Posts by Fading 772 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2009
"They are held responsible for the results of their team, or teams."
Really?! Taking the praise when things go well and shifting the blame onto subordinates when things go wrong - that is management.
And Decision avoidance is a essential management skill. No manager would last five minutes if they were actually held responsible (even for their own ideas).
All my Amstrad CPC 6128 needed was a rubber band to replace the perished one in the 3" disc drive (note: 3 inch floppy) and a bit of a clean up (nothing Isopropyl couldn't handle). Even the multiface II was still functional. Cleaned it up over Christmas and had some retro fun. No batteries to worry about in those old 8-bits. Amstrad's may have been all about cutting corners and "all on one plug" but the all bits still work.
Note - it wasn't in "storage" just a cardboard box in the wardrobe. Apologies for mentioning the hated Alan Sugar Trading's name on a Sir Clive Thread.
Have an upvote for mouse without borders - nice little program I use daily. Two problems - the odd occasion when it loses connection and you need to re-enter the security key and secondly, Excel does not like what it does to the clipboard (even if you disable this feature) - causes problems copying and pasting large datasets (well large for excel).
Whilst it takes a bit of effort to get the activities right I do like the harmony remote control. Still have the problem of my Echo spot trying to take control of the Marantz amp whenever Alexa feels like it but that can be solved with a few buttons and a stern "alexa go home" command.
There is something lacking in the Word training that users seem to receive (if they have even had Word training). I suspect a basic version of Word without styles, limited fonts unless expressly installed, easy access and editing of formatting codes and a simpler interface would be a better product for the majority (hmm, I think I've just described Wordperfect for DOS) .
Word tries to do too much some of which is better suited to DTP software and hides too much from the unwary.
Where the user has convinced themselves that only an expert can fix the problem. No matter how patiently you try to explain a solution, their conviction that they can't solve it is absolute. Time constraints and panic feed this conviction far beyond the place where reason can reach them.
Picked up a Lenovo Yoga slim 7 with a AMD 4500U and I am impressed with the build quality and performance of such a small slim device (doubles the 3d Mark score of my Alienware 17xr4 - admittedly a 7 year old laptop but still going strong). SWMBO was very happy with it (helped it was Orchid purple rather than the typical silver/black).
Your willingness to engage is commendable and you should not give up. You are unlikely to change an antagonist poster's mind with a few words on a forum but there is often a chance of at least making the silent readers think. By holding your equanimity and providing well reasoned counter points your example is there in black and white (or whatever the colour scheme is) for more than just the poster you are responding to. Avoiding contentious language, crass generalisations and acknowledging the humanity of everyone is the way to be a light in these dark times.
As a side note it looks like Parler will be back and hosted on Russian servers - I'm not sure this is a win for anyone (whilst hosted on AWS Amazon actually had some control over Parler - now there won't be any).
Your point being history is repeated by allowing the promotion of violence, insurrection and racism? My point is that the promotion of violence, insurrection and racism are symptoms and merely suppressing the symptoms will not get the change we (the human race) really need. If anything the suppression itself becomes another justification for people to feel the way they do. Is the goal to have a better world or merely sweep the bad things under the carpet?
Would it not have been better to flood Parler with non-racist, democracy supporting, inclusive posts and posters? Highlight the weakness of the causes being put forward, the disjointed thinking and paranoia? Lance the boil and let it heal in the light and air, not just spread the poison elsewhere?
If you learn nothing from history - that is how it repeats. Now remind me how well suppression and exclusions work against the disaffected? Helps bring people into the fold and heal wounds? Promoting insurrection isn't in itself a "bad" thing - e.g. insurrection against Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin was admirable. When insurrection is being promoted against a free and fair democracy that's when you know the promoters are feeling excluded - is suppression and exclusion going to help them accept they can make a difference in a legal and democratic way?
Are rising again .... Nurse! Nurse! More dried frog pills please.... After the curse of replacing hard drives, re-installing XP, a multitude of driver discs because the XP CD-ROM didn't have anything close to get the modem card working, only to have to re-activate windows by calling microsoft.... I think I'm coming out in hives....
Nice but older Xeons tend to lack a modern feature set - especially the motherboards. PCIe4, 2.5Gb and above networking, wifi 6, M.2 NVMe - no older Xeons support these features so whilst you have similar cinebench performance you are missing a lot of "nice to haves" (or essentials depending on your needs).
Oh and the latest from the Lancet:
"Facemasks and shields offer protection from larger droplets but their effectiveness against airborne transmission is less certain. Advice on spending time indoors should also focus on improved ventilation and avoiding crowded spaces."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30514-2/fulltext
The Official UK advice:
"The best available scientific evidence is that, when used correctly, wearing a face covering may reduce the spread of coronavirus droplets in certain circumstances, helping to protect others."
"may in certain circumstances." let that sink in. And from Sweden's public health body:
"We do not currently recommend face masks in public settings since the scientific evidence around the effectiveness of face masks in combatting the spread of infection is unclear. However, there may be situations where face masks can be useful despite the uncertain state of knowledge about the effects."
Hardly "Established Science" is it?
Cloth masks are for reducing the droplet infection vector - unfortunately even the CDC now admits Covid-19 also has an airborne transmission vector.
(now where's my lab-coat)
"Amstrad unfortunately faced a lot of criticism early on in the PC1512's life, with rumours that the models fitted with hard disks were liable to overheating. This turned out to be entirely false - fed by the fact that all other PCs came fitted with cooling fans in the power supply or system unit, and the Amstrad PCs didn't have one. Amstrad were already well known for building "cost-effective" versions of electronic goods, and with this consumers and businesses surmised that perhaps Amstrad cut one too many corners with its PC design in order to keep the prices cheap. In actual fact, the design choice to put the power supply in the monitor was a clever one as it meant the system unit didn't need a fan at all. The rumours got a lot of press, and it was too late to change the minds of the consumer, so Alan Sugar famously gave a press release announcing they would fit a fan to all PC1512 models with a hard disk." - from http://www.retroisle.com/DOSDays/computers/Amstrad%20PC1000/amstrad_pc1000.php
Sometimes a fan isn't there for cooling :)
"The best available scientific evidence is that, when used correctly, wearing a face covering may reduce the spread of coronavirus droplets in certain circumstances, helping to protect others."
Compared with the official advice on wearing masks in Sweden:
"We do not currently recommend face masks in public settings since the scientific evidence around the effectiveness of face masks in combatting the spread of infection is unclear. However, there may be situations where face masks can be useful despite the uncertain state of knowledge about the effects."
Not exactly full on in the support of cloth mask wearing are they?
I have a similar memory - I had to do a tape recording of it to run it as the combined unit I had the record player on didn't have any outputs (just a couple of connected poor quality speakers). Of course though the computers we were using back then "booted" from ROM normally into BASIC (unless you had a Sharp MZ700 then you had to load BASIC in by tape first).
Sitting on my desk in the office. Unfortunately I've been WFH since March. I have noticed though that the previous issue I had with using a mouse at work has not been so bad since WFH (I get bouts of cubital tunnel syndrome) . I put this down to having a nice weighted M65 mouse rather than the cheap plastic tat that was supplied by Dell.
Whilst I understand the hate - it works well if you never open csv or txt files with it. Link the underlying data using the "Manage data model" and then anyone will be able to use the functionality in power pivot for the analysis.
In business Excel is ubiquitous and even the upper echelons know how to navigate around it. So whilst a dashboard linked to a database would be better - in my experience no two managers want the same view of the data (twice) so building individual dashboards can get pretty expensive. At least with the drag and drop functionality in power pivot and with no access to the underlying data you get a bit of peace and quiet......
I don't see why not - the current 5700XT is as capable as a 1080Ti and I can play at 4k60 on many games already (GTA 5 looks good with all the bells and whistles turned up). The X box series X's GPU is (on paper) more powerful as a 2080 Super which is a step up from the 1080 Ti (approx 10% depending on game) .
Erm, I do have an HDMI cable from my PC with a 1080Ti at my desk that reaches the over to the 4K TV. Mosey over to the sofa with my Steam controller and I'm good to go (I also have a PS4 pro plugged in) . Sound is routed via ARC from the TV into my Marantz amp and it couldn't be simpler.
Whilst the sample size (no pun intended) is pretty small, what I have found is if someone feels "fat" instead of driving them to lose weight the opposite occurs (desire to eat comfort food and be miserable) . When they feel "thin" (scales have told them they have "lost a pound") this encourages them to do more and eat better and puts a "skip in their step".
I can only assume this "fatness" band will encourage consumption and comfort shopping - hmm maybe Amazon are smarter than I gave them credit for......
Autotune is prevalent in many genres now and is frequently used in "pop" where previously you would have had double/treble tracked vocals (thank-you Messrs. Stock, Aitken and Waterman, not). Whilst I don't get a headache from its overuse it does set my teeth on edge.
Thankfully the likelihood of my favourite tracks requiring "autotune" is fairly minimal as "screaming and yelling" in front of heavy electric guitar riffs rarely needs to be harmonic.....
Did the model assume 100% compliance by those tested and traced? Fiddling with inputs and publishing scary papers based on outputs from non-validated models makes good copy but doesn't add anything to the sum of human knowledge - ultimately it is just computational game. Second waves are already occurring in some countries (even where mask wearing is the norm) - this shouldn't be about stopping the second wave but keeping it at levels the NHS can cope with (unless the plan is to wait for a vaccine - but that is going to be an expensive and open ended wait) .
T&T is the only one tool - we could provide postcode alerts with infection rates, public transport infection alerts - inform us all where and when so we can decide for ourselves the likelihood of exposure and isolate accordingly. At the moment the figures we get to see are out of date and the granularity sucks (local authority level).
It is a lot easier to trouble shoot if you know the events leading up to the problem - unfortunately the user is more likely to be a hindrance to this and is probably best kept out of harms way (sent somewhere else so they don't overhear the aghast swearing and incredulous expletives). No one likes to be publicly shown-up and there are benefits for keeping known episodes of idiocy on the QT as long as they know you know (and with Karma you never know when you may require such a face saving) .
Erm isn't that a per-thread figure? AMD offers more threads for less money and less power than the equivalent Intel chips so I'm not sure what the win is supposed to be for Intel (and you also don't need to turn off SMT/Hyperthreading because of security concerns with AMD).
Are not direct replacements for B450 motherboards - they are a step up in quality and specifications (to the point where the cheaper X570s look poor in comparison) . The motherboard manufacturers have finally accepted that AMD chips are not the cheap and cheerful option (and therefore only require cheap and cheerful motherboards) but quality chips in their own right (I'd swap my skylake-x for a ryzen 9 3950 at the drop of a hat - even on a B550 board) .
Competition isn't just about prices but also about driving innovation and quality.
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