Posts by the Jim bloke 1083 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
.. from the food instagramers.
or a cynical exploitation of the same.
"Look at my photo of a humourously shaped turnip! and then check out the attached 17 meg of spectroscopic analysis!! complete with blockchain proof of provenance! 11!1! !! ! ! ... ! ..
.. !."
only with emojis, as well
Different situations require different solutions.
I require music to keep me awake on long drives - through external speakers.
On flights, wired, noise cancelling headphones let me listen to my music while avoiding the stupid in-flight offerings and headache inducing movies.
Someplace in our clients workplace policies is a prohibition on ear blocking headphones or buds.
Walking around what is effectively the wilderness, an external bluetooth speaker lets any wildlife or stock know I am approaching and decide what it wants to do about it without startling them (It turns out cattle are fascinated by Finnish Black Metal).
Walking in the city, or using public transport, wired or bluetooth earbuds allow me to enjoy my tunes without inflicting them on others.
Listening to music has significantly improved my mental health, too much time alone inside my head isnt good for me, and having the screaming going on outside does put a smile on my face.
The issue here is definitions. technology and equipment wear out or become obsolete and require replacement after a period of time. Obsolescence isnt really an issue - If you bought an item to do a job it will still do that job even if newer kit can do the task better (- or worse, win 10 anyone?). Wearing out can be avoided by quality of manufacture, and replacing specific components.
On the other hand, consumables exist to be used and thrown away. Apple is marketing their consumables as equipment, but they want you to buy it and piss it away.
I was going to use a beer icon - but I wont waste one on Apple
to a society where energy and materials are unlimited, where money is meaningless, and people only work because they want to..
(ignoring all the later next-gen crap, dumbed down because viewers couldnt understand the implications of replicators and the rest of the technology)
Wouldnt mind something that spoofed the phone location data, just feeds it the coordinates of some huge house in Washington, or an office building in Virginia - or a range of other humourous selections. Would only mildly inconvenience the serious black hats, but would piss off the lazy marketers - like google - so will never make it into the app store.
Avoid the "celebrity" charities, They didnt get enough money to advertise on TV by giving the stuff away...
A relative did some work for one of the think-of-the-poor-sick-children charities,( which i will not name as the other common feature of these organisations is a vicious legal department), and he was saying they literally had more money than they knew what to do with.
Support your community groups, support worthwhile causes that you care about, but dont throw your money to smooth talking sales people or corporate publicity/advertising departments masquerading as social conscience.
i know wikipedia is not a reputable source - but its so damn convenient...
Tetrachromacy - in humans
"Another study suggests that as many as 50% of women and 8% of men may have four photopigments and corresponding increased chromatic discrimination compared to trichromats"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
your boss has screwed up.
and thats the entire point.
Management induced crises{1} are the main reason we have to basically, sleep with one eye open, constantly watching for some disaster-in-waiting that can be dealt with easily early enough, but will be much more troublesome if allowed to develop.
[1] including not employing enough people to do the job, or getting rid of people with required skillsets,
The banks - which are the primary vehicles for saving money - get more of THEIR money by selling debt to people (and calling it credit), Therefore from the banks point of view, people saving money is bad, people going into debt is good.
Nobody seems to have asked if this is sustainable, or good for anybody beyond the banks - actually many politicians seem to think everyone in debt with no savings is good for the economy, but a politicians perception of debt may not match the general publics.
At least they arent using Powerpoint (yet)
Where I work we get daily "site notices" with all sorts of information, relevant to anybody who might idly glance in the direction of something thats going on, plus the touchy=feely HR bits, and the corporate indoctrination.. all required to be presented on Powerpoint.
As a contractor - I was working across 3 sites, so triple the joy.
sounds like you are describing an ICBM - (or are they Ballistic if they are rocket driven anyway?) or an intermediate range one maybe.. anyway..
and a shit-ton of money and effort went into those, and the manned space flight descended from those...
Even the most insignificant knowledge or technology may lead to world altering discoveries further down the line.
Except for social media.
That's a complete waste of entropy.
at the end of the day you can see some visible, discernable results of your work
You see those potholes over there? I put those in last week. And the ones down the street?, My pappy put those in.. and the big one shaped like.. a really big hole, on the corner of the highway, my grandpappy put that there. They still talk about him you know, he was a real legend. Ah, tis a grand life, working on the roads, knowing you are making something that future generations will see and marvel at.
I would have been more impressed if the video showed it stepping through the tyres, instead of up a clear path behind the tyres.
Still, the suggested use cases - hostile environment monitoring /hazardous recon does sound reasonable, though you would want to do a cost/benefit analysis against just using a graduate engineer.
Still early days, and plenty of progress to be made, but the the more these things are used, the more advances will be made.
Personally, I would like to see corporations taxed on the proportion of MBAs in management positions. So if everyone has an MBA, thats 100% tax. and on earnings, not "profits".
This is an attempt to recapture the golden age when companies made "things", and were run by people who knew how, and wanted, to make "things", as (violently) opposed to now, when companies only make "money", and dont really give a shit how they do it.
I just dont like MBAs, and think they are a contributing factor to the demise of ethics and the social contract.
The entire point of Google - is that they DO have "all the information" - about the employee, about the managers, and if that isnt enough, about the lawyers, the judges, and the congress/senator-things..
How they choose to use that information depends on what they want to achieve.
Use it tactically for a short term win, or refrain, to manipulate their image and strategic position.
Evil Empires R Us
Put them up for compulsory organ donation (anyone remember Larry Nivens Gil Hamilton stories?)
Even the article author talks about "service that cost an arm and a leg".
Maybe some of the oldies that were ripped off could get something useful back..
I am very deliberately NOT using the joke icon.
they try to tell you its cruising the information super highway
because while describing it as "chewing your way through rancid fatbergs" may highlight that the faster you go, the more shit you are forced to deal with. it doesnt promote a positive ambience or lend itself to selling accessories,
is that Google has more in common with the criminals than with the users.
Googles interests arent served by promoting security and privacy, and utilities which protect the public probably have a larger effect on Googles bottom line than the skimming carried out by various independent predators/parasites.
Google would doubtless like to be the only predator in the pond, but it isnt worth their time to make it so.
But on the other hand, there is a stigma attached to supporting existing products and services, "its just maintenance.."
So all the so-called talent will be trying to get onto new projects, all sexy and shiny, irrespective of how useless or stupid the idea actually is, and the products that people do use are starved of resources.
Google is not the only entity guilty of this.
He seems to be making some (more) random media flailings.
Maybe he is afraid another Tiananmen Square event will push him off the front pages, or there might be something local in the U/S thats got him nervous.
If everyone ignored him long enough, he'd probably set himself on fire.
In the biological world, an organism will grow to the limits imposed by its environment and the constraints imposed by competition. One major mechanism is having a limited lifespan, which allows a high level of activity then senescence and getting out of the way, and encourages the production of offspring which may increase their domain, or adapt to changed conditions.
Apart from achieving senescence, Microsoft have avoided acknowledging this concept, but like those species of mites that dont have an anus, their internal load of crap is approaching toxic levels.
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