Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Archiving data (Score 2) 84

Writes age it, so the best method is to write once, then plug it in for a while every few years to let it do whatever automatic maintenance can or must be done. And honestly, I'm not sure whether that's baked into the hardware or if you need some software process to check the thing. Not my area of expertise.

In theory you can throw one in a drawer and it'll be fine a decade later... but you can't trust that it will be.

Comment Re:I learned on stick and never used it again (Score 1) 213

Cool story bro time.

I developed finger-based calculation independently as a 10 year old. Freaked the teacher right out, she didn't understand what the hell I was doing.

Probably not as complex or effective (I have never heard of Chisanbop, but I assume it's well-developed), but my method definitely helped me rapidly finish math tests without the more traditional intermediary steps of pencil and paper or a calculator.

Comment Archiving data (Score 1) 84

Please keep in mind that a flash drive is next to useless for long term storage. It will randomize over a surprisingly short time if it doesn't have power for data maintenance.

Your typical CD is better but still not good enough - under perfect conditions it will outlast you, but the way most people store them you might be really disappointed when you try to read it a decade from now. You're also going to run into the issue that even 20 years from now there may not be a consumer 'CD reader' available.

For music, your best bet remains a carefully stored vinyl collection. For now you should grab a USB vinyl ripper with a laser pickup and listen to your digital copies on whatever media you like, knowing that there will probably always be a traditional record player to fall back on if you look hard enough.

Comment Re: Put out fires quickly letting fuel build up (Score 4, Insightful) 33

40% of Canada's land area is covered in forests. It is simply impossible to "manage" that much forest, and it's utterly fucking absurd to suggest otherwise. And to try to take climate change out of the equation is just a way of misdirecting away from the actual fucking cause; GHG emissions raising surface temperatures.

When will humans stop buying the most trivially fucking moronic red herrings? What a disreputable idiotic species.

Comment Re:I learned on stick and never used it again (Score 1) 213

>What's next, making them learn how an abacus works? Yeah, real good use of time there.

I shall don my fedora for a moment and say, 'ecktually...'

There's value in teaching kids how to use an abacus. I doubt anybody benefits much anymore from learning to use one like an expert, but for basic counting, place value, and addition / subtraction I'd consider it an excellent tool for starting kids down the road to mathematical literacy.

Manual transmissions in a world where we're heading to EVs? Not so much. The ability to drive stick is more a hobby thing, and soon a historical curiosity for niche enthusiasts.

Comment Re:Put out fires quickly letting fuel build up (Score 2) 33

It's almost as if allowing emissions to ramp up with little meaningful effort to control them is having the inevitable consequences predicted decades ago. But let's not deal with that, because it's hard. Instead let's have the President of the United States demand Canada hold back the tides.

Comment Microsoft sucks (Score 3, Interesting) 53

My kid lost his Minecraft account due to 'suspicious account activity' that magically registered while converting his Mojang account to a Microsoft account as they were pressuring him to do.

'Customer service' was completely unhelpful and presumably the company knows you're not going to go to the bother of taking them to court over such a small amount of money.

So congratulations, Microsoft - I pirated the game because we owned it and you were denying access. You 'win'!

Comment Re:Not sure what the answer is? (Score 1) 109

You can't stop the LLM if it's published... but you can sue the company that scraped data it was not legally entitled to scrape, and the legal sanctions should involve destruction of the collected archive of training data and all copies of the resulting LLM as well as a financial penalty that is sufficiently large to dissuade future repetitions of the offense.

"But that would harm our bottom line" is not an acceptable defense against this. Don't steal. It's easy.

Of course, stealing's easier if you're a megacorp who can buy politicians and pay settlements out of the corporate equivalent of pocket change.

Comment Re:Why do you hate yourself? (Score 1) 105

I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

Comment Re:For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score 1) 105

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

Comment I wonder (Score 2) 105

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

Comment Re: Wait...? (Score 2) 105

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

Slashdot Top Deals

Heavier than air flying machines are impossible. -- Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, c. 1895

Working...