I used to play in a band with a mate who bought a Transit Van in the mid 1990's. Weirdly the van came with an 8 track player (rather than the usual radio and compact cassette player) and the only two 8 track tapes he had also came with the van. They were Ted Nugent's "Cat Scratch Fever" and a compilation featuring various British miltary marching bands.

We spent several years driving up and down the country to various gigs alternating the tapes. Absolutely tedious but also somehow fun. At some point someone did find a Neil Sedaka album on 8 track in a local charity shop but sadly the tape snapped after about the third play :(

Alas the van, and the 8 track player, are no longer with us but my mate still has the tapes !

I've written about this before, but it bears repeating. My father worked for several supermarket chains as a department manager. I don't mean that he ran the delicatessen for one market, he was the delicatessen supervisor for the entire chain. He told me once that if a market was doing very, very well, it would have a net profit margin of 2%. Now imagine what all of those CC fees are doing to that.

I like that old time rock and roll That kind of music really soothes my soul

And where were you The Day the Music Died?

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.

Remember, I did specify lakes as a place where a ship would need a pilot.

This means you

The pilot will have to take into account calm areas and avoid those as well, but satellite weather forecasting makes that possible now.

In nautical terms, a pilot is a specialist in navigating through a harbor, lake, river or other difficult passage, and is not a regular member of any ship's crew. You have the right idea, but the proper job title is "navigator."

Their aggressive military actions against Tawain and their (Well Xiâ(TM)s) statements about a probable hostile takeover over Tawaiin by 2027 kind of makes them bad. Or did we decide that autocratic Putin was not âoebadâ for invading Ukraine so he could bring back the Soviet era??
And Xiâ(TM)s promise to Trump that he will not invade Taiwan during Trumpâ(TM)s term in office seems more about playing Trump as the fool he probably perceives Trump to be.

Ergo, fomenting war is a bad thing, and in that light China should, in fact, be seen as âoebad.â

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

That's going far past anything I would know; I'm software, not hardware and it was a long time ago. All I remember is that there were a pair of uprights that helped hold the chip up and it went from the motherboard almost to the top of the case.

This reminds me of something that was done back in the (I think) 90s for one of the Pentium chips. Instead of it lying flat on the motherboard it had all of its connectors along one edge and stood upright on that edge in a special mount that kept it upright so that all of it was exposed to the air and didn't need a heat sink or special fan. Yes, it had its drawbacks, mostly that it couldn't be used in a laptop and needed a tall case, but it worked and worked well. I know, because I used one for several years back then and only replaced it to upgrade.

One good example is ModemManager. It can't exit until either the modem is on-line or it times out, generally because you either don't have one or it's not connected to anything. Why it doesn't start out by checking to see if you have a modem and if not exit right away I don't know. Personally, one of the first things I do is disable and mask it so it doesn't even try to start because it's been well over a decade since I last needed it and nuking it that way makes a significant change for the better in the boot time. HTH, HAND.

I happen to be a member of a social club that's organized as a 501-C. I've sent a copy of TFA to the club's treasurer so that she can be on the lookout for any funny business and not be taken unawares. If any of you know about any non-profits that might be affected by this, please give them a head's up!

One particular home is a brand new, probably a $25 million dollar plus creation, very modern and sleek. The entire house, HVAC, lighting, cameras, gates, door locks, etc. is controlled by a central service on a network. Things go wrong all the time. When the system goes down, nothing works.

Let me guess: that home, as designed and built had no built in batteries or generator to pick up the load when the inevitable power failure occurred. How long did it take for that brain phart to be corrected and how long was the house dark when the omission was first discovered?

1. There are a lot of empty seats; a lot.

2. The demo wasn't live, likely due to the huge failure of an event that the Meta one was.

3. They noted that you do all of this 'hands-free', likely an intentional knock at Meta's offering.

4. The examples were...odd. Who the fuck is going to be using this to shop for a fucking rug? Come on; give some real-life examples that are IMPORTANT. None of these were.

5. The entire presentation's style, across multiple different presenters, was...exhausting...halting...jarring...and...really undergraduate level. It was almost as if they were being fed what to say in their earpieces, not from memory and not in a fluid and practiced way.

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Personally? I love the idea of AR glasses that work well. I want to have live subtitles for humans talking to me as I'm hard of hearing and hearing aids do not work well for me, particularly in public spaces.

I want it to give me important information, respond to my environment in ways that are useful (telling me where I am really isn't that; I know where the fuck I am--tell me what I should be doing or where I should be going next, perhaps?)

I know these are early adopter level devices, but they're just fucking ugly due to their bulk.

I strongly prefer this option to Meta's simply because I don't have to do stupid fucking mime-style hand gestures, but I want this technology to be useful, now, not in 5 years. We're going to see this largely flop just like so many other AR/VR toys out there unless they make this something more than a gimmicky piece of shit.