
When will people learn?
Pretty much the only lesson we can learn from history is that people never learn anything from history.
GJC
1798 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2008
RM380Z/480Z were both Z80. The 380Z ran CP/M, I'm not sure about the 480Z.
Where you *should* have picked Liam up was on his comprehension. In the late '80s, most well-spec'ed PCs did indeed have two floppy disk drives, one 5.25" the other 3.5", as we were in the change-over period to 3.5". That they also had hard disks was not covered in the original comment.
GJC
"Trust" does not mean what you apparently think it means.
If a small percentage of police officers are crooked, or incompetent, or insane, or possibly some combination of all three, then it becomes foolish to trust any police officer (and that counts double if you are female, or from an ethnic minority, or disabled, or...). Which places a responsibility on any individual police officer to demonstrate *very* early on in any interaction with the public that they are both trustworthy and competent. And I'm afraid to say, over the course of my life, I have not yet met one single police officer in an official capacity who understands this.
GJC
It has long been the case that early generations of challengers in any market are less capable than the incumbents. It has also long been the case that challengers sometimes win, by rapid iteration, understanding the market better than the incumbents, and very simply undercutting on price.
Still, that's never a guaranteed outcome, more often than not the challengers fail after a promising start. So, as I'm saying increasingly often these days, we will just have to wait and see what happens. I like saying this, because it seems to *really* wind up almost everyone, whether they are pro or anti. It seems not taking sides is the most radical stance one can have, in the modern era.
GJC
I have long held the view that organisations need to stop assuming that everyone knows how to use Word Processors and Spreadsheets, and get all new joiners onto a minimum of a day of training to show the basics like style sheets, outlining, and the use of formulae.
For some weird reason, this is very rarely well received, because every knows how to use WP and Spreadsheets, right?
GJC
Yeah, it's not a popular opinion, but I rather like it. Far too big for UK roads, of course, so I will never own one, but I think it looks good, and it's very durable.
I find it sad how many knee-jerk reactions are posted whenever it is mentioned. You don't like it? Cool, don't buy one. You don't have to pretend that your engineering chops are better than the whole of Tesla to justify that stance, as so many people do.
Down-vote away. I don't care, it's your own time you're wasting.
GJC
You can get joysticks and other controls that are exactly the same as the ones fitted to arcade cabinets. For example:
https://shop.xgaming.com/products/x-arcade-tankstick-trackball-usb-included
I have one here, and it makes MAME so close to the original experience. Well worth the money.
I've not yet found a good rotary controller, but to be honest I've not tried that hard.
GJC
My Model S is a very early one (2014) with none of the driver assist features. No autopilot, no park assist, nothing to interfere with the steering. No, it's definitely something fundamental about the driving ergonomics going on here, but I'm buggered if I can work out what.
GJC
That'll be me, then. Seven years and 90,000 miles in a Model S.
I am generally very good at parking. I've driven all sorts of cars over many decades, and pride myself on parking neatly and without fuss. And yet, even after so long in the Model S, I struggle every damn time. I have spent hours pondering over it, and to this day I have no idea what is going on. Some combination of the seating position, body shape, reversing camera, whatever, makes it hugely difficult to park straight and central. It's a standing joke in the Tesla owners' forums, too, so it's not just me.
GJC
Yup, your two points are the core of it. I understand they have already closed one of three existing data centres, and the services are all still running.
Where and how any future improvements are made is rather more nebulous, but the bottom line is that there is now someone at the helm with a proven record of cutting costs without sacrificing quality, and another one with a proven track record of making a profit from media companies, and a bunch of engineers under them who are used to making Musk's demands real. OK, those engineers work for companies other than Twitter, but that's just a paperwork problem :-)
As I said above, I'm not into making predictions about the future, I'm happy to sit back and see what happens. But I'm also not into jumping on the tribal bandwagon doing the "Musk is a prick, therefore Twitter will obviously fail" thing. Musk arguably is a prick, but he's a successful prick in multiple engineering businesses.
GJC
In the short term, advertisers still spending money, a small but solid base of paying subscribers, and a massive decrease in running costs, both on staff and other stuff like data centres.
In the longer term, the development of additional paid services (most notably subscriptions for content providers that Twitter take a chunk of), engineering solutions to further reduce running costs, and just generally having a business-focused leader who is good at process engineering and has a big pool of engineering talent to draw on.
And now, the downvotes and sneering will begin, of course. I don't care, you're only wasting your own time.
GJC
Oh?
I'm happy to wait and see what happens at Twitter. Musk runs two of the most successful companies on the planet currently, and all the doomsayers who confidently predicted that Twitter would collapse a month after the takeover, then three months after the takeover, then six months, have been wrong. I suspect that Twitter has a profitable future ahead of it, whatever you think about the direction it has taken.
GJC
"Somewhat discounted" being 7.5p/kWh on Octopus, for six hours every night. Charge your car, load-shift the big stuff like tumble driers and washing machines into this time (but do make sure they are in good condition before you do this) and you will save loads. My last bill, the average unit price was 17.1p, and that was with little use of the car.
GJC
The reason I asked should be clear now - you are having a different conversation to the one I am having, and I wanted to make sure that was the case.
Yes, for normal day-long operational use, absolutely go for the nicest, most powerful USB-C hub that you can find and afford. I was addressing the situation in the article, where you need to get the laptop configure and running, you are probably not in your home office, and you need to get it talking to the outside world as a one-off exercise as part of the installation process. For that, a USB-C to USB-A converter is the absolute right tool for the job.
Clearer?
GJC
<shrug>
I have worked with computers for 40 years. I've used pretty much every OS out there, and will happily work with anything that fits the requirements in front of me at the time - my current estate covers Windows and three flavours of Linux (all of them on our own hardware, plus AWS, Azure and VMware), some MacOS, some OpenBSD. In the past I've used VMS, various other flavours of Unix, OS/400, all sorts of weird minicomputer and PC server OSs the names of which have mercifully vanished from my memory.
Yes, it's a bias. That it matches your bias doesn't make it any less so.
GJC
I've never understood the purpose of Windows Repair. I fiddle around loads, and routinely break things - all part of the fun of computers. And when I break things, I reach for the installation media, delete all partitions, do a fresh install, and restore data from backups. In the modern era, on any kind of competent machine, it takes about 30 minutes, I get that might be longer if you have some more esoteric applications with odd installation requirements.
A fringe benefit is that fresh installs work *way* better than machines that have suffered in-place upgrades for the last four versions of any OS, but especially Windows.
GJC