Re: The reason I lost so much weight in short order?
No different to beef chilli. Depends on the chillis you use (mercurial little buggers at the best of times). Choose badly and the world will fall out of your bottom.
1010 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
A healthcare assistant made a colossal conversion error, in his head, and told me I was just short of 20 Stone. It was actually 16; now 12. I suppose the miscalculation could be deliberate. I know the way they inform patients or their cholesterol level can be very misleading... They just add the good cholesterol figure to the bad cholesterol figure and tell you death is imminent. Thanks to that I discovered Quorn chilli ( and recommend it to meat eaters, like myself, and vegetarians alike).
I suppose it depends on whether or not you view the US being able to completely own its own processes and manufacturing for 7nm and smaller chips as being strategic. Then there is the question of whether or not it can be done economically in the face of cheaper competitors without government help. Of course Intel will hold out their hands and say yes to the first and no to the second. Getting at the truth is going to be harder but I get the impression the whole investor model is holding some US sectors back at the moment. Strategically, perhaps it this the US government should be addressing.
I think it was the last Labour government that effectively stuffed it for the firemen when they banned work on the side. Apparently, someone who can climb up and down ladders all day, and can carry someone heavier than himself, makes a great roofer and scaffolder. Who'd have thunk that?
I don’t know of any tech company that doesn’t have an “If you make it, it belongs to us” clause, and in most jurisdictions the law supports that. Some are reasonable enough to include an “if it’s related to our business” clarification. So I can write a dating app (because no one else has thought of that bright idea) without my employer making a claim. In any case, always ask yourself if your private shit and and your employer’s shit might intersect if expressed as a Venn Diagram.
To be clear, I’m choosing not to express an opinion either way here (but feel free to infer). This is not new. Employed tradesmen used to call private work for a bit of pocket money, at the weekend (often using the company’s tools, just like today), as doing a foreigner. Employers didn’t like it then; less so now.
"No "Cancel culture" is a bullying tactic that is used in order to ensure that other points of view are not heard."
I think that depends on who/what is being cancelled. I'm a bit rusty on my history, but the last time the kind of people who say "The Jews will not replace us" were given a platform, it didn't end well?
Apple has absolutely murdered Google (and Android in general) in the the bits of the tablet market that actually matter*. A Chrome OS tablet, with good Anroid compatibility and touch support in general is probably Google's last best chance of making inroads into a space owned by Apple. The Slate was a mess.
* People who actually pay for apps and content, not to mention enough of a device to work with.
Kill it now! Kill it with fire! We got lucky - the office migrated fully to Teams in Feb 2020 (after which everyone stopped using the consumer Skype they preferred to Skype For Business). With a pandemic on the way, this turned out to be a smart move.
Back when I was travelling often, I had the ultimate status with a certain hotel chain.... This usually got me a room upgrade (often to a suite), unlimited complimentary minibar and Club access. On a holiday in Malta, I went to the Club lounge for breakfast one morning, grabbed some cereal, put some bread in the toaster, not realising some toasters are less equal than others, and walked off. That turned out to be a big mistake. Fortunately, it was caught quickly when the fire alarms went off and the hotel was surprisingly forgiving.
Since the MacBook Air (late 2020 variant) is usually plugged into a hub when on the desk, USB-C has the slight advantage of just a single cable into the laptop. However, I prefer MagSafe and I’m not comfortable (although not yet hampered) with the parsimony of ports on the latest MacBooks. My 2015 Pro (13”) has MagSafe, 2 x USB3, Thunderbolt, HDMI and an SD Card reader.
“ I suggest with 5G we can expect similar and in fact this is exactly what EE are saying, implying that they will be capping 'normal' 5G download speeds at 100Mbps.”
Ookla’s best download result was 397Mbps for me. Best upload speed I’ve had is just short of 40. That doesn’t mean you’re not bang on the money thought. Popular speed test services may well be whitelisted.
Sure, I have 5G and I live in the kind of coverage that would make a conspiracy theorist’s eyes swivel independently of one and other. In addition to the attention grabbing download speeds, it gives a consistency of service that 4G does not. Also, since I can end up shunting lot of data about when out and about with a camera, the improved upload speeds are nice. I tend to like improvements on general principle.
I recall similar arguments when 4G arrived. I find these arguments against progress about as compelling as arguing against gravity.
"backs the hardened Trumpists and friends (MAGA, Q-anon etc) even more into a corner.
What's all this about 'cornered rats'?
They won't give up easily."
If the US wishes to remain a democracy (and the popular vote suggests this is the case), these people will simply have to be dealt with. There may well be blood.
It has a small problem common to all high end intel ultrabooks at the moment: The late 2020 MacBook Air. It make these expensive laptops look, erm, expensive.
That said, the Carbon is not without its own advantages and, bearing in mind power consumption, Lenovo have managed impressive battery life (and I still slightly prefer the typing experience of my 2015 Carbon to that of the much improved Apple keyboard). Oh, and per the comment above, well done Lenovo for supporting Linux! It's going to make this laptop very desirable for developers looking for something light to carry.
"Too true. Masks ARE established science"
Masks are just used as things that get in the way of other things. In this case, we are hoping they get in the way of an airborne virus. Masks are porous. Otherwise the wearer would have a worse problem than the virus itself. The more porous a mask is, the less COVID it blocks. To mitigate this, a mask made using multiple layers can be used, providing a better aggregate probability of effectiveness. Masks do not in themselves guarantee to stop the spread of the disease. Rather, different masks provide different degrees of protection, typically expressed as probabilities. Numerically illiterate people seriously lose their shit over this, as evidenced by some of the comments above.
See: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext
"These data also suggest that wearing face masks protects people (both health-care workers and the general public) against infection by these coronaviruses, and that eye protection could confer additional benefit. However, none of these interventions afforded complete protection from infection, and their optimum role might need risk assessment and several contextual considerations."
Navy's shore-based training in 16 sites across the UK as the lead partner in a consortium, Fisher Price Training, which bid for the work. FTFY.
Speaking of training and outsourcing, we're not quite as dystopian as Africa. Yet... A few years ago, on a business trip to Uganda, I rapidly came to the conclusion that no one in a G4S Uniform should ever be handed an M16 ("Would you be kind enough to point that at someone other me," I said more than once). At some point, someone in government is going to come up with the idea of just outsourcing the military altogether.
I've no idea what Microsoft's plans for Linux* are (other than possibly slowly morphing Windows into a kind of Linux). The main attractions of Mac, for me, is that it is i) Unix, ii) mainstream on the desktop and iii) capable of doing everything I would want to do in either Linux or Windows in one box.
* Though pretty stupid not to have Office - they're missing out on a subscription revenue stream.
With good memory management, perhaps we could expect little or no noticeable performance decrease where there is a mix of integrated and DIMM memory. That said, it is starting to look like what memory you have goes further on these new Macs (various demos of users maxing out the 8GB MacBooks; lots of vigorous debate around this).
The MacBook Air 2020 M1 sitting behind me (humble base model I've just bought)? Erm, runs like the clappers. Office under Rosetta? About 20 seconds when launching each application for the first time. Near as damnit instant thereafter (proving there is a pre-process step). So, clappers for Office also. I'm a big believer in the capitalist principle that competition is good. This is that massive (and much needed) boot up Intel's arse.
Probably not. Worst issue I had with Big Sur was that it didn't like executables downloaded via a web browser. That is easy enough to sort out:
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine <name-of-executable>
I would hope anything build on the box would run absolutely fine without issues. I do Ja little ava (so none of those binary executable Shenanigans) but would be happy to give helloworld.c a quick try (thirty years, but I think I can manage hell world in c) to prove either way.
It looks like Rosetta pre-compiles intel code rather than translating during execution. I've seen a couple of YouTube vids where the first attempt to lunch an intel app takes quite a bit more time than subsequent launches. I've also seen a demonstration of VS Code running perfectly well. As such, I'd expect intel versions of things like Git and Maven to work perfectly well. That said, for the developer it's going to be a mixed bag:
- Native versions of Java are here already: https://adtmag.com/articles/2020/11/12/azul-supports-apple-silicon.aspx
- But no idea when Homebrew will be available.
For my work, I would want to know that there are either native versions chromedriver and geckodriver or that, at the very least, the intel versions are ok and will play nice with whatever Firefox and Chrome is on the box.
One interesting point to note: The review units Apple sent out all appear to be base, so 8GB and it doesn't look too shabby at all (and might be good enough for most of the users that don't need to run up virtual machines). Speculation on various fora that Apple upped their memory management game.
Overall, I'm seriously thinking of picking up a base Air to play with.
And the slightly larger form factor makes it very comfortable to type on and the touchpad is absolutely fine. For none development/work/travel, this will make the iPad the only computer I need*. That said, I do in some ways regret not going for the Magic keyboard which has an extra USB-C port and raises the iPad to the perfect level for video meetings.
* Having taken the time to sort out a photo workflow, video editing and so on.
“ I would just leave the code lying around somewhere. Someone is bound to pick it up in the future and restart development.”
I think MSFT perhaps already did. It’s how they provide enhanced mode access to Hyper-V hosted Ubuntu (complete pain in the arse to get working with 20.04, btw, but rather nice once working).
Windows is increasingly just that. A desktop and not much else. The world is largely Linux. Windows is in danger of rapidly becoming little more than a window onto the world. In the near term, it is smart for Microsoft to see Office (and Azure) as the chicken that lays the golden egg.
Well Amazon still sells the Key2.... I'm not convinced I'll be able to type on it as quickly as I could with the (T-Mobile UK) Blueberry I used for a few years (it still charges up and switches on, but I doubt it will be very useful even if I could get a SIM to work with it).