There could be aliens out there now, but what interest would they have in us? We are down right barbaric, not to mention that our own space program(USA) has almost taken a giant leap backwards, with all of the budget cuts! Unless we are to become slaves/food/resources, they would likely have zero interest in us IMHO.
I agree with you... but THEY don't know that.
Look, it's really almost impossible to fathom the size of our solar system, let alone the universe. I would venture that most people can't even conceptually understand it. But coming up with outright dumb theories - they are great at doing.
Technically, I think you can thank the reaction of insurance companies to ObamaCare for that. Sure, they said they were losing money and had to raise rates, or pull out of "unprofitable" markets because of it, but I never really believed them. I think that small businesses suffered, and blamed it on ObamaCare. But the insurance companies were the ones who started that chain reaction. I don't think ObamaCare was a smashing success, but certain money-grubbing industries made sure to not help it succeed.
No. That's not the case. People CHOOSE to be exposed to it, and they choose to buy into it. I used to be on Instagram, until a little over a year ago. I enjoyed it, there were some fun things about it. Then one day I realized I was like a chicken, peck peck pecking my phone all the time. And I quit, and was much happier for it. I don't use FB either.
You can avoid these things, you don't have to pay attention to them. And if you do, you don't HAVE to like/subscribe/whatever. Just stop being a ME TOO person and stop worrying about what everyone else does or thinks.
You know the American dietary guidelines? Not based on scientific papers, results, and they have a.gov address. The American Heart Association.. same story.
That is what you should be outraged about. We've all been lied to... remember the "low-fat diet" craze that a lot of people still believe? OK, well that one WAS based on research. But the research results did not show any positive results from a low-fat diet. But that was still the recommendation because they thought it did.
Remember doctors recommending smoking? Same thing. Now it's the sugar industry, doing the same thing for their product using some of the same people.
I tried Plex, didn't like it and stayed with serviio. It has some annoyances, but has been working for me for years. We mainly stream videos from my server to computers and TVs via Rokus. Works like a charm.
I feel the same way. It's not that I don't ever buy a coffee somewhere, but it's a rare thing. For one, I like black coffee and most places cover up their terrible coffee with sugar and milk and flavorings. And it really stinks to buy a coffee somewhere and it be terrible. At home, I know what I am getting.
On a similar note, if anyone goes out to bars and spends money at them, they are wasting it. Sure, there's the social aspect, especially if you are single... but just know that you are paying a fee for that in the extreme markup of drinks. Want to save money, or spend it on other things, buy your own alcohol and don't go to bars. Or if you do, just drink water.
What does a beer cost these days at a bar? Depends on brand, but let's say $5 + $1 tip. For the price of 2 beers you can probably buy a 6-pack at the store. So you are paying a 3x premium. Same goes for wine and spirits. It's crazy. I'm not cheap, but I'd rather buy a decent bottle of bourbon and enjoy it than 4 drinks at the bar.
I don't agree with the idea that you should do it to invest it, investments are risky. You should do it because it makes sense. Or don't... it's your money.
The height of the missile was much higher than any previous one from NK. Based on that, if they had fired it at a lower trajectory, it could have reached anywhere in the US. Granted, it didn't have a massive nuclear warhead on it, but that fact alone is significant. They could still land one in NYC or wherever they choose in the US as a show of capability.
And we are the country that has our dickbeater-in-chief trading insults and playing crazy-chicken with NK.
I have the Life One X, and I got it because of all of the good reasons you stated. Dual-SIM, good features, mostly stock, unlocked, and $150. So I got one for myself and for my wife. It came with Lollipop, and I thought it would never get udpated... but it did! They updated it to Marshmallow earlier this year. I was shocked and happy. I sung the praises of BLU.
Then the spying came out.... and I was nervous, but my phone wasn't affected. My wife cracked the screen on hers, and we just couldn't go with BLU again, so she got a Moto. When mine dies or becomes too outdated, I don't see how I could choose BLU again. It's unfortunate, it seemed they were doing so many things right.
Excel is a tool, and a good one. I use it all the time. I've worked in startups, banking, mortgage, medical. If anything, people need to learn how to use it better. Most applications don't include decent reporting tools, but you can always get the data out into a CSV and put it in Excel.
A lot of people don't even know how to use pivot tables. If you want the data to tell you something, it's pretty easy with just data dumps / pivot tables / slicers. I don't like linking to the data because Excel kind of sucks in that regard. We have some complex spreadsheets that take 20 minutes to open because some asshat linked it to about 10 different TFS queries. I've done some neat things like building tables and graphs based on an indirect field... type the name of the tab into field A1, and the tables and graphs read from that tab and update automatically. I implemented that to replace one guy who spent 5 days every month copy/pasting data into Excel. he just had no idea how to use it. My process ended up taking 10 minutes.
I once worked at one of the big mortgage companies, in a group that did quality audits of mortgages. I managed an internal dev team that built a system to do those audits, and we used SSRS for reporting. There was another internal audit team that just used Excel for a similar function. We had the cool system, and they were envious of it, but they could produce much better data, and could implement new stuff way easier than we could. I am sure could have done a lot better if it wasn't just 2 developers in a sea of luddites who had no idea what software development entailed.
I have noticed that with all of the integration with Excel and Office365, and with the fact that we use OneDrive to store things... Excel locks up and/or crashes on me quite a bit more now than it ever has. All MS Office apps, actually. So i think it's headed in the wrong direction, but hey... cloud.
Read Taubes' book The Case Against Sugar. Some of the same people who "worked" the PR for Tobacco did the same for the sugar industry.
Do you know why people can inhale cigarette tobacco so easily and deeply? It's by using tobacco blends, and by soaking the leaves in.... sugar.
Tobacco was for adults. Sugar is for everyone. It's part of every special occasion, it's now woven into the fabric of our society. Tobacco is expensive, sugar is cheap.
And most importantly, we all know tobacco is harmful. We all think sugar is harmless.
I think I understand your point, there ARE valid uses for this. It's frustrating to develop software and not have full understanding about how your clients use it. There is a desire and a need to have that information in raw data that can be used to make the product better. It could even be used by client support and to help prevent bugs. I'm not talking about shopping carts or blogs, but enterprise-level systems that are very complex.
But let's not kid ourselves... that isn't what this story is about.
About a year and a half ago it was hard to recognize it anymore. So I switched to PaleMoon, which is much more like Firefox than Firefox. (think Coke vs New Coke)
I didn't break up with Firefox, Firefox broke up with me. I've moved on.
A year and a half ago, FF started freaking out on me. I would launch it with an empty about page (default), or even with a link via email, and it would open and just sit for 30 seconds. It was unresponsive, and my cpu/,memory was fine. Then it would magically become responsive and work fine. I deleted my profile, disabled add-ons (I only had 3 or 4 basic ones like adblocker, gestures, etc.). I went through several new versions, hoping it would be fixed. Nothing worked. After about 6 months, I gave up - which was hard to do. Being a Linux user, FF was my browser since before it was called FF. I did try Opera and Chromium for a little bit, but never really quit using FF.
Luckily I found Pale Moon, which has given me back the FF of old. Maybe FF will eventually get their shit sorted out, but as of right now I have zero reason to go back to it.
I may have to go to India this year for work. While I have worked with Indian people here as well as in India for many years, I simply do not want to go. I have no desire to see dead bodies rotting in a river, or public feces. These are things that should not happen at this scale in this day and age. It's their society, but I don't understand their caste system or why they can't solve sanitation issues that cause 569 million people poop outside.
Never tried it, but after many many years of using it, it took a steep drop in the last few years and I got tired of it. ESR works for you... that's great. Palemoon works for me.
Although everything gets slower and slower as they cram more and more into websites. Gotta have ads, and flying banners, and things minimizing, and embedded video auto-starting, and all that shit. For some reason.
At work - Office all the way, and I am glad for it. Yes, it's annoying, and the integration with the cloud/OneDrive can be maddening! OneDrive has a hiccup synching, and all of my open Excel documents freeze and never come back. There's a reason that it creates recovery files, because it crashes a lot.
I don't care about Word, I basically use it to convert things to PDF. I use Excel and Powerpoint a lot, Visio on occasion. For the home user, LibreOffice for sure, but if you want to do anything significant MSOffice is the way to go.
And I don't have a problem saying that. It's just better. I run Linux at home so it's not really an option, but the two times a year I need to use LibreOffice for something I find the general operation to be confusing. I am sure if I used it more I might get used to it.
Sure, if your team members all work in isolation and don't really have to work with other people to get things done, then that's great. That isn't how the real world works though. And you can't take people and just put them in roles. I can't take a database developer and make them a BA, I can't take a developer and make them a tester.
Or just have well defined goals, work that needs done, and judge them on how well they actually get the work done. Novel, I know.
Based on your 'loose' statements, I am guessing you have never done this before. I have found that this is much MUCH easier said than done. If you can even define goals reasonably well, you get people who "meet the goals" but can be shitty employees. I have had very good programmers who worked for me who got their work done, but were total assholes to work with. (can't really put that in a goal) Not everything that you need to have done to be successful can be broken down into tasks - at least not for every profession.
Not to mention in corporate America, you need to define all of your goals in the beginning of the year, make them measurable, and meaningful, and apply to everyone equally. (SMART goals indeed) Then there's a re-org 2 months later, and direction shifts, and those goals don't mean anything anymore.
I've been a technical manager for over 10 years, and what really happens is that you have generic corporate goals (make the clients happy... be financially responsible....etc.) that everyone has to have. You end up bending what you do to show you meet these goals. Then you have department specific goals that are either easy to meet or impossible to measure. So you end up rating people on how good they are (subjective) and how well they do their job (again subjective), and solicit feedback from peers. The only time you don't do this is for your outliers - the really good performers, or the really bad performers.
Slashdot Mirror
There could be aliens out there now, but what interest would they have in us? We are down right barbaric, not to mention that our own space program(USA) has almost taken a giant leap backwards, with all of the budget cuts! Unless we are to become slaves/food/resources, they would likely have zero interest in us IMHO.
I agree with you... but THEY don't know that.
Look, it's really almost impossible to fathom the size of our solar system, let alone the universe. I would venture that most people can't even conceptually understand it. But coming up with outright dumb theories - they are great at doing.
I have, since the late 90s.
I think they only care about high-bandwidth sites.
You can thank ObamaCare for that
Technically, I think you can thank the reaction of insurance companies to ObamaCare for that.
Sure, they said they were losing money and had to raise rates, or pull out of "unprofitable" markets because of it, but I never really believed them. I think that small businesses suffered, and blamed it on ObamaCare. But the insurance companies were the ones who started that chain reaction. I don't think ObamaCare was a smashing success, but certain money-grubbing industries made sure to not help it succeed.
"everyone is exposed to it 24 hours a day."
No. That's not the case. People CHOOSE to be exposed to it, and they choose to buy into it.
I used to be on Instagram, until a little over a year ago. I enjoyed it, there were some fun things about it. Then one day I realized I was like a chicken, peck peck pecking my phone all the time. And I quit, and was much happier for it. I don't use FB either.
You can avoid these things, you don't have to pay attention to them. And if you do, you don't HAVE to like/subscribe/whatever. Just stop being a ME TOO person and stop worrying about what everyone else does or thinks.
You know the American dietary guidelines? .gov address. .. same story.
Not based on scientific papers, results, and they have a
The American Heart Association
That is what you should be outraged about. We've all been lied to... remember the "low-fat diet" craze that a lot of people still believe? OK, well that one WAS based on research. But the research results did not show any positive results from a low-fat diet. But that was still the recommendation because they thought it did.
Remember doctors recommending smoking? Same thing. Now it's the sugar industry, doing the same thing for their product using some of the same people.
I tried Plex, didn't like it and stayed with serviio.
It has some annoyances, but has been working for me for years. We mainly stream videos from my server to computers and TVs via Rokus. Works like a charm.
I feel the same way. It's not that I don't ever buy a coffee somewhere, but it's a rare thing. For one, I like black coffee and most places cover up their terrible coffee with sugar and milk and flavorings. And it really stinks to buy a coffee somewhere and it be terrible. At home, I know what I am getting.
On a similar note, if anyone goes out to bars and spends money at them, they are wasting it.
Sure, there's the social aspect, especially if you are single... but just know that you are paying a fee for that in the extreme markup of drinks.
Want to save money, or spend it on other things, buy your own alcohol and don't go to bars. Or if you do, just drink water.
What does a beer cost these days at a bar? Depends on brand, but let's say $5 + $1 tip. For the price of 2 beers you can probably buy a 6-pack at the store. So you are paying a 3x premium. Same goes for wine and spirits. It's crazy. I'm not cheap, but I'd rather buy a decent bottle of bourbon and enjoy it than 4 drinks at the bar.
I don't agree with the idea that you should do it to invest it, investments are risky. You should do it because it makes sense. Or don't... it's your money.
Pink Sugar Espresso (and places like them) would beg to differ on that one. As would I.
Take me down to the Microsoft city
Where the UI's flat and security's shitty
Oh won't you please take me home
Take me down to the Microsoft city
Where upgrades are forced and there's no privacy
Oh won't you please take me home
I wanna go, I wanna go
Oh won't you please take me home
The height of the missile was much higher than any previous one from NK. Based on that, if they had fired it at a lower trajectory, it could have reached anywhere in the US. Granted, it didn't have a massive nuclear warhead on it, but that fact alone is significant. They could still land one in NYC or wherever they choose in the US as a show of capability.
And we are the country that has our dickbeater-in-chief trading insults and playing crazy-chicken with NK.
I have the Life One X, and I got it because of all of the good reasons you stated. Dual-SIM, good features, mostly stock, unlocked, and $150. So I got one for myself and for my wife. It came with Lollipop, and I thought it would never get udpated... but it did! They updated it to Marshmallow earlier this year. I was shocked and happy. I sung the praises of BLU.
Then the spying came out.... and I was nervous, but my phone wasn't affected. My wife cracked the screen on hers, and we just couldn't go with BLU again, so she got a Moto. When mine dies or becomes too outdated, I don't see how I could choose BLU again. It's unfortunate, it seemed they were doing so many things right.
Excel is a tool, and a good one. I use it all the time.
I've worked in startups, banking, mortgage, medical. If anything, people need to learn how to use it better. Most applications don't include decent reporting tools, but you can always get the data out into a CSV and put it in Excel.
A lot of people don't even know how to use pivot tables.
If you want the data to tell you something, it's pretty easy with just data dumps / pivot tables / slicers. I don't like linking to the data because Excel kind of sucks in that regard. We have some complex spreadsheets that take 20 minutes to open because some asshat linked it to about 10 different TFS queries. I've done some neat things like building tables and graphs based on an indirect field... type the name of the tab into field A1, and the tables and graphs read from that tab and update automatically. I implemented that to replace one guy who spent 5 days every month copy/pasting data into Excel. he just had no idea how to use it. My process ended up taking 10 minutes.
I once worked at one of the big mortgage companies, in a group that did quality audits of mortgages. I managed an internal dev team that built a system to do those audits, and we used SSRS for reporting. There was another internal audit team that just used Excel for a similar function. We had the cool system, and they were envious of it, but they could produce much better data, and could implement new stuff way easier than we could. I am sure could have done a lot better if it wasn't just 2 developers in a sea of luddites who had no idea what software development entailed.
I have noticed that with all of the integration with Excel and Office365, and with the fact that we use OneDrive to store things... Excel locks up and/or crashes on me quite a bit more now than it ever has. All MS Office apps, actually. So i think it's headed in the wrong direction, but hey... cloud.
Read Taubes' book The Case Against Sugar. Some of the same people who "worked" the PR for Tobacco did the same for the sugar industry.
Do you know why people can inhale cigarette tobacco so easily and deeply? It's by using tobacco blends, and by soaking the leaves in .... sugar.
Tobacco was for adults. Sugar is for everyone. It's part of every special occasion, it's now woven into the fabric of our society. Tobacco is expensive, sugar is cheap.
And most importantly, we all know tobacco is harmful. We all think sugar is harmless.
I can only hope someone sets up a botnet to visit these sites and relentlessly hammer their pages with searches for bizarre words and profanity.
I think I understand your point, there ARE valid uses for this.
It's frustrating to develop software and not have full understanding about how your clients use it. There is a desire and a need to have that information in raw data that can be used to make the product better. It could even be used by client support and to help prevent bugs. I'm not talking about shopping carts or blogs, but enterprise-level systems that are very complex.
But let's not kid ourselves... that isn't what this story is about.
About a year and a half ago it was hard to recognize it anymore.
So I switched to PaleMoon, which is much more like Firefox than Firefox. (think Coke vs New Coke)
I didn't break up with Firefox, Firefox broke up with me. I've moved on.
A year and a half ago, FF started freaking out on me. I would launch it with an empty about page (default), or even with a link via email, and it would open and just sit for 30 seconds. It was unresponsive, and my cpu/,memory was fine. Then it would magically become responsive and work fine. I deleted my profile, disabled add-ons (I only had 3 or 4 basic ones like adblocker, gestures, etc.). I went through several new versions, hoping it would be fixed. Nothing worked. After about 6 months, I gave up - which was hard to do. Being a Linux user, FF was my browser since before it was called FF. I did try Opera and Chromium for a little bit, but never really quit using FF.
Luckily I found Pale Moon, which has given me back the FF of old. Maybe FF will eventually get their shit sorted out, but as of right now I have zero reason to go back to it.
I may have to go to India this year for work. While I have worked with Indian people here as well as in India for many years, I simply do not want to go. I have no desire to see dead bodies rotting in a river, or public feces. These are things that should not happen at this scale in this day and age. It's their society, but I don't understand their caste system or why they can't solve sanitation issues that cause
569 million people poop outside.
Never tried it, but after many many years of using it, it took a steep drop in the last few years and I got tired of it.
ESR works for you... that's great. Palemoon works for me.
Firefox sucks. Use Pale Moon .
Although everything gets slower and slower as they cram more and more into websites. Gotta have ads, and flying banners, and things minimizing, and embedded video auto-starting, and all that shit. For some reason.
At work - Office all the way, and I am glad for it. Yes, it's annoying, and the integration with the cloud/OneDrive can be maddening! OneDrive has a hiccup synching, and all of my open Excel documents freeze and never come back. There's a reason that it creates recovery files, because it crashes a lot.
I don't care about Word, I basically use it to convert things to PDF. I use Excel and Powerpoint a lot, Visio on occasion. For the home user, LibreOffice for sure, but if you want to do anything significant MSOffice is the way to go.
And I don't have a problem saying that. It's just better. I run Linux at home so it's not really an option, but the two times a year I need to use LibreOffice for something I find the general operation to be confusing. I am sure if I used it more I might get used to it.
Sure, if your team members all work in isolation and don't really have to work with other people to get things done, then that's great. That isn't how the real world works though. And you can't take people and just put them in roles. I can't take a database developer and make them a BA, I can't take a developer and make them a tester.
Based on your 'loose' statements, I am guessing you have never done this before..
Great guess, I've only been a developer for about 30 years, clearly never done it before.
I was referring to having been a manager of a team, and had to come up with goals for everyone. So you confirmed, you have never done that before.
Or just have well defined goals, work that needs done, and judge them on how well they actually get the work done. Novel, I know.
Based on your 'loose' statements, I am guessing you have never done this before. I have found that this is much MUCH easier said than done. If you can even define goals reasonably well, you get people who "meet the goals" but can be shitty employees. I have had very good programmers who worked for me who got their work done, but were total assholes to work with. (can't really put that in a goal) Not everything that you need to have done to be successful can be broken down into tasks - at least not for every profession.
Not to mention in corporate America, you need to define all of your goals in the beginning of the year, make them measurable, and meaningful, and apply to everyone equally. (SMART goals indeed) Then there's a re-org 2 months later, and direction shifts, and those goals don't mean anything anymore.
I've been a technical manager for over 10 years, and what really happens is that you have generic corporate goals (make the clients happy... be financially responsible....etc.) that everyone has to have. You end up bending what you do to show you meet these goals. Then you have department specific goals that are either easy to meet or impossible to measure. So you end up rating people on how good they are (subjective) and how well they do their job (again subjective), and solicit feedback from peers. The only time you don't do this is for your outliers - the really good performers, or the really bad performers.