I don't trust Snopes to debunk anything, but it's not for any political reason whatsoever. They have an article about Marilyn Monroe having six toes. To be clear, I think the whole idea is silly and I don't think (or particularly care whether) she did. However, they quote as evidence:
There is no record of Marilyn's having had an operation at that point in her life, and no contemporary references to anyone's noticing her walking with a bandaged foot or a limp for a period of time. (One doesn't simply get up and start trotting around after having a toe removed — the missing digit affects one's balance, and it takes some time to adjust to the change and "relearn" how to walk.)
My wife is a podiatrist. I asked her about this reasoning and she said it's BS. She amputates toes from time to time as part of her practice and says that patients usually bounce back and are walking perfectly fine in no time, even when she has to remove the big toe. Lopping off an extra little vestigial toe wouldn't have any noticeable effect once the wound healed, and the patient certainly wouldn't have to '"relearn" how to walk'. I wrote to Snopes with that information and got back a response basically blowing me off and arguing that the sixth toe story is a fake and my facts are wrong because "there should be no reason why a person with a painfully infected toe
would walk with a limp. But they do.". Yeah, I get that. I never said otherwise. But I do claim that this one piece of evidence is completely wrong, does not accurately contribute to their conclusion (which I agree with), and I have a subject matter expert's testimony to that effect.
Since then, I've been a bit loathe to trust Snopes about anything. I mean, they're probably right about most things, but I have firsthand experience with them completely ignoring evidence that doesn't fit their narrative. I haven't paid enough attention to their articles to know what their political slant is, but the point is moot for me already anyway.
I love IRC. Have you used Slack, though? Think about why the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was popular: it was friendly and non-threatening. Same with Slack, really: even if it functions like IRC, it looks absolutely nothing like your favorite IRC client. Anyone in the company can start using it with basically zero training. It's pretty, brightly colored, approachable, and discoverable. HipChat could have won that space but their UI felt like they wrapped IRC in Java and called it a day.
Slack's made a killing off an IRC-alike that non-technical people genuinely like using. Microsoft seems corporately unable to improve upon the things that made Slack take over businesses by storm, but there's no technological reason they couldn't do it. There's a lot of room in this space for someone willing to put a premium on user experience.
I write web services for remote clients to send information to. 50 msec includes the time to establish a TCP connection to the nginx frontend (written in C!), then to run a little bit of Python code to massage the request and either store it in a database (probably written in C, or maybe Java) or fetch data from one, then to return the results to the remote client. At a previous employer, my code did that about 80,000 times per second, averaged 24/7. At the shop before that, we load tested to 500,000 requests per second but it was only for a few minutes sustained at a time.
When was the last time you personally wrote code to handle 500Kops? Did you know that those durn whippersnappers at Google runs a big chunk of their stack on Python and that they'd laugh at our tiny it doesn't matter to the end user. If we could have reduced a 50ms transaction to 10ms by altering the speed of the light signals carrying our requests, we probably would have. But since we live in a universe with physics, the best we could possible hope for was to reduce the time spent in application code to 0.000ms and thereby drop the entire transaction time to 49ms.
Or, you know. You could actually learn how to write good code at the most powerful level. That's a radical thought.
I did, and that's why I'm using Python. I'm capable of writing web services in C, but who the hell's got time for that craziness? Also consider Amdahl's Law: in most of stuff I write, the "running code to process data" bit is a teensy portion of wall clock time. Much more is spent in socket handshaking or waiting for database queries to finish. Out of a 50ms request lifecycle, perhaps 1ms is spent inside a box that I have complete control of. Even if I rewrote it in assembler (C is for high-level pansies) to be 1000x faster, the request would still take 49.001ms. An assload of work porting security-sensitive code into an untyped languages so that the end result can be 2% faster? Yeah, no. My boss would fire me with a quickness if I proposed that.
I'd be much more likely to rewrite performance-critical code in Go or Rust. They're as fast as C but without the death of a thousand cuts like gotofail waiting to ruin your careful planning. Life's too short to waste it hacking in languages that hate you and make you want to look incompetent.
It doesn't cost $800 to manufacture an iPhone. More like $100. In the US it would maybe be $150. It is Apples greed that is the blame.
There are always lines around the block on launch day. People cheerfully buy tens of millions of each iPhone. If people are willing to pay that price without a gun to their head, and there are alternatives that they could buy instead but they choose to buy iPhones anyway, how do you justify describing it as greed?
I switched off Comcast a few months ago to a regional ISP that's deploying fiber-to-the-premises all over the place. Their current offering in my neighborhood is FTTN, which is basically fiber to a box near my house, then DSL from that box to my living room. I have two DSL lines bonded for a 50Mbps down, ~8Mbps up connection (that is, faster than Comcast in uploads) for about a third what I was paying Comcast. That's to tide us over until the ISP gets around to replacing that last mile, which they've actually been doing and not continually deferring to some distant future.
Don't cry for me and my DSL connection. Our download speed is theoretically slower, but in practice it's just as fast, utterly uncapped, and far cheaper. I somehow think we'll scrape by.
Also, as a server admin, having IPv6 open increases your traffic, not because more people are visiting but because a lot of bot nets are scanning IPv6 looking for vulnerabilities.
I'm very skeptical of this. What's the Venn diagram of "people who know what IPv6 is" and "people who think you can scan IPv6 space before the heat death of the universe"?
I answered one of those calls that was spoofing an area code where I still have lots of friends. When I realized what it was about, I started asking questions about how it worked, what they did, etc. The guy said they had arrangements with Google to promote pages and it was guaranteed.
He asked what kind of business I have. "Oh, I work for Google. By the way, we both know this is bullshit, right?" "Oh, no no no sir! It is not bullshit! It is real!" "Well, thanks for all your company information. I'll give it to my boss this morning and you'll be out of work." "Oh, no no no! There is no need to be doing that!" You could hear his butt pucker from over the phone.
I don't work for Google, but he didn't either so I don't feel bad.
This can be ended quite easily, blacklist numbers that receive a large ratio of complaints to calls.
First, numbers are trivially spoofed so that may not help. Second, that requires a certain percentage of users to still receive (and spam-flag) those calls. No thanks.
Wow this plan didn't take me 30 days to come up with, it took me 30 seconds.
If you read the article (yeah, I know), table 2 shows "Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2Q16". Last year in that quarter, Blackberry delivered 1.15M phones to end users. Same quarter this year, they delivered 400K.
Blackberry's market share has gone down enormously since the switch, but I don't know if that's causal or coincidental. Maybe Blackberry fans are allergic to Android and refuse to switch, or maybe they love it but their sales were trending down faster than the switch could bring them back up.
There's no decent voicemail search: "which one of these 10,000 voice messages had that information I needed?"
It's a non-starter for the hearing impaired, although the reverse text-to-speech is readily available for visually impaired people who want to hear their messages.
It's a death knell for anyone with the slightest tinge of ADHD, like most engineers (remember: hyperfocus on interesting tasks is the payoff for being unable to pay attention in long meetings).
What you have hear is an audio learner - which it is 100% perfectly OK to be! - having no empathy for others with different learning and communication styles. Again, it's far easier to convert text to speech for those who need it than speech to text for the rest of us.
Because sometimes "buying milk" is pillow talk between spouses and that's no one's damn business except for me and my wife. There's not a convenient "keep this private" vs "OH SURE GO AHEAD AND READ THIS ONE" toggle, so I opt for keeping all my interactions private.
I value messaging privacy for the same reason I have a door on my bathroom. I'm not doing anything illegal in either case, but damned if I want someone observing me while I use them.
I like my Apple Watch (the Sport - read "inexpensive" - model). I like having notifications on my wrist, because it's a lot less disruptive to make a quick glance at my arm than to pull out my phone. Don't underestimate the convenience of seeing your next scheduled appointment at a glance! I also really enjoy the activity tracking. I used to have a Jawbone UP but I had to send it back several times for repairs; it wasn't up to the rigors of my Desktop Warrior lifestyle. My watch (plus a couple of third-party apps) is far more useful for fitness stuff than the UP ever was.
watchOS 2 went a long way toward converting the watch from a fun gadget into something genuinely useful, and by all accounts watchOS 3 sounds like a huge step forward. If I lost my phone, I'd hightail it to the store to pick up another one ASAP. It's where I keep my schedule, to-do list, contacts, and other stuff that makes day-to-day life as easy as possible. If I lost my watch, I'd meander back to the store when I had some free time. I'd be bummed and would keep glancing at my naked wrist out of habit, but I'd survive. I would eventually replace it, though. While I could certainly live without it, I like having one and wouldn't voluntarily go without.
But it wasn't one guy. It was a whole group of his classmates, and that's what made it so weird. I could totally understand if a single person thought I looked a bit like someone else, but apparently I confused lots of his friends.
When I was in my 20s, I was in a fast food restaurant across town from my house. Some guys started calling out a name I forget. Let's say, Mike. I eventually started looking to see who they were calling to, and was very surprised to find out it was me. The conversation from there was very surreal.
Me: Uh, sorry. I'm not Mike.
Them: LOL. What's up, man! We haven't seen you in ages.
Me: I don't think I know you.
Them: LOL. Seriously, where've you been?
Me: Uh, no, really, I don't know you. Who's Mike?
One of them, as confused as me: What are you talking about?
Me: I'm not Mike.
The guy: You're serious?
I pull out my driver's license, cover up most of it with my thumb, and show him my name. The guy mildly freaks out.
Guy: Whoa, this isn't Mike!
They all rush over to look, then stare at me like they're seeing a ghost.
Guy: We've gone to school with Mike since elementary. I swear to God you look like him. Do you have a twin?
It turns out their buddy was a year or two younger or older than me. I don't have a twin - I'm absolutely certain about that - but there's someone out there approximately my age that looks similar enough to me that his childhood friends couldn't tell the difference between us.
I'm a Gen-X dad to several Millenial kids. I've taught mine what "the cloud" is. Have you explained that to anyone? If not, you get to shoulder part of the blame for them not knowing.
it's all in the cloud now and these "big data" NoSQL solutions are failsafe
My company uses lots of big data tools, because we have business processes like "run a few thousand separate machine learning jobs on a database with a few dozen TB of data". I promise you we have backups.
Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".
Or even invert that: save copies locally and then upload them when they're ready. Know how long it'd take me to get my blog back online if a provider nuked it? As long as it takes rsync to finish copying the files.
First, I'd never trust a hosting provider not to delete everything I've written for some unknown reason. Second, the writing/editing apps on my laptop are way better than any browser editor I've ever used. I'd loathe creating anything substantial directly on a remote server.
I am not a Hillary fan and don't plan to vote for her. I'm saying this from a "these both suck, that's really the best you've got?" position: you're deluding yourself if you think she's "owned" more than Trump.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife is a podiatrist. I asked her about this reasoning and she said it's BS. She amputates toes from time to time as part of her practice and says that patients usually bounce back and are walking perfectly fine in no time, even when she has to remove the big toe. Lopping off an extra little vestigial toe wouldn't have any noticeable effect once the wound healed, and the patient certainly wouldn't have to '"relearn" how to walk'. I wrote to Snopes with that information and got back a response basically blowing me off and arguing that the sixth toe story is a fake and my facts are wrong because "there should be no reason why a person with a painfully infected toe would walk with a limp. But they do.". Yeah, I get that. I never said otherwise. But I do claim that this one piece of evidence is completely wrong, does not accurately contribute to their conclusion (which I agree with), and I have a subject matter expert's testimony to that effect.
Since then, I've been a bit loathe to trust Snopes about anything. I mean, they're probably right about most things, but I have firsthand experience with them completely ignoring evidence that doesn't fit their narrative. I haven't paid enough attention to their articles to know what their political slant is, but the point is moot for me already anyway.
I love IRC. Have you used Slack, though? Think about why the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was popular: it was friendly and non-threatening. Same with Slack, really: even if it functions like IRC, it looks absolutely nothing like your favorite IRC client. Anyone in the company can start using it with basically zero training. It's pretty, brightly colored, approachable, and discoverable. HipChat could have won that space but their UI felt like they wrapped IRC in Java and called it a day.
Slack's made a killing off an IRC-alike that non-technical people genuinely like using. Microsoft seems corporately unable to improve upon the things that made Slack take over businesses by storm, but there's no technological reason they couldn't do it. There's a lot of room in this space for someone willing to put a premium on user experience.
I write web services for remote clients to send information to. 50 msec includes the time to establish a TCP connection to the nginx frontend (written in C!), then to run a little bit of Python code to massage the request and either store it in a database (probably written in C, or maybe Java) or fetch data from one, then to return the results to the remote client. At a previous employer, my code did that about 80,000 times per second, averaged 24/7. At the shop before that, we load tested to 500,000 requests per second but it was only for a few minutes sustained at a time.
When was the last time you personally wrote code to handle 500Kops? Did you know that those durn whippersnappers at Google runs a big chunk of their stack on Python and that they'd laugh at our tiny it doesn't matter to the end user. If we could have reduced a 50ms transaction to 10ms by altering the speed of the light signals carrying our requests, we probably would have. But since we live in a universe with physics, the best we could possible hope for was to reduce the time spent in application code to 0.000ms and thereby drop the entire transaction time to 49ms.
Or, you know. You could actually learn how to write good code at the most powerful level. That's a radical thought.
I did, and that's why I'm using Python. I'm capable of writing web services in C, but who the hell's got time for that craziness? Also consider Amdahl's Law: in most of stuff I write, the "running code to process data" bit is a teensy portion of wall clock time. Much more is spent in socket handshaking or waiting for database queries to finish. Out of a 50ms request lifecycle, perhaps 1ms is spent inside a box that I have complete control of. Even if I rewrote it in assembler (C is for high-level pansies) to be 1000x faster, the request would still take 49.001ms. An assload of work porting security-sensitive code into an untyped languages so that the end result can be 2% faster? Yeah, no. My boss would fire me with a quickness if I proposed that.
I'd be much more likely to rewrite performance-critical code in Go or Rust. They're as fast as C but without the death of a thousand cuts like gotofail waiting to ruin your careful planning. Life's too short to waste it hacking in languages that hate you and make you want to look incompetent.
It doesn't cost $800 to manufacture an iPhone. More like $100. In the US it would maybe be $150. It is Apples greed that is the blame.
There are always lines around the block on launch day. People cheerfully buy tens of millions of each iPhone. If people are willing to pay that price without a gun to their head, and there are alternatives that they could buy instead but they choose to buy iPhones anyway, how do you justify describing it as greed?
I switched off Comcast a few months ago to a regional ISP that's deploying fiber-to-the-premises all over the place. Their current offering in my neighborhood is FTTN, which is basically fiber to a box near my house, then DSL from that box to my living room. I have two DSL lines bonded for a 50Mbps down, ~8Mbps up connection (that is, faster than Comcast in uploads) for about a third what I was paying Comcast. That's to tide us over until the ISP gets around to replacing that last mile, which they've actually been doing and not continually deferring to some distant future.
Don't cry for me and my DSL connection. Our download speed is theoretically slower, but in practice it's just as fast, utterly uncapped, and far cheaper. I somehow think we'll scrape by.
Also, as a server admin, having IPv6 open increases your traffic, not because more people are visiting but because a lot of bot nets are scanning IPv6 looking for vulnerabilities.
I'm very skeptical of this. What's the Venn diagram of "people who know what IPv6 is" and "people who think you can scan IPv6 space before the heat death of the universe"?
I answered one of those calls that was spoofing an area code where I still have lots of friends. When I realized what it was about, I started asking questions about how it worked, what they did, etc. The guy said they had arrangements with Google to promote pages and it was guaranteed.
He asked what kind of business I have. "Oh, I work for Google. By the way, we both know this is bullshit, right?" "Oh, no no no sir! It is not bullshit! It is real!" "Well, thanks for all your company information. I'll give it to my boss this morning and you'll be out of work." "Oh, no no no! There is no need to be doing that!" You could hear his butt pucker from over the phone.
I don't work for Google, but he didn't either so I don't feel bad.
Here, let's get the resistance out of the way:
"But, but, if we can't have NAT then we'll be h4xx0r3d! And I can't remember all those hex digits LOL."
If you have a Mac, Paw is the best I've found for that.
Curse you, Google, for EOLing that thing I literally just learned of in its EOL announcement!
This can be ended quite easily, blacklist numbers that receive a large ratio of complaints to calls.
First, numbers are trivially spoofed so that may not help. Second, that requires a certain percentage of users to still receive (and spam-flag) those calls. No thanks.
Wow this plan didn't take me 30 days to come up with, it took me 30 seconds.
Like most such plans forged in a moment...
Blackberry's market share has gone down enormously since the switch, but I don't know if that's causal or coincidental. Maybe Blackberry fans are allergic to Android and refuse to switch, or maybe they love it but their sales were trending down faster than the switch could bring them back up.
There's no decent voicemail search: "which one of these 10,000 voice messages had that information I needed?"
It's a non-starter for the hearing impaired, although the reverse text-to-speech is readily available for visually impaired people who want to hear their messages.
It's a death knell for anyone with the slightest tinge of ADHD, like most engineers (remember: hyperfocus on interesting tasks is the payoff for being unable to pay attention in long meetings).
What you have hear is an audio learner - which it is 100% perfectly OK to be! - having no empathy for others with different learning and communication styles. Again, it's far easier to convert text to speech for those who need it than speech to text for the rest of us.
Because sometimes "buying milk" is pillow talk between spouses and that's no one's damn business except for me and my wife. There's not a convenient "keep this private" vs "OH SURE GO AHEAD AND READ THIS ONE" toggle, so I opt for keeping all my interactions private.
I value messaging privacy for the same reason I have a door on my bathroom. I'm not doing anything illegal in either case, but damned if I want someone observing me while I use them.
I like my Apple Watch (the Sport - read "inexpensive" - model). I like having notifications on my wrist, because it's a lot less disruptive to make a quick glance at my arm than to pull out my phone. Don't underestimate the convenience of seeing your next scheduled appointment at a glance! I also really enjoy the activity tracking. I used to have a Jawbone UP but I had to send it back several times for repairs; it wasn't up to the rigors of my Desktop Warrior lifestyle. My watch (plus a couple of third-party apps) is far more useful for fitness stuff than the UP ever was.
watchOS 2 went a long way toward converting the watch from a fun gadget into something genuinely useful, and by all accounts watchOS 3 sounds like a huge step forward. If I lost my phone, I'd hightail it to the store to pick up another one ASAP. It's where I keep my schedule, to-do list, contacts, and other stuff that makes day-to-day life as easy as possible. If I lost my watch, I'd meander back to the store when I had some free time. I'd be bummed and would keep glancing at my naked wrist out of habit, but I'd survive. I would eventually replace it, though. While I could certainly live without it, I like having one and wouldn't voluntarily go without.
But it wasn't one guy. It was a whole group of his classmates, and that's what made it so weird. I could totally understand if a single person thought I looked a bit like someone else, but apparently I confused lots of his friends.
Uh, what city was that?
When I was in my 20s, I was in a fast food restaurant across town from my house. Some guys started calling out a name I forget. Let's say, Mike. I eventually started looking to see who they were calling to, and was very surprised to find out it was me. The conversation from there was very surreal.
Me: Uh, sorry. I'm not Mike.
Them: LOL. What's up, man! We haven't seen you in ages.
Me: I don't think I know you.
Them: LOL. Seriously, where've you been?
Me: Uh, no, really, I don't know you. Who's Mike?
One of them, as confused as me: What are you talking about?
Me: I'm not Mike.
The guy: You're serious?
I pull out my driver's license, cover up most of it with my thumb, and show him my name. The guy mildly freaks out.
Guy: Whoa, this isn't Mike!
They all rush over to look, then stare at me like they're seeing a ghost.
Guy: We've gone to school with Mike since elementary. I swear to God you look like him. Do you have a twin?
It turns out their buddy was a year or two younger or older than me. I don't have a twin - I'm absolutely certain about that - but there's someone out there approximately my age that looks similar enough to me that his childhood friends couldn't tell the difference between us.
He sounds Millenial.
I'm a Gen-X dad to several Millenial kids. I've taught mine what "the cloud" is. Have you explained that to anyone? If not, you get to shoulder part of the blame for them not knowing.
it's all in the cloud now and these "big data" NoSQL solutions are failsafe
My company uses lots of big data tools, because we have business processes like "run a few thousand separate machine learning jobs on a database with a few dozen TB of data". I promise you we have backups.
Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".
Or even invert that: save copies locally and then upload them when they're ready. Know how long it'd take me to get my blog back online if a provider nuked it? As long as it takes rsync to finish copying the files.
First, I'd never trust a hosting provider not to delete everything I've written for some unknown reason. Second, the writing/editing apps on my laptop are way better than any browser editor I've ever used. I'd loathe creating anything substantial directly on a remote server.
As opposed to Trump, who owes $100M to a German bank fighting with US regulators.
I am not a Hillary fan and don't plan to vote for her. I'm saying this from a "these both suck, that's really the best you've got?" position: you're deluding yourself if you think she's "owned" more than Trump.
Did you imagine that I'd said otherwise?
If I had to use Windows at work, I'd probably be spending lots of time on Slashdot too.