Posts by John Brown (no body) 28765 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
I think they are planning on leaving for Qatar before any impeachments happen. They have a rather large nest egg saved there as proceeds from recent Venezuelan oil sales. No one seems to be able to explain why the money didn't end up in either the US or Venezuelan treasuries,
My very old, but still up to date[*] Garmin SatNav manages to turn Campbell Road into Camp Bell Road
* "lifetime" map updates have gone on far longer than I expected!! It must be at least 15 years old by now - I did have to add an SD card some years ago as the map had grown too large to fit the internal memory. - Updated the maps again a few weeks ago.
"I wouldn't like to even place, let alone open a PC up in any metal-working environment."
That reminds me of the time I was sent to assess and repair a PC in an iron foundry. It was full of black dust. Half the DIP chips had crept out of the sockets. I swear it was only the iron content of the dust that had kept it mostly running!
"asking a coworker to try and reproduce a problem only to have the solution leap out and slap me…"
Many times. I think it the result of stepping back from the problem and thinking about how to describe the problem to someone else. It gets all the ducks in a neat row so you can now see the problem (and therefore the solution) more clearly.
"Juliet works nights. All the old ladies in the building talk behind he back calling her a hoe"
She's a gardener in the Midnight Garden?
"you can't upgrade the RAM as it's soldered on."
I'd like to see the tech specs/service manual before making that claim. In the case of Lenovo, at least, consumer grade stuff invariable has only soldered on RAM. Business grade used to always be SODIMMS, but they now come in cheapest option, no SODIMM sockets, mid range with soldered on RAM + 1 SODIMM and high end with only SODIMM sockets. You get what you pay for.
"[2] I'm almost surprised that Apple isn't using this Win11 and all the forced Copilot crap as an opportunity for a big marketing blitz. An average Mini or Air is more than enough for most users and the price ain't bad for long-lasting kit."
Apple may be less obnoxious in pushing to an Apple account and the Apple Store, but they'd still very much prefer it if people went that route. So I doubt they'd want to shout it from the roof tops that they don't force their accounts on you like MS do.
"Yeah, sure, any day now Microsoft (established April 4th 1975) and Apple (April 1, 1976) will get their comeuppance!"
Too big to fail? Even huge businesses go under every year. Household names. Although in the case of the likes of MS or Apple, I'd expect it more likely by a division rather than the whole company. Some big names are left as shadows of there former selves too. Lycos? AskJeeves? Yahoo? AOL? Others get subsumed by bigger fish and slowly, quietly vanish. SCO? MGM? Warner Bros? Brand names may continue for a while, so long as there's value in the name, even if the owners are different and the products, thanks to debt loading, are pared back to the bone for rapid ROI.
"On the plus side, they are both equally stupid behemoths so this event horizon may not be as far off as Cupertino and Redmond think it will be."
I'm seeing a number of no-techy youtubers posting about switching to Linux recently. I sometime click on one to see what they are saying about it. One started off by apologising that this was not his usual stuff then went off on a rant about wanting to watch a DVD and Windows, after installing the drivers/software had to be rebooted and went to the bitlocker recovery screen. From his explanation of it being "bricked", I'm guessing he never recorded the recovery key as he said he got the key from his MS account via another PC but it didn't work (I assume he was just entering the "PIN"). Basically a non-techy person, so didn't know he needed to save the recovery key somewhere safe on paper, didn't know there was an option to turn off bitlocker (it's on by default these days) railed against having to have an MS account that took ages to log in because he had to keep saying "no" to MS sales pitches for OneDrive etc every time and about adverts on his paid for OS. In other words, exactly the sort of issues we increasingly deal with for our non-techy friends all the time. So he installed Linux Mint. And he's shouting about this to an audience of non-techy Windows users.
I wonder how long it would take to fix this issue if many, many people asked grok to create "bad" images of Musk and his family/friends? He's "free speech absolutist" of course, so this may not bother him. Like publishing the location and flight plans of his aircraft. oh, wait....
There are already civil and criminal laws against the creation, distribution, and/or possession of some of these images in some jurisdictions, and in some cases the only defences are "as part of a criminal investigation" or "it didn't happen".
An interesting aside: If Grok is prompted to created the image, are both the person instructing it and Grok co-conspirators[*]? Grok originated the image and is both creator or possessor. The person instructing Grok has it delivered to their phone/laptop and so is also a possessor. But because the data is sent in ram form and only assembled into an image when it arrives on their device, did they also create the image? ISTR in UK law the person converting the data into the image can be deemed "creating" the image although I'm not aware this has been tested in court yet.
* Conspiracy is a good catch-all with excellent jury prospects of conviction because "conspiracy" sounds more scary and only requires proof that two or more parties made plans to commit a crime. Asking Grok to commit an illegal act and then Grok carrying it out and delivering the goods sound like conspiracy and the act to me ;-)
"Put yourself in the shoes of the person thinking of applying: what incentive is there for a grant recipient to leave their current work and go to Australia?"
Maybe take your own advice there? It may depend very much on their current country of residence as to whether Oz might seem more attractive or not. Quite a few countries are targetting US scientists in attempts to attract them overseas at the moment, some of whom are accepting the offers.
What do you think the retirement age will be 2100? The 3 year old might still be working all hours to pay off the mortgage at 77 :-) But at least they might have self driving flying cars powered by "Mr Fusion" and useful AI will still be 20 years away.
"I had to explain that the reason you have insurance is so you can claim if you need to: you don't use the argument that because you haven't needed to claim, you don't need insurance."
And nothing has changed :-( Bean-counters especially balk at the "cost" of back-ups, disaster management, patch schedules, system updates (hard and software) etc. all the time. There's probably 100's of stories to be told by readers coming up against this brick wall on a daily basis.
"On advising the checkout lady that the adverts were unbelievably awful and intrusive, I was told that (a) I wasn’t the only one who’d complained and (b) they were collecting feedback as this was something of an experiment."
Ah, the same "experiment" Shell tried up here. I suspect the result will be the same. They turned the sound off. Something about repeating actions hoping for a different outcome?
Maybe read up on the "dark patterns" and other marketing tricks used on these germ infested ordering screen used in the like of McDonalds. Sales numbers and per customer value increased because they guide to the more high margin items and hide the "cheaper" options at the bottom with smaller text and images. And they are even more annoying at upselling than someone asking if you want to "go large" often adding 3 or more options to press before getting to the actual payment screen.
I had fun trying to diagnose an elderly relatives first Win'98 computer when the taskbar went missing. She'd managed to click/drag it down to only a few pixel high. That took quite some while to do over the phone with no remote access s/w and anyway only one phone line.
"an e-bike which reaches 33mph which is an absurd speed."
103.8mph!!! North Yorkshite, not Silicon Valley :-)
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