Posts by Luiz Abdala 514 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2007
Free market. No monopoly. 4 competitors were set, and the race to the bottom happened.
Landlines were so expensive in my youth that they were included in the deed of the property, at a substantial price. The mobile, when became commercial, followed suit.
US, of all places, has no free market, apparently.
A full-blown PWR has about 1200MW. Just buy one and sell the extra power to the grid.
And that could happen anywhere around the planet where you can buy and sell energy, and because it is Microsoft, that can run their servers anywhere in the planet as well.
Or, I don't know, build a 1200 MW server farm and slap a power plant right next to it, in a Country that doesn't mind nuclear power.
No microreactor thing, think big already.
ISP router? That thing that had the wifi name and password stickered to the bottom of the unit? That any former disgruntled employee could have collected and do whatever he can?
Hard pass.
Sometimes, I may open a DMZ setting on my router to access some feature directly, but most of the time, the ISP wifi is no man's land for me.
"There is no wireless in the planet that can replace a stable, low ping Cat 5 under the carpet, when it comes down to headshots".
Now, really, some games are uber-sensitive to channel hopping these wireless devices are prone to doing.
Some will drop you out of the game completely, some will lag you out, some will LITERALLY crash the game.
If you can get wired, DO IT. It doesn't matter how good the wireless is, a cable will best it, eleven out of ten times.
I don't care how deep are you into Wifi specs, as a home user, a cable will best a wireless, every time. Even the crappiest, scratched, nailed on ethernet cable will trump a wireless connection.
And even when you DO find a neat wireless, it will suck 2 amps out of the wall, and probably burn red while you do it, or all the time.
We proceeded to apply the picture in the article to all HP inkjet printers in our possession. We made sure to smash them with extreme prejudice and toss them violently in the trash compactor, making sure every single one was torn to pieces.
We only use bulk-ink Epson ecotank printers - as far as inkjets are involved -, where a 75cc blister costs 10$ and it is legit from epson themselves. We could also buy per pint or per gallon, far cheaper than that.
As for everything else, we found that even A PLAYSTATION 3 can run our networked epson inkjet printer. Not kidding. Not joking.
As far as drivers go, Laserjet 4s have been included in every Windows since...
Joke icon to avoid concerns.
Yeah, a DARPA BigDog can carry 340 lbs. It could be probably carrying a M134 Minigun at 85lb. with a lot of 7.62x 51 NATO ammo and extra batteries, but they say it will carry just a rifle with 10 rounds.
This is the California-Compliant robot dog version, but you can bet someone is strapping a Minigun to a BigDog while we talk, but totally off the record.
(Discontinued because gasoline engine, pffft, not a problem for a minigun armed mule, don't believe that excuse!)
Is the EU airspace still that hodgepodge of a dozen or more restricted zones that you must avoid on a single flight, or did they streamline things a little bit?
Not saying both being related to be the cause, this time...
You know, if you have a extremely complex flight plan just because NATO, Russia, etc, you could prevent an automation meltdown in the first place if they were greatly simplified, perhaps?
I wholeheartedly support BIG PWR nuclear power plants, producing 1000+ MW each. Except these guys don't like to slowdown or speedup and love working at 100% all the time, just changing fuel rods every 18 months. Sell the rest of the energy to the grid or make hydrogen.
Don´t forget the Lawrence Livermore research to break down the HLW (high level waste) into something less risky for the environment, and that research should be included in the package.
This hydrogen part needs a lot of research however.
So if humans fail the task 50% of the time, you should present 2 or more tests, expect humans to fail, and bots to complete all of them successfully.
After 10 tests, there is only 1 in 1024 chance of humans doing all of them correctly, while bots will get them every time.
See icon.
This has been the subject of TEMPEST for over 20 years.
Straight from that wiki: "TEMPEST is a U.S. National Security Agency specification and a NATO certification referring to spying on information systems through leaking emanations, including unintentional radio or electrical signals, sounds, and vibrations".
Yeah, a leaky VGA cable or the sound of a keyboard, all the same. Altough reading the electromagnetic emanations of a VGA signal is a much more esoteric way of snooping around, IMHO.
Keyboard icon for reasons.
Oh boy, the RGB crowd is gonna go nuts with this. Bling-bling through and through.
Imagine that, 30-billion-transistor-9000-carat-chips, with gold-plated coolers, the Kim Kardashian of PCs is gonna be born within 10 years!
"Oh I spent 30000 quid on this new shiny Intel 20th generation diamond Core i11!"
To top that, my plan is outdated, no longer sold, all the ISPs sell only 300 mpbs minimum, and with no "cable" TV attached on the plan, just raw broadband, for cheaper than what I am currently paying.
I plan to change soon and ditch the TV plan that only shows low quality programs, that I don't watch anyway, any longer. All the good stuff have their streaming equivalent straight from the web, so the "cable" is no longer justified.
And I just bought a FireTV from Amazon that hosts an impressive amount of streaming channels, that even takes voice commands from Alexa, which is neat.
By the way, I am paying the equivalent of 64 USD / month here in the... remote South America. The next plan is going for 21 USD. (64 still feels like I am being ripped off.)
How come the US of A is so far behind ? This is beyond my understanding.
I had an acquaitance that complained his POTS had a crosstalk with another line, and he was being charged through the roof for calls he didn't make. He called the phone sparkies, which found nothing.
That process was repeated for a month.
He then got hold of a coil - the kind used to ignite spark plugs -capable of 5 or 6 digit (volts or amps, whatever, this is irrelevant). As soon as he heard the line being used, he turned it on, immediately frying his line, the junction box down the street, and the line of the perp that was stealing his phone, just outside the box, on a carefully dug hole on the sidewalk by a tree root.
He then called the phone company for "Line not functioning" and everything was magically solved.
I used KDE once, 20 years ago, trying dual boot in a Pentium II machine, breathe some life back into it. Maybe a Gnome Ubuntu boot disk in recent epoch to unbork some system when Windows hit the fan (not that often lately, it turns out).
But I never used Slackware... maybe if I had came fresh out of DOS in those days, I would have tried another OS without a GUI.
GTA also has a 90-ish GB footprint these days, last time I checked some years ago... The original game had 60-ish GB, the difference has to be all the business, vehicles, and Cayo Perico, the single landmass added to the game.
Anyway, google could answer this one reasonably, on the other hand:
Steam Games With The Biggest File Size And How Many GB They Take
1 Ark: Survival Evolved - 400 GB.
2 Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare - 235 GB. ...
3 Borderlands 3: Director's Cut - 135 GB. ...
4 Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War - 175 GB. ...
5 Red Dead Redemption 2 - 120 GB. ...
6 Final Fantasy 15 Windows Edition - 110 GB. ...
I don't know about you, but I don't think I even have room to install Ark if I had it. And that list mention just Steam. Yes, Call of Duty has a bunch of modules that can be installed separately, this must be the whole thing.
I only find it a crime that Lamborghini sold their tractor division. (Lamborghini Trattori)
The last chance you had to drive a Lambo with 4-wheel drive, 40 inch tires, and 300 HP at a blistering 20mph through a crop field is gone, whlle making fun of John Deere owners locked away from their Right to Repair.
At least the guy that made the server rooms didn't weld the wrist straps ground to the lightning rod's ground... like someone I know...
The friend of mine that noticed this averted a Benjamin Franklin experience en masse, and got in charge of the grounding of the building for his troubles.
... the ability to make a variable assume two values at the same time, which happens to help when you want to bruteforce password guessing, making it infinitely faster (in a rough definition).
But a quantum password that assumes two values at the same time should accept an attempt to guess it by inputting either one of the values, thus making it less secure.
(See icon.)
Extra sugary tea had no chance against the handyman working with me at a Language Course center back in the day. He washed all of it: removed all the keycaps, gave them a scrub, and applied a hair dryer, at a safe, tolerable to the touch temperature.
As for the parts where he didn't dare to use the dryer, he literally hang them to dry, then kept all the caps in a plastic shopping bag tied to the cord, giving me the honor to put it back together 24 hours later.
Flawless operation ensued.
Obvious icon.
Over here, the relay in an old fridge sends a massive spike back through the mains and the unfiltered 2.1 subwoofer sends it straight to the 4" speaker. It sounds like a 9mm bullet that was hit by lightning, the best approximation.
The kicker is, it goes through USB earphones as well. A loud, sharp CRACK ringing through, every time. The affected machine has an UPS, but since the 2.1 spike comes through the sound port, it does not block the signal.
It took a while to figure it was a fridge, now I miss a way to filter it away.
There is an anectode around the web about a student that gets late to his Class. The teacher has a set of problems on the board. Because he is late, he thinks he is supposed to solve them. He took a while to solve, but he managed. It turned out to be a famous set of problems, like the Fermat Theorem or thereabouts, and this student solved it.
Found the source: the student was George Dantzig and the Class was about statistical theory, and he solved it, thinking it was an assignment.
So those tests with impossible questions, well... some day somebody might solve them out of the blue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
I spent more time fine tuning dos boot sequences to free the 600 kilobytes of base memory to make those DOS games run properly, than actually playing them.
Then their original media got destroyed before I could setup a dosbox for them, eons later. Never bothered with them again, chasing a bootleg copy, whatever.
Now they are so cumbersome to play, they belong in the past, behind several layers of rosy, laser-etched colored glasses.
A drink to those memories.
There was a cruise missile design based on that principle. It used nuclear fuel rods to power its flight and would cause nuclear fallout as it moved around. It was as horrible as you could ever imagine.
But the plane itself never ejected chunks of the core. In fact, it never powered itself with the reactor, they never connected the whole thing to the conventional jets on the plane, just tested powering it up.
Search Project Pluto, wikipedia. and the plane as NB-36H, nuclear powered aircraft.
Yeah, a vacuum-sealed container filled with boron sand lined with lead and kevlar and with an USB extension cord is a good idea.
Altough a usb stick can carry its own battery and detect the leads being connected to trigger a detonation, even without a USB 5v power, or detection current.
I would suggest some form of rail guide and a relay to push the drive into said USB extension cord port, then powering it up.
*Chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons
Finally that icon is relevant again, because both annoying companies intercepted when Louis Rossmann picked up the Right to Repair crowd about Apple (the fact that he repairs iphones despite Apple blocking him at every chance), and a handful (more than that) of disgruntled John Deere customers showed up on the same RTR meeting.
Just a reminder.
I miss my HP 48GX with the game Columns played sideways, fully customizable universal Remote Control that used the IR transceiver, and an Italian version of Poker, plus a full blown text editor.
Taking a break from thermodynamics lessons and reading "Doppia Coppia": priceless.
All of it from 3x AAA batteries that lasted months, the best keyboard ever devised for a portable device, and a monochrome LCD.
My college didn't demand the Texas Instruments equivalent, it was agnostic, but people chose the HP48GX due familiarity from the brand and easy to find on the grey market.
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