Re: Day planner. On paper.
It;s kind of difficult to be a good programmer if you can't think like your compiler and the target processor.
Scary devil monastery .sigs were usually the playthings of children.
26584 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"Framed *within* the cacophony"
At both Berkeley and Stanford (and SLAC) such messages were deemed "not sent properly", and thus the word not getting out was considered to be the fault of the sender. I managed to convince DEC and a couple other companies to implement the same policy.
Those who refuse to learn from history ...
I thought it was in Northern California.
(The only reason I know this is because I'm helping a friend start a vineyard and winery near there. If you ever drive through, be sure to visit the Bake Shoppe ... 'orrible yuppie-tourist name, but delicious old-fashioned hand-made baked goods. Recommended.)
Last weekend I pulled a soggy and bewildered X-ray out of a car that landed in my creek. Cop arrived in time to wrap her in a blanked and stick her in the back of his patrol car. Talk about your four-letter fun ... her, not the cop. Mouth like a sailor. Spent the night in the drunk tank. Her car spent the night in the creek. Late the next morning, she blamed me for putting the creek there. With more four letter words. I guess it's true that no good deed goes unpunished ...
"Some might suggest we conceal the simplest of concepts behind a bewildering array of letters."
And to be perfectly fair and honest, sometimes we use abbreviations to keep the uninitiated's heads from exploding. It's the humane thing to do.
CSMA/CD comes to mind.
ADPCM is another ... I'm sure all y'all have your favorites.
"So, not the solution then."
Actually, yes. It is. After several decades of studying how users manage to bollocks up damn near everything out of sheer, unadulterated ignorance, I truly believe that user education is THE solution. No others will work.
"Any proposal in the form of "this would work, if only [...]" is not a solution until the [...] bit is sorted."
All I did was point out the solution. I in no way suggested a method to implement it.
"It is worrying isn't it."
Not if you don't buy into it.
I'm absolutely astonished that the Corporate World keeps falling for it, year after year, decade after decade. You'd think they'd have learned by now.
I wonder how many tens of billions of dollars have been lost in man-hours alone due to Microsoft incompetence. And the Corporate Lawyers allow this crap in the building? Still? Mind boggling.
So you have just been trolling all along.
An honest troll would have come clean when called on it. For shame.
"the fact that aborted fetus cell lines are used in either production or testing."
That's bullshit, not "fact".
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are synthetically produced. A computer was used to sequence the genes. Fetal cell lines were used nowhere in the synthesis or production of the vaccines.
Yes. Get rid of the religious exemptions, They have no place in tre 21st century. Or the 20th, for that matter. Or the 19th ...
So called "religious objectors" can kiss my pasty white butt ... unless you can show me in scripture (any scripture!) where it unequivocally states vaccines are a big Thou Shalt Not. I've looked, and see no valid examples, just dumb-ass "preachers" rabbiting on about their freedumbs. (The only freedom they actually seem to want is the freedom to collect loot from their flocks, and otherwise maintain their power over other people. Slimeballs, the lot of 'em.)
For the record, Christian Scientists accept vaccination where required by law.
Not that it matters much ... there are probably fewer than 65,000 of them left, world-wide, and under 45,000 here in the US.
Religion of all kinds has been on the decline here in the US since the 1950s.
... Facebook has decided that the AI algorithm has had enough training data to ID six or seven 9s of all photos and no longer needs the "help" of the luserbase putting names to faces.
I'll give you even odds that it "accidentally", if quietly, gets turned on again in six to eighteen months to update that data, and stays on until somebody conclusively (and publicly) proves that it is, in fact, on.
As for Facebook deleting the data... bullshit. Facebook has never deleted anything, They aren't going to start now. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool. Even if they very publicly go out of their way to "prove" that the data is off their systems ... well, that's what backups are for. And you know they have backups. They may even "prove" they delete the backups. That's what off-site backups are for. And you know they have those, too.
Mid-80s, I was working for a company that built gear to dynamically allocate bandwidth between video, voice and data.
Incredibly Big Monster of a company started getting weird bit error rates on their global T1 (E1, T3 etc ...) network, which was larger than the Internet itself at the time. The network used our kit to terminate the telco supplied wire, and because telcos are perfect ::coff:: & it couldn't possibly be Monster's fault, it must be our problem, right? I was assigned to track down the problem after lower level techs couldn't figure it out.
Going thru' the data, I discovered that once the problem started occurring at any one site, it gradually became worse ... It was never bad enough to actually take down a connection, but network errors ramped up over time.
Further review showed that the same team of installers had installed the gear at the sites with the problem.
I flew out to Boca and discovered that they had installed punch-down blocks in a janitor's closet ... directly over a mop bucket full of ammonia water. A couple quick calls confirmed similar placement in other offices, world wide. Seems it was the only wall space that was unused almost universally in such spaces.
Corroded metal replaced and blocks relocated, no more bit-errors ... Rather than a "thank you" and a bonus or raise, I got the task of updating the installation documentation. Naturally.
There is a big difference between ones and zeros in computers and a virus in humans. Most computers kept on trucking at the dawn of the year 2,000, and not by accident. However, the graveyards are full of humans lost due to the Covid pandemic. That'll be rather harder to debunk.
IT is not a product.
IT is maintenance. Overhead. A cost center.
Think janitorial, or grounds/building maintenance, only slightly more spendy.
IT is needed in this current era, and IT costs money (sometimes LOTS of money), but in reality it doesn't, in fact, actually MAKE money in and of it's own, any more than cube farms full of people using 13-column pads and 10-key calculators did in the 1960s and '70s.
It's up to Management to figure out the direction any given company is going ... however, Management rarely looks into the details of how the plumbing works, or who is cleaning the windows or trimming the shrubbery. That is left up to the maintenance people.
Unfortunately, computers (and the use of computers), gets very expensive when you head into the several hundreds of seats range ... and extremely expensive when your eclipse 1K seats ... I won't get into the costs & complexities of 100K+ desktops spread world-wide. That's a lot of money being spent on what traditional management sees as "just maintenance" ... So traditional management thinks that it must be something more than maintenance. IT isn't.
Any company with half an ounce of common sense in this era will have both a "technical" track and a "managerial" track ... In this scenario, management does management stuff, and a more technically inclined person with managerial ability, hopefully sitting at the Board level, manages the technical side of things that most management quite frankly aren't properly equipped to understand. This person's duties should include hiring, firing, and promoting of more technologically capable employees (or, in larger companies, appointing staff to do same).
Traditional management's feudal derived mindset doesn't work with IT. IT changes too fast. Traditional management can't cope with fast changes. Trying to define IT in traditional MBA terms is, in my mind, an exercise in futility.
So no, as far as "The Corporation" is concerned, any "status improvement" won't last any longer than the plumber's status is improved after unclogging the executive washroom's bog.
I and several hundred thousand (a couple million? Dunno.) computer people "worked through the Y2K problem" for well over 20 years, on and off. Come the morning of January 1st, 2000 damn near everything worked as intended.
Brilliant minds concluded Y2K was never a problem to begin with.
A "wetlands" in the North San Francisco Bay was "restored" a couple years ago, to great fanfare by the denizens of Novato. There was a huge song and dance about it. Now the very same green-and-granola people are bitching about the large swarms of salt-marsh mosquitoes eating them alive. And the smell of decaying plant matter and the odd fish whenever the water is low (it's tidal).
Excuse me? The Residents aren't saddos or losers ... Freaks, maybe, but then we all have a little bit of freak in us. Their art might not be for everybody, but calling them that is kinda harsh, don't you think?