
Funnily enough...
...de-aging the work force never seems to apply to the CEO and other senior execs, where extensive experience is considered a plus.
114 posts • joined 26 Nov 2014
Intel has had many forays into software - remember it's stewardship of Lustre, for example, which was decidely... uh... lackluster? And every time it fails for the same reason: ultimately, Intel cares only about selling hardware.
And you can't make good software unless your goal is to make good software. So Intel always ends up making software that is neither good in its own right nor good at driving hardware sales. Then it loses patience, throws the software business out, and after a couple of years repeats the cycle. Prediction: DAOS will be next to be thrown out of the boat.
...is that there is such a thing as "healthcare debt", and therefore "healthcare debt collectors".
The first and best protection against security issues is to minimize the attack surface. Not only does the American health care system provide the worst care at the highest cost, and bankrupt people for reasons beyond their control, it also creates this entire class of security risks that simply should not exist.
"As far as I understand it (thirty seconds on Google), Jeopardy gives you an answer and you have to respond with the correct question. This likely isn't that hard to do if you have a fast processor and access to a massive data set."
Not to be rude, but you really don't understand it very well. Jeopardy questions/answers are very hard to figure out, often more like crossword clues than pub trivia, and the best humans are highly regarded for both their knowledge and skill. And Watson, like the best human players, was also really good at introspecting on how confident it was of its answer, and therefore whether to take the risk of buzzing in (Jeopardy penalizes for wrong answers).
It really did take a lot of work to get Watson to the point where it could not only win the game but also avoid making a fool of itself (early iterations were sometimes hilariously bad).
The problem with Watson's Jeopardy win is that Watson achieved something very difficult... that did not translate into anything financially valuable in the real world. It solved a problem that nobody had.
Read the IBM statements carefully. They are entirely consistent with the original plan to move all internal staff to "other projects" and to produce Red Books using external contractors. PR weaselry at its finest.
The resulting Red Books will, of course, be complete crap, and will come at the cost of doubling the effort required from the IBM SMEs who create and check the meat of the content - and, I suspect, many of those SMEs will be exactly the same IBM Garage people who were previously professionally producing the old Red Books that customers loved so much.
It seems enormously unlikely that something like this exists in isolation, if only because the skills and techniques had to be developed through simpler predecessors. Even Babbage's Difference Engine, huge advance that it was, did not appear out of thin air, and it had a number of successors.
Were they just very few of these? Were they not preserved well?
Or are there other examples that have just been missed, mistaken for lumps of mud and rock?
"Are you the International Alliance of Atheists?"
"F*ck off! We're the Atheist International Alliance!"
"Wait, I thought we were the International Atheism Alliance?"
"No, they split years ago. By the way, whatever happened to the International Atheism Alliance?"
"He's over there."
(All) "Splitter!"
"Random internet person thinks he understands financial law better than highly experienced judge who write 100-page opinion citiing authorities, statute, and precedent".
What is with some people that they think they can just wake up, fall out of bed, and pronounce on complex matters of law?
The combination of the large size of the error *and* the fact that it was the exact amount due is critical here. Neither part *by itself* sets a precedent, dangerous or otherwise. Indeed, the judge relied strongly on *existing* precedent.
The relevant New York law says that a transaction made in error is not reversible iff
(a) It is (or appears to be) payment in full for a debt that is owed
and
(b) The receiving bank has done "due diligence" to verify that the payment was correctly made
So the size of the loan is not the important thing by itself, but rather its supports the receiving banks' belief that it couldn't possibly be a mistake, i.e. it is one part of satisfying (b). Several of the banks also checked with each other to see if they had also been paid and when the answer came back yes, said to each other "Welp, I guess Revlon refinanced with somebody else". And the judge said that was a reasonable inference under *all* the circumstances, size included.
Not that complicated. A big chunk of the revenue in the Systems business is driven by z (mainframe) sales. Whenever a new z machine is released there is a massive spike in revenue as buyers rush to the new machine. The following quarter there is typically a smaller but still significant spike in mainframe-attached storage. And as that machine generation ages, demand declines... until the next release and the next spike.
So if you want to understand what is happening in the rest of the Systems business - primarily Storage and Power - you need to factor out the extremely cyclical z impact.
If the author is American, "could care less" is exactly what they meant. The phrase has a universally understood meaning in American English that decades ago diverged from the literal meaning of the words taken out of this context. "Understanding what the phrase should really mean".
Fun fact: I have a list of things called "More Wrong", where the people correcting others are actually incorrect. This is on the list
Um, actually... "the hoi polloi" is correct English.
Yes, "hoi polloi" means "the people" in Greek. However, we are not speaking Greek, and the phrase "hoi polloi" has been thoroughly assimilated into English entirely independently of the grammar of its Greek source. And "hoi" does not mean "the" in English. Hence, "the hoi polloi". That's how languages work.
For the same reason, the plural of "octopus" is "octopuses" and not "octopodes".
Fun fact: it's a common misconception that "prove" in "the exception proves the rule" really means test.
The original, original meaning comes from lawyers, in particular the Latin phrase "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis" - the last part meaning "in cases not excepted". When a sign says something like "Parking is allowed between midnight and 5am", this exception "proves" that there is a general rule against parking there; otherwise, why would there be a need to state the exception?
There, isn't that fun?
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