Posts by ChaosFreak

If it's free, it's inaccurate

While we'd all love everything to be free, the current surveillance capitalism, advertising based business model of the internet should have taught us that you pay for free stuff in other ways.

With search, you pay for free search with inaccurate results that are littered with sponsored content, sometimes disguised so carefully as to fool the user.

I think a lot of people would be happy to pay a small amount per month to know that the answers to their questions are the best, most accurate answers, and not the answers that sponsors paid Google the most to display.

Safer than self-driving cars

Comparing automated drones to self-driving cars is not very illuminating.

Roads are far more crowded than the sky. There are no pedestrians or bicycles in the sky. There are no traffic signals or roadsigns to read. All aircraft that fly in controlled airpace carry transponders that broadcast their position and speed to other aircraft for collision avoidance.

It's a far easier environment for automation.

Out of Pocket!!!

A million kudos for the proper use of the phrase "out of pocket"!

Out of pocket means you are left to pay an expense yourself that should have been covered by another party, for example, your company. It does not mean "out of the office" or "on the road" as so many misuse it today.

Whenever I hear someone misusing it this way, I think to myself that they are psychopaths contributing to the downfall of modern civilization as we know it. Perhaps I'm overreacting...

Frank Boring

My Dad told me they used to call him Frank Boring, and everyone including Frank took it as a compliment. On a high risk mission, you want someone steady and reliable.

EHRs are billing systems

Sadly, this is another case of "the user is not the customer." Why does Amazon and Google search suck? Because the user isn't the customer, the advertisers are. Google and Amazon search don't return the best results, they return the results that maximize sales for advertisers and ad revenue for Google and Amazon.

Why do EHRs suck for doctors? Because they're not the customer, the accounts are. EHRs are designed primarily to maximize revenue and reimbursements, and only secondarily to serve doctors and patients. At least in the USA....

You are not out of pocket!

Number one on my list of misused phrases is "out of pocket", which people began using interchangeably to mean "out of the office" about 15 years ago.

Out of pocket does not mean out of the office!

Out of pocket means that you are spending your own personal money and not being reimbursed by the company. As in, "I am paying for this out of pocket".

I suppose with remote work having become the norm, we will hear this less often hopefully.

How's that Koolaid Tasting?

Dell to its customers: "Buy lots of Dell laptops so your staff can work from anywhere!"

Dell to its employees: "You'll come the office to work and like it!"

Teslas have always had poor quality

Tesla quality has always been terrible, and has only gotten worse. They ranked at the bottom of the JD power initial quality ratings in 2022. People have purchased these cars up until now because (1) there really aren't that many other options for all-electric vehicles, or (2) they are fanbois who are buying into an image rather than making a rational decision. Unfortunately for Elon, the image most of his Tesla fans have been buying into is at odds with his more recent behavior, and also there are now many electric vehicles available from much more reliable brands. I don't see how Tesla can survive, and it looks like the stock market agrees with me.

Almost there

Another way of looking at this is that they built an incredibly complex machine and manage to get it almost into orbit on the first attempt. That's actually not bad, considering how many failures NASA, SpaceX and others have experienced on their way to perfecting new launch vehicles.

Get off my lawn!

Old man shakes fist, yells at those damn kids to get off his lawn

Surrendipitous Interactions?

The idea that "serendipitous interactions" In the office lead to creative ideas has been so thoroughly debunked, I'm surprised we keep seeing this old trope dragged out over and over again one discussing the merits of working in the office.

Serendipitous interactions are more likely to be productivity sucking interruptions 99 times out of 100. If you want to foster creativity, schedule events to promote brainstorming, including off sites, activities and brainstorming sessions.

I'm surprised the credit card company didn't automatically detect those fishy charges

Yeah, but...

Yeah, but you still can't sort comments newest to oldest on JIRA's "New Issue View".

Instead of working on "AI", Atlassian should tackle the mountain of bugs and missing features on their community forums.

Nah, that would only make users happy. Announcing fake "AI" features...now that makes investors happy!

Spelling error

Her name should be spelled Matsuoka, not Mastuoka.

I gotta wear shades...

"Once it becomes like putting on a pair of shades, things will really take off, but that could be a decade away."

Have you heard of this company called Magic Leap?

My First Computer Game

OK, so not a Timex Sinclair 1000 but still nostalgic... I managed to get my parents to splurge on a TRS-80 ("Trash 80") as an "educational device" (not a toy) back in 1981 when I was still in primary school. My big sister (six years my elder) was taking night computer courses at Boston University and so we bought a modem so that she could dial into their PDP-10. I soon figured out where she kept her password and spent hours playing "adventure"... when I finally got a Commodore 64 a few years later, the first games I bought (OK, downloaded from a pirate BBS) were the Infocom games as opposed to the flashy graphics games, which were WAY more engaging. I remember spending almost 48 hours straight solving "Planetfall". But try and tell that to kids these days...

I did manage to teach myself BASIC from the manual included with the TRS-80, the start of a long and satisfying career. My sister also has spent her whole career coding. I think she made it in just before the home computer industry decided that computers were "toys for boys" and began marketing exclusively to boys. Most of the jobs I worked in the early days had a very healthy (even by today's standards) mix of gender among the programmers, but that was a window that soon closed, unfortunately.

Maybe now the Eco-idiots will embrace GMOs?

This would seem to be a huge call to action for agricultural scientists to use gene splicing and editing to engineer crops that can resist insect attack without the need for pesticides.

But you'll hear very few "ecologists" embrace that approach. They'll just start screaming "Monsanto is evil!" even though the vast majority of GMO research is done by non-profit institutions.

As the article rightly states, organic is only an answer for those who can afford Whole Foods (aka "Whole Paycheck"). So I guess we need to starve 3 billion humans to save the insects, because GMOs are "evil"...

Indiegogo -- It's like Amazon Prime but with special three-year shipping!

Indiegogo -- It's like Amazon Prime but with special three-year shipping!

ADS-B

Why not equip them with ADS-B and traffic avoidance software?

Maybe I'm just old, but this reminds me of Salvage 1!

https://starlogger.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/spacecraft_salvage4.jpg

Anyone remember this show?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078681/

What we likely won't see is a change in policy from Microsoft.

The author ends with "What we likely won't see is a change in policy from Microsoft." I'd be interested in hearing from the author as to what policy changes he would recommend to Microsoft.

This is not meant as a criticism of the author or a defense of Microsoft, I am genuinely interested in how Microsoft could change its policies to make it less likely that un-pached XP machines will be attacked in the future.

Right On, Man!

I've "bought" three items on Indiegogo in the past three years:

One was a kinect-like device that was supposed to allow you to control your computer with gestures. They were six-months late shipping. Their driver caused Windows to crash. Then they went out of business before they could fix the driver. I have an expensive paperweight.

The second was a set of glasses that was supposed to help you fall asleep or recover from jetlag. They were over a year late shipping. The first one didn't work. They replaced it and this one "works" but doesn't do what they originally said it would do.

The final one was a carbon fiber wallet. It is two years late shipping and still hasn't shipped.

Indiegogo... it's like Amazon Prime but with three-year shipping!

(PS - I know that Indiegogo isn't an online store and that I'm not "buying products", I'm "supporting projects". It's just that the fail rate is so incredibly high.)

Skype and Hangouts Suck -- There's a Real Opportunity Here

Our organization has shifted back and forth from Skype to Hangouts as we experienced constant instability with both platforms. With a hangout with more than 4 people, there's about a 100% chance that one of them will be unable to get audio or video to work.

On Skype, the issue is drop-offs, occasional complete inability to make or receive a call and screen sharing is hit or miss.

If Amazon comes out with a solid, high-quality service, they could clean up.

We're on MS and Google--Not Happy with Either

We're in the unenviable position of paying MS for Office 365 to get email and access to Office software, but we can't use their cloud because, when we previously tried to migrate all our files from Google to MS, the MS cloud "updated" all of the "Last Modified" timestamps on the files, making it impossible for users to sort files by date (which is quite common when looking for files). MS support refused to call it a bug, instead saying it was "by design" because, technically, the new "copy" of the file was "modified" when it was created on the new cloud (even though it's an exact copy).

So, we're stuck with two clouds, paying two bills and using only half of the functionality of both.

Dammit! I thought of that years ago

Should've filed for a patent...

You have six fingers on your right hand... someone was looking for you.

Go the Fuck to Sleep!

Damn... I have the same "bag heater" issue with my SP3. You put it to sleep, it wakes up immediately. Put it to sleep again and put it in your bag, an hour later you have a very hot bag and your Surface has turned itself completely off (due to thermal overload) which means you're starting from a clean boot.

I was hoping the SP4 would solve these problems. Sounds like it hasn't.

Boeing = Russian Rocket

Hmmm.... I'm glad NASA is excited to have "two American companies" who can put people into space without going "hat in hand" to the Russians, but unfortunately one of those companies, Boeing, buys 40-year-old rocket motors from Russia, so... better hang on to that hat the next time Russia decides it wants some of its old Soviet territory back and we decide to impose sanctions.

Open the Pod Bay Doors

What if HAL doesn't let them back into the airlock.

Ummm... you missed a word there

I think you meant to say "skirting of CORRUPT taxi regulations"...

Like every other inefficient, poorly run, low-quality business, the taxi industry rushes to their government protectors to keep them from having to actually provide clean, safe taxis driven by polite drivers. You know, like a real market economy would demand that they do. So instead they try to outlaw the competition.

I live in Cambridge, MA (mentioned in the story) and for the past 2 years I've been taking Uber almost exclusively instead of taxis. Today I happened to be on the way home from a meeting and happened to be right in front of a taxi stand so I thought, OK, I'll save some money and take a cab.

The taxi pulls up, I get in and immediately he says "CASH ONLY!" even though his cab had the VISA/MasterCard logo on the window. Having learned my lesson in the past in trying to argue with cabbies over this issue, I just got right out and ordered an Uber.