Posts by Grunchy 922 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
Bread usually falls butter-side down because the extra mass of the butter makes it a little more stable oriented that way.
And so the screen side might be a little heavier, in part to ensure more work for Apple screen replacers.
(Cats tend to land rubber-side down because they can use their tail as a rudder. A high proportion of cats would survive 16,000 ft free fall, you know how come? Because of eating birds, I reckon!)
I use the “Ghost Spectre” edition of Win10 specifically because they streamlined most of the MS bloat out of there. But they never culled Wordpad.
(Besides Notepad++ there’s another really interesting freeware app, and that’s Notetab.)
I never liked Wordpad. Well it doesn’t open Word files and the “rich text” markup isn’t of any use.
These days I’m using Libre Office, or else Ubuntu Edit.
I don’t think I care about Microsoft anymore… they can do whatever they want in their abandoned mall. I’m not ever going back again!
Here in Canada the 3G shutdown is postponed until Dec 2025.
Meanwhile, I found out I can easily just pay $40 and get a 4G wi-fi hotspot. This is perfect for me because I don’t pay for any cellular plan anyway: instead, I pay for a tablet data plan. Not only is it much cheaper, but I can get all the same utility with VOIP and SMS alternatives to “normal” cellphone functions.
Now I can skip the whole nonsense of providers trying to force my legacy equipment offline, by attacking my 3G radio.
Ok, suit yourself. Now I’ve got a 4G hotspot, and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop me!
Why did anybody update? I still have iPhone SE 1st gen, circa 2014, because it has excellent 3G radio, good screen, good performance, 64 GB memory.
“Newer is always better,” yeah, for who though? For the guy trying to perpetuate his expensive, eternally improving handsets. I paid $100 for this thing back in 2015 and refused every single Apple “update” which is nothing but Apple sabotage. Jobs was an ass and his company sucks. I only have this thing because FLIR made a companion IR camera for it, which I got for $50 second-hand because people are in a rush to get swindled.
I use data for free from my unlimited wi-fi, I barely use any of my “tablet” 6GB plan. This mobile internet is handy, but in no way is it “crucially important” at all. My 500 kbps wi-fi is plenty good enough.
NO SALE on 6G.
I actually tested this and so far Steam still seems to work on Win7. I know, I brag hard about running Windows completely sandboxed inside a VM isolated from the internet, but I just made a separate copy running only Steam. It has a snapshot anyway, so if hackers attack my image I’ll just recover it and move on.
The only hiccough was some kind of error involving a “sandboxed browser,” which doesn’t mean anything to me.
I played some more Portal challenge levels, got a couple more silver ratings on good ole Win7.
Who’s telling me I have to upgrade to Win11? Because I think rather not.
I’m not “upgrading” to Windows 11, why would I? Windows 11 has no beneficial features (of any value to me, anyway).
The most beneficial feature has been to run Windows inside of Qemu/Virt-manager inside of Linux, because now my entire Windows environment is encapsulated inside a single qcow2 file, so backup has suddenly become utterly painless — after decades of being jerked around by Microsoft. Second feature is the snapshot function. Windows can suffer all the b/s of failed updates or whatever incompetence they are guilty of, and I can recover no matter what bungling Microsoft does to it. And now security updates are wholly irrelevant because I run Windows sandboxed from the internet: I use Linux to access the internet.
What does Windows 11 do? I really couldn’t care less, to be honest.
Microsoft is, frankly, just another vendor to avoid like the plague. Same as like Simpson Sears down at the mall, when Craftsman and Kenmore were no longer providing compelling value.
These companies have become obsolete, and I have moved on.
Why does any customer data need to be net-accessible? You set up three servers. The first one faces the net, has no data, and can only talk to server 2 through a single low-speed connection and only using a particular messaging protocol. The second server has no internet connection and also no data. It can only talk to servers 1 & 3 via two separate low-speed connections and two different protocols. The third server can access the data, but only for confirming true or false if a particular query is correct; and can only speak to server 2.
And all 3 of these servers could run on the same physical hardware, as independent VMs!
I could write this in BASIC and it would still be utterly unhackable.
I worked with some ACTUAL intelligent assistants, and they were a complete disaster.
The circumstance was that we had a mountain of drawings to be updated per redline, but the majority of them were “simple” updates. So the boss had a great idea, let’s hire some intelligent assistants in India. The workflow goes: bundle up all the simple, busy, impossible to get wrong work (into a zip file), email that to India, and spend all the rest of your time doing the more specialized, challenging stuff. Then tomorrow morning, briefly check all the work from India, and release all the updates at once.
But what really happened: everything sent to India was mistaken, or poorly done, or introduced new mistakes. It’s as if you gave your information to hackers to mess it all up, and then they billed you for the privilege.
The amazing thing is that this persisted for months! Well it wasn’t hard to figure out. The boss got a raise for “solving” the problem, and he had a “closed ears” policy about the solution not working. Plus even better, he made it so that all the performance metrics were produced exclusively by the Indian vendor with no input from the on-site design and drafting department (as a matter of fact — we were deliberately gagged). Needless to say, our outsource colleagues published an unbeatable 100% on-time, 100% error-free performance record, justifying several rounds of bonuses: all fraudulent.
How did the whistle finally get blown? The dept VP finally came for an independent tour and asked to see the “success” with our online friends. Boy was he surprised to learn it actually took more time and effort to correct the “intelligent helper’s” edits than if we were to simply do the original job without help. Our actual workload ballooned from 100% to something more like 140%.
My prediction: AI helper bots prove to be a far greater hindrance than net useful benefit for all the foreseeable future.
Exactly like “full self driving.”
(Trust me: come test your chauffeur robot in a Calgary black-ice blizzard, to truly understand the meaning of “futile” !)
Sometimes you can temporarily substitute a disrupted broadband link by sharing a cellular connection.
It depends how far out into the sticks you find yourself…
(This one time an out-of-control maniac wiped out a main trunk that provided connectivity for my entire neighborhood, including all the shops and gas stations and convenience stores, and interrupted all card transactions, whether debit or credit. You couldn’t even get a slurpee unless you had cash on the barrel! Even lotto lookup was offline, it was a complete disaster. THANKFULLY my iPhone SE still had wireless; I’d have had to read a book or something! It was an extended outage too, I heard the guy needed extrication via Jaws Of Life and everything.)
I bought a box with random 700 cds for $13.99 per hundred and I just rip em.
Hey it was funny people bought music libraries from iTunes and then passed away, and children tried to access the collection, only to find out Steve Jobs wanted all that for himself (and then died to spite em.)
I don’t buy Steam games any more because they don’t want to support that era of OS anymore, even though every game I have runs fine on Win7.
I’ve moved on to GOG for DRM-free games only.
I can’t believe anybody pays a cent for Microsoft anything. Libre Office is finally a decent alternative.
As for music & books: I do my shopping on FM radio & free little libraries. You know where’s a good place to buy content? Thrift stores. Or borrow from library and rip at will.
(I’m not paying any money for computer hardware anymore either. I can get amazing deals on cast-off equipment at the recyclers. I have six high end HP & Lenovo servers downstairs with hundreds of GB of ram each and the whole lot cost less than $500!)
I’m done with Apple, too.
I’ve moved on to Linux and run Proxmox server and virt-manager for other OS environments.
I’ve also reverted to Windows 7 for my legacy windows applications (minus the network connection, to avoid their security problems.)
Steam is dropping support for Win 7 so I’m dropping them first.
Somehow I got tricked into using “thorium” browser, and now I find out if has furry porn and circumcision images? I am trying to avoid google and microsoft spyware, and I got duped by “the individual” instead.
(If somebody ever tries to corner you into using their choice of pronouns, use “the individual” instead. Works practically everywhere.)
“The Cloud” is somebody else’s computer. They want your files in case you have some valuable information that can be exploited.
You know why google hosts everybody’s email for free? It’s so that an artificial intelligence can scrape everything that everyone is talking about, and then pose to it interesting questions.
(Such as, “hey google what is the stock market doing tomorrow, where are tomorrow’s 10-baggers,” or “who is getting murdered tomorrow,” etc.)
First of all, my personal data is pretty much worthless anyway!
Plus I keep offline backups, those are incremental and held on power-off servers (yeah, I’ve got quad redundancy).
Next, I work in VMs anyway, with ZFS raid and snapshots and all that jazz.
Plus some cloud account or two holding more backups. Plus a drawer full of old HDDs that were never deleted, and may still fire up.
Did I mention my data is completely worthless anyway? It really is, the only reason I have such redundant backups is because the local electronic recycler is practically giving away heaps of top notch equipment from just a couple years ago.
(It’s an interesting hobby.)
Thunderf00t already “busted” the idea that this research has anything to do with power generation. It’s actually nothing but weapons research.
(For example: to “harness” the heat energy you’d have to incorporate a steam generator, or some kind of thermal capture apparatus, and they don’t have the room in between all those super laser beams.)
Sabine Hossenfelder goes further into competing technologies, but even the most likely candidates use severely esoteric, sketchy techniques. Probably all 100% of this research space isn’t being commercialized in the next 50 years…
(It’s a wonder Musk isn’t mixed up in this too, if he were then we’d know for certain it’s just an elaborate scam.)
Moved up to Linux. Now I run “ghost spectre” win10 in virt-manager sandbox (no internet — antivirus no longer needed, nor are ‘updates’ since it’s just for legacy software anyway).
The nice thing is that vm “snapshots” actually work, unlike microsoft garbage “restore points” that always failed. Plus I became offended by microsoft snooping, stealing personal data, and unwanted advertising. That all ended just a few months ago, I did not realize how anxiety inducing that “experience” was — until I fired microsoft.
The forgotten cage match…?
I’m still waiting for the cave rescue submarine!
Musk promised he would deliver even though the kids were long since rescued!
You might laugh at my “faint hope,” but he did finally get around to delivering his abysmal cyber truck, after all.
(I’ve noticed that people seem to have extremely short memories about stuff like this. Does anybody remember, there used to be a company called “Pontiac?” Do people remember when they released their latest godawful truck, “Aztek?” Yeah.. that one.)
I remember trying to ask out girls (prior to Windows 1995, which is when the internet started in earnest) and every single one of them said they were suffering some kind of emotional crisis.
I was like, what gives with this???
The only thing they all had in common was that they all happened to be suffering nervous breakdown at precisely the same moment that I happened to be makin’ my moves on ‘em.
+*+ Mystified! +*+
I’ve got Proxmox on the servers and Virt-Manager (Qemu) on the workstation.
I tried out VMWare many moons ago, upgraded to VirtualBox, then settled on Proxmox & Qemu.
Of course Proxmox is a given, for the ZFS pool.
On the workstation it’s really unimportant, it’s just a sandbox for Microsoft Windows to be trapped in. It’s strictly for legacy stuff, I don’t even really have a use case for it.
(If I was running a cloud server I’d probably just use Proxmox, depending on the specific technologies needed, of course.)
That’s right, the artificial intelligence thing. Yes, one of the reasons I bought all this server equipment was because I wanted to set up stable diffusion down in the basement. But then I got way more interested in Proxmox, virtualization, and ridding myself completely of Microsoft.
(Well, I still have the Windows. Locked safely inside a VM sandbox. Mostly for legacy software, but also to observe Windows and Mac OS being brought to heel — utterly — inside Linux.)
“I might also mention that I'm somewhat skeptical of the drive for human spaceflight in general”
Yeah. Agree. Virtually the entire Universe is completely hostile to human life. There’s nowhere to go, and once you get there, there’s nothing to do.
I predict when Musk sends people to Mars they have a thoroughly awful time interrupted only when they die in thoroughly appalling circumstances. Luckily, they will be too far away to actually take any revenge against Musk.
(Much like Russian armed forces fighting in Ukraine, and will never be able to do anything against Putin.)
“Oh for the happy days of Windows 7 when the OS (mainly) did what it was asked and nothing more.”
Yup, I hear you. I actually set up about a dozen Windows VMs, each of which to run one particular app, and all of them using the same license key. Once I got GPU passthrough working, yeah let’s get several instances of that set up.
Not only Win10, but also Mac OS, Linux server, and even Solaris, Free BSD, whatever I want!
I admit I do have one Win7 setup (also Ghost Spectre) that I let online because I have it running Steam. Sadly, this absolutely perfect setup I only get to enjoy until Dec 31. Because Steam are foolishly dropping Win7 support on Jan 1.
Grr.
I upgraded to Linux and I only run Windows from within VM now. Furthermore, I don’t expose Microsoft to the internet anymore.
It’s just a setup to run certain legacy software, and absolutely none of it is ever gonna be tampered with, a.k.a. “updated.”
So that’s why I run the Ghost Spectre edition. No antivirus, no updates, no internet, no viruses, and no meddling.
Also, absolutely zero spying.
Ransomware has negligible cost to distribute, same as email spam. Even though both schemes only pay off in a tiny fraction of instances, and may be long periods between payoffs, they’ll never go away, or stop evolving.
All you can do is be aware of the problem, protect your interests, and live your life.
Keep a sharp eye for new exploits, because they will be coming…
Somehow they weren’t doing backup, or data security, or email rules. The virus got into the server and encrypted entire data sets. Plus you can bet the baddies kept a copy.
Cost $50,000 in bitcoins and about 5% was never recoverable.
(It all happened mere months before I started.)
Personally, I run Windows inside Qemu now, from disk images inside a ZFS data pool.
I’ve got snapshots and backups, including offline.
It took me decades to switch to Linux, I’m glad I finally got around to it!
It seems to me that Google has access to everybody’s email, all of which are exposed to an artificially-intelligent observer., which is owned operated controlled and queried by Google.
“Hey Google, what are the top 5 stocks on Nasdaq that are gonna jump in value today?”
Nice system.
You can’t even get out of the solar system in a reasonable time frame, let alone to another star system. Even just getting to the sun takes no less than 8 minutes — no matter who you think you are!
Any alien that’s gonna travel for centuries to get here, when they do show up they’re going to be real “slow talkers.” As in, not very stimulating…
Operating system is irrelevant now, no matter what software you want to run. Said from the perspective of, “if I can do it, pretty much anyone can.”
I’ve upgraded my CAD and engineering workstation to Ubuntu 22 and am running Qemu and Virt-Manager to run Win7, Win10, Mac-OS, even Solaris. I’ve even gotten these to work with full GPU passthrough acceleration (even HDMI audio, if that’s important.)
So, that’s it then. I converted to Linux for daily driver and any other operating system as a mere sandboxed environment, completely sheltered from the view (and control) of Microsoft, Apple, even Oracle.
“Arm” is great, I guess? I already have all the computational power I need or want, it’s all paid-for, and the electricity bill is quite affordable. I doubt I’m upgrading any time soon. Put it this way, I’m still going great with iPhone 4. What do I need a modern, clown-size phone for? Nothing!
I’ve been upgrading my 2017 “budget build” went from Ryzen 1800x to 3800x, still pleased with my SX8200 1TB “pro”. Main slot has the Vega56, secondary has the GTX1050-Ti. Just yesterday splurged $300 Cdn on 4x 32GB DDR4-3600 modules.
The *big* upgrade, however, was from Win10 to Ubuntu22. Now I run Virt-manager with Qemu, and pass-through the Vega56 to my compartmentalized instances of Win7, Win10, and Mac-OS (which no longer run any form of anti-virus, since they are unfit to be exposed to the internet. Nothing but legacy offline apps.)
Even though my rig is already 6 years old, I doubt I’ll be upgrading anything else before 2030, if ever.
“It all has to do with monetizing the user after the sale. Create a Microsoft account just to install, now they know who you are. Send you a text to your cell for MFA, now they have hooked in your mobile device as well.”
Seems that Microsoft has become a peddler of “shitware.”
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