well. thanks to all the Australian veterans who served to build this... this western society, for what it is. it was a great thing to love at one point. now i'm not so sure
it's better than the alternative I guess
better than living under some crazy offspring of Hitler in despotism
I love how I can write a crappy question on another SE site (two, actually), and I get Notable Question and Popular question on both within a couple days!
@CanadianLuke there's definitely something fishy about that. I have some meh questions on gaming.SE that got a handful of upvotes and a good answer, but they're not amazing questions, yet I get awesome badges for views :D
huh, I guess I never noticed that the OneDrive icon isn't in my windows explorer in Windows 8.1 either... I can't remember if I followed some instructions to remove it, or if it's just been that way... but I never use it
Having problem resuming laptop from standby. As soon as on Windows logon screen, laptop hangs. Problem happens randomly and so far I was unable to reproduce. However this happens after long hours laptop has been on standby.
I am trying to install the Mac OS on my partition. In the setup, when I try to format that partition using the Journaled method, it erases it successfully. But when I select the partition, it shows me that it's NTFS-3G. What's going on?
Why is the NTFS permission 'Create Files / Write Data' named as such when it also allows you to create subfolders?
Confused...
This is when the permission has been applied to a root folder.
There is a separate permission called 'Create Folders / Append Data', but it appears that if you have 'Create Files / Write Data', then you dont need 'Create Folders / Append Data' in order to create subfolders.
I don't have enough repo to add an answer so I write here: AFAIK tar's fault tolerance is much higher than other similar tools. If you have to save something from a not so reliable medium (for example network fs.) tar is probably the best tool for saving as much data as it is possible. Rsync and other tools failed when the first error happened, but with tar we were able to pass single errors. (It was a not so critical daily backup.) — Lajos Veres14 hours ago
"The "m" just means that you have multiple versions of Chrome installed in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application. You might have multiple versions of Chrome if you didn't download the latest version, but updated to it. The new version won't replace the old one, in case of installation failures. So in essence, when Chrome detects that you have more than one version of Chrome, it displays "m" after the version number in the [About Google Chrome] window."
@Bob why would you be surprised? you can't exactly just ask your smartphone to broadcast a transmission in precisely the right direction with the right tx power to escape our atmosphere and then hit the spacecraft with a high-enough SNR to be interpreted by its radio
remember, this is 36 year old tech, so we're not dealing with microelectronics; I imagine the signal has to be rather strong by modern standards for it to even consider it a valid message
@Bob I know, but I thought you were surprised they needed the ground station at that university to transmit (as opposed to, say, a ham radio)
as far as the actual signaling, I am not at all surprised they need specialized equipment for it -- it could even be an analog signal, and generating something that old on modern hardware without having the ability to run the old system (or virtualize it) will require a lot of reverse engineering and/or looking at old docs
@allquixotic On the other hand, they could still communicate with Voyager, which is from a similar era. And newer tech has probably also increased broadcast power, rather than reducing it.
@allquixotic I'm just thinking it would be a relatively simple software change. Reuse the transmission equipment, just set a different freq and give it a different signal (compared to the 70s, it should be trivial to generate a given signal). Not that I know anything about radio broadcasting.
a major long-term consequence of all the recent de-funding of the space program in the US is that we are losing all that operational knowledge of the old spacecraft -- many of which still work -- to the point where, even if we got a huge surge of funding today, it would take us decades to re-develop the technology and science ("knowledge capital", basically) just to duplicate the level of discovery and innovation that was occurring a few decades ago
nevermind doing something even better
for instance, with the space shuttle program done, a reusable LEO vehicle is basically out of the question until at least 2030
we couldn't spin up a new program this decade with any amount of funding because nobody still alive knows how
or they know how, but they're in a nursing home hooked up to oxygen and watching The Simpsons
the combination of KSP, and the recent spate of much less realistic space-based games, has really rekindled my love of space and space exploration, which I had strongly within me all while growing up, but it kinda faded in my late teens and early 20s as I got more interested in more... terrestrial matters, like computing
come to think of it, I'd really love a career where I could apply my considerable talents as a software or IT guy to the space industry in some way
"I belieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-yeeee-yeee-yeee-yee-yeeeeeeeeeee-ve *rampant cheers and applause* eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeve I can flaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
> An American golden retriever being mistaken for an Australian marsupial? I think they need to start drug testing the photo editors. Of course, the picture accompanying the story about the deaf using assistance animals may really get things hopping.
> It could be like that story of a “zoo” in China which used domestic animals of various kinds as stand-ins for the animals that the signs said they were. No handy kangaroo? Let's use this dog instead; it's a better fit than a cat or a tortoise…
> And it's not as if those clueless proles would know the difference. And if the Party declares that Golden Retriever to be a Goodfellows Tree Kangaroo, who's going to argue with the Party? No one who wants to live, that's who.
(from the comments in TDWTF, thought it was funny)
Another example is to say, in 2001 my monthly salary was $2,000 which in today's economy is $7,000. I just made up the latter because I don't know how much $2,000 back then are in today's economy.
@n11 could be the HDD heads parking due to inactivity
or just the disk actually reading or writing
if you're running off the battery, the default power profile probably has the disks spin down after a couple minutes of idle... the time would be longer (one would guess) if it's running off AC power... but it's normal for a disk to make clicking sounds even when it's running
@allquixotic thnaks, I'm with the battery and plugged on AC, so if I close all apps (Chrome, etc) , (but of course there are still a ton of services that run) but after several minute it should be silent?
@sammyg testing what? for what purpose? basically no one runs old versions of chrome, so what exactly are you testing?
@n11 no, not necessarily. it would never be "silent" unless you shut it down completely. there are some things on Windows that will pretty much always cause some disk activity, unless you specifically isolate and remove those services, which might break your Windows installation and make stuff not work right
> but of course there are still a ton of services that run
you should never expect a system with a mechanical hard disk drive to be completely silent, unless you only have a minimal OS running and you have absolute control over its processes and behavior
that's not the point -- the point I was trying to make is that, if you're really, really worried about the clicking noise being some sort of indicator of abnormal/damaged/failing hardware, you could boot up Debian minimal, kill all the background services (if any; it'd be easy to identify them in such a short ps -ef list); and see if the clicking still happens
for bonus points, you could boot up Debian off of a flash drive (which is 100% silent), and not even mount the internal hard disk drive, so Debian would have no reason to be accessing it
but the hard disk would still be spinning because it would be considered "online"
you could use your Ubuntu to do the same... boot it up, but make sure the internal hard disk is not mounted, and see if you can still hear the clicking
if we can be certain that there is zero read or write activity on the HDD, and it's still making that noise, that could be a problem
on Linux, you won't have any read or write activity on it as long as it's not mounted, and as long as you don't run a command such as fdisk or dd on it (which the OS itself would not tend to do automatically)
@Bob Thanks and I assume there is a formula to find out the current value compared to 20 years ago? I mean I have X (20 years ago) but how do I find Y (today)? I must calculate difference in percentages first?
@Boris_yo something like this usinflationcalculator.com (for the US). but these things are not very accurate, as the inflation on something like food or gas has varied way off of inflation on tech goods. so many factors.
Plus there is something i like to call "The Crap Factor" that never gets calculated in. How many of the goods are cheap, because the quality is lost completly. inedible cheap food, methods for providing mass without any quality. even taxations that provide horrible service, and abuse of funds etc.
Then ya got the "clean-up factor" methods that are leaving huge long term damages to the environment and the populations, that someday will be paid for one way or another.
I am trying to install the Mac OS on my partition. In the setup, when I try to format that partition using the Journaled method, it erases it successfully. But when I select the partition, it shows me that it's NTFS-3G. What's going on?
