Posts by Grunchy 927 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
It’s just as well, the only good time to visit Dubai is during Ramadan anyway. Well, because that’s the only time the attractions aren’t completely overrun by tourists, isn’t it. Just don’t let the po-po catch you with any food or water, or anything. Wrigleys? You can get chucked in the slammer if you can’t live without your chew.
… but outside of Ramadan, the whole place is a non-stop zoo.
I heard those guys were still trying to resuscitate the Sony Home service. It’s basically what Meta is trying to be, except it had become abandonware since about 2015. Maybe some laid-off Meta staff could jump on the project and help bring it back from the ashes?
https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2021/11/26/playstation-home-revived-by-fans/amp/
They shoulda paid extra for Watson (IBM) because he was mighty effective at beating up Ken Jennings.
I’m just waiting for the day that Watson humiliates all human lawyer parasites — IN COURT AND SETTING PERMANENT PRECEDENT.
(Open source only, of course. As far as I am concerned, IBM can go dry up & blow away.)
This one time I found an iPhone 4 in the electronics recycling bin they used to have at Staples, so I snagged it.
But then! It was account locked. However, the owner thoughtfully put their personal details under the “Medical ID” portion of the emergency dial function. All I got out of it was their Facebook info, but it was enough to hound and pester them into dropping their iPhone 4 off their iAccount.
… and that’s how I got a free iPhone 4 to turn into my downstairs AirPlay receiver!
Software isn’t a product that you can just buy anymore, now it’s become a subscription service.
Likewise the “agile” development scheme isn’t a Project Management technique. Instead, agile is more like a Service Management technique.
That’s because projects are supposed to end, and a final work product delivered. “Normal” software used to work like this, but now software projects never ever end. Well, they do, but only after some competitor came up with some new technology that made the old software obsolete. It’s not like the project ended so much as the service was abandoned.
“Abandonware.”
Well no, Pi-Hole won't work because my old DNS-323 (running Alt-F) doesn't have the necessary resources to run APT.
But I did find AdGuard Home for Arm5 runs magnificently within the 64 MB ram! It subscribes to any/all of the Pi-Hole filters and does daily updates and adds just 115 ms latency to any DNS lookup. Memory utilization holds to about 90%, CPU to about 15%. Swap file only 1 MB.
Works good and I did not have to buy anything or even do much config. I was already serving HDD over Ethernet (NAS) so why not host a freeware DNS filter too?
“If they have in their possession some internal Chinese government documents/communication that indicates a coverup..” well if that existed I would expect the FBI to say something a lot more definite.
This whole “gain of function” weaponization research theory doesn’t make any sense. Just making that stuff is a crime against humanity, you’d have to be a psychopath to do it in the first place, there’s no way funding for a disease that threatens all humans on Earth equally can possibly get funding.
Preposterous!
“Robbed,” when somebody doesn’t physically take anything but instead makes a perfect copy of your whole household except in their own household.
Which reminds me of the time I asked the security guy at Iko Industries (shingle manufacturer in Calgary) how come he even has a job, it’s like, who gives a toss about the security of asphalt shingles. You could wander around the entire compound and maybe find one or two things worth your while to pick up, and they are empty apple juice containers outside the smoke doors.
“Well!” offers our hapless hero, in full conspiratorial mode. “This one time in the 1950s there was this whole gang of Japanese visitors visiting from deepest darkest Japan, and they all had their finest Nikon Canon Fuji Konica Kyocera Minolta cameras out and they toured the whole plant and they shot the whole place to smithereens (on film, that is) and then they left leaving nothing behind but footprints, and two months later they had their own Iko Industries asphalt shingle plant, perfectly replicated in every detail, and so that’s how come we have such tight security to this day.”
I was like, “are you joking me? Man it’s friggin shingles who gives a toss,” and just like that he was fired and the security shed burned down, and now I can sell photos of those apple juice jugs without getting hassled by some id-10-t who has nuttin better to do, for heaven’s sake !
When I was delivering for Amazon most times the customer would explicitly forbid any form of disturbance, especially by doorbell, and usually because the infants and pets had finally achieved peace in the household and the customers would tolerate no disturbance of that uneasy truce. However there was a sizeable contingent that insisted that the doorbell notification be rung, and most especially so if it were the “smart” doorbell security monitor that had already alerted the occupants of the invading presence by SMS delivery of the offending video footage!
I never touched those monitors on the grounds that a) the customer already acknowledged delivery over the loudspeaker, and b) who’s to say these aren’t fingerprint sensors out to gather and investigate my precious biometric data in order to learn all about my criminal past?
I say fuckem.
I am not exaggerating when I say you can get an ESP32 delivered to your door for under $3.50.
It’s got enough jam to run WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, what’s wrong with that? That’s enough to do everything they want for a B.Sc. degree (from first-hand experience!)
I’ve got X3100 and P30s, what could be the problem?
Obviously I only buy em once they’re about 10 yrs old and depreciated down to $20 or so.
Wicked awesome industrial construction!
The best part is if you call technical support they still have to call you “sir” and answer whatever hare-brain questions you can dream up ! Even if they have to look it up & call you back a couple days later, it’s magnificent. Consumer grade equipt is for SUCKERS.
Personally I find there’s no difference between a worthless print and the priceless original. As a matter of fact, most of what Escher made were woodcut print masters, so in effect every copy anybody ever saw was always “just a print.”
Anyway, if Picasso was any good then why wouldn’t you see more of his work around in print form? Anybody who says they love Picasso so much, show me the print! I don’t care for Picasso but I do appreciate the Eschers.
(I have yet to see any worthwhile Dall-E interpretation of any Escher btw - I think the AI just can’t comprehend it.)
All these fancy hotrod junk are dreadfully easy ways to get yourself killed.
Motorcycles, mopeds, e-bikes even. Skateboards!
Also jet boats, hopped-up cars. A good one is a gas-powered remote-controlled airplane that crashes into your neighbour's house & lights his roof on fire, there's a classy way to make your acquaintance.
John Denver provides a cautionary tale. He bought his new home-built, with several years of good service under its belt, but with an awkward fuel tank switcher up & behind his left shoulder. ("For Safety Reasons")
So he takes it for a rip, and runs the one tank out, so he unbuckles his harness and kinda twists around to yank that lever over. Meanwhile he pushes with his right foot onto full right rudder at about 150 ft above the deck. Instantaneous nose dive and ker-splash! I think he got decapitated by that one.
Every time you try one of these things it's your "last chance".
Suggestion: A song about sasquatches arm wrestling and eating termites.
Verse 1:
In the woods of the West
Sasquatches do their best
To show their strength with a test
Arm wrestling with the rest
Chorus:
Sasquatches arm wrestling,
Eating termites all day
In the wild they're nestling
In their Bigfoot way
Verse 2:
Gigantic arms they flex
Competing with no regrets
Who will come out next?
The crowd roars with applause, "yes!"
Chorus:
Sasquatches arm wrestling,
Eating termites all day
In the wild they're nestling
In their Bigfoot way
Bridge:
Munching on those tasty bugs
Gives them the power to flex their muscles
Arm wrestling is just a plus
They're wild and unstoppable hustles
Chorus:
Sasquatches arm wrestling,
Eating termites all day
In the wild they're nestling
In their Bigfoot way
Outro:
Sasquatches in the woods
Making their presence known
Arm wrestling and eating termites
These Bigfoots are never alone.
My dad knew of a guy that jumped out of a pickup bed & unfortunately got his watch caught on a metal thing, cut up his arm really bad.
Rings are also prone to getting caught somewheres, or just stuck because you got a bit fat since the last time you took it off !
I heard of a guy who bent over his carburetor to see what’s up & his necktie got caught in the radiator fan and yanked his face into the whirling blades.
I had a buddy in high school who wore both long hair & a big feathery dangly ear ring, and they all got twisted up together one time, drew blood even.
Sadly, we had a dog who didn’t have a “breakaway” collar, and twisted up his lead and then fell over the side of something & expired by strangulation.
Yeah, I'm doing it. "Ghost Spectre" is a lightweight version of Windows 10 that has all Microsoft updates locked, Microsoft will soon be prohibited from attacking my computer any more.
To me this story raises one more question, "why does Microsoft Office need internet access anyway?"
It's not a browser and it's not an FTP client. Outlook is an email client but other than that, I don't see why the program was built with an online attack vector in the first place.
I'm weary of all the updates, I can't even run a program without it scanning online and informing me that it needs a new version and it has to download 100MB of data and re-do the installation before it can possibly do what I require it to do. No more!
They've created an ecosystem in which we will all require fibre optic connections to handle all the data requirements. None of this does anything for me.
You know what I've got several TB of data storage at home, I'm pretty sure I don't need One Drive or Apple iCloud. Why do you guys need to control all of my data? Get lost!
I run software to accomplish specific things, once I have a version that does what I need done, I don't see the need to update any more.
"It already works fine for me, not gonna update any more, thanks" is what people who run Ghost Spectre say.
I'm actually motivated to try out Ubuntu + Wine after reading this.
I clicked several of the links in the article and the compatibility lists for Wine 8 are actually hilarious:
Platinum - Final Fantasy XI; World of Warcraft; Starcraft; Guild Wars; The Sims 3; Adobe Animate Flash CS6; Gothic; .NET 3.5; Diablo III; Silkroad Online
Gold - Adobe Photoshop CS6; Eve Online; The Witcher; Left 4 Dead; Guild Wars 2; Final Fantasy XIV; Command & Conquer 3; Sid Meier Civilization IV; Supreme Commander; Allods Online
Silver - Magic The Gathering; Logos Bible; Steam Official; Starcraft II; Roblox Player; Watchtower Library; Deus Ex; Warcraft III; MS Office 2019 Installer only; Half Life 2
My first criticism is these are largely older games, the MS office is for the "installer only" for some cryptic reason (the game itself doesn't run?), plus you've got Logos Bible vs Watchtower Library (e-book readers for religious magazines?) Guys: Adobe Animate Flash, platinum compatibility. Give me a break. Let's get serious.
The bit about the "outliner" category of software was extremely interesting. First of all, it's absolutely hilarious to read how incensed people are about the 2003 "ribbon menu" innovation of 20 years ago, gee guys, are you actually serious? I had to look up what the gripe is about, it's the words+icon horizontal menu bar for selecting commands. All I can say is that back in 2015 I got in touch with Microsoft "HUP" (home use program) and bought a permanent license to "MS Office Professional Plus 2016" for $11. If you want to grouch about aspects of a $11 software program, be my guest. That's about the same cost as a burger & piece of pie at the truck stop, I suppose one could get all fancy about such a thing, but seriously, guys: get a life.
Ok anyway, the bit about Outliners (outliners.com). Ok that web page dates back to 1999, and seems to describe a software category defined as an expanding and contracting hierarchical list.
"Outliners started out as simple hierarchy editors, used by lawyers, educators, students, engineers, executives; people who think -- to plan, organize and present their ideas.
Over time the products became more full-featured, especially on the Macintosh. Then the category died out, no one can explain fully why that happened, but in the early days of personal computers, outliners such as ThinkTank, Ready and MORE were popular programs.
Outliners are everywhere. Outlining as a user interface, survives to this day.
The expanding and collapsing file system viewer first appeared in Macintosh System 7, and now has become a common feature of all file system browsers."
(I have NEVER heard of programs such as ThinkTank, Ready, and MORE. And I grew up in the 1980s!)
Yes it's true, TSLA was about $23 on Aug 2018 before plummeting to $16-ish a couple times in Sept and Oct, then rebounding back to $23 levels in Nov 2018.
So investors did suffer a rapid loss of about 1/3 their share value immediately after the infamous tweet before it recovered a few months later, really it would be impossible to say precisely what caused that.
After then it skidded to about $12 by June 2019, then bounced along until it finally recovered back to $23 in Dec 2019 before it left those early valuations behind for good (more or less).
(I actually don't understand the "$420" bit, the share price then was literally $23 a share. What part was $420? I don't get it, it could only have been a stupid joke.)
The boom has dropped and it seems you can now get all you want on eBay for $130 or whatever.
To refresh everyone’s memory this was the 2016 edition that only used about 75W and originally had a MSRP of like $7,000!!
On the other hand, working-condition RTX-2080 is going for about $300 or so (and can play “Microsoft” Flight Simulator with aplomb). Disadvantage, it can draw about 250W.
(Or how about… one of each??)
(I guess it doesn’t matter either way, my $50 Z800 comes with a 1100W power supply!)
Chromebook never interested me, I don’t care about it. “Internet apps” are ok once in awhile but I’d way rather have the software & data on my HDD. If I want to “share” the software & data with the teacher, email still works.
But you know what I always wanted was one of those “Personal Internet Communicators” from AMD, with the Geode CPU, or else perhaps the “One Laptop Per Child” units. I heard they were rugged, adequately powerful, and included a hand-crank for power in a pinch. So cool!!
https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-13-amds-pic-canned-as-olpc-production-begins.html
“$10 a day,” you could get that with two good pan-handlings. Minimum wage is either $15 an hour now or imminently, thou doth exaggerate overmuch? I may be poor in actual “cash” terms but I’ve got me plenty of cast-off HP, WD, Netgear equipment. Granted not quite a full-supercomputer, but getting there. In me basement!
Yep I can confirm about those server sales, I just picked up another DL380P Gen. 8 for $34.33. It’s not “perfect,” first of all it’s 22nm product dating from 2013 (and some of the fans got liberated). Also, a rack mount ear got clonked. Only 24GB system ram. And as usual, somebody ran away with all the HDD sleds. Nevertheless that’s a good buy of about 50 lbs of top HP + Intel tech!
I think the most important thing that renders a computer obsolete (for most people) is the browser, and it’s tough to get a usable browser for XP anymore.
Honestly more people are using the cellphone as an internet browser, and particularly if you’re out of the house. Dedicated desktop computers are becoming more and more irrelevant. I bet the majority of internet bandwidth I consume is with my T95Z Android 7.1 media box, running NewPipe as an alternative to the YouTube streamer.
I’ve bought about 5 ass-kicking commercial servers, all of them for about $20 or less, simply because they are bulletproof industrial equipment with immense capability. This technology is literally worthless now, I’m never paying for it again!
I only turn it on to do a backup, then I turn it off again. I dunno how the cyber-warfare ransomware expert is gonna attack it remotely when it’s off!
(I guess you could burn the house down to destroy it? You’d have to figure out where my street address is, and you STILL don’t know if I’ve got any worthwhile data at all [nope.] Or offsite servers [nope. MAYBE!])
I don’t get it, and I’m going word-by-word.
“Joint,” between military branches? Or is this ship-to-ship?
“Warfighting,” well I suppose the Navy would probably expect to “warfight“ out at sea somewhere. Implying satellite communication? Excluding cell tower communication? I guess I’m grasping at the implication.
“Cloud,” so if you’re doing data-processing out at sea somewhere, in the middle of a battle, using some land-based server system, that surely involves wireless communication at some point. Must be satellite?
“Capability.” Mystifying. I cannot guess what they’re up to. What is this, some kind of “cyber warfare” scheme?
I guess you might do some battlefield simulation, or some weaponry development research, or maybe you’re controlling a cruise missile in real time.
At some point any initiative must boil down to some, “what the h are you doing” - sort of mission statement.
(I think it’s a con-man dodge, “if you don’t know what’s going on and you need somebody to spell it out to you, you probably aren’t fit to even be at the table!”) uhhhhh, are you scamming me? That’s what I’m trying to figure out!
PBS Frontline just had their “Pegasus” documentary put online, I guess the moral of the story is, “be careful about the surveillance potential of your smart cell phone.”
The interesting part is that they think this is somehow “recent” news, and they mention a couple famous cases including Khashoggi.
But then they kind of omit Bin Laden who was tracked down by his butler’s cell phone addiction, like 12 years ago !
Or the “mob reporter” on YouTube, gleefully recounting all the organized crime take-downs they got from that “ANOM” encrypted phone network. All hapless individuals who thought they were somehow immune from the surveillance.
As for “most surveiled country,” isn’t the UK also fairly high up there on that ranking? It seems to me I heard somewhere that might be the case…
For internet I subscribe to "Cable 5 Pro" from "TekSavvy" (Canada) which goes to as fast as 5 Mbps! Costs just $34 per month, with unlimited data limits.
It's scraping toward the extreme lowest-bottom of the barrel and in fact I don't think they even let people subscribe to that anymore, you'd probably have to be "grandfathered" in (yuk yuk!).
I mean, sure, we watch a lot of NewPipe videos (definitely not YouTube anymore: Google has destroyed it with commercials!) but the "Cable 5 Pro" easily keeps up with 720P streaming.
I also do torrent in the F1 races each Sunday, many thanks to the lads on "MotorSports Replays" on Reddit.
Data transfers are not "immediate," but it gets the job done.
I do far less network access on the cell phone, I literally have no use for even 4G speeds. I guess I may not qualify as a "power user" anymore, but I cannot fathom what people are doing with 5G network speeds.
Of course that pales in comparison to 2000+ Mbps fibre connections, but come on, I'm not running a server network...
I dunno 'bout you guys but I'm thankful whenever a flight is delayed or cancelled while they work to figure out some kind of technical difficulty.
I'm aware plenty like to grouse about the inconvenience, but I also know that, beneath it all, is a 40-ton jet-powered missile that "cruises" at Mach 0.85 or so (roughly the speed of a typical subsonic bullet). The whole craft!!
That's a lot of kinetic energy, on top of 33,000 ft elevation which is more than 6 MILES vertical of potential energy.
So you see, if you ever got a bruise bumping down some stairs at walking pace KE + half a flight of PE, that (comparatively speaking) there's a possibility you could sustain serious injury if something technical goes wrong on a typical commercial flight.
It's, like, game over, man! Game over!
I disagree! Unit conversions are ridiculously easy, once you know how to wield MathCad.
I find it perplexing, however, that in each worksheet I have to “declare” that
° := π/180
“If you ask an American, specifically USA, how much Foot-pound if required to heat 1 grain of water by 1 °F, and then ask to extrapolate that to ounce, pond, minim, teaspoon or gallon the usual answer would be "f* you" since those don't correlate well. Even US scientists would just smile and decline due to the amount of work and stick with the metric system they already use (hello NASA!).”
Frankly, I get along just great with hexadecimal, and always have. Then my boy comes home from some club they set up at school, affiliated with the “dozenal society,” and all of a sudden they want factor of 3 wedged in there: yeah, duodecimal. All of a sudden it’s all these stories coming home, like how come a minute is five-dozen seconds and a day is two-dozen hours, or a circle is 30-dozen degrees, and all this! Listen, I grew up when Swatch came out with Beat Time, where a whole day is 1000 .beats: that’s 10^3.
Also as a donut appreciator I prefer the “baker’s” dozen rather than a traditional dozen.
(Although some enterprising grocers will sell you a hexadecimal dozen eggs, $12, which is a full 50% more vast than any mere dozen. Who says Easter eggs are only for Easter? I say, let’s move to “Easter Island” where every day is appropriate for egg salad sandwiches!)
Somebody found a shareware preview of Peasants Quest on a CD-rom in an old magazine, and >boom< it’s a run-away 1994 ransomware pandemic, all because some yokel put it on internets. Everybody thought it was safe to thrown away their windows xp antivirus & whoopsie!
https://youtu.be/xixgDV_9RJI
8 petabytes is what, 8000 terabytes?
What could that be, either a photo collection or a mp3 collection or what, a bluray movie collection?
If it were ebooks I don’t think you’re going to read them all in 1 lifetime, is all I’m suggesting.
(“Somewhere in my 8 petabyte data hoard is a single fact worth $1 million. How many centuries will it take to find it?”)
How many programmers does it take to maintain the minuscule code base? I heard SMS was originally created to piggyback off of the constant data handshakes between handsets and cell towers, which had room for 160-character messages injected with the rest of the handshake data frame. It was unused & otherwise unusable bandwidth, which is why it was originally provided for free.
… just because somebody paid $40 billion for the app doesn’t mean there’s $40 billion worth of content there, or any particular need for any staff. The entire interac network was created and operated for years by two guys, I dispute that there’s ever been any need for any more headcount than that.
How soon we forget yesterday’s big buzzwords such as “big data” and “machine learning.” Even today, I cannot apply for a job without claiming some expert knowledge in machine learning.
(Thankfully nobody seems to care about big data anymore. What a relief!)
I’m surprised that tech is only due for just 2 years of difficulty. I haven’t upgraded a thing since I last built my pc in 2017 (Ryzen 1800x still working great!) I actually never turn it off since it also monitors my network security cameras 24x7, yet it never wore out yet. I’m more interested in picking up salvage server deals from the local system recycler than paying full price for anything new. I have some serious kick-ass server systems. The last MS Office license I bought was 2016 and it still works good enough. If Windows 10 goes out-of-date I’m just going to Linux. There’s absolutely no chance I’m ever paying any licensing fee for any software, ever.
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