Posts by quxinot

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

Given the panel gaps, I wouldn't have wanted one when I was 6, either.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Using ublock origin, just update the filters periodically and they've been very good about stopping the YT nags.

PiHole is awesome, I just run it in a VM on my NAS machine.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Re: And then there's Insurance

Depending on your outlook, risk aversion, and local climate.... if you want properly fast accelleration, you buy a motorcycle. A ZX-14R can cherfully show a taillight to a tesla fancycrap edition, and for a fraction of the price.

That's the route I went, at least. A powerful motorcycle, and then a cheapish car for particuarly ugly weather (read: snow). Means the buck goes a lot farther on the 'fun' end, but without all the compromise needed when you just need to get from A to B.

(If considering this route, please budget an extra two grand or so and buy the best gear you can. It's completely worth it, not only for getting less hurt in a crash, but also for comfort when you don't crash.)

$17k solid gold Apple Watch goes from Beyoncé's wrist to the obsolete list

Re: Easily avoidable PR disaster

Cars all look the same today due to crash laws and regulations. So it's not that they're without style, it's that they're not allowed to have style.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

Re: I beg to differ

I'd go further. The shame is not that Microsoft tried to join the phone biz and failed. The shame is that they tried at all.

The focus on phone-like interfaces managed to really ruin their OS releases as well as a fair chunk of their major software output for a number of years, and it's fairly clear that the damage isn't completely healed yet.

That said, absolute agreement that it'd be nice to have a reasonable third choice in the phone market--but I don't think MS would be a good option. Heck, it's difficult (not impossible!) to name another company that I'd trust even less with controlling significant market share in the phone space. Imagine an HP phone, or a IBM phone...... Anti-emetics are in the pockets->

You snooze, you lose? It's not quite as simple as that

I am going to very politely not link to what my alarm is set to play. I suspect you would go directly through 'awake' and straight to 'cardiac arrest'. Some of us need a bit of a kick to get out of bed, particularly in the ridiculous early hours (seriously, if the sun isn't up, leave me alone), especially in winter.

(For the morbidly curious, find "The Great Southern Trendkill" and listen to the first, oh, ten seconds. Generally that's all the longer needed to get me up and turning the damned thing off! It helps that the alarm device is placed on the opposite corner of the room from the bed.)

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Re: Crimbo

Wow. How many is a Brazilian?

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: We had a similar incident

I'd wonder honestly if the plug itself took the load. Rather than the cable trying to get stretched, if the plug got wedged in the works, it could bind the mechanism and provide a tremendous load for the motor.

'Weird numerological coincidence' found during work on Linux kernel 6.5

Re: If you say you're English these days, you'll be arrested and thrown in jail [etc]

Beats hearing someone pontificate that it's all going to be screwed up by Brexit, though.

Meltdown avoided: Intel rediscovers profitability

...

Has a business ever created growth by cutting staff, budget, or output?

Sounds like it's going backwards pretty fast still.

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

Re: Some of us figured all that out ...

People are horrible. Doubly true in groups.

News at 11.

(Did the author not go through a childhood, schooling, and otherwise interacting with others to learn this early on?)

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

Re: Why

ABS does not make a car stop shorter, ever. It allows you to steer while failing to have any decel force (which is why it's so miserable in genuinely low-grip situations like snow--rather than mandate it, why not just mandate better damned tires?)

This does not belong in the 'benefit' list at all. It's a useless pile of crap that just adds weight. That said, it does make it very much easier to add additional pressure when emergency braking, as most drivers are unable or unwilling to properly push on a brake pedal in an emergency, and a temporary massive boost can be provided in a detected emergency.

Benchmark a cloud PC? No way. Just trust us, they work, says Microsoft

They'd be happy to do that.

Of course, you'll need to pay a per-user cost. And probably a per-CPU cost in addition. And an overprovisioning cost.

Stanford sends 'hallucinating' Alpaca AI model out to pasture over safety, cost

Re: Not surprising

I read that as the 'Fine art of balcony detection' and wondered if I had missed a BOFH story.

:)

At Citrix, 'perpetual licenses' means 'we'd rather move you to a subscription'

Gosh, where have we seen that before? I wonder if they just add an x to the end of the file extension...

Sick of smudges on your car's enormo touchscreen? GM patents potential cure

Why not an even smarter idea? Maybe skip the distracting screens and provide a car that's actually rewarding to drive, which means drivers pay better attention?

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Re: I swear

Just ensure that a desk follows them.

You need to put in the effort to ensure reliable results, after all!

Intel offers desktop chip that can hit 6GHz if everything goes right, you can keep it cool, stars align, pigs fly

Re: New paradigm time

Many bugs have been noted in testing, though.

On both models.

Self-driving car computers may be 'as bad' for emissions as datacenters

Re: Our potential future is a carbon-heavy one

You're not allowed to say that. The only horrible thing to the environment is the internal combustion engine and the car it's within.

The eight billion people on the planet are absolutely not remotely at fault. Only the car.

Microsoft’s Nadella: Tech is in for a rough two years

Re: Watch for the MS buzzwords

Stick to IT? He's not worth a crap at that, either.

I mean, he hasn't thrown even one chair yet.

(And now we should all be collectively horrified that that would be a significant improvement....)

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

Hate to say it, but so what?

Older, out-of-support versions of Windows will become more easily hacked.

Was it really all that much better when they were supported?

Here's how to remotely take over a Ferrari...account, that is

Re: Pure BS and security is really only a PR problem

I'd like a dis-connected car/account. Or at least, the option for one. I suspect it'll be like the ancient 'radio delete' option was years ago--sure, we can remove that, but there's a fee....

More and more, it's looking like my next car will have a number of previous owners and will be from the prior century.

Women sue Apple claiming AirTags helped their stalkers

Re: re: You have a choice. You can educate people or you can be a dick.

>The tricky bit, mastered by years of reg commenting, is pretending to do the first while doing the second!!

There is a third option: Confuse everyone.

See AMFM1.

BOFH: We're an industry leader … in employing idiot managers

>Have to think about the safety of the cleaners, nothing to do with that window's ability to open wide enough to allow an office chair to exit gracefully........ It might be on fire and need to be 'removed' from the office....

And to ensure safety, the chair must have adequate clearance to the windowframe to ensure that it fits through easily. Even if there's a CEO-shaped object tied to the chair.

Re: Nice screen layout

The world needs more BOFHs.

A green revolution is neigh! Do your part! Lock the board in the conference room when the fire alarm goes off!

And ensure that you're safely down at the pub. With an alibi.

iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to

Re: Energy doesn't HAVE to go somewhere.

It's good to see that we're developing interesting and useful technologies for batteries. There's lots of places (phones, cars, laptops, and a zillion other applications) that could use a really good, long-lasting battery.

Unfortunately, in pretty much every application, they're skipping the comparatively cheap and easy steps of making the battery easily replaced. Which would make the lifespan of the item tremendously longer and that makes it not only more user friendly, but more environmentally freindly as well.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Men and a Man. Amen.

Oh god, there's more of it.

Why hasn't anyone used this fancy ML/AI stuff to make an AMFM1 to English translator app available online yet?

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Bit klunky, but...

There's antibiotics for that.

Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions

Re: This is going to destroy's Tesla's stock price

We can only hope.

Foreign spies hijacking US mid-terms? FBI, CISA are cool as cucumbers about it

There's been election fraud since elections were a thing. The question is just if it's been caught or not.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

AT power supplies? Black to black, smoke you will lack. Black apart from black, PSU will go CRACK!

But god help me if I ever run into a coral snake.

Better than doing the same thing with a CPU heatsink!

Remember back then, when they came with preapplied thermal compound, covered with a sheer plastic layer covering it? Was not uncommon to have a 'new' cooler that didn't cool, and an embarrassed assembler after revisiting the installation.

[No, never happened to me. I always cleaned and lapped my coolers, so I could use Arctic Silver 7 or MX-4 or whatever, because I was far too cool for the stock thermal compounds. I had wholly different problems, but never that particular one!]

The next deep magic Linux program to change the world? Io_uring

Re: Perfect for hackers :)

Please keep Poettering away from it.

Record label drops AI rapper after backlash over stereotypes

Re: Indians are slightly ahead of the AI game. Or are they?

>>There's been some changes recently to the phone systems mandated by the FCC which have cut dramatically the volume of Spam calls.

And yet, that's what I woke to this morning. Improved I can agree with, but like only adding half as much sewage to my coffee, it's still not acceptable.

California to phase out internal combustion vehicles by 2035

Re: America without V8's just isn't America

Shame about the hateful throttle response of them, not quite what you want on a good twisty road.

We tested all the Ubuntu remixes for resource usage so you don't have to

Re: Thank you for the report

Even without a bare metal test, it's nice to see, as I'm in the process of using up spare parts to build a machine to play with--which oddly, requires ordering more spare parts, as it would be clearly terrible if I ran out [this may be tongue-in-cheek, but anyone with a big stockpile of spares knows this as it's why we have so many spares!].

If nothing else it makes me think that I'll do some back-to-back playi... testing, myself. I was going to just stick Mint with MATE on it, but it raises my awareness that I haven't run Lubuntu for awhile and have never tried Ubuntu with MATE, so I'll have to have a good tinkering session to see how it goes.

Thanks for that!

Improve Linux performance with this one weird trick

There's an old adage about the tool and the job needing to be matched for best performance.

Why $52b chip subsidies are being held up – and what the White House is doing about it

Re: Congress's Main Task is Thinking Up Cutesy Acronyms

>Congress's Main Task is Thinking Up Cutesy Acronyms

It worked. Got you thinking about them wasting time being useless instead of actively being criminals and stealing your money and freedoms, didn't it?

Re: "These are the subsidies Intel and others have been clamoring for"

Easier still.

Tax the crap out of their imported chips, and notsomuch on their locally-produced ones.

But ffs can we stop giving tax breaks and other perks out? Let's see some stick and less carrot.

COO of failed bio-biz Theranos found guilty on all twelve fraud counts

Or your lawyer should share in the punishment. Would be nice to see the risk:reward ratio altered a bit to prevent so many of the obviously wasteful lawsuits/appeals bogging down the courts.

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

Slot 1 (and the physically idential slot A), and Slot 2 were only really useful for dirty jokes.

Socket A was clearly the nicest of the ZIF types, though. :)

Never fear, the White House is here to tackle web trolls

You forgot the government representatives themselves, which would be one of the top priorities to have privacy, of course.

California Right-to-Repair bill quietly killed in committee

Re: The 1%

Newp.

The American approach to freedom is MY freedom to tell YOU what you're allowed to do.

Sadly.

And I'm not sure when that really happened, as it seems really common today with the modern public, but if I think back to childhood I can pick up examples regularly. Perhaps social media has just made it easier to see and recognize, as you don't have to go to the PTA meeting or whatever gathering to notice that attitude.

Re: Not just tech

Uh no, the big commercial guys would much prefer to buy parts off the shelf cheaply and hire a cheap mechanic or two to be on staff for preventative maintenance when not fixing the big stuff.

The big commercial guys like to make money, you see, and not spend it at the JD service department.

I would still love to see alternative aftermarket support happen, though it'd be kinda a weird crossover to get the guys from microsquirt (an open-source ECU) working on tractors.

FTC says Frontier lied about its internet speeds amid $8.5m settlement

Re: Up to...

That is an amazing way to handle it. Pro-rate that payment when the speed does not hit advertised targets.

Engineer gets Windows 11 working on a Surface Duo

Re: I wonder who in the world would like to run Windows 11

"Yes, I still have my Yggdrail install media from 1993 in my spare room "museum"!!"

That's it, I'm renaming my junk storage as 'the museum" too. Brilliant!

It's cute that you think that 10 and even 11 started off as being anything but a complete mess of code.

Or 7, far as that goes.

John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine

Re: Bad News

I suspect if they do reverse engineer the controls, they'd find (after the war is over, etc) a very ready market worldwide that would like to use their equipment without JD's interference.

Re: They can be completely bricked, sadly

"[0] Fun fact: where in a car your steering more or less self-centers when on a level road, so that when you let go of the steering wheel you end up going straight ahead again, "

Shouldn't. Almost no roads are level, they're always crowned for water runoff. If you drive on the right side of the road, the car should pull very slightly to the left to fight the crown. It's not a very noticable effect, but drive with the car set up for the street on a much flatter surface (an airstrip, a racetrack, etc) and it is distinctly present. [Reverse for driving on the left, of course].

Point stands though, you're describing the 'on-center' feel that comes from caster/trail in the way the wheels are held to the chassis in relationship to the normal direction of travel (and is a big part of why your car becomes very unstable when driven backwards fast).

Don't hate on cryptomining, hate the power stations, say Bitcoin super-fans

Re: My reasons for not investing are because I don't understand all my biases and levers

In fairness, I suspect that very argument doesn't fly if you use it in the more obvious condition...

....e.g., taxes.