Posts by jelabarre59 2005 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2013
My hatred for UEFI runs deep. Having it absent (best), or being able to disable it entirely is a bare-minimum requirement for any machine I buy.
Really, we should have been on MicroChannel rev.5.x by now. Had IBM been a bit more clever, and less determined to steal the market back for themselves, they should have opened the MC spec, freed up the licensing, and instead made their money on chipsets and consultation/implementation services.
didn't we go through all this with XP ffs ?
Yes, and here we are missing yet *ANOTHER* opportunity to have gotten behind ReactOS. If some indeterminate percentage of those people complaining about the impending demise of WinXP/Vista/7 had put their resources, money and effort behind making ROS fit their needs, it wouldn't matter WHAT bullshit MS is pulling.
And just as there's a lot of people using Photoshop who need nothing more than Gimp (or MS Paint even), there are plenty of people who could achieve everything they need on Linux. Sure, there are various games that can't run under Wine (may Roblox be forever cursed to the furthest depths of hell), and some specialized hardware control systems can't manage with anything other than bog-standard WinXP; these are the places where we should be pushing ReactOS (personally, I'd rather see fixes in Wine for better hardware passthrough, and whatever graphics fixes are needed for any games *other* than Roblox).
The benefits of a regulated market over those of the free market?
Actually, the other way around. We don't have a "free market" for telecom, cable and internet in the US. Instead, we have various communities that, some decades back, accepted bids (and bribes) from various companies to establish **MONOPOLY** presence to a particular area. These "providers" accepted regulation in exchange for perpetual monopoly ownership of that particular area. Then any smaller companies would get absorbed by larger and larger neighbouring monopolies, eventually having major swaths of the country under one particular unresponsive behemoth or another. The "free market" has never had an opportunity to even start growing.
Don't confuse the ideal of a free market with actually having one.
Yep, that's my car, and I even had to add the stereo later (didn't come with one).
And it's good I bought my (rhymes with 'Sunday') hatchback (model name is what a Frenchman trying to speak English would have) the year I did, because the next year the newer models no longer came as a 2-door hatchback, and they jacked the price up 40%+ over the model I bought.
Manual *everything*.
Just today I saw an amusing example of just how much advertisers can try to target you (and get potentially confused in the process).
I was on the Japanese-language-only site piapro.jp (a Vocaloid music site). There is no English-language version, you have to do a bit of trickery to get an account on the site if you're not currently in Japan (I'm in the US), and navigating around the site is a bit of guesswork and also eventually learning the iconography and a handful of Kanji.
So what do I see for a bottom of the page ad? An ad for a Dunkin Donuts (presumably one closest to my ISP PoP), with the town name in English but the "buttons" in the ad in Kanji and Hiragana...
Whenever I see a whiney little message pop up about me using an ad blocker on a website, I never go back.
Especially when I'm *not* using an ad-blocker. I'm blocking third-party cookies and the like. Although I suppose that means I'm using a TARGETED-ad blocker, so the words fit in there someplace.
Recently I went to an Amazon listing for a product I had looked at, and had even put on my "wish list" to pick up at a later date. Ads for that specific listing started showing up everywhere, so I put a "product review" on the product that I would NOT be buying it specifically because the ads were harassing me.
Maybe we ALL need to start flooding product reviews with such statements. Maybe even make an add-in for Firefox & others that will automate it for us.
For the same reason that telemarketers call numbers on the do-not-call list, or spammers try and get around anti-spam measures.
But those calls are *ENTERTAINMENT* for me. I get my jollies harassing the spammers...
I just need to learn a few Hindi insults...
So sure, we're talking about the recycling of the electronics themselves, but what of the multitude of cables you needed to connect all those older devices? I've just started pulling out ALL my parts, cables, etc into the garage, to sort them into cable types & such. The USB and audio cables are simple enough, keep some small yet adequate number of each type, dispose of the rest. But HOW to properly dispose of the rest? And then there's the mass of SCSI cables I don't expect to ever use again. It would take too much time & effort to sell or give away the parts piecemeal, especially since I want to get things out *now*.
As the title, if I paid £600 for my old phone and you want me to recycle it when I buy a new £800 phone then give me at least 25% off the new phone.
PAY you? Hah! A local waste management company *used* to have a dumpster at their site where you could just drop in electronics. Last time I went there they wanted to CHARGE me to drop them off, and it wasn't cheap either. Local "bulk pickup" days, they won't take electronics. Most I can do these days is strip the drvices down to their pieces (metal, plastic, glass, then boards). Metal goes in our metal scrap pile, plastic in the recycling bin (it can just be ground up & reused), and I save the boards for when I'm meeting with my counterparts at an IBM site, and drop them in the electronics bin there (considering some of the stuff came *OUT* of those bins when I was still working there).
Might also encourage the manufacturers to make them a bit more easily repairable if they're going to end up paying a lot to get them back.....
Well, there's the trick, giving the manufactures the incentive. But you think they fight the "Right to Repair" legislation a lot? Wait until they'd face having to recycle all that stuff...
I would think, since the hardware is going to be broken down to it's constituent elements as part of the recycling, a very powerful magnetic pulse through the device in heavily shielded containment should effectively wipe the device. It's not being repurposed as-is, so you don't have to worry about making it usable in it's current form.
A degausser/HDD eraser like the one we had in our test lab is about the size (probably smaller) of a mid-tower computer. So make one that can handle tablets & such as well, and zap them hard enough to wipe any data on them. Then they can safely go through the dismantling and recycling process.
For that matter we should be mining our own landfills for raw materials (harder to isolate "rare metals" when you can't separate out the electronics ahead of time). Not so much for the electronics, but for any raw materials in general.
There's exactly the problem. Google Chrome is well on it's way to becoming the disaster MSIE6 had been back in the day. Only difference is the Chrome/Chromium codebase is an infestation on more than one browser.
And not only the concern of the potential disaster of an easily-infected browser monoculture, but if MS is seriously expecting to compete against Google, they should have teamed up with the group in the completely opposite camp. Ah well, MS used to teeter back and forth between "evil" and "incompetent"; these days they seem to lean more towards the latter (but certainly not always).
So non-upgradable/non removable memory, and a **micro** SD card reader?
The memory thing would be enough to steer me away from this machine already, but seriously, folks, even as a "smaller-form-factor" laptop, there still has to be **PLENTY** of room for a full-sized SD/MMC card reader. Most of your digital cameras still use the full-size SD card, so why wouldn't you put the full reader on it? When you're dealing with cell phones, of course there isn't room. As for Android tablets, I'd expect they could do a fill-sized reader if they really wanted, but it's borderline either way. But a microSD on a computer? That's just sheer stupidity. (unless you'd like to put both; that would be OK)
Could they perhaps write an app to automatically tell Google what a bunch or corrupt yet incompetent morons they are, so I don't have to constantly send them feedback for every damned stupid and/or irritating thing they do? Maybe something where I can point my phone camera at a page and say "Hey Google, you're being dipshits again..."
May we could get UPS to program the delivery robot to put packages ALL the way up on the porch and out of the rain, rather than on the very edge of the steps where they get rained (and snowed) on. Sometimes all the way down the yard, on the stone wall by the driveway...
Knowing UPS, it would probably *still* be beyond their capabilities.
You mean something like Project Babylon? I remember one of the prototype Martlet 4 projectiles (from the predecessor Project HARP) on display down the hall from my dad's office.
Any countries you have in mind for better rail infrastructure? Based on weight/distance, the US is similar or exceeds European countries for rail freight unless they have significant shipping:
Except in the critical high-density areas (such as the Northeastern US) where the rain infrastructure has been torn up, and even now when we should know better *CONTINUES* to be torn up. Sometimes for something as foolish as Faceborg executives bribing the county government to build a bike trail for the execs and three of their friends (hello Ulster).
What is needed is more localized hubs where containers can be dropped off for local deliveries, and maybe smaller containerization options so they could be quickly offloaded at local stations. New Your Central Railroad had worked on an experimental system at one time, which had 4-6 containers (?) per rail car.
Now, I can see the usefulness of facial recognition as *corroborating evidence*, to be combined with thorough police work and witness testimony. Relying on it as the *only* means of evidence is the problem. It should be there as a way of validating the rest of your evidence, just as DNA isn't a full proof in itself.
But just like many other technologies, a tool meant to assist your work and/or improve accuracy instead becomes an excuse to be lazy or sloppy in your own work.
To me a smartphone is something that bursts into life halfway down the drive informing me I have 17 missed messages from people I dont know.
Same thing here, no signal at our house. And I'd be surprised if the actor living up the road from us (who has appeared in commercials for TWO different cell companies) has a signal at his house.
Updated Cloudflare has yanked its services from 8chan, the "lawless" 4chan spinoff forum favoured by far-right nuts and paedophiles, after two mass shootings in the US over the weekend left nearly 30 people dead.
And a ***SINGLE*** arson attack in Japan left 35 people dead (and who knows how many more will ultimately succumb to their injuries). But because it didn't involve guns there wasn't an excuse for the brain-dead media to start frothing at the mouth.
And there's **EXACTLY** the problem with the gun-grabbing pundits. If a gun just happened to be somewhere in the vicinity of a tragedy, it's suddenly a "gun crime", even if the gun didn't have a part in the incident. But far be it for the gun-haters to actually think and examine the details. The ONLY thing a gun did in the Bath Township bombing was when the bomber used it to kill himself. Seems to me it was put to GOOD use.
Still looks like an early 1990s software program, they really need to work on the look and design to make it beautiful. Not just features.
It functions, and does it's job very well. That's more beautiful in MY eyes. Especially when you consider the Fugly-Flatso look that all the lemmings are so hyped up on these days.
A few real inventors may be harmed by this as they might have trouble legitimately getting funding or other backing for getting their product to market, but patent trolls would rapidly lose their "inventory".
I would expect even there, if you could show proof that you were actively seeking funding and/or licensees, that could count as actively promoting the patent.
Then there's our lab setup where you had to go through a "jumpbox" machine to get to the management/console network in the server lab. Log into the JB, then log into the machine you're working on. Problem was, sometimes the connection to the machine you were working with would drop (might have been an intentional timeout, it's been a number of years now). But the prompt *wouldn't* change when the system dropped, it would sit there showing the name of the machine you were (no longer) connected to (hitting enter or some other key would make it drop, but you had to actually do that first).
So one day I'm working on a system, and then go to get a coffee or hit the head. Either way it gave it enough time for the connection to get dropped. I get back to my desk, and issue a reboot command, not paying attention that whatever key I hit to clear the screensaver also dropped me back to the jumpbox. And of course the required command logging pointed it right back to me.
Only potential issue with stickers on the front are with PowerEdge servers (and some others for that matter) where the whole front bezel clips on/off before you can access the drives, buttons etc. So do you unclip the bezel and stick the label onto the chassis of the server?
We usually ran such boxes without the bezels.
Not complaining *here* about it being an option, along with other options. Conceptually it's a good idea. But a couple of issues do crop up as regards the company implementing it. The first two questions that come up would be will Microsoft:
1: severely fuck it up
2: use it as another method of vendor lock-in (an extension of the "Secure" Boot bullshit they've tried to push through)
The first is unfortunately unavoidable (from any vendor, to be fair). The second is the one I would be concerned about the most.
I don't understand the complaint. You've been able to download an ISO of Windows 10 and install a clean version for years. You have to choose the base language and whether it's 32 or 64-bit but beyond that it's simple.
The advantage with MSWin there is you can download the image on a Linux system and even write the USB or burn the DVD from there as well. As far as I was able to find out, a MacOS reinstall image/USB could only be downloaded and created from a Mac (or Hackintosh, presumably).
If I have a problem with my Mac, as long as I have a Wifi or Ethernet connection working I can re-install the Mac in a mater of minutes. OK, it's likely to download several gigabytes, so you do need a relatively fast internet connection, preferably unmetered.
You would need those to create a boot USB. You would also need a second machine, as well as the drive itself.
Even when you have a handy Linux machine available, I don't think Apple provides a means of downloading the reinstall image from the store. Maybe on the MSWin iTunes application, but I doubt it. It was in the process of trying to find alternative ways of downloading the OS image for my flea market Mac that I found the net install option.
But what happens when the emergency boot has been wiped?
Is it in the UEFI?
I would guess that it is. I picked up a 2010 MacBook Pro really cheap at a flea market (my one-and-only Apple product), and rather than trying to hack an account onto the existing OS on it, I simply booted with a Linux live DVD and wiped the disk. I had figured I'd either order a reinstall DVD, pick one up at WorstBuy, or get a friend at a partner site to make a USB reinstall image for me. At this point there was no OS, partitions or boot sector on the HDD.
While looking up the info for ordering a fresh OS, I found the info on the internet-fased install. Took 2 or 3 tries to get it to kick off, but it did work (installed straight into High Sierra, the newest supported version for that machine). So score one thing Apple could do competently.
A month or so later I moved it to an SSD I had lying around (after upgrading another machine) and made a USB installer from the existing install to re-load onto the SSD. That worked too. Not that I'm doing much with the machine other than maintaining familiarity with MacOS in case I ever need to for some future job.
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