m0xte

Language Log is brilliant. Perfect morning reading with my coffee. “Orca emits speech-like sound; reporters go insane“ says more about our culture and media than anything I’ve read for years. Thanks for posting the link.

It’s expensive and a nightmare of cost complexity which leads to an entire meta-industry of cost management which I’m sure is a net loss.

I’m really more concerned about the absolutely miserably shitty performance of snapshots myself which always goes unmentioned and unmaintained. So I’ve got a 4TiB volume online attached to a node which is blasting out fragmented writes galore (Jenkins - ugh).

So we need to back up this volume for DR. Snapshots right? Well not when it takes 28 hours to snapshot that volume. So off to rdiff-backup it is. Back in the last infrastructure cult of virtualisation this was a 20 minute turnaround.

Good job it’s 5 nines now. That means we only risk a 3 day recovery window 2000x less often. Actually that hurt writing that.

I’m sure someone will now immediately sell me EKS to run Jenkins now which is ten fresh layers of eye gouging pain between idea to delivering software, something which I barely remember being able to do efficiently at this point.

Not necessarily the case. The newer xboxes don’t come with removable media and the bought keys are tied to your Microsoft account.

The whole thing is slippery mass of corporate worms trying to fuck each other over for market control and the only losers are the end users. I want nothing to do with any of them any more.

The first thing everyone does is check the box and the next thing you’ve got is android which is a complete privacy and security shit show to the point I know and work for organisations that have banned it.

I’m not a fanboy. But I know the other side of the coin and it’s even more of a shit show. If there isn’t standardisation it turns to a race to the bottom where predatory tactics such as perpetual micro transactions and auto renewing difficult to cancel subscriptions reign.

This is all about perspective and how you write your headlines.

As a consumer I’m on apple’s side which is not all about top slicing cash. I want one place to manage my subscriptions rather than having to sign into 50 different accounts with different cancellation and billing policies. Some of them even make it difficult to understand on purpose.

The main objectors to all of this are businesses who want to set their own policies and rates. I suspect that the rate is less of an issue considering Apple’s infrastructure taking a lot of cost away but it is being used to leverage policies which might not be good for the consumer.

Hahaha no way :)

There's quite a bit of power in that sort of stuff. If you move the steppers on my 3d printer while it's not plugged in it'll light the backlight on the LCD screen very brightly!

It’s fairly cheap compared to some of the vintage systems I’ve seen. Acorn stuff here in the UK goes for a fair bit of cash at the moment. This is depressing as I actually turned down a whole 600kg skip load of it once.

Indeed. However I get the feeling people will just be paying more for this in overheads and fees now.

Great ideology. Shame we’ll all starve or kill each other on the way and it’ll turn to shit the moment someone is more equal than someone else...

They would if they could get away with it. Look at telemetry and the general disrespect for users’ privacy preferences.

This smells like typical google. I naively signed up for GSuite for my domain earlier this year. After a week of ticket tennis with their support, they couldn’t work out how to fix me hitting gmail and it instantly redirecting to the admin console.

Also they require £30 payment (well $30 dollars with no other info on how to pay it in any other currency) to allow your org to create YouTube accounts now for some reason otherwise it throws an error. This is a policy decision.

Whole thing feels like an incoherent poorly designed mess.

I use O365 now which actually works properly so fuck ‘em.

This. Also they ship the Mac mini and no reasonable display options themselves leaving you at the mercy of LG (unreliable and almost completely unavailable) or 1.5x display scaling on other 4K monitors or a monitor which costs three kidneys attached to a stand that costs another one.

And let’s not get into the overpriced input devices. Wobbly keys and a mouse designed much like the furniture at the start of Men in Black.

Gah I’ve just convinced myself to sell the Mac mini and the iMac I already have now. And probably the iPad I’m whining about this on. Yes I’m a member of the cult. I have a whole cupboard of white boxes. But the pc pays the bills.

Ah yes the design with the ports on the back that get scratched up, the unopenable case without destroying the screen cables, the dangerously fragile corners, the thermal issues, the proprietary storage thermal monitoring and the fact it’s all in one lump so if something goes wrong you’re in trouble.

I have repaired a few and own one (2015) I think the design is absolutely dire.

I have a Mac desktop as well. I want to use macOS. I am the market. But I have to be realistic about cost.

So add £200 to the base. Where’s my £1679 advantage?

Also I’m paying full retail not OEM prices for these parts.

Well they can quite frankly fuck off with that one.

The 32gb additional memory option costs 4x the price of the entire 32gb of ram in my desktop. It costs independently 60% of the cost of my desktop pc base unit just for the upgrade.

The bottom end unit features 256gb SSD (probably soldered) and the next tier up wants +£200 to go from 512 to 1TiB. My entire 1TB Samsung evo plus nvme cost £165.

The 5k display isn’t worth it for my use case so I’ve got a 27” iiyama 4K display I paid £379 for. I suspect for 90% of people the story is the same.

Add the shit show that has been Catalina so far and this is a comedy gouging.

Edit: equivalent spec of my desktop build is £3399 here. I paid £1520 for my desktop approx: ryzen 3700x, 32gb ram, 1TB ssd, gtx1660, 27” 4K display, decent mechanical keyboard, decent mouse, Windows 10 pro.

Where is the £1879 advantage?

Depends which model. Some require taking the screen off, which unlike earlier models is taped on and some have soldered in RAM. Until someone has seen a hole in the back or has torn one down you just don’t know.

A friend of mine upgraded his 21 inch one out of the box because Apple RAM pricing and turn around is terrible. However he damaged the screen ribbon cable at the same time. Happens a lot.

That’s always been the case for technical content. The form factor and the document structures are fairly unsuited to pocket devices. I use mine for fiction only.

I crank out the desktop for technical content almost universally. iPad doesn’t cut it either.

But at the same time I have actual physical books for very technical stuff. They are still easier to use.

I have one. It works flawlessly for me

Perhaps it’s “done”. Overdoing products is a massive problem these days.

Think it’s Electron. Doesn’t surprise me. I wouldn’t want to take slack into space with me.

I use Siri regularly to add reminders and control Apple Music while I’m driving and that’s about it. Hands free is the only utility IMHO.

That’s absolutely amazingly on the mark.

Latest Apple magic keyboard is awful. The key tops rock all over the place. Back on my Cherry MX board 1.0 with red switches.

It’s better than the cancerous lump of excrement that is the Magic Mouse 2 though.

TikTok is politically poisonous. Why would they?!?

Ah yes the famed google customer support. Spent five days trying to get a g-suite dashboard error fixed immediately after provisioning. Eventually I switched to O365 with no regrets. And then there was the bricked chromecast from hell which they wouldn’t even acknowledge. Switched to Apple TV with no regrets.

Add the usual quality control (how many years did my android phone alarm not go off or my SD card get trashed with photos on). Nope!

That makes sense then.

This is standard for CPU manufacturers. I haven't had a clue what the hell has been going on since they killed off the Pentium 3.