The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ratinox

Can I just rant briefly about Amazon's delivery service logistics? And by extension degenerative AI?

I ordered two of an item. Two identical items. From one vendor.

And for some forsaken AI driven reason, Amazon decided to split the order and ship one via USPS and the other via their own delivery service.

The (current) promise of (de)generative AI is to reduce this kind of wasteful nonsense, not promote it. Welcome to the future.

I'm finding Amazon's delivery to be rather annoying. I look at the map and it shows 1 delivery. Then it shows the driver in another location near to where he was. Then it shows the driver in another location saying there are some other deliveries needing to be done before mine. And he's now farther away then he was to where I am. We've had a number of deliveries not make the initial time window given. The delivery still arrives on the day it's supposed to.

If the delivery is going to be coming via the mail,I will contact Amazon if it does not arrive on the day it's supposed to. I've had some mail deliveries never show up and even the post office was never able to find it. Amazon did send out out replacement orders. I've had some mail orders sent out again and eventually the original order showed up. I always ask Amazon if what to do it the original order does show up and Amazon says to keep it. That's how I've ended up with a few extra items such as another 256GB micro SD card.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

That's what I was thinking of, but I didn't want to say it. There is one remnant of Microsoft Bob that still exists: Comic Sans.

Nowadays, the move is towards Flat UI design.There's still some remnants of duplicating the real world, such as the "Save" icon looking like a floppy disc, although floppy discs have been abandoned.

The save icon is a 3.5" disk. Not floppy at all.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The save icon is a 3.5" disk. Not floppy at all.

Take one apart. It's floppy inside!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

TI read that Win11 has messed up the battery charge indicator, something that worked well on Windows laptops over 25 years ago.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Take one apart. It's floppy inside!

I used to punch a hole on the other side of the 3.5" disk so I could hopefully use the other side.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The save icon is a 3.5" disk. Not floppy at all.

It's the disk that is floppy, not the case.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I used to punch a hole on the other side of the 3.5" disk so I could hopefully use the other side.

Would not have worked on a 3.5", only on 5.25".

[Solitaire1]

j.p.s wrote the following as part of a post:

Originally Posted by j.p.s

It's the disk that is floppy, not the case.

With 8" discs and 5.25" discs the actual disc was put in a sleeve that was slightly floppy. With 3.25" discs they improved it by using hard plastic for the disc case, and putting metal shutter so that you never touch the actual disc.

It is similar to the CED video format. It's a format similar to the LP (a stylus-like device reads the disc). The actual disc is so delicate that you can't touch it (just a touch will cause damage), but it is put into a strong case that you put in the player and then pull it out. The disc itself remains in the player until you put the case back in to pull out the CED disc.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by ratinox

Can I just rant briefly about Amazon's delivery service logistics? And by extension degenerative AI?

I ordered two of an item. Two identical items. From one vendor.

And for some forsaken AI driven reason, Amazon decided to split the order and ship one via USPS and the other via their own delivery service.

The (current) promise of (de)generative AI is to reduce this kind of wasteful nonsense, not promote it. Welcome to the future.

It's possible that two separate warehouses / fulfillment centers were used

Sent from my Pixel 7a using Tapatalk

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I used to use Wordperfect for DOS and then Wordperfect for Windows. I liked it better then Word. Unfortunately the better program lost the war.

I used Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS and although I resisted at first (I'm an old Wordstar 4.0 user that was extremely proficient at it) I eventually transitioned to it and found that I liked it. Unfortunately, Wordperfect 5.1 for Windows was horrible. It was so bad that after about 30 minutes I went back to the DOS version. It wasn't the worst word processor I ever used, that honor goes to Enable. If I had a choice between using Enable's word processor or writing HTML in a text editor, I'd choose writing HTML in a text editor.

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

So, what bit of technology has annoyed you today?

My workstation at work has a PCIe SSD in it. That is, it's a PCIe card, not the M.2 form factor you're probably familiar with.

Well, turns out that Microsoft Windows install ISOs still do not have drivers for devices like this. Means that the backup I need to restore cannot be restored: no Windows Recovery Environment can see the damn device. I spent pretty much my entire day struggling with this thing, trying all sorts of tricks and hacks to try to get it to work. No luck so far.

No help from Dell (the vendor) either. They apparently never published a standalone driver for the card. They do have a tool for creating a Windows installer image with the drivers slipstreamed into that image but it doesn't have a way to start a command shell, so I can't restore my backups that way.

The device works. The old OS boots, it just isn't usable in its current state. And I was able to image it with Clonezilla so I have that much as an extra backup. Pity that company policy won't let me run Linux on the bare metal.

Super-duper frustrating. I have one more thing to try next week and then it's time to bite the bullet and reinstall the whole thing from scratch. On a SATA SSD.

[BetterRed]

I had a couple of guys working for me in the early 1990s who wrote their doco in Postscript. When they gave one of their .ps files to our Cisco engineer she didn't know what to do with it. The content eventually found it's way into a Cisco submitted IETF RFC, which is why we gave to them.

Did they get get any credit… nah, it was a love job for Cisco forgetting to collect the fridge router they lent us. They got it back when our skunkworks was disbanded.

Not only did they have the same given name, they were both emigres from the USSR, one from Ukraine the other from Russia.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by ratinox

My workstation at work has a PCIe SSD in it. That is, it's a PCIe card, not the M.2 form factor you're probably familiar with.

About 8 years ago my work PC got replaced with with one of those. It had a big honking heat sink. Of course the first thing I did was reparition to my liking and install debian. The install went well and was super fast. But it wouldn't boot. I assumed the HW was too new for debian, so I reinstalled from scratch, but with a 2.5" SATA SSD as /boot and the rest
on the PCIe SSD. That worked great until the next mandatory HW refresh.

Originally Posted by ratinox

Well, turns out that Microsoft Windows install ISOs still do not have drivers for devices like this. Means that the backup I need to restore cannot be restored: no Windows Recovery Environment can see the damn device. I spent pretty much my entire day struggling with this thing, trying all sorts of tricks and hacks to try to get it to work. No luck so far.

No help from Dell (the vendor) either. They apparently never published a standalone driver for the card. They do have a tool for creating a Windows installer image with the drivers slipstreamed into that image but it doesn't have a way to start a command shell, so I can't restore my backups that way.

The device works. The old OS boots, it just isn't usable in its current state. And I was able to image it with Clonezilla so I have that much as an extra backup. Pity that company policy won't let me run Linux on the bare metal.

Super-duper frustrating. I have one more thing to try next week and then it's time to bite the bullet and reinstall the whole thing from scratch. On a SATA SSD.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I had a couple of guys working for me in the early 1990s who wrote their doco in Postscript. When they gave one of their .ps files to our Cisco engineer she didn't know what to do with it. The content eventually found it's way into a Cisco submitted IETF RFC, which is why we gave to them.

Did they get get any credit… nah, it was a love job for Cisco forgetting to collect the fridge router they lent us. They got it back when our skunkworks was disbanded.

Not only did they have the same given name, they were both emigres from the USSR, one from Ukraine the other from Russia.

Not postcript but... I still panic remembering latex (it's still used) and SDML and TEX.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

Not postcript but... I still panic remembering latex (it's still used) and SDML and TEX.

I suspect you mean SGML.

BR

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I suspect you mean SGML.

BR

Yes, you're right... SGML and tex.