Please let them also remove all the XBox nonsense. The other day my laptop from work that runs Windows 11 Pro gave a big ass prompt if I didn’t want to try XBox Game Pass with the new Doom game. It’s basically an ad for games on a Pro machine, ridiculous.
I assume it’s to handle DDOS attacks? If somebody has beef with your instance, it would be very easy to bring it down for an extended period of time without some kind of protection in front.
It’s kind of like a fire extinguisher, everything is fine without it, right up to the point it isn’t.
How are you going to play that guitar Egg? You’re a fucking egg. Did your inside get scrambled? You ain’t got no bloody arms man!
I remember when I was 15 living at my father at the time and my girlfriend was visiting for the weekend. I had to work on Saturday, but she wanted to stay over the entire weekend and would find something to do whilst I was gone. I told her to be free to use my computer.
We also had a couple of cats and one of them would always hang out in my room. Now this wasn’t your regular cat, this was a big boy. Not fat, just a huge bundle of muscles, big claws and huge teeth. We’re talking dog sized cat here. He was very sweet, but could be a bit playful and use his claws and teeth whilst playing. He was very careful with humans and tried to be gentle, but it could be intimidating for people who didn’t know him.
When I got home I found the cat sleeping on my desk and my girlfriend on my bed reading a book. I asked her how her day went, she pointed to the cat and said: “I wanted to use the computer, but that asshole over there didn’t let me.” Apparently what happened was the cat lay down in front of the keyboard, easily blocking the whole thing. And every time she wanted to type he would try to grab her hand and play with her. Being so large, she got scared of him and just didn’t use the computer. The cat declared victory and slept in front of the keyboard to celebrate, thus blocking the computer all day.
After she got to know him better, they got along just fine. He was such a sweet boy and never hurt anyone on purpose. You did need to be careful giving hem treats tho, T-Rex chomping off a hand comes to mind with that one.
I ride my bicycle to work, so on average I eat at least one decent sized bug each week.
Ah you are from the US? No then it probably won’t be available. The US is very slow to make changes in retail. You only recently got those digital price tags that update constantly, we’ve had those for 10 years or so. In Europe the hand scanner or app self scan thing is very common.
Yup, that’s the one.
I think where I live it’s a company that offers the whole thing white label to supermarket and other shops. The systems are very similar across a bunch of different stores, but the branding is specific to the store. So their logo, their colors. Not just on all the UIs (both the scanner and the checkout), but also the physical hardware colors.
The hand scanners all run Android, the other day I got one that said Google Play Services had crashed. The scanner itself is probably made by Zebra and then customized by the company providing the scan and checkout solution.
It has become super common around here, to the point where I’m annoyed when it isn’t an option and I have to use the self-checkout where you need to scan at the checkout.
No, the hand scanners aren’t connected to the kiosks. They are at the entrance, you pick them up, scan all you want to buy. Then at checkout you place the scanner into a kiosk, it knows what you bought and you can checkout as usual. Every once in a while a store employee takes the scanners and puts them into the holders in the entrance. Depending on the size of the store there can be up to a hundred of these scanners available.
Other stores do the same, except your phone is the scanner with an app you can download. It works basically the same way. Most stores that offer the app also offer the hand scanners, which I prefer.
For me personally, the self checkout is just a way better solution to the problem. It’s for me much faster and more efficient. It’s also easier for the store itself. The best kind of self checkout for me is where you can scan everything with a hand scanner or app whilst shopping. Then just pay at the self checkout and walk out. That way I just put the stuff in my bag directly, instead of from the shelf into the basket or cart. Then from the cart to the checkout and then from the checkout into my bag. It also spreads out the action of scanning the products, which means avoiding a slow and repetitive task scanning it all in 1 go. I’m also not blocking a checkout whilst scanning. I hate it when stores that offer the hand scanner have people scanning a whole cart full of stuff at the checkout. And then bagging it of course, which blocks a checkout for ages. Just go to the regular checkout if you want to do that, the cashier is faster than you are and you can focus on bagging exclusively.
However the lack of human contact is an issue. I’ve seen a lot of stores that offer self checkout recently make one or two lines available for chatting. It’s just the regular oldskool cashier, but they are relaxed about it and chat with the customer. This means people in a hurry or that don’t need contact right then can go fast through the self checkout. And people who like to chat can use the chatty checkout with a good old human being.
This for me is the best way to apply new tech, all of the benefits for all parties involved and hopefully none of the downsides.
In trouble shooting it always important to answer at least these questions when asking for help:
This will help other people help you quickly and efficiently. This will greatly improve your chance of other people being able to help you, or you being able to help yourself.
I’ve always thought it to be important my partner comes first, I come second or not at all and that’s just fine with me.
There are valid reasons to limit password length. For example when a hashing function is used that requires a lot of processing power and the amount of power required to calculate the hash is related to the length. In that (very common) case, a denial of service attack vector is exposed. By simply spamming insane long passwords into a login form for example, the servers calculating the hash get easily overloaded. Even with rate limiting, only a small number of attacking nodes can be used to pull down a site.
So a maximum number of characters for a password is a valid thing to do. HOWEVER the maximum length for this purpose is usually set at something like 2048 or 4096 characters.
There is no excuse for a max password length of 16, that’s just terrible.
Most of his books are standalone, but set in the same universe yes. They kind of follow each other, but can also be read as standalone books.
Pushing Ice is one of the better ones imho, I love that book. The first book I ever read from him was Revelation Space and it blew my mind. One of the absolute best books I’ve ever read. He has a way of creating a universe that feels absolutely real and logical, yet be completely different from the world we know.
Another good one is Redemption Ark.
And if you like stuff like this I can also recommend Fred Saberhagen, his books are excellent. They are old but hold up pretty well.
Check out the works of Alastair Reynolds, he loves to apply this principle in his books. Great on world building and describing the weirdest parts of large civilizations.
For more a meta/review/fermi paradox talk point of view check out the content from Isaac Arthur, he also likes to point out this when discussing things like the fermi paradox and sci-fi in general.
This is a well known concept in sci-fi where civilizations massing in the tens of billions will have all kind of weird outliers. But at such a scale, even the really weird ones can form groups of tens of thousands or even larger. In sci-fi storytelling this is often used to explain weird behavior that probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense otherwise.
It also comes up in the fermi paradox a lot. For example aliens always want to stay at home and not be noticed or interact with anyone. But at a certain scale of civilization that doesn’t hold water. Even if 99.99% of a given alien species think that way, there would stil be at least a million of them that think otherwise and would be willing and able to act on it.
So it makes perfect sense for all the Predator people to be really normal and the hunting cult is a hobby that got out of hand.
Are you referring to the red ring of death on the Xbox? Because that has absolutely nothing to do with ATI. They just made the chips, it’s Microsoft that put them on the board. Most of the issues were caused by a poor connection between the chip and the board, not a hell of a lot ATI could do about that.
A lot of it was engineers underestimating the effect of thermals between 80 and 95 degrees for very long times, with cool down cycles in between. The thinking was this was just fine and wouldn’t be an issue. It turned out it was an issue, so they learnt from that and later generations didn’t really have that issue.
I hate how IDEs with error checking check the code at every character. Like my dude, we got this shit right with text editors having spell check back in 1997. Wait just a moment before checking please. All the time when I’m typing the editor freaks the fuck out, this is wrong, this is wrong, here is an error, wtf is this supposed to mean? And then when I type the ) or whatever, all is well. Just give me a freaking second to work and think.
Where I live the speed has recently been reduced from 30 mph to 15 mph in an effort to make the area more livable. Roads have been narrowed with more room for trees, sidewalks and bike paths. As well as artificial choke points and high speed bumps, all in an effort to improve life for the people living there. This is done alongside an effort to create larger high speed roads around the area and push cars to use those, which are the long way around but since they are higher speed still faster.
However fucking idiots driving these huge trucks can just go across the speed bumps at 45 mph and they rush all the choke point no matter if they have the right of way or not. When such a huge thing comes rushing at you, you move out of the way. They also regularly cut across parts where cars aren’t supposed to go. For example tight corners where the side walk is lower so larger delivery trucks and busses can still make the corner by cutting across the side walk a bit. Regular cars are supposed to just drive around them and in a regular car the kerb will make sure people don’t normally do that. The big trucks however use them all the time as they don’t even notice the kerb.
Since car brains experience the efforts to slow everything down as obstacles to overcome, more and more choose to drive these huge trucks and drive any speed and route they want. This actually goes against all the efforts to make the area better for pets, bicycles and people.
We desperately need max weight and size limits for cars.
Skill issue
Thanks for the suggestion. It’s my laptop from work, I have zero say in what software it runs, I don’t even have admin rights on it. None of my personal stuff runs Windows. But it might help other people on their own machines.