Tag: Technology

ASUS Delenda Est

Technology, Two-Minute Hate

Quick recap of my laptop woes:

  • Several weeks back the thing bricked on me.  One minute typing, the next thing black screen, totally dead and unresponsive.  All efforts to revive are fruitless, including long chats with online support staff.  Off to Best Buy (an ASUS repair facility).
  • The Geek Squad informs me that they don’t do any warranty repairs on ASUS machines that they themselves have not sold.  Nice.  So I send the thing to ASUS, imagining fondly that since I only purchased this POS in January of this year, that it is still under warranty.
  • It isn’t.  [50,000 very bad words redacted]  So I tell ASUS to return the brick to me, because I’m not comfortable having repairs done at a remote location (Indiana, incidentally) when, if I’m going to have to pay for the fucking repairs, I’d prefer to have the job done locally.  So off I go to Micro Center (Dallas).  This was yesterday (Monday) morning
  • Micro Center gets on it right away — I mean, I got a sitrep text message only an hour after I got back home.  That’s about the only good news.
  • Apparently, the motherfuckingboard is kaput.  On a brand-new computer.  Cost to replace:  $380 (part) + $150 (labor).  For a machine that cost around $500 new.  But:
  • None of Micro’s vendors have the board in stock, and ASUS themselves are looking at a 4-17 week resupply time.

My options seem to be:

  1. Grit my teeth and have the repair done, continuing to stumble along for the next 2-4 months on my old HP laptop with its occasional freezing-up, malfunctioning keys and broken chassis.
  2. Buy a new replacement machine* from Micro Center — average cost for a similar-to-my-ASUS machine, about $600-$700 which I don’t have.
  3. Try to reinstall my whole fucking life onto  some other (secondhand) laptop, of which a couple of you generous souls sent my way, but which I cannot get to function.  (I have the best Readers on the Internet.)
  4. Migrate to New Wife’s desktop PC, which is tucked away in a dark corner of our tiny apartment, and has NONE of the features of any laptop, and by that I mean a decent keyboard, sufficient power and storage, Win10 (okay, I can live with that), all while I’d have to sit on an ancient office chair which will cause me to have back problems, guaranteed.

To say that I am angry does not begin to describe my mood right now.

And oh, by the way:  if anyone out there is thinking of buying an ASUS machine in the near future;  DON’T.

*New Wife has okayed this option, but it still sticks in my craw.

Computing Thoughts

Advice, Housekeeping

While waiting at not-so-Best Buy to have my hard drive backed up / wiped prior to sending my ASUS Brick Model off to be repaired, I took a little walk around the store just to look at my options should the laptop be “unrepairable” and ASUS refusing to replace it (I know, it shouldn’t be a problem to replace a piece of equipment that was purchased in January of this year, but it’s a fool who doesn’t make at least some contingencies in case of corporate bastardy).

All the laptops looked the same, had too many unnecessary features and cost too much, so I didn’t spend too much time there.

Then my eyes fell upon this creature:

It’s one of those “everything in a screen” systems, and I must admit I was drawn to it — in no small measure because of the earlier suggestion from The Reader Formerly Known As CoffeeMan that I look at a desktop PC instead of a laptop. 

While my need for portability has admittedly been reduced because I no longer travel as much as yore, I still might need to take a computer out of the house when going somewhere on vacation, for example — or needing to carry the thing out if there’s a fire in the apartment block.  Carrying a PC tower and screen out is a non-starter for all sorts of reasons, but a single screen (plus keyboard) that in extremis  could be carried in a large suitcase?  That is a distinct possibility.

Here’s the White Monster’s spec sheet:

Hmmm.  Big screen for my Aging & Failing Eyes, a properly-sized keyboard for my Fat & Fumbling Fingers, manageable size (see dimensions) and if I may be greedy for once, more computing power than I would ever need for the remainder of my existence on Planet Earth.

There’s the small matter of the dollars required, but I’d just raffle off a gun or two from my ever-dwindling stock of Second Amendment appliances.

If anyone’s had actual experience with one of these beasts, let me know in Comments, because right now it’s looking awfully attractive.

Two Views On Oppression

Deep Thoughts

This article by Gustavo Jalife at TCW opened up a new line of thought for me.  He starts off by quoting Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death:

‘Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.’

Jalife continues:

Over the last two decades the expansion of police society – across both capitalist and non-capitalist systems – has intensified, fueled by online minorities and off-line majorities that cry out for protection and assurances.

…the ghastly Covid restrictions on personal movement and social intercourse being an excellent example.

In the Bad Old Days — inhabited by people like George Orwell — oppression was simply a function of the State, whether post-Revolutionary Jacobin France, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union or the MiniTrue of WWII British Government.  It was, if you like, a brutish system wherein the various police forces arrested, imprisoned, or executed anyone seen as resistant (“counter-revolutionary”), non-compliant or (to use the word beloved by oppressors) deviant, if not “treasonous”.  We can call it the “Orwell” model, and while it lasts, it’s reasonably effective.

Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, took a different view.  Huxley based his thesis on the old Roman panem et circenses (bread & circuses) philosophy, whereby people in general will almost always take the easy and more pleasurable option when it comes to dealing with life.  In that, people are distracted from opposition to the ruling diktat  by drugs (soma), spectacle (Olympic Games) or immersive entertainment like the “feelies”.  What’s mistaken about Huxley’s thesis is thinking that the State would create such diversionary pursuits — in most cases, such technology is beyond the capacity of the State to create — whereas we all know those pursuits could only be created by private corporations, a.k.a. Big Tech.

It would appear that modern Western society is operating more on the Huxley model, whereas the Orwell model is being used by the North Korea / CCP regimes, as well as the religious autocracies like Islam.  But there’s another twist to this.

We all know that the “ruling diktat ” (sometimes called The Narrative) differs between the West and the Rest.

For the Rest, it’s simple:  dogma, whether political (Marxism) or religious (Islam) forms the diktat  and prescribes the actions to be followed.

In the West?  Well, that’s not so simple.  In the absence of a strict political- or religious foundation, there are many other contenders:  political correctness, multiculturalism, environmentalism:  you name it.  People need a flag to follow, and the power-seekers and social controllers are only too pleased to provide them.

And as long as there’s enough soma to go round to deaden the senses, it doesn’t matter how silly, impractical, illogical or even destructive those flag-standards are.  Let’s be honest:  without all the in-home distractions provided by streaming movie services, Zoom calls and the like, the Covid restrictions wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few days.  Even more ironically, when the Covid crackdowns were ignored or actively opposed, the State (in whichever nation) used some very old-school methods to punish or suppress.

Gustavo Jalife poses the question:  “Do we actually like being controlled?”

I would phrase it rather differently.  “Do we actually care about whether we’re being controlled or not?”

“More soma?”

Sure, why not.  Let’s go shopping on Amazon, doomscroll, play a video game, watch some porn or scroll through the options on Netflix for a few hours until bedtime.  Adderall and Xanax are for losers, dude.  We can munch on some “edibles” while we play — it’s not harmful, really:  all the studies point to that.

Quote Of The Day

Technology

…from Jim Treacher, talking about Grok:

“This thing is just telling me what I want to hear. Which is a nice feeling, but that’s all it is. The user is being manipulated, by design. People are now learning the hard way that these machines are programmed to give an answer, not necessarily the answer. They’re incredibly sophisticated, but they literally don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know anything.”

It’s received, not actual “wisdom”, because it’s only as good as what’s been fed into it.  Moreover, there are no footnotes to say where they got it, and there’s no telling how many hands may have played with it, massaged it and directed it before it reaches the end user.

Caveat lector.

4-Bangers Aus

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Eco-Crap, Morons & Idiots

Yeah, with the demise of EV Duracell cars, it wouldn’t take long for Mercedes to notice that their other pet Green project wasn’t too popular with their client base:

Mercedes-AMG is transitioning away from the four-cylinder plug-in hybrid powertrain and back towards the inline-six and V-8 powertrains more traditionally associated with the brand. That isn’t to say that AMG had a change of heart concerning the merits of the four-cylinder powertrain, but rather that the automaker is responding to customer criticisms. “Technically, the four-cylinder is one of the most advanced drivetrains available in a production car. It’s also right up there on performance. But despite this, it failed to resonate with our traditional customers. We’ve recognized that.” 

“Failed to resonate”, as in “WTF do you idiots think you’re doing?”

Yeah, forgive us if Merc fans don’t care about the gee-whiz technology when it replaces the brilliant engines that have served Mercedes since the 1920s.  And the same driver skepticism that accompanied the stupid EV-only diktat  would apply no less to the plug-in hybrids too.

I couldn’t be bothered to look up the numbers, but I bet the technology R&D costs for both Green projects will have run to the billions of dollars:  all wasted.

And just add to that the cost of bringing nuclear power generators back on line after the most un-German-like panic following the Fukushima disaster, which was caused by a tsunami — last time I checked, the likelihood of the same affecting the German nukes was.. what? oh yes, zero — and which took place halfway around the world.

Yeah, that Green eco-thing is really working out well for the Krauts, isn’t it?

Fine Motor Control

Technology

…and I’m not talking about Porsche’s new gearbox, either.

Consider this, which arrived on my recently-acquired laptop w/Windows 11:

It’s the scrolling button on the extreme right of any open window, and Alert Readers will no doubt have realized that it replaced the old square one that we all grew up with.

I have two questions about this shrunken silliness.

Firstly, as any fule kno, I use a Logitech Ergo Trackball:

…whose giant “thumb ball” controller gives one plenty of ability to steer the pointer over to the tiny space in the top right-hand side of the window with relative ease.  How do people achieve the same goal using the sloppy and imprecise finger pad of a laptop?

Secondly, and this is a question for the propeller-heads out there:  is there any way one can change the shape / size of the scrolling thingy back to its old appearance?  (I’d bet there isn’t because Microsoft, but I’ll gladly be proved wrong in this case.)

I get by okay with the LogiTech mouse, but even so it’s not as easy as it used to be, which irritates the shit out of me, and I can’t be the only one thus affected.

As always with Microsoft, change seems to come not only unrequested and generally unwanted, but also in such a manner that it requires considerable effort to manage it.