I believe that's where he came from originally. I heard around the traps he used to practice wizardry at UNSW, and was involved in a sit-in in the Vice Chancellor's office. He migrated to New Zealand at a time when passports were not necessary - I understand he's never had any sort of official ID.

I understand Surfaces are glueballs. Once taken apart, they don't go back together. It was for this reason I chose not to buy a Surface last time I bought a laptop (early 2019), and went with an Asus Zenbook instead. With the Surface, it so annoyed me to have to pay an extra $400 for an extra 128GB of SSD, and the fact I couldn't easily upgrade (at the time, 256GB SSD went for about $120, and 512GB drives for less than $200). Otherwise, the Surface was one of my leading choices.

By jove man, you have really put your finger on why some codebases are the craptastic, bloated, difficult to understand things they are! It's all religion. No wonder I can never remember what the acronym SOLID stands for.

Maybe they should have changed the name to Fickung!

I have two machines (desktop and laptop) that I updated regularly. I always do one at a time. If one becomes unbootable (and it happens occasioanlly), I use the other machine to download a fresh distro to install. Only once the machine is bootable, do I repeat the upgrade process on the other machine.

This is truly astonishing. A human comparable artificial neural network would have somewhere in the order of 100 billion parameters. This entails they've trained a model of comparable complexity to that of a human brain. Kurzweil would say this is right on cue - Singulatarians have been predicting human level AI by 2020. I still think the harder problem of how to do AGI is still to be cracked, but I had no idea we were this close on the easier problem of scaling this stuff up.

It's almost half way to the Andromeda galaxy and also the Triangulum galaxy, which along with the Milky way make up the big 3 of the local group. Highly suspicious, I would think.

I quite often do background research on what we're watching, particularly if it is a historical drama. It enhances the viewing experience I can often look away from a TV show for a minute or two, particularly if it is just some sex scene, a fight scene or just some background setting panorama shot. I'll wait until we pause for a toilet break or whatever to discuss with my wife what I learnt.

Now we just need to get Microsoft Outlook to support it. I'm sure that has been the single reason why we haven't had encrypted and signed emails in those 20 years,

+1 this. I release my software for MacOSX, and am fairly widley read, but until now have never heard of "fullscreen mode".

To be honest, why expect application support at all for these features? These things should be the domain of the OS, not applications.

I say I have been doing agile for decades - since the turn of the century at least. But for me, agile means getting working software in front of users as frequently as possible. By working, I mean using some version of TDD and continuous integration to ensure you're not just serving up steaming shit to your users. No mention of user stories, pair programming or daily stand up scrums, which may or may not be appropriate for various circumstances. Agile is all about incremental development, and a conversation between the stakeholder and developer.

This answer is somewhat foreshortened over my previous attempt - for some reason slashdot lost my previous draft when I logged in.

This meant that during the bad days of IE-only websites, I was simply unable to access some websites, which meant frustrating calls to company's or government departments:

1. Are you using Internet
2. Yes, of course I'm using the internet
3. I mean did you click on the blue 'e'
4. There are many blue links with the letter 'e' - which one did you mean?
5. The one on the toolbar
6. What toolbar?
7. Look I'm using Netscape Navigator if that helps.
8. Oh, I heard about that one. Why don't you try Internet Explorer?
9. Yeah, I heard about that, but there isn't a version available for my operating system.
10. But its available for both PC and Mac.
11. I don't have access to either - I'm running Slackware...
12. Eh, what's that.
13. Linux
14. What's leenooks??
15. Never mind - please send me a paper form I can fill in, sign and fax back to you.
16. What's a fax?

At least with Chrome, I could always use it on Linux for just those rare occasions needed.

The EFF got it right in their report. It is irrelevant whether half the 'net is transported over https, as some other protocol may well displace it and http (eg whatever netflix uses for streaming its movies).

Is it just me,or do other people find Chrome's UI sucks? For example, click on the window title, which normally raises a window, and - nothng happens. Try to resize the window, aqnd it suddenly jumps to full screen mode - even when trying to reduce the size.

I use Chrome when I have to (one of my client's software only works in Chrome and Chrome's development tools are pretty cool). Otherwise, I use Seamonkey, as I can find everything I need. I'll use Firefox when a web site refuses to serve Seamonkey (looking at you Slack), but otherwise the lack of menu items to find things like "Open file", or "open new window" makes it a bit annoying for my main browser. Ya, probably this is me not being used to the Firefox way of doing things, but anyway.

I get good mileage from a NUC. Highly portable performant CPU module. Doesn't have battery option, but for me I'd only use it with power available. Myself, I use a laptop and ethernet cable to vnc into the NUC, however I can sometimes borrow monitors/keyboards, so I usually throw in an HDMI cable into my kitbag. You already have travel monitor/keyboard worked out so this might be an option for you, so long as you don't mind being tethered to power.