Re: I wonder why …
Horsepucky
60 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Aug 2018
Once I flew from Mombasa to somewhere in Masai-Mara game park. The plane was a little 14 seater, open to the cockpit and dripping oil from multiple spots. Heart was pounding from takeoff to landing (buzzed the strip to scatter the zebras first). Only after we landed did I realize the fast heart rate and difficulty breathing was also because we flew at about 12K ft without pressurization. Needless to say - never again (although I do want to go on safari again)
I had a 2 cylinder 4 valve dual carb Italian motorbike. One day I got it in my head to tune the engine, as it was sounding a bit rough. I managed to barely drive to my mechanic to unravel the mess. He gave me a resounding smack across the face and stated loudly - " I don't try fix my computer, YOU keep your hands f'in hands away from your bike!"
From my experience - these so-called consultants are actually gunning for a job in the outfit they are consulting. Numerous times a consultant has come in with grandiose plans and lots of bells && whistles - which culminated in their receiving a senior (aka high paying) position in said company.
Need to re-establish onshore the capabilities for production - including returning to older technologies (reopen fabs from previous generations) - to get the capacity online and remove the dependence on foreign production with interruptible supply chains. Do we really need the latest and smallest for most of the products? Even if it cost slightly more - not having ready inventory of chips impacts everyone.
You mean like buying a VAX 750 with 4K of memory, and when you want to upgrade [after shelling out $$$], the fiend (field) engineer, opens the panel, and moves a single DIP switch - presto, 16K.
This has been standard practice for decades.
I once had a situation with a PC server using 2 mirrored SCSI adapters running Netware on a token-ring network that brought down the entire corporation including the mainframe because of a magic app running a btrieve database...
Shows how old I am... and what an a** saver the NSE was (pre-internet!).
SCSI=SCARY
A long time ago, before it was a thing - I was at a demo at Microsoft Israel (at the time it was a very small subsidiary and way before I worked for MS) - someone who will remain nameless to protect the guilty was demoing the email capabilities of a product and for an example send a missive to billg@microsoftdotcom. It was in Hebrew as this was supposedly a demo system. A few moments later, Bill replied with a note saying that if we would send him the mail again in English, he'd be happy to reply. Oops.
I have a NO ONLINE TRANSACTIONS order on my account - I can RECEIVE money, but cannot TRANSMIT funds online, only over the phone or by conventional means (check, cc). I sleep much easier this way - even if someone hacks my account, the bank can only blame itself.
BTW - Surely you all don't mean Shirley (or am I missing a Britishism?)
A study was made whether the tribe of Indians who sold Manhattan Island got stiffed or not - turned out that the $24 deposited in an account with compound interest for 400 years was worth more than the combined real estate on the Island!!
https://www.independent.ie/business/personal-finance/manhattan-island-deal-provides-historic-compound-interest-lesson-37185530.html
Back in the good ole days, I worked for IBM and the company had a fantastic way to get us to use our vacation days - when we had a short business trip, for example a 48hr jaunt to London, the company would induce us to buy the week long ticket (which was much cheaper than flying out Monday and returning the day after)... and the savings on the ticket was applied to your extended hotel stay. It didn't cost the company a penny more, and got us to reduce our vacation days balance (which was a direct hit on the company's bottom line as these needed to be set aside on the budget). Not to mention doing wonders for morale. A win-win.
...and it's great!
I wanted to use my old Microsoft webcam on the MS Win10 box I had to set up for the kid's remote school platform... but it wouldn't work. Obviously. Refused to shell out for a new MS webcam on principle. Connected the cam to one of my Linux systems - which worked flawlessly - and took out an old phone from the junk drawer with a USB cable and DroidCam. Problem solved. I'll buy him a new Logitech camera when prices return to earth.
What do you think will happen with a burner phone? You still have to connect to some network in order to talk. All they have to do is filter out the "known" phones (ID'ed) - showing just the burner phones... you make it easier to track and marked yourself as an object of interest.
I installed a piece of [governmentally created] tracking software on my phone, which tracks my location vis-a-vis potential infection vectors... as I am only going from home to supermarket and back (we are under lock down). When this is over, I intend to flash my phone with a new operating system (/e/) - don't even trust the removal of the program to suffice... one can never be too paranoid.