Posts by AK565 182 posts • joined 20 Jun 2016
I've encountered several laptops that have a completely separate, physical, on/off switch hidden somewhere on the OUTside of the computer. NOTHING in the software makes any reference to it. One simply has to know of its existenc and location and make it part of your checklist for wifi mysteriously not functioning.
Exactly. A certain state in the US decided to save $$ by firing all its interpreters. So instead of paying a local interpreter to spend his day doing local jobs, they paid people like me 4 hours travel time plus the 2hr minimum for each job. A local college apparently got wind of this scheme, fired its staff interpreters, and hired through an agency. Bottom line: A class formerly covered 3 man hours of staff was replaced 8 man hours of higher cost agency interpreters. But different budget lines were used so money was "saved". I'm sure someone got a huge bonus in both cases.
You should see when Republican congressmen have to actually explain or debate something. More often than not it's clear in two minutes they know nothing about the topic in question. TBH, the Dems often aren't much better. However, that ' not much' is usually enough to make them look stunningly well informed in comparison.
Part of the problem is that the Republicans know that they can say almost anything and it won't be questioned. As in, they don't even have to make any sense or be factually accurate. OTOH, the Dems are saddled with having to make at least a modicum of sense and some degree of coherence to sell themselves/their platform to their electorate. Republicans have no such worries.
Agreed, my BBerry 9900 had 3G service almoat literally everywhere until 4G showed up. Then I started finding weak signals and dead zones. A year or two after that all these mysterious problems made an appearance.
I had a Razr M until the third or fourth upgrade which caused battery life to go from 2 days to half a day, if that. Judging from the uproar it appeared to happen to almost everyone. Motorola never acknowledged it.
Exactly! If I use the free version I expect to see adverts. But when I pay for a subscription I expect to see on mbre than one static ad per page but much, much more importantly I expect not to be asked, told, or offered anything! Leave me the fuck alone if I'm paying a subscription for your services!
There's a general prudishness that's taken hold of the USA in recent years. From what my younger colleagues say, most gentlemen don't shower in locker rooms unless there are private stalls. The 'towel dance' (look it up; it's actually a thing) is employed lest anyone find out that the dancer has the same equipment as everyone else in the room. The list goes on...
I'm in almost the exact same situation. One job is 10a-2p required +5hrs admin work when convenient. 2nd job runs roughly 3-7p. In a few weeks will start a 3rd which consists of my being on standby while I do my own thing at home. The 15hrs/week saved in commuting makes up for anything I might've lost.
So if we use the Bard as our cutoff point, we're essentially left with Everyman to work with, unless we want to go back to Chaucer. Alternatively, we could look to Yola and Fingalian. A third possibility is is going the Aenglisc/Anglish route and eliminating all words and syntax of Latin origin. This last might be the easiest as many have already made inroads.
5 or 10 years ago there was a span of time when I had access to Macs almost daily. Memory's fuzzy.... While many things impressed me, I recall distinctly that any 'right click' functions were torturously complicated.
The iPhone really blows my mind. I can tell you that whoever designed all the functions related to document and photo handling never had to do either for work. It took me an inexcusably long time to figure out how to turn off picture sharing suggestions.... As in I'd unlock my phone and a random pic from my porn stash would be front and center.
Zoom links almost never work. If I manually type in the meeting and access codes it works on the #irst try 99% of the time. Teams does not work at all with Firefox on Ubuntu. But Teams is fine with Chromium on Ubuntu. I just found out today the school where I'll be working a few hours daily uses Google Classroom which I'd never even heard of. Another agency was all gung ho on their proprietary version of Zoom until I asked a few basic tech quertions... I suddenly didn't need to use it any more and was told to use whatever the school uses.
Yeah, education on line is quite interesting.
"... the right are too stupid and selfish to care until it happens to them."
It's a little more complicated, at least in the US. There's a disturbingly large % of the population for whom an event is only real if it affects them in some way. Friends in property management guess it's 1/4 - 1/3 the population and it seems fairly evenly distributed among the population irrespective of demographics.
Some people do work best thay way: Start Monday with a list of what must be finished by Friday 5pm and then do it where and when they please. Boss doesn't know or care....fly off to a beach if you want. Just get it done on time. Last week was brutal, physically. But I got all my work done because I spent Friday on my couch with my tablet.
At present I'm scheduled to full time WFH within two weeks. I'll save 15hrs/week in commuting time and close to US$1000/month in work related costs. Factoring in the above time savings, my new work week will be 10hrs/week longer but for 1/3 of that I'll be on standby, during which time I can literally do whatever I want as long as I can get to my laptop in under a minute.
WFH drastically decreases the wear-and-tear on my body, thereby increasing my chances of working more years and not needing Social Security until age 70. That delay will gain me nearly $1000/month more for the rest of my life. I fail to see a downside here.
Frankly, I'm curious as to how so many people have the discretionary time and energy to spend on FB. Since Covid19 hit 90% of my time has been spent on keeping afloat financially. It literally took until a few hour's ago to sort that all out. I anticipate having some discretionary time in the very near future and I'll certainly not be spending it on FB.
At this point I don't think I actively refuse to engage with entities that insist on FB log-in. I suspect I just ignore them without the FB log-in consciously registering as the reason.
Mozilla have come out with a FB "bucket" that supposedly markedly reduces the amount of data FB can slurp without your permission. I haven't had the chance to check it out but wonder if there's any truth to the claim.
After 56k, I discovered a modem used two phone lines. One was the 'dedicated' computer line that have you 56k. The second line was the 'house' line. When the house line was not in use the modem would use that to double speed. When a call came in or someone made a call the modem would disconnect from it.
This was mid 90's. I don't recall details beyond getting a noticeable speed bump.
The problem with this way of thinking is that changing the label doesn't change the thing. Calling the master password 'primary'doesn't do anything. One could easily make an argument that 'primary'is just as '-ist' as the word 'Master' is.
'Whore' used to be the PC word for 'lady of the evening' Languahes change.
"It would be a shame if Mozilla went the way of so many other developers and unilaterally decided that they know what is best for their users."
Exactly. They think they know best yet are nearly always wrong. It makes me wonder how well I'm actually being tracked, lol. Features I use disappear and those I don't are 'enhanced'. I don't bother any more. I just switch to an alternative or I drop it all together. One of the main reasons Facebook lost me was that they kept undoing all my tweaks.
I'm on my first iProduct. I cam tell you that it was made very clear to me that unless I deliberately pick and delete a photo, every single photo is both on my phone and in iCloud so it is automatically backed up and I don't need to think on it any further. I'm not saying that's necessarily true. I'm saying that's what I was told numerous times by numerous people. I'm not much of a photographer so I really don't care, but if i were i'd make sure to save my pics in third place.
In the same vein, my laptop's keyboard just crapped out. But that's OK. I backed it up on a separate disk just a few days earlier. I needed some files from two weeks ago. No problem, right? When I tried to restore the latest restore date offered me was May 22nd.... And I do weekly backups! Ihavent had time to tackle that fiasco.... I have a list.
"Some of these jobs are in places that no one wants to live in like, Nebraska or somewhere."
This is another issue on top of everthing else. It's been going on for years but has hit the media as a result of Covid. Many white collar workers in both tech and non-tech fields have no interest in living in areas where science (aka reality) is treated as a liberal conspiracy and schools teach that cave men and dinosaurs coexisted in a world that is only 6,000 years old. No, it's not happening, no matter how much money a company might offer. Full stop.
And those of us of a certain age and from certain parts of the English-speaking world will recall there was a time when the phrase "mentally retarded" was the Politically Correct way to refer to a person with cognitive disabilities.
Generally speaking, getting a work visa depends on one's education/skill set/credentials vs need in given areas. If one's a widget painter and areas A,B, & C in Canada have a shortage of widget painter it's supposedly easy to get a work visa if you agree to go to one of those areas and work there for a specified time period. If one's dead set on moving to non-shortage area, it is decidedly more difficult. The website made quite clear that if one first moves to shortage area A and hates it, one is free to move to shortage area B without restriction.
Strangely, in spite of all the emphasis on this, there seemed to be no way to type in one's credentials and get a list of current shortage areas. Go figure.
I could quibble over a few details, but your overall point is dead center correct, IMO.
Regarding US workers being 'uneducated': I do agree that an ever increasing % of people successfully holding down intellectually demanding jobs become completely flummoxed by the slightest derivation of the routine. If you take them out of their zone/world their IQ seems to drop by 20 points. No argument from me.
My point is that even if you ARE a person who can handle changes in routine and who meets your standard of 'educated', you are just as likely to be in the aforementioned 70% than those who are 'uneducated'. Being 'educated' doesn't provide nearly as much a safeguard as it used to to avoid living paycheck to paycheck.
It's a constant refrain among white-collar workers of all types in the US: How is it the numbers on my paycheck keep going up yet I have to keep cutting back to make ends meet?
If you define "real wages" as total compensation including such things as health insurance, vacation, sick days, retirement/pension options, etc., then the answer is a resounding "NO".
Gross hourly pay may be going up, but when you factor in the above items, total compensation is going down. More and more jobs are "1099" (named for the tax form) meaning they provide zero benefits. If (like an increasing % of Americans) you hold down two or more such 'gigs' to equal one full time job your travel time between gigs is esentially unpaid work time.
If companies were willing to pay real wages for Americans we wouldn't have the present gig economy, the need for foreign workers, etc.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2021
