I've noted this for a while, that even with a perfectly good WiFi connection ("good" = streaming video bandwidth)
my iPad insists on using cellular data for some network functions. So I leave the cellular data turned off
unless I actually need it.
The motivation when I bought it was that I could use cellular data to access flight planning and weather information
if I land at an airport that has cell coverage but no WiFi. It has served this function just fine, but somebody at Apple
needs their ass kicked very hard over this one.
A step in the right direction. The solution is always going to be a mix of technologies. One size does not fit all
A couple of weeks ago I flew
over Altamont Pass just east of San Francisco and the wind farms weren't doing much...but it was sunny,
so solar facilities would be cranking out the watts. As it should be. Earlier in the summer I was
in northern Alberta (Edmonton -> Peace River -> High Level) and the perpetual wind had me watching
for wind turbines. Saw a few.
Here in B.C. we have lots of hydroelectric capacity (and some fossil fuel generation, alas...)
and are playing with wind and tidal
power. Our climate isn't particularly sunny (except for the Okanagan), so solar is a non-starter.
A few years ago I measured my longitude myself, just for fun. I measured the time of local noon, using a portable shortwave
radio tuned to WWV. Correct local solar time to mean time with the equation of time, read off my longitude. I would have won
the prize. Shows what an accurate clock can do.
I've read Captain Cook's logs and in his time they observed things like the moons of Jupiter to get a time reference.
Reasonably accurate, but time-consuming.
The only "tech" things I ever seem to use in a car are cruise control and the entertainment system.
On a recent trip I had a rental car with all the in-car controls on a touch screen. I appreciated the convenience
of being able to adjust the cruise control and climate control, play tunes, tune the radio and so on, all from a common interface.
This is a car, dammit, not a mobile computer laboratory. Techie toys must do more than be
cool. They must solve problems.
I'm reminded of airplane glass cockpits. Pilots rarely need exact numbers, most of the time they just need
a glance at an analogue display. "Full power...confirmed! Gauges green...airspeed alive...rotate..."
I think the last time I used a Windows 95 system was in the 2000/2001 timeframe. It's been a while.
I used Windows 95 a lot. It worked, but when USB started to become important I upgraded to Windows 98. Some people claim
there is a USB implementation for Windows 95 but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.
I worked for the Evil Empire in the early '90s and had access to early versions of Windows 95 (still codenamed Chicago).
One memorable early build crashed and corrupted my hard drive after I attempted to adjust the mouse settings.
We decided, a long time ago, that the web would be supported by advertising. Other business models
are possible, and were explored, but subsequently abandoned. So be it.
OK, so show me good ads. Cut the "weird trick" ads. Lose the pop-ups, lose the auto-play videos,
lose the bad HTML
that makes web pages fidget and bounce around while the browser figures out what size your image really
is. Lose the web pages that never finish loading. And please lose the Flash ads that freeze the entire browser.
When I loaded this page I got
a BMW ad, an ad for a camera store and an ad for shoes. I can deal with that.
A few years ago the U.S. military were evaluating a new hybrid vehicle to replace the Hummer.
Their main interest was logistics, since Hummers aren't the most economical
vehicles to operate.
They couldn't help but notice that in electric mode their new vehicle was quiet.
Around here the Toyotas are positively noisy. The Teslas, on the other
hand, only make a faint whirr from their tires.
The standard desktop at the company I work for used to be a Sun Ultra 5, and when the company imploded
I picked an Ultra 5 with a fast processor (400 MHz), put some more memory in it, took it home and put Debian on it.
It worked fine. Entirely decent interactive performance, like a fast Pentium 2. Not a box for
video editing or other high-CPU/bandwidth activities, but fine otherwise.
I was amused to note that it
wasn't a Windows box, so it was immune to Windows attacks. It wasn't an x86 box, so it was
immune to x86 attacks. I guess I amuse easily.:-)
We had a pile of 32 bit SparcStations. We (literally) couldn't give them away.
And I am guessing that spaceyhackerlady does, in fact, know she is surrounded by linux machines.
My employers pay me to do cool shit, and we use Linux to do it. Company standard is CentOS, but my personal
research/playpen box is Slackware.
FWIW, I've run Linux on x86, 68k, ARM and UltraSPARC. My home computer, the one I actually spend
my own money on, is a Mac. It shares desk space with an x86 Linux box and a Raspberry Pi.
Prior to the IBM PC there was enormous diversity in computing. I have some early issues of Byte and the
hardware in the ads is all over the place. Most of the names are long forgotten now.
The BBC did Micro Men, a cute
(and mostly historically accurate) program about the rise and
fall of Acorn, which happened in the same time period. They too got broadsided by IBM, but managed
to develop the ARM processor before they imploded.
Yup. There are some examples of good AI in tv shows. Data and the hubots in Real Humans stand out in my mind.
I remember the scene in The Offspring where Data's daughter Lal was complaining about not being able to feel
emotions. While doing an awfully good imitation of anger and frustration...
1. I am an American citizen, and I have the right to enter my country.
You do. Just as I, a Canadian citizen, have the right to enter Canada. I do not have the legal
right to enter the United States, but can do so with official permission. Which usually amounts to the
Customs agent at the border or airport telling me to have a nice day.
If the government want to be difficult, your citizenship must be verified. Then Customs can
give you the once over: yes, you can enter the country, but they want to know what you're
bringing with you.
I ride the bus to work. It's a non-issue. It's the right thing to do. No parking required, let somebody else deal with the traffic.
I have a car that I drive on weekends. One day a week I drive to work to remind myself why I take the bus the other four days.
The bus takes a little longer than driving, but not enough that I worry about it much. I save up mid-week errands for the day I
drive my car.
If I'm going to downtown Vancouver I take the bus. Parking is scarce and expensive. The traffic is impossible. UGH!
And now Seattle is going on a war against vehicles by eliminating required parking in new apartments and condos. So everyone must revert to on street parking. Good luck plugging your vehicle into an outlet if you are 200 feet down the street. It's back to gasoline for everyone.
Always ready to jump on a bandwagon, many new buildings in Vancouver are doing the same thing.
Most of our electricity here in B.C. comes from hydroelectric systems, so fossil fuels/emission elsewhere is a non-issue.
A middle-of-the-road EV like a Nissan Leaf would cover 98% of my driving. I can afford one easily.
I could afford a Model S if I put my mind to it. I've even looked in to buying an old banger and
converting it myself.
The problem is I have nowhere to plug one in. I live in an apartment building and there is no wiring in the parkade.
Nor is there any requirement (or incentive) to retrofit the building. I've talked to the building management, but
we've never come up with any answers.
New buildings must have EV support. Old ones don't.
I see this with many of the older light airplanes. Types like the Cessna 150 and Piper Cub were designed when people weighed
less, and it's difficult to get two 2015-size people plus a usable fuel load in either. There have been commercial plane crashes
due to portly passengers (e.g. Air Midwest 5481).
I can fly a Cessna 152 solo with full fuel tanks, but if I have anybody in the plane with me I have to calculate how much fuel
I can carry without being overweight. I can't do anything meaningful with a 150, and I'm not that heavy.
I've seen two quasi-startups go down the tubes from the inside.
One company had some very clever ideas, but were chronically incapable of making reliable hardware, or
of making software that worked. They had no internal procedures to track what they were making, what it
was supposed to do, or how they knew it worked. Too many releases were "we have to ship something
to keep from losing what little credibility we still have".
Another company tried to reinvent itself after its prime business peaked and then started to implode.
The idea we tried to develop wasn't commercially uninteresting, but we had major focus issues. What, exactly, do we
want to do? Who is going to buy it? For how much? Having owned our old industry
we weren't very good at competing with others in our new industry.
Both companies had issues with ineffectual leadership, flavour-of-the-month development, and business
decisions made to help friends rather than make money. Both were broadsided by external developments
that eventually rendered their products commercially irrelevant.
In Canada we've just had a verdict in a supposedly homegrown terrorism
case (do a search for the names Nuttal and Korody), but it's clear that
the defendants only have a handful of brain cells between them (heroin will do that...),
and the undercover cops had a major part in turning a couple of harmless losers who aren't quite sure
what day it is in to a major
threat to national security.
Needless to say, their lawyer is going for entrapment.
Also needless to say, the media are going entirely with the government/party line...
Windows 3.0 was the first version I used to any significant degree. It looked so high-tech, though to 2015
eyes it looks like something from the old stone age. It did some cool stuff. It also gave us General Protection Faults, the predecessor to the Blue Screen Of Death.
For a long time I recommended Windows 98 to non-technical users. Some people claimed there was a USB implementation
for Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion they were mistaken. My first exposure to Windows 95 was an early alpha
(I worked for the evil empire at the time) that crashed
and required reformatting the hard disc after attempting to reconfigure the mouse.
I was intrigued by some of the other options out there. I sent my resume to Quarterdeck - I thought DESQview was neat - but only
got a thanks-but-no-thanks postcard back.
The bottleneck is the cavalier attitude
of web designers to network resources. You do not need to load
25 different URLs (DNS lookups, plus autoplay video and all the usual
clickbait junk) to show me a weather forecast. Or a Slashdot article, for that matter...
I came of age in the late '70s and early '80s, and my musical tastes reflect that.
There have been some new discoveries along the way. I adore Sheryl Crow, and thought Lady Gaga
was a breath of fresh air. With those exceptions (and a few others) I haven't heard much of interest
since the early '90s.
If I saw somebody with an aol.com email I'd wonder if they were a tech dinosaur,
a total hipster, or somebody who had simply stuck with something that worked.
I've had my Hotmail email address since 1996, prior to Microsoft taking it over.
I've stuck with it because it works. It does exactly what Hotmail promised from the start,
providing email that is independent of my ISP or employer.
Slashdot Mirror
I've noted this for a while, that even with a perfectly good WiFi connection ("good" = streaming video bandwidth) my iPad insists on using cellular data for some network functions. So I leave the cellular data turned off unless I actually need it.
The motivation when I bought it was that I could use cellular data to access flight planning and weather information if I land at an airport that has cell coverage but no WiFi. It has served this function just fine, but somebody at Apple needs their ass kicked very hard over this one.
...laura
A step in the right direction. The solution is always going to be a mix of technologies. One size does not fit all
A couple of weeks ago I flew over Altamont Pass just east of San Francisco and the wind farms weren't doing much...but it was sunny, so solar facilities would be cranking out the watts. As it should be. Earlier in the summer I was in northern Alberta (Edmonton -> Peace River -> High Level) and the perpetual wind had me watching for wind turbines. Saw a few.
Here in B.C. we have lots of hydroelectric capacity (and some fossil fuel generation, alas...) and are playing with wind and tidal power. Our climate isn't particularly sunny (except for the Okanagan), so solar is a non-starter.
...laura
A few years ago I measured my longitude myself, just for fun. I measured the time of local noon, using a portable shortwave radio tuned to WWV. Correct local solar time to mean time with the equation of time, read off my longitude. I would have won the prize. Shows what an accurate clock can do.
I've read Captain Cook's logs and in his time they observed things like the moons of Jupiter to get a time reference. Reasonably accurate, but time-consuming.
...laura
My personal/playpen Linux box at work is Slackware. It uses LILO. Of course.
There is always a place for software that works. Software that does one thing, does exactly what it's supposed to do, and does it well.
...laura
The only "tech" things I ever seem to use in a car are cruise control and the entertainment system. On a recent trip I had a rental car with all the in-car controls on a touch screen. I appreciated the convenience of being able to adjust the cruise control and climate control, play tunes, tune the radio and so on, all from a common interface. This is a car, dammit, not a mobile computer laboratory. Techie toys must do more than be cool. They must solve problems.
I'm reminded of airplane glass cockpits. Pilots rarely need exact numbers, most of the time they just need a glance at an analogue display. "Full power...confirmed! Gauges green...airspeed alive...rotate..."
...laura
I think the last time I used a Windows 95 system was in the 2000/2001 timeframe. It's been a while.
I used Windows 95 a lot. It worked, but when USB started to become important I upgraded to Windows 98. Some people claim there is a USB implementation for Windows 95 but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.
I worked for the Evil Empire in the early '90s and had access to early versions of Windows 95 (still codenamed Chicago). One memorable early build crashed and corrupted my hard drive after I attempted to adjust the mouse settings.
...laura
We decided, a long time ago, that the web would be supported by advertising. Other business models are possible, and were explored, but subsequently abandoned. So be it.
OK, so show me good ads. Cut the "weird trick" ads. Lose the pop-ups, lose the auto-play videos, lose the bad HTML that makes web pages fidget and bounce around while the browser figures out what size your image really is. Lose the web pages that never finish loading. And please lose the Flash ads that freeze the entire browser.
When I loaded this page I got a BMW ad, an ad for a camera store and an ad for shoes. I can deal with that.
...laura
Or drive by's.
A few years ago the U.S. military were evaluating a new hybrid vehicle to replace the Hummer. Their main interest was logistics, since Hummers aren't the most economical vehicles to operate. They couldn't help but notice that in electric mode their new vehicle was quiet.
Around here the Toyotas are positively noisy. The Teslas, on the other hand, only make a faint whirr from their tires.
...laura
The standard desktop at the company I work for used to be a Sun Ultra 5, and when the company imploded I picked an Ultra 5 with a fast processor (400 MHz), put some more memory in it, took it home and put Debian on it. It worked fine. Entirely decent interactive performance, like a fast Pentium 2. Not a box for video editing or other high-CPU/bandwidth activities, but fine otherwise.
I was amused to note that it wasn't a Windows box, so it was immune to Windows attacks. It wasn't an x86 box, so it was immune to x86 attacks. I guess I amuse easily. :-)
We had a pile of 32 bit SparcStations. We (literally) couldn't give them away.
...laura
And I am guessing that spaceyhackerlady does, in fact, know she is surrounded by linux machines.
My employers pay me to do cool shit, and we use Linux to do it. Company standard is CentOS, but my personal research/playpen box is Slackware.
FWIW, I've run Linux on x86, 68k, ARM and UltraSPARC. My home computer, the one I actually spend my own money on, is a Mac. It shares desk space with an x86 Linux box and a Raspberry Pi.
...laura
Prior to the IBM PC there was enormous diversity in computing. I have some early issues of Byte and the hardware in the ads is all over the place. Most of the names are long forgotten now.
The BBC did Micro Men, a cute (and mostly historically accurate) program about the rise and fall of Acorn, which happened in the same time period. They too got broadsided by IBM, but managed to develop the ARM processor before they imploded.
...laura
Yup. There are some examples of good AI in tv shows. Data and the hubots in Real Humans stand out in my mind.
I remember the scene in The Offspring where Data's daughter Lal was complaining about not being able to feel emotions. While doing an awfully good imitation of anger and frustration...
...laura
1. I am an American citizen, and I have the right to enter my country.
You do. Just as I, a Canadian citizen, have the right to enter Canada. I do not have the legal right to enter the United States, but can do so with official permission. Which usually amounts to the Customs agent at the border or airport telling me to have a nice day.
If the government want to be difficult, your citizenship must be verified. Then Customs can give you the once over: yes, you can enter the country, but they want to know what you're bringing with you.
...laura
I ride the bus to work. It's a non-issue. It's the right thing to do. No parking required, let somebody else deal with the traffic. I have a car that I drive on weekends. One day a week I drive to work to remind myself why I take the bus the other four days. The bus takes a little longer than driving, but not enough that I worry about it much. I save up mid-week errands for the day I drive my car.
If I'm going to downtown Vancouver I take the bus. Parking is scarce and expensive. The traffic is impossible. UGH!
...laura
It's all Greek to me...
...laura
And now Seattle is going on a war against vehicles by eliminating required parking in new apartments and condos. So everyone must revert to on street parking. Good luck plugging your vehicle into an outlet if you are 200 feet down the street. It's back to gasoline for everyone.
Always ready to jump on a bandwagon, many new buildings in Vancouver are doing the same thing.
Most of our electricity here in B.C. comes from hydroelectric systems, so fossil fuels/emission elsewhere is a non-issue.
...laura
A middle-of-the-road EV like a Nissan Leaf would cover 98% of my driving. I can afford one easily. I could afford a Model S if I put my mind to it. I've even looked in to buying an old banger and converting it myself.
The problem is I have nowhere to plug one in. I live in an apartment building and there is no wiring in the parkade. Nor is there any requirement (or incentive) to retrofit the building. I've talked to the building management, but we've never come up with any answers.
New buildings must have EV support. Old ones don't.
...laura
I see this with many of the older light airplanes. Types like the Cessna 150 and Piper Cub were designed when people weighed less, and it's difficult to get two 2015-size people plus a usable fuel load in either. There have been commercial plane crashes due to portly passengers (e.g. Air Midwest 5481).
I can fly a Cessna 152 solo with full fuel tanks, but if I have anybody in the plane with me I have to calculate how much fuel I can carry without being overweight. I can't do anything meaningful with a 150, and I'm not that heavy.
...laura
I've seen two quasi-startups go down the tubes from the inside.
One company had some very clever ideas, but were chronically incapable of making reliable hardware, or of making software that worked. They had no internal procedures to track what they were making, what it was supposed to do, or how they knew it worked. Too many releases were "we have to ship something to keep from losing what little credibility we still have".
Another company tried to reinvent itself after its prime business peaked and then started to implode. The idea we tried to develop wasn't commercially uninteresting, but we had major focus issues. What, exactly, do we want to do? Who is going to buy it? For how much? Having owned our old industry we weren't very good at competing with others in our new industry.
Both companies had issues with ineffectual leadership, flavour-of-the-month development, and business decisions made to help friends rather than make money. Both were broadsided by external developments that eventually rendered their products commercially irrelevant.
...laura
It's not just in the U.S.A.
In Canada we've just had a verdict in a supposedly homegrown terrorism case (do a search for the names Nuttal and Korody), but it's clear that the defendants only have a handful of brain cells between them (heroin will do that...), and the undercover cops had a major part in turning a couple of harmless losers who aren't quite sure what day it is in to a major threat to national security. Needless to say, their lawyer is going for entrapment.
Also needless to say, the media are going entirely with the government/party line...
...laura
The perfect presentation slide is blank. Because I am giving the presentation, and I expect people to listen to what I have to say.
...laura
Windows 3.0 was the first version I used to any significant degree. It looked so high-tech, though to 2015 eyes it looks like something from the old stone age. It did some cool stuff. It also gave us General Protection Faults, the predecessor to the Blue Screen Of Death.
For a long time I recommended Windows 98 to non-technical users. Some people claimed there was a USB implementation for Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion they were mistaken. My first exposure to Windows 95 was an early alpha (I worked for the evil empire at the time) that crashed and required reformatting the hard disc after attempting to reconfigure the mouse.
I was intrigued by some of the other options out there. I sent my resume to Quarterdeck - I thought DESQview was neat - but only got a thanks-but-no-thanks postcard back.
...laura
Fiber is amply fast.
The bottleneck is the cavalier attitude of web designers to network resources. You do not need to load 25 different URLs (DNS lookups, plus autoplay video and all the usual clickbait junk) to show me a weather forecast. Or a Slashdot article, for that matter...
...laura
I came of age in the late '70s and early '80s, and my musical tastes reflect that.
There have been some new discoveries along the way. I adore Sheryl Crow, and thought Lady Gaga was a breath of fresh air. With those exceptions (and a few others) I haven't heard much of interest since the early '90s.
I remain baffled by rap.
...laura
If I saw somebody with an aol.com email I'd wonder if they were a tech dinosaur, a total hipster, or somebody who had simply stuck with something that worked.
I've had my Hotmail email address since 1996, prior to Microsoft taking it over. I've stuck with it because it works. It does exactly what Hotmail promised from the start, providing email that is independent of my ISP or employer.
...laura