Posts by a_yank_lurker 4138 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2013
Using these oxides makes sense because there is plenty of data available. It appears that there is something going on that the current theories miss entirely with superconductivity. If that is true, then there is a possibility of finding materials that superconduct at ambient temperatures.
How would you know? The official numbers about the economy ignore the plight of the working class who never recovered from the last recession. No jobs for burly men only for bureaucrats and the chattering classes (or so it seems). Pay raises for many are anemic if they occur at all. One statistic that is often ignored is the labor participation rate is down to very low levels, about were it was 20 or 30 years ago. To many the recession never ended.
Before one can fix a problem one has to define what is meant by "fake news". Mostly what I see the operative definition is "whatever I disagree with or conflicts with my beliefs" is defined as fake news. It seems as if the debate is not about finding the truth but about posing to look good for one's side. So, for example, some will say a pro-Trump story or pro-Clinton story has to be fake because it challenges their worldview. It does not matter that the story is factually accurate. The facts, being pesky things, are challenging everyone to shut up and evaluate their assumptions.
The first primitive text based interface I remember was with a teletype and we will not discuss how long ago that was to protect the senile (me).
If 'zilla's patents are truly valid why don't they go after Slurp for DOS or ATT for Unix? I suspect both CLIs predate the patents.
@kmac499 - I personally believe the key idea behind agile methods is to remove relatively useless analysts from the middle between the end users and the developers. As a corollary, the end users and developers actually talk to each other on a regular basis as the project goes forward to refine what is needed now and what might be nice in a later release. What is happening is too many are focusing on a precise set of rules and not on the key idea - end users and developers should be in regular contact and this contact should be encouraged not hampered. The rules tend to replace the worthless analysts and cause procedural delays.
"The world doesn't just need developers." - There was show over here "Dirty Jobs" where the host (Mike Rowe) went out and helped people doing dirty jobs showing that there are many jobs which require one to get dirty. The show was about the dignity and hard work of the people who do these jobs. Having worked in sewage treatment plants aka "shit plants", I know how dirty and smelly some of these jobs could be and how low on the totem pole most snobs treated you.
"As you can see, it can be a skill applicable to more than just writing software." - The key to being a good to great programmer is not specific programming skills (those are easily learned) but logical problem solving. Problem solving involves knowing how to ask questions, how to interpret the answers, some trial and error to learn more about the problem until one understands the problem and its solution. None of this requires specific coding or computer skills.
What kids should be taught is how to solve the problem, develop a solution, and then describe the problem and solution both verbally and mathematically showing how the solution logically solves the problem. One old school programming techniques was "pseudo-code" which describe the solution in a format that looked like a program but did not follow any specific language syntax.
Sleaze meet Slime. Symantec has a bad reputation for garbage products while LifeLock has been deservedly in and out of trouble with the ferals. May be the marriage of Sleaze and Slime will lead to the death of both.
AV has always been mostly reactive rather than proactive by design. The problem for software vendors is the underlying market is mature so sales growth comes from mostly getting customers from your competitors.
Publicity does not always win business especially when the post points out that the little guy will run afoul of the same law that LinkedIn did. Free publicity works when the service accurately describes itself and accurately describes what makes it different and hopefully better and this reported in a post. Opportunity was trying to capitalize on LinkedIn woes instead of highlighting why one should give them a look. Since I do not live in Russia, problems with Russian privacy/data location laws are a minor concern to me.
Any exploit that requires physical access or using an USB connection is a lower priority problem compared to phishing, macros, malware ads, etc. which only require the user to make a mistake once. Also, an exploit requiring physical access is not one that will be used against random users; it is more likely to be used against specific targets.
I still occasionally use taxis. I also have the cell phone numbers of several cabbies so I can call them directly when needed. Uber/Lyft make it easier to be a driver for most and shift the maintenance costs to the driver. Cabbies actually rent the taxi from the company who is responsible for maintenance.
Is it possible that Slurp is hearing through there back channels that many 'bloat server customers are planning to migrate to Linux? Relational databases behave very similarly (some differences in the SQL dialect and the DDL) that changing one for another is relatively straightforward. If Slurp wants to stay relevant, their products will probably need to run on other server OSes.
Actually, manufacturing may start moving back to the US. As producing countries get wealthier the local wages start rising. This happened with Japan and Korea. It is happening in China and India. At some point the local wages, etc. plus freight costs are high enough that there is little or no advantage to manufacture overseas. So the manufacturing migrates back.
Assange commented there was very little in any information Wikileaks had about Trump that would be new and none would be surprising. Trump made sure of that. However, they had tons of information about Clinton. Once the light was turned on the cockroaches would flee.
I have no idea if the Swedish charges are solid, politically motivated to discredit him, or both. But for Sweden to take 6 years to meander to Ecuadorian embassy in London is definitely a head scratch. It's not like Assange was going anywhere or they had to find him. The timing makes it sound like the Swedes are looking for a way out because they feel the Trump administration is less interested in Assange and Wikileaks than the current one.
Twitter has problem with its basic design. It tends to be oriented towards loud-mouthed, vain, narcissists who by definition at best only obnoxious. The more obnoxious the more trollish the behavior. It is not a platform designed for something resembling a coherent post, 140 characters pretty much limit one to snark. A longer post allows one to express more subtlety, facts, and, hopefully, logic about a topic.
The problem with trying containing trolls is very basic. What is a troll? Outside of some very loutish people it is often in the eyes of the reader; particularly if the topic is controversial such as the recent US election. Too many define a troll as someone who disagrees with them or expresses an observation which may very accurate they wish to ignore.
Often in the real world, refractoring or rewriting old code sounds very good. But the problem is the revised/new code still needs to be thoroughly tested and verified which is not a trivial task. Thus, code clean up could end up being a bigger mess than leaving the gnarly, dirty code alone.
One way to generate effective passwords is to use a good password manager that will generate gibberish passwords on demand. 48 or 64 characters of random gibberish will take a good while to guess.
This research highlights the more one can learn about a potential victim the easier it is attack. The Internet makes finding a lot information much easier even if was always publicly available.
@Youngone - Something smells fishy about this whole affair. I suspect part of the problem was the PHBs running HP panicked and bought Autonomy without proper due diligence. But it is possible that there were enough signs that should have alerted someone who paying attention that Autonomy had its problems. Whether there was fraud involved, maybe, but definitely incompetence.
The absolute size of the code base for some applications so large that current, common development tools are inadequate and no matter how competent the developer there is some subtle detail overlooked throughout the process. Also, QA is hard to do and takes commitment from the C-suite.
AC? do I need to explain? - No. The problem is many of the elites are extremely dismissive of the "deplorables" as Hildabeast called them. Once dismissed as being something border Untermensch it is pretty easy to dismiss their real problems and issues. Blowhard and Sanders highlighted that there is deep distrust and real angst out in the hinterlands about very real problems people are facing daily.
The real problem for GrubHub is the restaurants they have in my area is that I can either call for delivery or use their website for delivery. In either case, I do not need to use and so have not. Note this is not a political but pragmatic decision - they offer almost no value to me. The CEO is a class A idiot. Smart managers know if they want a competent, capable staff they are likely to have diverse staff. Good talent comes with differing views, values, and demographics and limiting yourself to a narrow subset is likely to cause problems in the future in not understanding your customers who are likely to be more diverse than your staff will ever be.
Any publicity is not always good publicity and needlessly antagonizing your customers is never a good policy. This memo is something that will needlessly antagonize some current and potential customers driving them away, In my case the issue is moot because their service is not very useful to me for other reasons.
My sense of Trump and Sanders was they both realized there were large numbers of Americans being tossed into the landfill by the "elites". The hinterlands have been hammered economically for years and the residents have been accused by ignoramuses of being just this side of Hitler for years that they got fed up.
After the Tokyo subway sarin gassing a colleague and I looked in the Merck manual (a chemistry reference) sarin. We found a reference to the synthesis of sarin that was published in 1950 (this was about 1995). The basic problem that scientific illiterates have is that making almost all explosives or chemical weapons uses basic organic chemistry and the synthesis of these chemicals has been published decades ago, The bigger problem with making these chemicals is the inherent danger of the precursors and especially the final product. Many explosives and chemical weapons are very dangerous to handle if one does not know what they are doing and are dangerous if do know.
More to the story, my colleague researched nerve agents and found that the first known agent was synthesized in the 1850's from two very common chemicals. The information for making these agents is on the scientific literature.
Just to note, my original training is as a chemist and I am an ex-lab rat.
At roughly 60 or 70 per month per seat adds up to a nice chuck of change for a largish organization. Assume on has 100 users that 1200 user month or about 72K or 84K a year. I do not know much about CRM software other than it is pricey but at those rates one is idiotic not to look at purchasing a copy.
@Doctor Syntax - The young'ens are used to multiple devices with different OSes on them. They have learned the key fact about OSes; they only exist to make the device useful. They are less likely to slavish use an OS because that is the only one they ever used. Many middle age and older users only learned Windows and many struggle to use anything else. Slurp is losing the consumer market as it migrates to phones and tablets. They can maintain a strong hold on the business market if they stop doing idiotic moves.
Slurp's "leadership" is acting like the quip about generals - "they are fighting the last war".
@lotus49 - Large projects are more difficult than smaller ones but the one key to any large project is proper planning. I have around some very large non-IT government projects that came in on time and on budget. To do this require a lot of careful planning and costing and discussions with potential vendors about what is suitable (usually fairly standard equipment). And there was field testing done with pilot scale equipment. It appears that large, government IT projects do nothing like any of these things but go off with big bang and thus fly on a wing and a prayer. Migrating data from one database to another, did any even try a pilot project to see how difficult it might be. It will get all the answers but it will force people to actually address the nuts and bolts of doing..
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