Posts by Unicornpiss 1616 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2011
..for a "Space Force". But, um, don't we need more actual people in space first? Or an outpost somewhere perhaps? Kind of like scoping out the land for your new home, then immediately building the swimming pool before even digging for the foundation. And when you can barely afford to dig the foundation.
Sticking with my old Galaxy S5 until it dies. Or I get sick of the increasing amount of newer software that doesn't want to support its old OS. The 16MP camera still takes pretty good photos, and it took Apple ages to exceed it, though they do have some clever tricks in their photo app. But with an SD card slot, IR emitter, and easily removable battery, it remains very functional and relevant. It's also proven durable, as I am not easy on phones.
To me buying a new phone is almost as aggravating a task as selecting a new car, which is also part of the reason I keep my old phone. My next phone may not be a Samsung, but it would take a major paradigm shift from Apple to make me switch.
If you're using a cable box or streaming service, who knows what telemetry is going back to the mothership. At least with a stream on a PC, if you have the ability, the time, and enough headache medicine, you can figure out some of what is being monitored. With a sealed cable box, with its own modem built in, who knows how much of your activity is being tracked? They may even know how long it took you to get fed up and mute a commercial, or change to another channel. And if you're using any kind of cloud-based DVR or one included by your service provider, all kinds of demographic info is being harvested. And you're paying a hefty fee for the privilege of having your activities monitored.
..to not be bombarded with ads. I'm far from rich, but we don't all have to accept the lowest common denominator just because it's free, do we?
Mostly I will go out of my way to block every ad I can though. I don't mind the quiet, relevant ads such as on this site. I mean the blinking, aggravating atrocities that block content you're trying to view. And I hate the way you go to a site looking for software only to find 10 giant buttons to download worthless crap while the actual link to what you're looking for is about 1mm in size. Also hate when you're on a mobile device and navigating a minefield just to get to the next page of your article without inadvertently clicking on the trash that surrounds what you're trying to read. News sites that do that or that won't display content without turning off an ad blocker either get their ad scripts blocked by me or if too inconvenient, I can just find content elsewhere. The companies that allow these ads for a little revenue boost are scamming the system too--they only care that the ad shows as delivered, even if you instantly closed the popup before it finished loading, so they purposely make it easy to inadvertently click something you don't want. Which is just shitty.
I make a point of utterly avoiding anything aggressively marketed in these ways, even when the product would be useful to me. And I think everyone should. People's acceptance of continual annoyances is why the Internet is a swamp that must be waded through to get to the clear water. Avoiding marketing and the capture of personal data is also one of the reasons that I use Linux everywhere I can.
..or does the whole Insider program seem like where Linux was about 15-20 years ago, but without Linus as a unifying force? And when I say "where Linux was 15 years ago", I mean Windows being an inconsistent mess that has only a glancing acquaintance with QA, and a good chance of putting your machine in a state where extraordinary measures will be needed to recover it, except the Linux project (and forks) seemed to use a bit more common sense and at least a smidgen of quality control, and was a passion for a lot of its developers, unlike the lackluster efforts made by MS these days. (for example, the bizarre and quirky tiled 'start' menu in Win10 would have been quickly scorned and then repaired in Linux)
While we remain dependent on chemical rockets to escape Earth's (or any other body's) gravity, we will never be a space-faring civilization in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, there is nothing better yet, and even after 50+ years of sending humans into space, rockets are still temperamental and extremely expensive to launch.
Until we focus more on the long game for humanity and less on petty disputes, we will be a home-planet bound race. And I really think that for a sentient species to truly evolve, it must at least partially leave the nest. (but it may just be all the science fiction I've read since I was a young teen talking)
But I'd bet a few dollars or pounds that they are Intel drives. We had a number of Intel drives that never got firmware updates fail (in high-end workstations) within weeks of each other a few years back. The ones that did get updated kept going. They were quietly replaced by the PC manufacturer, but it soured me on Intel SSDs. And again, I could be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least if lessons weren't learned by Intel. Of course we had a smaller rash of Samsung failures around that period too. Really, the only ones I have no complaints about were made by Crucial/Micron. I'm not a marketing shill, I swear, but Crucial's stuff has had a much lower failure rate for us than anyone else. And a few that were unresponsive were recovered by whatever internal failsafe that is built in, simply by hooking them to power and letting them sit for a while.
If someone knows the manufacturer of these drives for sure (or if I'm just being thick and missed it somehow in the article), I'd be curious to know.
Many, many years ago, I had one of my first jobs, which was delivering food. We'd often go to hotels in the area late at night. We were friendly with one of the local hotels that was a pain to get to, as you would have to go to the front desk, then walk through the whole facility to the room. There were exterior doors that guests could use with their key card to get in, so they didn't have to walk all the way through the hotel.
This was back when key cards were just making their debut. The cards were plastic and had numerous holes punched in them and no mag stripe or RFID chip. We made so many trips to that hotel nightly, that the manager was kind enough to gift us with a card that would open the exterior doors, so we didn't have to make such a long trip each time. However, when I tried it on a whim on a closet, and then on the door of a room that was being cleaned (door was open), it was apparent that they'd given us a master key to all of the card-operated rooms. Yikes. I informed the manager and she was rather indifferent to the situation, but grudgingly gave us a different card that was fit for its intended purpose.
"The blinds on the rear of the building had a tendency to spend all day cycling between up and down"
We have automatic blinds where I work. I've worked there for over a decade and have always been mystified by when they decide to open or close. On a bright, cloudless day, they will suddenly open wide for no obvious reason. On a rainy day, sometimes they will close all the way. There is supposed to be a sun sensor, but I think it's located on another world, or possibly in the employee refrigerator, detecting when the fridge light goes on. Perhaps it's a sophisticated mood sensor and closes the blinds when it's raining to avoid unnecessarily depressing the staff..
..it's helpful to have a smart brick handy. This will open any residential window, usually in one try, and many doors too. Also useful for autos. It can also be used for personal defense in a pinch, and can be networked with other similar devices to build a defensive perimeter or even an attractive dwelling if so desired. It doesn't require firmware updates. (it's already pretty firm) Or hardware updates. (it's pretty hard) It is portable, but is more of a luggable. It requires no electricity to run, but does have a solar function that makes it pleasantly warm after exposure. If a smart brick isn't your style, there are similar devices available from Pebble and Fossil. It's rumored that the original makers of the Pet Rock are going to be releasing their own version as well.
Big MEH! to Apple. For the price you could have an Alienware with better specs and a lot of change left over for a monitor, an evening out, and perhaps a car payment. The Alienware looks cooler too. And has a better warranty. If you don't like Win 10, you could dual boot or put your favorite flavor of Linux on it. If you must have Apple's OS, you might still have enough money left over for a couple of therapy sessions..
20 years ago computers were a hobby and I was in the last year or so of my former career as the harried manager of a busy restaurant. As a restaurant manager, there is always something on the horizon to dread, whether it's an inspection, half your crew leaving to go back to school, some huge catering event, drama with customers or employees, or some nameless thing that will surprise you with the efficiency and subtlety of how it utterly screws your day. Ultimately, there really was no better training for an IT career if you look at it that way and from the standpoint of intensity.
Going back to IT, I had a user that had been ignoring the "SMART" warning that his hard drive had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel for a week or more, had never backed up his data, and was a general pain in the ass to boot. (there's always a few of them) Inevitably, the drive failed and the machine landed on my desk. I spent several hours trying every trick I knew to get his data back, to no avail. Because what he did was so "vitally important", he managed to persuade his manager to shell out the >$2,500 for data recovery. Upon getting the recovery media back, I took a look at what was recovered. About 30 gigs of personal photos, music, and other personal docs like his tax returns, and maybe about 100MB of spreadsheets, PowerPoints and the like, most of which had dates older than a year. In other words, nothing especially business-critical as far as I could see without delving into it. Maybe one or two relevant spreadsheets that he could have recreated easily in the time it took the recovery company to process his drive. (and which he probably had to anyway) Overall, time and money well spent. Beer icon because we all deserve one.
"Ever use X10 kit? Mine has been working for decades.
So, how does it do when you have a brownout? Or your fridge kicks in? Or the neighbor's does? Or a trucker with a linear amp keys his mike nearby? Or during a thunderstorm?
My granddad was ahead of his time in adopting home automation. He'd often come home to find the lights hooked to his X10 kit in some random state. Lights he left on were off. Lights off were on. He was (rightfully) afraid to use one of the appliance modules to control anything that had the potential to start a fire. Sometimes one of the dimmable modules would leave a light in a seizure-inducing rapid flicker state. I played with X10 and had similar results. It was neat for its day and had a ton of features, including PC control with the right software and hardware add on. But the analog nature of the control signals just didn't filter out spurious signals, which were easily mistaken for legitimate control codes being sent.
Some years back, one of our users brought me his laptop, which was completely dead. He wouldn't initially say what had happened to it. Upon examination I found everything coated with a fine crusty white deposit, inside and out, and anything ferric had splotches of rust on it. When I confronted him about it, he sheepishly said he was "soaking my feet in Epsom salts and knocked the laptop off the TV tray into the bucket" No amount of rinsing would fix it, and even the hard drive was destroyed. I think I saved one memory module from it. The rest was junk. I had no idea Epsom salts were so corrosive..
"Desktop PCs are not even remotely close to dying and won't be unless financial businesses work out how to work without the use of some form of PC or similar desktop device."
You're not going to see a lot of laptops on shop floors running production machines either. And while there are some pretty fine gaming laptops out there, if gaming is your thing, you can't beat the power and ease of customizing and expanding a desktop. Try upgrading a CPU or video card on 95% of the laptops out there. Or overclocking most of them. And you can make a desktop case light up "real purty".
From a security standpoint, this article reads like asking your teenage daughter where she's been and having her casually tell you "We were at the ER because of the accident." "What accident??" "Oh, Bobby had been drinking and the brakes went out on his motorcycle. He was distracted by his infected neck tattoo, so his reaction time was slow when the guy with the shotgun jumped out at us. Lucky I took too many pain killers so when I was thrown from the bike, I was so relaxed that I wasn't hurt at all."
Avast compromised themselves years ago by spamming their users continually with Ads. A shame too, as they used to have one of the best freeware AV programs out there.
Being in IT, I consider the Trump administration to just be one big DR test of how well the founding fathers crafted the checks and balances in our political and governing systems. Since we've managed to avert WWIII thus far, there hasn't been a coup, and the economy is not in the toilet yet, I think the wisdom of our forefathers holds true. Many other countries would likely be experiencing civil war by now. (of course we've been there, done that too) However, like any DR situation, that UPS battery or generator power isn't going to last forever, so I HOPE that people do a bit better with their choices in the next election..
.. and I would love to use them more, but their search results just aren't even close to being on par with Google. At least not yet. Hopefully they're improving. And Bing IMHO is still pretty much worthless. If I want to find something on Microsoft's own Technet sites I need to use Google to find it--if I try searching from within Technet (which I'm assuming is Bing), I generally get around 11,000 marginally-relevant results, while Google manages to zero right in. (at least after you've skipped the first few 'sponsored' results)
..Remedy was to uninstall/reinstall on most, as the article said. They would not crash until either Live Update ran, or you tried to bring up the SEP console on some. Made for a 2nd Monday with all the frills, basically. The worst part was fixing all the VMs/Azure stuff we have, and a handful of remote and traveling users.
Also fun is when someone links multiple Excel sheets--and the links point to local files on the user's hard drive, which are of course inaccessible to everyone they shared the main sheet with. Or in one case, where they were accessible by an administrative assistant, until her boss traveled, at which point I had to tell her she'd have to wait until he landed and hooked up at our other facility there so this mess could be fixed.
It sort of reminds me of Motorola's efforts with its "Atrix" dock about 7-8 years ago. My first Android phone was a Moto, and when plugged into a display you could choose "desktop mode", which was a pretty credible effort to add productivity to that little phone. You didn't even need the pricey dock. Add a Bluetooth (or even a wired) keyboard and mouse and you had pretty much the same thing, albeit in not as slick of a package.
That's a nice line, though I think porn stars are probably smarter than that :)
But you're right, not only is Java being squeezed out due to the constant security issues and more modern ways of coding web content, but Oracle's own decision to begin charging for their Java engine is shooting themselves in the foot. When someone uses something for free for well over a decade, then finds out it suddenly isn't free anymore, it's the most powerful motivation I know of to find alternatives. (Like Amazon Corretto, for example)
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