Posts by MyffyW 2330 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2013
There is (as others have noted) a long history with Windows NT and it's derivatives:
One of my personal faves was File and Print Services for NetWare which made your Windows NT Server appear as a NetWare 2.x file server. Which led to some interesting edge-cases when migrating off of NetWare 3, having your clients think they were connecting to an even older NetWare server.
Or indeed the horse-racing form guide.
I worked with a gentleman who put his acknowledged data skills to predicting horse races. And for a time (many race meetings) he won more than he lost. But eventually the fund he was manging on behalf of himself and his optimistic colleagues went into the red and stubbornly resolved to remain irrational longer than he could remain solvent. He is currently an advocate for Cryptocurrency. Make of that what you will...
Can I be the first to ask for a token-ring adapter for my smartphone? With the proper IBM type 1 plug on it and those thick, fiendishly inflexible black cables?
Failing that I'd like an AUI ethernet adapter. I loved those things because they came in such cute old-fashioned little cardboard boxes.
It definitely wasn't in MS-DOS 3.3, as I recall having to master EDLIN. And by "master" I mean mangle many a source file with my neophyte ability to find all the rough edges.
MS-DOS 5 was a work of beauty by comparison, and 6.22 a summit I wasn't to surpass until NT4 took me into layers of abstraction.
For any sentient beings who are not fully up to speed the featured picture of That Twat Musk has nothing to do with space exploration and is instead widely interpreted as him copying a fascist salute. I know most of us know this, but no harm in clarifying matters for any visitors from outer space.
Phlogiston as a theory had something to commend it, in that it was repeatable and explained a broad set of phenomena. Interpreted rather narrowly as "the absence of oxygen" it's not factually wrong. It's just better theories supported by a wider set of experiments replaced it.
First they came for the writers, and I don't earn much from writing so I said nothing.
Then they came for the musicians, and I'm a fairly poor pianist, so I said nothing.
Then they came for the Lego nerds. And that, dear reader, is me. And you. And my AC friend above.
Enough, end this madness!!!
Remind me what the CO2 contributions of the bicycle are compared to the SR-71 Blackbird?
For that matter, how many passenger-miles did we get last year from Lockheed's (retired) strategic reconnaissance marvel? How does that compare to the humble bicycle?
Yes, I'm being deliberately obtuse. And I'm actually an advocate for responsible nuclear power. But the AI bollocks and it's attendant energy race do not and will not contribute to the sum of human happiness. And we would be better off if we accepted that sooner rather than later.
The '90s Thinkpad was an ok laptop. It's docking station was a piece of crap that failed to connect to the (IBM Token Ring) network more often than it succeeded.
The AS/400 was a perfectly reasonable mini-computer.
The pSeries UNIX kit was nice as an alternative to the other vendor UNIXes (back when that was a thing).
Even the xSeries (x86) servers weren't too bad (but HP was better IMHO).
Their services business, despite employing some sincere individuals, was God-awful.
So a sort of "Meh" for the 80s, 90s and early 2000s from me.
It does assume your - mains connected - nest device runs for more than a couple of years before it fails in many interesting ways because the on-board battery no longer retains enough charge. And whilst it is theoretically possible to replace that battery rather than throw away the whole caboodle, good luck finding the right one even on fleabay.
Nest was a great, innovative company. Google has fracked it up from the first day they took over. I look forward to their eventual demise.
Cooling on Earth can be challenging, cooling in space is w-a-y more difficult when the only way to shed heat is via radiation.
I am reminded of the quote that the least hospitable part of earth is easier to colonise than the most hospitable part of any other body in this solar system.
Reputations can always take a few dings, but to properly lose it takes real effort: you have to show a real contempt for your customers, treat license renewals as a chance to literally suck the lifeblood out of corporate IT budgets, fail to show any real vision and generally enshitten every promising technology your mergers and acquisitions team land you with.
It's not easy, it takes time but I think Big Red may have finally nailed it. I for one will raise a glass and whisper "schadenfreude" to their eventual demise.
The phrase "the gas turbines will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60-65 percent per megawatt-hour compared to the plant's retired coal units" made me smile wryly.
There would be no need for any of those megawatt-hours if we just stuffed the AI bollocks back into the bottle. I don't need a cutesy AI kitten picture, a written-by-machine lump of prose or any of the other hallucinatory-delusional bobbins.
JP Morgan realised it back in the middle of last year, and their latest target is $120 a share (whilst Tesla is inexplicably trading today around $245).
Current Tesla Price-to-Earnings ratio is 120:1 whilst for normal motor manufacturers 5:1 is more optimistic.
Seriously, this isn't even anti-Musk invective (though I think he's a dick), Tesla is w-a-y overpriced. Tesla is a meme stock buoyed originally by a market-leading product and now dependant (IMHO) on the expectation of favours from the US government.
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