* Posts by Troutdog

13 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2014

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Troutdog

Sales is one area that doesn't make sense [to me] for RTO. Performance is easily tracked. And, sales people who don't make their numbers are let go. Maybe this is more directed at the support staff.

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

Troutdog

I see an elegant solution for Elon here:

Advertise Tesla on X.

1. Tesla demand has fallen, and it is well known that advertising increases demand.

2. X needs more revenue, and more ads means more revenue.

This is hand and glove.

Google again accused of willfully destroying evidence in Android antitrust battle

Troutdog

Not excusing Google here.

It is very common for companies involved in (or anticipating) litigation to discourage leaving a paper trail (or e-trail). It is wrong, but frankly very common.

A couple common ways are face to face discussions or phone calls between trusted employees. Slack and email are not good if you are trying to be sneaky.

As another poster commented, the punishment is likely less disagreeable to Google than having the conversations exposed.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Troutdog

Re: DX2

Those were the days of the "turbo" button, before engineers decoupled software timing from the CPU clock rate.

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

Troutdog

Token Ring

I have an anecdote about Token Ring. I worked at a startup in the 90s, and we decided to develop a Token Ring hub. (The company was reasonably successful making other networking gear). During development, we moved the company to a new building. The decision was made to deploy 100Mbps ethernet for all computers in the new building, even though that is what we were competing against in the market. LOL. In retrospect, this was the right call. This was back in the days when Synoptics was a leader in ethernet.

I thought it was ironic at the time that this decision was made. The main reason was price. But what about deterministic performance? "Yeah, we're not paying 2x for something you can't explain to me". Enet was cheaper, and TR was prone to issues at that time (jitter aggregation). The product was ultimately a failure.

Microsoft makes tweaks to Windows 11 Start Menu for Insiders but stops short of mimicking Windows 10

Troutdog

How to make Windows 10 bearable

1. Disable Cortana.

2. Disable Bing search from start button.

Now, you have a very useable search function for things on your computer without being plagued by shitty suggestions from Bing.

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

Troutdog

Re: I thoroughly recommend...

Agreed. "Bad Blood" is fascinating. It's an easy read, too. The HBO documentary is also worth watching, but the book has more detail.

Microsoft's Cortana turns its back on consumers as skills are stripped from Windows 10

Troutdog

Cortana will not be missed by me

As a hardware engineer, it is easiest to use Windows (because most hardware design tools I need are developed for Windows). That said, overall, I like Win 10. It has been stable for me, and is a worthy successor to MS's last good OS: Windows 7. Also really like WSL.

One of the first things I did was disable most of the Cortana crap. Absolutely no value add, IMHO.

Incidentally, I literally have never used the tiles, although I see them there when I hit the start button.

Also, I sit near the IT guys, and Cortana is really annoying every time they provision a new Windows laptop and don't turn the volume down right away.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Troutdog

I don't need someone else deciding what is insulting to me.

In fact, telling me what should be insulting is more insulting than any of the names discussed in the article.

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

Troutdog

"Old Man Yells at Cloud"

Christ on a bicycle. Who's buying this shit?

Presumably the cooling function doesn't rely on DNS or certificates.

I work in technology, and I don't understand the need or even desire for connected kitchen appliances.

WeWon'tWork: CEO Adam Neumann enters Low Earth Orbit to declare, I'm outta here

Troutdog

I think many of those people are on-site staff for all the office space. Sales, security and maintenance mainly. The space you rent from them is managed. The basics are provided by them: power, networking, janitorial, heat, shared kitchen with coffee and other stuff etc. Direct WeWork employees take care of most if not all of that crap.

My current employer was located in Wework space for the first 18 months of business, until we grew out of it. You can rent anything from shared space access (cheapest) to as many desks as you care to pay for.

Full disclosure: I do not plan to invest either. Just relaying my experience.

Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms

Troutdog

I could not agree more

There are potentially hundreds of triggers in python. Perhaps the interpreter should explicitly barf on offensive terms used as variable names to prevent users from creating insensitive code. The parser could compare all variable and function names against a blacklist (oops, I meant a condemned word list). Of course, such a list would itself be offensive, so would need to be obscured so that no fragile developers would stumble across it accidentally. Probably best to just ban any recognizable words as a precaution.

Also: Token ring used hermaphroditic connectors at one time. There is a concrete example of another sex.

Uber, Lyft and cutting corners: The true face of the Sharing Economy

Troutdog

Some Observations

This is an interesting discussion. I'd like to add a couple of thoughts:

My own experience with Uber has been very positive. I do not use it exclusively, but it is a nice option when you need a ride and aren't close to a hotel or airport (where all the taxis are).

One point that has not been discussed (or I overlooked it): no cash money changes hands in an Uber transaction. This is actually quite a nice feature. It enhances security for both the rider and driver. In order to use Uber, you need to have a credit card, which also means there is a "paper" trail for every rider. (I suppose some would view that as a negative).

I recently spoke with an Uber driver in DC. He told me that previously he had been a taxi driver, but he moved to Uber because of safety concerns. He said that when he had a fare to certain parts of the city, it was quite common for the rider to bolt without paying. He also stated that there was virtually no animosity in that city between taxi drivers and uber drivers. This is only one data point, but it was interesting. I suspect the people that are really upset about Uber (and Lyft) are actually the medallion holders - and not the drivers.