Dave.

There’s a lot to be said for “http://yourISP.com/~username” being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.

As if the software was as permanent as the hardware lol

There’s no guarantee that the software will ever be updated to something that the user finds usable though.

Google could just one day go “meh, we don’t think folding displays are where we want to be right now”, and - ta-da! - you’re left with a folding doorstop and Google’s got yet another entry on the “killed by Google” list.

As another poster has mentioned, M-Discs are written using a Blu-ray writer and are good for a few hundred years, in theory.

Blu-Ray USB drive and M-Discs is about the best you can get at present. Keep the drive unplugged when not in use, it’ll probably last 10-20 years in storage.

Seeing as there hasn’t been much advance past Blu-ray, keep an eye out for something useful to replace it in the future, or at least get another drive when you notice them becoming scarce.

90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:

“Yes yes whateverrr” <click>

Never understood why smartphones are so super bright by default.

Because they have to compete with 50k lux outside and then scale to 600 lux indoors, then down to just to a few lux in a darkened room.

Perhaps the brightness slider needs to be more logarithmic so you can slide from 0.001 percent to 100 percent more easily.

I’ve got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

But they are my “other backup” for Google photos so I don’t mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

That’s about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it’s probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.

when they’re powered down.

There’s no periodic cell refresh in flash memory like there is in DRAM. When USB sticks are plugged in, all you are doing is powering up the flash chip and interface ICs.

You’d have to read a block then write it back to actually refresh the stored charges in the cells.

They need to learn how to use their tools better. Winscp does all that transparently for you if you press F4 on a file on a remote system. Or maybe they did and you just didn’t see it…

It’s quite a handy function when you’re diving through endless layers of directories on a remote box looking for one config file amongst many.

Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, “You’re right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here’s the updated code that fixes it”.

It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there’s any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it’s full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

For some things it will offer solutions that don’t solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can’t, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don’t really achieve anything.

Sometimes when it hits that point I can say “start again, and use (this methodology)” and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that’s workable.

So basically, right now it’s good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you’re working in fairly well already otherwise you’re shit out of luck.

If library devs do versioning correctly, and you pin to major versions like “1.*” instead of just the “anything goes” of “*”, this should not happen.

Your unit tests should catch regressions, if you have enough unit tests. And of course you do, because we’re all operating in the dream world of, “I am great and everyone else is shit”.

They also came from a time when hard drives could draw several amps while in use and much more on spin-up. There was a good reason why SCSI drive arrays used to spin each disk up one-by-one.

Molex connectors are good for 10 amps or so, SATA connectors couldn’t have handled that amount of current.

Excuse me, “UXers” is not the preferred term any more. You should be using “HXers”, as per the article.

In my opinion, replacing “users” with “humans” feels wrong in much the same way as when incels replace “women” with “females”.

They are reducing the accuracy of the description. All users of computers can generally be assumed to be human. All humans cannot generally be assumed to also be users.

how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability

Because they can manage and control all the windows PCs , pushing updates automatically, restricting what users can do locally and on the network, they have monitoring tools and whatever antivirus and antimalware tools they have, and are able to easily manage and deploy/remove software and associated group licensing and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile you’re a single user of unknown (to them) capabilities that they now have to trust with the rest of their system, basically.

The first rule of corporate IT is, “control what’s on your network”. Your PC is their concern still, but they have no effective control over it. That’s why they’re being a bit of a pain in the ass about it.

They could have hooked the phone up to a windscreen wiper motor (a high torque motor with a crank arm) and left it to run for a few hours, that would have given them about 10,000 open/close cycles. But no, it’s “let’s hang a 5kg weight off it and use the phone as a bit of a hammer”.

Me: “This binary file is merely an approximate mathematical and statistical transform of the complainant’s “Deadpool 3”, your honour. If you care to glance through a few A4 pages of the binary representation of both items, you can clearly see that there is no direct copying involved, thus, no copyright claim can be upheld.”

Result: $250k fine, two years community service in anti piracy groups.

NVIDIA: “Each copyrighted work was ingested and a statistical model was generated that leverages that information for our own profit. We have no intention of compensating copyright owners for their information.”

Result: Oh you! Get out of here, you scamp! Ruffles hair

I hate the camera bumps. Just make the entire phone the same thickness and - hey! This is crazy, but maybe then you could then add a bit more structural integrity and put a bigger battery and a SD card slot and a headphone jack in there as well.

Energy efficiency can be offset by extra computational ability though.

Eg Linux has a plethora of CPU and IO schedulers and allows you to tune the system to maximise performance for your particular workload. Getting more performance than with the generic CPU and IO schedulers provided in other OS’s generally means more power consumption, unless you do some sort of “performance per watt” calculation to take that into account.

*shrugs*

The current state of Nova Launcher will take my four year old phone with Android 13 to the end of its life.

Google play reports an update with a few fixes a couple of months ago.