I want 35mm film-quality stills from the lenses and bodies currently residing in my basement
Depending on how old your gear is, buy a DSLR of the same make and use your lenses. Back in the day the camera body was just there to hold the film and the lens, you won't be able to reuse that.
My Nikon DSLR can happily use lenses I had on my film SLR. Not all lenses will work. Heck, some models should cover lenses going back to 1959. I assume other companies have done similar.
I ought to be able to get a 35mm "consumer" version for a few hundred bucks. As long as it had 1080p resolution or better
I think a Nikon D3200 is currently under around $400... and it's a freakin' 24 megapixel camera.
The main thing you need to remember is the focal length changes... a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera is an objective lens which sees the world like you do. The same 50mm lens on a DSLR ends up being a moderate telephoto, and is equivalent to an 80mm lens.
You may find you can still get a camera body which has all the modern features, but still works with your lenses that you spent a small fortune on.
In fact, depending on the specific brand and lenses, there's a really good chance of it.
Maybe not pennies, but certainly a small fraction of what you paid.
Not so long ago I realized my Nikon F75 body would pretty much never get used again, since I now have a D90 and don't use 35mm film any more.
I can't remember what the camera store gave me for it, but I'm sure it was under $50, possibly closer to $25.
My 50mm lens? Well, slapped on a digital camera it works out nicely as the equivalent of an 80mm portrait lens.
The lenses still hold their value, because good optics in lenses still counts.
If you want to use your old lens, you're going to have to pony up to a D800 or so, but now we're getting technical.
I was lucky enough that my camera and lenses were new enough they all had autofocus to work with my digital camera. If you're willing to have manual focusing and the like, there's no reason why you can't use older lenses on newer Nikon bodies. Depending on what you use the lens for, that may be ok.
The mounting and physics of the lens is the same (give or take focal length for the lens), it still works, you just lose the ability of the camera to control it.
But it should actually still work... it's still a lens. I'd be surprised if you couldn't use a 40 year old lens on a modern Nikon.
Isn't the main difference between an apartment and a dormitory that in an apartment you don't have to share facilities?
Typically, yes.
What most people in North America mean by apartment is "you have a self-contained unit to dwell in; kitchen, living space, bathroom, possibly a bedroom". Your studio flat is the same as our studio apartment. With the possible exception of laundry, it's got all its own facilities.
This seems to be giving an intermediate solution between living on your own, and living with your parents. You can get a very tiny private space for less money, and the shared stuff to be sociable and have a little extra space.
It's taking the idea of having room-mates (flat mates for you) and doing it on a much larger scale, it would seem.
If it's cloud computing, there is ZERO incentive to pay US wage levels
Well, then it's becoming time to either give them an incentive, or give them a penalty if they don't.
Tie their corporate tax rate to how many jobs they have in the US, and the more they move out of the US the higher their taxes. Any company which reaches a certain threshold and is deemed to essentially not have enough domestic staff pays a much higher amount of taxes.
For years we've been following policies of cutting corporate taxes, because somehow magically that is supposed to improve our lives. Since that clearly isn't working, build in a penaly.
Oh, moving 20% of your workforce offshore? That'll be a 10% higher tax rate. It's time to stop letting companies trade domestic jobs for corporate profits, and do it for free.
But stop giving corporations the benefit of being incorporated domestically if they're going to move all of their work overseas. You want to offshore all the jobs, you move there too. But don't expect tax discounts or ANY taxpayer funded services.
Fuck companies over the same way they're fucking us over. Make it an actual business cost to offshore workers. And stop pretending that a company which doesn't keep jobs here is entitled to any benefits here.
I know, on behalf of those of us who have been on many successful projects which used Waterfall, I find myself thinking "no wonder that clown didn't want his name used".
Anybody who says it doesn't/can't work literally has no experience in running projects, and is so utterly unqualified to talk about it as to defy belief.
This is finger pointing, and claiming how your new methodology is going to be so much better. Right up until the replacement project fails as well.
But to say it hasn't been successful in 40 years? Sorry, you immediately lose all credibility and can't be taken seriously.
Go ahead, build a bridge or a house without Waterfall. Let's see what you end up with.
A bunch of people randomly doing some subset of what you need for completion and then trying again next week? That's no guarantee of anything, it's just smaller tasks to almost get right.
Agile is no magic bullet, and Waterfall isn't some method which has been so badly discredited that nobody uses it.
The company's initial approach proved especially controversial. Known as "Waterfall," this approach involved developing the system in relatively long, cascading phases, resulting in a years-long wait for a final product. Current and former federal officials acknowledged in interviews that this method of carrying out IT projects was considered outdated by 2008. "The Waterfall method has not been successful for 40 years"
LOL... wow, now that's quit the claim. Sounds like utter bullshit to me.
Reading the article, it sounds like DHS had unlimited cash, little oversight, and no clue.
Agency officials did not complete the basic plans for the computer system until nearly three years after the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM, and the approach to adopting the technology was outdated before work on it began.
OK, so the cheap shot here is IBM.
But I often see these things and think to myself, there's probably a list of reasons why shit like this happens.
Stupid conflicting policies, politicians angling for a little pork for their constituents, politicians who want to fuck up the system to show why government can't do these things, bad vision to start with, departments dickering over their own little information silos, competing agencies trying to get you to use their system to help them pay for their own mistakes.
I frequently think this kind of thing happens as much from mismanagement and meddling by the people who started the process as anything.
And I've seen a few cases where people want to blame the vendor because it's just easier, but the vendor had to put up with tremendous amounts of dithering an inability to make decisions from the players.
Yes, sometimes the vendor falls short. Yes, government can fall short. But sometimes it seems like there's too many competing agendas, and individual players dropping in and trying to redefine everything. Delivery of anything is doomed from the start because they don't know what they want.
You never get to know the real truth, but in a lot of ways I bet an objective understanding of how things go so horribly wrong would be interesting. Usually, however, it's almost impossible to get an honest evaluation of what really happened... because so many asses have been covered the truth has been buried under an avalanche of finger pointing.
Hell, I've see these kinds of things fail because the original sales people lied to badly what was being offered had no chance... and I've seen customers redefine what they're looking for so often as to make it impossible to actually deliver the contract.
Invariably some new PM or stakeholder wants to scrap everything done so far and use the technology they're most comfortable with.
These projects fail, often spectacularly. And the difference between what the low-level people think happened, and what management things is often staggering. Because the higher up the org chart you go, the less reality is defined by what is true, until you get to a level where facts don't even enter into anything.
But, really, is this actually a real functioning super-secret "command center"?
Or is this some PR stunt so people can be given the tour and go "ooh" and "aaah".
I'm having a hard time taking this seriously as a "command center", because the question isn't "how do I make a NOC which lets me monitor my stuff in real time and respond to it", but instead says "how do I make a really cool looking NOC-type-thingy so I can give clients a tour of it to get them to sign the contract".
Nobody is asking how to make this work, or be useful, or effective. Or the best way to ensure people can control stuff and fix it as best as possible. Or what tools allow you to have something meaningful on the screens.
This mythical room full of professional in the secret command bunker? I'm not buying it.
Allow me to offer a different alternative: the poster has a history of asking such questions.
So, you can optimistically say "wow, this guy gets to do cool things and is using the intertubes for due diligence".
Or, you can cynically say "Wow, first managing passwords, then dealing with managing access for new employees, and now dealing with a realistic-looking NOC... how does someone get out of their depth so often and need our help?"
By the third "how do I solve this problem which is part of my business model", one starts to ask if this is researching possibilities, or asking if the internet can do your homework. Because the trend is "I run an MSP, and I haven't solved some of the problems I've already signed contracts to deliver, please help".
Of course, depending on your inherent level of cynicism, YMMV in terms of how you interpret that. But I know what mine suggests to me.
You do realize all of that climate gate conspiracy bullshit has been discredited and that you're linking to something from 2009, right? ALL of that drivel which claimed to show manipulation was pretty much bullshit.
So either you like to trot this out because you haven't kept up to date, or you know damned well you're posting links to stale information which has been discredited.
Because, really, a Telegraph article from 2009 about how the Russians have confirmed that climate data was manipulated? That's about the least quality source of information you could pick.
In which case I assume you know you're full of shit. If you don't, well, you should fix that.
LOL... I remember somewhere around Y2K+-2 my brother was looking for a new VCR.
One of them cost quite a bit more, but had "Home Theater Ready" stamped on it.
When asked what that actually meant, the sales guy (after giving some really hand-waving explanations) eventually realized my brother knew a fair bit about VCRs. Eventually he said "It's got the same footprint as the rest of the components so it stacks nicely".
There was absolutely no discernible technology which made it "Home Theater Ready". But the unit had been sized to stack nicely with other home theater components.
You should always assume marketing is lying to you. Because they probably are.
So, I actually have an AMD FX 8320E eight core as the processor on my personal desktop.
This is what AMD says: "The industry's only 8-core desktop processor", or "The industry's first and only native 8-core desktop processor for unmatched multitasking and pure core performance with "Bulldozer" architecture".
Now, I bought it knowing there was likely some behind the scenes tricks, and because I don't strictly need a high-level of sustained CPU intensive tasks. For me it was as much about letting multiple programs run without too much contention.
However, AMD isn't exactly jumping up and down to point out how this isn't quite 8 full cores.
So, me I bought it knowing that it wasn't likely to be a full 8-core CPU like the 8-core Xeons we have at work in some of the servers. But I think it's a little much to claim it's purely retailers making this claim. AMDs own marketing material isn't suggesting anything different.
For my purposes, having bought it knowing it wasn't "really" 8 cores, I'm still happy with the performance. But if you bought something thinking you could have sustained 8-core performance for specific tasks, I can see you'd be unhappy.
Executives and sales people of companies who lie to the public being sent to jail?
That helps everyone except the lying bastard executives and sales people. And then the other lying bastards know they're next if they do the same thing.
Know what doesn't help anyone? Letting the lying bastards keep being lying bastards without any penalty.
Then the message to the other lying bastards is "it's OK to be a lying bastard, nothing will happen".
But let's stop pretending this is "customers abusing corporations", and remember that it's really "lying bastard abusing customers".
So, in other words, telco's are large Ponzi schemes whose business model is predicated on misleading customers about what they're actually buying so that faulty business models can be sold as if they weren't complete bullshit?
I'm sorry, but there's a word for that: fraud.
So maybe I can sell 1 million people my car? And then when I don't have 1 million cars I can say "well, I wasn't selling you my car, I was selling you the idea of car?
Sorry, their shitty business model and deceptive marketing are their own damned problems.
Oh, but wait, this was to maximize shareholder value and executive bonuses, so it's perfectly OK to commit fraud, right?
No, the ones doing the abuse here are the lying bastards in marketing who should have bloody well know this before they offered unlimited packages.
If you sell me unlimited service, and then subsequently decide you can't live up to your bullshit promises... it's not because I abused it, it's because you fucking lied about it in the first place.
All of these telcos and ISPs have made a business model of massively oversubscribing their product, and then utterly failing to invest in the infrastructure.
The real question is how they got away with claiming it was "unlimited" in the first place. Because that was a lie from the beginning.
So you'll pardon me if I don't give a shit of some greedy corporation lied to customers, and is now changing contracts. They're not deserving of my sympathy that the mean old customers actually tried to use what they were sold.
These companies knew damned well they were lying when they sold it. Now I say "too fucking bad".
Maybe instead of just saying they've changed their mind and realized they were lying bastards in the first place, we stop letting companies misrepresent what they're selling by using words like "unlimited". Call it what it is: deceptive marketing practices, and let the FTC hand them fines for having lied in the first place.
The problem is, most of the people they would walk through the room to try to impress will not be impressed by just some blinky lights
Someone must be impressed, otherwise people wouldn't build one.
All this sounds like to me is some neophytes having a field day on someone else's dime thinking they're going to impress experienced IT and network operations people and it's not going to work.
So, on the field trip for the tour, who do you think goes? PHBs and other people who don't know what they're looking at? Or experienced IT and network operations people?
Maybe they really do want a functioning place to keep tabs on their system. I can't rule that out.
But I'll stick with my initial impression this is entirely for show, precisely like it doesn't sound like the primary goal here is to build a functioning NOC.
Yeah, there's two references to the tours in the submission, and it sounds very much like it's as much marketing as it is functional.
Suddenly I'm imagining a room in which the tech people never actually go, stage dressed with some carefully chosen people, and which will serve for a great tour but which otherwise will have nothing at all to do with operations.
Meanwhile the actual staff are in dingy cubicles, with ancient CRT monitors, and not ever able to see this glorious presentation of the monitoring center because they're not photogenic enough for the customers.
If this isn't your actual room you plan on using for actual work... you might find that when your customers figure it out they're not impressed.
This sounds like it is window dressing for the sake of window dressing, and might not actually help do the actual job.
We are an MSP and this is a tour showcase center, so more is better
Basically I read this as "we want to have some really cool blinking lights when we walk customers through here, even if none of this stuff actually does anything".
Is this marketing, or actually intended to be functional?
Please tell us you are really going to have people working in this room and monitoring stuff and that this isn't just for show.
You know, at a certain point, the language doesn't change just because the technology does.
No, my cable box isn't on top of my TV.
But people still "tape" shows, "dial" the phone, "film" an event, "rewind" through a movie, and all sorts of things.
Something comes along, it becomes the word used to describe something, and it becomes part of the language. Over time the underlying technology changes, but people have no interest in changing the language.
Exactly... take away one revenue stream, and they'll just tack on some new line-items to the bills to make that up.
Between their business people who will ensure they don't lose the money, and their lobbyists who will ensure it will never happen... there is no way in hell those companies are going to allow any loss in revenue.
And they'll have enough politicians on the payroll to ensure their profits are entrenched in law.
And, just like happened when Cablecard came out... the cable companies will do everything in their power to make sure it doesn't work... either they'll just dig in and refuse, or they'll just add on additional fees.
If anybody thinks the cable companies will allow this to happen without trying to gouge people and make up the shortfall, they're delusional.
The cable companies simply don't give a crap about consumers. They never have, and never will. And they sure as hell aren't going to make it easy to stop paying them.
Honestly, all they have to do is seem so grossly incompetent as to not be able to make the system work. And that should be shockingly easy.
But don't start thinking this will work any better now than when cable cards came out in the first place.
The cable industry has far too much power, far too many lobbyists, oh, and did we mention they pretty much run the FCC these days?
There is simply no way in hell these companies will allow anything to happen which cuts into profits. They'll stop it dead in its tracks, or make anything so onerous and impossible that it won't actually work.
Since they mention this in the first paragraph... this will be exactly like the old black rotary phone... even if you no longer have it, they're going to gouge you for "touch tone dialing" and pretend like it costs them anything.
Which means they'll charge you whether or not you have their box, will charge you to connect your box to their stuff, will charge you for the privilege of connecting your box to their stuff and for maintaining the infrastructure, and will find all sorts of ways to keep gouging consumers.
These companies have strangleholds, and monopolies... they sure as hell aren't going to accept any regulations which cost them money. They're far too entrenched and feel they're entitled to that money.
And they have far too many fucking politicians on the payroll whose job it is to entrench in law their revenues.
Why should they? You promised and lied it would work. THey are already paying you $60,000 a year and you agreed to it in return for 100% uptime. There is no budget for $416 an hour. That budget for support goes to you!
Where the hell are you seeing this in the article?
I'm seeing "corporations use free software, give back a little, expect 24x7 support for nothing".
LOL, you know "code monkey" isn't a value judgment for all of us, any more than nerd is. At one point I jokingly called myself a C-monkey.
At the time we had a room full of guys, half of which had Master's degrees, building and designing software from the ground up. All of it.
We referred to our design process as "poo flinging monkeys", in that we'd lock ourselves in a room, screech at one another, and come out when we'd come up with a design.
We designed it, we built it, we documented it, we tested it, we debugged it, we optimized it, we fixed it, and then we planned the next release. We wrote the UML diagrams, and defined how the pieces worked, developed the pieces we needed to, and co-opted existing BSD and Apache stuff where we could. I spent years working only in C, and at times right at the hardware level.
In some contexts the joke was I was the chief howler monkey because I led the discussions on the whiteboard and kept the other monkeys to some semblance or order. We were all monkeys.
We did all of the things which are classically part of engineering, but we were not "Engineers", because where we live Engineer is a protected term, used only by people covered by the governing body of engineers. We filled the role of "software engineers", but it wasn't legal to call us that.
Sorry, to me code monkey isn't a pejorative term for some hack who needs to be told what to do. It's what a bunch of smart, university educated guys collectively referred to ourselves as code monkeys.
So, when I called myself a code monkey, I meant it in an entirely different way that you think I did. In the same way that I say nerd, hacker, geek, or various other things... it's pretty much just a catch-all term. It's self deprecating, but not in a seriously derogatory way.
I don't code any more, because I've moved on to other things. But at no point in my life was I ever a code flunky who took someone else's specs and typed them in. In fact, for that specific definition of "code monkey"... I have never ever once met ANYBODY who did that.
Other than one project I knew which tried to outsource specs to people who just implemented them, I've never known anybody to every use that kind of programmer. And in that one project I saw where they tried to outsource the implementation of the spec, people spent so much damned time chasing them and getting them to fix it, it likely would have been cheaper to just have the people who wrote the spec write the code in the first place.
For some of us, code monkey is more of a term of endearment than an indication someone is a coder who gets given a complete spec and told to make it go.
And once again Nerval's Lobster posts a story which links to a dice.com story.
Seriously, not one story ever accepted from Nerval's Lobster doesn't point to dice.com, which pretty much means he's a paid staffer whose stories get promoted to click-whore for dice.com.
Honestly, make him an editor and give us a box to block stories from him.
But stop pretending he's getting accepted because of any other reason than shilling for dice.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on how old your gear is, buy a DSLR of the same make and use your lenses. Back in the day the camera body was just there to hold the film and the lens, you won't be able to reuse that.
My Nikon DSLR can happily use lenses I had on my film SLR. Not all lenses will work. Heck, some models should cover lenses going back to 1959. I assume other companies have done similar.
I think a Nikon D3200 is currently under around $400 ... and it's a freakin' 24 megapixel camera.
The main thing you need to remember is the focal length changes ... a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera is an objective lens which sees the world like you do. The same 50mm lens on a DSLR ends up being a moderate telephoto, and is equivalent to an 80mm lens.
You may find you can still get a camera body which has all the modern features, but still works with your lenses that you spent a small fortune on.
In fact, depending on the specific brand and lenses, there's a really good chance of it.
Maybe not pennies, but certainly a small fraction of what you paid.
Not so long ago I realized my Nikon F75 body would pretty much never get used again, since I now have a D90 and don't use 35mm film any more.
I can't remember what the camera store gave me for it, but I'm sure it was under $50, possibly closer to $25.
My 50mm lens? Well, slapped on a digital camera it works out nicely as the equivalent of an 80mm portrait lens.
The lenses still hold their value, because good optics in lenses still counts.
I was lucky enough that my camera and lenses were new enough they all had autofocus to work with my digital camera. If you're willing to have manual focusing and the like, there's no reason why you can't use older lenses on newer Nikon bodies. Depending on what you use the lens for, that may be ok.
The mounting and physics of the lens is the same (give or take focal length for the lens), it still works, you just lose the ability of the camera to control it.
But it should actually still work ... it's still a lens. I'd be surprised if you couldn't use a 40 year old lens on a modern Nikon.
Typically, yes.
What most people in North America mean by apartment is "you have a self-contained unit to dwell in; kitchen, living space, bathroom, possibly a bedroom". Your studio flat is the same as our studio apartment. With the possible exception of laundry, it's got all its own facilities.
This seems to be giving an intermediate solution between living on your own, and living with your parents. You can get a very tiny private space for less money, and the shared stuff to be sociable and have a little extra space.
It's taking the idea of having room-mates (flat mates for you) and doing it on a much larger scale, it would seem.
Well, then it's becoming time to either give them an incentive, or give them a penalty if they don't.
Tie their corporate tax rate to how many jobs they have in the US, and the more they move out of the US the higher their taxes. Any company which reaches a certain threshold and is deemed to essentially not have enough domestic staff pays a much higher amount of taxes.
For years we've been following policies of cutting corporate taxes, because somehow magically that is supposed to improve our lives. Since that clearly isn't working, build in a penaly.
Oh, moving 20% of your workforce offshore? That'll be a 10% higher tax rate. It's time to stop letting companies trade domestic jobs for corporate profits, and do it for free.
But stop giving corporations the benefit of being incorporated domestically if they're going to move all of their work overseas. You want to offshore all the jobs, you move there too. But don't expect tax discounts or ANY taxpayer funded services.
Fuck companies over the same way they're fucking us over. Make it an actual business cost to offshore workers. And stop pretending that a company which doesn't keep jobs here is entitled to any benefits here.
I know, on behalf of those of us who have been on many successful projects which used Waterfall, I find myself thinking "no wonder that clown didn't want his name used".
Anybody who says it doesn't/can't work literally has no experience in running projects, and is so utterly unqualified to talk about it as to defy belief.
This is finger pointing, and claiming how your new methodology is going to be so much better. Right up until the replacement project fails as well.
But to say it hasn't been successful in 40 years? Sorry, you immediately lose all credibility and can't be taken seriously.
Go ahead, build a bridge or a house without Waterfall. Let's see what you end up with.
A bunch of people randomly doing some subset of what you need for completion and then trying again next week? That's no guarantee of anything, it's just smaller tasks to almost get right.
Agile is no magic bullet, and Waterfall isn't some method which has been so badly discredited that nobody uses it.
LOL ... wow, now that's quit the claim. Sounds like utter bullshit to me.
Reading the article, it sounds like DHS had unlimited cash, little oversight, and no clue.
OK, so the cheap shot here is IBM.
But I often see these things and think to myself, there's probably a list of reasons why shit like this happens.
Stupid conflicting policies, politicians angling for a little pork for their constituents, politicians who want to fuck up the system to show why government can't do these things, bad vision to start with, departments dickering over their own little information silos, competing agencies trying to get you to use their system to help them pay for their own mistakes.
I frequently think this kind of thing happens as much from mismanagement and meddling by the people who started the process as anything.
And I've seen a few cases where people want to blame the vendor because it's just easier, but the vendor had to put up with tremendous amounts of dithering an inability to make decisions from the players.
Yes, sometimes the vendor falls short. Yes, government can fall short. But sometimes it seems like there's too many competing agendas, and individual players dropping in and trying to redefine everything. Delivery of anything is doomed from the start because they don't know what they want.
You never get to know the real truth, but in a lot of ways I bet an objective understanding of how things go so horribly wrong would be interesting. Usually, however, it's almost impossible to get an honest evaluation of what really happened ... because so many asses have been covered the truth has been buried under an avalanche of finger pointing.
Hell, I've see these kinds of things fail because the original sales people lied to badly what was being offered had no chance ... and I've seen customers redefine what they're looking for so often as to make it impossible to actually deliver the contract.
Invariably some new PM or stakeholder wants to scrap everything done so far and use the technology they're most comfortable with.
These projects fail, often spectacularly. And the difference between what the low-level people think happened, and what management things is often staggering. Because the higher up the org chart you go, the less reality is defined by what is true, until you get to a level where facts don't even enter into anything.
But, really, is this actually a real functioning super-secret "command center"?
Or is this some PR stunt so people can be given the tour and go "ooh" and "aaah".
I'm having a hard time taking this seriously as a "command center", because the question isn't "how do I make a NOC which lets me monitor my stuff in real time and respond to it", but instead says "how do I make a really cool looking NOC-type-thingy so I can give clients a tour of it to get them to sign the contract".
Nobody is asking how to make this work, or be useful, or effective. Or the best way to ensure people can control stuff and fix it as best as possible. Or what tools allow you to have something meaningful on the screens.
This mythical room full of professional in the secret command bunker? I'm not buying it.
Allow me to offer a different alternative: the poster has a history of asking such questions.
So, you can optimistically say "wow, this guy gets to do cool things and is using the intertubes for due diligence".
Or, you can cynically say "Wow, first managing passwords, then dealing with managing access for new employees, and now dealing with a realistic-looking NOC ... how does someone get out of their depth so often and need our help?"
By the third "how do I solve this problem which is part of my business model", one starts to ask if this is researching possibilities, or asking if the internet can do your homework. Because the trend is "I run an MSP, and I haven't solved some of the problems I've already signed contracts to deliver, please help".
Of course, depending on your inherent level of cynicism, YMMV in terms of how you interpret that. But I know what mine suggests to me.
You do realize all of that climate gate conspiracy bullshit has been discredited and that you're linking to something from 2009, right? ALL of that drivel which claimed to show manipulation was pretty much bullshit.
So either you like to trot this out because you haven't kept up to date, or you know damned well you're posting links to stale information which has been discredited.
Because, really, a Telegraph article from 2009 about how the Russians have confirmed that climate data was manipulated? That's about the least quality source of information you could pick.
In which case I assume you know you're full of shit. If you don't, well, you should fix that.
LOL ... I remember somewhere around Y2K+-2 my brother was looking for a new VCR.
One of them cost quite a bit more, but had "Home Theater Ready" stamped on it.
When asked what that actually meant, the sales guy (after giving some really hand-waving explanations) eventually realized my brother knew a fair bit about VCRs. Eventually he said "It's got the same footprint as the rest of the components so it stacks nicely".
There was absolutely no discernible technology which made it "Home Theater Ready". But the unit had been sized to stack nicely with other home theater components.
You should always assume marketing is lying to you. Because they probably are.
So, I actually have an AMD FX 8320E eight core as the processor on my personal desktop.
This is what AMD says:
"The industry's only 8-core desktop processor", or "The industry's first and only native 8-core desktop processor for unmatched multitasking and pure core performance with "Bulldozer" architecture".
Now, I bought it knowing there was likely some behind the scenes tricks, and because I don't strictly need a high-level of sustained CPU intensive tasks. For me it was as much about letting multiple programs run without too much contention.
However, AMD isn't exactly jumping up and down to point out how this isn't quite 8 full cores.
So, me I bought it knowing that it wasn't likely to be a full 8-core CPU like the 8-core Xeons we have at work in some of the servers. But I think it's a little much to claim it's purely retailers making this claim. AMDs own marketing material isn't suggesting anything different.
For my purposes, having bought it knowing it wasn't "really" 8 cores, I'm still happy with the performance. But if you bought something thinking you could have sustained 8-core performance for specific tasks, I can see you'd be unhappy.
Executives and sales people of companies who lie to the public being sent to jail?
That helps everyone except the lying bastard executives and sales people. And then the other lying bastards know they're next if they do the same thing.
Know what doesn't help anyone? Letting the lying bastards keep being lying bastards without any penalty.
Then the message to the other lying bastards is "it's OK to be a lying bastard, nothing will happen".
But let's stop pretending this is "customers abusing corporations", and remember that it's really "lying bastard abusing customers".
So, in other words, telco's are large Ponzi schemes whose business model is predicated on misleading customers about what they're actually buying so that faulty business models can be sold as if they weren't complete bullshit?
I'm sorry, but there's a word for that: fraud.
So maybe I can sell 1 million people my car? And then when I don't have 1 million cars I can say "well, I wasn't selling you my car, I was selling you the idea of car?
Sorry, their shitty business model and deceptive marketing are their own damned problems.
Oh, but wait, this was to maximize shareholder value and executive bonuses, so it's perfectly OK to commit fraud, right?
No, the ones doing the abuse here are the lying bastards in marketing who should have bloody well know this before they offered unlimited packages.
If you sell me unlimited service, and then subsequently decide you can't live up to your bullshit promises ... it's not because I abused it, it's because you fucking lied about it in the first place.
All of these telcos and ISPs have made a business model of massively oversubscribing their product, and then utterly failing to invest in the infrastructure.
The real question is how they got away with claiming it was "unlimited" in the first place. Because that was a lie from the beginning.
So you'll pardon me if I don't give a shit of some greedy corporation lied to customers, and is now changing contracts. They're not deserving of my sympathy that the mean old customers actually tried to use what they were sold.
These companies knew damned well they were lying when they sold it. Now I say "too fucking bad".
Maybe instead of just saying they've changed their mind and realized they were lying bastards in the first place, we stop letting companies misrepresent what they're selling by using words like "unlimited". Call it what it is: deceptive marketing practices, and let the FTC hand them fines for having lied in the first place.
Someone must be impressed, otherwise people wouldn't build one.
So, on the field trip for the tour, who do you think goes? PHBs and other people who don't know what they're looking at? Or experienced IT and network operations people?
Maybe they really do want a functioning place to keep tabs on their system. I can't rule that out.
But I'll stick with my initial impression this is entirely for show, precisely like it doesn't sound like the primary goal here is to build a functioning NOC.
Yeah, there's two references to the tours in the submission, and it sounds very much like it's as much marketing as it is functional.
Suddenly I'm imagining a room in which the tech people never actually go, stage dressed with some carefully chosen people, and which will serve for a great tour but which otherwise will have nothing at all to do with operations.
Meanwhile the actual staff are in dingy cubicles, with ancient CRT monitors, and not ever able to see this glorious presentation of the monitoring center because they're not photogenic enough for the customers.
If this isn't your actual room you plan on using for actual work ... you might find that when your customers figure it out they're not impressed.
This sounds like it is window dressing for the sake of window dressing, and might not actually help do the actual job.
Basically I read this as "we want to have some really cool blinking lights when we walk customers through here, even if none of this stuff actually does anything".
Is this marketing, or actually intended to be functional?
Please tell us you are really going to have people working in this room and monitoring stuff and that this isn't just for show.
You know, at a certain point, the language doesn't change just because the technology does.
No, my cable box isn't on top of my TV.
But people still "tape" shows, "dial" the phone, "film" an event, "rewind" through a movie, and all sorts of things.
Something comes along, it becomes the word used to describe something, and it becomes part of the language. Over time the underlying technology changes, but people have no interest in changing the language.
Exactly ... take away one revenue stream, and they'll just tack on some new line-items to the bills to make that up.
Between their business people who will ensure they don't lose the money, and their lobbyists who will ensure it will never happen ... there is no way in hell those companies are going to allow any loss in revenue.
And they'll have enough politicians on the payroll to ensure their profits are entrenched in law.
And, just like happened when Cablecard came out ... the cable companies will do everything in their power to make sure it doesn't work ... either they'll just dig in and refuse, or they'll just add on additional fees.
If anybody thinks the cable companies will allow this to happen without trying to gouge people and make up the shortfall, they're delusional.
The cable companies simply don't give a crap about consumers. They never have, and never will. And they sure as hell aren't going to make it easy to stop paying them.
Honestly, all they have to do is seem so grossly incompetent as to not be able to make the system work. And that should be shockingly easy.
But don't start thinking this will work any better now than when cable cards came out in the first place.
The cable industry has far too much power, far too many lobbyists, oh, and did we mention they pretty much run the FCC these days?
There is simply no way in hell these companies will allow anything to happen which cuts into profits. They'll stop it dead in its tracks, or make anything so onerous and impossible that it won't actually work.
Since they mention this in the first paragraph ... this will be exactly like the old black rotary phone ... even if you no longer have it, they're going to gouge you for "touch tone dialing" and pretend like it costs them anything.
Which means they'll charge you whether or not you have their box, will charge you to connect your box to their stuff, will charge you for the privilege of connecting your box to their stuff and for maintaining the infrastructure, and will find all sorts of ways to keep gouging consumers.
These companies have strangleholds, and monopolies ... they sure as hell aren't going to accept any regulations which cost them money. They're far too entrenched and feel they're entitled to that money.
And they have far too many fucking politicians on the payroll whose job it is to entrench in law their revenues.
Where the hell are you seeing this in the article?
I'm seeing "corporations use free software, give back a little, expect 24x7 support for nothing".
What the hell are you talking about?
LOL, you know "code monkey" isn't a value judgment for all of us, any more than nerd is. At one point I jokingly called myself a C-monkey.
At the time we had a room full of guys, half of which had Master's degrees, building and designing software from the ground up. All of it.
We referred to our design process as "poo flinging monkeys", in that we'd lock ourselves in a room, screech at one another, and come out when we'd come up with a design.
We designed it, we built it, we documented it, we tested it, we debugged it, we optimized it, we fixed it, and then we planned the next release. We wrote the UML diagrams, and defined how the pieces worked, developed the pieces we needed to, and co-opted existing BSD and Apache stuff where we could. I spent years working only in C, and at times right at the hardware level.
In some contexts the joke was I was the chief howler monkey because I led the discussions on the whiteboard and kept the other monkeys to some semblance or order. We were all monkeys.
We did all of the things which are classically part of engineering, but we were not "Engineers", because where we live Engineer is a protected term, used only by people covered by the governing body of engineers. We filled the role of "software engineers", but it wasn't legal to call us that.
Sorry, to me code monkey isn't a pejorative term for some hack who needs to be told what to do. It's what a bunch of smart, university educated guys collectively referred to ourselves as code monkeys.
So, when I called myself a code monkey, I meant it in an entirely different way that you think I did. In the same way that I say nerd, hacker, geek, or various other things ... it's pretty much just a catch-all term. It's self deprecating, but not in a seriously derogatory way.
I don't code any more, because I've moved on to other things. But at no point in my life was I ever a code flunky who took someone else's specs and typed them in. In fact, for that specific definition of "code monkey" ... I have never ever once met ANYBODY who did that.
Other than one project I knew which tried to outsource specs to people who just implemented them, I've never known anybody to every use that kind of programmer. And in that one project I saw where they tried to outsource the implementation of the spec, people spent so much damned time chasing them and getting them to fix it, it likely would have been cheaper to just have the people who wrote the spec write the code in the first place.
For some of us, code monkey is more of a term of endearment than an indication someone is a coder who gets given a complete spec and told to make it go.
And once again Nerval's Lobster posts a story which links to a dice.com story.
Seriously, not one story ever accepted from Nerval's Lobster doesn't point to dice.com, which pretty much means he's a paid staffer whose stories get promoted to click-whore for dice.com.
Honestly, make him an editor and give us a box to block stories from him.
But stop pretending he's getting accepted because of any other reason than shilling for dice.