Posts by Notas Badoff

Quantity over quality?

"There's a sucker born every minute". But the size of the pools of suckers might sway one?

If there's 10000 consumer suckers to every enterprise sucker, maybe it makes sense to give up sales to discerning enterprises and trade on a dead reputation with ignorant consumers?

BTW: humoring myself watching the antics of the 'free' 1-year installation on a new Dell PC. McAfee has now "optimized the performance" of Vim 7+ times in 2 months. Strange hiccups on keyboard input, file reading, web page loading, etc. I will enjoy disabling it permanently soon.

Not as bad as...

So I'm checking in to workplace in USA from some burg in France and wonder why the server's a bit 'odd'. Finally track it down to some idjit has sent a page message to a group email hookup a few dozen times. Only it's a high-level email group and multiplies out to 3000 page messages in total to president/vice-presidents/lesser-gods/etc.

And I'm checking in in the morning. That means it's 0x:xx o'clock in workplace timezone where pages are being spewed without end. Ho-ho-ho!

I smash the page queue and logout. Login later that night, and strangely no threatening emails. No mentions in passing either. Ever.

Either I was prescient and caught it *just* as the madness struck, or the external page gateway was borked long enough for discovery, or *somebody* really likes me.

Pre-learning - it's a thing.

"As an M.D. and scientist, I have a special responsibility to learn from mistakes, ..."

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

Otto von Bismarck

Learn? You failed. You learn by the observation of mistakes and avoiding those mistakes. You do not repeat time-worn mistakes and call it 'instructive'.

"Lessons have been learned" was never said by anyone who paying attention to begin with.

It's just natural.

Wasn't there an apocryphal story about the number of groups working to develop a compiler determines how many passes the compiler would have?

Seems to me every large independent organization ends up building up its own in-house framework. Maybe several. It's just natural.

And management comes along and says "a framework is not a product, why are you wasting time on this? You should be working on ..."

And then some bright spark says "Hey, let's opensource it for the creds (and to validate our egos) and... just maybe... to get free help from everyone."

Later, management comes along and says "why are you working on community engagement? That's not a product! You should be working on ..."

And that opensource framework dies. It's just natural.

Money for nothing and votes for free

Another article I read recently brought out that the impetus for the project came from Congress. Not so much caring about national reputation (who, them?) but about spreading the contracts all over hither and yon. Thus the Congressoids probably see no problem 'tall about continuing funding for years and years and...

What's this? I know, I'll plug it in...

"The third chunk is designed so that it appears to contain a SIP packet used to initiate video-conferencing sessions and the like. This is parsed by the ALG, which is fooled into thinking a SIP session is starting, and opens an external port that's routed through to the victim's PC."

So this is the ALG (Application Level/Layer Gateway) picking up a 'lost' thumb drive in the parking lot and plugging it in to a USB port to see what's on it? Who knew that was a bad idea...

BTW:

Thank you for having Kieren on the team. So many backgrounders and information we'd not know otherwise. Thank you.

Two sets of egotistical people 'helping' open source?

Seems that Eternal September for open source is here.

Looked at the risen to 28 list (which is now at 34) and at least 8 were changes to "404.html", a file in the root of the repo. And a bunch to readme.md. Numerous picayune changes proving they don't know English.

One PR changed

<div class="failed">

to

<marquee><div class="failed"></marquee>

proving they don't know HTML either.

Another added "<h2> HTML </h2>" to the readme.md just before the "### Code of conduct" heading, proving they don't know markdown either.

And - sorry - but look at the user names. The competition over there to prove you are a really great web whiz is intense I hear. That this might be a honey pot trap never occurred to them? (Is there a 'ban' action for Github repos?)

Where there's a 'will', there's a "when?"

I count the word 'will' used 10 times in the fine article. Which year will this Christmas present be wrapped up and under the tree? And not just as an empty box. I haven't been motivated by Microsoft's promises in... decades now.

Ground Control to Major Tom: Commencing countdown ... later

I'm not getting any warm breezes up my .... From what little I can espy now, this does not appear to be a ready tool to be applied to a code project. The warmth from Introduction to QL is minimal: "no simple example of look for problem - found"?

Good grief, their "query console" has a happy horsehockey link to "Semmle is joining GitHub" from last year? Were they *really* ready for rollout?

Me-thinks the marketing crew got slap happy at their online conference GitHub Satellite.

Let's see...

I hate that language! <bang reason="hate">

I hate your code! <bang reason="hate">

I hate your clever code! <bang reason="hate">

I hate your code is more clever than you are! <bang reason="insulting">

I hate your code is so clever! <bang reason="insulting maybe">

How clever! <bang reason="snide">

Too clever! <bang reason="snide">

Paula, brillant! <ok> (sigh)

At least it's not "None of the above"

As usual with the WMF the whole effort didn't seem to be publicized well enough to draw in a wide crowd for informed comment. I mean, surely ElReg mentioned it... oh, not at all?

I do like the one comment (you linked to it) "Vue core is Evan You's one-person project, which poses a risk to MediaWiki's sustainability" to which someone asked why not have WMF just buy Evan You. Which is classic. But not WMF's way. They'll just switch over to Vue and then fork it when they want to do it their own way. Thus closing the loop with their reason not to use React - dark side ownership.

I'm just amazed they haven't forked something else *already* with NIH so embedded in WMF's DNA.

Who watches the ...

Quite amazing no mention of the other 'helpful' satellite presences, such as in this article.

The lack of space law regarding interference with satellites is why this hasn't been tried before, well, publicly. Every government has said you can't do that because we don't want anyone to be able to do that. While, you know, 'researching' how to do it.

Let's see... wide-open environment with technological innovation providing benefits to everyone. Space. Internet. Noticed how "wild west" the Internet has gotten? Wait till someone demands 10K GreenCheeseCoin to unlock your satellite.

Just playing around

Anyone else struck with how minor some of these Win10 features/improvements are? What're the user stories here? Oooo, flexible tabs - that's worth 100Ks of seats! It's like they're playing with us. Or themselves.

Those moneychangers...

Recently read an article positing that it was Boeing's take over merger with their old rival McDonnell Douglas that turned them away from the engineering side. They _were_ an "engineering first" company, but the siren song of the accountants has done the full moon thing on the executive suite.

Searching I've found Quartz article The 1997 merger that paved the way for the Boeing 737 Max crisis. There are a few other "what went wrong with their culture?" articles if you look around.

There's a reason we near universally disdain the "alternative routes to riches". "Engineering first" *is* "people first"!

Time and tide ...

He wants his own castle on the beach? Give him a toy shovel and pail and watch him cry like every other child when the tide comes in.

Clumsy there, clumsy here - when thought and understanding are required we all fall down

Please note the reputation on the Dec 23 posting from StackExchange -1446 ! They seem to have failed to "make it all better".

"We believe she did not understand ... and was confused ..." You'd think that a site that specialises in professional answers to how-to questions could get some help with the foot gun.

.

And, sorry, but I'm still amazed that several several commentators *here* had trouble connecting the dots when

* a well-known moderator for Orthodox Jewish topics

* is off'ed minutes before a multi-day religious observance

* with the cavalier "but we sent her an email" minutes before said off'ing

* and then company protests "but she herself hasn't said anything" for days after scandal unfolds (still during the religious observance)

* and the company is based in New York City (you only need live there a short while before knowing e.g. what an 'eruv' is)

* and the company employs people of various kinds of Judaism (heard of Joel Spolsky ?)

* so they *knew* she would be incommunicado and couldn't defend herself

* and so everything would blow over (they really hoped)

and people here are, like, who cares if she is Jewish? What's that got to do with anything?

So someone getting fired during their surgery? While attending their parent's funeral in another country? Would you miss the import there? Got something to hide? Release the news before a major holiday / blackout period. Like, say, Dec 23 ?

Be part of the world! Be aware of other people's needs! Be less dismissive of other people's situations. Ignorance and crassness still amazes even here.

What a retirement party!!

And now they're off to their retirement homes, with lots of stories of fun to tell the kids*

* Not many of the other inmates will be 73 / 65 / 72 years old

Anywhat?

Once you mentioned them going directly to the "Skia graphics library" I began to question. Is this "write once, run anywhere" or is this "write once, run anywhere on hardware from Google" ? It's so mighty tricky fitting in 'anywhere', but making assumptions on something as low-level as how to make pretty dots sounds like premature specialisation.

Oh well

it's cheaper than the piano my parents splurged for so I could learn to play. (That didn't quite work out as planned, though keyboard facility turned out to be useful for 'something' after all) This way parents can let the sprogs experiment with wishful thinking for much less expense.

BTW: In the same vein, a teen's first car must be at least half as old as they are. Let them learn the limits of their uncultivated abilities for cheap.

They disappeared!

I was going to copy my scathing comment from Phys.org over to here, but my comment has disappeared, the article there disappeared, Google cache erased - it's like there was a cover-up! Or something...

Pareidolia was mentioned, as it being not too strange for an entomologist of 40 years to see bugs everywhere. Though then I mentioned the possibilities for cameos for he and Wickramasinghe of Cardiff in the upcoming "Attack of the Killer Bees from Mars!" movie.

Two things brought up by this disappearing of things. First, under what conditions do institutions and media agree to grant mercy to the unwise. It doesn't seem to happen much these days, which makes it notable. I think I like the idea of mercy, but it becomes fuzzy as to 'when'.

Second, this is another case where content is erased from the net, here an embarrassment to a notable. Not that I'm particularly outraged my clever (discomfiting) comment was blackholed, because that has happened on occasion 'nearby'. Rather, I'm still trying to find a past quote "out there" about banks and 2008 financial crisis where a pol of a certain party had said banks didn't need any more regulation because "bankers are smart people". That a particular party is incapable of obvious economic realities couldn't be important enough to disappear, could it?

Drip, drip, drip, ...

Why is it *always* a mystery to the individual miscreants when the 'revolution' comes? It's not how bad this one is, or how nasty that one is, it is that the increasing number of insults accumulate to the point *no one* can tolerate *any* of them any more.

Well, we'll just try something else...

What bothers me is that, at the end, when the courts have decided that the CBP and friends have neither common sense nor a good understanding of the constitution, the same people will still be employed there.

If the people employed by the government would fail a citizenship test, that's okay? I think it would be wonderful for every American to have to pass the same citizenship test immigrants must. Hey, call that native-born citizenship merely a learner's permit! Though "Old one" above would never ever graduate...

Research

"Based on all of the Stack Overflow threads tagged as 'java+json' as of January 2014" Ouch.

So this is a result of research on a very restricted domain. And like most research (and legitimately so) the summary basically ends with "need more funding to pursue questions arising from the research."

IBM, pioneers yet again

So, IBM has been at the forefront of the gig economy all along, but just forgot to tell the sales people? Talk about taking people for a ride... ;-)

Psych out the psyche-less?

Reminds me of the very very early 'success' at recognition of tanks. The day before the big demo to DOD a couple new photos failed. Then they realised they hadn't trained with any photos of tanks in shadows."