Re: Wrong mustelinae
So it should have been "microwaved marten" instead of "warmed weasel"?
1061 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2009
Um, so which of those trial markets have other broadband companies directly competing with Comcast for customers? Thought so. Less is more when the choices are some of any or none at all.
Oooo, ooo, I know, I betcha Google Fiber is competing in those cities! Hmm, no mention of Galax, Virginia, or many others. Louisville is "potential". Huntsville is "upcoming". Oooo, Atlanta and Nashville are "current"!
Direct head-to-head competition in 2 out of 26 markets. Yay Capitalism!
Shall we take it as given that if every mother's child in Atlanta and Nashville suddenly starts enquiring when GFiber will be available in their neighborhood, that Comcast might quietly shelve this whole thing?
An older friend of mine, a professor elsewhere in CaCa-land at the time, was tear-gassed by the state police on the orders of a certain ex-actor then governor named Reagan. Seemed the students on campus were getting uppity.
Don't tell me PR agencies can't rewrite history so well that an arch-nazi-conservative can't move on to bigger and better accomplishments.
They'll get her on nepotism, agreeing under the table to skip all the other stuff she shouldn't have done and they should've noticed to begin with. Phoo.
Please go back to the phys.org discussions threads.
After being pleased at another nice science news site besides sciencedaily.com, I made the mistake of reading a couple article comments threads. It was as entertaining as loading the LHC with trucks and anti-trucks and seeing what spurts out at meeting points. Oh dear, hard science attracts soft brains!
People will always say they want to improve situations, especially if they don't have to do anything of substance about it. This is just PR positioning, as they want people to not notice how they are currently making the situation worse.
Instead, notice that this 'proposal' has a built-in time lag. Get those kids courses and training so that we could employ them years from now. Notice the word 'could', as in, if there were a million applicants, they could choose what to pay the fraction they deign to use.
In the meantime, keep those H1B workers flowing. Since we don't have the 100K's prospects, we can't be bothered with the 10K's unemployed available now.
Gee I wonder if recently there haven't been articles about how if NHS had 50K applicant doctors per year that things would go so much better for them. NHS that is.
I think it was only today on another topic that someone mentioned "The Marching Morons". Do note the reference to 'lemmings' and the 'solution'.
Oh please somebody print a bunch of business cards saying
.
Gottfried A. Boodle
Aught but Avarice and Ego
.
or name of your persuasion, leave these around at conferences / business meetings / etc. , and we'll see which industry these are copied into. We know what kind of person that'll be - what'll be interesting is in what kind of industry this is considered mere bragging rights. Finance?
Does the report give a background number of how many iDevices there are in said countries?
500 requests in a land having 5M devices sounds a lot more reasonable than 1005 requests if there are only 20K iPhones.
Simple absolute numbers are simplistic... (We saved 20 patients lives last year? Uh, how many did you treat?)
The first question I teasingly ask new parents after a couple months is "introvert or extravert?" Often they don't even know what I'm asking. Explaining, it hopefully gets them to think about their treasure as a distinct personality that might differ from their own tendencies.
I sorely miss the opportunities to watch over someone's shoulder as they tackle something they are currently having problems with. Very often, while exploring their difficulty and helping them, I am rewarded with seeing a useful technique or hearing an eye-opening tidbit I've not encountered before. We both get a reward!
But as an introvert I can't mosh with everyone/anyone more than a couple hours a week. I do need the space, the distance, and the quiet, to work. (After hours is when I can relax, yes?) If this becomes labeled antisocial then that will be 'extreme' programming.
Not yet experiencing it full-on, I can still see how useful it might be, in metered measures. After all, command sequence 'xp' is shorthand in Vim for swapping adjacent characters, a very useful trick. Swapping seats working through a conundrum has to help shake out new directions...
Hello, "future threat", yes? That is, we have already seen this asteroid aforehand, it's passed by this time, but its future path has been well-characterised enough that we can tell that N+1 or N+m orbits from now that it and the earth will definitely intersect.
So no use for the new guy on the block introducing themselves with a "mind if I barge in?", but useful for something we've gotten a whiff of and don't want plopping onto our couch.
But for all that, making sure that whatever much smaller pieces still will intersect with earth have been christened with eau-de-Pu doesn't thrill me.
As someone else here suggests, send a thruster up and shove the whole thing into a safe orbit. That is applicable for many more cases, such as asteroids that haven't yet passed by cuz they're gonna hit first time up at bat. Go for the more general case rather than the special case mooted here, okay?
from their users. Recently the E. coli-rich packets hit the turbulence generators over at Wikipedia when the dev head had to admit they had been developing software for basically no identified benefit to the users. And that that had led to one user revolt after another.
Since the central Moz developers betrayed my (and others) interests years ago by purposefully not enhancing a core bit of functionality in favor of blue-skying a just-as-good that's *still* not available, I have no patience with "but it'll be better thisthat way, whichever way, our way..."
Get with the users, develop a plan first, get buyin, then develop code to the users' satisfaction, okay?
though the 'cause' might change from time to time. Two 'oopsies' during Roman wars, religious intolerance (or was it really politics?), then religious conquest (or was it politics and booty?).
Knowledge needs to be as infectious and as easily spread as a virus. Then maybe we'll eventually become immune to plain stupidity.
"..., but they chose to found the company in the innovation hotbed of China, close to the engineers and supply chains they needed."
And the money... the easy to get funds in a region full of cash-heavy bettors. With huge infrastructure projects and other big bets shutting down due to govt controls, where is one to put all that western money that has piled up? When people are climbing over each other to give you money, why wouldn't you found a new company there?
But... there should be some obvious resonances with some other areas and recent times with overheated industry sectors. All eyes *have* "turned East", but the ears are listening for crashes.
Not sure, as this mention doesn't say how often underlying things will be updated, or where the accompanying utilities need to be located. We'll need to wait and see how the implementation actually helps us.
I also have been relying on grep, diff, (gnu)find, etc. through Cygwin and have for forever. Together with node.js, I haven't had to rely on MS development tools for ages. Hence, still smiling while coding.
At one point recently I waded through pages and pages of 'hits' on a keyword, trying to find a package that already did a particular widgetty thing somewhere on NPM.js. I know there is one out there - there has to be - but I couldn't find it.
While searching, I got sidetracked into examining some of these 'packages'. Several were empty. More than a couple were *one* line containing the definition of a data variable. Many are separate packages each containing one file, dozens of them exploded out of some proud parent's private parts product.
NPM has become a community wall festooned with wet noodles all looking alike. "Pretty bytes"? I wonder how one is supposed to find that? Without a concerted attempt to organize this pile of ground sausage, NPM will only become more useless.
BTW: Anybody up for claiming package names for sale to highest bidders, ala domain names?
There's this word - 'respect'. All the CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md files popping up on Github won't fix anything unless people require respect from each other.
And that was always possible. 20 years ago the company almost fired a guy because he was altering interview test questions ad-hoc and mostly after seeing women interviewees. He had a problem with women, so the company had a problem with him!
"In neither version of your story do you address one essential point."
In neither version of their story did they mention whether the tape deck controller would then sound out Beethoven's 9th. Have none of you worked with people like the mentioned 'programmer'?
One guy was given some thousands of lines of network code I'd written to maintain. His method for learning that code was to line by line _manually_ reformat the source to his preferences. That way he would have 'read' every single line and would 'understand' the code. Of course this mere transformation could not possibly introduce problems... That could not possibly be revealed with available diff programs. And no, there were (then) no automated source reformatters available either.
I'm not ashamed to admit that upon being asked by him to explain some bit of 'difficult' logic, upon seeing what he had been doing for the past weeks of 'reading' I squealed. As in pig and knife and stuck.
Weeks he'd spent destroying the ability of anyone to help him. Truly, truly, some people are not fit to deal with code. Version 1.0 did the right thing for everybody's sake and was downvoted. Foo.
The way I figure it, Microsoft finally realized that any effort at porting to another OS, would also afford another opportunity to recheck for old flaws in the software. Nothing like "a linux bod touched the code?!? Retest everything, cuz something will be wrong!" And lo and behold, there will most likely be - from years and years ago.
And so those missing features will be the ones they realize were full of poots that need to be winkled out first, just as soon as they can re-understand the code.
synergy/syndoche/schenectady!
Isn't this the expected outcome of all the accumulated breaches of personal information over the past few years? Any given set of "are you the person you say you are" questions will likely have answers "out there on the netz". The IRS set up a front-end that checked for "is it you" stupidly, and then they gave out even more personal information.
There is no set of online questions that is proof against the aggregated 'private' information 'stolen' from all the idiot corporate/government databases. I say 'none', ever, because if the IRS should now add requiring your grandmother's blood type and shoe size, they would store that somewhere, it would get lifted sometime, and rinse-repeat...
Can we at least give up on "the security of your private information is important to us" vs. the far simpler "we lost your shit, so we lost the company and our jobs, and yes your shit is for sale but our names are on the free publicly accessible wall-of-shame site www.footgun.org" ?
BTW: Is footgun.org really available? Damn!
You didn't read any of the background behind this before opining, did you? Everybody expects to be tossed around a bit at first in a new job. In her case she found herself trapped in that "we're testing your loyalty" position far beyond reasonable expectations. With no job progression possible, even after the hard work expended, *then* it was obvious the situation was impossible.
According to your last line, unemployment for life is the better road? Nice.
Was reading yesterday about Taft the American president, who later was Taft the Supreme Court Chief Justice. One comment about him was on the order of questioning how anyone who could be so unsuccessful as a president could then turn out to be an excellent Supreme Court member/leader.
Individual people can be entirely unfit for particular positions. You can have praiseworthy goals, but if you care not about the existing organizational dynamics and politics, those goals will sink out of sight while everything becomes about _you_ (at least as the opposition will frame it).
Focus on people as the means to any goal. Forget about them and you can forget your goals!
From memory, there is a defined percentage of judgements/fines from financial and tax crimes that is paid to whistleblowers .
Simply start making fines a decent multiple of coffee budgets, give the hackers researchers 10%+ and that will make security happen by incentivizing probes research. And the required follow-on tracking against continued non-compliance will then be provided free to the regulators at the same commission rate!
This is golden: consumers win trustworthy equipment, governments get most of the fines, and basement bounty hunters get enough money to move into their own pads!
OTOH: Free market advocates gnashing teeth: companies might actually forgo the revenue stream from making products they are unqualified to produce. Hmmm ... Naah, that's a benefit to everyone else!
Which one, in the local paper or here? If the article here is simply relating what the local paper is documenting, wha'chr'beef? I think you'll agree ElReg goes to no end to relate how unhappy the network incumbents make people, so there's the balance you seek, just not repeated here.
Aside: got taken to see a sight south of Austin. A railroad bridge, with the tracks about 40-45 feet over the normal level of the river. Noticed something that looked strange, yet couldn't recognize the significance for awhile. Then it clicked that it was water-borne brush wrapped around the top of the bridge pillars, at track height. Not like this was a narrow gorge either, but a quite broad area for the river. And this was the second flood last year, higher than the first. Which is why they now are going to have to replace both the concrete road bridge washed out in the spring and now the roads _to_ the crossing washed away on either side in the fall.
El Niño's bladder is really *really* large, and when he pisses in your direction...
BOFH Stardate 56844.9
"That's here? The local system? Does it have enough capacity for our cloud? We have a lot of data, and it's growing!"
"Well, if you really need more capacity, I know a company named Bok can supply just the cloud you need. The storage density keeps increasing over time with no additional charges."
"Sounds great! Any drawbacks?"
"Mmmm, the network latency is longer than we're used to..."
I think you skipped a few steps in your "slide" diatribe.
"There used to be loyalty from employees to their company, not anymore, with all the lay offs of people getting close to their retirement age, ..."
There used to be loyalty from the companies to their employees. As I see it, the entire 'miracle' after the war was built on the superhuman efforts of Japan's people working towards a common purpose. There was the expectation that they were building up the country while building the individual companies. All these would be stronger than ever and the people would be taken care of by the several paternal authorities.
That bubble was popped when the largest and strongest companies laid off salarymen to repair balance books when management/government missteps caused problems. The companies preserved the very strengths that so many had built for them, though many workers were now cast off and unemployable.
And now you say it was the 'westernization' of the people that caused the problems? The "screw it" mentality was never seen at all until demonstrated so ruinously by the companies. All these things you blame on westernization of the people... aren't they the to-be-expected response of people betrayed by "the system"?
Oh the Japanese are lazy, lacking good education, no quality, mediocre, "screw it" mentality... and it's their own fault. Gah, this is a perverted backwards view.
This wouldn't have happened in the 40s, 50s, 60s when the government actively feared the Communists and quite paternally said none of that agitation was needed to protect the people and then worked steadily against labor organization.
Japan is a very good example of what happens when industry and government both turn their backs against their own citizens. You get the country you deserve, government and voters alike.
"Earlier today, Arnnon decided to step down from the Board."
This is not so much the fault of the HR guy (as hateful as his actions were) as another illustration that the board is out-of-step with reality. One of these days they'll stop saying "you aren't listening to us" and realize "we weren't listening to anybody..."
In a comment below someone mentions asteroid mining. Yes, this and other "enterprises in space!" are indeed the answer. Why? Because no one - well, no majority vote - is going to suggest using 50% or even 10% of your GPP (gross planetary product?) for 'bullshit' like moonshots to exoplanets.
But if you get so much going on at ground-level plus all that's possible out in the home system, that's today's economy on steroids! Once you have even small two digit multipliers in effect, hey, who cares about splurging 1% of so much more than we had before? Catering to a vocal minority (like those durn explorationists) is much easier when it doesn't hurt (the politicians) at all.
No need to invoke concerns about alien intelligent life as a danger for motivation. The simplest motivation is humanity (or parts thereof) surviving random events. Which can be presumed to occur much more often than "take me to your leader", given the witness of our planet's history. We must diversify!
This rather reminds of Microsoft's reputation problem with developers. When you explicitly tell developers they don't matter they rightly get a little rude. Why should we 'want' to recommend the bigger siblings to WS when the company says it only wants to talk to your management, cuz they're stupider?
Hey I keep my "Dr. Gui" t-shirt on hand just to remind Microsoft apologists that their favorite company told developers to take a flying leap at a rolling DVD a number of times. I'll have to look around for VMware tat for show-n-tell.
Are the data centers saying they are doing all these wonderful things - now - so that they can claim they are "pro-active"? Umm, why were they waiting to do these worthy things?
If they hadn't had several days warning to prepare... how were they going to claim that being down was out of their control, due to unforeseen calamity, when they are *already* supposed to be prepared to stay up according to the contracts!
It just sounds like they are trying to catch up now with the guarantees they already sold? How about clarifications and/or rebates...
(My comment wings on the title whinge)
A company I worked for early on, went hook, line and sinker for OSI as the next big gotta-have standard and the soon-to-be required network offering. They did a beautiful new implementation of the full 7 layers and all the protocols. I don't think any other company as much (though everyone else said theirs was "just like" the OSI spec) so it was a industry reference and I suppose served as an example that the standard was "ready".
That hook/sinker turned into a boat anchor. There was no interop as no one else really had an implementation. No 'synergies'. No combinatorial explosion as others adopted the standard. It wasn't SNA. It wasn't TCP/IP. It was fish guts nobody wanted to pass through.
Regarding standards, you do need to pay attention to the corporate interest (who is sponsoring/pushing the activity and why), while avoiding the worst effects of the corporate interests. Beware the purely academic standard chiefly fostered for purity's sake.
Over the last 3 decades everytime I saw reference to the OSI 7-layer-model picture I thought "Go for it, you'll have a Ba'al!"
No, it would not be funny.
But I do predict a new urban 'sport' of flash-piling in-demand landing spots with stationary junk - trash cans, cars, park benchs, signs, etc. - forcing the 'autonomous' brain to choose between obeying the passenger repeatedly bonking the "land where I said" button vs. landing with load noises and unable to take off again vs. running out of juice and landing quite suddenly anyway. I'm sure the random taxi driver will be quite amused at the autocar deciding a taxi roof was the best choice to land with flat batteries.