Posts by whbjr 33 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2010
"stopping semiconductor production mid-cycle can damage products."
Boo-f'ing-hoo. People DIED in this rare freeze. Samsung et al will be back in production in a few weeks or months. The dead will not be back, and their families won't care about delays in semiconductor production.
(FYI, I live in Austin)
"You just can't get a reliable network engineer to work in austere, violent, life-threatening conditions that *hasn't* already experienced combat..."
So, you only get hired if you've already been shot at? I'm trying to escape the Catch-22 aspects of this, where you won't hire me for a shot-at position unless I've already been shot at - unless you're hiring network engineers who weren't network engineers while they were in "austere, violent, life-threatening conditions" (austere?).
"... do you think it would be any trouble for them to con a psychiatrist into thinking they had changed?"
Psychiatrists, particularly those who work with convicted felons, are usually pretty good at avoiding con-jobs. "The subject presented himself as reformed, but was unconvincing. Recommendation: Continued confinement."
"One of the main landing gears failed to deploy... "
If only we could have had the same landing gear used by THOUSANDS, or perhaps ZILLIONS of aircraft which land every day, across the globe, using landing gear which does not fail to deploy! Oh, but *this* landing gear has to survive high altitudes and zero gravity! The vacuum seals have to operate even after being exposed to a vacuum!
In my workplace, which is so far from the cutting edge of technology that we can't even see the handle, we have a device which requires Flash for remote access... and of course, the people selecting this device claim to NEED remote access.
We also have a device which uses Java... but not any of the new versions, this requires Java from, as I recall, six or seven years ago. Thank goodness for archives of old versions of Firefox (and Portable Apps, so it doesn't interfere with newer versions)! This device does not have a physical control panel, and as far as we can tell there will be no updates to the firmware ("Buy our newer hardware, which is more expensive and not suited to your needs").
Back when eBay had interesting Chat Groups, they had a profanity-checker which (for better or worse) ignored whitespace, so you couldn't say "the PEN IS mightier than the sword" or "It's a BIT CHilly out tonight." Those of us familiar with HTML learned that it didn't understand the "nbsp" character.
Apparently, they're creating a new database, or table, or something, to back up the request... then trashing it when the request is complete. I don't claim to understand this.
Nor, for that matter, do I understand this: "That means being able to A/B, or blue/green, a deployment..." What is a blue/green deployment? Did I miss the color-coding class at the recent Bleeding-Edge Briefing?
A local church uses .faith, as in ChurchName.faith, and in fact they have a .org address which redirects to the faith-based (ha!) hostname. If my DNS server dropped that on the floor, I'd never be able to get info which is required for my BUSINESS (not my personal life). Dropping valid DNS requests is not an option.
I would admire Michael Dell for sticking with the now-gone council, in the hopes of influencing the president. I would admire that with just about any other president. However, this president is only going to listen to the voices in his head, he's not listening to Michael Dell, or any others, unless they echo what he's already decided. It's just as well that he's disbanded the council - now they can go back to realizing that they were wasting thei time.
.gz and the app won't work? Sigh
"Blame the teaching of product-specific IT at schools for that."
True - but that includes the schools which accepted Apple's hefty discounts to create a zillion Mac users... which, in my humble opinion, resulted in a zillion iPhone users, and now here we are with MS apps on Apple products.
"Given the choice between using an API and a CLI to automate, the API is always the preferable route. Less "geeky" but more stable and less dependent on a person to write and maintain the scripts on your side."
As a long-time script writer and script-READER, I find it much easier to read, maintain, and update a shell script, as opposed to a compiled program which requires knowledge of an API with calls and hooks and layers to semi-documented libraries. Yes, I'm a geeky sysadmin who prefers CLI, but I have a verifiable reason for preferring it.
"It certainly didn't help that when cable TV ushered in the 24-hour news cycle, outfits like Time and Newsweak became more and more irrelevant when, by the time they hit the stands, the "news" between their covers could really have been more accurately called "olds"."
Actually, when the 24-hour news cycle hit, I relied even more on newspapers and Newsweek to give me reporting with a bit of perspective - when every item is treated as "Breaking News!!" then no item is treated as uninteresting. Print news does a much better job of sorting that out... unless they stop spending the time and effort to do that, which is what happened at Newsweek.
For some strange, inexplicable reason, once Tina Brown became editor, Newsweek's coverage of the fashion industry increased greatly... and coverage of just about anything else, including national (US) and world news, declined horribly.
I've been a subscriber since 1978, and it'll be strange to not have it in my mailbox. On the flip side, I feel incredibly intelligent for ignoring their offers: "Renew your subscription now! Before it expires! Only six months left!"
Graham: As a registered voter in Texas, I'm forced to agree with you. We seem to have gone bat-sh*t crazy at three (!) gubernatorial elections... My only hope is that the rest of the country sends Mr. Perry back to Texas, where we'll either reject him or put up with him. But please please please don't make him the leader of the country and our representative to the rest of the globe.
(Boy, this was supposed to be humorous, but then I started crying in my beer...)
the first comic strip. Well, perhaps not the *first* comic strip, but one of the more significant ones. There's a direct artistic and storytelling link from the Bayeux Tapestry (which I've loved ever since National Geographic printed the whole thing in '66) to Peanuts, Doonesbury and the like.
But (said in my most condescending voice) if you IT folk would like a small claim to it, then we'll not object.
I've been using Catch for, oh, almost a year, and it does everything I ask of it. And no, they don't pay me to say this - I guess maybe I'm not asking much of a note-keeping service. Perhaps I should be more demanding!
One of the highlights for me is the lack of ads, and the lack of nagging to upgrade to the paid version. I sincerely hope they're making money - maybe someday they'll make money from me...
Beer because you don't have an Android icon, and I'd rather have a beer than a penguin.
"... a shock would require multiple failures, and be cut off by any modern fuse box, so overall a good deal safer than climbing around on the roof with insufficient safety equipment"
This whole project is a delightful series of slightly-less-dangerous choices. I'm expecting the next step to be a choice of TNT vs C3 for putty.
(Posting title courtesy of Harold Lloyd)
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