eight or even nine of which were left basically empty.
GJC
Boeing swipes at Starlink as it finishes two internet slinging satellites
Tuesday 6th December 2022 11:22 GMT 
Latency
I wonder why they felt the need to repeat "low-latency" quite so often? Starlink is up around 500kms, and that gives 30-50ms round-trip latency depending on a bunch of stuff. Assuming some of that is routing on the ground, and waving a finger vaguely in the air, I reckon that puts this service at, what, 3-400ms round-trip latency?
Which, OK, is way better than the 1100ms I "enjoyed" with our first satellite service many years ago (actually, that was hilarious, made Telnet sessions feel like a 110baud teletype), but definitely isn't low.
GJC
How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?
Tuesday 6th December 2022 16:25 GMT
Re: Unpopular opinion incoming...
When Steve Jobs regained control of Apple in 1997, the first thing he did was to fire over 4,000 people, about the same number Musk fired. OK, probably a smaller percentage, but no doubt exactly the same method - firing whole departments he saw as surplus.
I don't recall anything but praise in that case.
GJC
Tuesday 6th December 2022 10:00 GMT
Unpopular opinion incoming...
...how about we just wait and see?
Give it six months, or even better twelve, and see what the landscape looks like then? What's the point of all the catastrophising and doom-mongering? Does it make you feel better? Do you, perhaps, have some sort of emotional investment in Twitter that has been somehow trodden on by Musk? Do you, in short, really care?
I don't. I'm watching it with interest, and perhaps ironically, I'm using Twitter quite a lot more than I did previously (but from a very, very low starting point). Will it work, or will it collapse? I have no opinion. I can wait, because I am an adult.
GJC
Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest
Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech
Wednesday 23rd November 2022 11:57 GMT
Too much complexity
Voice assistants will take off when you can talk to them in normal conversational language. At the moment, they are like 1980s Adventure games, where you have to find the exact combination of very specific words in order to make something happen, and even when you find the magic incantation the results are often not what you wanted to happen.
It will happen. But not with this generation of devices and services.
GJC
Koch-funded group sues US state agency for installing 'spyware' on 1m Android devices
This ancient quasar may be the remains of the first-gen star that started us all
Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'
Tesla reportedly faces criminal probe into self-driving hype
Thursday 27th October 2022 18:17 GMT
Re: Autononmous cars
And then, at the other end of the market, you could choose to use a multi-occupancy taxi that would not necessarily take the most direct route, in exchange for a lower cost. Effectively a small free-roaming bus, but one that picked you up and dropped you off exactly where you wanted to be, rather than 15 minutes walk away.
There's lots of possibilities. Some might happen, some won't. We'll see.
GJC
Thursday 27th October 2022 07:44 GMT
Re: Autononmous cars
I think you mean "a problem that you don't personally have".
The world is full of people who cannot drive, for any number of reasons - the young, the old, the blind, the drunk, and so on. Autonomous cars will bring huge benefits to all of those, without the high costs of the current solution, which involves having someone else dedicated to doing the driving.
Then there's the question of utilisation. Most cars spend 95% or more of their time parked up, doing nothing. Hugely wasteful, and hugely disruptive in large towns and cities. Especially true of second cars in families. The utilisation of autonomous cars should be way higher than this, allowing the world to contain many fewer cars. This is a good thing.
GJC
Musk grumbles about 'overpaying' for Twitter but says he's excited
Thursday 27th October 2022 08:27 GMT
Profit
Well, profit comes from offering services that people want or need. One that I can see Twitter pioneering, and which Musk has hinted at, I think, would be a federated identity service, so that online users can have a validated identity used across multiple services. Things like Facebook login services come close to offering this, but fall a bit short.
GJC
Thursday 27th October 2022 08:02 GMT
Re: All these single lonely downvotes...
On the flip side, there are people for whom Musk can do no right, which I find equally baffling.
Me, I think he's a bit of a prick who needs to learn when to keep his mouth shut, but at the moment he has two products on the market that are unique in their combination of capabilities. So, for the moment, I own those two products, and like them a lot. When they come due for replacement, if there are other products that meet the requirements, I will compare them and buy whichever is best for me.
GJC
To build a better quantum computer, look into a black hole, says professor Brian Cox
Microsoft ships non-Surface PC: a cheap Arm box for devs
Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel
Tuesday 25th October 2022 07:59 GMT
<raised eyebrow>
On the one hand, yeah, sure, who needs it, strip it out and be done with it.
On the other hand, this rather implies that support in the kernel for old processor architectures is on the critical execution path for current architectures, which rather makes me wonder if there isn't a fundamental design problem in there somewhere?
Me, I'd leave the code in, but make it a conditional compilation option, so that if you *really* want to run ancient hardware, you can, but the code isn't included on mainstream builds.
GJC
Chinese carriers collectively claim to have cracked a billion 5G subs
Tuesday 25th October 2022 07:50 GMT
Mmmmm?
Well, yes, I'm sure that the basic figures are right. However, there's a difference between "a billion people chose to subscribe to a 5G service" and what actually happened, which was "a billion people subscribe to a phone service that happens to be 5G capable".
But, hey, 5G is a good thing, I'm quite happy with it. I just wonder why the figures needed to be provided with that narrative.
GJC
Sony, Honda collaborate on 'premium' electric vehicles that are born in the USA
Microsoft arms Surface Pro 9 with Qualcomm SQ3, 12th-gen Intel chips
Thursday 13th October 2022 11:50 GMT
Re: Much ado about nothing...
Microsoft has never said anything about Surface being a Mac killer, and neither do they have particularly big aspirations for sales figures. They are, if you like, reference builds for vanilla Windows machines.
Me, I like them. My regular travelling machine is a Surface Pro X, and my work "laptop" is a Surface Pro 7+. Both excellent machines, that do everything I need in a light yet reasonably rugged package. I have no idea what you mean by them being "locked down", perhaps this is a reference to installing Linux on them? I've not tried, I have other machines for that, as I mostly use Linux on servers rather than on desktops or portable machines.
The Pro 9 and Laptop 5 are nice evolutions of the line. Nobody is claiming that they are revolutionary.
They don't fit your needs? That's cool, buy something else. They're not compulsory.
GJC
Apple exec sues over 'ageist' removal of $800k stock bonus
iPhone 14 iFixit teardown shows Apple's learning on repairs
Microsoft Outlook sends users back to 1930 with (very) mini-Millennium-Bug glitch
Friday 16th September 2022 08:49 GMT
Re: Y2K & Date Windowing - THIS IS NOT A BUG
It's in the same place in Windows 11 (and presumably therefore in 10, too). It's one of the few remaining things you need to launch the old Control Panel for, there isn't an equivalent in Settings.
Interestingly, in Windows 11 the default setting is 1950 -> 2049, so dates up to 31/12/49 should fall into the 21st Century correctly.
GJC
Biting the hand that feeds IT
