Posts by Marshalltown 739 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2011
"And if that's not bad enough, how about websites with 'help' options - none of which remotely deal with the problem in hand."
Or worse I my view, the error that pops up, and when you check the forum, you notice that the same error has reappeared and been repaired over the last 15 years. The developer seems incapable of not reiterating the past.
Yep. We considered the BOH a training manual. The World Wide Web was invented shortly after that discovery, but we considered useless for quite a while, sticking to tools like "archie", and of course usenet. What was the name of that tool for stitching digital images back together after down loading the various chunks from a news group?
Ah yes, or peripheral vision loses all color, as the target becomes preternaturally sharp. The beard prickles. The target's eyes open wide. Must not throw him over the cliff. He signs the pay checks - his partner signs them - must not - his partner won't mind at all - mmmmuuusssttt not. Oh look he almost backed over all by himself, and I stopped him. Later, his partner, "what's wrong with you?"
One of the peculiar realities anyone who uses measures a good deal runs into is the AVP/Imp/Metric schism. From a US point of view the differences between AVD and Imperial are much more confusing. Canada for instance uses Imperial Gallons, the US uses an older version that is smaller in volume. A US gallon is 0.83267 British gallons, a bit more than 4/5 ths of a Gallon(Brit) as Glover's Pocket Ref would put it. [The Canadians also seem to get milk in bags, which seems - well - Canadian.] In Britain you often see Youtubers using inches and feet, and the reason is that for some activities such as building furniture, "old money" is actually easier. The numbers are all smaller for example, and the fractions are common fractions which are fairly easy to deal with in your head, while decimal fractions are more difficult. 16 1/5 inches for instance is 419.1 mm. You can round that to either 420 or 419, but finding that on a ruler when you're older and the eyes are showing a lot of mileage is a fussy and frustrating task. A 1/16 inch is 1.5875 mm, finding the right 1/16th can be fussy and irritating as well, but if you are using the right scale, there WILL be a graduation mark there. Obviously you can work to whole millimeters and the problem should go away. However . . . using "old money" drawings means that you convert every measure to meteric, and because of rounding, errors creep in. You have to define a tactic to prevent the random noise of rounding from turning your build into a cat' cradle of odd angles - not quite square, and non-Euclidian surfaces - not exactiy flat, and places where things join oddly. You must in short employ a different kind of approach to measuring. It doesn't look that way, but it is.
You hear a good deal of metric disparagement of the use of a human body part, e.g. a foot, as a standard measure. The trouble with this arrogance is that it assumes a lot. Furniture, even metrically laid out designs still work to standardized human proportions. You'll discover that measures such as 300 mm, and 600 mm occur frequently (one and two feet more or less). This is because humans really are more or less standardized. The traditional measures employ that in ways that guarantee than most furniture will fit most people (not all), and where you have volumes, people will tend to feel they are not being cheated. To habituate from a gallon down to a liter takes practice. (Though many "traditional" volumes and weights are outright weird, such as a pipe, a tun, or a quarter).
What is more of an actual issue is that the measuring is the different arithmetic. The "old money" system uses "12" with simpifies a lot of fractions, because you get nice common fractions. That harks back to Babylon and Summeria where a hexagismal (bas-60) system was employed. This offers many more common fraction solutions and whole number results than base-10. The Arabs, and their heirs who divised the metric system, stuck to counting on their fingers. Apparently the Summerian decided that teams of three (10 finger and ten toes person) worked better.
Just to keep the AVDP/Imperial divide stirred, the US standarized the inch to 25.4 mm exactly. This still has its drawbacks I had a bureaucrat who tried to insist that we had made a mistake. The standard form devised by bureaucrats and would-be desk jockeys wanted both AVDP and Metric figures for certain things recorded in the field. They apparently had assumed they needed to check field scientist's arithmetic, and had discovered our metric areas were wrong. Their area estimates however were achieved by trying converting a square meter area to square feet using a linear conversion factor. When this was pointed out, there was a deafening silence, followed by an "oh." No apology or "my mistake." Note there that the "area" we turned in was a metric estimate. People and their preferences are _always_ more of a problem than any particular measurement system.
Truly. "Apache" probably derives, through Spanish, from a label (Zuni?) for the "Dineh" - the people called "Apaches" and related "Navajo." The Zuni label designated the Navajo, or Apache as "enemies." Etymologies tend to drift with time. The Navajo, who, like the Apache, are Athabascan speakers are said _now_ to acquired the appellation from Spanish adaptation of a word from another indigenous group. But many moons ago, my anthropology instructor indicated that "Navajo" was derived from "Navaja." A navaja is a Spanish folding knife, with a very impressive pedigree reaching back to Rome. The professor claimed the Spanish had referred to the Navajo as "throat cutters." Take your pick.
". . . Simplified English . . ."
Not really. Just simplified English speakers. Consider the hell of being in third grade, living in California, having relatives who spell "coloured" "colored" and others that spell it vice versa. You learn to use the dictionary very young, and argue with the teacher about spelling work as "labor" or "labour," and with the dictionary you prove to the teacher that both are accepted spellings. But the teacher doesn't like smart ass little nine year olds, and you spend more time writing sentences on the chalk board than any one else in history.
I don't think I ever worked at a company big enough to have an HR. Mostly you dealt with a "boss" who tried to wear as many hats as he could and fumble through things that his staff could easily have done for him. I'll never forget the mid-'90s virus battle we fought. It ended when we discovered he had been "checking security" using a program on a bootable floppy he brought back from Israel. Some one there told him it was a critical aspect of computer security to check the computers in the office weekly, and handed him the "tool" to do it. I personally used a large tin snips to convert it into trash.
Not to mention that when we install Linux and configure it, quite often we also need to tell the printer that, no, we use US Letter, not A4. All too often a newb will unwarily jump from installation to printing only to discover that the printed material is clipped at the left and right margins, but there's lots of room for notes at the bottom.
US legal is still used for real estate documents and automobile purchase and contracts. I've long wonder how it became a standard. Another vanished standard was a paper required by US military and government which was an odd size slightly smaller than US letter, around 8-in. by 11, or 10.5. The US Forest Service even had manilla folders sized for it, and occasional government contracts would specify the format this was up into the late 1970s and early '80s. I believe it was referred to as US Government "letter" paper.
Space ... someone will want the space to store something actually useful. So, what happens is that instead of storing the mostly useless cable in a leaky shed, critical boxes of ducuments are selected by someone in charge of "space." The critical documents are ruined by damp, while the nice shiny cable that could be converted into garrottes remains there, safe and mostly useless.
The first BOFH I ever read mentioned redirecting a doctoral dissertation to /dev/null IIRC. I worked at a company with absolutely no reason to deal with the more intricate details of computers, networks, servers and such. Then the "boss" got a wild hair up an orifice and decided to diversify, become an ISP. Briefly I and my co-workers were drafted to help as "support" staff, hell desk and such. Then he brought in a young Goth to manage the ISP side of things, and another to support him. The young Goth decided that all computers in the office were HIS domain, regardless of the needs of the rest of the business's other side, which, as I said had nothing whatsoever to do with ISP trivia. But I and a colleague HAD installed the peer to peer network, before the Boss had his brainstorm. Our would be IT manager would lock the rest of the office out of access to the print server for no good reason when he left for the night. It was NT, but we had a floppy disk that could reboot it to useability for its intended purpose - printing. He would rage about the instability that would ensue. NT didn't like the by pass trick. Finally, he quit, calling out "harassment" as the reason, since he received no respect for his decisions regarding the Print Server. Even the Boss pointed out that there were others that needed the printers. His understudy moved up, and after actually talking with us about what was "wrong" with the print server, nearly died laughing, and directed me to the early BOFH pieces.
My favorite misdeed of all was to write a script called by the autoexec file that blanked the screen and then started a count down in very large numbers. I added it to the office manager's system. She screamed and ran out the door when it popped up. She was a firm believer that the world would be ending RSN at the time.
In an office I worked at in the early '90s, the machines we used were DOS systems. As such, they employed an autoexec.bat file to configure things as the system finally reached usability. It was considered a good joke to set the text color to black or similar little pranks by editing the batch file. We kept a bootable floppy on hand with edlin on it to correct any "edits" to the file.
The best way to do hash browns is to take a smallish potato, ideally a little less than fist sized, maybe lady fist sized. You wash it, make sure it as no bad spots, and grate it coarsely. In a 10-inch (25 cm) pan pour in about 1/8 - 1/16 the inch (3 - 1.5 mm) of oil - it has to completely cover the pan bottom, Start it heating at medium heat. When the oil starts shimmering scatter the grated potato in the hot oil all over the bottom of the pan so the potato layer is as thin as you can get it. Maybe press with a spatula to get the layer thin. Salt it liberally (less of course you are sodium limited, in which case you shouldn't even be reading this). There should be bits of the pan bottom visible or the pan is too small, or the potato is too big. Let it cook for about three to four minutes and check to see if the bottom is browning. The entire mass should lift like a large potato chip. If it does, flip and let the other side have its day in the heat - well not a day, but until the sizzling diminishes. Turn the pan lower - say a bit below medium, let potato cruise a bit, but don't burn it. Lift it out and place on a plate at least as big as the disk of hash browns. It should be crisp, dark golden brown, and well salted. Add black pepper here if you like it. Pop three eggs in the pan and cook how you like them. Slid them on top of the potatos along with any bacon and/or sausage. Being American I don't really worry about mushrooms or tomatoes. You'll get various people saying you should par boil the potato, or wring the moisture out of the freshly grated potato, and these steps might please some, but they aren't nessary in a big enough pan with enough oil.
Or the normal hell-desk "required" response as indicated by job "training." Basically, "don't fiddle with the hardware. We do not want to deal with a liability suit when you electrocute yourself because you neglected to unplug the device first." Some old tube-driven radios had components that could still knock you cold hours after being turned off and unplugged.
I would like to see a stable word processor that offers the basics that most people would need, which would encompass the basic writing tasks that a single person needs. MS could break out other "tools" like commenting and team composition perhaps. But you would first need to educate the functionally illiterate to genuine writing needs and confuse "comments" with the silliness you run into in "comments" as understood in social media. There's actual work to be done.
The issue with many security systems is that they necessarily implement some form of tighter access control. That has its upsides and downsides. It may very well be more secure to intrusion (physical or electronic), but if the implementation also makes it even slightly more onerous for the users and clients then 1) many users start to look for short cuts, or easier means of achieving an end; and 2) clients conclude the effort is worth less than the reward and start to look elsewhere. So, poorly implemented security measures from the point of view of those who have to deal them. People start writing down "more secure" gibberish passwords that are hard or impossible to memorize except by savants, meaning the "keys" to the kingdom can be on a thumb drive or a slip of paper.
I used to war drive around the city where I live and the unsecured access points were most numerous in state government buildings. I pointed this to a friend who worked for a state agency and was actually responsible helping maintain security, eliminating viruses, trojans, etc. He told me that the biggest problem were work bottle necks, issues such as one printer available to anywhere from ten to some times 50 personnel! Bureaucracies run on paperwork. So people would bring a personal printer, usually run off an unauthorized personal router in order to meet deadlines. Effectively their wireless routers created back doors into secure systems. The security staff were running their legs off suppressing this, but the people committing the acts were also the most productive. So, they might be chewed out by a superior, but you can't shoot the cow and improve milk production.
He said they were continually monitoring this (war driving themselves). There were other security problems as well. He had spent a month chasing a virus source that seemed to skip around town from one building to another, but always within the same unit. The head of said unit was complaining bitterly about this. In desperation my buddy created a board tracking dates of new outbreaks in places previously cleared, sometimes several times. It finally emerged that the very complaining supervisor had been carrying around a 3.5-inch disk from section to section of the unit to "backup work" and "monitor" work progress. The floppy was one from his home (to save the unit budget he said). Ultimately my friend had to physically catch the supervisor inserting the disk into and have him stop while the disk was scanned. Some of the unit sections affected had physical access limitations that required authorization before a person could physically enter the building or suite. So the problem was the fellow with the boss of the unit.
This is the point that really should be looked. Are Teslas as presently sold as safe as a normal, human operated vehicle or not. There's a lot of fuss when a Tesla is in an accident, but mile per mile, just what are the accident rates perTesla vs say a Lexus? All this personality jabber is just that, and irrelevant to what is really at stake. What Musk says is irrelevant. What does the actual data say?
I find it surprising that there is so little discussion of features on Mars that look like dust-covered glaciers, or the other immense elephant in the room, the elevation of the Martian south polar regions. There are many satellite shots of the surface that contain what look like glacial features, but they are dust colored. Yet, no one thinks back to the "melting" of Himalayan glaciers that turned out not to have happened. The glacier surfaces were covered in rock and soil and were not visible as ice. The whole Himalayan ice loss issue had to be scaled back a very long way. There are also photos of events where it appears that an entire stratum is jetting some type of vapour out of a cliff face, accompanied by a land slide. The color, form and spacing indicates a level feature or stratum in the cliff is discharging some form of pressurized gas or vapour, and that discharge triggered the slides. Then, there is the Martian south pole. The planetary surface is higher at the south pole. That should lead to morphologically driven adiabatic cooling and precipitation. If the planet entered an ice age, that pole would grow and rise, the ice itself adding to the adiabatic effect. The long term result could be the fixing of water at the pole, and as the planet chilled, that would be further insulated by CO2 ice.
The sad part is that these scammed people don't actually try to contact the real IRS, right there in the Government pages or on the internet. They don't know that the IRS doesn't notify anyone by phone of anything. You kind of get the impression that they likely voted for Trump and took Q seriously.
I could buy perhaps the Chinese as a potential source, but NORK? Really? One of the serious problems that country has is that it discourages talent and merit. The Iranians might be a source, and they have the motives to be. But, on the balance, when you see the similarities to the Ukraine episode, the Russians are easily the best, immediate choice. They are also seriously handicapped by external sanctions that limit their ability to trade. Their agriculture has taken repeated serious hits several years in a row, and last, as a kleptocracy, their PTB are quite unhappy that their money launderer was turfed out of office before he could complete his work. China is in agricultural difficulties too (so's the US as far as that goes), but China is tremendously better off than Russia and has a vast array of legitimate overseas investments that can cover a lot of their short fall. So Russia is number one on the short list.
A couple o decades ago I was working for an "expedition" is Israel. They were excavating a site in the Bet Netopa Valley north of Nazareth. One evening the directors threw a staff and labor party at the site (the "labor" were students who paid for the privilege of experiencing sweat, dust, scorpions, and discovering whether they were allergic to fig tree sap). Toward the end of the evening the cook, a Palestinian Christian, who, with his wife and daughters, produced a very fine meal of grilled meat fresh, various sorts of flat breads baked on site, rice, and fresh vegetables, imbibed a tad to much beer. We got a bonfire going and while waiting for a ride home, the cook tossed a very liberal amount of fuel (gasoline I think) on the fire. After that his wife and children dragged him off. I heard the next morning he couldn't find his eyebrows. Things quieted down and we sat and enjoyed the dark, and the distant thump and flare of artillery shells detonating beyond the mountains on Jordanian (or southern Syrian? border, east of the Jordan Valley and the Sea of Galilee.
Hmm, I grew up in the Sierra Nevada in California. My dad was a black powder enthusiast and had a cap-and-ball muzzle loader he liked to shoot at targets, slowly, since each shot required wiping the barrel, measuring and pouring in an amount of black powder, ramming home a lead ball, rinse and repeat. I think his record rate was three shots a minute, but that is another tale. My brother was interested in theater and conceived the idea that black powder would be ideal for special effects, like Gandalf vanishing in a puff of smoke. However, he had the odd handicap of having difficulty lighting anything on fire, even black powder. One of my sisters saw this sad performance and took pity. While my brother had trouble igniting anything, that particular sister had the family nickname of "one match." Her ability to start fires in wet wood was scary. Naturally she succeed remarkably and caught the flash in her face. No serious damage, but I became aware of it when I heard her coming up the driveway trailing blue smoke and bluer language. She still has not quite forgiven me for putting her out by shoving her head under the faucet. Only minor temporary inconvenience as her eyebrows and bangs grew back. Life in the country.
My old boss told the staff, this was in the early days of Windows NT when a lot of the libraries still had OS2 in the names, that since computers had become essential work items, we were expected to buy our own kit. That proposal did not go over well at all. Everyone asked for a raise to cover equipment and software costs.
"... We sometimes get mails from our customers claiming to have found a calculation error in Excel, when in fact the calculation isn’t wrong, but the side effects of binary floating point precision make it seem that way. ..."
The article doesn't explain how the square root of a squared number can yield a negative number. Just a simple variance, always a positive value for archaeological counts and measures, nothing esoteric, yet taking the square root, there it was: a negative standard deviation. I quit using Excel (or any other spreadsheet for statistics after that). I still don't get quite how that number, which was seriously wrong, only "seemed" that way.
In Word and some other current wp's you can type the values in as comma or tab separated columns, select the block and tell the word processor to convert it to a table. You can then the format the table in the wp. Or, you can simply copy a csv or tsv file, paste it into the wp and again convert to table. Vastly better than creating tables using the GUI and less aggravating than dealing with some of the weird incompatibilities encountered occasionally even between MS products.
I have to disagree. It is more or less OK as a data entry system, if you're not very fussy. But once you start to do anything practical things can go pear shaped in a blink. I was encouraged long ago in the dawn of Windows to use Excel and "shut up." So, simple statistics - came with an add-on set of statistical tools. What could be difficult about calculating the standard deviation of a set of artifact lengths? It is after all simply the square root of the variance, which is mean of the summed squared deviations. There aren't many. I could do it easily by hand, or right there in the spreadsheet. But there's a tool. So - what's this? A negative variance? That can't be right. How can that happen? There's no place for the number "i" in a simple sum of measures. I ran the calculations by hand and there the error was again! Square all deviations, they look right, sum them, still look right, divide to get the mean (the variance) and- where did that negative sign come from? I switched to R right there and then. Later I was told that the problem was probably due to some underflow or overflow condition. All I know is that impossible numbers are no use.
"...awakened by the sound of Chinese jackboots in the middle of the night then these two interferences are totally equivalent...."
China has a population of around 1.4 billion. That is a lot of bodies. And, they are bodies that need to eat, drink and do the same general stuff that every human does. Compared to that population, the Chinese Army runs about 2 million. The US has just under 1 million in the Army alone. And the US number does not count the Navy, Air force, and Marines. China has the the "third largest" military, and as fraction of the population, it is even smaller. China has a very long, very extensive history of "throw the rascals out" moments. Their interests are primarily at home, and that includes the home population not getting ideas. But, because of that same population, they must look outside the country to off set risks from crop losses in side their borders and the last two years for example have been catastrophic to their agriculture. The point here is that they essentially that they are pretty near the edge economically. Trying to put "Chinese jackboots" too far from home would be counter productive and not in China's best interests. They know that better than any other country on earth. The modern "Communist Party" is composed of Mandarins in the 19th century sense, with very few remaining believers. They are and have always been very pragmatic. They know markets just as well as any western capitalist. And, because of a very long recorded history, they may have a better predictive grasp of possible and likely problems (weather, crops, etc.) than we imagine. They have been buying land in Australia and parts of North Africa and curiously in North Africa, those areas are receiving more rainfall than they have in centuries.
Ah, the optimists out there. The take away from the Cambridge debacle was that if a private corporation working more or less openly could be employed as it was, then just extensive would databases kept by various alphabet soup entities be? The Chinese effort is impressive, but Cambridge Analytic's was an order of magnitude bigger, so how big an how extensive could some secret western DBs be?
Heh, "hourly." I used to check email three times a day. At the start, just after lunch and about half-an-hour before leaving. No SMS. The boss regularly complained that I wasn't looking at my email often enough. I would point out that his door was ten strides from mine, and he even had a telephone if he didn't want to yell.
I worked with an office manager who was - shall we say - a bit odd in some aspects. She was not the most patient of people, and at the time was expecting the End of the Word - really. Her pastor had foretold just when it would occur. She also had a spouse who was a professional bowler on a long losing streak. There were other personal issues as well. Every so often, she give me a yell, literally, and I would go to her desk and find that her computer was frozen. She could never reboot because she would lose work. This was in the early days of Windows and that might have had something to do with it. At that time we referred to the compiled code running on the systems "programs" - not "applications" or "apps," BTW. I believe term appeared a little later with the advent of java. Any way, I would walk in, shoo her away from her desk, sit down and "magically" the machine would behave flawlessly - with an innocent cooperativeness that had her gritting her teeth. The best hypothesis I ever came up with is that she had some form of buffer problem that cleared in a fairly brief interval, she did all the graphics and page layout for reports we generated, and her machine was limited to 640K. Either that, or our boss was routing pr0n through her system to his. My "fix," such as it was, was to tell her that electrons were sulky beasts and that they didn't like people being impatient with them. What she needed to was to sit back, clear her mind and breath. Oddly enough she followed the advice and it seemed to work.
There are a number of ideas about the causes of the last extinction's causes. One of the rather poorly considered aspects of the extinction is that it was not sudden at all. Cave bears in Europe for instance pretty much were gone by the glacial maximum. Other extinctions waited until the Holocene was well underway. Some ecological communities such as the mammoth steppe completely vanished - that is an entire habitat type that no longer exists. The best explanation is that a number of circumstances came together in a perfect storm of events. One of the aspects of the Y-D period is that it marks the end of Clovis, so any list of extinctions correlated with the Y-D should include Clovis as an extinction. I think that there were demonstrably several "suboptimal" conditions. One is that as the last glacial developed, primary productivity declined globally. There was both cold-associated drought and a seriously low level of CO2, very close to levels where primary production just shuts down. There was the abrupt climatic shift as the glacial ended, mark a period of very rapid warming and quickly shifting environmental communities. Then there was the Y-D, part way through the warming that complete reversed climate trends for around a millennium. At the same time something extraterrestrial happen as well. There is a problem with radio carbon dating that seems to collapse the Y-D into a span much shorter than it was in reality. That suggests an influx of cosmic rays adequate to significantly enrich C-14 in the atmosphere. For the Americas, the end of the Pliestocene also marks the end of geographic isolation and that may very well have lead to the epidemic spread of disease among many genera including possibly, paleoindians.
I never had any issues with any unix or linux system but I worked for a company that were religiously faithful users of Micro**** products. These would not infrequently eat their own young, including the servers. The Boss would every so often insist that we "clean up" our hard drives, specifically of old project files. I never did so, and oddly he would always ask me for help in recovering lost or strayed project files. Once, an entire year's worth of work vanished including gigabytes worth of images which were critical (maps, property photos, ...). Unhappily in that insatnce, the only recoverable data was what I had cached on my system - and since these were "team" projects and other team members dutifully deleted everything they were told to, it was pretty ugly for awhile. The bad part was that somehow, the backups were corrupted as well. That really set some hearts beating. The boss never ever again advanced as company policy that closed project files be removed from machines of the individuals that created them.
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