Posts by DanceMan 588 posts • joined 17 Aug 2009
For me it was not in the way pretty much everyone here has written about. I went from Miranda to budget Nikon in SLR in the years I developed and printed my own B&W but I bought an Olympus 35RC to have a compact camera I could keep with me, and later the wonderful Olympus Stylus. Full frame 35mm in a small package that had no competition now has understandably been wiped out by camera phones. Technology has destroyed their niche.
It may not be be TYOLOTD, but it''s been my year since I discovered MX linux, and interestingly the main two are on a Thinkpad T410 and a Lenovo M58 SFF. I'd tried linux occasionally for 10 or 15 years on old hardware but Win 8 and 10 pushed me harder. Linux handles wireless and ethernet drivers better than Windows these days. I don't game and thus don't have experience with video gpu's other than the chipset versions. I'm very happy and learning to deal with the occasional command line tasks.
My reading tells me that for linux to make the big jump, it has to have a Domain and Exchange alternative and a way to run actual MS Office. For one example, my union used to use a spreadsheet with complex macros for estimating payrolls that would never have run in Open Office. The vast majority of people will run whatever came on their machine. I note tv ads recently promoting Chromebooks. As long as linux support remains at the current level, I'm quite happy running a somewhat obscure OS.
Earlier during the HK protests a grandfather in Richmond (Vancouver suburb heavily Chinese) passed around a loyalty to the regime paper for the younger family members to sign. The community has always been divided. Years ago the Chinese Benevolent Association was known to be allied with the Chiang Kai-shek Nationalist faction.
The older Vancouver Chinese community was primarily Cantonese from Quandong province.
There's an Iranian-Canadian community locally, many in North Vancouver, They were also detained at the border (made the local news) for about 7 hours for daring to want to take a family outing to Seattle. Ever occur to the brainless CBP that these people may have wanted to get the hell out of Iran given it's current gpv't? Some of these people were among the dead in the 737 crash.
This idiot could not say, two or three weeks after the incident, whether the data had been encrypted. I'm sure the IT guys had some idea about how to safeguard data, but the responsibility for this lies with management, the head of IT and those above him. If the CEO is so clueless he doesn't know this that long after the hack, he needs to go. First for incompetence and second to begin sending a message to others to take this seriously. The frequency of these losses is a stark reminder that CEO's have learned nothing to date.
A small arena used for rock shows I work in had a new led house light system installed. As a backup for the mini-controller hidden in a room under the seating there were two ordinary wall switches located in a vomitory* just above head height. They could instantly kill or bring up the house lights. Said vom also led to the only men's washroom in the building, They were enclosed in a box maybe a year later, thankfully without incident.
*Definition of vomitory
: an entrance piercing the banks of seats of a theater, amphitheater, or stadium
The ex and I had a house built around 1984 and I did a bunch of low-voltage wiring before the walls were drywalled (covered.) By now all of it has been super-ceded by newer standards. The 75 ohm coax for cable tv is now a heavier gauge, cat5 has replaced the old untwisted telephone wire, and surround sound arrived after I'd run zip cord for speaker wiring, so no rear speaker wires. The zip cord for alarm and intercom has become cat5 standard.
Here in Vancouver and the neighbouring Burnaby the north-south streets begin numbering at the north end. but there are a couple of bubbles further north of the zero start cross street, so those addresses are 123 XXX Avenue North (Canada Post mandated order). When I began getting Newegg deliveries by Purolater, the tracking would show "querying address" several times then back to the depot, where I would have to pick it up. The inexperienced driver was seaching for 123 XXX Avenue a block away, unaware of the north-south divide. I had to change my address with Newegg to 123 North XXX Avenue to solve the issue.
That issue solved, even with a notice taped to the door saying "I'm home, okay to drop, but please ring the bell," the bell is never rung.
Called "Marrettes" locally. They have a copper spiral inside and when properly installed the wires being joined are wound around each other tightly as well as all being in contact with the copper spiral of the marrette.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twist-on_wire_connector
I've used Mint Mate and Cinnamon briefly on a changing assortment of old Thinkpads, from T40 on to T410's. One of the last installs had issues with some program features not running properly, possibly after hibernating. Because I use Pale Moon as a browser and it's not in the Mint repositories I decided to try a distro that did have it, thus MX Linux. It's on a T400, it's fast, it does not use Systemd, (it has it for those programs that need it) and all my regular programs work. The only exception is Pale Moon which needs to be shut down and restarted when I hibernate. And it does that quickly. MX Linux has brought me to XFCE. I'm very happy.
"Paper or punch/mark cards don't fill the need for on-the-night results"
Bullshit. Here in Canada in at least some of our elections, the paper ballot is inserted by the voter into an optical reader to tabulate the results. The paper ballots remain available for a recount.
Alas, there are far too many idiots already behind the wheel. The current emphasis (Nissan commercials on Canadian tv touting their driver assist features) on adding these driver assist functions is only encouraging the new generation's lack of attention to the task of driving. Driving is more demanding now than it was 50 years ago when I learned: much greater volume and density of traffic, moving faster. There is no room left for distractions.
From Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers?in_source=amp_trending_now_1
"The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs."
"Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India."
Sometimes you get what you pay for.
Yet another reason I'm happy using Pale Moon in both Windows and Linux. It's not perfect though because one of the extensions I use has disappeared. I still have it only by copying over my profile. This is due to Pale Moon only being compatible with extensions made for up to about FF 24. The change in code base now in effect with FF has led to some devs abandoning their earlier extensions.
When my sisters and I escaped from our mother we rented the top floor of an old house in Vancouver. There were pigeons nesting in a triangular alcove of the roof beside a dormer. There was a giant pile of pigeon poop at the opening of this alcove. What animal shits where it rests? One result of this was a surfeit of those flies that fly around in random patterns inside the house.
Years later I was working on the opera The Cunning Little Vixen (an animal allegory) by Janacek in a Welsh Opera production that at one point featured several housewife chickens in housedresses and aprons leaning on brooms, smoking and cackling. Putting these together my image of pigeons ever since has been of avian rubbies with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, walking around the sidewalks saying "Got any bread crumbs, bud?"
Before you allow Huawei to dominate your country's 5G space, which will be all-encompassing, it is well to remember the Chinese surveillance state, hacking of foreign IP, suppression of freedom of expression, and bullying of anyone who gets on their bad books. Note the arrests of two Canadians, change to a death sentence to another, threats made to Canada directly by Chinese officials over the Meng arrest, and the links between Huawei and the PLA. They don't play by internationally accepted rules and before you put all the future 5G technology in those hands it's wise to keep that in mind. Jim Balsillie, ex RIM/Blackberry co-founder who might have a clue about security said as much on Canadian tv recently.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2020
