Wow... I'm reading these comments (not just yours) and I'm a little flabbergasted as to how blase people are about losing data. People say things like "Well... I only lost 250GB" implying that it's not big deal and I'm flashing back to a time only a few years ago when that would have been a significant chunk of a corporate data warehouse I managed. I can't imagine the look on my boss's face if I had to tell her that "Hey, it was only 250GB". Sure we could restore that from backups but the downtime would have been inexcusable if this much data had just been lost without warning.
'This test had nothing to do with United States consideration of military action to respond to Syria's chemical weapons attack.'
I'm sure it was, um, just a coincidence. Yeah, that's it, a coincidence. A previously scheduled anti-missile test that just happened to not actually test the "anti" part of the anti-missile system.
Well, based on the number of survey questions related to Morse code and ham radios that I had to plow through just to get on (the newly revitalized) Heathkit's mailing list... there must be more than you seem to think.
I really think that there are reporters who want to report on those issues but are being told "Why should we spend time on that story when there's a video of a dog riding a skateboard that we can show after the sports segment?"
``America has become everything they were against 30 years ago -- scared sheep with the government looking over your shoulder at everything you do.''
And just who was running the U.S. thirty years ago? That a**hole -- who I suspect was already falling victim to the ravages of Alzheimer's while he was in office -- did more to screw up the U.S. than anyone wants to believe.
We used Xerox WorkCentre copiers heavily where I used to work, using them to scan/transmit change documents back and forth for signatures before doing anything to FDA validated systems. And the folks at work used to wonder why I would always set the image quality to the highest setting -- something like "SuperFine" -- before pressing "Send" (and then requesting others to do the same). I always did it because I hated trying to read the blurry quality you got from "Normal" ("Low" was not even an option for me). Looks like I might have accidentally avoided this problem ($DIETY I hope so). Maybe the only time having bad eyesight came in handy.
I'm left wondering what the compression even does for the copier. It's not like having the compressed image inside the copier speeds up the printing process; it would need to be uncompressed before printing. I'm guessing that the compression is done to speed up the transmission process to other machines (other Xerox copiers or plain 'ol fax machines) and, if it's being done for plain copies you are making, it's because it simplified the internal processing, i.e., rather than having to decide "local copy -> don't compress, copy destined to remote machine -> compress" they decided to compress for everything. While what they're doing now must have seemed like a good idea at the time it certainly looks like they're going to need to switch to a different method of compression.
``when it's about life or death (and a car at any non-ridiculous speed always is), erring on the side of caution is not exactly stupid.''
That won't stop an insane number of posts from people who will all say something to the effect of "I can do it so it shouldn't be illegal" and who will become really upset when you tell them that they really aren't capable of driving safely while playing with their cellphone.
... the injury rate of drivers who were so enthralled with swiping through their cellphone menus when the light turned green that they were dragged out of their cars and thrashed by the people stuck behind them?
I don't have a cap imposed by my ISP. Well, at least not based on the measured amount of data my household downloads. It's a law of physics limit imposed by the phone company's hardware and aided by the laws that allow them to lock out other internet providers from their faster lines. As a result, there's only so much time I'll allow for a web page to load before I'm off to another web site. (Make me watch some lame video before taking me to the main content and I'm outta here.) The current crop of ads that pollute my "news" feed are annoying enough. (Dammit! There were already ads on the right-hand side of the stinking page. I guess they figured out that people were training themselves to ignore that real estate. I know I do.) Video ads on my news feed will be the last straw and will almost certainly likely result in me making one last post: the new URL where my FB friends can find any further postings by me.
``not causing problems to breathe compared to a 3000+ large page monster on you chest when you lay on couch, hammock or bed while reading''
Surely that's a typo (3000 pages is six reams of paper; not even the OED comes in volumes that thick) but, good grief, if even a 300 page book makes it hard for you to breath while supporting it on your chest... well, you need to get to a gym.
... to eliminate annoying ads from their Facebook pages, news feeds. etc. and replace them with "special features" that are highly likely to be even more annoying than the ads you used to get?
So the CIA would like to have at their disposal those scientists in the Flint movie who controlled the world's climate using volcanoes. Kidding aside, the "I" doesn't seem to stand for "Intelligence" any more. (More like "Incompetence", IMHO.) Hell, they can't even figure out who the good guys are before toppling foreign governments; what chance do they have in managing the planet's climate?
Seeing as how the Earth's climate has been getting changed by humans for quite some time already (climate change deniers kindly take a flying leap) -- and without our even realizing it for most of that time -- any efforts to change things back to what they were (to the state before we tried burning in the shortest time possible all the fossil fuels we could lay our hands on) would likely fail. Look at how long it took us to figure out that the climate has been warming. Now guess what time frame it would take to figure out that "Crap! This method of climate change reversal didn't work." And during that time what are the odds that the attempt made things worse.
Probably the best thing we could do is to continue to use fossil fuels for only for as long as it takes to replace the vast majority of our power generation to renewable methods (after all, we'll need some kind of power source to allow the manufacture of wind turbines, batteries, solar cells, etc.) and then stop using them altogether.
The advertisers actually came up with a proposal that said something like ``Well, what we'd like to do is that when the browser user chooses to not be tracked, we'll track them anyway. Would you folks find that acceptable?" Incredible.
... wondering just what would most home users be using a 3-D printer for anyway? Will your vacuum cleaner come with a CD containing the printer files to allow you to make your own spare parts? What you wind up making using an inexpensive home 3-D printer probably wouldn't hold up under use anyway making it more likely that the local vacuum cleaner repair guy will have a higher quality 3-D printer (and the business deduction to afford it) and will be the person who really takes advantage of 3-D. Then ease of use from Win8 becomes interesting but essentially useless for most people. (Though the home user's computer will still probably still have all those drivers on their hard disk and grayed-out menu items on the Windows print menu.) Some people (hardcore geeks, for example) might think that's nice to have but I suspect that the vast, vast majority of home computer users aren't interested in that sort of thing. I seriously doubt the home market for 3-D beyond cheap plastic birthday party trinkets is going to take off any time soon.
a.) ensure the printer accepts PostScript
b.) ensure the application can either produce PostScript output or produce something that can be converted to PostScript
Easy peasy though I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to get away with that.
... they could have had some people plugging up the USB ports on all computers with epoxy before deploying them to anyone's desk. No laptops. Period. Dammit, they control their computing environment. Or, at least, we probably all thought they did. There's no excuse for someone being able to walk out with a USB drive full of documents. Not one. I can remember working on secure systems where the effing printer ribbons were locked up in the safe at the end of each workday and anything that came off those printers was on special paper that wasn't allowed outside the secure area. Apparently, what passes for secure computing nowadays is a major joke.
``It's much like food labeling or processes running on your PC.
If you don't recognize it, chances are that it's to be avoided.''
I've adopted that attitude when grocery shopping. I figure that if I feel a need to consult my old BioChem text to figure out just what that ingredient is, I shouldn't be eating it.
``Sometimes if you leave a JS page open overnight, it will be pegging one of your CPU cores in the morning.''
Had this happen more than once. I don't think it's really possible to figure out which tab is running the offending code. I wind up bookmarking the lot, bouncing the browser, and reloading each previously opened tab with the idea that, today, I'll finish reading that web page and can close the tab and keep the JS from pegging the CPU again.
``You're right, Actually, back in the old days, college WASN'T for career training. It was for an education to better and refine oneself.
Hear, hear. One of my college professors told me that of of the purposes of a college education -- perhaps the task -- was to teach you to learn on your own, i.e., to embrace life-long learning. Nowadays... nobody in HR believes that you were actually able to learn something without attending an expensive class -- more and more on your dime -- and taking a test to get and maintain that oh-so-valuable "certification" (again, on your dime).
``Engineer? You apprenticed or went to a TRADE school because engineering is a trade.''
When I started my first job as an engineer, your college experience was where you learned all the theory and got some hands-on experience in the labs. Once at a company, you moved between several different groups/teams for about the first six months. The team that you worked best in would adopt you and you were off to the races. Those six months were your apprenticeship and while you moved around with those different teams you were being trained in all the processes, tools, etc. that the company used. Anyone with more than two working brain cells knows that each company runs their business differently than pretty much every other company. Why does business management believe that there's a large population of people outside the company that are going "hit the ground running", especially someone just out of college? (But I digress...)
``Business school? Please! Apprentice.
Right. The basics of business were taught during high school as part of what was called the "Diversified Occupations" curriculum for the non-college bound students.
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Wow... I'm reading these comments (not just yours) and I'm a little flabbergasted as to how blase people are about losing data. People say things like "Well... I only lost 250GB" implying that it's not big deal and I'm flashing back to a time only a few years ago when that would have been a significant chunk of a corporate data warehouse I managed. I can't imagine the look on my boss's face if I had to tell her that "Hey, it was only 250GB". Sure we could restore that from backups but the downtime would have been inexcusable if this much data had just been lost without warning.
I'm sure it was, um, just a coincidence. Yeah, that's it, a coincidence. A previously scheduled anti-missile test that just happened to not actually test the "anti" part of the anti-missile system.
Wow... just. wow.
Well, based on the number of survey questions related to Morse code and ham radios that I had to plow through just to get on (the newly revitalized) Heathkit's mailing list... there must be more than you seem to think.
I really think that there are reporters who want to report on those issues but are being told "Why should we spend time on that story when there's a video of a dog riding a skateboard that we can show after the sports segment?"
And just who was running the U.S. thirty years ago? That a**hole -- who I suspect was already falling victim to the ravages of Alzheimer's while he was in office -- did more to screw up the U.S. than anyone wants to believe.
We used Xerox WorkCentre copiers heavily where I used to work, using them to scan/transmit change documents back and forth for signatures before doing anything to FDA validated systems. And the folks at work used to wonder why I would always set the image quality to the highest setting -- something like "SuperFine" -- before pressing "Send" (and then requesting others to do the same). I always did it because I hated trying to read the blurry quality you got from "Normal" ("Low" was not even an option for me). Looks like I might have accidentally avoided this problem ($DIETY I hope so). Maybe the only time having bad eyesight came in handy.
I'm left wondering what the compression even does for the copier. It's not like having the compressed image inside the copier speeds up the printing process; it would need to be uncompressed before printing. I'm guessing that the compression is done to speed up the transmission process to other machines (other Xerox copiers or plain 'ol fax machines) and, if it's being done for plain copies you are making, it's because it simplified the internal processing, i.e., rather than having to decide "local copy -> don't compress, copy destined to remote machine -> compress" they decided to compress for everything. While what they're doing now must have seemed like a good idea at the time it certainly looks like they're going to need to switch to a different method of compression.
That won't stop an insane number of posts from people who will all say something to the effect of "I can do it so it shouldn't be illegal" and who will become really upset when you tell them that they really aren't capable of driving safely while playing with their cellphone.
... the injury rate of drivers who were so enthralled with swiping through their cellphone menus when the light turned green that they were dragged out of their cars and thrashed by the people stuck behind them?
If so, become a regular visitor to their web site. Buy something from time to time.
I don't have a cap imposed by my ISP. Well, at least not based on the measured amount of data my household downloads. It's a law of physics limit imposed by the phone company's hardware and aided by the laws that allow them to lock out other internet providers from their faster lines. As a result, there's only so much time I'll allow for a web page to load before I'm off to another web site. (Make me watch some lame video before taking me to the main content and I'm outta here.) The current crop of ads that pollute my "news" feed are annoying enough. (Dammit! There were already ads on the right-hand side of the stinking page. I guess they figured out that people were training themselves to ignore that real estate. I know I do.) Video ads on my news feed will be the last straw and will almost certainly likely result in me making one last post: the new URL where my FB friends can find any further postings by me.
It doesn't matter. Congress and their military-industrial campaign donors will make sure the F-35s get built regardless of the availability of pilots.
Surely that's a typo (3000 pages is six reams of paper; not even the OED comes in volumes that thick) but, good grief, if even a 300 page book makes it hard for you to breath while supporting it on your chest... well, you need to get to a gym.
... to eliminate annoying ads from their Facebook pages, news feeds. etc. and replace them with "special features" that are highly likely to be even more annoying than the ads you used to get?
This article should have the above tag.
So the CIA would like to have at their disposal those scientists in the Flint movie who controlled the world's climate using volcanoes. Kidding aside, the "I" doesn't seem to stand for "Intelligence" any more. (More like "Incompetence", IMHO.) Hell, they can't even figure out who the good guys are before toppling foreign governments; what chance do they have in managing the planet's climate?
Seeing as how the Earth's climate has been getting changed by humans for quite some time already (climate change deniers kindly take a flying leap) -- and without our even realizing it for most of that time -- any efforts to change things back to what they were (to the state before we tried burning in the shortest time possible all the fossil fuels we could lay our hands on) would likely fail. Look at how long it took us to figure out that the climate has been warming. Now guess what time frame it would take to figure out that "Crap! This method of climate change reversal didn't work." And during that time what are the odds that the attempt made things worse.
Probably the best thing we could do is to continue to use fossil fuels for only for as long as it takes to replace the vast majority of our power generation to renewable methods (after all, we'll need some kind of power source to allow the manufacture of wind turbines, batteries, solar cells, etc.) and then stop using them altogether.
Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" adapted that for TV. One of the earliest episodes, if memory serves.
The advertisers actually came up with a proposal that said something like ``Well, what we'd like to do is that when the browser user chooses to not be tracked, we'll track them anyway. Would you folks find that acceptable?" Incredible.
... "putrid.dung.heap"?
... wondering just what would most home users be using a 3-D printer for anyway? Will your vacuum cleaner come with a CD containing the printer files to allow you to make your own spare parts? What you wind up making using an inexpensive home 3-D printer probably wouldn't hold up under use anyway making it more likely that the local vacuum cleaner repair guy will have a higher quality 3-D printer (and the business deduction to afford it) and will be the person who really takes advantage of 3-D. Then ease of use from Win8 becomes interesting but essentially useless for most people. (Though the home user's computer will still probably still have all those drivers on their hard disk and grayed-out menu items on the Windows print menu.) Some people (hardcore geeks, for example) might think that's nice to have but I suspect that the vast, vast majority of home computer users aren't interested in that sort of thing. I seriously doubt the home market for 3-D beyond cheap plastic birthday party trinkets is going to take off any time soon.
My solution to printing complexity has been to:
a.) ensure the printer accepts PostScript
b.) ensure the application can either produce PostScript output or produce something that can be converted to PostScript
Easy peasy though I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to get away with that.
... they could have had some people plugging up the USB ports on all computers with epoxy before deploying them to anyone's desk. No laptops. Period. Dammit, they control their computing environment. Or, at least, we probably all thought they did. There's no excuse for someone being able to walk out with a USB drive full of documents. Not one. I can remember working on secure systems where the effing printer ribbons were locked up in the safe at the end of each workday and anything that came off those printers was on special paper that wasn't allowed outside the secure area. Apparently, what passes for secure computing nowadays is a major joke.
Dammit... I commented so I can't mod this up.
I've adopted that attitude when grocery shopping. I figure that if I feel a need to consult my old BioChem text to figure out just what that ingredient is, I shouldn't be eating it.
Had this happen more than once. I don't think it's really possible to figure out which tab is running the offending code. I wind up bookmarking the lot, bouncing the browser, and reloading each previously opened tab with the idea that, today, I'll finish reading that web page and can close the tab and keep the JS from pegging the CPU again.
Hear, hear. One of my college professors told me that of of the purposes of a college education -- perhaps the task -- was to teach you to learn on your own, i.e., to embrace life-long learning. Nowadays... nobody in HR believes that you were actually able to learn something without attending an expensive class -- more and more on your dime -- and taking a test to get and maintain that oh-so-valuable "certification" (again, on your dime).
When I started my first job as an engineer, your college experience was where you learned all the theory and got some hands-on experience in the labs. Once at a company, you moved between several different groups/teams for about the first six months. The team that you worked best in would adopt you and you were off to the races. Those six months were your apprenticeship and while you moved around with those different teams you were being trained in all the processes, tools, etc. that the company used. Anyone with more than two working brain cells knows that each company runs their business differently than pretty much every other company. Why does business management believe that there's a large population of people outside the company that are going "hit the ground running", especially someone just out of college? (But I digress...)
Right. The basics of business were taught during high school as part of what was called the "Diversified Occupations" curriculum for the non-college bound students.