Re: Don't know if it's just that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet...
Including Ten Pund notes made by Mitchell and Webb, with credit cards that improve on the originals by being made of cheese?
3819 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Including Ten Pund notes made by Mitchell and Webb, with credit cards that improve on the originals by being made of cheese?
Anyone else remember when computer software manuals were printed on green or red paper to try and deter little Johnny from having his dad duplicate the manual using his office photocopier?
Beta Basic for the ZX Spectrum is one I particularly remember - black ink on dark red paper. Barely readable by humans, never mind photocopiers. And using that replacement BASIC without a manual would have been a PITA.
(Pint for the author of Beta Basic. It was awesome and was what should have been in the Speccy's ROM from the get-go.)
It has no cloud dependency. No DLC, no microtransactions. Doesn't send telemetry or push "exclusive content from carefully-curated partners". No enforced updates. No mandatory account creation. No social media integration.
Please, at least tell me that it has a Modern UI where text and controls are indistinguishable from each other (and the window background) and there are dark patterns to steer you away from the useful options?
Spidey-sense tingling. Does not compute. Error! Error!
Reminds me of Bernard and Manny drunkenly discussing their impending fortune:
"Manny, we are going to be ve...very rich."
"How rich, Bernard?"
"Oooh... uncontrolib... incontinently rich."
"Success will bring problems! I don't want to wake up in rehab with Shergar!"
..and it just gets sillier from there.
I made a joke in another article's comments a few days ago about systemd taking over every aspect of the linux platform, and ended my comment with hyperbole along the lines of "some distant future version will even..." (here, I racked my brains to think of something as far away from init scripts as it was possible to imagine) "...handle DISK PARTITIONING, hahahahaha"
Only for a fellow commentard to point out that yes, systemd now handles disk partitioning too.
Truth, stranger, fiction, etc etc.
Stretching your (well, Sir Pterry/Neil Gaiman’s) analogy perhaps too far, I wonder what the Them would make of the Goats’ Cheese, Marionberry & Jalapeño ice-cream I bought from the somewhat hipster-ish Salt & Straw last week?
I'm about 40 minutes away from Portland Oregon, one of the country's tech hubs. I'm just off a major highway, with a town of 100K people about 5 miles down the hill from me and another town of similar size about 8 miles in the other direction. Neighbors all around. This is not the back end of nowhere by any means.
Right now I'm paying $150/month to a local niche ISP for a microwave relay link that bounces off a dish down in the valley and gives me maybe 14Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up on a good day. It does at least have the side-benefit of dropping the occasional cooked-from-the-inside eagle onto my lawn (just kidding, nature lovers).
So, yeah. I'd like to get the previous version of the standard, never mind Rosenworcel's new improved one. 100/20? In my dreams.
Go to hell, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon... and especially Ziply, who keep spamming my phone with unsolicited texts advertising their fiber service even though they don't serve my area.
My first PC - in the pedantic, “technically it stands for Personal Computer so includes just about anything smaller than a mainframe” sense - was a Durango F-85. I never could find a CP/M-80 boot disk for it, so the poor thing never did more than boot to a flashing ‘_’ prompt. Shame, because it was an impressive piece of hardware - built-in keyboard, 2x 5-1/4” floppies, and daisywheel printer, with even a little monitor too.
Liam - commiserations on still waiting for your Spectrum Next. I’m in the same boat, as the Aug 2021 release date has faded into memory due to so many factors. Still, the frequent updates on Kickstarter from Henrique, Alvin, Jim & others are keeping my anticipation alive.
Fingers crossed that the Release 2 machines - complete with new FPGAs and re-re-re-tweaked motherboards - will ship before too long, eh?
Upvoted.
However, my own beloved Volvo is currently en panne, having suddenly and mysteriously and without any warning whatsoever lost all its oil at 60mph on the highway. If the garage ever get back to me with a diagnosis - or post-mortem, I suspect - I will be facing such a large bill that I could cosplay as a pelican :(
Minor point of order: after years of referring to the cars as Beemers, I learned quite recently that among aficionados of the brand, that nickname is reserved for BMW bikes. The cars are, apparently, “bimmers”.
Not sure if I personally care enough to respect the distinction, but there you are.
No, what you have bought is a licence to use the car for a limited period, subject to the manufacturer’s terms and conditions which can be changed at any time without prior notice and which you agreed to when you opened the car door.
*Your* car? What a quaint idea. Like trafficators, floor-mounted headlight switches or hand-cranked engine starting.
Icon: have a beer. At least we’re all used to only renting that.
You think you’re joking but there was a kerfuffle a few months ago - sorry, CBA to look up the details - about a motorbike jacket with a built-in airbag, where the airbag functionality had a monthly subscription to enable it.
Come off your bike and are flying through the air towards a telephone pole? Welp, better have your credit card ready to renew that airbag subscription…
Don’t forget the whole “let’s put EVERY vehicle control on a touch screen, which has no tactile feedback whatsoever and is really difficult to prod at accurately without taking your eyes off the road when you’re in motion on any road that isn’t glass-smooth”, which is my personal pet-hate-du-jour (ok, and long-sentence-du-jour, touché)
Icon… that’s me, that is.
(unless I’ve missed a comment, in which case my apologies)
…is that this allows BMW to reset the feature/subscription when the car changes hands. *You* might have paid the $400 or whatever for “lifetime” heated seats, but I’m sure the seats will be deactivated as soon as you sell the car. See also the similar recent incident with a Tesla.
So it’s basically, perpetual revenue for BMW. It’s all aligned with the move in our own beloved IT industry towards <whatever>-as-a-service. Why sell your customer something once, for a one-off payment, when you can milk them for ever more, and for even more, on a monthly basis?
Grrrrr.
The preferred, “approved” way to install Linux these days is on top of Windows using WSL. That way, Microsoft can ensure that you get the best possible Linux experience.
(I couldn’t decide whether to go with the Trollface icon, because I worried that people might think the above comment is serious…)
Well, obviously. That’s what the letters on a 0-9 numeric keypad are for - you just have to spell out someone’s email address using the telephone keypad and the resulting number will connect to them.
I admit I’m not sure how you dial a ‘@‘ symbol, but I think you can dial the Email-From-your-Landline helpdesk at 999, and ask the nice person who answers the call to walk you through the process.
Right now I’m trying to find a working method of getting rid of the annoying “header banner” in Windows 10 Settings. You know, the one that tells you how you could be earning Microsoft points or whatever. Useless waste of space.
There was a method that got rid of it, using a powershell command, but it seems that since a couple of recent Windows Updates, the header is back and there’s no way to remove it.
That is very Microsoft. They want to shove a feature in front of you? Well by Jove they’ll keep doing so, and bypass any of your attempts to avoid it.
Which is why I’m not wholly excited about the new version of Rufus the article mentions. Rufus is a fine tool, but once it gets into the sphere of modifying/bypassing Windows restrictions, it’s dancing on quicksand.
Funny how the suggested defaults always seem to favour Microsoft, isn’t it?
Would you like us to spy on you? [X] Yes
Allow apps to access your location? [X] Yes
…etc, etc.
And their pathetic clingy attempts to stop you switching away from Edge to a proper browser are infuriating, but that’s a whole ‘nother rant.
Obligatory Pratchett quote…
‘Ye gods,' he said, under his breath. ‘The Mayor of Quirm has been struck by a meteorite . . . again.'
'Can that happen?' said Sacharissa.
'Apparently. This is from Mr Pune at the council offices there. Sensible chap, not much imagination. He says that this time it was waiting for the mayor in an alley…'
FYI for those wondering it's simple to find answers like that on Ark.intel.com. That link is directly to a search for "processors with AVX-512".