I had a friend die from MELAS over a decade back. It was not a clean death, either. She faded away slowly and then suddenly. That shit was tough to watch and there was nothing that could have been done to stop it.
Back in the mid-90s, I ended up with a random broken 4x CD-ROM drive that was headed to the trash. It had a Rise of the Triad CD stuck inside. The drive only needed the eject belt put back on.
Having a steady job with a good wage, though with slim hours, can be great for students and people who are trying to launch their artistic career or whatever and just need to get the basic bills paid. I'd have loved a 20 hour a week job that paid $15 an hour when I was in college. That's twice minimum wage and part-time jobs just didn't approach that kind of money.
If you've got a side-hustle income that isn't consistent, it can help a lot to have some measure of stability.
We don't like being real. The moment someone's out on the street because their apartment block is on fire in the middle of the night, they become a target for the local TV news where they get judged for their messed up hair and half-asleep expression.
My craptop has a camera and I'm not paranoid about some NSA prick somehow watching me take a shit while catching up on the latest VanossGaming video. Joke's on them if they do.
We ached for video phone calls for decades, but now that it's dead-easy we're all monkey about it. Grow up, humanity. Nobody cares about your mundane life.
Vinyl records were huge. CDs were smaller. microSD cards are much smaller. Encoding an MP3 in realtime was easy in 1999. Streaming was impossible over dialup. People don't generally run 5.1 Surround and even seem happy with Mono Bluetooth speakers. Stereo is fine. There's a limit to bandwidth required for an audio stream. SSDs basically last forever when reading instead of writing and take laughably little power compared to HDDs. CPU power is increasing. The world's audio streaming needs will eventually be met by something the size of a Raspberry Pi. The energy consumed by arranging rights and licenses to said music will dwarf (to put it lightly) the energy consumed by hosting it.
I remember the days when a Flash ad would instantly peg CPU usage. I just killed Flash instead of looking into why. Maybe it was rendering 1000FPS instead of 60? Sure, I missed the latest Strong Bad Email, but those eventually disappeared, too.
Now it's not so much CPU as RAM. When closing one small page frees up 2GB, that's not a good sign.
Before the economic meltdown circa-2008, were making decisions that were just as boneheaded.
"Sales numbers are slipping. Why not try something new like one of the concepts we've had on the shelf for years?" "Oh sweet summer child. We're going to give the world what it really needs: Another front-wheel-drive, V6, four-door sedan." "What the fuck? That's what we've been doing for the past ten years." "You're not paid to think. Our focus groups consisting of boring soccer moms and cubicle droids know what they want." "Why not cater to customers who aren't boring?" "Good idea! We'll change the body panels a bit, slap on some chrome, sell it under our premium brand, and double the price."
Plenty, but the best way is by moving upmarket. You can charge more for improved service over the competition. I know photographers who kept raising their prices because they hated doing weddings, for example. One became the only photographer in the area who would do a wedding because people were willing to pay the astronomical price instead of having "Uncle Joe with his low-end DSLR and smudged kit lens" do the job. The rave reviews led to even more business and being able to afford better and better equipment with immediate backup of all photos so nothing has ever been lost. If Uncle Joe's battery dies halfway in or his discount memory card gets corrupted and the photos are lost forever, that's too bad.
I applied the same principle with electronics and computers. I originally believed in making computers less daunting for people in my community, but I ended up with a bunch of white trash customers expecting caviar service on a Tuna Helper budget (and they'd stiff the bill half the time). Bucky Threeteeth gets real irate when he can't get his porn fix at two in the morning. Then it turns out his computer is so clogged with cigarette tar and dust that the motherboard fried. Then he tries to pay you with meth or stolen painkillers after you fix it.
I began to charge way more than the hoi polloi repair shops I was undercutting and ended up doing professional work for professionals. If downtime is costing you thousands of dollars an hour, you're not going to wait a week for a hoi polloi shop to get the job done, you're going to call someone who can get you back up and running ASAP.
Business internet costs more than residential for the same reason.
Highlands Ranch, CO? I've actually been there. I worked on a documentary about Rachel Scott (killed at Columbine). Her Dad lived there. Small world. Beautiful scenery when I went through. Granted, the second trip a few years later was less impressive because green was replaced with brown.
There was a plan to have fiber internet become a utility no different from water/sewer/power/etc across the entire system well over a decade ago because it would have cost so little to do it all at once, especially because the system would be paid off in record time, avoiding interest on the loan. Old people who didn't use the Internet balked at the idea of paying $10 a month with 20mbit symmetrical service (impressive at the time) and when they finally saw the value in it once their offspring scattered to the four winds and travel became expensive, they bitched about paying $60 a month for 250mbit symmetrical service (the lowest speed offered because there's no point in offering anything lower to the user base) for their Skype and Facetime calls.
My Grandma's old "I've fallen and I can't get up." button was wired to the phone line and still required power from the wall. The new one is wired via cable modem, but now the call box and the cable modem both require wall power, but have backup batteries inside that are fine for a half-hour or so. My fiber box will stay up for days on the battery at my end and the whole system is backed with batteries and generators that run on natural gas and diesel if the outage runs long as recently happened during a storm last fall. Comcast is supposed to have battery backup, but their Alpha box on the pole at the end of my block has been flashing the red failure LED for the past five years so it was no surprise my connection dropped even though I had everything at my end on a hefty UPS/generator combo before I dumped them for UTOPIA.
Comcast (at 12mbit/3mbit at the time) and Qwest (now CenturyLink; the phone line service that _still_ can't deliver DSL faster than about 4mbit/768kbit in 2018) pissed and moaned about other communications companies getting access to the power poles and such the local governments and power companies paid for. They tried everything they could to stop UTOPIA and UTOPIA gave them the finger by spending the bit of extra money to ensure each city block would easily have enough dedicated fibers to handle skyscrapers in the future. My block has 15 houses on it. We have a 192-fiber pipe coming in from each side. Each one of those fibers, with the proper equipment installed at each end, will handle 100gbps with today's technology.
We have "caps". For your $65 a month, you can move two terabytes in each direction without attracting any attention. I don't know anyone who has even come close to that. What they look out for is whether someone has hijacked your connection.
We have complete neutrality on the network. Since there are a dozen providers to choose from, they all know it's bad for business to do anything that goes against that.
Comcast tried to kill Utah's UTOPIA fiber project. They failed and now even a town with less than 1000 people has a 10G fiber option (most go with 1G).
Slashdot Mirror
"...atmosphlatic lensing..."
ftfy.
I had a friend die from MELAS over a decade back. It was not a clean death, either. She faded away slowly and then suddenly. That shit was tough to watch and there was nothing that could have been done to stop it.
"I'm going to take my ball and go home!" is only a threat if the ball isn't flat and somehow infected with herpes.
I'm sure Louis already understands it's an empty gesture. I'm becoming similarly jaded.
"Nobody carries a calculator wherever they go." -- every math teacher in history
My Dad's cellphone already had a calculator in the early 90s.
I'm sure TI will figure out plenty of ways to force a $100+ price on 1980s technology.
Back in the mid-90s, I ended up with a random broken 4x CD-ROM drive that was headed to the trash. It had a Rise of the Triad CD stuck inside. The drive only needed the eject belt put back on.
Every computer I resell I've started checking for cryptocurrency.
Back when BTC was going for a couple bucks, college kids would set up miners on school PCs that I would later buy at surplus sales.
That $5 Core Duo with the massively outdated GPU might be worth its weight in gold.
Having a steady job with a good wage, though with slim hours, can be great for students and people who are trying to launch their artistic career or whatever and just need to get the basic bills paid. I'd have loved a 20 hour a week job that paid $15 an hour when I was in college. That's twice minimum wage and part-time jobs just didn't approach that kind of money.
If you've got a side-hustle income that isn't consistent, it can help a lot to have some measure of stability.
Why'd they get rid of magsafe in the first place? Seems like a keen idea, what's the catch?
Don't have to buy another one if it doesn't get pulled onto the floor?
Nah you win bye
We don't like being real. The moment someone's out on the street because their apartment block is on fire in the middle of the night, they become a target for the local TV news where they get judged for their messed up hair and half-asleep expression.
My craptop has a camera and I'm not paranoid about some NSA prick somehow watching me take a shit while catching up on the latest VanossGaming video. Joke's on them if they do.
We ached for video phone calls for decades, but now that it's dead-easy we're all monkey about it. Grow up, humanity. Nobody cares about your mundane life.
Vinyl records were huge. CDs were smaller. microSD cards are much smaller.
Encoding an MP3 in realtime was easy in 1999. Streaming was impossible over dialup.
People don't generally run 5.1 Surround and even seem happy with Mono Bluetooth speakers.
Stereo is fine.
There's a limit to bandwidth required for an audio stream.
SSDs basically last forever when reading instead of writing and take laughably little power compared to HDDs.
CPU power is increasing.
The world's audio streaming needs will eventually be met by something the size of a Raspberry Pi.
The energy consumed by arranging rights and licenses to said music will dwarf (to put it lightly) the energy consumed by hosting it.
Some people just have way too much spare time on their hands.
Recycle Aluminium. It's basically electricity in solid form, considering the crazy energy involved in refining Bauxite.
Not a good track record at this point, pot-bitching-at-kettle.
Great! Only $3.14 million a year.
I remember the days when a Flash ad would instantly peg CPU usage. I just killed Flash instead of looking into why. Maybe it was rendering 1000FPS instead of 60? Sure, I missed the latest Strong Bad Email, but those eventually disappeared, too.
Now it's not so much CPU as RAM. When closing one small page frees up 2GB, that's not a good sign.
Before the economic meltdown circa-2008, were making decisions that were just as boneheaded.
"Sales numbers are slipping. Why not try something new like one of the concepts we've had on the shelf for years?"
"Oh sweet summer child. We're going to give the world what it really needs: Another front-wheel-drive, V6, four-door sedan."
"What the fuck? That's what we've been doing for the past ten years."
"You're not paid to think. Our focus groups consisting of boring soccer moms and cubicle droids know what they want."
"Why not cater to customers who aren't boring?"
"Good idea! We'll change the body panels a bit, slap on some chrome, sell it under our premium brand, and double the price."
Plenty, but the best way is by moving upmarket. You can charge more for improved service over the competition. I know photographers who kept raising their prices because they hated doing weddings, for example. One became the only photographer in the area who would do a wedding because people were willing to pay the astronomical price instead of having "Uncle Joe with his low-end DSLR and smudged kit lens" do the job. The rave reviews led to even more business and being able to afford better and better equipment with immediate backup of all photos so nothing has ever been lost. If Uncle Joe's battery dies halfway in or his discount memory card gets corrupted and the photos are lost forever, that's too bad.
I applied the same principle with electronics and computers. I originally believed in making computers less daunting for people in my community, but I ended up with a bunch of white trash customers expecting caviar service on a Tuna Helper budget (and they'd stiff the bill half the time). Bucky Threeteeth gets real irate when he can't get his porn fix at two in the morning. Then it turns out his computer is so clogged with cigarette tar and dust that the motherboard fried. Then he tries to pay you with meth or stolen painkillers after you fix it.
I began to charge way more than the hoi polloi repair shops I was undercutting and ended up doing professional work for professionals. If downtime is costing you thousands of dollars an hour, you're not going to wait a week for a hoi polloi shop to get the job done, you're going to call someone who can get you back up and running ASAP.
Business internet costs more than residential for the same reason.
... I wouldn't be surprised if it's a main source of food for some people.
I've heard it mentioned on Trailer Park Boys so I think you're right.
Highlands Ranch, CO? I've actually been there. I worked on a documentary about Rachel Scott (killed at Columbine). Her Dad lived there. Small world. Beautiful scenery when I went through. Granted, the second trip a few years later was less impressive because green was replaced with brown.
There was a plan to have fiber internet become a utility no different from water/sewer/power/etc across the entire system well over a decade ago because it would have cost so little to do it all at once, especially because the system would be paid off in record time, avoiding interest on the loan. Old people who didn't use the Internet balked at the idea of paying $10 a month with 20mbit symmetrical service (impressive at the time) and when they finally saw the value in it once their offspring scattered to the four winds and travel became expensive, they bitched about paying $60 a month for 250mbit symmetrical service (the lowest speed offered because there's no point in offering anything lower to the user base) for their Skype and Facetime calls.
My Grandma's old "I've fallen and I can't get up." button was wired to the phone line and still required power from the wall. The new one is wired via cable modem, but now the call box and the cable modem both require wall power, but have backup batteries inside that are fine for a half-hour or so. My fiber box will stay up for days on the battery at my end and the whole system is backed with batteries and generators that run on natural gas and diesel if the outage runs long as recently happened during a storm last fall. Comcast is supposed to have battery backup, but their Alpha box on the pole at the end of my block has been flashing the red failure LED for the past five years so it was no surprise my connection dropped even though I had everything at my end on a hefty UPS/generator combo before I dumped them for UTOPIA.
Comcast (at 12mbit/3mbit at the time) and Qwest (now CenturyLink; the phone line service that _still_ can't deliver DSL faster than about 4mbit/768kbit in 2018) pissed and moaned about other communications companies getting access to the power poles and such the local governments and power companies paid for. They tried everything they could to stop UTOPIA and UTOPIA gave them the finger by spending the bit of extra money to ensure each city block would easily have enough dedicated fibers to handle skyscrapers in the future. My block has 15 houses on it. We have a 192-fiber pipe coming in from each side. Each one of those fibers, with the proper equipment installed at each end, will handle 100gbps with today's technology.
We have "caps". For your $65 a month, you can move two terabytes in each direction without attracting any attention. I don't know anyone who has even come close to that. What they look out for is whether someone has hijacked your connection.
We have complete neutrality on the network. Since there are a dozen providers to choose from, they all know it's bad for business to do anything that goes against that.
Comcast tried to kill Utah's UTOPIA fiber project. They failed and now even a town with less than 1000 people has a 10G fiber option (most go with 1G).
The hell with Comcast.
Sounds like you're in an area with a rather different infrastructure.