Re: I seem to have gotten to this planet by mistake. Does anyone here speak English?
An «Experience» is marketing-speak for something that will disappoint you, that cost a lot to put together and has high entry fees.
1388 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
I know that it is not the Apple Way but Apple should have massively subsidised the first batch as a sweetener to get as large an initial roll-out as possible. Say USD500 a pop.
With Apple's massive reserves, they could easily pay for it on the interest they earn from their reserves alone and still have money left over for wheels of a new computer.
And secondly, how hard would it have been to have written a few apps to demonstrate the awesomeness of AR?
Link up with Boeing or Airbus and have an app that shows all of the parts & part numbers of, say, a fuselage listed in front of you as you look at it, along with possible diagnostics, numbers of spares in local warehouse?
Or an app for a surgeon that lists detailed anatomy of a patient opened up for surgery along with possible noteworthy points about what is on screen?
Or an app that shows you, step by step iFixit-style how to repair, say, a bike, a dishwasher and the like?
Or an app that shows you how to cook an elaborate meal along with hints, suggestions and instructions while you are doing it'
Or an app that explains how to solve, say, the maths problem in front of you using a variety of different ways?
Or an app for farmers looking to buy cattle at a cattle mart: display details of the animal in front of you, possible illnesses or injuries not apparently visible, estimated weight and so on?
There is no end of possibilities that AR can't make better.
These would all make for great ads as well thus killing two birds with one stone.
Think of it as being inside a useful YouTube video and it's showing you what to do in real time.
On 3D printers, I'm waiting for three things:
1. A company like Apple to produce an appliance that's reasonably small, easy & intuitive to use (not that Apple products have been either of these things for quite a while now);
2. An easy to access library that is complete with files for anything I might ever want. To be fair, Thingiverse is heading that way;
3. More support of different plastics, which many already support;
While it's nice to be able to design things yourself and then print it out, I want it primarily to replace parts that would cost me a fortune to get from the manufacturer/tradesman, that would make me wait 6 weeks to arrive or, most likely, is no longer available.
To use the peripheral metaphor, I feel like as if we are still in the 1990s when it comes to printers, scanners and the like. They are pricey but getting cheaper. Colour was available, but... One could combine scanners to printers, but... Nowadays, there are easy to use MFPs, which while still a pain in the arse in some regards, are what I wanted back in 1995: a network-attached, colour 600-dpi laser-printer with scanner for €300.
As someone who writes a lot of SQL daily, I am annoyed that CoPilot is not available for SQL Server Management Studio but *is* for Azure Data Studio.
CoPilot itself looks very promising. It's predictive capacity was quite good and I got used to it quickly. The problem again is ADS.
I have SSMS nicely configured and I know how to use it. I don't want to have to learn how to use ADS unless I really have to and CoPilot is not yet enough of a reason for me to spend a month or so mastering ADS to make it useful.
I asked a psychiatric nurse recently had she noticed any trends over the last 10 years.
Her immediate response was that the number of teenage girls/young women presenting in their clinic with suicidal ideation, self-harm (mostly cutting themselves with blades) and eating disorders has increased markedly in this timeframe.
If I understand this correctly, Microsoft wants Australia, the UK and the US to run their cross-border info from their Azure Government Cloud, which will be hosted in a data-centre or two somewhere in the USA.
Immediately there are several points of failure here: the data-centres themselves and the undersea cables. All it takes for the data-centres to be compromised is some demagogue to rile up his (or maybe her) foaming-at-the-mouth supporters and they will be burnt down in short order. Take down the data-centres and the droids won't know what to do.
I suspect that Mr. Putin has the Russian navy out looking for the various undersea cables, if he doesn't already know where they are, down the metre. Cut the Internet connection in the sea and Australia & the UK lose an important connection with the mothership. I would expect there to be secondary & tertiary connections but have they been tested when all of the processing power is done half a world away?
At the moment the stakes are relatively low, but if the Azure Government Cloud becomes a great success and it comes to control more important matters (for example coordinating military affairs), then these single points of failure become serious & likely targets (which, to be fair, they probably already are).
AWS» These collectives argue Microsoft unfairly locks customers into Azure, or makes it difficult or too expensive to run its software in rival clouds – such as Amazon Web Services, or AWS
Is Amazon correct here?
Or is it simply that AWS wants to unfairly lock in these companies instead?
Is AWS actually more agreeable / more transparent with costs/services for the expanded world of database work than Azure?
That this field is so complex, I expect that the answer is, 'it depends...'.
He did design the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) some 10+ years before USB or FireWire were invented.
ADB allowed for the daisychaining of devices like mice, keyboards, joysticks and graphics tablets.
It was more agreeable to be able to plug the mouse into the keyboard rather than straight into the computer.
And you didn't have to worry about IRQs and the like.
In case anyone should accuse me of being party political, Iet me say that FG couldn't have done it without the invaluable groundwork laid out by the preceding Fianna Fáil governments.
Garret Fitzgerald's miserable rein as taoiseach was nicely set up by Jack Lynch and his give-away budgets. Even Charlie Haughey had difficulty [1] with the mess Jack Lynch left him.
Enda Kenny's government had the mess left by Bertie Ahern & Brian Cowen's approach to regulation (euphemistically called 'light').
[1] But not personally, you understand. The tightening of belts is what other people do.
And the Irish will be happy to make that sacrifice. They don't mind giving up their electricity to data-centres.
They understand how important it is that people's Instagram posts are instantly available.
Indeed, being cold reminds them of the life under Garret Fitzgerald and during Austerity (thanks Brussels!).
Fine Gael governments have that effect on the Irish.
And the Irish government gets to take in more money in the form of corporate taxes.
So everyone is happy.
I can only speak for my company and the team I'm in.
During CovId, the company introduced a WFH policy and once the epidemic had abated somewhat, 1 day in the office was mandated. We have picked Thursday for ourselves although we aren't strict about it. We have our weekly meeting then.
I'd say that about 40%-70% are in the office, excluding the poor women in help desk who don't really get a choice in the matter.
The company also introduced hot-desking at the same time and it is a pain in the arse.
Three quarters of the employees sit in the same place all of the time and so any benefits that might come from it are lost.
I prefer the office to home on account of there being fewer distractions but the other two people in the team far prefer to work from home.
One lives more than an hour away and she has a dog. Life is so much easier for her when she can work from home.
The other colleague has made an impressive setup at home with his own chair, one of those massively wide screens, his own computer and so on.
He lives within a 20 minute commute and could come in, but why bother when the setup at home is so much agreeable than that at work.
And he is disturbed less often. Fewer people just drop by for a chat. He likes to be able to work as uninterrupted as possible.
Unlike the anonymous office space that has to be set up and tidied away at the ends of the day, he has customised his workspace and he feels for comfortable and relaxed there too.
And he has his cats with him to lie on his keyboard.
Some of us hate Google & Facebook more than we hate Micros~1. Not much more, I will grant you that, but still more than Micros~1.
That being said, I'm not one of the three people mentioned although I do like Bing as a search engine.
And, as for Google, in the end, I will surely love Big Brother but at the moment I still savouring the new cream paper.
Wow, 6 downvotes in a few hours.
Now, to those who have downvoted me: what did I write that was wrong, misleading or offensive?
I am open to being corrected on the origin of 'hilbilly'.
The people in the Applachians and much of The South *are* descended from the Ulster Scots.
President Andrew Jackson was one of their finest. I went to see the cottage of his parents in Northern Ireland last year.
elDog» The US colonies still have a solid remnant suffering from partial genetic brain damage and will vote for a trump or bojo or their dead heros like Strom Thurmond or Mitch McConnell (is he dead?)
We still have their genetic forebears in the form of the Loyalist community in the North of Ireland and look what a progressive, considerate lot they are. Just at the massive bonfires they build out of wooden palettes and adorned with Republic of Ireland flags, nationalist politicians and such like. Attention seeking or a simple reaffirmation of values?
I don't know whether this is true or not, but I heard on a podcast that the word 'hillbilly' comes from the term, 'King William's Men who live in the hills'. That's the Unionist community in the Northern Ireland — Ulster Scots proud & true.
They haven't gone away, you know.
As a Rightpondian, I don't mind many of the words from the Webster reforms (color, humor, flavor), I dislike, purely on aesthetic grounds, the 'z' in -ize words (recognize, patronise) but I would be really happy if the continual use of nouns as verbs would disappear ('architecting a solution').
This seems to be a Californian Tech phenomenon and it could also be that I'm getting old and this is the modern equivalent of telling those brats to get off my lawn.
p.s. For those too young to remember them, the title comes from 'Calvin & Hobbes', one of the great gifts of America to the world: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
If Mark Zuckerberg wants to beat Elon Musk, he should use what extraordinary strength he has, namely, financial.
He should buy Twitter and turn it into a platform that shits heavily on Musk (or even just reports the truth about him).
That would irritate the fuck out of Musk. Also a 'woke' Twitter would cause few blood vessels to be burst too (woke as defined, naturally, by Musk).
With any luck he might also bring down Twitter & Meta with it. One can only dream.
The Japanese still think that WWII started with the bombing of pearl harbour in 1941 and that they are victims of WWII.
They learn nothing about Korea in 1910, Manchuria, Nanking and so on.
One Japanese I met told me that he didn't learn about Japan did in the first half of the last century until he got to university.
The Japanese government has not apologised for what happened and they do nothing to educate their citizens about it.
The Japanese have an awful lot to worry about in the next big war. The rest of East Asia and especially the Chinese & Korean *do* learn about their history and the Japanese are not the most loved people in that neck of the woods. Envied yes and there is a lot of resentment there.
Especially as 90% of Japanese food (except rice) is imported and there are three times as many people there now than there was in the 1940s.
The future is not rosy for Japan.