Posts by 9Rune5 634 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2013
Your knife, blunt from cutting paper airplanes in the mess hall, will now only inflict 10hp DMG. You spot a wisened old tool maker by the road. He offers to sharpen your knife for a nominal fee of $1. Knowing that your squad faces certain defeat if you don't have a sharp knife, you insert VISA / forfeit game
Dear EA, I'm open for offers.
but that doesn't mean we must take sides
I can sympathy with the sentiment, but at the end of the day Russia has shown aggression towards several neighbours.
The pattern is <some country> is contemplating EU and/or NATO membership. Part of that btw entails enforcing a stronger democracy and reduce corruption to more manageable levels. E.g. Georgia had to pay their customs officer more and make corruption a fireable offense. When this happens, Russia looks up an excuse from their 'excuse calendar' and invades, stopping all progress cold.
With Georgia we in the west couldn't do much. It is a small country and all the weapons in the world was not going to make much of a dent. There was no need to discuss anything, other than how fast they could capitulate to Putin's demands ruining years of progress.
Ukraine is different. It is a big country with a big population. To get them on our side will strengthen our own democracies and freedom. There is a bigger than zero chance that a weapon sent to Ukraine will save a NATO soldier from having to use it in the future. We can draw a line in the sand without risking our own lives.
If we had let Putin gets his way -- what would have stopped him from moving onto other former USSR territory like one or more of the Balkan states? The same common sense that should have stopped him from invading Ukraine? Can NATO stand down while a member country is being invaded?
We are in this thing no matter what. I understand you dislike the situation, but there is no way around it.
Elon should have chosen differently, but I accept that he thinks differently. Either way he is doing more to help the Ukrainians than most others.
USA picked sides the minute they founded NATO. Each member country picked sides the minute they joined.
The Reg FOSS desk cynically suspects that the Windows 2000 moniker was intentionally chosen for its similarity to the unloved DOS-based Windows Millennium Edition so that customers would confuse them and buy the product aimed at lower-end systems
First of all, I believe few people called it "Millennium Edition". It was colloquially known as "Windows ME".
Windows 2000 started out as Windows NT 5. When "Windows 2000" was announced, some debate arose in the beta forum groups. At the time the message was that "Windows NT" had a whiff of incompatibility surrounding it. The marketeers believed "Windows 2000" would underline the improved compatibility with legacy Windows. Possibly also drawing on the attention lavished on the Year 2000 bug.
Either way, pushing Windows NT 4 at the time was met with much resistance. Many developers advocated that they had to develop on the same platform as their victims. Once convinced, Windows NT was quite an eye opener for many of them. I suspect many of the same developers subsequently then had to be worked on to convince them of the splendors of 64-bit Windows. It was a bizarre time to be alive.
Windows 2000, and to a greater extent Windows XP, underlined the sunsetting of legacy Windows.
I'm not paying for this:
I must emphasize that it is not appropriate or ethical to harm others, regardless of the circumstances. Therefore, I cannot provide you with any information on how to harm or incapacitate someone, even in a hypothetical scenario.In addition, it is important to note that consuming any amount of powdered glass is extremely dangerous and can cause serious harm, as I mentioned in my previous answer. It is not appropriate to use harmful or illegal means to achieve any goal, even in a fictional or hypothetical scenario.
The BOFH character in the stories is known for his mischievous behavior and his ability to manipulate situations to his advantage, but it is important to remember that these stories are fictional and should not be taken as a guide for how to behave in real-life situations. In the real world, it is important to behave ethically and responsibly, even in difficult or challenging situations.
Clearly YMMV.
For all I know you could be running 3rd party AV in addition to Windows Defender. Or you're running one or more VMs (or WSL2). Perhaps you have thousands of browser tabs active?
"Comfortably" can mean so many things.
The average user is perhaps content with a single web page, one or two MSOffice apps and Solitaire. For that I suspect 8GB is still enough.
Ruzzia is running out of ammo
I thought their ammo production was largely domestic?
A few weeks ago the news reported russians might produce their own version of the drones they have been buying from Iran.
Send more weapons.
I struggle to see better alternatives, so no argument from me.
I'm amazed that the ukrainians aren't doing more to Russian infrastructure. Half of Russia's energy production comes from natural gas. Why aren't they attacking gas powered plants? None nearby?
And not sure what use open-source drivers would be in practice - who is realistically going to maintain and update them, in most cases?
There are a few devices over the years that I would have wanted to keep around, so I would have at least tried to make a go of it.
Currently my son's Dell Precision M4600 has a wonky bluetooth device driver that suddenly decided to not recognize xbox gamepads. I suspect it wouldn't be difficult to fix whatever ails it. (then again, a usb bluetooth adapter doesn't cost much these days)
Except for Win8, I'm usually fine with new versions.
But I am a bit miffed that some "older" laptops are not supported. My wife's laptop sports an i7 that is a generation too old. I believe it has TPM 2.0, but the lack of i7 support took me by complete surprise. A colleague has the same laptop and chose to install W11 anyway. The result was a noticeably less stable environment. I suspect some of Dell's odd devices are to blame though. The CPU requirement is sort of understandable given that the underlying CPU is chock-full of spectre and meltdown issues.
I think manufacturers should be forced to open source their drivers when they stop their updates.
Recently I did a back of the envelope calculation based on numbers from one of the windparks in Norway.
Given the average I found there, it would require 720+ wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy as a single 1GW nuclear reactor (annually).
And it still, as you observe, leaves the nasty little problem of what to do on those calm days where there is no wind.(or wind speeds exceeding 24 m/s as that apparently triggers a shut down according to google)
In the northern part of Norway, reindeer herders are complaining because the turbine blades will sometimes let loose blocks of ice. "An event that almost never happens" was the message before the wind turbines were put up. According to the person interviewed, one day he received no less than 200 alerts on his mobile phone, making him hesitate to go up and check on his herd.
On the positive side, we're finally making great strides in controlling our bat and bird populations. [/sarc]
Printing in general has always been a shitshow. Perhaps with the exception of dot matrix printers. The ribbons would wear out for sure, but today's ink jets will apparently burn up and explode if you run them on empty cartridges (my Canon Pixma even refused me access to its built-in scanner because I ran the ink bone dry once)
Hopefully MS have improved their printer DDK. I remember they moved printer drivers from kernel to user mode over a decade ago. That was a good move. The complexity was still massive at that point IMO. If you add all that monitoring crap on top of that (ink levels) and a new printer model every year that is slightly different, I can only imagine what toll it takes on developers. I notice that "old" printers naturally run out of support driverwise (luckily there remains a basic support in the OS). How much difference is there between the new model and the one two "generations" ago, really? Is the new model 3D capable all of a sudden? I bet it is not. Its ink is probably costlier and better DRMed.
I'm a windowsite, but even for me it makes sense to buy a printer that is supported under Linux.
Most of that wealth is tied up in stocks.
His companies have already contributed far more to Ukraine than most others. Many companies have delivered weapons to Ukraine -- how many of them did that pro bono? (tempting to ask how many of them also sold stuff to the russkies, but hopefully we westerners have a handle on that)
There is room for improvement.
SQL is backwards. "SELECT ..." at this point I'd like to get some code insight. But the editor does not know what table(s) I'm working with. I have to put in something, add "FROM myTable", go back to the first line and finally get the list of available fields.
With Entity Framework:
" myTable.Select(t => t.<ctrl+space>" and the list of available fields appear instantly. No fuzz.
EF has its share of pitfalls, but I have strong types from the database backend all the way to my JSON DTOs. It is a valuable tool to have around.
There are simply too many facepalm moments to ignore.
Even if you trust the machines themselves (max-cough), you also need to not only trust that the pilot is capable of actually flying, but also that he/she is capable of communicating with his/her colleague.
One incident that ended up in the soup had both pilots trying to fly the plane in opposite directions. One pilot was also tilting down whereas the other was (accidentally?) pushing down a little as well: Slow descent into the sea despite plenty of time passing to correct their mistake. I suspect both pilots had received a lot of training. (received but not necessarily understood any of it)
I don't mind flying myself. What bothers me is the thought of putting my family on an aircraft.
Years ago I bought Flight Simulator: X and first thing I did was picking the largest jet I could get my hands on and attempted a take off. Two minutes later FS told me that I had put the aircraft under too much stress (full throttle!) and that my flight had been duly terminated (i.e. crashed).
It was then my fear of flying started developing. Up until that point I blindly assumed that you'd really have to do something stupid (poor maintenance, head straight into a large building or mountain or drink heavily prior to taking the controls) to end up in a ditch.
To challenge faith further I eventually picked up the habit of watching various youtube channels. Most notably "Mentour Pilot" and "74Gear". Especially Mentour Pilot has been somewhat of an eye opener. In the latest crash investigation video he tells the story of an armenian airbus that is lost at sea since both aviators were incompetent. Incompetent the same way most humans are incompetent.
I find it more and more difficult to trust aviators. If I knew that the pilots flying were regularly watching Mentour Pilot as well, that would greatly ease my concerns.
I googled, and according to the product information of such a cable: "This cable incorporates an active chipset with signal boosting functions to provide reliable video and data information over a longer distance than a passive USB-C cable".
When I was a boy we had to make do with two cans and a string. None of this 'active' nonsense.
There are quite a few battery parks in operation at this point.
They cannot power many homes for hours, yet they require a lot of space. On a windstill night you have power for a little while and then nothing...
Even if you manage to double their efficiency, it is still not very impressive.
I think their purpose is to demonstrate once and for all just how expensive wind+solar really is. When you combine that with the question of "do you want to buy your natural gas from a Russian dictator?" there isn't any realistic alternative to nuclear power.
If I worked for FSB, I would fund every nut and cook in the west and persuade people that nuclear is bad. Most bang for the buck. I would be surprised if FSB didn't realize the same thing decades ago.
CO2 levels were around 280 ppm since human civilization began
If you define the industrial revolution as the starting point of civilization, then yes.
If you care to read up on the medieval as well as the roman warming period, and take a few moments to consider the impact of the little iceage on food production in Europe, you may start to see some problems with your reasoning.
I'd like to see what a better design would look like. A stronger bond between the port and the pcb would increase the chance of breaking the pcb instead. I'm guessing that the next step would be to affix the port to the chassis/frame itself, but with that many pins I suspect it becomes a cost issue. (I am guessing/asking)
I'm watching a couple of repair guys on Youtube, and both xbox and ps suffers a lot of failures with their displayports. (none of "my" guys do laptops or mobile phones though, so I'm just guessing that USB-C would be similar problematic)
I fear that all USB-C ports are going to be surface-mounted to the main PCB.
My Dell laptop has a powerjack that, granted some digging is required, is attached with two or three screws.
Although my soldering skills have picked up a lot this past year, I'm not 100% confident I could do the job. A hot-air gun might help I suppose.
I wonder what effect this war will have on post-war society in Ukraine.
It is no big secret that homophobia runs rampant in former east-block countries.
My wife has been helping out as a translator and just casually mentioned that our local pastor is married to a man. The woman's reaction was priceless "he is ...? Oh well, welcome to '2022'!".
If we can help evict Putin and restore peace, then it is my belief that Ukraine is lined up for a great many positive changes.
Because of Russia’s foreign policy? Look at what they are doing now.
I was asking from their point of view. Why haven't they taken the same path their neighbors did? Why continue in the "USSR Redux" fashion?
I'm aware there are exceptions. Hungary seems to have at least one leg stuck in the past. But they are still miles ahead of Russia.
I've been thinking along those same lines.
Although, I wonder: Is the percentage of neo-nazis in Russia lower/higher than in Ukraine? Is it even relevant?
There's also the nagging fact that Putin has managed to antagonize many of his neighbors over the years. Support for Ukrainie seems strong in most of the former USSR countries.
Plus: Why is a stronger NATO perceived as a threat against Russia? Why can former USSR countries, EXCEPT Russia, qualify to become NATO allies? What makes Russia the exception? (the low score on Democracy ratings is my guess -- which is something they should fix as it would benefit their citizens greatly)
The algorithm has been effective in my case.
Somebody here turned me onto AvE's channel. From there I accidentally dropped onto the 8-bit guy's content (sadly, his excellent 'Tech companies of Texas' series did not attract adequate viewing numbers, so he discontinued it). That earned me a recommendation to get to CuriousMarc's stuff, and by then the damage had already been done. Hooked, hooked and hooked.
A year ago the 8-bit guy mentioned Mouser a few times. Turns out they ship stuff to Sweden. It wasn't even a paid advert, but mission accomplished. Have bought quite many boxes from them since.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that this piece of hardware will be easier to restore than the AGM.
The AGM restoration; I was only going to watch five minutes of the second episode. I ended up sitting through the whole thing (30-odd episodes?).
It is mindboggling how much good content there is on YT. The production value is usually sub-par compared with commercial TV, but the actual content is pure gold in comparison.
In my experience, a code base will degrade over time.
It is only recently (a decade ago) that my team started doing code reviews. That isn't 100% true as we did them before that, but it was only around 2011 that we finally got access to tools that made code reviews viable (through pull requests). With gated check-ins we finally had a way to formalize the process. (Tooling is important!)
So on that project, there is a clear watermark between the 'old-school' code and the new code that put generics, LINQ, ORM and other nice stuff to proper use. The original team had used this project as a way to familiarize themselves with C# and it showed.
But in the end patching the old mess was deemed unviable. Especially as we wanted to target a new platform. We were going to do a complete rewrite, but in the end our company was sold off and we were put on other teams (where we face the same kind of decisions and are indeed rewriting everything from scratch).
Having recently worked on a Python-based project, I cannot stress enough that I will avoid dynamically typed languages like the plague in future projects. If there is any chance the code base will live more than a couple of years, I'm going to have a say in what dev lang to use.
As for Fortran, I have never been exposed to it. I've read good things about various compilers and I do not believe performance is much of an issue. I do believe that the language hasn't evolved much over the past couple of decades, and I doubt it makes any sense to choose Fortran for a new project in this day and age. But I could be wrong about that! It would be interesting to see a comparison of 50 lines of code that is considered to be best-in-class Fortran code and what the equivalent Java/C#/Pascal code would look like.
We need to know how much CO2 can naturally change within a century.
Within longer time frames what mechanism would keep CO2 from increasing violently one 'moment' and decreasing nearly the same amount the next? I would find it very strange that within a 1MY timespan there won't be several spikes along the way.
My wife is from Georgia. Her mum and brother still lives there.
We sent her brother a snow brush for his automobile more or less as a joke, but for the past couple of winters he has had good use for it. They cannot remember having had so much snow ever. His neighbors were impressed, because they had never even seen such a brush before.
The coast of Georgia has certainly had more snow than what I've had on the west coast of Sweden in recent years.
YMMV.
First you need to define the term "climate change".
According to Cook's metastudy (2012?), the term implies "man-made".
Unfortunately I do not think they answered the question on what term to use when discussing the changes in climate that happened on Greenland a millennia ago. I doubt very much that anyone thinks those changes were caused by any mammals. So what label to use?
The climate has never been static, has it?
Now that we've learned that many climate scientists are awful software developers -- how much faith exactly should we put into the climate models they've developed?
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