Posts by jake 26713 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Little known fact: Loggers[0] plant more trees than they cut ... in North America, anyway. Doing otherwise is destroying your own income, and the height of stupidity. Each year, far more trees are planted than are harvested. Seems that wood is a renewable resource, regardless of what you might have heard from the greenaholic wingnuts.
[0] Sorry, "forest product companies".
"Large scale integration was VERY expensive at first. ONLY NASA had a budget and a need for it."
That was Small Scale Integration, or SSI .... in the early 1960s defense and aerospace used all that could be produced, a couple million dollars worth. By the mid 1960s, space and defense only used a third of production (a total of over a third of a billion dollars/year worth already!), and SSI had been joined by MSI (Medium Scale). By the time LSI came about with things like 1K RAM chips and early microprocessors (call it 1971ish), the vast bulk of production was for commercial projects.
They built the AGC "that way" because that was the only way they could be certain it would survive what little we knew about radiation in space. By the time Apollo flew, we had vastly better computer capability on the ground. Hell, some people already had better computers on (or under, or next to) their desks!
Some folks prefer to stay in mummy's basement, risking the odd paper cut folding cranes. Others prefer to see if there is a new species of crane over the next mountain.
Me, I like to think about folding mountains. Spotting cranes is just gravy.
BTW, it's not a tank. It has no defensive capabilities.
That actually made me laugh loud enough that the Wife wondered what was so funny ... she laughed too. Have a cold one :-)
Sadly, however, I must regret to inform you that the shipment was rejected at the dock, and the contract remains unfilled. Upon inspection, it would appear that your effort has no NSFW component.
"With proper source control system"
Back "quite a few years ago" (the time frame referenced by the commentard) that wasn't necessarily an option. If there was any kind of "code review" it may have been his mate at the next desk. The world has changed quite a bit in a very short period of time.
The first five times I went to Hawai'i, I landed at night, was met on the tarmac by a taxi & taken to the NOC, where I did what was needed in a locationless, windowless space, and then returned to the airport by taxi the following evening. I never saw a beach or any other scenery, not even from the air!
"Jet lag was horrible back in my home country"
Cure for jet lag: Melatonin.
Part of my job title was "global network troubleshooter" from the early '80s thru' the late '90s ... at any given hour I could expect to be flying off to anywhere on the planet. 0.25mg melatonin 35 minutes before "local bedtime" on the first night out, and I was fine for the duration of the trip ... until the next timezone. Lather, rinse, repeat ... I experienced no ill effects, could wake up immediately if required, and apparently it's not addictive (all unlike alcohol, sleeping pills, etc.).
Yes, I know, "studies indicate", yadda yadda yadda. I am not a doctor, this is not a prescription, might be illegal in your jurisdiction, etc.
... not only were "Customs Charges" and "Additional Customs Charges" and "Expedited Customs Charges" all not only expected, but were questioned if they were not present on the expense report after visiting certain countries.
The other one that I remember from the early Silly Con Valley was the "CODB" expense report line item, which was quite useful after most third world trips ... "Cost Of Doing Business".
Even Frontiers Media (specifically Frontiers in Pharmacology) have called the FLCCC's so-called "studies" full of unsubstantiated claims and pulled the abstract on March 1st.
I, personally, don't feel that trusting my life to what appears to be a few self-serving media whores making a living from that side of YouTube is a very good idea. YMMV.
Seriously, I thought it was capable of it, or I'd have dropped a suggestion to Mars Lab years ago ... scads of cameras, a couple of microphones, and no way to easily sync the one to the other? What were they thinking?
Come to think of it, are they not capable of video at all? That would make no sense ... Maybe after they fire up the chopper :-)
... a microphone that was inadvertently dropped picking up on harmonics through the chassis.
I have an old RCA ribbon microphone in need of a rebuild that sounds similar (garage sale, $25, scored!) ...some frequencies are distorted, others come through just fine.
It'd be nice to see synced video to connect the sounds to what is actually happening!
Or they buy a job-lot of left-handed screwdrivers and don't understand why the entire staff bitches about it except Joe ... who is a southpaw. Shirley the rest of the staff can learnt to use their left hands? Look at Joe! He has no problems with them!
Well, yeah. Thankfully, most developers wouldn't dream of doing marketing, and hate the concept of management. Sadly, the M&Ms are convinced that not only should they, but they can do engineering. Thus the slimy morass we find ourselves in today.
Free advice[0] for sysadmins tired of the status quo: Take as many business related courses as you can stomach. Haul your ass[1] to your nearest post-secondary school that offers night courses and talk to a career counselor. Tell 'em that you are a techie, but are interested in management. You want to take courses that can be applied to a future MBA (should you want to go that route later).
If you already hold a four year degree, and you can code fluently in one or more upper level languages, chances are you can snooze through an MBA in two years (or less, if the classes line up right). Lest you think getting an MBA is difficult, think about all the feckless idiots you know who hold one ;-)
I realize that not all of us are cut out for management ... the objective isn't necessarily to become a manager, but rather to learn their lingo. It's amazing how fast long-closed doors open once you learn to talk to Moneybags in his/her own language. On top of that, an MBA will better prepare you for when the time comes to strike out on your own and become a consultant.
[0] And worth every penny! No refunds without receipt.
[1] Or arse, depending on which side of the pond you hail from.
Marketards & manglement need to stop trying to do engineering and leave it to the engineers. Between them, the M&Ms are cocking the technical world up completely. It's kinda like watching a liberal arts major trying to use a lathe ... spectacularly dangerous for onlookers, but funny in a morbid kind of way.
Hint: Get a melon as red and sweet as you can find. Use a melon baller for the watermelon. Don't warn your diners. They will bite into one of the balls, expecting a cherry tomato. The look on their face is priceless ... as is the empty plate soon after :-)
My round.
""Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put one in a fruit salad.""
Intelligence is knowing that a Watermelon is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing it is actually a cucumber, and works well when sauted with chicken (or pork chops) and served in a chipolte tomato sauce.
Back in the early days, it was fairly common for me to arrive on site to troubleshoot, pull up the logs, and be asked with shock (and sometimes more than a little awe) "You can DO that? WOW!" ... The same type of people were even more flabbergasted when we could do it remotely. It was all magic as far as they were concerned.
Get rid of Redmond products entirely.
Me DearOldMum, Wife and Great Aunt run a cut-down version of Slackware. None of them have ever used root, not even with su or sudo. Between the three of them, they needed precisely zero technical support in all of 2020. Right tool for the job and all that. (I handle their software updates and backups from my desk here in the office ... or rather a computer does it for me. A simple cron job or two and some scripting takes care of those details, with only very occasional input from me.)
My sister, on the other hand, who insists that if she doesn't run Windows the entire planet will implode, is constantly trying to get me to fix her computers ... Sorry, Sis, I don't do Windows.
"When it comes to document readers, there is another point, which is that we may need them to render files that are otherwise inaccessible."
Off hand, I know of no old[0] file format that I can't read using something from the FOSS world, and that goes back to punch tape and card decks. So in this particular case that's hardly an issue.
[0] I picked an arbitrary pre-2000 for "old" in this case. YMMV.
Yes, Reader was a free download. Still is, unless they revoked it.
And now you know why using bots to take down singleton human-used instances of any given communications system is inherently evil. Even if that instance is controlled by a bot.
The twitter-bot should have flagged a human at twitter to eyeball this single instance, and not taken any other action. In theory, the human would have laughed and flagged it as OK (for obvious reasons). If the human found an issue, he should have emailed the owner of the account for an explanation, thus allowing human-human interaction to fix the issue. No, this would not be a huge waste of resources at twitter, there probably aren't more than a few tens of this kind of thing per day.
If the user-bot is spamming, or otherwise abusing resources, it's a whole 'nuther stable of worms. Nuke it on sight using any resources you have available.
"One of these gears has 227 teeth, FFS! Imagine figuring out that is a prime using only Roman numerals and an abacus!"
My Daughter figured that out in her head when she was about 7 years old. So did my grand daughter. I hardly think that the mathematicians of the Classical Era would have found it to be as difficult as you portray.
Its the poor who are really stupid, throwing away what little money they have on sporting events ... and the wealthy encourage it, to help maintain the status quo.
iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.
The canonical work is Charles Mackay's "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" from 1852.
Worth a read. And a ponder ... if all this was known nonsense back in the mid 1800s, why are people still taken in by it? Available on Project Gutenberg.
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