Dave.

In Visual Studio you can set the build number in your project as something similar to a unix timestamp/raw excel date value, so you can convert it back to a date/time of the build.

In that case it would always increment on each build regardless of whatever version numbers you set.

Time is a cube, and always will be.

Assumption:

Someone crams a 300 watt solar panel onto the roof of their EV and manages to integrate it into the charging system so that it’s pretty efficient to use that power.

Numbers:

One hour of good sunshine on the 300 watt panel = 300 watt-hours (Wh).

Average EV energy usage : 200Wh per kilometre these days. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depends on how and where you’re driving.

Result:

One hour of perfect sunshine hitting the roof of your car equals 1.5 kilometres of extra range, or you can drive your car in a steady-state fashion at a 3-5 kilometres per hour because an EV is more efficient than the average usage at lower speeds.

Conclusion:

Probably better off increasing the storage capacity of the battery as a full day’s sunshine will get you about 10 kilometres of range.

i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re…

Searching for a solution to any problem on the internet.

There are a million ad- laden sites that, in answer to a technical question about your PC, suggest that you run antivirus, system file checker, oh and then just format and reinstall your operating system. That is also 90 percent of the answers coming from “Microsoft volunteer support engineers” on Microsoft’s own support forums as well, just please like and upvote their answer if it helps you.

There are a million Instagram and tiktok videos showing obvious trivial, shitty, solutions to everyday problems as if they are revealing the secrets of the universe while they’re glueing bottle tops and scraps of car tires together to make a television remote holder.

There are a trillion posts on Reddit from trolls and shitheads just doing it for teh lulz and Google is happily slurping this entire torrent of shit down and trying to regurgitate it as advice with no human oversight.

I reckon their search business has about two years left at this rate before the general public regards them as a joke.

Edit: and the shittification of the internet has all been Google’s doing. The need for sites to get higher up in Google’s PageRank™ or be forever invisible has absolutely ruined it. The torrent of garbage now needed to ensure that various algorithms favour your content has fucked it for everyone. Good job, Google.

I work in OT. The number of “best practice” IT mantras that companies mindlessly pick up and then slavishly follow to the detriment of their mainly-OT business is alarming.

Make your own damn best practice that suits your business best, don’t copy and paste something from a megacorp. Sure, include elements from megacorp’s best practice if they are applicable, but don’t be a slave to the entirety of it.

Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

Added edit:

Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.

not only claim the right but also apparently claim ownership of any content you publish there, while providing no consideration (payment) in return.

That’s not entirely true.

The payment is hosting your content for free on their servers that provide reasonable uptime and unlimited retention. You can choose to carve out your own place on the internet and post your content on your own hosting if you want, but a lot of people choose Reddit, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, because the tradeoff is agreeable.

It’s really when you get into the thousands though that SI prefixes generally start to be used, you don’t see deca or hecto used that often. It’s mainly because we’re usually happy keeping three digits of precision in general conversation (185 degrees C, 250 metres, etc). After that we get a bit sloppy and start rounding, and that’s where kilo comes in and we start talking about “1.25 kilometres” and such.

Add in the fact that people rarely need to describe temperatures higher than 1000 degrees C with any precision, (they’ll just round to hundreds/thousands/millions usually) and that’s why SI units feel weird with temperature.

2004:

User: “I moved my PC to another desk and now my monitor is off. The hard drive is making noises though. All the power cables are in haha. I made sure the connections were all nice and tight it’s a bit strange.”

IT: “Okay I want you to follow the video cable from the monitor to the hard drive. It should have a BLUE connector at the end.Can you see the label where it is plugged in?”

User: “…yes it says ‘serial’, I think?”

IT: “Aha. I’ll drop around this afternoon with a spare monitor. That Trinitron monitor you’ve got will need to go away to be repaired.”

North east coast of Australia gets hit with category 5 cyclones every 5 to 10 years or so, there are plenty of buildings that survive that.

Parents copped the brunt of Cyclone Yasi with 180 mph gusts, only damage to their house was they lost a section of guttering, it was peeled off never to be seen again.

Building standards there are rigorous. They built their house themselves (in a rural area, 180 acre farms), its engineering design was required to withstand wind loadings of at least 70m/s (160mph) .

It is a steel-framed, single story kit home, on a steel piling foundation about 3 feet off the ground. The local building inspector also told them to put long threaded rods from the roofing trusses to the subfloor and the foundations while building it and tension them up, they eventually put in 36. This effectively ties the roof to the foundation and stops it peeling off, once your roof comes off the rest of the house usually folds up like an open cardboard box.

Apart from losing the section of guttering, there was no other damage to the house. They boarded up the larger glass sliding doors and were somewhat alarmed at the amount of flex on the glass as the cyclone passed, but they held up ok. They didn’t get power back for two weeks , which was the worst of it for them as it’s very humid afterwards, they had a generator and ran it in the evening to power the aircon in their bedroom each night until it ran out of fuel.

when you can help people live in discord.

That live support is super handy when you’re 8 timezones apart from the maintainers.

• Hey there, how do I get this thing to compile?

11 hours later

• Ok just need to make sure you have this list of prerequisites installed and then we can walk you through the compilation process.

6 hours later

• Nevermind, I built and installed another project.

2"If we raise prices by 10 percent and make things a little bit shittier, we’ll lose 5 percent of our user base to pirating and the non-tech-savvy users left behind who don’t know how… Well they can just take another 10 percent up the ass next year! It’s win-win!"

Scroll Lock? What does that even do nowadays?

In Excel it pans the whole worksheet with the arrow keys instead of shifting the active cell.

Same thing in Word, you can move around in the document without shifting your cursor position.

It also does the same kind of thing in most editors where there is an “active editing position” vs a “view of the page”.

I remember helping a teacher at school who had installed a CopyIIPc card on one of our computers. They used it to make everyday copies of the master disks of the copy protected educational software we used in our room full of Sperry IBM compatible PCs.

The card went in between the floppy controller and the drive and could do a pretty good job at duplicating all the physical copy protection tricks of the time.

They copied a lot of stuff, not for pirating reasons but simply because they were literally 5 1/4" floppy disks back then and school kids were not kind to them. Either it was simply jamming them into the drives, or touching the exposed disc surface, or chucking them around the room, those disks didn’t last long.

Chrome mobile put up a pretty good fight. I have been meaning to put Firefox + ublock on my phone, maybe I’ll stop being slack and finally do it today.

Accessing that from my phone shows the actual site content for about 3 seconds and then an endless array of “popup and notification blocked messages” as well as the usual combination of “oh noes your PC has three dangerous viruses click here to resolve” type redirects.

Is this just a cunning way to weed out the normies or can I expect the same kind of thing from their allegedly-excellent app? Because they’re not leaving a good impression right now.

There were quite a few Delphi applications back in the day, they were easily recognisable by their “exit door” icon.

Booked a place in Queenstown (New Zealand) on a long weekend via booking dot com. Tourist town, you know what it’s going to be like on a long weekend, and I had trouble finding a place a week out, it was a short notice trip.

Same, “no need to confirm!”

Arrive 5pm… nope, no room, fully booked due to the long weekend, nothing from booking dot com as far as the hotel is concerned.

Slog through booking dot com’s horrible script driven online chat, 90 minutes later, “oh noes we can’t find a place in Queenstown, here’s your money back plus a 5 percent off your next booking voucher for your trouble”.

6.30 pm in Queenstown on a long weekend.

After ringing through every accommodation provider I could find on Google I eventually found a place that had a four bed room for $450 for the night, vs the $150 I had originally planned.

And as a final irritation, the money that they naturally zapped out of my card in an instant at the time of booking took three weeks to be returned to my card.

Booking dot com, booking dot never again you fucks.

to modular open design where nothing is irreplaceable.

It adds interesting aspects. For example, I work with systems that have 5 I/O modules. Each one keeps a backup of the main controller settings, so that you can replace any component, including the controller.

After a quick question on the next boot, you’re up and running again.

Imagine if each module of your ebook reader had enough cheap/slow storage that everything in “main storage” could be replicated across your modules. As long as you only replace a couple of modules at a time, you’d have everything forever.

The US would be able to spend even more on the military if they fixed that.

Maybe someone needs to phrase it like that to their politicians.