Posts by Throatwarbler Mangrove 1904 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Oct 2015
The point of wireless peripherals is to have fewer cords getting tangled or, in the case of a mouse, interfering with range of motion when the cord gets caught. I can also do things like take my keyboard off my desk and set it aside when I want to use the desk space for something else.
I'm afraid I don't understand your point. What is the value in having smaller partitions or smaller drives? With modern filesystems, significant corruption basically doesn't happen, and having multiple drives presumably increases your chances that mechanical failure will happen, increasing the odds of some sort of data loss. If you want redundancy, buy two large drives instead of one and create a mirror set. Ultimately, there's no substitute for backups, though. While most people may not understand how to do backups in the traditional sense of separate physical media, I think many people at this point have at least some awareness of cloud backup solutions (OneDrive or Google Drive, to name just two), which help protect the data users care most about. While the traditionalists among us may turn their noses up at the idea of cloud backups, for most people, backing up to the cloud is still an improvement on what they would have otherwise.
Thank you for saying this; it's what leaps to mind every time some naysayer comments that we need to fix things on Earth before going to space. For the cost of all the pointless military projects on Earth, we could feed and house every human with plenty of money left over for space exploration.
*flips pages*
”It looks like your issue is ... transient voltage, you know, like when a homeless man steals the copper out of your electrical wires?"
*dummy mode on*
"So what do I do to fix it?"
"Just run down to the main power transformer, and you see that big red toggle switch?"
"Sure."
"Just flip that thing up and down a good twenty times."
"Won't that take out all the power to the site?"
"No, no, it will normalize the power by forcing the volts to flow over a non-transient circuit."
From the other end, I hear *chunk* *chunk* *chunk* *blam* as a million volts explosively surge through the transformer and, incidentally, the poor luser. I swear, you can't pay for job satisfaction like this.
With apologies to Simon Travaglia.
"Have they made the windows slide bar (or whatever you call it) wider? And stopped it from disappearing? Have they put the ticks back on the top and bottom of it again (try just sliding your window a little when it has 30,000 lines of code)?"
As another poster says, this is not just GNOME, but as UI paradigms go, this has to be one of the most frustrating to emerge in the history of interface design. Can UI designers please give us back the old scroll bar model?
McDonald's milkshakes are all manufactured at a central European facility whose location is a closely-guarded secret. As these "milkshakes" are actually a synthetic polymer-based liquid, they are loaded onto unrefrigerated trucks and shipped out across Europe on a regular schedule. Once at the individual restaurant, the milkshake substance is cooled to the appropriate level to simulate an actual milkshake. While this distribution scheme is tremendously efficient compared to, say, making actual milkshakes on-site at each restaurant, it does run into problems when the supply chain is interrupted.
Similar issues were expected stateside with getting Spam from the Spam mines of Minnesota out to Hawaii, but it turns out the demand for Spam in other parts of the country is so minimal and the canned reserves so plentiful that the Hawaiian supply chain was never in danger.
TheMoreYouKnow.jpg
I see a lot of cynical comments about what people can do and drones can't, but one thing drones can't do is lie about trying to deliver a package and failing like, for example, the UPS guy who claimed to have been by my house multiple times yet without ringing the bell or leaving a delivery notice. While drones might be robbed, they are also unlikely to steal a package that looks especially appealing, nor are they as likely to decide that it's fun to run packages repeatedly through the PPR (package processing railgun, a device whose existence I infer from the battered state of many of my packages).
It seems likely to me that Facebook was asked by the US Government to keep the WhatsApp channels open so that the US Government could monitor Taliban propaganda. This doesn't mean that the government was tapping WhatsApp via a backdoor, simply that government personnel could subscribe to the Taliban's channels and figure out what their next move would be and how they were communicating with the general populace. Now that the Taliban has control of the country, the US Government may have decided that it's time to deprive the Taliban of a communication channel or that it looks bad for them to be using a US company for this purpose; it's also possible that Facebook has been wanting to shut down the Taliban's use of their technology but the US has only allowed them to do so now.
"Please explain how having email slowed down the core function of web browsing in anything but a superficial way"
I believe the OP's point was that the developers lost focus and chose to add secondary features rather than improving the core browser experience. Fortunately, this lesson has been thoroughly learned by modern developers who never replicate the same error.
Thunderbird is one of those programs I really want to like, but it feels like it's stuck in the 90s. In particular, why is it necessary to pop up a window showing the status of sending an email? Every other modern email program just, you know, sends the email, with maybe a notification in the program's status bar. The search function is also thoroughly wretched, popping up a strange text list of message content rather than, say, the messages themselves. Maybe now that they're rolling in cash, some improvements will take place, although the fact that the developers have taken the time and effort to focus on IRC integration into the program bodes ill.
Whether you agree with it or not, the goal is to identify the consumers of child pornography and thus both reduce the consumption of it and potentially identify the originators, reducing the sexual abuse of children, which we hopefully all agree is a good thing. On the one hand, I agree with the principle that simply being in possession of child pornography is not prima facie evidence that you yourself are a pedophile. On the other hand, there are not a lot of other compelling, legitimate reasons to be in possession of it, so I can see why the authorities would take interest in someone who has it.
I just installed the beta on my underpowered Dell XPS, and it runs great despite the warning that the hardware is technically unsupported. I like having the Start menu, etc. in the middle of the taskbar instead of off to the side as it reduces mouse movement (the travel distance is a lot shorter to the middle of the screen vs. the far left corner). It also seems like there's been work towards making all the UI elements consistent, which is nice. That said, I dislike that Microsoft has decided to cram a bunch of useless crap onto the Start Menu (e.g. the Twitter app, which I would not install at gunpoint), and I share the complaint that the Start Menu should be organized in some logical fashion. Hopefully someone will see some sense on that point.
My prediction: the haters are gonna hate, like they always do, and the rest of the user base will quickly adapt.
Some of what China is doing seems like a PR blitz. Other efforts seem like they're trying to learn from the lessons of the West and making sure that social media firms don't get too big for their britches. Some of it could be smokescreen, of course. I'm not saying China is right in what it's doing when it comes to tech companies, but I'm not saying it's wrong, either. And that's what happens when capitalism gets out of control . . . Communist autocracy starts to look appealing by comparison. It's an illusion, of course; Facebook may be a cancer on society, but it does not have an army or internment camps.
In my experience, the main problem with DevOps is that it was conceived of by programmers who went to top-tier engineering schools and thus have a reasonably deep background in programming theory and practice and a great deal of comfort with reducing projects to a series of discrete tasks. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other people in the industry who learned organically and came from other backgrounds and thus are lacking the same innate expertise and comfort with the DevOps approach. This problem will probably sort itself out with time; of course, there's a good chance that some new hotness will come along to replace DevOps entirely.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that programmers don't really like dealing with the operational side of the house, where things break for no obvious good reason, and some poor sysadmin/SRE has to spend hours chasing a fault only to find that it's a bug in a third-party driver or library that's no longer supported. In the ideal world, these problems get sorted out by a continuous feedback loop which leads to the removal of faults over time, but that assumes the organization is willing to spend the time and money to remove the faults.
Conversely:
"Well-run companies set clear goals, we know which team does what, people communicate, they have autonomy. They tend to do really well at DevOps."
There are a lot of poorly-run companies (and IT groups) by those metrics. What's remarkable is that they still manage to stay in business.
In the seminal 1980s hit comedy Revenge of the Nerds, the supposed heroes of the piece join a fraternity and use tactics such as doxing and rape to gain the advantage over the more conventionally attractive and successful college students who have tormented them throughout the movie. One expects the culture is something like that.
Sorry, you fail to understand "Cancel Culture." According to the right wing, the real victim of "cancel culture" here would be Shane Sonderman, who was just using his free speech rights as carved into stone by God Himself when He wrote the US Constitution and handed the tablets down to Jefferson Davis at Stony Mountain.
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