Posts by Alterhase 33 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Feb 2013
Many years ago, I was the team lead for RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) for a new storage product at a large company.
In that role, I sat in on the code reviews and brought up issues as I saw them. I was explicitly "uninvited" to the review meetings because I was slowing down the process.
Guess what: when the product was shipped it had a number of issues that I had explicitly warned about!
"Parry the buffet"/"cushion the shock"/"gear engages"/"switches lock".....
Sounds like Kipling was talking about "locomotive drivers" coupling up and driving a train.
On the left side of the pond, "locomotive drivers" are called "engineers", and "locomotive drivers" are the big wheels on a locomotive -- perhaps this reference comes from his time in America.
I live in Silicon Valley and have Sonic as my land-line telephone service provider -- both a POTS line and a high-speed fiber (VOIP) line. Sonic does a pretty good job at blocking robocalls -- I get two to three "missed calls" (hangups without going to my answering machine) per day. One interesting thing is that my POTS line will ring and not go to the answering machine and then, a minute or two later, my VOIP line will ring, presumably the same robocaller.....
But a couple of times per week, I get a Chinese language robocall on my AT&T cellphone. I have had the cellphone number since 1993 so it never belonged to a Chinese speaker....
Mage wrote: Often above average because they needed to be to get that far.
When I think of the women in computer science, I think of Ada Lovelace and all her successors, including Grace Hopper, plus the "computers" who did so much during World War II and the space programs.
One of the most intelligent managers that I had the opportunity to work for was a woman.....
-- And why is there only one woman among the 30 icons offered to commenters, and why is that one woman Paris Hilton?
The San Francisco Municipal Transit ("Muni") still uses trolley buses (along with trolley cars/trams),
Recently they have deployed trolley buses with batteries which allow them to travel off the trolley wires, enabling them to route around problems (accidents, etc.) and to serve some areas without having to install the overhead wires.
(With regard to having high voltage trolley wires overhead, I have never heard of complaints or particular problems. But the power distribution system run by the Northern California public utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.....)
I know that the topic of the article is Google, but I, too, have had Amazon keep sending me ads for something that I have already bought from them.
It's particularly annoying for something long-lasting (like a dishwasher) -- can't they figure out that I would not be interested in another dishwasher for the next 10 year?
So much for AI....
I live in one of the high-rent areas of Sillycon Valley, and I have to go out of my house to the street to get a usable cell-phone signal (4G).
But one of my neighbors has started a "no 5G antennas in my area - think of the children" campaign. (He probably has a WiFi router in his house to irradiate them already.....)
Even here we have Luddites.
As a statistician, I am more that aware of the "false positive paradox" -- when the actual incident rate (in this case "criminality") is low in the general population, the probability that a person identified as as criminal is actually a criminal is low.
Wikipedia offers a good description of the paradox with examples, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#False_positive_paradox
Here's an idea:
Don't let pedestrians walk around unless they have their phone turned on and sending their location continuously to sensors in autonomous vehicles, which could then avoid them.
You could even add a flag to the data stream if the pedestrian was actively looking at the phone....
Fred Franzia, whose winery produces "two-buck Chuck" (now $2.99 in California), once said something along the lines of "Anything over $10 a bottle for wine is marketing."
I have held blind wine tasting parties for friends, and over a group of people,there is little or no correlation between price and perceived quality.
I don't pay more than $10 a bottle for the wine I drink every day, and I can tell that $100 a bottle wine is "better", but it's not worth 10 times more to me....
“The rules governing the Internet allowed a generation of entrepreneurs to build services that changed the world and created a lot of value in people’s lives. It’s time to update these rules to define clear responsibilities for people, companies and governments going forward.”
Let's be honest and change this to read "created a lot of corporate value from people’s lives"
It's interesting to note that "McLaren San Francisco" is located directly next door to the Palo Alto Tesla salesroom...If a Telsa does not have enough cachet for you, you can pop next door and get a McLaren.
(I wonder whether Elon Musk still has the McLaren he bunged up several years ago, showing off to a friend on San Hill Road.)
It is my understanding that part of the education of a gentleman was the ability to tell the time to within fifteen minutes by looking at the sun. Then the pocket watch and later the wrist watch came along and the need disappeared.
Ahh, progress!
Icon because how else would you know it was time to head to the pub?
I was a thirty-year IBM employee back in the old days of the Watsons et al. Like the old HP, the old IBM did feel responsible to the employees.
I remember one time when the project I was working on was canceled, my manager came to me and said, "I don't have any work for you right now, but stick around and I want you on my team for an interesting project that is coming up." So for a couple of months, I reported for work daily and read technical books and magazines -- the hardest part was to keep from bothering my friends (colleagues) who did have real work to do....
Another time, during a time of tight budgets, the headcount in the department I was managing was cut below the minimum I felt was necessary to do the job, so I went to my manager and said "Get me out of here!". He helped me get one of the best jobs that I had in IBM. (Interestingly, three years later the department that I had left had twice the minimum headcount that I said I could run it with.)
The discussion of Morse code reminded me of my first real tech job after I got my BSEE and while I was working on my MS in Computer Science. I was working on a project to understand the propagation of Extreme Low Frequency (ELF) radio waves which were in the range of 15-30 KHz. Since ELF signals propagated around the world and penetrated water a few feet, they were used to communicate with slightly submerged submarines trailing a mile-long antenna. Due the low carrier frequency the signal bandwidth was very small and was used for low-speed Morse communications. Several of my colleagues on the project knew Morse and could transcribe it, but since it was all encoded strings of numbers, I never bothered to learn it.
Ahh, kinder eggs! That's the only kind that will be legal in California when Proposition 12, which was passed last month, goes into effect. It requires that all egg-laying hens have at least 1 square foot of usable floor space by the end of 2019 and be cage-free with accommodations like scratching posts, nests and perches by the end of 2021.
Oh, you mean "Kinder", the German word for "children". I didn't know we harvested eggs from them....
> "Oggetto inaspettato nell'area di insaccamento."
Ahhh -- This is why this Silicon Valley techie avoids the automated checkout lines at his local supermarket!
Normally three of the six automated checkout stands are out of service at any given time and the working one that I choose to use decides it does not like me and says "Please wait for attendant" in the middle of the checkout process, leaving me to wait for a human being to finish checking out other customers in the human-attended lines before coming over to reset the machine.
To slow the rise of the machines, I choose the human-attended checkout lines whenever I have more that one item to purchase...
I am surprised that no-one has commented about the American Commander-in-Chief's idea for a new branch of the military to wage war in space.
Far beyond Google locking people out of their homes, disrupting the Internet from space by whatever means would quickly take us back to the 18th century.....
>>> Perhaps Aldi are trying to cut yet more corners by encouraging shoppers to step forward and man more checkouts themselves.
Aldi is behind the times -- many Safeway grocery stores in our area have "self-checkouts" where you get to scan the items yourself and then wait several minutes for a store clerk to come over to reset the terminal when something goes wrong, as happens in about half the cases....
Ahh, progess!
As someone old enough to have actually worked on the development team for the IBM 3800 printer, I can confirm that the original model was rated at 12,000 lines per minute.
One my memories was that we used laundry bins to catch the output from early versions, before the burster-trimmer-stacker (BTS) was developed. The continuous paper would fly in an arc for several feet before landing in the basket.
<i> it seems to grow exponentially in resource requirements and inversely in speed</i>
This seems to me the fundamental problem with blockchains. And if you are not going to catenate multiple transactions on a single blockchain, how does it differ from a conventional hash checksum?
From http://boingboing.net/2012/10/02/what-a-dead-fish-can-teach-you.html
In 2009, a team led by neuroscientist Craig Bennett and psychologist Abigail Baird ran an fMRI experiment using the salmon as their subject. Not only did they really put a dead (and frozen) fish into an fMRI machine, later analysis of their data actually produced evidence of brain activity — as if the dead fish were thinking.
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