322 karma · joined August 9, 2019
As in "Man, I have to take my welfare cheque to Money Mart and then go all the way over to the liquor store to get my Night Train, I guess I better take my Rubbee".
I wish I had been in the focus group for that one. I would have laughed and laughed.
Take Hubert Marcoux as an example. He set out to cross from Nova Scotia to Bermuda in November and was never heard from again. There was very bad weather during his crossing, as expected in November. The mystery, if any, rests in why he would set out to cross one of the nastiest pieces of water in the world in the very worst season.
In order for a disappearance at sea to be considered "mysterious" it has to be something that is not easily explained by things like bad weather, alcohol, and hypothermia.
If, for example, a crew of naval cadets on a J/Boat were raptured out of Annapolis harbour without a trace on a sunny summer afternoon, that would be a mysterious disappearance at sea. The rest of these--not so much.
Edit: corrected passage direction
If someone promotes something that doesn't work, they can expect the feedback you have described.
Many developers suffer from lack of empathy: they can't understand how their work will look to others, and, if there is documentation, it doesn't answer the obvious questions others will ask. Fine, so long as they don't waste my time with self-promotion of something that they are unable to see through the eyes of others.
The negativity is fair payback for my wasted time getting sucked into something that the developer falsely promoted as fit for some purpose.
That would save money on the computing power as well as the mining, transportation of raw materials, refining, transportation of refined materials, manufacturing, transportation of finished goods and the whole retail chain.
Unless we achieve room-temperature semiconducting processors, this will only benefit data centres, most of whose power is used to sell stuff. Does anyone actually think that the savings will be passed on to the consumer or that business won't immediately eat up the savings by using eighty times more processing power?
Hey, now we can do eighty times more marketing for the same price!
Instead of hoping that the 0.8% will shrink over the next 4 years, Let's Encrypt should understand that the 0.8% are the sane, reasonable people who realize that their Android devices still work fine for their intended purpose and do not have to be mindlessly upgraded because of mass-media pressure.
We should work instead to expand that 0.8% to avoid ripping out the heart of the planet for pointless capitalism.
This is one of the reasons why I objected to Let's Encrypt in the first place. Anyone who takes any measure to make older devices obsolete when they are still perfectly capable should be ashamed!
We are in the middle of a mass extinction; we have destroyed the oceans with plastic and runoff; we have created an environmental catastrophe. Mindless media-driven consumerism must stop.
I checked to make sure that the small area I was looking at was covered by at least some available imagery.
The greatest horror for me would be to not be interested in anything. So many people seem to have this affliction. That is what I would call unhappiness: to be interested in nothing in particular.
The headphones have clear line-of-sight to the laptop in both the "off" (comfortable) position and the "on" (infinite set of uncomfortable) positions.
The absorption of the radio signals by my large capacitance, I would think, doesn't change much with position. Also, it turns off when I scratch the back of my head.
It also drops out when I touch my head or my face.
I have tried reorienting the laptop to no avail. No matter where the laptop is (or, in fact, any components of the system, including the couch between 1m and 2.5m distance from the laptop) it always finds the same comfort spot to drop out completely.
If I move my neck about 15 degrees to an uncomfortable angle, the signal is perfect.
An anecdote, yes, but a relevant one.
Messed up titles are extremely common, even in areas where it matters enormously because most searches won't turn up an odd spelling.
This can't be an auto-correct issue because "codding" is not a common enough word to be corrected to.
Now this is where my comment gets risky and the group think is likely to take me down: if we're running so fast that we can't stop to ensure that a few words of a title are correct, we must be living life at a very fast pace indeed. I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that people who don't have time to check their titles also consume a huge multiple of the resources they actually need.
We all need to slow down.
Articles like this are pandering to the lowest intelligence that purports to be able to read.
Just tried it with Win10 and current Debian ISOs. Ventoy menu comes up showing both ISOs, but both fail to boot the same way with cryptic and meaningless error messages. Impossible to copy the very wordy messages; may have to get out the phone and grab an image.
Nothing in the FAQ or forums about the error. Thought it was a secure boot issue, but same thing happens with secure boot turned off.
The documentation is, as with almost every project this century, hopelessly inadequate, so there is not much help available. Guess I'm supposed to read the source code, which I will do, eventually.
EDIT: tried it on two different UEFI laptops: a MacBook Air and a Lenovo core i7. Same problem on both. Haven't tried it with legacy BIOS yet.
The first hurdle is that it errs out on the bash version. Yes, yes, I know, Apple supplies v3.x something and you have to upgrade to v4.x something or higher. But when I upgraded using 'brew install bash' I got to v5.x something. Voila, the script still thinks we're in the wrong version.
The path is good, the test, run manually in the terminal, is good, the script looks good, but still fails. Not sure why.
Never mind, I modified the script to remove the 'exit' on wrong bash version, and all was well until the install crashed with an utterly incomprehensible "./macos-guest-virtualbox.sh: line 1400: -: syntax error: operand expected (error token is "-")"
Line 1400 is the end of some very obscure keyboard scancodes. No idea where to go with that.
When I manually formatted a virtual drive GUID and Mac OS Extended (journaled), the install inside the VM failed with some cryptic Mac error.
Fortunately, after a reboot, the Catalina installation seemed to proceed without problems and I achieved a working system. So, yay!
(1) Steve placed the highest priority on optimizing the user experience.
(2) He was a benevolent dictator. Software requires someone to trash the code and the people who write it when it is bad. No one likes it when someone does this, but it is necessary.
Now we have change for the sake of change. Interfaces get redesigned because someone wants to leave their mark, not because it improves usability.
We have things constantly being redesigned to optimize profit and claim turf, even at the expense of an optimal user experience.
And we have a load of buggy, undocumented, poorly-thought-out APIs that exclude the most crucial functionality because someone figured out a way to make a few extra pennies per unit.
We have some of the best hardware ever created, like the iPad Pro, that you can't use for any meaningful, creative or intelligent purpose because of artificial limitations.
They lie outrageously when the claim to be "green". Their security for both IOS and Mac are solely profit-motivated. They could easily allow someone with an iCloud or T2 locked device to generate a message to the Apple ID of the user, who could then agree to unlocking if the device had been donated, sold, or recycled, but they refuse.
They could easily implement a simple tracing program online or through the Apple store that allowed people to file a case for unlocking if the device were not listed as stolen, but no, they would rather contribute to the destruction of the planet by padding the bottom line.
I am called on to recommend hardware for a lot of people and companies, and my advice now is "Don't buy Apple". It will take a few years, but eventually they will decline because of techs like me giving this advice.
The first thing I do when I am considering any new product is to look at the repairability score. Apple is not doing well. You would have to be a complete dolt to buy AirPods.
Moore makes an excellent point: creating solar panels and wind farms requires fossil fuels. Doing so in such a way as to accommodate perpetual growth is unsustainable.
We need to prune the human species to a sustainable level and keep it there.
We need forced sterilization, now. We need to limit waste and useless economic activity, now. Or else we will become extinct.
COVID-19 is clear and unequivocal evidence that population density has reached unsustainable levels. We are looking at The Great Filter.
We can have innovation, technical progress, and a good life. But we can only do that on a smaller scale.
Read through the documentation... awful documentation, but the project looks cool.
Looked for the source... no source, that's weird, isn't this Github?
Found the binary... crashes without Combine.framework. That's funny... nothing about requirements in the docs...
Looked through the comments... couldn't get the source ready for "Launch Day"? Nor, apparently, any of the above. So what is the point of a launch day?
Maybe I'll try a sample app at the Bazaar... It says it's for sharing, right? So I can see some demos there... Nope.
Got 234 upvotes at this point, though, so people seem to be finding something worthwhile here. Wish I knew what it was.
Why am I using IOS 9, you ask? Because that is the latest my device supports. Why not upgrade you ask? Because my device works fine and is in great shape, so I'd rather not destroy the planet for for that sake of my own greed, vanity and stupidity.
Does the person who wrote this understand that they are incapable of communicating effectively? Do they do it anyway to prove some kind of point that is tangential to the main one? Is there some sort of secondary gain involved in being unclear?
In short, is the author getting some sort of self-aggrandizement out of explaining things poorly, or are they just incompetent?
The bottom line would appear to be that capitalism is, by far, the best system we have, but only when it operates inside a walled garden.
We should impose tariffs on essential items so as to allow local employees to be paid a fair and living wage, put restrictions on the multiple between the lowest wage in a company and the highest, limit growth to preserve the competitiveness of markets, and ensure that the true cost of production, including the environmental damage associated with production, distribution, and disposal is accounted for locally.
Imagine if this small business was allowed to charge a fair price for their product without competition from a totalitarian state that has bred 1.6 billion slave workers to exploit the planet and conduct a covert economic war to undermine democratic free-market countries.
Imagine if the earnings of every CEO were capped at 3x the lowest wage on the factory floor. Imagine people having stable jobs that fulfill a genuine need while producing something in a sustainable and environmentally-responsible fashion. Imagine that those hard workers get health care and generous vacations and a living wage.
Is it so ridiculous to dream of limited capitalism? Sane capitalism?
No, technological developments that cannot possibly be used by anyone but the wealthy few, no matter how energy-efficient, are not a sane solution to urban transportation issues.
The solutions are more prosaic:
(1) Reduce population, population density, and the product of population times lifestyle. We have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, and our science is telling us that unequivocally with a cacophony of data from coral reefs, the status of the ocean, the loss of insects, and many other sources. We must control our own numbers. There is no technological alternative to that.
(2) Create spaces and routes that foster personal human-powered transportation, such as bicycling. Separate the cars from the people to stop the carnage and remove legitimate safety arguments against bicycling.
(3) Make public transit extensive and free. Stop extracting a pound of flesh from the poorest for every ride that they must take to get to a job that doesn't pay a living wage. The inequity of wealth distribution in our society has passed all limits of sanity. Incentive works great in small "c" capitalism, and we need to make sure that mom and pop outfits and very small businesses have the incentive to innovate and produce, but there is no need for the unlimited capitalism that we have now. Take a few pennies out of the pockets of the uber-rich to pay for transit.
(4) Stop the propaganda, herein represented by NASA's usual BS about how we all benefit from their R&D. Organ transplants my fanny. The only thing this kind of transportation is going to do is to further increase the divide between ordinary people and the ultra-rich who pay no taxes in any case. Taxpayer-funded research into new toys for the CEO. Yay.
We are brainwashed into a profligately wasteful, unnecessary, insanely-self-focused lifestyle. Mass media makes us feel bad so we'll go out and spend all our money on the latest stupid thing that will break in a year or less and we'll throw out. All the while we are striving to fill some artificially-stoked hunger for more: more money, more things, more waste and more destruction.
The X-57 feeds right into that brainwashing. It will be our end.