Re: Half Life 3
Ooo-eerrrr. Better watch that one alone, definitely not with friends and/or family!!
25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"And yet software companies keep pushing this cloud nonsense."
What they are pushing is the notion that data in "the cloud" is safe because it's distributed and duplicated so you will never lose anything, even if a data centre burns down. What they don't make a headline "selling point" is that free accounts definitely don't get that safety net and paying customers need to pay a LOT more for that resilience and that it might not actually work anyway.
"Many other" might be correct, I suppose, but given the extraordinary variety of editors and other programs out there it might be hard to be sure. It seems that in your usage, one thing is dominant, but on mine the other is."
In my (early) world, CTRL-W is scroll up one line. Likewise, other cursor control keys were up^/E, down/^X left/^S and right/^D because not all computer or terminal keyboards had arrow keys on them. This layout was pretty common across a lot of programs back in the day, especially in CP/M world. Many of the more common WordStar and SuperCalc keyboard commands are still ingrained in my "cold storage" memory :-)
"Well if you just delete them, why are you complaining they're not there ?"
In defense, I also delete "most" emails I get on one particular business account. It's not unusual to be scrolling through and deleting the crap that I then sometimes have an "oh shit" moment and have to go into the deleted emails folder and restore that last one back to the inbox. Her problem is how she was deleting them, not that she was deleting them unread, or possibly the email system didn't work like most modern email systems and all deletes were "hard" deletes.
"The USB standard emerged in 1996 as a way of powering and connecting devices on a single bus."
A bit like the Atari 800 did all those years ago. Serial connector on the back and everything daisy chained along the serial bus.
And, IIRC, the guy who designed that went on to be on the USB standards committee or helped design it or something (not sure now, I read that quite some years ago)
I've not noticed that being an issue on FreeBSD. What i DO find disturbing is that Windows seems to have to not only re-enumarte a device but re-load the drivers if you unplug a USB device and then plug it back in to another USB port and it takes a noticeable amount of time to do that. If I switch my mouse or keyboard into another port on FreeBSD, it just works, instantly.
There have been odd times when my keyboard ended up inverted in some sort of shift-lock mode, acting as if the shift key was always pressed and pressing it acted like you'd stopped pressing it. Very weird and disconcerting. It's happened only a few times over the years, far enough apart to be different keyboards on different computers and almost certainly different OS's or at least OS version. Usually because I hit the keyboard in frustration, pressing many keys at once. I can only assume it's either something in, or at least used to be in, the keyboards internal controller chip, or the keyboard simply taking revenge on me for mashing the keys!
Because it was rare and "accidental", I never did find out what made it do that and hence never found out how to reverse it other than to unplug the keyboard and plug it back in, hence my reasoning it was a function of the keyboard controller that was never documented, or at least not widely known about.
"I have also witnessed plenty who can't seem to work out how to push a BIG green button to exit the building"
In some cases, it may be because they've not seen them before. Or worked recently in a company/building that used something other than Big Green Button releases. Was in one this week that had a brushed stainless steel plate the size of a standard light switch with a small, approx 10mm diameter brushed stainless steel button in the middle. Probably difficult to see the button for anyone with vision problems. I've seen others that look like light switches but are rocker switch and is a momentary contact that springs back...next to actual light switches as well as those light switch type next to other non-standard switches that most would assume to be door access rather than the one looking like a light switch.
Big Green Button exit switches may be fairly common, but are far from standard, ubiquitous or even recognisable by people who don't work in buildings that use any kind of press-to-exit systems.
"I've done that to myself on my phone also : take a screenshot inadvertently, then try to use the phone which doesn't do anything."
Out of curiosity, which phone/OS/App was that? Whenever I need to take a phone screen shot, I press the relevant buttons and the image is saved to Photos (or wherever, it shows as an Album in Gallery for me). It's never been automatically displayed with no hint it's an image, such as not having a translucent menu along the bottom included icons for share, delete etc.
"The Linux thing of moving focus with the mouse pointer is even worse, but at least you can turn it off."
As a *BSD user, I love that it works like that and get frustrated using Windows and having to remember to actually CLICK on a window to give it focus. At which point I suddenly realise that click DOES SOMETHING and isn't just sucked up by the system as an "activate this window" click, but fully passed to the underlying window so I have to sometimes be very, very careful where I click to activate so as not to trigger some unwanted action.
...and when you pause to actually think about it, computers have been more than powerful enough to do that for years now and it's a pretty obvious feature to add. So obvious it probably took a genius to actually think of it, while the rest us slapped or foreheads, said "Do'h, that is SO obvious, why didn't I think that!"
Similar here. The first mouse I used was the AMX mouse on a BBC micro. The cable came out the side near the front end. I was working in a teaching environment at the time and pretty much saw all possible "wrong" attempts to use a mouse since no one had ever seen or used one before. Although I don;t recall anyone "doing a Scotty" and picking the mouse up and using it a microphone, since speech recognition was also pretty much unheard of by then :-)
ISTR the early laptops had the logo the "right" way up, but once product placement deals were happening, the logos all got turned upside down so the TV/film audience could see the logo the right way up. At least that's how I heard it. I've also heard that Apple were the first to do because they wanted people using their laptops in public places, coffee shops etc and the logo being the "right" way up on an opened laptop advertised the brands to all and sundry passers-by :-)
Whatever the original reason for the switch, clearly it's now used as brand advertising to everyone who is not the actual user. After all, the user already bought the brand, no need to advertise to them :-)
Depends how you calculate it :-)
The core stage and tankage etc is all still there, but possibly modified for the new engines, so yeah, a bit like an old car or plane restoration that only has maybe 10-15% original, everything else is new :-)
"Hopefully in the last 47 years, we've made some progress in power conversion efficiency that can be applied to future devices."
We do, but the temptation with better power sources is to use more of it. See the improvement in laptop batteries and power management, the end result being not a laptop that run for two or three days, but smaller, thinner laptops with the same battery life :-)
"In the end, everyone will end up losing, including Google themselves."
Sadly, in realty, what will happen is the vast majority will accept the situation and the few of us who actually care will have to either switch off and tune out or join the crowd and put up with it :-(
"interrupting videos every 3-5 minutes."
That seems to be "The American Way". I was watching a YT video of Adam Savage the other day talking about his time on Mythbusters and was shocked to hear him describe it as a "6 act show", ie 5 ad breaks in what is supposedly an hour long show. I'd only ever seen it on UK TV, with 3 ad breaks in the show. It's no wonder streaming services took off so rapidly and meteorically in the US is they are forced to watch ads on broadcast TV every 5-7 minutes during a show. YT are just copying that modal and making it even worse. Surely the people at YT who are doing this must remember growing up watching TV with far too many ad breaks and being frustrated by them! And yet they are inflicting the same on their audience, on steroids!
Either way, it still doesn't make sense to me.
"file its lawsuit in Texas's 5th District court, as opposed to the 9th District where X is headquartered,"
Shirley they should be filing this where either they or Media Matters are headquartered, not "shopping around" for the most sympathetic jurisdiction.
"When you think how many Falcons they blew up in their early days, they actually seem to be on a pretty good trajectory with this latest toy."
And, of course, not forgetting the number of early Starship "hops" that ended in RUDs too, but to be fair, this is effectively two separate rockets, each with the own foibles and problems doing things that have either not been done before or not been done on this huge size of vehicle and then combining them and their "unknowns" into one big launch stack :-)
I wasn't surprised the first launch ended in explody bits, but was surprised at the amount of damage to the launch pad and tower. I wasn't *too* surprised at the second lauch booster explosion and was really getting hopeful for Starhip as it just seemed to keep going up and was sadly dissapointed but hugely surprised that it too didn't fully succeed.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. SpaceX seem to operated a little like Kickstarter projects. There's a goad you want and need to reach, and then there's "stretch goals" that would be nice to reach. On the whole, SpaceX do generally seem to meet their main goals and sometimes reach some of the stretch goals. If nothing else, it's a lot more existing than spending 10 years, going massively over budget and massively of target date for a "first time success" :-) And as someone else suggested, a first time success could mean it's over engineered and over weight as well as over budget!
On a similar note, the booster engines shut down in stages, probably to reduce the levels of deceleration "pushing" the fuel upwards, potentially either cause pressure issues or hydraulic shock, and so was a mitigation. But I wonder if the thrust from the Starship engines doing a hot staging "pushed" back on the booster, causing an increase in deceleration rate and resulting in fuel pushing "upwards" and/or hydraulic shock" to levels more than expected? Whatever caused the problem, it does seem to have been an issue with fuel feeds to the engines as they seemed to go out in a cascade very quickly after re-light.
From the article, it's only been available since Jan 2022, so most teachers have been using it for 12-18 months, the early adopters being the few at the 18 month end of the curve and after education had been pretty much back to "normal" for a while. So for most teachers, only one school year. It should not be hard to go back to how the worked in the previous school year. In the case of UK schools, I doubt they switched to this before the start of a new school year, so most likely used it from Sept'22 to July'23. That means they are into their 2nd year of using it now, so the short notice cut-off is a bit of a bastard, and the current years course is based on it, but it really should not be THAT hard to go back to their older lesson plans. Likewise, anything that is free is going to be limited in some way, never depend on "free forever" because it never, ever is.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell with the Americanisation of El Reg, as in the US, "school" can be almost any form of learning environment from compulsory age schooling through to college and university. Back in the dark ages, when I was young and there was much less US TV and films available in the UK, hearing a US university student talk about being "in school" or "going to school" was very confusing until I started to understand that US English was similar to but not entirely unlike English :-)
An excellent question. It's not a service I can get my head around. What is the business case for companies transferring data around, especially between parts of their own spread out organisation, that a middle-man can do it better or cheaper? A middle-man for the actual fibres and wires inbetween, but why would anyone need a middle-man to actually send the data for them?
I'm sure there are people here who will have good reasons for why MoveIt exists and people use their services, so please, do share that info because I'm stumped!