I've traveled for work to Ronkonkoma many times. The variety of cuisine is embarrassing. There is some good seafood but you have to travel relatively far. I grew up in the suburbs of another large city and you could get just about anything with only a short drive. The quality might not be best but at least there is always something new down the road. Next time I go there, I'm tempted to just stay in a hotel with a mini-kitchen and just shop at the grocery store to avoid eating at chain restaurants every night.
I had an old Bose surround sound system that did the same thing. You'd place the mic in the best seat in the room and it'd tune the phase to center the sound.
Unless you can find a way to pay for your retirement almost entirely in Bitcoin, you will probably need to transfer it out to something more liquid. No one wants to sell you a house in Bitcoin only for the value to drop significantly overnight before they could convert it to cash all because some tech billionaire made a funny tweet. Maybe a stablecoin has more potential for a payment system but Bitcoin is just too risky to hold onto if you aren't trying to make money off of it. If someone really had that much Bitcoin laying around, they might as well just take out a large chunk now to throw into a stable index fund and just live off the dividends. Even just a yearly return of 1% from $100M would provide a lavish lifestyle where you'd never have to do anything you don't want to ever again. Set your whole family up with trust funds, make a huge donation to get a hospital wing named after you, fill a garage with supercars, the choices are endless. Or you could just sit staring at a computer screen as your crypto bounces around waiting for some huge crash or new legislation to fuck you over.
I've got equipment racks that haven't been connected to a network in years. It's absolutely obnoxious when everything is a few minutes off from eachother. I just figured out how to set up one Windows box as an NTP server to keep everything else sane. The time doesn't have to be exactly right but it just needs to be consistent across everything. It's very confusing when a log file has a creation timestamp inside from one machine that is widely off from the Date Created timestamp on the network drive. We've got a nice rubidium source for the test equipment but I don't have any way to feed that to a Windows box.
Android will routinely clear out cache as it ages or when other apps need more space. The developers don't need to worry about cache usage if the OS is handling it all for them. The problem is that all the apps get a quota so you can quickly run out of space on the device unless you either have a lot of internal storage or can move the gluttonous apps to an SD card. I keep social media apps on internal storage since I usually want things to load quickly but keep apps that cache movies or music on the SD card since that's fast enough.
It prefetches every image and post as you scroll. Even some of the unofficial apps will do this too but may give you an option to turn it off. A large portion of the cached data is videos depending on the subreddits you subscribe to. Wipe the cache and scroll through reddit without clicking anything, the cache will be massive. Make a new account and only sub to text subreddits and you'll see the cache massively decline.
An FPGA would be hardware emulation rather than QEMU which is software emulation. For older systems, am FPGA can get you a lot closer to how an older hardware worked by mimicking the actual timing characteristics or by just straight copying the gates into RTL. It all depends on the goal, you may just want to run the software at the same speed like for games or you might want to just see how fast a softcore Z80 can run VisiCalc. With the development of systems like the RC2014, FPGAs and newer microcontrollers or SoCs have made their way into peripheral cards to allow easy connections to modern day interfaces like SD Cards, Wifi, and even HDMI. It takes almost no effort to connect an ESP8266 to the serial port of an ancient computer and send AT commands to access websites and network fileshares.
I talked to a biologist once that was running experiments on mice in front of a particle accelerator. He was testing to see how well the mice responded to both routine and unfamiliar tasks after receiving some level of dosage from the high energy particles (heavy ions I think). The mice usually responded to routine tasks as well as they had prior to the exposure but had much more trouble responding to the unfamiliar tasks. The theory was that the particles damaged the elastic parts of the brain more than the plastic parts, that the brain had more trouble forming new connections to solve problems but strong connections formed by training survived the exposure. The experiments were to study how space radiation may affect astronauts solve problems when confronted with less familiar or totally new ones.
You could easily put a point on the slug and give it some penetrating ability. It might not blow a hole through you but could at least break a bone or puncture some blood vessels.
From what I've read, the scanning only takes place on icloud images. You can choose not to backup to icloud and the images won't be scanned. Other cloud storage providers have done something similar in the past where if the hash of the content matches copyrighted movies or music, the content is deleted.
If you develop cheats, it's a challenging problem that you can make a good bit of money if you are successful. As for the users, some do it to win money in competitions, some just like to play on god-mode. It's definitely more prevalent in free games since there's no financial disincentive when you get banned. There are also other ways to cheat that aren't actually cheating, like smurfing where a good player just makes new accounts to play against low level players or intentionally loses higher level games to bring them back down to low-level games.
I was looking for a nice coffee table recently. I decided to try the unfinished wood furniture store, most of it made by the Amish or Menonites. I'm handy enough to stain but not equiped to build a table myself so I figured I'd save a few bucks doing the finish. Most the tables weren't our style but finally found one that looked great and was some real quality oak. Asked for the price and just about crapped my pants. We stopped by Ikea on the way home and bought probably the nicest table they had for a quarter of the price. The nicer Ikea table will be able to make it through any moving we do in the future but it most certainly won't be an heirloom like my parent's old oak stuff.
I want try my hand at some furniture building in the future but just don't have the space or some of the standard tools for it now.
We used to do actuals for business trip expenses. It was very obnoxious having to justify every dollar you spent and needing the receipts to back them up. Forget to grab a receipt for a gas station coffee and sandwich and the admin assistant just assumes you were buying cigarettes and a 40oz. Whatever money the company was saving on paying actual expenses, I'm sure they were paying more for approving complicated expense reports. Now, we get per diem and there's no annoying oversight into how you spend your money and what on.
It's all part of retail business. Whether it's employee theft, customer theft, broken items on shelves, or returns of faulty items, it's all a part of doing business and it factors into the sticker price.
That's a neat system. Looks like it works by allowing any phone with the Milwaukee app to identify a nearby tracked tool regardless of who actually owns it. You'd really only be able to keep using a stolen tool as long as the lock-out time is still active and no one with the app comes in range. I wonder if they are able to integrate it with Apple Airtags to at least provide location data.
My Makita batteries have an anti-theft feature built-in that offers a way to disable the battery after a certain date or number of hours or days. You have to plug the battery back into a special terminal to "recharge" the day or hour timer or to set a new lockout with a PIN. It comes with warning stickers you can put on your batteries. The system is mostly just meant to prevent workers from borrowing equipment for weekend side jobs or keeping batteries after the job is finished. It doesn't actually stop someone from stealing them (or even the tool the battery goes with) but hopefully they read the sticker and realize that it's not worth stealing what will soon be a worthless battery. I've never used this feature but it's a neat system. Sometimes the tools themselves have anti-theft tags inside that will set off sensors but I don't know if anyone actually uses that outside of the store you bought the tool from.
All the contractors I've had at my house usually have Dewalt electric tools. I think it's a convenience factor, they are already going to Home Depot during their lunch hour anyway to buy whatever small thing they need to finish the job.
I used to wear a fleece-lined sweatshirt that would set off the sensors at Barnes and Noble every time. I checked all over for the anti-theft sticker and had washed it multiple times but it must have been inside the jacket.
I accidentally scanned a flank steak as a can of beans since I was holding the can and flank at the same time. The bagging station must have had the weight sensor turned off since I didn't notice the mistake until looking at my receipt at home.
There is a little bit of a survivorship bias with regards to old tools. The crappy ones broke long ago but the quality ones survived. But also, there were not the modern manufacturing methods we have now back there. There was no hammer with a plastic integral handle, everything was wooden and cast iron or tool steel. You could easily buy or make a wooden replacement handle when the old one rotted away. There was no dirt cheap Chinese forged metals so everything was more expensive and you took better care of the metal parts. Dulled edges were sharpened, peened hammers would get grinded down, broken rivets could be replaced. The few electric tools were beefy, simple, and offered easy replacement of the brushes. You also may have just experienced what happens when poor people have little access to the latest and greatest cheap stuff at the store, they make do with what they have. Compare that to the numerous old cars still on the road in Cuba, parts are difficult to source so when something breaks you'd go to the mechanic with a rudimentary machine shop that could fabricate a replacement part.
I got stopped for speeding once and the state trooper followed up the ticket by asking me if I was military or law enforcement because of my demeanor. I had been truthful about the speeding, I said I wasn't paying attention when he asked why I was going 82 in a 55. He had knocked 10mph off the ticket for me and I had thanked him for that. Anything over 80 in my state involves a lot more punishment than just a simple speeding ticket, you have to go to court, pay a bunch of money, and you get extra points on your license which raises your insurance significantly. I was a little taken aback by the question and just said no. I am a fat nerd with shaggy hair and have never been confused for military or law enforcement ever before. I'm not sure if it was just my politeness or there was something more to the question.
Occasionally we find clay tablets like the one where the guy is bitching about quality of copper ingots he was supposed to buy for his boss. It's kind of a fun look into normal, everyday life that almost never made it past the recycle bin of history.
If it's a desktop workstation with lots of expensive development tools installed or a delicate toolchain (especially one in a lab), why spend the time and effort wiping the thing just to reinstall all of the same stuff over again? It might even be a shared computer. I remember my help desk summer job, I worked at a hot desk that was staffed 24/7 so the same computers were used by first, second, and third shift. There were a lot of things that had to be logged into (mainframes, customer email accounts, etc) and not all of the desktops covered the same customers so it would have been a nightmare to handle all of the images and configurations. Whenever a configuration had to change, they would make a new backup to cover that specific desktop in case it died.
Plus, you can open source the code but leave the textures, models, maps, whatever else as proprietary. iD software already did this with the source code of Doom, you can read it but unless you want to reskin the whole game, it's entirely unplayable.
That seems so much more complicated and expensive than just offering compensation and bonus based on a standard scale. Obviously there's some wiggle room within the pay scales to reward higher performing employees but to have totally different compensation schemes for each employee sounds extremely complicated and unnecessary.
A vape can be much cheaper than cigarettes and you get the benefit of not inhaling smoke and smelling like smoke. You can also begin reducing the amount of nicotine in your vape juice without reducing the amount of time you spend vaping. Most brands offer numerous levels of nicotine from something that's a little stronger than regular cigarette down to none.
They captured one of the distributors for a secure phone company they had already taken down. He was trying to start up his own secure messaging app so they basically funded him, added the backdoors, and used his network to market the new device. It's funny to think about but who would you trust more, some silicon valley company making a "secure" messaging app or one made by another criminal? It's not like there is a LinkedIn for international criminals so there's a physical network of trust required and this guy seemed to have had it.