
Most worthless read ever?
Well, if I ever saw clickbait ...
1202 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2008
This whole "only good for 10 writes" claim seems to be a bit unfounded. I did a bit of goooogling and the more trustworthy sources state that tapes can be rewritten indefinitely, although there will be a little bit of wear and tear. They should last up to 30 years. Tapes are chiefly damaged by incorrect handling or faulty recording equipment. This makes sense because there is little difference between playback and recording and the magnetic media could not care less how many times you changed the orientation of the magnetic field.
All this AI BS seems to me like we've reached the point where we have so much computing power and we simply don't know what to do with it. All the features have already been crammed into operating systems, office tools, CAD products, etc., so now we are attempting to branch out but have run out of ideas.
Updating .NET breaks the code. So much for backward compatibility. This is the reason why I abandoned ASP.NET Core Yadda after a very short time: I simply don't want to rewrite a great deal of the base code every time there's a .NET library update and some Bozo at Microsoft decided it's time to rework the code model yet again.
Let me! Let me!
Saw one at a car show in ODESSA.
There's a button there to toggle Auto Pilot. It's marked AuSchwitz.
Engage the Auto Pilot and it takes you to Himmelfahrtstrasse.
And there was a kid who didn't look before crossing the street and the Tesla nearly Hitler Youth.
And if the car won't work in the snow they offer Winterhilfe.
In the Netherlands and Belgium the car is marketed under the brand Rommel.
Musk ordered a special Paul von Hindenburg edition but it crashed and burned.
Ok, I must get back to work now. Arbeit macht frei, and all that.
So instead of converting C to Rust, why don't you convert Rust to C? That way you can code your little program in a safe environment, make sure you're not hurting the little pointers, and send your contribution off as generated C. Let me go make room in the trophy cabinet for the 2025 Turing award.
I'm clearly not the trusting kind. How do you go into business with someone like ARM when they can cancel the license for your core product at any time and basically sink your business overnight? You can't just jump over to something like RISC-V without a complete redesign of your products.
Windows XP had that stupid search dog in explorer. If you switched the search "assistant" off it showed you its rear end. I wondered if it was a subtle message from the development team for not wanting to use their juvenile search tool. I was actually just always happy to see the back of that thing after an XP install.
Hehehe, here is me laughing in my beard about having to issue a microcode patch to patch up the faulty microcode and to my great astonishment I see that that is exactly what AMD did. I'm assuming that a power cycle reverts the CPU to it's factory state and either the BIOS or OS has to load the patches. So how can you trust such a device if your BIOS likely spends 70% of its initialisation time loading rootkits from NSA / Chinese Military / North Korea / Russia / Finland.
Ok, so I've never had a beard. Just happy in a strange way that I got the Intel CPU despite the challenges over there. I was kinda surprised that this type of attack took so long to happen.
So now I wonder: did an ancient Akkadian read on the morning edition clay tablet about drought threatening collapse of civilisation in Mesopotamia and scientists blaming the disaster on the abundance of slaves slaving away at their tasks? In short: never you worry, climate change has been a thing since the earth began. I'd be much more concerned about all the pollution and devastation of the natural environment, but those don't attract many research grants and angry teenage schoolgirls. None of these "alternative energy" solutions are recyclable or sustainable – they just exist to channel money into the pockets of their suppliers. The only reason why we have it easy these days is because the weather has been pleasantly stable for 12,000 years.
Asteroid Terrestrial Last Alert System. If you shoehorn those acronyms any harder there is going to be permanent damage.
Anyway, I'll re-read Lucifer's Hamner to see what should be done. Hiding out in the Sierra mountains IIRC and a gun to fend off canibals. But they are on the other side of the earth from where I am. No way I can get there unless I surf the tsunami over the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, and up the west coast of America.
Oh no! Halthaus stopped the project.
This is what happens when you become complacent. You saw that you're approaching the end of the line of what you can wring out of your core product. Competing technologies arose and techniques changed. And yet, even with all these MBAs sitting around, you could not come up with another product that people would actually want to buy? Kind of like at the place where Apple found themselves in the early 1990s. Nokia (in the old days) and 3M spring to mind as examples of companies that were able to adjust their business models radically. Apple survived with some cash from Microsoft; maybe AMD can come to Intel's rescue? Not sure if a bunch of accountants can devise a plan for new products to attract tech customers though. The tech graveyard is filled with once super successful companies that just wilted and died: Lotus, Borland, WordPerfect, DEC, Novell, ...
Social media is a creep show, indeed. My dentist sent a WattsUp to ask if they can move my appointment to their other practice or set it up for another time. So I replied that they set up another time at the practice in my area because the other practice is quite far to drive. It wasn't 5 minutes after sending the message that I got a text advertisement for some estate agent doing free property evaluations in my area. What am I to do? I'm force-fed WattsUp because that is what everybody uses. If we all switched to Signal we'd have to contend with that weidro Marlinspike, but I doubt all our communications would be monitored for any scrap of information – however flimsy – that could be turned into an advertising opportunity. If these bozos started following somebody around and noting down everything their target did, the cops would soon bust them or they would be punched in the face. But somehow this antisocial behaviour is allowable online.
I'm definitely no expert. But I find it strange that this isn't a solved problem. Disk drives have had PIO / DMA for ages now. I would have expected a NIC to have some cache memory for buffering and hook into DMA to keep the cache filled / empty depending on whether it's doing TX or RX and issue an interrupt when the kernel has to action something. Can't believe that polling is a thing in the year 2025. (Highly effcient sleep states and such).
But what do I know?
I'm not a gamer / digital artist / video editor so my computing interests aren't really dependent on any kind of GPU acceleration working. GCC will work regardless of what is drifting around in the nVidia driver cesspool. But yeah, mental note noted: don't buy anything nVidia during the upcoming hardware upgrade cycle.
This seems to be an longstanding problem: bunch of brainiacs in ancient times had copies of their publications stored in the Great Library of Alexandra and some barbarian came along and sacked the place. Should have used clay tablets. Or you thought you had everything down in hieroglyphics and some fundamentalist comes along and bulldozes the place.
'Shut down' museum IT systems. Did he remove a vacuum tube?
At least they can grab an abacus from one of the displays and continue operations. Better than that theft from the Dutch museum.
A better Windows than Windows. Linux is doomed. DOOOMED!
(I tried to run WINE on a laptop with drivers from Nvidia. Oh my goodness! Was there now ever much lament. Apparently it works better with the open source drivers installed but I couldn't really come up with a use case to justify the effort. Initially I wanted to run the Foscam configuration software in Linux. But they are perfectly configurable if you don't mind using cURL and some PDF documentation).
So I was working for this place in the 1990's. So after I got upgraded from a 386SX to an eggciting new Pentium-66 NEC thing (that did not have video drivers for whatever hardware they soldered onto the motherboard and it had to run in 16-colour VGA mode at dismal speed). So the new box shipped with WinNT 3.5 and Win95 had just been released. A friend outfitted me with a software of sorts that would make WinNT 3.5 look like Win95. As bad luck would have it, the PC rebooted with just blue background and a mouse cursor. Tech support chap investigated for a while, couldn't figure it out, and decided it would be be best to reinstall Windows because the thing wasn't very stable, etc. (I think I did admit to the guy eventually that I may or may not have installed some software that could have contributed to the OS instability).
Nobody to blame, but ... There was a huge project on the go at a previous employer in early 1990's. Everybody involved in the project got new PCs and the rest of us got their broken carp. So there I was, outfitted with my 386SX, running WFW 3.11 and some terminal emulation thing to connect to a Unsys A-Series painframe. One day the computer started working very strangely; it was as if the clock speed was halved. Pressing the Turbo button switched it into glacier mode. Tech support was able to verify the problem by running some advanced diagnostics and speed testing software that came free with DOS 6.2. It was called "GORILLA.BAS". After satisfying themselves that the exploding bananas were indeed flying somewhat sluggishly, even for a 386SX, I got a replacement (386SX) machine.
I wish they would focus on making their existing products a bit more stable before adding all this AI clutter an redesigning UI's to the point of being unusable. I'm typing this on a work laptop running Win10. Windows explorer is sitting unresponsive there now, grayed out and with a spinning wheel cursor. Probably some shell extension that has croaked, but this being a work asset that is locked down so completely that it won't read USB drives – let alone install anything on it – this must mean that something must have rotted with a previous OS update. Up-time has been 1h40m and now requires a reboot. Killing explorer does not help.
And give me the option back to specify the window border width. Effing measly 2px would do the trick so I can at least see where one terminal window starts if it is overlaid on another window. Now everything is black and if the text from both windows happen to align, it makes for confusing output. Even if you're just looking for the title bar to move the danged window around.
I'm not in the recycling business, bu there's probably not much of value to recycle on a PCB anyway: the chips are mostly plastic and silicon, which are worthless. You'd have to strip down an enormous mountain of PCBs for the copper / gold / tin to become somewhat valuable. Maybe all the chips need to be socketed so that the working ones can at least be recovered and reused easily.