Posts by Shadow Systems

Re: US voters get what they vote for

Except even DSL isn't an option in some places. Where I live I have the "choice" of overpriced & crappy speeds from Comcast, AT&T claims they can give me DSL but only if I agree to upgrade their copper (otherwise a standard land line voice circuit is barely doable), or try to go with a wireless carrier of some sort. It doesn't matter, both cell & satelite have the same problem to my home, namely I'd have to get all my neighbors to chop down all their trees so I could have LOS to either a cell tower or the horizon for a satelite. And I'm not THAT far from SillyConeValley where they treat FTTH as if it were as ubiquotous as chewing gum & just as cheap. Go out into anything even more rural than this cow town & you can forget wireless cell, there may not be a tower for miles, & satelite is so expensive it might as well not be on the table. Fibre in the country? Only if you've got more money than Beezos & promise to give it to $ISP by the billion to get them to run it to you. Otherwise, kiss that pipedream goodbye.

All this is to lead up to the point of the fact that G.Fast isn't an option in many places, because even DSL isn't an option. They're lucky if they can get *dial up* over a POTS line that may have last seen a repair tech sometime around the last ice age. =-(

Re: Search?

Intelligence in Redmond? Not even SETI could find intelligent life out there. MS is a dimensional rift to the Plane of Stupidity.

Re: Yeah, no formaldehyde

Oh dear lord, that was an excrutiatingly ba-aa-aa-aad pun.

I approve! =-D

Re: Forsooth!

*Thunderous standing ovation*

Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore!

*Showers you in roses & chocolates for a job well done*

Congratulations! You just won the internet! =-)p

At CodySydney, re: Linux suitability.

I wish I could have upvoted you, I'd really love to be using Linux right now, but the screen readers for Linux are still woefully lacking. I've tried to buy computers from the Vinux Project, System76, & ThinkPenguin, all to no avail. Until accessibility on Linux is a drop in replacement for that on Windows, folks like me *can't* switch over yet.

If I could see to make the switch then you would certainly get my upvote, I would have switched right around the WinXP EOL hit & never looked back.

Join me at the pub & I'll buy you a pint. You can toast your Linux experience, I'll drown my sorrows in mine. *Clinks tankard* Cheers.

Re: Regressions

They have NOT replaced the coding team with monkies.

Monkies would do a better job.

At Steve the Cynic, re: downloading 700Mb.

Now imagine downloading it over a flaky dial up connection at a miserable 300Baud via an acoustic coupler, joystick port mounted, piece of crap modem. Through AOL. During a storm that causes so much lightning strike interference that you spend +50% of the time resending line noise mangled packets.

*Shakes a palsied fist*

Danged whippersnappers anyer newfangled fiber optics. Why, back in MY day the only fiber we got was from eating granola, and that's the way we LIKED it, dagnabbit.

*Brandishes a cane menacingly*

Now get off'n my laaaaawn!

=-D

At Dwarf, re: lease vs buy.

I can see only one major advantage to leasing versus buying the product outright. The moment a Win10 update bricks your machine you call up the leasing company & demand they replace it with a brand new, fully functioning unit or cancel the lease "because I'm leasing a *working* computer, this one isn't working, so bill Microsoft for their cockup."

You get a new computer, the depreciation starts fresh on the new one, & the leasing company is stuck with the repair bills. They *may* try to stick you with an "equal value unit" that turns out to be refurbished, but you can cite the fact that the lease was for a brand new unit not a refurbished one, thus they either send you the brand new one or cancel the contract.

Otherwise I agree with the sentiment that buying it outright makes more sense (cents). Especially if you put it on a credit card that offers warranty guarantees that any problems the seller refuses to fix allows you to give it to the CC company, the CC company refunds your money, & then turns their legal hounds loose on the seller.

Re: Is it still a choice...

From another blind user requiring a screen reader, I can't upvote you enough.

Let's find a sighted person that wants to take a break, have them lead us to the pub, & I'll pay for drinks until we can no longer maintain a proper grip on the floor to keep from sliding off this spinning world. =-D

Re: Mickey The Cat

I was feeling in a bad mood one day when some salesdroid kept pestering me to sign up for a store credit card. I gave in & filled out the form as "Notgunna Payforit". I laughed my ass off when "I" got my shiny new card a week later. So much for making sure the person actually exists, that the PII isn't obviously fake (like a DOB of 01.01.1000, etc), or that the indicated income (None: Unemployed) might be suitable for the issuance of credit. Nope, doesn't matter, just issue that card & collect our commission! *Snort*

Re: Christmas is essentially Page 71 of the Brand New Monty Python Bok

At JohnFen, re: American Christmas.

Your local stores have NOT started assaulting you with Christmas crap yet?

You. Lucky. Bastard. =-)p

I'm in California near the Bay Area & our local stores are already playing the music, putting up their displays, & forcing folks to play Hunt The Wocket to try & find stuff that's not part of the Christmas crap. Like the milk display now has eggnogg in it at the cost of the space where other brands would be. If you want $OtherBrand then you have to shove stuff aside & look all the way in the back, but if you want over priced eggnogg then it's right up front & in your face. If you want regular, plain, simple plastic trash bags then you've got two or three choices, but if you want "holiday themed" crap then there were no fewer than *TWELVE* different kinds on the shelf where I shop. Even the fucking *breakfast cereal boxes* were holiday theme shit. It's enough to drive me even more insane than I already am. =-J

My next door neighbor tends to build elaborate light displays for his home. It can take a while to set it all up. I understand that. But it's fuckin OCTOBER FFS & the cheery chump is already hammering & painting & stringing lights & singing carols. I retaliated by putting my speakers to the window & cranking up anti-Christmas music as loud as I dared in protest. "I hear your Twelve Days & raise you techno polka bagpipe music! HA!"

*Cough*

Your local stores haven't started assaulting you with Christmassy shit yet? Where do you live? It sounds almost sane!

Re: this is just the start of a very ugly battle for your home

Nope, you're not the only one. My son is of the age bracket currently called Millenial but he's not all that happy for such snoop-tastic crap either. Someone gave him one of those Alexa smart speakers as a birthday gift, but he refuses to even plug it in to either power or the network unless & until he feels like making use of it. Otherwise "I don't want that nosey little fucker uploading every cough, belch, & fart to the mothership". There's still hope for the Human race yet!

Re: iPad-killer

How to kill that which is already dead involves a wood chipper, a barge pole, & not barfing all over the place when the ichor starts to fly.

Remember, skeletons can't play wind instruments & zombies can't sing worth a damn. That will help you weed them out of the crowd of supposedly still living.

At Usbac...

"The last thing you need is for a $20 transformer to bring an entire company to it's knees."

Why not? If a $20 hooker can do it...

*Cough*

Re: @ Shadow Systems

Oh, I have pants, I just refuse to let them out of their cages. Once bitten twice shy. =-Jp

At Veti, re: MS.

"Dear Microsoft: is it really asking too much for you to just STOP FUCKING AROUND WITH THINGS THAT ALREADY WORK?"

I wish I could upvote you to infinity & beyond. Go enjoy a couple dozen pints in gratitude!

At the AC, re: what I use it for.

My desktop runs W7Pro64, Jaws 18 (my screen reader), Outlook 2010, IE11, Notepad, & VLC in the background for light music to keep me somewhat sane. That's the base load, the programs always running with others thrown in on top. Windows plus Jaws seems to go through RAM like a starving Calvin Kleine model at an All You Can Eat buffet. Give Outlook a fist full of stupidly bloated HTML emails & it chokes on them, even though I have it set to never load the graphics, tracking crap, or do anything but display it all as plain text. Give IE11 even a dozen open tabs of non-video content (aka not Hulu, Netflix, Twitch, or Youtube style sites) & the (Java) scripts can damn-near *cripple* the machine entirely. In some cases merely visiting a site causes the entire system to shit itself & require a hard power cycle to recover. My browser security settings refuse *ALL* scripting & won't run JS at all, but I still get notices from IE11 that "this site has timed out due to a long running script". Really? And how the *$&%(^ is it allowed to be running ANY script in the first place? GAH!

*Deep breath*

I realize I'm not a typical user, I realize that my normal program load isn't typical, but I still encounter all too many times where the 16Gb in my machine just isn't enough to keep it from taking a faceplant into the desk. I'll bring up the Task Manager (if it reacts at all to the keyboard) & find out that the CPU is pegged at 100%, the RAM has been gone through like a white hot chainsaw through warm butter, & even killing off process' trying to regain control may not work. I realize that 32Gb will probably only mean even more RAM for such crashes to inhale, but for me at least it's about the only thing I can do to solve the problem.

My current machine is a 4th gen I3 Intel NUC running at 2GHz, 16Gb RAM, & a 250Gb SSD. It was speedy as hell when I first got it, it still IS speedy some of the time, but everything has become so bloated over the years that it's just not doing the job as well any longer. I've got a new 8th gen I7 4GHz with 32Gb RAM & a 1Tb SSD due to arrive soon as a replacement. Twice as fast, twice the ram, & over twice as much storeage space should *hopefully* be future proofed for at least the next 4+ years.

=-j

I was going to answer flippantly that I use a 10th gen I10 running at 100GHz with 1Tb of RAM & an Exabyte of SSD space all to run Infocomm games, but then I thought I didn't want to be beaten with rubber chickens.

=-)P

Cheers, go have a pint on me, & have fun.

At Phil Kingston, re: optical media.

Dang it, I wanna submit mine on clay tablets!

I'll get my coat, it's the one with the mud (ancient Tippex!) in the pockets...

Re: The FCC isn't going to do anything that isn't easy

What about land lines & feature phones that can't run such apps? There needs to be a solution that *all* phones benefit from.

At Ucalegon, re: cookie poop.

You also don't expect it to be laced with Picolax.

Re: No...

Aw come on! You know you wanna get a Windows VD (Virtual Desktop? Venereal Disease? Vicious Diddling?) to play with!

Re: Take them round the back...

I was thinking of launching them from an orbital platform at a very high speed so they make it through atmospheric reentry burn & impact straight through the roof of a certain MS CEO's office...

Re: Why anyone would do business with Apple is a mystery.

I'm one of those odd bastards that gets *quiet & calm* when I get angry. (I was once accused of shouting at a student on the playground during one of my shifts; my son told them "My dad doesn't yell, he gets quiet. If he starts to smile, RUN!") It lets me think of creatively evil things to say/do in retaliation. I tend to deliver such lines in a tone of voice that implies that if I *DO* "snap", the person I'm speaking to will find out the hard way that there ARE worse things than death. Like still being alive after an SUV plows through a wall, parks on your chest, & leaks boiling radiator fluid all over your torn flesh. It's like salt in the wounds, only boiling & acidic. Most folks think "Psycho nut job!" & decide to run away rather than keep pushing, and I think that's the big reason they decided to give me the refund. If they have to choose between giving me back my money or paying the legal & hospital bills for a lobby full of victims that Apple could have prevented, they smartened up enough to do the refund.

I was probably wearing my t-shirt that read "I void warranties". *Gleefull evil cackle*