Posts by J. Cook

Re: Why are they leaving ?

They fear it turning into a worse cesspit under Elon 'sh!tweasel' musk's so-called 'leadership'.

Re: No loss of hardware support

And some of those older machines generates a LOT of heat and drank a fair amount of power for that small amount of compute, too...

Except that it didn't work; there were several 3d printer makers that tried to lock down their units so that only filament purchased from them (in spools with a NFC chip on them and DRM 'securing' the lot of it) would work; that went over about as well as flatulence in a middle of a church sermon. The names escape me, because... well. they aren't around anymore. :)

I don't think that 3d printers will ever reach the point where you can apply the copier rental method to it- (i.e., pay for what you use instead of the entire machine up front) for a number of reasons, but mostly the typical end user is ideologically opposed to that scheme.

The printers are leveling out, as far as price points versus how much fettling you have to do to tune them in and keep them there.

3d printing can (and does) replace things like the item you are making a mold of for casting (as long as the surface is prepped properly), and CNC is more of a complementary method (the former is additive manufacturing, the latter subtractive)

Re: I don't mind PDFs

Well, they have to fix all the security bugs in the scripting language they shoved in there somehow... And add more bloatware as well, AND anti- disablement measures to keep people like me from neutering the auto-update service, the "Oh I'm going to start and run in the background as a critical service that DOES NOTHING USEFUL except take up memory and CPU" service, and all the other internet connectivity bullshart that's been crammed into it like a blivet.

Meanwhile, I've been running with SumatraPDF, which it light weight, doesn't snoop on you or offer you a clown car of prompts for this, that, and everything else, and has 90% of the functionality. (of which is rarely used for my use case, like the form filling portions.)

Re: Election Scam

Ponder for the moment that student loans in the US are one of the few things that can't be discharged from a bankruptcy, which is already a horrible process to go through and often leaves you worse off...

See also Debt Jubilees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_jubilee) for something that really should have happened a while ago.

Re: Particularly idiotic

"Oh, but you can get a charging dongle to go from USB to charge the pencil."

Or I can go and buy a lightning to lightning coupler and a lightning cable and charge it that way without the fool thing flopping around in the breeze.

There's probably a reason for it, but it's either not a good reason, or it's tied to large-ish contracts for companies that use the base ipad as a foundation for their products. (like point of service terminals and such.)

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

The teaching landscape in the US is all about getting the students to pass the standardized tests- no more, no less.

I have a rant around here somewhere, or at least my (retired) mother does- she used to teach kindergarten until the shenanigans with the school administration forced her out on disability.

And the wheel of reincarnation strikes again...

And mainly because using the OLE Automation hooks are hard and require additional time and effort to build to.

And as we can all see, no one at Adobe looked at Microsoft's problem with it and said "hey, let's embed a scripting engine into our PDF viewer which will let miscreats do the same exact thing!!!"

Re: Illegal speech???

That, and how the hell does one determine what is 'illegal'?

From the article:

Levy and Robinson propose "have language models running entirely locally on the client to detect language associated with grooming."

On a certain level, I know what grooming is, but no one has really stated in these proposals an actual legal definition of it, preferring to lean entirely on the emotional response it invokes, which leads to bad laws that can be interpreted in any number of ways, depending on what the person's trying to achieve with it.

And plus, if the kids are told that they are under surveillance, they'll figure ways around it, especially if it's a case of parents abusing their children by putting them under surveillance. (which happens frequently enough)

Re: 365

Yep; there's a very good reason I call it Office 279, or Office 307, depending on how many outages they've had in a given 12 month period...

Re: Ford (Found On Roadside Dead)

My parting comment after I returned that rental was "It needs to Focus on being a car."

My mother had an 1998 Aspire at the time; My running joke on it was "It aspires to be a car some day. It was a pink jellybean of a car with no A/C and manual gearbox, and had the best mileage I've ever seen because of it. It just was not a good car to drive in Arizona summers...

(She traded it for a 2004 Saturn ION, which lasted her until after she was unable to drive due to health problems; I ended up donating it to a place for the tax write off after finding that it needed over six thousand US rubles for it's many mechanical issues, and that wasn't counting a bunch of issues with the worn out interior...)

IIRC, for FreeBSD and linux, you have to actively work at it to exclude developer tools out of a distro, and even then the first time you need to install something that's not a flat-pack or something that requires a dependency tends to trigger the "Install the Dev Tools" circus. :D

Oh, the places I could go with this; unfortunately, none of them are work safe. :D