Posts by phuzz 7116 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
On one call I specifically made a point of explaining that the screen and the computer were separate, and that the computer would be under the desk. After a very frustrating 15 mins of trying to get the user to turn the computer on, in desperation I asked them how far apart the button they were pressing was from the screen.
"Oh, it's on the screen"
*mute phone, bang head on desk
The call was resolved quite quickly after I explained a second time the difference between a screen and a computer...
Generally, this is something people add to their personal phones to allow them to use them for work, so to answer your questions:
"The maker of one single app is going to allow itself to wipe your phone if it doesn't like what it sees?"
No, the app can however wipe all of the work info and logins from your phone.
"Under what authority?"
Your work IT department.
"Why do we put up with this bullshit?"
Because they pay us?
OP was talking about King Charles, who comes from a family that these days uses the name of the House of Windsor, but before that they were the House of Saxe-Cobug Gotha.
Of course, the royal family have been residents in the UK for many generations, and all the European royal families were so inbred they're practically all related (eg the King of Sweden is a fourth cousin to Chrales, and is in the line of succession for the British crown, although he'd have to bump off around two hundred people to become king).
You can get it from Waitrose, apparently it's good.
(Although presumably this business has now passed to William as the current Duke of Cornwall? The Dutchy of Cornwall is in an odd legal position; sometimes it acts like a normal private business, and sometimes asserts Crown immunity to prosecution, which theoretically would allow Wills to avoid all sorts of laws, even including the Nuclear Explosions (Prohibition and Inspections) Act 1998.)
Humans are a lot less conscious than we like to think. Our brains will just make things up to make us think we made a conscious descension.
Of course, I know I'm fully conscious, it's the rest of you I have doubts about.
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.
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.
I was only a kid then, and mostly concentrating on my Amiga, but I remember that there was all sorts of 'bedroom experiment' software and OS's, and to this day I don't know why Linus's experimental OS became the Linux we know today. At that point it wasn't even clear that x86 would have such staying power, RISC was talked about as being more future proof.
The future could have gone in many different directions at that point.
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.
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)
I have, more than once, gone to move a cable, and inadvertently brushed a C13 power cable which had been just making contact, and disconnected it. I have a feeling that years of vibration from fans might cause them to slowly back out. Often, you don't know anything has happened until someone comes running it to the server room wondering what you've just done.
I try and insist on the C13/C14 cables with latches on now. (eg). Equally, RJ45 cables that have lost their locking tab get thrown in the bin.
Unless it was a gen 9 HP Proliant server, in which case the red lights might have been the 'do not remove' lights. When there's a disk failure, that light goes out, and different, orange light comes on. (IIRC, this was a few years ago now)
I found this out after swapping out the disk with the red light on it for a failed mirror array. It was even more failed when I pulled the good drive :(
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.
ctrl+c and ctrl+v isn't a Windows invention, it's been around for much longer than that, I remember using it on the Amiga (well, technically it was a different key combo, but still used c and v).
Wikipedia tells me it came from Xerox Parc (unsurprising, about 50% of modern computing was invented there), so it predates Sun by a while.
Here's your frustrated old guy image ;) >>>>>>
'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.
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.)
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.
Clearly the US Navy didn't want to be upstaged by the US Air Force's KC-X shitshow, (wherein they took about twenty years to build aerial refuelling tankers, because they had to keep re-running the competition until Boeing won). Or the Joint Strike Fighter program which started in the late 1990's to replace a bunch of other procurement projects that hadn't gone anywhere, and took twenty years to got at least ten times over it's budget of $200 BILLION. Or maybe the US Army's Ground Combat Vehicle program, which spent a billion dollars to deliver nothing, following up on the complete failure of the Future Combat Systems project. The current boondoggle is called the Next Generation Combat Vehicle program, and is set to run until 2035, and the same companies from the last two projects will be given even more money to come up with more designs which will probably never be built.
Honestly, the US Marines need to come up with a way to waste a truly monumentally huge amount of money, because they're really dropping behind the other services in terms of procurement fuckups.
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.
Uptime is a measure of how long it's been since you last successfully booted.
Although this story really reminded me of these folks who transported a live server, and it's UPS, across Hamburg, together with a mobile 3G link to keep it online. On public transport, in the rain, just to make it more fun.
Oh, and the server only had one power connection, so they soldered a second power connection to the board while it was powered on.
Or if you prefer your router to function well without endless fiddling, try the open source Merlin firmware for Asus routers ;)
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