dgriffith

That's easy. Just fly somewhere and bring it in your carry-on, airport security will let you know.

There's a lot to be said for "http://yourISP.com/~username" being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.

90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:

"Yes yes whateverrr"

I've got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

But they are my "other backup" for Google photos so I don't mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

That's about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it's probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.

when they're powered down.

There's no periodic cell refresh in flash memory like there is in DRAM. When USB sticks are plugged in, all you are doing is powering up the flash chip and interface ICs.

You'd have to read a block then write it back to actually refresh the stored charges in the cells.

I don't think there's anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

• Get a group of photos from a burst shot
• Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
• See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
• See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.

Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, "You're right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here's the updated code that fixes it".

It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there's any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it's full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

For some things it will offer solutions that don't solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can't, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don't really achieve anything.

Sometimes when it hits that point I can say "start again, and use (this methodology)" and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that's workable.

So basically, right now it's good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you're working in fairly well already otherwise you're shit out of luck.

They also came from a time when hard drives could draw several amps while in use and much more on spin-up. There was a good reason why SCSI drive arrays used to spin each disk up one-by-one.

Molex connectors are good for 10 amps or so, SATA connectors couldn't have handled that amount of current.

Excuse me, "UXers" is not the preferred term any more. You should be using "HXers", as per the article.

In my opinion, replacing "users" with "humans" feels wrong in much the same way as when incels replace "women" with "females".

They are reducing the accuracy of the description. All users of computers can generally be assumed to be human. All humans cannot generally be assumed to also be users.

Letting it ring has no impact. They have autodiallers that call, and when someone picks up, only then is that call assigned to someone in the call centre.

You can often tell this because there is a marked delay in the response to your initial "Hello?". Long enough that you can reliably just hang up if you don't hear a response in two seconds.

If it's a real person who actually wants to call you and they you call again straight away, you can just shrug off your hang-up as a network issue.

True. Hence my caveat of "most cards". If it's got LEDs on the port, it's quite likely to signal which speed it is at with those LEDs.

I haven't yet come across a gigabit card that won't do 10Mbit (edit: switches are a different matter) but sometimes I've come across cards that fail to negotiate speeds correctly, eg trying for gigabit when they only actually have a 4 wire connection that can support 100Mbit. Forcing the card to the "correct" speed makes them work.