AmVess

I was going to manufacture a line of useful products here in the USA, but decided against it. I'd release the product, then a month later counterfeits would be on Amazon for 10% of the price.

As a small operation, there are 0 affordable resources at my disposal to fight IP theft.

Aluminum frame with fiberglass panels. I put a cellular GPS tracker in the one I rented and it worked fine.

I bought a cellular GPS tracker for my PODS. It worked fine, and being able to track it every step of the way added a bit of stress relief.

It also came in really handy when the driver claimed his truck broke down and he wouldn't be able to drop it off on schedule. I told them I could physically see the container in the storage yard and would like it delivered on the agreed upon date. They dropped it off 20 minutes later.

They stop driving in places with stiff penalties for driving without a license. I used to live in a state that made driving with suspended or revoked license punishable by up to 3 months in jail. Repeat offenders would have their vehicle taken off of them. Taken off as in seized; it is no longer yours. It becomes a rather burdensome crime when the car they seized has a bank not attached to it. Having a car seized doesn't end your obligation to pay off the loan.

All the local police and state police have license plate scanners, and would also alert on DWLS/DWLR. No point in trying to get around it by driving someone else's car. That vehicle also subject to seizure.

All this sounds rather hardcore, but the payoffs were many. Low number of accidents and traffic deaths, low cost of car insurance. Really dangerous activities like reckless driving and DWI could have life changing consequences even from the first offense.

I've kept a sleep schedule for at least since high school. Always in bed with enough landing space at the end in case my body needed 7 hours instead of usual 6.

My body has long since gotten used to feeling sleep time arrive, and starts unwinding naturally. My brain also followed suit. No going to bed and waiting for the thoughts to run out. I'm usually asleep in less than a minute after hitting the bed.

I always set my alarm as a back up, but I was usually awake before it went off. Return to wakefulness and not groggy is also very fast; 5 minutes or so and I am ready to go.

My girlfriend suffered from pushing into late nights and getting in one more chapter of a book or what have you when we met. I got her onto a schedule and she's now like me. Body and mind tired at an early hour, mind clear of thoughts after lights out. Fast to fall asleep and stay there, deep sleeps every night.

There's a few other things I do to prepare for bed. No caffeine for a few hours prior, no alcohol. If I need a snack, then some vegetables instead of junk food. That slice of pizza might be tasty, but 100% it will interfere with my sleep in some way.

My bedroom is very dark. Almost no light leakage from the windows, no LED's, no tv set.

I always thought it was strange for people to active shaft themselves with poor sleeping habits, day after day for decades on end.

Not CS, but I got a STEM degree from a top university. You read all the books to pass the course, and if you wanted an A, you also read the material on the suggested reading lists.

Small homes just plain suck. No room to do anything, stuffy, cramped. GF and I moved, rented a house for a month. 1400 square feet. 700 up, 700 down. Tiny and cramped, and it only had one very small bathroom.

We had to sleep on different floors. Master bedroom was barely larger than the queen bed, and no way 2 people could sleep in there because it would get blazing hot in minutes.

Garage was similarly minuscule. GF had a tiny suv and still couldn't open both doors.

I figure 1000 square feet per adult is just about right.

I had a 2021 model. It was pretty poor in all aspects. Slow, laggy on the desktop just clicking around. Loud when doing anything resembling work. Very poor audio. Bad keyboard. 4 hour battery.

I switched to a new M1 MacBook Air and it was like going from a Cessna 150 to an F-15. Everything on the M1 MBA was decades ahead of the XPS.

Everyone and their brother now sells a much better product than XPS, and often for nearly half the cash. I picked up an Asus Vivo last year. Very nice product, half the cost of the XPS they had on offer, but with the same specs and screen.

It feels like it was engineered as a unit, much like the MBA. The XPS in comparison is a parts bin special.

No surprise. I called failure the moment they announced the price and features, as did most other people.

Stupid price tag, did absolutely nothing new, and they didn't learn from the mistakes and downsides of all the other VR headsets, and made them worse in some cases.

Then to top it all off, they had the genius idea of putting on that dumb front screen that displayed your face, but at 96% actual size. I still have no idea how something that stupid made it to release.

Here's my prediction for Apple's (everyone's) next VR set:

- It will still weigh too damned much. No one currently likes the feeling of having a cinder block strapped to their face. No one will like it in the next product because it will also weigh too damned much. Here's a hint: move compute and battery to a stronger appendage than someone's nose. Now introducing the new Apple ComputeScarf™! Compute pack on the left, battery pack on the right. Short cable from the shoulder to the Vision glasses and these things have instantly become much more usable. Or even a ComputeBelt™.

- It will still have no software or any compelling reason to use it.

- Apple will still give it stupid pricing. $2k is too much. $1500 is too much. $1000 is too much. These things are $500 devices. Price them accordingly, or people will continue to ignore them.

I can't read it because he made the website unreadable. Kind of interesting considering his subject matter.

In the US, portion size, calorie density, frequency of eating high calorie foods are contributing to people getting a lot fatter a lot faster than before. We now have instant gratification in food delivery services. Get anything you want without leaving home.

In fast food, people are eating a day's worth of food in one sitting. Triple burger, large fries, large drink. People are doing this once a day every day of the week.Then they go home and order more high calorie food with high calorie drinks and constant snacking.

It is amazing to see how much more obese people have gotten in the last decade, and the % of fat people has gone up a lot, too.

Restaurants of all types serve massive portions, and people eat it without thinking or realizing they are eating a day's worth of calories in one meal, and I haven't touched on the amount of fat, sugar, and sodium they are packing away.

The fact that people today have shorter lifespans than their parents should be sounding alarms everywhere, but there is nothing but silence.

Wrong. Biden welched on the deal Trump made. The same day he did that, Taliban began attacking.

The fustercluck withdraw from then on was all Biden's fuck up. All Biden had to do was honor the previous terms and use the previous plans, then the pull out would have gone off without much drama.

I usually get 6 hours dead on. Rarely 7 or more. I'm asleep less than a minute after going to bed, and have such a regular sleep duration that I never have to set an alarm. In fact, I haven't used an alarm clock at all in 20+ years. Well perhaps, less than a dozen times.

I am fully awake and ready to go a few minutes after waking up, too. No coffee needed.

I do occasionally take an hour nap here and there, but that is also rare.

Scary would be right.

Reminds me of the F-22 Raptor crossing the International Dateline error in 2007. They were flying a squadron of them from Hawaii to Japan. They crossed the IDL and all nav/fuel systems went down, as well as some communications gear.

They only made it back because they were flying with tankers at time, who led them back to base.

Most of them. Either as new units or returns. I'm surprised they didn't stop production months after release as it was very clear the product would be a complete failure based upon price alone.

Half of these striking workers make $250k a year or more. They want a 77% increase over 6 years on top of that.

They also want a ban on automation, which simply means they will have a perpetual lock on being able to hold our economy hostage.

Fully or nearly fully automated ports are the future, and that future is happening in China and EU right now.

Obscene demands such as theirs will simply hasten the demise of those jobs they are seeking to protect.

These are gone from many markets due to the race to the bottom. They cut the quality out of clothes so they could make more per item without paying attention to the simple fact that quality is what brought people into the store.

At the end, they all sold the same junk sourced from the same places, but with different labels sewn into them. Consumers saw no value in paying a lot extra for something they could get for a lot less somewhere else. Thus, department stores outside of big cities vanished.

The same thing happened to malls. They used to be full of locally owned businesses that offered a variety of goods. Now, they are all the same handful of stores selling the same things you can get for a lot less online. Even worse, nearly all of them offer a low rent experience because there are only a handful of stores left operating in each one. Seeing a building full of dark and closed stores screams economic decay. Who wants that experience?

We are at the point in time when you could fire every UI designer on the planet and would be doing humanity a favor. They all have the approach that change for the sake of change is a good thing. It isn't.

I hope this will be as pleasant and performant as Teams aka how to make your 16-core CPU feel like it is an Intel Atom from 2009.

I recently bought my little ma a new big ipad. Her first response to it was "holy cats, this is fast!"

She used an A14 Bionic equipped ipad.

She is in her 80's.

I tried Adobe's beta of Photoshop with AI.

Pretty useless, as it would refuse to process edits because of adult content.

These pictures were of house interiors, some cars. Nothing pornographic, but the flunk rate was high enough for me to give up.

I don't need big brother looking at my work and judging its content.

It already is an ad platform. They want to turn it into the surveillance platform of choice for governments, businesses and law enforcement alike.

Windows is already a privacy farce. The OS and 3rd party drivers capture a large chunk of what you do. Imagine having everything you do in one tidy location that can and will be used against you at the drop of a hat.

I hope adoption of Linux accelerates.

Windows has become incredibly anti-user. I built a new PC recently. No internet because the latest version of the Windows 11 installer didn't have a realtek Wifi driver on it. This driver was present in the Windows 10 installer.

If I didn't know the work around, I would not have been able to install the OS.

Ok, so I got the OS installed, and was greeted with an OS with 4 different UI styles glued together from W7 on up. Keep in mind, the OS in its entirety has UI elements dating back to Windows 3.1.

Still no WIFI drivers which I had to hunt down and wait because the OEM's website was spittling out corrupt data for a while.

WIFI up, Windows update missed a bunch of drivers. Installed them manually.

After about 45 minutes, finally got the OS ready to install apps. Basic apps. Office, dev stuff, photo stuff. This took over an hour, what with Windows updates, and all.

I also put the latest copy of Fedora on my laptop. No internet connection needed. Typed in username, passcode. Installed in about 10 minutes. WIFI working out of the box. One reboot later, I had a fully functioning OS that came with everything I needed. 20 minutes total, perhaps.

Microsoft has completely thrown away any notion of usability while Linux is accelerating towards it.

I still can't quite wrap my head around requiring internet to install the OS while also not providing a means to access the internet via WIFI.

And then of course there are all the other issues surrounding the OS that has been talked about at length here.

Finally, Windows 11 is a buggy, slow, unresponsive mess of an OS, and it makes using Windows 10 feel like a breath of fresh air due to its comparative responsiveness and lack of bugs. Keyword is comparative. Windows 10 is still a corpulent waddling pig of a sloppily glued together OS.

The whole thing speaks to complete mismanagement on every level. That they still haven't made any kind of decision 3 months in is absolutely laughable.

Now they are saying the astronauts could be up there until MARCH. They miscalculated by EIGHT MONTHS. These people are complete clowns.

Dump that pile of junk, cancel the program, and fire all the managers involved in this cosmic fiasco.

They only went after Madoff because he stole from the rich.

The only way to fix things is to drag the occupants of the c-suite into civil court and start dropping massive fines on their heads. Do that, and this type of behavior would vanish within days.

It has basically made their app store completely unusable. I am not going to manage a bunch of subs for what amounts to zero effort crapware.

Clownflare. Different circus, same clowns.™

TOW missiles are a LOT faster than a drone and fired a LOT father away.

Nope. They get passed on to the consumer, anyway.

The only way to stop this type of behavior is to throw execs in jail and take their personal assets off them.