The only, I mean *only* reason I put up with Windows is to run Lightroom and the Adobe CS suite. I started using Photoshop on a Mac (G4), switched to Windows because Apple and Adobe were feuding and I got tired of paying a premium for what was basically a generic Intel box.
But Microsoft, not being content to leave a good thing alone when the got they bugs out of Win7 and concentrate on incremental improvements, royally screwed Windows as an OS, partially recovered from that (Win10, if it lives up to the hype) and then appears to be deliberately screwing the pooch with OS rental.
The small glimmer of hope is that incremental pricing means that they could incrementally maintain the OS, breaking the cycle of some new potentially disastrous complete rewrite every 2-3 years. In fact, this gives Windows an opportunity to do continuous development on the OS like their competitors currently do.
But I don't have any faith at all that Microsoft will get this right. It'll just be another revenue stream with no user benefit whatsoever.
So... It looks like Windows is becoming unviable, Macs are too expensive and I dislike being associated with the glassy-eyed user base, and the Adobe tools don't work on any other platform. (Don't even bring up Carousel. It's a toy, for dressing up party photos taken with the ipad.)
In the old days I really tried to switch to Gimp, and it just wasn't all there at the time. But some googling this morning reveals a variety of photographic tools for Linux, including what looks like a fairly complete Lightroom works-alike. If Adobe won't port to Linux, perhaps it's time to look at other tools. I guess you could call this collateral damage.
The expectation is raised that the job be fully documented
Sysadmin here.
Back atcha.
This should be the case anyway.
At least the H1Bs will fucking follow the instructions, unlike rockstar brogrammers.
Routine stuff should be. If it isn't, we've failed in our jobs. Moreover, we collect lore as any employee does in a complex environment. Trivially, if you've run into a sticky problem six months ago, you'll need to review how you fixed it when it happens again this morning. Documentation is key.
I'm talking about stuff that requires some diagnostic skill to deduce, and the ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances.
As a sysadmin, you *know* the difference between sysadmins and operators, and why we have both. And why an operator can not do a sysadmin's job. But companies think they can hire procedure monkeys and put them in senior sysadmin positions -- and the first time they run into something new, they're lost. This is the root problem. When it happens, the excuse is invariably that the outgoing admins did not document their work well enough. This completely ignores the key bit of information that this problem had never happened beforeorthis requirement has never come up before. There is no procedure to cover it, and you'll have to fall back on diagnostic expertise, the ability to put together a plan of attack, devise tests, understand the results, and come to a conclusion. Or in the case of a new requirement, accurately pull together the requirements, devise a plan of attack, learn whatever new skills are required, and implement the plan. And this is precisely where things fall apart.
There will always be cowboy admins, and I detest and avoid them as much as I suspect you do. But to expect the job we do to be so well documented that a taxi driver can step in and do it adequately for fifty pasie a day is unreasonable. That's not documentation, that's learning and experience. And you can't train a green recruit to be an experienced admin in a couple of weeks. Or by handing them a shelf of paper and saying "follow these, good luck".
That's not what it was supposed to be originally. When American companies found out they had a similar control over H1-B employees that they have over "undocumented workers", IE, they're frightened, willing to work long hours for low wages, and are unlikely to cause trouble, then the idea just sold itself.
Yep. The obvious "fix" that nobody seems to be taking very seriously yet is making it much more difficult to get permission to hire an H1-B worker.
Corporations are ALWAYS going to push for a plentiful supply of these as a cost savings measure, but it's ultimately the government who issues them. It's about time they start putting pressure on companies to PROVE they're unable to hire from the talent pool of American citizens before qualifying to go the H1-B route.
I'd argue that if they're firing locals to replace them with H1-B employees, they've already lost that argument.
> This is all done under the supposed auspices of saying there aren't enough "qualified" workers in the US. "Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want".
Yes. If you've worked in a company that gradually fired locals to replace them with H1-B employees, you'll see how capable the replacements actually are -- no communication skills, no diagnostic skills, just a frightened willingness to work long hours. And oddly enough, when bad things happen, the company will just accept it if it can be shown that the employee was following a process.
Ostensibly, one of the qualifications that US workers supposedly don't have is following process. The expectation is raised that the job be fully documented -- that everything that happens in the job have a procedure to carry the employee through, and then the employees need only follow the procedure for a given issue. If you've worked in IT, you know how little of the job falls in that category. And so, much of the process becomes "raise a ticket with the vendor", and then when they find out that the vendor is only responsible for what the vendor sells, not how it's used, things get really interesting.
It's the worst of false economics. The company can show an immediate reduction in direct labor costs, but start to lose agility, robustness and reliability almost immediately.
Obvisouly a while but its not out of the question. Sony pissed off North Korea several months ago when they announced The Interview. If it takes a week to download ~100TB at ~1Gbps then a couple weeks/months is all they need for all that data.
Agreed, but, isn't someone monitoring internet usage? 100 TB being downloaded even in a week to 10 days is an increase of multiple terabytes a day over whatever they normally use. One would think that would cause a spike on a graph somewhere, that someone ought to have investigated.
I've been hosting websites for years, and the only time I was ever compromised (one server turned into a spam mail server -- how embarrassing) I caught it almost immediately by a sudden spike in the network traffic.
As someone else said, since Sony has been compromised before, it just seems amazing that there wasn't some higher level of scrutiny.
It always appeared to me that "synch" in the case of an ipod and itunes isn't really a synch, it's a dump (overwrite) from itunes to the ipod. I never assumed that anything I had on the ipod that was not in my itunes account would exist after a "synch". I don't think this is diabolical, just the way the itunes/ipod interface works. After all, the paradigm assumes that the only information on the ipod is from itunes.
Now that I think about it, ipods that have a camera would have to truly synch in some fashion, at least for photos. But for music? If you're putting non-itunes music on an ipod, you have to (in my opinion) assume issues like TFA describes. If you don't like this, choose another device, or learn to work around the issue. One possible workaround is to get in the habit of re-downloading your non-itunes music after every itunes sync.
Most phones will do what the ipod does, and non-Apple phones even have removable storage (micro-SD) up to 128 Gbyte these days. I could argue that ipods are redundant.
60 minutes was pushing sensationalism, because it sells advertising, as they always do. There's no need to imagine any more insidious motives than that.
Ok. So it's not just that water has been boiled off during the star's hot stage, it's that low mass stars go through multiple stages, none of which are conducive to life, for different reasons. Thanks, I get it.
So, there's not just a goldilocks zone, there are goldilocks stars. Too small is not good, and too big is probably not good for other reasons.
It seems to me this is only true when connected to the grid with no storage. If you're running off-grid and storing electricity in batteries to use later, you want to position your panels for maximum output. (This is how mine is configured. Not grid connected, with marine batteries storing power during peak output, and panels facing south.)
But I would opine that any system, even grid connected, that didn't allow for solar panels to be placed for maximum solar exposure is not designed properly. If this requires some method of storage during peak solar output, well, we knew that would be an issue sooner or later. Renewables tend to fluctuate, and a practical means to smooth out those fluctuations must be engineered.
Caveat, I'm not an astrophysicist or anyone who would know anything about this. I couldn't even play one on TV. However:
> some planets close to low-mass stars likely had their water and atmospheres burned away when they were still forming because they were exposed to high temperatures from their parent stars.
Ok, I understand that, but isn't it possible for an ice bearing comet (or several) to impact the planet at some later time when the sun was cooler? Surely those planetary systems have their own equivalent of oort clouds?
Still having faith in the constitution? That same one that gets raped on a daily basis? I think you need a new strategy.
The constitution? Actually, yes.
The way it's currently being followed? Not so much.
The constitution isn't going to climb out from under that bullet proof glass in Washington and right wrongs like Batman. It takes diligence and sometimes sacrifice on the behalf of citizens to keep the country in line with the principles on which it was founded. We get the government we deserve, through out inaction, or through voting for free stuff rather than principles.
That was Arthur Carlson, the station manager, who had the idea of throwing Thanksgiving turkeys out of a helicopter on unsuspecting shoppers, giving us the famous line: "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly". Les was covering it live. "Oh my God they're dropping like bombs! One just went through a windshield! Oh the humanity!"
> But it doesn't end here: diesel at the pump should be more expensive than gas. Only a small tax break makes it cheaper.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious -- why should diesel be more expensive? It's my understanding that diesel is a less refined form of petroleum -- that it takes less work to turn oil into diesel than it does to turn oil into gas. So assuming that the government hasn't "picked the winner" through taxation, diesel should be cheaper. Could it be that the government is taxing diesel further upstream, and then rebating part of that tax at the pump? (They do that sort of thing all the time in the US.)
Diesel is more fuel efficient than gasoline. Hence, banning diesel will force people to buy more electric and hybrid cars.
Hm? I would have thought, Hence, banning diesel will force people to buy gasoline cars. Why would banning diesel force people to buy electric (very limited range) and hybrid (additional cost) when gasoline cars are more plentiful, have a significantly greater range, and are cheaper?
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The only, I mean *only* reason I put up with Windows is to run Lightroom and the Adobe CS suite. I started using Photoshop on a Mac (G4), switched to Windows because Apple and Adobe were feuding and I got tired of paying a premium for what was basically a generic Intel box.
But Microsoft, not being content to leave a good thing alone when the got they bugs out of Win7 and concentrate on incremental improvements, royally screwed Windows as an OS, partially recovered from that (Win10, if it lives up to the hype) and then appears to be deliberately screwing the pooch with OS rental.
The small glimmer of hope is that incremental pricing means that they could incrementally maintain the OS, breaking the cycle of some new potentially disastrous complete rewrite every 2-3 years. In fact, this gives Windows an opportunity to do continuous development on the OS like their competitors currently do.
But I don't have any faith at all that Microsoft will get this right. It'll just be another revenue stream with no user benefit whatsoever.
So... It looks like Windows is becoming unviable, Macs are too expensive and I dislike being associated with the glassy-eyed user base, and the Adobe tools don't work on any other platform. (Don't even bring up Carousel. It's a toy, for dressing up party photos taken with the ipad.)
In the old days I really tried to switch to Gimp, and it just wasn't all there at the time. But some googling this morning reveals a variety of photographic tools for Linux, including what looks like a fairly complete Lightroom works-alike. If Adobe won't port to Linux, perhaps it's time to look at other tools. I guess you could call this collateral damage.
Sorry, Adobe.
I'm just about done with Windows anyway.
The expectation is raised that the job be fully documented
Sysadmin here.
Back atcha.
This should be the case anyway.
At least the H1Bs will fucking follow the instructions, unlike rockstar brogrammers.
Routine stuff should be. If it isn't, we've failed in our jobs. Moreover, we collect lore as any employee does in a complex environment. Trivially, if you've run into a sticky problem six months ago, you'll need to review how you fixed it when it happens again this morning. Documentation is key.
I'm talking about stuff that requires some diagnostic skill to deduce, and the ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances.
As a sysadmin, you *know* the difference between sysadmins and operators, and why we have both. And why an operator can not do a sysadmin's job. But companies think they can hire procedure monkeys and put them in senior sysadmin positions -- and the first time they run into something new, they're lost. This is the root problem. When it happens, the excuse is invariably that the outgoing admins did not document their work well enough. This completely ignores the key bit of information that this problem had never happened before or this requirement has never come up before. There is no procedure to cover it, and you'll have to fall back on diagnostic expertise, the ability to put together a plan of attack, devise tests, understand the results, and come to a conclusion. Or in the case of a new requirement, accurately pull together the requirements, devise a plan of attack, learn whatever new skills are required, and implement the plan. And this is precisely where things fall apart.
There will always be cowboy admins, and I detest and avoid them as much as I suspect you do. But to expect the job we do to be so well documented that a taxi driver can step in and do it adequately for fifty pasie a day is unreasonable. That's not documentation, that's learning and experience. And you can't train a green recruit to be an experienced admin in a couple of weeks. Or by handing them a shelf of paper and saying "follow these, good luck".
That's not what it was supposed to be originally. When American companies found out they had a similar control over H1-B employees that they have over "undocumented workers", IE, they're frightened, willing to work long hours for low wages, and are unlikely to cause trouble, then the idea just sold itself.
Yep. The obvious "fix" that nobody seems to be taking very seriously yet is making it much more difficult to get permission to hire an H1-B worker.
Corporations are ALWAYS going to push for a plentiful supply of these as a cost savings measure, but it's ultimately the government who issues them. It's about time they start putting pressure on companies to PROVE they're unable to hire from the talent pool of American citizens before qualifying to go the H1-B route.
I'd argue that if they're firing locals to replace them with H1-B employees, they've already lost that argument.
> This is all done under the supposed auspices of saying there aren't enough "qualified" workers in the US. "Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want".
Yes. If you've worked in a company that gradually fired locals to replace them with H1-B employees, you'll see how capable the replacements actually are -- no communication skills, no diagnostic skills, just a frightened willingness to work long hours. And oddly enough, when bad things happen, the company will just accept it if it can be shown that the employee was following a process.
Ostensibly, one of the qualifications that US workers supposedly don't have is following process. The expectation is raised that the job be fully documented -- that everything that happens in the job have a procedure to carry the employee through, and then the employees need only follow the procedure for a given issue. If you've worked in IT, you know how little of the job falls in that category. And so, much of the process becomes "raise a ticket with the vendor", and then when they find out that the vendor is only responsible for what the vendor sells, not how it's used, things get really interesting.
It's the worst of false economics. The company can show an immediate reduction in direct labor costs, but start to lose agility, robustness and reliability almost immediately.
Electric companies frightened!
Yeah. No. Wait, what?
Obvisouly a while but its not out of the question. Sony pissed off North Korea several months ago when they announced The Interview. If it takes a week to download ~100TB at ~1Gbps then a couple weeks/months is all they need for all that data.
Agreed, but, isn't someone monitoring internet usage? 100 TB being downloaded even in a week to 10 days is an increase of multiple terabytes a day over whatever they normally use. One would think that would cause a spike on a graph somewhere, that someone ought to have investigated.
I've been hosting websites for years, and the only time I was ever compromised (one server turned into a spam mail server -- how embarrassing) I caught it almost immediately by a sudden spike in the network traffic.
As someone else said, since Sony has been compromised before, it just seems amazing that there wasn't some higher level of scrutiny.
It always appeared to me that "synch" in the case of an ipod and itunes isn't really a synch, it's a dump (overwrite) from itunes to the ipod. I never assumed that anything I had on the ipod that was not in my itunes account would exist after a "synch". I don't think this is diabolical, just the way the itunes/ipod interface works. After all, the paradigm assumes that the only information on the ipod is from itunes.
Now that I think about it, ipods that have a camera would have to truly synch in some fashion, at least for photos. But for music? If you're putting non-itunes music on an ipod, you have to (in my opinion) assume issues like TFA describes. If you don't like this, choose another device, or learn to work around the issue. One possible workaround is to get in the habit of re-downloading your non-itunes music after every itunes sync.
Most phones will do what the ipod does, and non-Apple phones even have removable storage (micro-SD) up to 128 Gbyte these days. I could argue that ipods are redundant.
But I kept getting 1/2 clip art of a girl holding a pizza, and 1/2 copyright notice.
60 minutes was pushing sensationalism, because it sells advertising, as they always do. There's no need to imagine any more insidious motives than that.
Ok. So it's not just that water has been boiled off during the star's hot stage, it's that low mass stars go through multiple stages, none of which are conducive to life, for different reasons. Thanks, I get it.
So, there's not just a goldilocks zone, there are goldilocks stars. Too small is not good, and too big is probably not good for other reasons.
It seems to me this is only true when connected to the grid with no storage. If you're running off-grid and storing electricity in batteries to use later, you want to position your panels for maximum output. (This is how mine is configured. Not grid connected, with marine batteries storing power during peak output, and panels facing south.)
But I would opine that any system, even grid connected, that didn't allow for solar panels to be placed for maximum solar exposure is not designed properly. If this requires some method of storage during peak solar output, well, we knew that would be an issue sooner or later. Renewables tend to fluctuate, and a practical means to smooth out those fluctuations must be engineered.
If you have batteries to accumulate power to be used during peak times, you absolutely want your panels pointed where they'd get most of the sun.
Caveat, I'm not an astrophysicist or anyone who would know anything about this. I couldn't even play one on TV. However:
> some planets close to low-mass stars likely had their water and atmospheres burned away when they were still forming because they were exposed to high temperatures from their parent stars.
Ok, I understand that, but isn't it possible for an ice bearing comet (or several) to impact the planet at some later time when the sun was cooler? Surely those planetary systems have their own equivalent of oort clouds?
I'd argue that it's not a matter of interpretation, it's a matter of choosing not to follow it.
I'm watching this carefully, because the hardware vendors and carriers who actively resist are going to be the ones I do business with.
Still having faith in the constitution? That same one that gets raped on a daily basis? I think you need a new strategy.
The constitution? Actually, yes.
The way it's currently being followed? Not so much.
The constitution isn't going to climb out from under that bullet proof glass in Washington and right wrongs like Batman. It takes diligence and sometimes sacrifice on the behalf of citizens to keep the country in line with the principles on which it was founded. We get the government we deserve, through out inaction, or through voting for free stuff rather than principles.
LAIR!!!
We dont make cars in america no more! haha
Ok, minus the hyperbole, you may have a point in there somewhere, but I'm pretty sure that Teslas, at least, are made in Fremont, California.
That was Arthur Carlson, the station manager, who had the idea of throwing Thanksgiving turkeys out of a helicopter on unsuspecting shoppers, giving us the famous line: "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly". Les was covering it live. "Oh my God they're dropping like bombs! One just went through a windshield! Oh the humanity!"
One of my favorite shows, along with Night Court.
> But it doesn't end here: diesel at the pump should be more expensive than gas. Only a small tax break makes it cheaper.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious -- why should diesel be more expensive? It's my understanding that diesel is a less refined form of petroleum -- that it takes less work to turn oil into diesel than it does to turn oil into gas. So assuming that the government hasn't "picked the winner" through taxation, diesel should be cheaper. Could it be that the government is taxing diesel further upstream, and then rebating part of that tax at the pump? (They do that sort of thing all the time in the US.)
I would be shocked if it weren't the Germans who solved it, actually.
Diesel is more fuel efficient than gasoline. Hence, banning diesel will force people to buy more electric and hybrid cars.
Hm? I would have thought, Hence, banning diesel will force people to buy gasoline cars. Why would banning diesel force people to buy electric (very limited range) and hybrid (additional cost) when gasoline cars are more plentiful, have a significantly greater range, and are cheaper?
And turkeys aren't from Turkey. (They can't fly but they can dance)
Not what I meant. "French fries" originated in Belgium, not France.