Posts by TheFifth 247 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jul 2010
Yeah me too. One popup on first run and nothing since. I can live with that.
I know people stick their noses up at it, but I kinda like Pages for when I just need to write. It's simple and has all the features I require. Numbers is also useful for when I need to wrangle a CSV. It works quickly with very large CSV files and hasn't caused me any headaches.
Horses for courses, but they have their place in my workflow. And they're free!
This is the first thing I used to do on any new XP installation. I preferred the look and as a bonus the PC's performance seemed to be better without all the visual cruft.
I used Windows 2000 exclusively until XP came out and much preferred it to any of the Win9x versions. So much more stable, it was revelation. The only issue I had with 2000 was that drivers for some more consumer based peripherals didn't come out until XP was on the horizon. I didn't use XP for long on my personal machines though and went over to Linux full time in about 2002 / 2003. Was still stuck with XP at work though. Thankfully I managed to completely avoid Vista!
Completely agree. I've had to do a couple of integrations for a client, nothing too complex, just create invoices, send them and check payment status. Should have been a simple task.
Back when I did this (many years ago) all of the API documentation and examples were auto-generated from the code and were simply incorrect. It took hours of hunting around and reading forum posts from others in the same boat to finally get something that worked.
I note that the documentation has improved somewhat, but it's still poor.
I had the Pebble Steel, which I loved. Such a great watch and always a talking point when anyone spotted it.
After about a year it started having screen corruption issues. Not all the time, just once every now and again and it would go away with a press of a button. This did seem to be a common problem on the Steel. Fair play to Pebble though, I sent them a photo of the screen corruption and they just sent me a brand new Pebble Time. Didn't even ask for the Steel back.
I loved the Time even more than the Steel and was gutted when the FitBit takeover happened.
I have both in a drawer somewhere. I may have to get them out and see if there's any life left in them.
It's a completely different sector, but when I used to work as a TV editor / director, you would always have to show any programme you'd made to the commissioning editor of the TV station before it could be finalised.
All of them loved to 'put their mark' on programmes and most comments were utterly ridiculous. Either pointless (which I didn't mind) or worse, something that totally destroyed the narrative and flow of the piece.
Looking back, my favourite example (although not at the time!) was when we were making an episode that revolved around a school Christmas musical. It included everything from initial casting all the way through to opening night. We were pretty happy with it as we concentrated on a kid who wanted to be an actor when he left school, but didn't have the confidence to sing. It showed his journey from quiet off-key squeaks to confident projection on opening night. A real feel good story. The commissioning editor's comment? "Urrgh, I hate listening to kids sing, you need to cut all of the singing and just concentrate on the acting". It's a musical ffs!
From then on we would always include something so egregious and obviously bad in the first edit to give them something to comment on. We would gush "oh yes, wow that's such a good idea, thanks so much for spotting that" and they would go away happy, feeling like they made a mark on the programme.
The games we play!
This is a major way in which the iPad wins in my opinion and the base model is reasonably priced for what you get. I had a Google Nexus 7 tablet, which is 16:10, and the aspect ratio was pretty annoying for anything but video. When I switched to an iPad it made the tablet so much more usable.
Granted, when at home the iPad is pretty much only used for web browsing, YouTube and maybe some light email duties, but when I go away it is used with a keyboard so I can get real work done.
I currently have a Mac Mini at home setup with Jump Desktop so I can remote in from the iPad. If I need to do any client support that requires a 'real' computer, I simple remote in from the the iPad using a keyboard and trackpad. It's a pretty good experience dependant on network speed and Jump Desktop is the best remote desktop service I've found for MacOS and iOS.
Now if Apple would only allow me to run full fat MacOS on my iPad (which has the same specs as the Mac Mini!), I could use it for far more and maybe actually use some of what the hardware is capable of. Only being able to do real work on the iPad when I have a network connection (so the real work is actually happening on the Mac Mini) is pretty restricting.
Agreed. Give me a smaller screen that actually fits in a pocket, please. A bit lighter would be good too. I always have other, larger screens around me when I want to watch videos etc. so I don't need my phone to have a massive screen. I want something that actually fits in a pocket without poking out the top.
I absolutely agree! The thickness is the last dimension I care about when it's in my pocket.
I'd been using a 12 Mini since they launched in 2020 and loved the form factor. At the end of last year I had a bit of spare cash so thought I'd update all of my tech. Picked up a new iPad, laptop and phone, all of which will see me through for the foreseeable future. As there was nothing similar to the Mini I went with a standard base model iPhone 16. I don't use my phone for much more than phone calls, text messages and paying for parking with apps, so I don't need anything amazing.
I hate the size of all of the modern iPhone lineup. It's impossible to put in a pocket without being really aware that it's there. It pokes out of the top of most. The weight was the biggest shock to me. If I'm wearing comfy track suit type trousers around the house, the weight of the phone in the pocket pulls them down as I walk around!
It seems impossible to get a decent, small form factor phone from any manufacturer these days. Apple used to be the last company making one, but they've fallen for the Android mantra of "must have a massive screen". I hate it.
I agree that processor speed increases have definitely become more incremental recently and during normal work loads you don't notice an improvement. The increases in SSD and memory speeds have probably made more of an impact than the CPU for general use.
The first Mac I ever owned was an early 2006 black polycarbonate MacBook, which was a great machine for the time. That got dropped and broke, so I replaced it with one of the original retina MacBook Pros in 2012. That was a very, very good machine and was a noticeable jump in performance. The battery started to die on that in early 2020, so I replaced it with an Intel MacBook Pro. Typically this was just before the Apple Silicon announcement. I hated that machine. It felt no faster than the eight year old 2012 MacBook Pro and the fans were constant like a jet engine, even when doing the simplest of tasks. I could feel no improvement in performance at all. It felt like a waste of money.
My wife picked up an M1 Air on release and it was such a breath of fresh air. It was noticeably faster than my Intel based MacBook Pro (from the same year!) and completely silent. Its battery also put my MacBook Pro's battery to shame. I struggled on with my MacBook for a while as I felt I needed to get some return on the investment I had made. I finally bit the bullet in late 2024 though and picked up an M4 Pro MacBook Pro. Unlike the jump between the Intel 2012 and 2020 MacBook Pro, this felt like another world, even though it was only four years. I could really feel the difference in day to day stuff and it's completely silent 95% of the time.
But those massive leaps don't happen often and I guess we won't see another like that possibly ever. I'm hoping this MacBook will last me a good eight to 10 years, I can't see myself needing to replace it sooner.
I had a South African friend at uni back in the 90s and he referred to himself as Coloured. He considered it a distinct race / culture and staunchly wanted to be referred to as it. To him it was an important part of who he was, similar to the way Cornish is to some in the UK.
I remember talking to an African American woman in the early 2000s and the subject of South African came up and we spoke about him. She was utterly offended when I used the word 'Coloured' to describe his race and it took me a long time to calm her down and explain what it meant. Language can be super tricky sometimes!
This stuff is happening and this article is just a personal story of that. The article is in the 'Column' category, which is under the 'Off Beat' section of The Reg. This is where you'll find the columnists' personal opinions, which by definition will not be neutral. These types of articles have always been opinion pieces and are not meant to be pure facts. If you want dry tech news, avoid the 'Column' category.
I've read El Reg for well over 20 years and it's always had opinion pieces, the same as every news outlet does. Unlike Fox News though, El Reg is not 100% opinion.
Personally, I don't have children, but my nephews and nieces never had internet access in their bedrooms. All access was in communal spaces and only when parents were around. They had restricted accounts on the computer and I helped my Sister ensure that all parental locks were in place at PC and ISP level.
I think this is what annoys me the most about all of this stuff. Because some parents can't be bothered to actually parent their kids, the rest of us have our data and privacy put at risk by this madness.
I think every ISP in the UK offers free tools to block this kind of stuff at the connection level, but I guess that makes life harder for the parents who still want to access smut without any hinderance.
I think the iPhone gave the smartphone industry the kick up the arse that it needed.
As someone who had for years been happily(ish) using a series of Windows CE PDAs and smartphones (from the likes of Dell, HTC, Motorola etc.), I was blown away when I first saw the iPhone. At the time I was using a Motorola Q, which I was really happy with and considered it pretty much the best smartphone I'd ever had, but after playing with a friends iPhone I felt like I was stuck in the dark ages. The iPhone was the full web and email on a phone, not the broken, only half working stuff I was used to on Windows CE. And navigating with a finger was so much more fluid than a tiny stylus or keyboard. I still didn't buy an iPhone for a few years, but it certainly opened my eyes to what was possible.
Just take a look at the early pre-release builds of Android that were being shown off at the time. It was far more akin to Windows CE than it was to iOS and was built around devices with keyboards and a D-pad. Android had to have a rethink after the iPhone was released, which was a good thing for everyone involved. Let's face it, Android surpassed iOS in functionality pretty quickly (copy and paste anyone?).
I'm sure the industry would have gotten to where we are sooner or later, but I'd give Apple some credit for massively pushing things forward at a time when most were using Windows CE - which had been stuck in its ways for years - and pre-release Android looked like it would be more of the same.
Agree with lots of your comments here. Canon RAW seems to be incredibly hit and miss. Frankly, QuickLook as a whole has been very flaky in recent years and often hangs for me, with the only way to get the functionality back being to force close the processes.
They have updated Spotlight a lot in MacOS 26, but I'd bet several pints that at its core it's still the same ropey indexing engine. I'd be happy if it would just let me eject an external drive without having to kill the Spotlight process. I know you can add the drive to the Spotlight exclusion list, but you have to do that with every new drive you use and nine times out of ten you get an error and adding doesn't work.
I'd also add in the frankly weird issues with SD Cards. They'll work one time when you plug them in, but the next they won't mount. Restart the Mac and they work again. I find that the only way I can read the SD card from my DJI Pocket is to plug the unit itself in with a cable. Sometimes even that doesn't work and you have to ensure the device is plugged in and turned on when you restart the computer. I've had these issues on both an M4 MacBook Pro and an M2 Mac Mini, so it's not hardware. It's an utter mess.
I don't hold out much hope that these basic issues will be fixed. They've been present for years. But hey, look how shiny and transparent everything is now!
Me: Please fix all the bugs and make things more stable.
Apple: Look how transparent everything is now!
I think the new look is ugly and dated. I thought Vista looked like hot garbage and this is just the same thing rehashed and called 'revolutionary'. Don't get me started on the visual clutter introduced when the background of a button constantly changes dependant on what's behind it. Are they purposely trying to make it hard to see what's written on UI elements?
The whole iOS UI is changing to be similar to the universally panned Photos app redesign. Excellent work Apple.
And what is this fascination with hiding UI elements? They keep saying the UI 'gets out of your way', but hiding frequently used buttons doesn't seem like a great idea to me. I don't want my UI to be 'discoverable', I want it to stay where it was last time I used it, not constantly pop in and out dependant on the time of day. I'm constantly having this argument with clients who keep insisting on hiding important web content behind a hover or a tap. If it's important, keep it on screen.
Please, Apple. Can we just have a Snow Leopard style stability release and hold off on the 'new shiny' for a bit. Also, we don't need a new OS every year. Just release it when it's fully baked, I'm fed up with fighting weirdness everyday.
I will give them some credit for making iPadOS a bit more useful with proper windowing and file management. However, the amount of development time that went into creating that could have gone into something else if they just gave people the option to run MacOS on M based iPads. I'm not talking about forcing everyone to run MacOS on an iPad, but the kind of power users who want these features in iPadOS are likely also the ones who would be happier with MacOS - and more importantly the full featured pro apps available for MacOS - on their iPad.
From what I've read, there may be higher direct taxation in Europe, but in the US, by the time you factor in monthly healthcare costs (which can be 15% for basic healthcare, far higher for comprehensive cover), you end up paying more and receiving less. This is especially true if you factor in pensions, social safety nets, higher education cost etc. Don't be fooled by simple tax percentages.
Affinity Designer is an alternative. It's more basic than Illustrator, but has all the features many people need. If you were OK with older versions of Illustrator, I'm sure you would be OK with Affinity Designer.
I switched fully away from Adobe when Affinity Photo was released in 2015. Now I use Affinity Photo / Designer for graphics work and DaVinci Resolve / FCPX for video. Never looked back.
Apple increases profits and income by 5% and lays out what it's doing to counter the threat of tariffs. Stock falls 4%.
Tesla's net income takes a massive hit, sales plunge across the world and profit is down 71%. Musk details how they will be screwed over by tariffs when manufacturing Optimus, but gives no details on what they will do about it. Stock increases by 5%.
Please make it make sense.
Me too. DVD-R and CD-R are useless as a long term backup solution. I have a bunch of backup discs ranging from 10 to 15 years old and half of them are only just readable (with many retries) and some are not readable at all. On the other hand I own an old spinning rust backup drive (120GB) that is over 20 years old and still works perfectly (it only gets plugged in now and then). I do have other copies of the data that is on that drive as I don't expect it to last forever, but it always amazes me that whenever I plug it in it jumps into life and is no noisier than the day I bought it.
I had a 486 IBM PS/1 back in the day. On those machines it was very possible to kill a PS/2 port by plugging in something when the power was on. I knew this and was super careful (although I probably did do it a few times by mistake), but I was working in Dixons over the uni holidays and we did see a fair few come back with this issue. The engineers told me it was a tiny surface mount component that would blow. A capacitor if my memory serves me correctly (although it is 30+ years ago, so I could be wrong).
It's only Linux that has this much trouble going through puberty
I think Telsa and anything Musk related has an even bigger issue. There's a reason why the Tesla model names are S, 3, X, Y, SpaceX has a thing named Mechazilla and Musk constantly makes reference to the numbers 69 and 420. It's that he's an overgrown, edge-lord child.
I used OS/2 3 on my 486DX33 for a little while. The computer came with Win 3.1 but I acquired an OS/2 disk from a friend, so gave it a try. I liked it and with it's ability to run 16 bit Windows apps, I could do everything I needed to in a far more stable way than Windows 3.1 ever could.
But as you say, "people use applications not operating systems".
By the time I started university in late 95, I had switched to Windows 95. All the computers at uni ran either Win 3.1 or 95, with most on 95, so if I wanted to use the same apps on my machine I'd have to use 95.
It was a fun few months messing with OS/2 but ultimately I had to use what the uni was using if I wanted an easy life.
A couple of years later I did install Warp 4 during a uni holiday, just for a bit of fun. It was given away for free on a magazine cover disk, which I guess was IBM's last ditch effort to gain some market share. Again, it was good to use, but there were things I needed that were Windows only, so it was again replaced by Windows.
I got a B at A level Physics some 35 years ago, but the closest I come to doing anything relevant now is watching Brian Cox on the TV. I don't really remember any of it!
All this quantum stuff is so ridiculously beyond me I can't even see it with a telescope. Interesting though!
Yup. Soft power is generally considered excellent value for money, which is why relatively small countries can project power far great than their size (Sweden is a good example). China isn't building roads and infrastructure throughout the developing world out of the goodness of its heart, anyone with half a brain in their head knows this.
By most measures, the US is currently number one for soft power, however I'd bet that position is fast eroding. Trump and Doge are handing influence to China and Russia. They must think all their birthdays have come at once.
I always thought the claim that Trump is a Russian plant was hyperbole, but I'm beginning to wonder now.
You didn't mention the "public interest test" in your original post, which is what I was replying to. You didn't even allude to it. Adding that argument in a later reply won't change what my understanding of your original post was. Your original post was just about how the SEC is partly wrong because the consensus is Musk overpaid for Twitter (no idea how any of that matters or how it's related to a public interest test or blind justice in any way). You seem to be completely changing tack.
Maybe you need to learn to express yourself a little better the first time? Keep at it Champ, you'll get there.
"More paranoia I think. In no way could, or should you think my comment made Musk look better."
Maybe I am just paranoid, but starting your post with "I think this is a strange case because the SEC is both right, and wrong" seems to indicate that you think the SEC is at least partly in the wrong by going after Musk for breaking the law. Certainly seems like you are lessening the wrongdoing of Musk and suggesting some level of wrongdoing by the SEC. Hence my comment "make Musk look better and the SEC look worse".
You can disagree (and you will), but that's what I got from what you wrote. You seemed to be shifting some level of blame to the SEC for something that Musk entirely did to himself. The SEC are just doing their job.
When he disclosed his purchase, the stock price jumped nearly 30%. If he had disclosed this on March 24th, as he should have done, the stock price would have likely jumped on that day. The problem is that he bought $500 million worth of shares between March 24th and April 4th (when he did finally disclose), so these shares were likely priced at 30% less than they should have been. This is where he should have paid more, not in the final purchase price he paid.
The fact that he ultimately overpaid when he bought the rest of Twitter is irrelevant, which you likely know, but for some reason you want to make Musk look better and the SEC look worse.
What these "it's an echo chamber!!!!!1111" idiots don't seem to understand is that not everyone wants to be bombarded with politics and polarised views every time they view their timeline.
I want to read about science, development, retro-tech, guitar, music and maybe a bit of history too. I don't want people shoving their political views down my throat all the time, no matter the stripe. I don't want any politics at all. I don't use social media as my source for political news (and I advise others not to either!), so when I'm using it, I don't want to see any.
With Twitter I don't seem to have that option. Politics, especially of the right-wing American flavour, will be forced on me at every opportunity. It's why I left. With Mastodon I can read about what I want and avoid all the shouting. It's pleasant and it's what I want to use social media for.
I am just about able to put up with arguments over the use of Hungarian notation and tabs vs. spaces.
I use an older version of the YouTube app on iPad, it's uYou+ with Adblock and Sponsor block enabled, so I don't want to upgrade.
My iPad is set to en-gb and the YouTube app seems to select a random auto-translation for all videos I watch. One is playing in Spanish, another in French and another could be Italian, even though the original language is English. My guess is that the default English language is defined as en-us (that's what the language dropdown seems to indicate anyway) and the YouTube app doesn't seem to realise that en-gb will likely want that language, so it just picks a random one. You can set the region in the YouTube app, but it's ignored for video translations and only seems to set the region for the 'recommendations' page. From what I read, the iPadOS language is checked for video translations.
Obviously I don't want to set the locale of my entire iPad to be the US just for YouTube. It's annoying, but not annoying enough to force me to upgrade and no longer have Sponsor and ad blocking.
This is what I found after Musk took over.
My Twitter feed used to be relevant to what I follow (retro and modern tech, development, music, comedy). I didn't follow politics and I never saw any. I used to enjoy reading through my Twitter feed in bed each morning and some of the recommendations I received were actually interesting. I never saw any of the hateful side of Twitter because it used to be possible to avoid it if you didn't follow anything contentious.
Within a few days of Musk taking over my feed was full of right wing US politicians (MTG and the like), tonnes of US politics and of course Musk himself. I'm in the UK, why would I care about the latest nonsense MTG has just spouted? It went from a fun morning read to a depressing slog through irrelevant, hateful crap to find something I actually follow. I left within a few weeks.
I joined Mastodon, which I do like, although I miss some of the larger accounts I used to follow. If it's possible to only see what I actually want and any recommendations are actually relevant, maybe I'll give BlueSky a go.
I think that's what a lot of these people screeching about 'echo chambers' are missing. Not all of us want to see a feed full of political arguments or even polite political discussions. We don't want any politics. Some of us just want to read through fun posts about topics we are actually interested in without politics polluting our feed. I used to be able to do that with Twitter, but the second Musk took over, that became impossible.
Buckle up, this is a long one!
“No. I don't agree, sorry. Though for the record, I upvoted you because at least you were polite.”
It’s fine to disagree. The world would be a dull place if we all agreed on everything.
“I’ll see your Aleksandr Dugin's 1997 book 'Foundations of Geopolitics' and raise you Zbigniew Brzezinski's 'The Grand Chessboard' (1997). “
I’ve not read the book, but it is on my list, so I’m not sure I can fully respond to this fairly. I have however read many discussions and reviews of the ideas in the book (which is why it’s on my list to read), so I can perhaps talk about my understanding of it (with the caveat that I’m talking about the ideas in the book from the perspective of what I thought about what other people thought about them).
From my understanding, Brzezinski himself has said the book is very much about the US geo-strategy of the last decade of the 20th century. Obviously, what happened in the 90s has an impact today (as I said with the perceived embarrassment about the fall of the USSR in the Russian psyche) and some policies may still carry over, but how many of the strategies in the book are still current policy is open to debate. Dugin's work was very much a roadmap for the future, one that can be seen to be have been followed pretty closely up to now. He is also still active in Putin's ear and is cited as Putin's favourite 'thinker'.
Obama for example had his famous ‘reset’ of US relations with Russia in 2010. This involved the scrapping of plans to build military bases in Eastern Europe and the reduction of deployed warheads with the new START treaty. The US even helped speed along Russia’s WTO accession. They had agreements and discussions on everything from culture, education, sports, dealing with the financial crisis, ‘universal values’ (whatever they are) and much more. It really seemed to be an attempt to find common ground across all areas. Obviously you can claim this was all a ruse, but most of what I have read doesn’t think it was and see it as a genuine attempt to put old differences behind them.
Some in the intelligence community cite this reset, and later the lack of any real action against 2014’s annexation of Crimea, as the reason for Putin’s renewed confidence on the world stage.
It is also evident that the US has pulled back from its many international adventures during the 90s, and is now far more insular. It’s hard to argue that the US of today is as globally adventurous as the US of the 90s.
Moving outside of the US, Europe also had a reset of relations with Russia, with a policy of trying to bring Russia into the European community. This was strongly pushed by Angela Merkel and Germany as a whole, with many now thinking she was taken for a fool by Putin.
Obviously the book cannot be dismissed (the guy was an advisor to US government in the 80s after all) and I’m sure that the content has relevance today, but I’m not sure you can cut and paste the US policy of the 90s over the 2010s onward.
Perhaps my biggest criticism, and from what I understand is one of the main criticisms levelled at the book, is that it’s from a very one sided, US centric view. This is exactly what I see from everyone who says that everything in the world is the fault of the West, they don’t allow for the autonomy of any other country.
You back up my view when you say:
“The Ukrainians are nothing more than pawns on the chessboard, same as the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, and the Libyans.”
Ukraine is a nation state that has autonomy and its own ideas and wants. Diminishing a country of 40 million people down to a pawn in a US political game is insulting. I would think the fact that the Ukrainian people have multiple times risen up against their Government shows that they are not merely pawns. Even all the way back in 1990 with the Revolution on Granite, the Ukrainian people have been showing their autonomy and a strong will to be in control of their own destiny. Just because that desire looks West does not mean it’s all a CIA plot.
“I’ve also heard Putin talk of Peter the Great and reclaiming Russian lands, but only in the context of Crimea, the gifting of which to Ukraine by Brezhnev in 1954 was controversial (from the Russian standpoint).”
Putin has talked about reclaiming Russian lands multiple times, most recently that I have heard in 2022. He again likened himself to Peter the Great and discussed how Peter had retaken lands from Sweden. He was justifying the war in Ukraine in general and a wider desire to reclaim Slavic lands for Russia, not only Crimea.
“Sending countless thousands of Russian male conscripts to their death over such an old issue is political suicide. No, I think his actions are solely pragmatic, based on current geopolitical events as he sees them.”
I agree some of the reasons are pragmatic, I never said these were the only reasons, I was simply pushing back against your claim that the war only started because of NATO expansion.
Crimea for example was largely about access to the deep water port in Sevastopol, the lease of which was up for renewal. However, Putin soon found out that supplying Crimea with essentials like food, water and power was very costly and not at all easy, even with the new Kerch Bridge. This is one reason why a land bridge between Russia and Crimea is so important now. The reason Brezhnev gifted Crimea to Ukraine wasn’t just from the kindness of his heart. It was also because of the cold, hard realities of maintaining infrastructure in, and supplying essentials to a separate enclave. Ukraine is attached to Crimea, so it’s far more cost effective to run power, water and supply lines from Ukraine. As you say, this wasn’t much of an issue when the USSR still existed.
As for the thousands of conscripts, this is currently a major issue for Putin. He desperately needs to mobilise more manpower, however politically he cannot for the reasons you state. Politically he also cannot withdrawal from Ukraine as it would be the end of his rein. He (and his advisors) believed Ukraine would fail within three days and Ukrainians would welcome Russia with open arms. He believed his own hype about ‘one Slavic people’ and now has a mess that is all of his own making.
I don’t know where you are from. Are you Russian or from another Slavic nation, or are you from a Western country? Just to explain my interest in this, I am a British / Irish national, married to a Russian woman. She lived in Ukraine in her early life and has relations who are Ukrainian and live in Eastern Ukraine. I have spent a lot of time in Russia and, as I married into a Slavic family, I felt I should understand the history of the region and the culture. I have spoken extensively to both Russians and Ukrainians in my extended family and have probably annoyed them all by asking many questions about how things were and are for them. My wife still has family and friends in Russia, so we are keeping up to speed with how things are there now.
My Wife reads much of the current thinking on Putin from Russian political figures (mostly those exiled for wrong think) and the general consensus is that there is a strong ideological and legacy building element to Putin’s current actions.
"The conflict only started in the first place because of the NATO states proposing to bring Ukraine into NATO"
Absolute nonsense. To think that you need to ignore so much history and much of what Putin himself has said. Sure, it's a great justification that Putin can spout when he wants to redirect from his empire building desires, but to think it's the only reason this war started is simplistic and lazy.
Putin is enacting a plan that has been in the works since the 90s. Just take a look at Aleksandr Dugin's 1997 book 'Foundations of Geopolitics'. It reads like a playbook of what Putin has been up to since 1999, including making Western nations reliant on your resources, pouring money into Western financial markets to gain power and influence, sowing dissent in Western democracies and separating the UK politically from Europe (again by sowing dissent). Subsuming Ukraine into Russia was the next step on the list, a list which also includes reclaiming all of the Slavic countries. Dugin has been in Putin's ear for years. There's a reason why he's known as "Putin's Rasputin".
Putin also openly says he wants to rebuild the Russian Empire and make Russia a world power again. He often likens himself to Peter the Great and talks of 'reclaiming and strengthening Russian lands'. Talk which rattled the Baltic states long before 2022. For Putin this is almost a religious war and a battle for geopolitical dominance. Talk of NATO and de-nazifying Ukraine are useful distractions when you need to justify your actions on the global stage, but if you listen to what he says to his home audience, it's all about how Ukraine is not really a country, how Russia needs to reclaim its lands, how Russia is the Mother of all Slavs, and how all Slavic people should be living together as a single nation. It's entirely ideologically based.
It's been deeply imprinted in Russian culture that Russia is the Mother of all Slavs since the time of the Tsars, which is ironic when you consider that if any state can claim that name it would be Kievan Rus', which was centred in Kiev. Muscovy, from which Russia grew, was merely a region of Kievan Rus'. It was when Ivan IV was crowned Prince of Muscovy in 1547 and declared “Tsar of All the Russias” that a unified Russian state first began to claim the heritage of Kievan Rus’. I wonder why Putin is so desperate to say Ukraine is not a real country and is just part of Russia? (side note: The first usage of the word Ukraine to mean the region where Ukraine now sits dates back to 1187 in the Hypatian Codex, long before Russia existed as a nation - this is tricky for Putin).
A lot of this talk of pan-Slavism is also to boost Putin's popularity at home. Nothing boosts an authoritarian ruler's popularity like increasing your country's status on the world stage. His strongman image is very much tailored to play well at home. Russian culture loves a strong ruler.
We could also touch on the feeling within Russia that the nation was deeply embarrassed by the West when the USSR fell and a desire to regain lost glory, but this would take several thousand more words to pick apart.
Anyway, these are just a fraction of the reasons why this war started. It's deeply ingrained in an almost religious belief that Russia is the rightful leader of all Slavic people, hundreds of years of Russian history, and the desire of an authoritarian leader to leave a legacy, as well as protect his current position.
So saying "The conflict only started in the first place because of the NATO states proposing to bring Ukraine into NATO" is really sloppy thinking. This was always going to happen in one form or another, the NATO line is just a useful excuse.
I think I followed a similar Linux journey to the author. I remember around 2002 I was becoming more and more fed up with Windows XP, so was trying out various Linux distros. I'd tried Red Hat 8 and also whatever the current Mandrake release was at the time and found them OK, however I picked up a copy of SUSE through work and finally settled on that for a couple of years. As you say, rpm-hell was a real thing, but I found that SUSE mostly worked for me.
Come 2004, I saw a magazine with a CD of Ubuntu on the cover, so thought I'd give it a go. It was a revelation! Small, fast and apt was (comparatively) amazing. Gnome 2 was a breath of fresh air too.
That machine was upgraded all the way to Gutsy in 2007 when I bought a new computer. Happy times!
I still have a Surface machine running the latest Ubuntu to this day. It's not as revolutionary as it was back in the day, but it's still fine for me.
I even had that Alcatel modem, although I think I was running at 256kbps.
I've just been through this with my Mum a few weeks ago. She had two major strokes within an hour and lost the ability to swallow. She already had dementia and wasn't able to communicate that well anyway, so the stroke on top of it made her only able to open her eyes (with trouble fixing on anything) and hold your hand.
We were given the choice to take her into hospital and pump her full of fluids, but that would only delay the inevitable. She was never going to recover from the stroke and even if she did, the rapid progression of the dementia would have taken her within a year or so anyway. We decided to let her stay in the nursing home she was in and familiar with. After watching her Mother (my Gran) die with dementia, she had always expressed how much she didn't want to live like that. Her biggest fear was being incapacitated in exactly this way, so we didn't want to extend it in any way. We sat beside her bed for five days as she slowly slipped away. Within a day or so she was pretty much in a vegetive state and no longer reacting to stimuli, but her body held on for a few days more.
It was a horrific thing to watch, we honestly treat animals with more dignity. In a no hope situation like this, I would think it reasonable that, if a team of doctors all agree, medical professionals should be able to help speed things along. Watching her suffer for five days was terrible.
My YouTube recommendation feed did start to become infected with right wing dog whistles recently. One or two started to creep in initially, but it picked up pretty quickly. The judicial use of the 'Not interested' and 'Don't recommend this channel' options seems to have calmed it down again. Still the odd one creeping in though.
I mainly follow retro-tech, electronics, development, guitar and science stuff, with some philosophy thrown in here and there. I do follow a couple of political scientists who discuss the war in Ukraine, so I wonder if the dumb YouTube algorithm is assuming that as I follow a political scientist, I must be interested in extreme right wing politics. Weird.
I picked up an Amazon replacement MagSafe charger a few years ago as I wanted to have one permanently plugged in at my desk whilst the original was in my laptop bag.
When charging, the cable between the block and the MacBook would get really hot. Also, if it was plugged in the trackpad on the MacBook would play up, with the mouse pointer stuttering and jumping all over the place. I didn't notice this as first as I had an external mouse and keyboard plugged in at my desk, but needless to say the thing went back as soon as I spotted it.
I'll only buy original chargers now, or if it's a generic USB C type thing, I ensure it's from a trusted brand. It's just not worth the risk (as Mark Fixes Stuff from YouTube can attest).
I'd put my money on it being a QC/QA issue, either due to a change in process in the name of efficiency or pressure on the workforce to work harder and faster. Likely in the name of keeping up with the increased cadence of launches. Obviously I have no way of knowing this, but it was the first thing that jumped into my head when I saw the launch.
The Falcon 9 has an incredible success record, so either they've bumped into an edge case, or something has changed. I'm betting on the latter, but happy to be proved wrong.
Just look at Boeing for an example of how easily QC/QA can slip.
My car has both cruise control and a speed limiter (optional). I can switch it to either CC or limiter, so the limiter doesn't operate in CC mode.
I have never used the limiter and only ever use cruise control. I don't drive like a maniac and have been driving for over twenty years without ever getting a ticket. I have never felt the need for a limiter.
However, after reading through these posts, I'm thinking I may have misjudged the usefulness of the limiter. When I first got the car and turned it on it defaulted to 70mph. I always use CC on the motorway set to 70mph as that gives me the option to creep above 70 if I need to pass one of those wonderful people who drives slowly, but accelerates as you try to pass them. I can also just press the pause button if I need to let the car gently slow down without braking. I couldn't understand why I would want the limiter to be on at 70mph as it seems less useful than CC. So I kinda dismissed it from that point onwards.
However, reading the above I can actually see that it could be useful on lower speed limit roads rather than motorways. I don't generally have an issue keeping to the speed limit, but I have to admit that from time to time, especially if traffic is stop and start, it is possible to creep above a low speed limit when you finally get going. Especially on several roads near me where the local council have decided to lower the speed limit of some large out of town roads, in the middle of nowhere, far from any houses to 30mph from 40 or 50. It's so easy to forget the change.
Thank you fellow commentaries, perhaps I'll give the limiter a try. My only reservation is I don't want it to make me complacent about keeping an eye on my speed.
I also used Trillian and was in their tester group for a while during one of their major rewrites. Used to hang out on their forum and in their IRC channel too. Fun times.
I see they're still around but have pivoted away from multi-network support to using their own protocol. They had just introduced their own service as an additional network on top of the other providers when I stopped using it. Looks like they're targeting business and healthcare now with HIPAA compliance being a major selling point. https://trillian.im
When I was at school, we had a network of BBC Bs (initially E-Net and then 'upgraded' to Econet). There was one machine (2C if I remember correctly!) that would never turn on correctly in the morning. On initial power up, rather than being greeted with the iconic dual beep of the BBC Micro, instead the first tone would go on forever. If whilst the first beep was sounding continuously you lifted the front of the machine by around two inches and let it drop, the second beep would then sound and the machine would work perfectly.
You could switch it on and off as many times as you wanted and it would run all day perfectly. However, the following morning when it had been off overnight it would need percussive maintenance again to get beyond the first startup beep. It worked like that for years right up until the day I left school. Now and then I do wonder if it was ever fixed or if it was simply retired when the BBCs were replaced with (probably) PCs.
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