Posts by Scott 1 125 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
My work laptop was stable and extremely fast on Windows 10. After the forced upgrade to Windows 11, it's now a sluggish, frequently crashing (about 1 to 3 times per work day) POS. It's not a RAM issue (typically 45 to 55 percent free). SSD is only about 35% full. Drivers are all updated to their latest versions available. Application and System logs don't give any useful information about why crashes occur.
My co-worker, who uses a similar brand / model of laptop is having the same issue. He tried wiping his SSD and re-installing from scratch. Same issues. I would switch to Mac or Linux, but unfortunately there are a few programs that I need to use that don't have a Mac or Linux equivalent.
I work with contractors in the construction / repair industry. Almost every one of them runs with equipment that's 20 to 30 years old or older. One of them was beaming one time about how he was about to get ahold of a "new" piece of equipment that was going to be built around a re-built diesel engine from the 1960s or 1970s. Every time I've asked those contractors why they keep running with old engines and equipment, they say pretty much the same thing: they are able to repair the old stuff themselves the vast majority of the time. They can do this because they usually have at least one or two mechanics on staff to repair and maintain their equipment (but who can also step in as extra labor on jobs when they get very busy). For those times when the contractor can't repair the old equipment themselves, they are able to take it to an independent repair shop where it usually gets fixed relatively quickly at reasonable cost. However, when the newer stuff breaks, it requires them to haul it to a dealer, wait forever, and pay an arm and a leg for the repair. Time is money for them in a big way. It's not unusual for their contracts to have timeframes with bonuses for finishing early and major penalties for finishing late.
"...or forever be shouting at pigeons in the park."
You say this like it's a bad thing. Also, I propose we "verb-ivy" the word pigeon to mean engaging in that activity.
Examples: "Mark and I were planning to *pigeon* in Central Park this evening. Care to join us?"
"I saw the network administrator *pigeoning* about the idiots in upper management during my walk into work this morning."
"...overseeing the introduction of the controversial Ribbon UI in Office 2007 – a strategic move to distinguish it from rivals like OpenOffice as well as making features more discoverable."
More like *less* discoverable. I sometimes find myself having to use search to find the feature that I need - features that I used to be able to navigate to easily from the old-school menu system.
What you're thinking of already exists and is commonly in use. It's known as a lift station. These are used sometimes to pump sewerage from a lower elevation to a higher elevation. They're also used to pump sewerage from a gravity-fed (no pressure) sewer system into a pressurized "forced" sewer main line (as is common here in Florida). These incorporate a wet-well chamber into which the incoming sewerage is fed, and then a pump and grinder system pumps the macerated sewerage into the outgoing line.
I'm guessing this could break up some of the softer materials. However, this would be quite costly to retrofit into an existing large sewer system, and it would increase the amount of equipment that would need to be regularly maintained and monitored by the sanitary sewer service. For a city the size of London, that would be a rather large undertaking.
Additionally, this might change the situation into problems with a multitude of individual "fatbergs" in the lift station wet wells and/or trunk lines leading to the lift stations, rather than one or two "fatbergs" in the main trunk lines of the sewer system. Also, the macerated fats and cooking oils leaving the lift stations might still be capable of congealing into the "fatberg" material, which seems to be the result of a chemical reaction (calcification of lipids from reactions with alkaline liquids).
My cable internet service is fiber to the local box (which I believe is in my front yard, but is less than 1/2 mile down the street at the farthest) and coaxial cable from there to my house. No matter how fast and reliable it is, I don't think my cable internet service provider has the balls to try to claim that it's fiber internet. At times, I've heard it referred to as a HFC (hybrid fiber and coax) network, which I think is fair.
Note that there is actual fiber to the house internet available in my neighborhood, but ironically it has higher latency, not much better download speeds (but 10x better upload), monthly caps, and a much higher monthly service cost than the cable service.
I'm a licensed civil engineer in Florida. I'm not a fan of the overuse of the word "engineer" for jobs that obviously have nothing to do with actual engineering. However, Oregon was taking that too far, in my opinion. I can agree with restricting people from calling themselves a "licensed," "professional," or "registered" engineer, as that implies being certified and is fraudulent (as is the case in Arizona and Florida).
I still think one of our biggest problems here in the U.S. are the government-created local utility monopolies. For example, in my neighborhood we have only one coaxial cable provider and only one landline phone service provider (who is also the only fiber optic provider) because it is *literally illegal* for anyone else to attempt to offer those services. Ending that stupidity would go a long way toward solving these problems, because then we'd be able to get real competition for broadband services.
Verizon, my service provider, is up-front with their throttling. They openly say that they throttle all known video streams to an equivalent of about 420p (I usually get about 360p on YouTube). I can't easily tell the difference between that and a 1080p stream on a cell phone screen, anyway.
When I worked for a major hotel chain's data center, we once had a security guard push the emergency off button for no reason in particular. He said he just wanted to see what would happen (and it was strongly suspected that he was stoned at the time). The end result was similar, likely costing millions in lost revenues. On the plus side, we found out the hard way that the individual UPS units for our servers were absolute crap.
Surely they can come up with a better name than "Snapdragon 1000" for their laptop SoC. I think they would be best served by keeping the "Snapdragon" moniker for SoCs aimed at the mobile market and creating a new brand name for SoCs aimed at laptop and desktop computers.
"...and that would achieve the most important aim of the proposal, which is to force punters to use password managers that get in their faces and firmly insist on complex and fresh passwords for every online service."
Yeah, brilliant, until the password manager is hacked, resulting in *all* of your accounts being breached.
"Biased models have become a contentious issue in AI over the course of the year, with study after study documenting both the extent of algorithmic bias, and the real-life impacts such as women seeing ads for low-paying jobs and African-Americans being sent more ads about being arrested."
I just received a targeted ad for a gallon of coyote urine (and no, that's not a euphemism for mass produced American beer). I wonder if this was the result of model bias or just my weird browsing habits (maybe a bit of both?).
It's easy to point and laugh at the spectacle that results from outages of major "cloud" services (let's not kid ourselves, it's a lot of fun, too!). However, I wonder how their reliability compares to "in-house" I.T. / phone services.
I escaped the I.T. sector several years ago (which was fortunate for my sanity and the safety of everyone around me). I remember "back in the day" that our in-house I.T. and phone systems experienced complete outages from time to time, at a frequency of about 2 to 4 times per year, on average (per my best estimate).
[For the naysayers: no, I was not responsible for setting up or administering these systems.]
As a current resident of central Florida, I can tell you that the great majority of the people here are actually quite decent. We do have our share of oddballs, however, and the warm, moist climate seems to attract them for some reason. Despite their fame (thanks to the websites about the exploits of "Florida man/woman"), these are the minority, and it's truly a case of "a few bad apples spoil the bunch."
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