Javascript is used for many Terabytes of completely needless code for Websites.
Javascript is used for many Terabytes of completely needless code for Websites.
You could also say:
Java is used for generating many Terabytes of traceback in log files.
One wonders how much power at Amazon would be saved if they didn't have to accommodate all the Java traceback dumps flying around their infrastructure.
Maybe occasionally. Most of the time it's a royal PITA.
``Text messaging and its associated multimedia variations are rich and wonderful: words mixed with emoji, Bitmoji, reaction gifs, regular old photos, video, links.''
Texting is slower than Morse code for most people. The tiny keyboard that phone include make it near impossible to do anything more complicated than sending messages like "Wot U doin" without misspelling just about every word. Texting seems to be the beyond-the-grave revenge of the guy who invented the "If u cn rd ths u cn get a gud job..." ads you used to see in the back of magazines.
``Texting is fun, lightly asynchronous, and possible to do with many people simultaneously. It's almost as immediate as a phone call, but not quite.''
Texting is highly asynchronous. OK... I can send a message multiple people with a text but, guess what, you can do the same thing with a modern mobile phone: add another person to a phone call. Sending "I will be late" to a group using texting is great. Texting back and forth with that same group where to meet for dinner is excruciatingly slow. Texting has got to be at least an order of magnitude slower for communications than the human voice will ever be.
Texting does have one advantage over a phone call: it's slightly less of a disruption. A brief beep isn't the annoyance that a ringtone can be in a meeting. The worst part of that brief annoyance, though, is that once someone sends you a text, they nearly always expect you to text them back, no matter how complex your response is going to be. Try calling them back because your response is better done via actually using the phone to talk and they'll let your call go to voice mail.
That may be but at least before Microsoft bought LinkedIn they weren't going out of their way to be a Facebook clone. For me that became obvious that that was the direction MS wanted to go when they made the default LI feed ordering to be the "Top" (i.e., most "Liked") posts---you can change that to "Recent" but you can't make the change your personal default. As for it's job leads... that's rather gone downhill as well. I actually still get the occasional call from someone who's seen my LI profile. I still recall the days when LI was the preferred--even exclusive--site for some companies and recruiters to post job ads, sometimes using LI as the exclusive site for some job postings. Those days seem to be long gone but I noticed that this was happening even before MS got a hold of them. Nowadays, a good half of the communications I get on LI is from Indian recruiters wanting to join my network. I.e., spam.
Yes, but only a complete moron would terminate someone and tell them that it was because ot their age. The way it's done is to claim it's an economic issue--healthcare costs is a popular one nowadays--and just try proving that the real reason was for anything else. I had a former employer lay off the entire data center staff. Every single one of us but one were over 40 but they played another popular card used to get rid of experienced staff: they added one of the under-40 desktop support guys to have that token "young person" as an indication that it couldn't possibly have been because of age. However, when I came back as a contractor, guess what: there were all these late-20s and 30s people running the data center. But... who wants to spend money on legal fees.
``I suspect things are just going to get more grim for old pharts.''
Especially when there seems to be a long line of politicians willing to raise the retirement to 70... or higher.
The reason is incompetence of the school district.
More like the paranoia of the school district's lawyers. The school buses around here stop at every house where a kid who takes the bus lives. They're afraid that Mr. Stranger Danger is going to scoop up the little ones if they were to walk to the corner where 6-8 kids could be picked up in one stop. On the other hand, the kids who live close enough to the school that they can walk to school have to negotiate street intersections that have no stop signs for the streets with the most traffic. Where do they place a crossing guard? At the intersection near the school with a four-way stop. Go figure.
It's extremely (and I can't add enough HTML to emphasize that word enough) annoying to receive one of these alerts at 3:00AM about a missing child last seen in a car with license plate blah blah. Unless I personally know the car with that plate (highly, highly unlikely) or I'm actually on the road and could have a ghost of a chance of spotting it, the number of people who can actually take action on these alerts is vanishingly small. As far as I've been able to tell, it's not possible to filter these to only be received during waking hours. I doubt I'm alone in feeling that the only emergencies I'm interested in hearing about in the middle of the freakin' night are from my children or parents.
My `emergency' floppy always had a copy of 'edlin' on it; didn't eat up too much of your 360KB disk space but, if memory serves, it only handled files under 64KB. I always found it hilarious when people would delete edlin in order to save valuable hard disk space and then not have anything to edit a screwed up autoexec.bat. For big jobs, there was Logitech's 'point' editor that shipped with their mice. Would edit pretty much anything that could fit in memory. I managed to return many a corrupted WordPerfect document to a usable state using that editor after someone boogered them up---usually after trying to pull in a graphic that was too large.
That was still rather impressive. But... I was hoping to find that the project entailed interfacing an actual 11/70 front panel to a Raspberry Pi. Because--yep, you see guessed it--I have an 11/70 front panel and I've wanted to do something like that for ages. What I guess I need to find is a source of the 11/70 maintenance prints--should be a piece of cake, right?--for all the pinouts of the connectors on the front panel. Then... the real fun begins.
You could but I never encountered one that required booting from paper tape. We had one that, for some reason, came with what I was told by a DEC field service tech was a complete set of the XXDP+ diagnostics on paper tape. Not sure who made the original purchase but they forgot to include the paper tape reader.
He must have had some excellent earplugs to block out the noise of an 11/70. We had one that had been stripped down to the bare essentials--no memory enclosures; Setasi static RAM board in the CPU backplane instead; no removable pack drives; Dilog controller running Fujitsu 5.25in SCSI disks--and even then I really couldn't stand to be in the same room as that beast for more than a few minutes. I can't imagine anyone being able to sleep in the same room as one.
What is about to enter the public domain that absolutely, positively needs to be kept under copyright wraps? And kept under copyright wraps for, what, six/seven generations?
I've tried others--Kmail for a couple of years, Evolution before that--and occasionally try new versions of those older favorites but I haven't found any new features and/or behavior that keeps me from going back to T-bird.
I do try and keep my Inbox cleared and everything filed but usually seem to have a few dozen emails that I haven't yet filed away at any given time. I don't do any automatic filing using filters as I find the filters too unreliable. I do an initial scan and drag the easily identifiable junk into my Junk folder where it is scanned and the sender IP addresses used to update my spam filter. Then the remainder gets read and filed according to topic or tossed if it's something I'm not currently interested in, won't be able to attend, etc. Only takes a few minutes on most days. (Ctrl-click, Ctrl-click, drag make short work of most filing.)
``Unlike Indeed.com, glassdoor is not a job posting aggregator.''
Really? I still get job postings from them. And not very accurate ones, i.e., listings for jobs that are no longer active, are already filled, whatever. It was common for a while to hear from recruiters that jobs were no longer available and then, a week later, see them show up in Glassdoor's emails.
But that's not my biggest beef with them. I traded emails for a week or so asking them why they were grabbing your Facebook profile photo to use as the commenter's picture when you commented on one of Glassdoor's articles. They never once adequately explained why they were doing this only to say that it happens when you link your Glassdoor account to Facebook. Since they went out of their way to explain to me that I didn't have a Glassdoor account (which I already knew) they never once put two and two together and figured out that, if I didn't have a Glassdoor account, I couldn't possibly have linked it to Facebook (which I would have never done under any circumstances, well... I supposed a gun to the head would convince me). I had to drop the email conversation as it was hazardous to my blood pressure. I'm hoping the new owner eventually realizes what a CF they spent their money on. I predict that it'll turn into something like Facebook like LinkedIn did after Microsoft got their hands on that site.
I've gotten so many of these that I don't even have to hear that much of the spiel before I've launched my smartphone's call blocker and am entering the number into the backlist. These calls always come from my area code and my exchange followed by four random digits. I figure there's no point in reporting these calls; the phone carriers don't care.
My experience in this area was inheriting a data center with a series of healthcare applications/systems that were purchased by people with no idea of what was going on and were connected together in a variety of hodge-podge solutions that wound up requiring a full-time effort by one member of the IT team designing software interfaces to allow the systems to talk to each other. One pair of systems were connected--I kid you not--through a pair of terminal servers with rs-232 cables strung between them. Apparently, the genius behind this solution thought it was an excellent way to connect eight users on system A so that they could connect with the application running on system B but nobody knew for certain. And, of course, that Rube Goldberg interface was completely undocumented. We never knew what those terminal servers were for until, one day, our network lead, thinking that they were no longer needed (hell,,, none of us thought otherwise), powered off one of the terminal servers and the help desk lines lit up.
When the big project to build a data warehouse of patient treatment outcomes was being put together, of course the consultants included a line item for the cost of cleaning up the data that had been entered into the motley assortment of healthcare applications that had been installed in the previous decade. The word that came back to the IT group following the presentation was that, minutes into the presentation, upper management turned to the last page, saw the cost of the data cleanup task and had already made up their minds to cancel the project before the presentation was even finished. Nobody cared whether the planned system would have been good for the company (it would have been in the long run) or to the patients (you know, the people that came to us for healthcare after seeing our commercials). Following that, a good two-thirds of the IT team drifted off to other companies over about a six month period. It would not surprise me to find that some of those barely-documented systems had been kept in service long, long after the HW and SW support had sunsetted.
I learned that there are a number of new people in upper reaches of their management nowadays. Perhaps they're smarter about the systems that the business relies on than their predecessors were.
At another company, ancient HP-1000 systems (complete with 9-track tapes drive and removable disk packs) were still in use in the data center when I started. (My jaw actually dropped when I first saw them---at that time I hadn't seen any of those in use for at least 15 years. (And they were considered dinosaurs back then.) Any time a problem cropped up on either the hardware or the applications, they had to call a retired, former employee who knew how to fix the software or which used equipment vendors could be contacted that might have spare parts. For some reason this was seen as saving the company money by not replacing outdated systems. (IMHO, it was "if it ain't broke, then don't fix it" taken to insane extremes.) The group that owned the applications on those system kept them around for about another year after I joined. If Y2K hadn't rolled around, I'd bet that group would have insisted on keeping them around for even longer.
Back when I was a kid, jets would fly in and out of the local Naval air station and occasionally go supersonic after takeoff. I don't recall the sonic booms as being "earsplitting". "Window rattling"? Sure but even the level of that depends on their altitude when the shock wave passed by on the ground. They would have had to have been at low altitude for it to be "earsplitting".
Slashdot Mirror
You could also say:
One wonders how much power at Amazon would be saved if they didn't have to accommodate all the Java traceback dumps flying around their infrastructure.
Maybe occasionally. Most of the time it's a royal PITA.
Texting is slower than Morse code for most people. The tiny keyboard that phone include make it near impossible to do anything more complicated than sending messages like "Wot U doin" without misspelling just about every word. Texting seems to be the beyond-the-grave revenge of the guy who invented the "If u cn rd ths u cn get a gud job..." ads you used to see in the back of magazines.
Texting is highly asynchronous. OK... I can send a message multiple people with a text but, guess what, you can do the same thing with a modern mobile phone: add another person to a phone call. Sending "I will be late" to a group using texting is great. Texting back and forth with that same group where to meet for dinner is excruciatingly slow. Texting has got to be at least an order of magnitude slower for communications than the human voice will ever be.
Texting does have one advantage over a phone call: it's slightly less of a disruption. A brief beep isn't the annoyance that a ringtone can be in a meeting. The worst part of that brief annoyance, though, is that once someone sends you a text, they nearly always expect you to text them back, no matter how complex your response is going to be. Try calling them back because your response is better done via actually using the phone to talk and they'll let your call go to voice mail.
That may be but at least before Microsoft bought LinkedIn they weren't going out of their way to be a Facebook clone. For me that became obvious that that was the direction MS wanted to go when they made the default LI feed ordering to be the "Top" (i.e., most "Liked") posts---you can change that to "Recent" but you can't make the change your personal default. As for it's job leads... that's rather gone downhill as well. I actually still get the occasional call from someone who's seen my LI profile. I still recall the days when LI was the preferred--even exclusive--site for some companies and recruiters to post job ads, sometimes using LI as the exclusive site for some job postings. Those days seem to be long gone but I noticed that this was happening even before MS got a hold of them. Nowadays, a good half of the communications I get on LI is from Indian recruiters wanting to join my network. I.e., spam.
Yes, but only a complete moron would terminate someone and tell them that it was because ot their age. The way it's done is to claim it's an economic issue--healthcare costs is a popular one nowadays--and just try proving that the real reason was for anything else. I had a former employer lay off the entire data center staff. Every single one of us but one were over 40 but they played another popular card used to get rid of experienced staff: they added one of the under-40 desktop support guys to have that token "young person" as an indication that it couldn't possibly have been because of age. However, when I came back as a contractor, guess what: there were all these late-20s and 30s people running the data center. But... who wants to spend money on legal fees.
Especially when there seems to be a long line of politicians willing to raise the retirement to 70... or higher.
Bingo!
More like the paranoia of the school district's lawyers. The school buses around here stop at every house where a kid who takes the bus lives. They're afraid that Mr. Stranger Danger is going to scoop up the little ones if they were to walk to the corner where 6-8 kids could be picked up in one stop. On the other hand, the kids who live close enough to the school that they can walk to school have to negotiate street intersections that have no stop signs for the streets with the most traffic. Where do they place a crossing guard? At the intersection near the school with a four-way stop. Go figure.
It's extremely (and I can't add enough HTML to emphasize that word enough) annoying to receive one of these alerts at 3:00AM about a missing child last seen in a car with license plate blah blah. Unless I personally know the car with that plate (highly, highly unlikely) or I'm actually on the road and could have a ghost of a chance of spotting it, the number of people who can actually take action on these alerts is vanishingly small. As far as I've been able to tell, it's not possible to filter these to only be received during waking hours. I doubt I'm alone in feeling that the only emergencies I'm interested in hearing about in the middle of the freakin' night are from my children or parents.
... this data, there's nothing from stopping them from buying it from private companies that do their dirty work for them.
Spirit of the law, schmirit of the law.
Oh lord... not one of those IBM plugboards. My Dad used those back in the '60s.
Pictures here.
My `emergency' floppy always had a copy of 'edlin' on it; didn't eat up too much of your 360KB disk space but, if memory serves, it only handled files under 64KB. I always found it hilarious when people would delete edlin in order to save valuable hard disk space and then not have anything to edit a screwed up autoexec.bat. For big jobs, there was Logitech's 'point' editor that shipped with their mice. Would edit pretty much anything that could fit in memory. I managed to return many a corrupted WordPerfect document to a usable state using that editor after someone boogered them up---usually after trying to pull in a graphic that was too large.
That was still rather impressive. But... I was hoping to find that the project entailed interfacing an actual 11/70 front panel to a Raspberry Pi. Because--yep, you see guessed it--I have an 11/70 front panel and I've wanted to do something like that for ages. What I guess I need to find is a source of the 11/70 maintenance prints--should be a piece of cake, right?--for all the pinouts of the connectors on the front panel. Then... the real fun begins.
I'd be impressed to find Massbus peripherals that were still operable.
You could but I never encountered one that required booting from paper tape. We had one that, for some reason, came with what I was told by a DEC field service tech was a complete set of the XXDP+ diagnostics on paper tape. Not sure who made the original purchase but they forgot to include the paper tape reader.
Not sure about the others, but on RSX you could substitute in your own light pattern. Simple matter of programming.
He must have had some excellent earplugs to block out the noise of an 11/70. We had one that had been stripped down to the bare essentials--no memory enclosures; Setasi static RAM board in the CPU backplane instead; no removable pack drives; Dilog controller running Fujitsu 5.25in SCSI disks--and even then I really couldn't stand to be in the same room as that beast for more than a few minutes. I can't imagine anyone being able to sleep in the same room as one.
Pi/CMS? That would be pretty cool to see pulled off.
What is about to enter the public domain that absolutely, positively needs to be kept under copyright wraps? And kept under copyright wraps for, what, six/seven generations?
I've tried others--Kmail for a couple of years, Evolution before that--and occasionally try new versions of those older favorites but I haven't found any new features and/or behavior that keeps me from going back to T-bird.
I do try and keep my Inbox cleared and everything filed but usually seem to have a few dozen emails that I haven't yet filed away at any given time. I don't do any automatic filing using filters as I find the filters too unreliable. I do an initial scan and drag the easily identifiable junk into my Junk folder where it is scanned and the sender IP addresses used to update my spam filter. Then the remainder gets read and filed according to topic or tossed if it's something I'm not currently interested in, won't be able to attend, etc. Only takes a few minutes on most days. (Ctrl-click, Ctrl-click, drag make short work of most filing.)
Really? I still get job postings from them. And not very accurate ones, i.e., listings for jobs that are no longer active, are already filled, whatever. It was common for a while to hear from recruiters that jobs were no longer available and then, a week later, see them show up in Glassdoor's emails.
But that's not my biggest beef with them. I traded emails for a week or so asking them why they were grabbing your Facebook profile photo to use as the commenter's picture when you commented on one of Glassdoor's articles. They never once adequately explained why they were doing this only to say that it happens when you link your Glassdoor account to Facebook. Since they went out of their way to explain to me that I didn't have a Glassdoor account (which I already knew) they never once put two and two together and figured out that, if I didn't have a Glassdoor account, I couldn't possibly have linked it to Facebook (which I would have never done under any circumstances, well... I supposed a gun to the head would convince me). I had to drop the email conversation as it was hazardous to my blood pressure. I'm hoping the new owner eventually realizes what a CF they spent their money on. I predict that it'll turn into something like Facebook like LinkedIn did after Microsoft got their hands on that site.
I've gotten so many of these that I don't even have to hear that much of the spiel before I've launched my smartphone's call blocker and am entering the number into the backlist. These calls always come from my area code and my exchange followed by four random digits. I figure there's no point in reporting these calls; the phone carriers don't care.
... we're too busy looking for more decomposed dinosaurs and plants to burn to be looking ahead like the Japanese.
My experience in this area was inheriting a data center with a series of healthcare applications/systems that were purchased by people with no idea of what was going on and were connected together in a variety of hodge-podge solutions that wound up requiring a full-time effort by one member of the IT team designing software interfaces to allow the systems to talk to each other. One pair of systems were connected--I kid you not--through a pair of terminal servers with rs-232 cables strung between them. Apparently, the genius behind this solution thought it was an excellent way to connect eight users on system A so that they could connect with the application running on system B but nobody knew for certain. And, of course, that Rube Goldberg interface was completely undocumented. We never knew what those terminal servers were for until, one day, our network lead, thinking that they were no longer needed (hell,,, none of us thought otherwise), powered off one of the terminal servers and the help desk lines lit up.
When the big project to build a data warehouse of patient treatment outcomes was being put together, of course the consultants included a line item for the cost of cleaning up the data that had been entered into the motley assortment of healthcare applications that had been installed in the previous decade. The word that came back to the IT group following the presentation was that, minutes into the presentation, upper management turned to the last page, saw the cost of the data cleanup task and had already made up their minds to cancel the project before the presentation was even finished. Nobody cared whether the planned system would have been good for the company (it would have been in the long run) or to the patients (you know, the people that came to us for healthcare after seeing our commercials). Following that, a good two-thirds of the IT team drifted off to other companies over about a six month period. It would not surprise me to find that some of those barely-documented systems had been kept in service long, long after the HW and SW support had sunsetted.
I learned that there are a number of new people in upper reaches of their management nowadays. Perhaps they're smarter about the systems that the business relies on than their predecessors were.
At another company, ancient HP-1000 systems (complete with 9-track tapes drive and removable disk packs) were still in use in the data center when I started. (My jaw actually dropped when I first saw them---at that time I hadn't seen any of those in use for at least 15 years. (And they were considered dinosaurs back then.) Any time a problem cropped up on either the hardware or the applications, they had to call a retired, former employee who knew how to fix the software or which used equipment vendors could be contacted that might have spare parts. For some reason this was seen as saving the company money by not replacing outdated systems. (IMHO, it was "if it ain't broke, then don't fix it" taken to insane extremes.) The group that owned the applications on those system kept them around for about another year after I joined. If Y2K hadn't rolled around, I'd bet that group would have insisted on keeping them around for even longer.
Back when I was a kid, jets would fly in and out of the local Naval air station and occasionally go supersonic after takeoff. I don't recall the sonic booms as being "earsplitting". "Window rattling"? Sure but even the level of that depends on their altitude when the shock wave passed by on the ground. They would have had to have been at low altitude for it to be "earsplitting".
The music-to-ad content became low enough that people started going elsewhere for music. YouTube will learn that this can happen to them as well.
Surely no human being actually said that. Would someone ever walk up to an employee in a store and ask: "Excuse me... how do I transact?"