Posts by Mike Lewis 143 posts • joined 18 Apr 2009
Not to me. While I was doing volunteer work at a community computer centre, there was a steady stream of very upset people who had spent what little money they had on a HP laptop and found it was quite slow. I replaced its factory-installed McAfee with the free version of Avira and they went away quite happy.
BOINC and Folding@home make a good combination. BOINC uses a lot of memory while Folding uses a lot of CPU. I've had both running on my antique Intel i5-2400 for several months. It keeps my home office warm in winter.
The only problem is when I add subtitles to the enormous number of videos my deaf and disabled mum watches as she can't do much else. I have to set the priorities of the Folding client and video converter to low then the BOINC client to high to keep it going at a reasonable rate.
People will often make the case, “We can’t be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out as a species a long time ago.” I don’t agree. I find myself saying, “Well, no. Gee, all you need to do is be far enough along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce. And then, that’s it. You don’t need a lot of smarts. You don’t have to do tensor calculus. You don’t have to do quantum physics to be able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.” One could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still make it through the day.”
I decided to stick with Windows 7 as I figure the chances of its being infected by malware are fewer than the chances of Windows 10 being disrupted by Microsoft's "ready or not, here I come" delivery of buggy updates. Also, Microsoft wants £120 for it in Australia which is a bit much.
A local shop was producing DVDs that were legal but still frowned on by the powers that be. They were raided by the police, accompanied by a news reporter. The syadmin ran to get the key to the server room but that wasn't spectacular enough for next morning's paper so the police smashed down the door. Nothing illegal was found, the shop closed down and moved to Amsterdam.
And the news story? Something big broke overnight and it was buried.
When the police bring reporters along on raids, I've always wondered what favours they expect in return.
When I started working at the Melbourne branch of Nokia, they flew a bunch of us to Finland for training. The trip up was fine, not so much the trip back. It took me 36 hours to travel from Oulu in northern Finland to Melbourne. I finally arrived at 4:30 a.m. and the company rules said I had to be in the office by nine.
One of our programmers was told to fly to California, rent a car then drive to Petaluma. She wisely decided it was not a good idea to drive a strange car on the wrong side of the road after a 14-1/2 hour flight and at 4 a.m. her time so she spent a night in a hotel. She got into a lot of trouble for that with Melbourne and Petaluma having a pitched battlle over who was responsible for her hotel bill.
In 1984, I wrote a BBS for a Commodore Vic-20 with multiple rooms (message areas), email and an online game. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. It was very popular with users spending an average of 70 minutes on it.
One of my users got me my first job as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can wrte a BBS for a Vic can program!" Thirty-five years later, that same guy now wants me to work with him at Google.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
From "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
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