Posts by Short Fat Bald Hairy Man 71 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2021
The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
About right, too.
Nothing as fancy for me but my desktop has some mysterious (a.k.a. could not be diagnosed) problem where it was randomly rebooting.
The only solution I found was to disconnect keyboard, mouse and other external devices (speaker etc.), keep only the network on and use X over the network. Works fine as of now.
I have kept to a (thumb) rule of not using free/open/libre software owned by a (for profit) company. They will want to monetise it more and more. That is the nature of the beast. And if they have VC funding, just give up.
So Postgresql over even MariaDB, NOT based off technical but other considerations. Technical considerations come second.
Yup, I remember when I held one at the end of the previous millennium.
Me with whatever advanced degree I had, at the consulate, with pretty much the rest barely out of college.
Was left wondering did the USA not have ANYONE technically qualified.
And there was another company near my US office which I suspect did only this. Body shopping I think we called it. Always used to see fellow countrymen in groups of 4 (always 4 and always men). From what I could see, from a particular state.
Now a days, I read it is openly done.
https://infotechlead.com/bpo/walt-disney-sacks-250-and-asks-them-to-train-indians-as-replacement-30761
Whatever else, the current status of the IT filing in India is that most can file easily online AND the official website is not that bad. Even though there was unnecessary chaos last year.
And exiting in Jan!!!! Every dog knows that the financial year ending is 31 March! Real good! And companies can file (I think) till end October. So they do need to use it till then?
Also have CAs and plain As (!) who will do it (and do it well, and, uh, I am told, help you!) for a modest fee. Need to compete with that too.
And this? Is this correct? (I know, old link)
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-spend-millions-lobbying-us-keep-doing-n736386
The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
From The threats to computing science, Dijkstra. 1984
I think this is still valid.
I use my desktop for Home and Office - company is very comfortable about me using my personal desktop for office use.
Write product specifications for the company product.
Develop (try to, anyway) trading strategies for financial markets using pandas and co,
Last time I used Windows was in 2003 (Win95 + Excel in a 2GB qemu).
And, the company I am with issues only Linux (Ubuntu) laptops. We noted roughly a 100 USD difference (a while ago) between equivalent hardware laptops with / without Windows, which for us is quite a bit.
I have NO IDEA what all this is about and I been using various Linux/BSD flavours since the mid 1990s.
BUT, I have colleagues who were most likely born mid 1990s use it nonchalantly. I listen in, terrified. When is that ball they are throwing around going to explode? Do they not realise that it is a fucking hand grenade. With pin off?
Security? They have heard of it.
The reason I decided to stay away from all things this company is the completely sadistic bundling of non free components with free components.
Confusing (small company, me) to actually read the licence and try to figure out which part we could use and which we could not.
Just stay away if possible.
Legacy? Good luck!
I do use my printer for printing documents I have to study. Reading on a terminal/e reader does not work when you make(well, I make!) copious notes. And, these WFH days, going to the office is verboten.
That said, I do have a separate printer and scanner (just pure luck!) and am very happy with both, as of now.
When I needed a printer I did not need a scanner and when I needed a scanner I already had a printer. So, separate, and, until now, happy.
Takes up more space, though.
But, reading this and other horror stories, if I need to replace these, will again buy separately. Unless they stop manufacturing them separately.
Why would anyone buy from here?
I buy here only as a last resort. Either when not available anywhere else or the price differential is way too much. Rarely does that happen.
I go local shops -> town centre shops -> local sellers online -> then here
I have not seen expenses go up significantly due to my policy. And local sellers online seem to give almost all that I cannot find in the shops.
Exactly! The library is supposed to handle this. Now, no more.
Date time programming is hell. This has just made it more hellish for that "some" set of programmers. If you want to deal with Oslo pre 1970s dates and time, cannot use this.
And, as far as I can see, it is not even an actual problem, really!
Seventh standard (grade in many other countries?) final exams.
District level exams, so exams were not in the school I was studying. New place.
First exam, everybody sitting cross legged on the floor (hey, not as bad as you think!), and I started writing. Quite a few not.
15 minutes into the exam, the exam supervisor makes us sit in a huge circle around him.
He takes out a few sheets and dictates around 45% of the paper to us. We were allowed to do the rest by ourselves.
Why 45%? The most basic government job those days required a Seventh Standard certificate.
35% was the passing criterion.
No internet required. Not that it existed. The only way to stop this was to have unqualified supervisors.
Not that I would stop it, knowing why it was done. For quite a few it meant a job or no job.
If memory has not failed me, ALL papers were conducted in this format.
This one made me think a bit.
https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/
I do know, in theory, that Wikipedia is not accurate, but this is outright dangerous. I definitely would have believed it.
By its very structure, Wikipedia is always going to be susceptible to attacks. I have seen amateurish attempts which can hopefully be recognised easily, but these are difficult.
Just a very bad place to be in.
At college, I once offered to type out an exam paper for a friend. First time I was using a wordprocessor (Wordstar, if you care abiout such things).
After a while, my friend came up to see what was taking so much time, and then burst out laughing.
Accustomed to typewriters, I was carefully formatting each line and pressing a hard return every time I thought one was required.
Things did speed up after that and a year later managed to type out my thesis using Wordstar + 6 floppies (backups!) in no time at all.
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