[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 30 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Microsoft is shit. Windows, is shit. Windows 11 is a privacy goddamn nightmare.

But in the end of the day, it just fucking works, those damn bastards ensure that. And even when something doesn't work, it seems, for some unknown reason, most of the online solutions do fix the issue.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha

(Pause for breath)

Hahahahahahahahahahaha

Only if you count "most of the online solutions" as "run SFC /SCANNOW and if that doesn't work, just reinstall your OS".

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 33 points 1 month ago

Never understood why smartphones are so super bright by default.

Because they have to compete with 50k lux outside and then scale to 600 lux indoors, then down to just to a few lux in a darkened room.

Perhaps the brightness slider needs to be more logarithmic so you can slide from 0.001 percent to 100 percent more easily.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 30 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I've commented on this previously, but this is essentially either a hit piece, or very poor reporting on Reuters' part.

Basically nobody looks at raw numbers for injury statistics. It's normalised to injures per million man hours worked, and when you take some conservative estimates on the size of SpaceX's workforce and the time periods involved, you find that they land pretty much in the middle of current "heavy industry" injury rates.

But it surrrre does look bad if you look at the raw numbers, just like if you looked at the combined raw numbers of, say, 10 steel mills across the country.

Permalink to my previous, much longer, comment

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 32 points 1 month ago

If you're interested in the systems behind Apollo, go find and read "Digital Apollo".

It goes all the way through the project and describes in good detail everything, how they developed the control systems, the computer hardware, how the software was designed, how they implemented one of the first real computer systems project management, all the interactions between astronauts/test pilots who still wanted to "manually fly the lander", the political back and forth between competing teams, the whole thing.

It's a great read if you have a technical mindset.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 28 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

"guzzle more petrol"

"7 percent more than advertised"

Guzzle Def: "to drink quickly, eagerly, and usually in large amounts."

🤷‍♂️

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 30 points 3 months ago

McAfee wrote a program that used the Sqlite library for database storage.

When going about its data storage business for McAfee's program, the Sqlite library was storing files in C:\temp with prefixes like sqlite_3726371.

Users see that and get angry, and bug the Sqlite developers.

Now probably when initialising the Sqlite library McAfee could have given it the location of a directory to keep it's temp files. Then they could have been tucked away somewhere along with the rest of the McAfee code base and be more easily recognised as belonging to them, but they didn't.

So because of a bit of careless programming on McAfee's part, Sqlite developers were getting the heat because the files were easily recognisable as belonging to them.

Because the Sqlite developers don't have control of what McAfee was doing, the most expedient way to solve the problem was to obfuscate the name a bit.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 30 points 4 months ago

"I think there's something wrong with the door switch on my old microwave oven. I've been testing it outside for safety, that's why it's out in the back yard pointing upwards with the door open."

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 30 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The filesystem driver knows the size of the filesystem is larger than the physical size of the partition it is on. Because of that it refuses to do anything with it until that discrepancy is sorted.

Boot to a USB/ISO, run cfdisk, extend the partition size back to original or larger, then run fsck on the partition again.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 33 points 8 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Local channels are required to show 55 percent local content between 6am to midnight on their primary channel.

What's the cheapest content you can make? Reality television. Great bang for buck there. Practically writes itself, and plenty of fools will go on it for free for the slim chance of a prize at the end. Just provide a few locations/sets, some alcohol to get the drama going, and Bob's yer uncle.

Hence we have:

MAFS - seriously, how many times can you repeat an 'experiment' before you deem it a failure? Every season all I see is the miserable failure of alleged 'experts' in matching people.

SURVIVAHHH - JAW DROPPING CHALLENGES AWAIT OUR CONTESTANTS AND OMG BACKSTABBING, EVERY WEEK.

I'M A D-LIST CELEBRITY GET ME OUT OF HERE - As above. Less backstabbing though, that's nice.

This is closely followed by game shows, so we also have:

DEAL-OR-NO-DEAL

TIPPPPING POIIIINT

THE CHASAAH

Finally, news and "current affairs" can then be used to plug the gap.

So we now we can run:

  • 6-9am with a couple of hosts doing some morning television waffling on about nothing in particular.
  • have a repeat of last night's "prime time" shows from 10-12.
  • squeeze in some overseas content like Days Of Our Lives in the afternoon.
  • have a bit of gap-filler at NEWS, FIRST AT 5, WAIT 4.
  • and then we can show the "real" news at 6. 30.
  • Add in THAH PROJECT, or A CURRENT AFFAIYAAH, where we can talk for eight minutes , cut to two minutes of ads, cut back to the desk for another "coming up next" and then cut back to another two minutes of ads before we have to worry about actual content.
  • Finally we can show our prime-time content (MAFS et al), which we've teased all day with ads sprinkled between everything else.
  • After that, who cares? We've reached our local quota. Stick a movie or two on until midnight.

I used to think that ABC/SBS were a little dull. But now I'm glad of them.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Ok I'll just inject a little bit of context into those numbers because it smells faintly of a hit piece by Reuters, simply because of the timeframe used and the number of employees spaceX has.

My experience is 30 years in the mining industry, which in that time has become pretty good at managing safety, and reporting on it.

So I'll dig in a little.

Since 2014, so nine years.

SpaceX employee count : 13000 approximately.

Take about a quarter of that to weed out the paper pushers and company growth since 2014, gives us 3500 or so employees in the line of fire (that is, manufacturing and such).

600 reportable injuries, so about 66 injuries a year. About 5.5 a month on average, over 9 years.

Now those 3500 employees work 60 hour weeks (because: spaceX). So 5.5 injuries and 840,000 man-hours a month. I'm going to round those hours up to 1 million for convenience and to counter the fact that I ditched quite a few people in my initial assessment of SpaceX employees in the line of fire before.

And with a bit of half-assery , I say, "ta-da!" and get 5.5 reportable injuries per million man-hours at SpaceX over the last 9 years.

So, what kind of number is that? Well for tracking this kind of thing normally you would work on a value called that "lost time injury frequency rate" - LTIFR - which is the number of injuries per million hours worked. Oh look, my previous rounding to a million has become very convenient.

Looking at the data that Reuters has given, and my half-assed guesses about employees, spaceX has a long term LTIFR of 5.5. Note that number drops significantly if you use SpaceX's entire employee base, which as a single entity, they would be quite entitled to use and report.

How does that number stand up against industry norms? 5.5 is middle of the road for manufacturing and construction, generally, but that includes all sorts of manufacturing, from building houses, to steel foundries , to making cars.

The fact that Reuters had to take 9 years of data to make the raw numbers sound alarming enough is a bad smell. They could have calculated LTIFR numbers for each year and figured out a trend and if that was alarming enough, they could have reported on it, like "SpaceX increasingly dangerous to work at!". The fact that they didn't makes me suspect it's a hit piece, although I am willing to accept they didn't want to get into LTIFR numbers and are dumbing it down for the general public.

Absolutely the number of serious injuries is a concern. Serious injuries are also at the top of a "injury pyramid", with every layer underneath broader, all the way down to "Ow, I stubbed my toe". If you have real figures for one layer (like a layer where an employee can't hide an injury), you can get a good idea of what the other layers should look like.

Judging from Reuters' numbers, the bottom "minor" layers aren't getting reported enough, which suggests a lack of safety culture at SpaceX. Although that could simply be from Reuters' using only public records, which, you know, only keep track of injuries worth keeping track of, so the bottom of that pyramid might only be seen by SpaceX internally.

In conclusion, the reporting by Reuters of raw numbers over long timeframes is suspect. That's not how things are done in the safety industry, which works with weighted metrics to get results they can compare between companies. Dig in a bit further yourself.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It brings that consistent Seattle blandness everywhere it goes.

Neal Stephenson said it best in Snow Crash :

"In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.

But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.

The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto."

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 29 points 1 year ago

Article summary:

Linux: Do this.

Apple: Do this.

Windows: Conspicuously absent.

Config state is an absolute shitshow on windows. Is this application's config in $APPDATA/local? Roaming? The registry? Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE? USERS? In its own folder in Program Files, oh Program Files(x86)? Maybe it's just in a folder in $USER.

Gives me the shits.

Article is good though, just wanted to vent.

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dgriffith

joined 1 year ago