And when making hundreds of billions of dollars off of the ‘woke’ crowd that subscribes to the ‘building a better tomorrow’ ideal, turning into an ignorant and unrepentant fascist piece of shit is a good way to erode market share for free, if you exclude the $46 Billion USD social media site purchase, which is now worth essentially nothing.

I just checked some older eMails, and it’s not their mail provider / API token that got breached (previous messages used cyberimpact, not zoho).

I also assign unique eMail addresses for my online accounts, and also got this eMail today.

It’s likely that Bixi got hacked, not that they sold the eMail address.

Just do what I do – change the eMail address slightly on the mail server and on your online account.

First, if you have more than one disk, you should be either getting redundancy through mirroring, or building arrays of several disks with redundant methods like RAID5 / RAID6 / ZFS zraid2.

Second, no single copy of data is safe, you must always have recent, tested backups.

I’ve watched a company load up 2PB of data into a tape library, have them stack it full of bubblewrap, then roll it onto the back of a truck with the tires deflated for a softer ride, then driven across town to a new datacentre at 3am on a Sunday.

Effective data rate: 1PB per hour.

My old PMG3 (beige, the first one) came with a Zip drive. I still have that machine, and the Zip drive in it still works.

I’m not a gamer, but I remember their drivers for even their high-end cards were a fucking nightmare on Linux.

It’s not that hard to give the open source community what they need in order to build their own drivers, or enough source for them to get things working properly. This was one of their dumbest moves among many dumb moves.

need a computer with a CPU

So, like… a computer.

Not a physicist, merely a science enthusiast with a high school science education.

My understanding is that we’re having a hard enough time smashing hydrogen together into helium (and actually getting back more energy than we put into the process) that making specific isotopes of heavier elements with the current state of technology is between ‘extraordinarily unlikely’ and ‘impossible’. We would have to manage to get past Helium and then on to Lithium, Beryllium, and Boron to get to Carbon – I imagine the amount of energy required to produce even just a few C12 atoms would be off the charts.

There’s no way to make a concrete behemoth like the Olympic Stadium sound good.

I’d actually love to see that – Level 6: Finding fresh bok choi. Buy bok choi for stirfry. Monster attacks, defeat him, you win only if the bokchoi is left unbruised. Level 7: Make stirfry. Monster attacks, Goal - defeat him before stir fry gets cold. :)

This is how we found out my mother had it:

Mom: “The colours on this new TV are terrible. Everyone is green.”

Me: “Okay, hold on, let me adjust the tint.”

Mom: “Now they’re too blue.”

Me: adjusts the colour temp

Mom: “Ew, now everyone is too yellow, it’s like the Simpsons.”

• one hour later of adjusting each setting by one step *

Mom: “Well, it’s still not right, but it’s less awful.”

A few years later I found out about Tetrachromacy tests online, and she scored something like 98%.

A lack of competition. The snag is that Canada has low population density - which means that yes, you can afford to cover most big cities in cell towers, but not outside the city limits – because you might only serve users who are in a car or on a train as they pass through that cell – and it’s prohibitively expensive to put up a multi-million dollar cell tower to serve users who are passing through for a few minutes at a time.

This is why all of the cell infrastructure is owned by two companies – because when mobile phone service came to Canada, the fees were high enough, and the costs low enough, that they could afford to build out sites because they were insanely profitable – in addition to getting funding from the federal government to build out this infrastructure. That’s why they’re the incumbents – they have a critical mass of cell sites, and upgrading hardware every decade or two is cheap compared to purchasing/leasing the land and building a tower from scratch (including bringing in power and fibre).

lobbying, I guess

No, it’s absolutely lobbying and regulatory capture. When I worked in the telco space, back when long distance competition came to Canada, the CRTC was a constant revolving door of lawyers and company VPs from the telcos. The running gag in our office was that if a decision didn’t go our way, that the C-Suite would have to fire someone for the failure, so they could go work at the CRTC and influence the next decision in our favour.

But it wasn’t a gag. Three of my co-workers from that time ended up taking their turns at the CRTC as analysts and commissioners.

Generally speaking, buying outright is always cheaper than renting, because you can always continue to run the device potentially for years, or sell it to reclaim some capital.

Optical isn’t better, unless it’s magneto-optical which induces a phase change in the material itself - but even those drives had issues where static discharge would blast the media if the drive itself wasn’t properly grounded… Bit rot is real.

Nope, no Betamax (too rare, too expensive). And you’re right that I focus on camcorders – before my full-size VHS player died, I found that what people were bringing me were mostly old TV shows you can find on YouTube, and terrible quality pirated movies.

This is a “pro-sumer” level device. Images come out around 3-5megapixels, the software removes lint and restores faded colours based on the make/type of film. If you have a selection of slides you’d like me to re-scan for you (e.g. pictures you’d like to have better copies of) package them up and bring them by. I’ll lay down a caveat that sometimes the image quality is crap because the original image is improperly exposed – in the old days, photography was tricky, calculating exposure was difficult, and consumer grade lenses were awful.

I actually work in digital archival work, and this is true… Do NOT trust ANY technogy, you have to have a PROCESS for keeping data safe… Multiple copies, in different places, preferably using different technologies. RAID won’t save you if your house burns down!

This actually started with a friend complaining that digitizing old 8mm videotapes from when his kids were young was being quoted at $500-800. I told him that if he paid to buy an old player off eBay, that I’d do the work as long as I got the player at the end. The player was about $250, but got damaged in transit. I got refunded, and sent it off for repair… In the end, it only cost about $50, and he got two dozen videos of his kids growing up.