Posts by phuzz

At least in this case, these investors seem to be trying to get into the 'shovel-making' industry. Although, to torture this analogy some more, they're investing in very specialised shovels, which might not be worth much when the AI bubble pops.

The likes of nVidia and Micron etc will still be fine when the AI bubble bursts, because their products have more general uses as well.

Intel eventually stopped those shortcuts being enabled by default, but I wonder how many calls to IT they generated across millions(?) of businesses.

Re: Delete

I used to have a boss (Hi Malc!) who would delete pretty much every email that came into his inbox, unless it needed to be worked on right away. Then he'd delete it.

He used the 'Bin' folder the way most of us would use our inbox.

This actually worked for him, until the day he'd got me to do some other work to his email client while he was busy in a meeting, and I decided to be helpful and emptied his deleted items. He was annoyed, but had to admit that his ridiculous filing system was the real problem.

Win 11 was/is basically free, they offered free upgrades for the first month or so it was released, and never turned off the free upgrade for years. Even now it's not difficult.

Re: guide me

I'm surprised they never mentioned it in their PR response, but BitWarden offer an open source server that you can run yourself, so your passwords never go near their servers.

Then you just have to hope that you can secure your home password server better than a whole company can.

Re: "Steven" is lucky he's still alive

I've seen mechanics get a tattoo of a ring around their finger, which is safe, and very difficult to lose.

My cat managed to shove my Lego Mars rover Perseverance off the window sill the other night, and somehow it survived it's trip to the floor intact.

My sleep patterns were ruined, but that's cats for you.

6) Make sure not to use ferrous screws, so they won't stick to a magnetised driver. Especially for the ones positioned over gratings etc.

Re: Verschlimmbessern

Bless you! Do you need a tissue?

Re: "In space, no one can hear you bork"

That's how they start out, but as the mission ages, and funding is cut, sometimes they have to scrap or mothball the spare hardware, because they can't afford to keep it running.

Also, from the sound of it, the problem here was that an observation pointed the solar panels away from the sun, and lasted so long that the batteries almost went flat.

I can imagine that's a tricky fault to simulate with or without physical hardware. Simulating the power that the solar panels are receiving at any given time, plus simulating the battery charge levels will be tricky, as the Earth-bound simulator will age differently to the actual spacecraft.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

Starmer [...] and his unerring ability to choose the wrong course of action

I think readers of all political persuasions can agree with this bit.

Re: Admins do not care about Borkzilla's "substantial investments in AI"

The part that I don't understand is that they're trying to push AI etc. to their business and enterprise customers, who are the ones who actually spend money.

Home users mostly just have a copy of Windows from their OEM, so I can see why Microsoft try and up sell them (even if I don't like it). I'm not sure why they're trying to alienate their real customers.

*(or should that be 'AI-lienate'? Not sure the joke works in a san-serif font)

Re: "We don't have Linux systems; we only support Windows"

And probably didn't want to pass OP along to the Linux expert because they'd then complain that they were being passed 1st line support calls.

We've all had that colleague who was 'The Expert' on a certain system, but gets grumpy if anyone tries to ask them questions about it. Of course, they're also far too busy to document anything.

Re: Priorities?

OEMs were paid money by Intel to make sure they put the 'Intel Inside' sticker on pre-built computers. I wouldn't be surprised if that was still the case.

We used to just have rolls of stickers, and a specific checkbox on the QC sheet to check it was installed.

Re: Was it really a waiting game

'Build something, get a bunch of users, then sell your company/product' is how most startups work. It's just that in this case instead of getting bought by Facebook/Google/some VC they actually got bought out by by someone malicious.

Or maybe the initial sale was legit at the time, but the buying company realised that they could make more money by installing spyware.

These days I imagine more devs would be suspicious of random buyout offers, but this was at least seven years ago and this tactic was less well known.

Re: Ain't that convenient @NetMage

Russia's space program is in such a state, they've had to resort to buying surveillance satellites from China.

(I'm surprised there's not been more reporting on this, just for the opportunity to have a headline like "Russia buys satellites on Temu!" or similar.)

Re: "Oh yeah, I just push it back in when it falls out"

I used to work at a PC builder, and one day the guy responsible for putting CPU's and RAM into the crate for each build order, ran out of the little antistatic boxes for putting CPUs in, so decided to help out by just installing them straight into the motherboards. Alas, he'd never install an Athlon 64 before, and didn't realise that the arrow on the CPU had to face away from the leaver on the socket (the opposite of most CPUs at the time).

He got through twenty machines, all of which went down the line and had coolers jammed on top, before the first ones hit QA and were found to not power on. Every single CPU had a bunch of mangled pins from being inserted the wrong way around.

IIRC we managed to salvage over half, by carefully bending the pins back with a knife blade.

Re: Tempting! Bit square though..

Is there anything it is really compelling for, when you already have a phone in your pocket?

Even if my phone is in my pocket (and not in the other room or something), just lifting my wrist to read the time is much easier.

Mind you, I've worn a watch since well before I had my first mobile phone, so my wrist feels weird if there's not something strapped to it.

Re: Who uses TB with Exchange?

Shared calendars is pretty much Exchange's (and thus Outlook's) 'killer app'. I've tried a few of the alternatives, and while they mostly worked, none of them worked as well as Exchange/Outlook.

Re: How long before ....

Tricky with aircraft, but if there's more than one ship, there'll be an area in between them where neither ship will be able to fire anything for fear of hitting the other.

Re: I ask the other way around...

Why is the default made in such a way to prefer such accidents in first place.

Because this way Amazon get more money.

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

Muphry's law!

Re: Impressive engineering without burning money

The financials are already impressive for a company that is not reliant on feeding from the teat of government contracts.

They all rely on government contracts to stay afloat, even Rocket Lab.

(Although most SpaceX launches these days are for StarLink, so if that was a separate company paying full price for their launches, they might be able to get by without the government money)

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

To be pedantic... Mint is based on the latest Ubuntu LTS ('Long Term Service') release, and Ubuntu itself is based on Debian.

For example