Posts by spuck 309 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2020
Yes, you have a fair point here... not sure why I connected 01 April to the entire month of April.
From what I see online, typical astronaut quarantine is 14 days pre-flight, so I guess we'll see when they go back into quarantine.
Not to be the Grim Reaper here, but Artemis III launching a crew to land on the moon in 2028 depends a lot on Artemis II succeeding.
That flight has now been delayed several times, for a total delay of almost 3 years (and counting). In an article written yesterday I read that April 1 is the next targeted launch date, but in the same article it said the crew has been released from quarantine to continue training-- which means they will not be ready to fly in 3 days.
It's like they're still engineering the thing, which doesn't bode well for a successful flight in the next month.
I had a quote from Dell two weeks ago for an R6725 for ~$24k. Last Friday the same specced system on Dell.com lists for $55k.
Pricing is so volatile right now Dell is now offering us quotes good for only 14 days. Lead times are estimated at 18 weeks. A server bought today might be delivered in July, unless things slip.
The only time I was faced with the COBRA choice, I had up to day 59 to enroll, but then another 30 days to pay the premium or give up the policy. I left that part out because I don't know if that 30-day payment window was specific to my situation/policy, rather than the 60-day enrollment that is guaranteed by law.
So I really was only at risk for 1 day; I had to sign up by day 59 but then had until day 89 to pay the premiums for days 1-90 if I wanted the policy to be in effect.
During those 90 days, I had to take a child to the ER. It turned out paying the hospital directly for that visit was still cheaper than the COBRA premiums would have been, so I never did elect to pay for the policy, but it was a good thing to have available in case of a catastrophe. If the ER visit had been more serious, or if someone in my family had been injured or needed surgery, etc., then I would have paid.
Good luck!
If you have insurance through your current employer, check into the possibility of COBRA coverage from them. An interesting thing about COBRA is you have 60 days to enroll and pay the premium. So if you are willing to roll the dice a little you can wait until day 59 to sign up.
A mate of mine was deployed to Afghanistan, and he tells the story of how the company medic always made sure to have a pill bottle with M&Ms or Skittles in his kit. The locals knew the Americans had medicines they did not, so when travelling through villages they were often stopped and asked for medicine. The medic would knit his brow and think, then offer a "red one" or a "blue one" to best address whatever malady the person had.
When he told me this story, I wasn't sure what to think. Obviously the medic wasn't able to sort out and actually address real problems on every stop, but was he doing more harm or good with this charade?
American Scandal also did a quite good 5-episode season on the Challenger disaster: https://wondery.com/shows/american-scandal/season/58/
Their episodes are dramatised to keep them entertaining, but I believe the facts are all there.
It's been a few years, so the details are blurred, but a mate of mine once told me one of the more valuable tools in the engine room of a steam-powered ship is several good, solid broom handles. That way there is always something conveniently nearby to wave around looking for the source of steam leaks, rather than a hand or arm, which could mean almost instant amputation under the right conditions.
Another grisly rabbit hole to go down: high-pressure injection injuries
But not the full list of your old software, which you need to repurchase (process takes at least 2 days) and install on your own time. As for the standard stuff, and the settings. No they are apparently not allowed to do that in advance of pick up (you get given a specific appointment to come and pick up your hardware, so it's not like someone drops in unannounced to collect new hardware!). So really an excellent use of company time.
This sort of waste of time used to bother me to no end. I realized it was hurting only myself to stew over how inefficiently the powers-that-be wanted me to use my time, but then I realized: they're paying for 8 hours of my time every day, so if they want me to spend them in stupid ways, that's not my concern. But I refuse to give up my non-paid personal hours to make up the difference in the form of unpaid overtime.
Want me to spend 90 minutes of high-salary engineer time waiting for the helpdesk to figure out how to plug the now-mandatory MFA token into the USB-C port that this old laptop doesn't have? Fine. It's no more or less useless than a team meeting where we sit around rehashing what we decided or couldn't decide last week.
This week, my division had our "all-hands" meeting where the division director spent 45 minutes showing us the PowerPoint presentation that he was going to send to everyone by e-mail later that afternoon. Then they decided that 25 minutes of everyone in the division's time was best spent participating in a series of "fun" poll questions like if would rather live in a Star Wars universe or a Lord of the Rings universe.
So that's fine; I'm off to lunch afterwards, on time. I guess any actual work will wait for the afternoon. Or tomorrow, if I can't get to it before 5:00. Your call, management.
Yes, I usually view the keyboard as both a user-customizable choice and as a consumable.
Often the mechanical interface to the user is a weak spot, so I see this as a huge step backwards, to have the expensive, "compute-y" part of the computer be inseparable from the "interface-y" part.
At my work, we (employees) have the option to choose a wired/wireless keyboard and mouse, in either normal rectangular or ergonomic formats. When either wears out, you pick up a new one with no questions asked-- we're talking less than a $40 expense.
I've been trying to figure out as well why a professional would want to store critical (either to his business or his family memories) files only in a commercial cloud.
Because Big Cloud has been telling us for 20 years that the way to 99.99999999999% uptime and peace of mind is to just Trust Us.
Gartner thinks this moment is therefore an opportunity in which VMware users should contemplate [...] the alternative virtualization platforms that will make that possible.
If cost or worry about the uncertainty about what Broadcom is going to do is important to your organization, that moment was over 2 years ago.
The article's datapoint of "over 3,000" customer workloads moved to Graviton processors means they must have plenty more than that... and yet they still think they're saving money using AWS instead of owning their servers.
Serious question: Given that they chose to migrate away from their own hosting towards AWS a couple of years ago, is this now strictly about accounting and managing cash flow? I could see how a subscription-based service would prefer the pay-as-you-go option of Operational Expenses rather than the Capital Expenses of buying their own servers.
Cost is always a factor, if you're engineering for anyone making a product that has to be profitable. Apparently only engineers working with someone else's money (i.e., the government) have the luxury of not caring what something costs.
Engineering is not science: it is the art of reasoned guesswork, trying to solve a problem by using available resources. Money is just one of those resources.
Seems like a large part of the nastiness of IAM is that it's been tacked-onto and evolved over the last 20 years, all while trying to keep everything as backwards-compatible as possible.
Of course, if they ripped it all out and started over today, AWS would look like a different thing but one must admit the fact that it's still here, underpinning all the New Shiny on top of it at all is an amazing feat.
We have two computers in the office at home for web browsing, homework, etc.
The newer one (2 years old) upgraded itself to Windows 11 last year. The older one (6 years old) Windows Update tells me is not compatible with Windows 11 because the CPU is too old. The only thing it can offer to do is refer me to places where I can buy a new computer.
Of course, we know I could do a fresh install of Windows 11 bypassing the CPU check, but I've been too lazy to figure out how to jump through the hoops to do the update.
Tesla stock down 4% is not horrible. They've had worse days than that and it seems to recover fine.
Everyone thinks His Muskiness is a genius that an do no wrong, but it's a very real possibility that Tesla might do even better with someone else as CEO.
There were a lot of people who thought that Apple would implode once Steve Jobs was gone. One could argue that the "vision" has faltered without him, but you can't argue with the financials that Cook has delivered or the health of the company.
Yeah, they obviously should be building the airplanes right at the aluminum mine...
I would argue that with shipping as relatively cheap as it is, it makes more sense today than ever to have manufacturing spread across the country. It's not a big deal to book space on a train that's running between two cities anyway; there is so much more involved in running a business and a factory to be worried about, including workers' skillsets and housing, energy costs, etc...
Yes, it doesn't solve every problem, but I'm sure it would have its uses.
Maybe I don't need them RIGHT NOW, but if I could click a button as I squeezed the last bit of toothpaste on my brush in the morning and had a replacement on the porch when I got home, that would be great. (Isn't that what Amazon was trying to build with their Dash buttons?)
As for diapers... with an infant at home sometimes leaving the house is just not an option. Having diapers delivered within a couple of hours might be a godsend with a colicky or sleeping baby.
I can just picture these little robots, running down the side of an 80 km/h highway at 20kmh, bringing us soggy takeaway tacos and room-temperature milk...
I understand the principle of what you're saying: Musk's purchase of TSLA shares drives the price up; I get that much. But I don't see how the stock price going up 10% would give him a 10x return on his $1B.
And if he wanted to convert his holdings to cash, could the market absorb him selling $100 billion worth of shares, even over a few months?
My meager understanding of the stock market means I'll forever be a "buy index funds" kind of investor. I think I understand the same two rules that you do: 1. The game is rigged, and 2) the house always wins.
There's an analog to managers that I can relate to: I "manage" some tasks in my life by hiring others to do them for me. I am fully capable of replacing brakes or changing the oil in my car--sometimes I even do it. But I usually pay someone else to do it over lunch so that I can use my time for something else, which is how I buy back my Saturdays.
Having a small amount handiness with my car gives me the knowledge to know what jobs really are above my ken and best left to professionals. And I like to think a little knowledge allows me to judge if the professional knows what he's talking about or trying to shine me on.
It's not much different for managing business tasks. As I've told management here a few times: there is a reason I went to engineering school and not people school. I will manage/supervise if you want me to, but please don't expect me to be as competent at the task as I try to be at the technical side I've been practicing at for 30 years.
And usually in those instances, money somehow magically appears to solve the emergency...
Let me guess: the memory that was "too expensive" ahead of time was then purchased faster than you can say "priority shipping" and the field techs arrived to install it, thus averting disaster.
It's amazing how some managers seem to bumble their way from emergency to emergency, and somehow can tap dance around ever needing to explain why they seem to have so much experience solving crises...
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