Here in British Columbia we just changed our clocks for the last time and will remain on UTC-7 indefinitely. Parts of B.C. (the northeast part) have been UTC-7 all year for a long time. The southeast part has been Mountain time (UTC-7/UTC-6) for a long time. Neither are changing how they do time.
I applaud losing the time change but I'm not crazy about permanent DST. People obviously haven't thought this through, what it's going to feel like come November.
...laura
Near-lifelong B.C. resident here...
People have grumbled about time changes as long as I can remember. Pick one. Stick to it. Just do it.
I can't say I agree with their choice. Not so much the crazy late sunset in the summer - we're used to that - but the very late sunrise in the winter. The sun will still set by 5 in December and January. So what?
...laura
"Please" and "thank you" are relics of a bygone age to most people.
The one that pisses me off is the habit of customer service people addressing men respectfully ("sir"), but not addressing women with respect ("ma'am" or equivalent). This isn't an issue in places like Texas, but it's very much an issue here in Canada.
...laura
When I first saw 4k I was startled by the picture quality. I also winced at the price tag, and shook my head at the lack of native 4k content. I now own a 4k TV, stream lots of 4k content on line, and generally like what I see. I shoot my own YouTube videos in 4k.
Is 8K just not that much better? Lack of content? Or just bad timing, people would rather spend money on food than a new toy?
...laura
Subaru do a lot of things well - they're masters of all-wheel drive - but this is nuts.
I bought a VW Taos earlier this year with the usual trial subscription to Sirius XM. I was going to pull the plug when it expired but Sirius XM offered me a steep discount if I re-upped, so I did. They did it so readily that I wonder how many people are paying full price...
The bulk of my listening is two channels, Hits One and The Pulse.
...laura
Yes, there are corridors and city pairs in the U.S. where high-speed rail could get people from one city to another quickly and efficiently. But what do they do when they get there? How do they get around?
...laura
Too much money for not enough content.
When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.
...laura
The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.
The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.
...laura
I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.
The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.
When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.
The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.
...laura
The issue is not that the climate has changed - it has, and it will continue to do so - but what we're going to do about it. No matter what the crisis, the solution always seems to be greater government control. Usually at the cost of our way of life.
What part of NO do you not understand?
...laura
My employers recently signed up for a ChatGPT account and I've been seeing how it can help me.
I remain responsible for the big picture, for actually making apps that work on iOS and Android. I've found ChatGPT helpful for refining details. It saves sifting through years worth of Stack Overflow postings. It's a handy tool, but it won't replace me any time soon.
If you say "Chat GPT" in French it sounds like "chat j'ai pété" ("cat I farted"). I guess I need to get out more...
...laura
It's not that long ago that I found myself with a box of 8" floppy discs from a legacy product and no way to read them. Yes, the software on them was long obsolete. But I would have liked to be able to preserve a bit of company heritage.
The product in question (Glenayre GL-3000) had been updated in the interim to use 3.5" floppies, though with a bespoke format. I figured out how to use Linux and creative parameters to dd to write disc images. We packaged this as a bootable CD for customers to write their own disc images. After a sharp drop in floppy quality around 2005 I discussed other storage options with my boss (e.g. USB) but the business case just wasn't there.
...laura
The 757 got a new lease on life when it was certified for ETOPS. But they're old and, by modern standards, inefficient.
I'm sure the Boeing folks have considered a 757neo (sorry for the Airbus terminology there) or a 757Max, but they appear to have opted for a clean-sheet 797 instead.
...laura
I'm doing SwiftUI app development and upgraded one of my test devices to iOS 26 beta 4 this morning.
I don't see anything different, but I assume something different is happening under the hood.
...laura
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro
