Just to be clear Ontario's electricity system has been screwed up for a VERY long time. Long before the Liberals came in with the whole Green idea. The whole privatization of the industry was a mess (may have been a mess even before that). I recall having a "Debt Repayment" line on my bill for years. The system while likely mismanaged by government when it was owned by the crown. The transfer to private (sort of private anyway), was mismanaged, and it is actively being mismanaged by the "private" corporation. At any rate I think you would have to go back a very long way (1970's maybe) and across all political parties before you find some semblance of it running "well". Probably only then because it cost a huge amount that the government just subsidized and ate the cost in tax dollars to run. Anyway I find is very funny that it is somehow the current political party that is somehow behind it all the power woes... It is laughable. Heck there were specific laws that had to be put in place to prevent electrical distribution companies from ripping off people in Ontario it was so rampant after privatization... Never mind the CEO and Exes of HyroOne all paying themselves millions, or any number of boondogles, including gas plants, nuclear refurbishment, and a host of other things every couple of years. But sure lets blame the current political party for everything...
1) Canada electrical consumption is more than the US because of climate. i.e. it is cold here much of the year unlike much of the US. A better comparison might be some other Nordic countries (Finland, Norway. Sweden, etc...). Though I wouldn't be surprised if we're much high than them, likely due to resource abundance.
2) The increase of power cost has little to do with "Green Energy" and more to do with energy contracts signed (for 20 year terms I believe) by government with private sector. It was my understanding that this was over inflated to promote economic growth in the sector... So it is entirely artificial, and more an aspect of economic development than it is of actual energy generation. The false idea they had was this would bring jobs and generation, but largely only the later as all the stuff is built elsewhere and shipped in. The only jobs created are short term construction jobs, and a handful needed for maintenance.
Exactly the same. One of my biggest pet peeves was exactly the mp3 transfer and music library. Every so often for what seemed like no particular reason it would un-link my library from my file structure. A quick google showed that the issue had been around for years. So long in fact that a 3rd party of free developers created a tool to re-link your files. However every release of iTunes would "accidentally" break their tool, after awhile the developers eventually gave up trying to keep up. Apple had no intention of fixing it, because it only effected those files not bought through iTunes (surprise, surprise), they they really didn't have the incentive to do anything about it (other than you know keeping users happy). They did have a function within iTunes to re-link files, however it worked only ONE file at a time, and iTunes would un-link hundreds at a time. Making it just work enough to be annoying as hell and to try to influence people to buy everything through iTunes.
After a few years of that I got a Samsung and never looked back. It seems absurd to lack the functionality to simply copy files from one to the other directly. As mentioned I had a few run ins with the backup functionality of iTunes, which indeed seemed to work quite well, but they probably kept that clean to cut down on support calls and such to save money. At any rate their whole business model didn't seem all that user centric as much as it was to try and monetize their users. I've since gone with a LG and I am even happier with than than the Samsung (which was horrible on battery).
OK I was going to write something funny and stupid, but when I looked up the Wiki page for some additional information I found something much more interesting. They make a launch patch seemingly for every single launch, of which there have been a lot! Some are hilarious, others sort of menacingly inappropriate, others just cool artwork. Honestly some of them could be a bit more ambiguous if they are supposed to be "classified" spy satellites... I mean when your patch is a sailing ship with an angry looking eye over top, I mean people can guess the purpose... Also did they all go to evil art school? Apparently not all of them, because some look like they were designed by a 10 year old and MS paint. Interesting to look at anyway!
I think what NASA is trying to tell Trump is that sure they can possibly get to Mars while you are President, however we'll need about the same amount of money spent on the F-35 Jets in order to do that (1.5 Trillion?). Give us those kinds of resources and we'll get you there in no time!
The studio tried to sign a "contract" with a blackmailer/extortionist? Are they really surprised he signed with a fictional name? How can they not think it is a joke?
Somehow I think this deserves to be made into a Netfilx series, where brain dead executives that only understand one way to do things, and the befuddled criminals that have to deal with them, "Uh you want us to sign a contact? For blackmail. You want us to sign a blackmail contract? We use handles, and are asking to be paid in untraceable bitcoin currency, and you want us to sign a blackmail contract... as what? The Easter Bunny? Hey I'll do you one better..."
I'm thinking making the hackers either British al a Snatch, or possibly Russian gangster types with appropriate accents. The studio should be the ivy league Hollywood type, with a bit of valley accent. Show can be called "That's so Meta" or something... Once completed leak episodes themselves as from a fictional hacker group for fun and profit...
Never mind stuff that isn't reported because it is running in a VM.
Was having a pickle of a time trying to remotely troubleshoot wtf was going on with a client. They were trying to access a corporate application remotely, using a VPN though the corporate firewalls and network, using Citrix (more less a virtual desktop), and their print and network locations within the application were having trouble. They were running "Windows 7"... However after a lot of digging (bc the client doesn't really know), I found that they run everything off a NAS, and were actually running the application off a Windows XP VM on Windows 7, using ancient unsupported Citrix drivers... Anyway got them going again without making them change too much (though I recommended that they do soon)... Just a lot of networks and virtualized environments to crosstalk for what should be a moderately simple operation. It was a "your kidding me right" type of initial conversation... (There was a lot of "why are you doing this" in my conversation)
Though I have seen plenty of purpose built ancient hardware and or software, but it usually isn't connected to any network so who cares. Usually to support some piece of hardware or software that is old but too expensive to replace right away. Seen plotters, specialty printers, large format scanners etc... There used to be one huge scanner (gone now) that ran of an old Windows 95 box I believe, and it worked great, however the problem with with it not being attached to the network was that transferring the huge images it produced was more than a bit of a chore. Heck I have an old laptop (it's not that old) to support one application, because that is all it will run on... Did analysis on the cost of replacement of some old software once, was (a lot) cheaper just to buy all the users specific built laptops than to re-engineer...
The real problem isn't COBOL as a language. It is understanding huge highly customized systems that have evolved over decades of changes and being familiar with them enough to be effective. The problem is in many cases no one keeps IT staff on anymore. They are seen as a commodity. Everything is done by consultants now. In many cases it is the same old consultants, so it works for a time. However when they are gone, things get exponentially more difficult to try and maintain.
I had a laugh at your last sentence, pretty much the entire industry in a nutshell!
This. Add to that a lack of documentation, or if you had documentation it would be thousands of pages, not all of it even relevant anymore.
I maintain a number of legacy systems, while not COBOL (I did take COBOL in school ages ago), it doesn't really matter a whole lot what it was developed it. The larger problem is that the system was likely designed to do something very specific, then over the years has been altered and re-altered by who knows how many people (some good, some not so good, none of which are around anymore), to try and keep up with changing business rules. In some cases due to technology limitations these alteration need to be "creative" in order to try and deliver on some requirement not easily done by the platform in use. In a lot of cases the underlying DB structure makes little to no sense anymore because the system does something a lot different than what it was intended for. Half the time you are left guessing why a certain thing was done a certain way at some point in the mists of time. Yes these systems would be extremely hard and expensive to replace, which is basically why they have hung around for so long.
I have one current project to try and modernize a particular system slightly and it has been a nightmare. Every time we change something it breaks 6 other things many of which seem totally unrelated on the surface, then we fix those things which breaks other things, repeat ad infinitum, and it just gets more and more complicated. In many cases part of the problem is that we're doing things from scratch (re-inventing the wheel so to speak), which if we were using other technology would basically be built in to start with. The system itself is almost 30 years old, and I think it is starting to reach it's development saturation point, meaning it is only going to become more difficult (and expensive) to continue to make any changes, at which point management will have to decide if they are finally willing to bite the bullet and migrate to something a bit more reasonable. That said I've literally been actively championing that for the last decade, yet here we are... On a more humorous note, the other day I was testing very deep (in an attempt to break the aforementioned infinite development loop) and found part of the application that I have no idea what it does, and so far as I can tell does nothing (though seemingly nothing to do with my project). Curious I went through old documentation from the late 90's and found that even then it's function was "unknown", anyway I had a bit of a laugh at that at least. Literally no one has known what that function does for the better part of 20 years, and yet it is still in there.
Another non-COBOL related, but similar issue is at one point I was complaining about the output of a particular system because it feeds into several systems I have to try and maintain. After a bit of investigation (and it took awhile to even find someone that has been around long enough with this bit of knowledge), I found that the system in question is even *older* than any of my other systems, written in FORTRAN, nobody knows how it works anymore (other than it does it's thing and presumably spits out seemingly correct numbers), and no one is willing to touch it with a 10 foot pole for fear of breaking it... So I am stuck dealing with that for the foreseeable future. Not sure if FORTRAN programmers are easier or harder to find than COBOL, but even back in the day I never took FORTRAN in school. I'm sure that will be an interesting project when someone has to eventually deal with it...
It probably took a lot of work to award that program, get it started, and perhaps a lot of good work was happening. Perhaps NASA though that either the Constellation Program might come back under some other name, or that the next political masters might go forward with it etc... They probably hoped that the project might be saved, so they kept the project on a low burn, risk managing the fact that the money might be wasted in the end, in an attempt to salvage the project. When the reviewed the project it probably became clear that it wasn't going to go anywhere, or that at this point the risk of continuing to throw good money at bad and they likely canceled the contract, saving most of the money that would have been spent.
This is one of the major problems any government agency in any democratic country with large multi-year long term projects. Every election could mean the project failure due to political interference in one form or another. I've seen plenty of projects simply canceled because it was started by some other political party. I've also seem projects "cancelled", tweaked a bit, re-named for the political party of the day, and continue on successfully.
We are so far away from a "moon base" it is ridiculous. Simply supplying it would be a nightmare. Never might actually getting there, never mind actually constructing something, never mind about a million other things... I don't see it happening in my lifetime.
Although 22 minutes seems like an awfully specific number so it must be true!
It is also the exact same time of a TV show minus commercials... coincidence? I think not!
Anyway I think common sense is more insightful that a lot of the rhetoric. I've always subscribed that butter was better for you than margarine. I mean come on.
As for sugar, I've always thought that was by far the more dangerous dietary issue. Bodies just not built to handle the amount of refined stuff we pump into it on a regular basis these days and it is hard to avoid. As the saying goes, everything in moderation.
Or give legal advice somewhere you are not licenced to practice law... Plenty of examples.
However I think the distinction here was if he was actually giving professional advice. In reality he was just a citizen complaining about street lights.
The association could have simply said like; while we do not consider you to be a professional engineer seeing as you are not licenced to practice, have paid any professional fees to our association, or registered as an engineer within this state, we appreciate your concerns and will consider your input, thank you. Then promptly threw his complaint in the garbage like a normal person. Fining him 500$ bucks is a bit on the nose.
While not an engineer myself, I've had to deal with the the issue. Where I live there are similar legal limitation, some of which are silly, others not so much. Basically not only do you need to have the education to be called an engineer, of which there are only certain types, to which I believe "software engineer" isn't one of them anyway, but you also have to belong to the professional association (which I assume OSBEELS is in Oregon). The reason they pursue it is that A) likely they don't consider a "Software Engineer" to actually be an engineer of any sort, and B) professional dues to which all engineers pay to be licenced. The fees, at least where I'm from, aren't trivial and there are plenty of folks that try to get around it, usually individuals (as opposed to those with firms or companies). Even if the degree is from abroad, that usually isn't an issue as the association usually has a certification process, though that might be lengthy or costly, I don't know.
Typically from my perspective it is used most often when it is stipulated by law that a certain thing needs to be reviewed, signed off, or otherwise inspected by an engineer to ensure that it was (whatever that is) was done properly. By stating that it needs to be done by an "engineer" means that the people doing that work have to meet certain criteria in order to be able to do the work. I've had to deal with some legislation that didn't specify an engineer must to the work but rather "qualified individuals" (likely for flexibility in areas where getting an engineer might be difficult), which to be honest was a huge PITA, because some manager then needs to review the qualifications of each person, and in many cases don't want to, because if something goes wrong, well they were the ones that said so-and-so were qualified to do the work. It was later changed to only allow engineers for simplicity.
That said, in this particular case the guy was obviously just complaining about freaking street lights, and the association was trying to make a point (we don't consider you an engineer) while at the same time shutting him up from complaining anymore. Pretty stupid if you ask me. I don't think the association was really in the right here. If his complaint ever went to court (which it probably never would), at that point they could easily argue that no, he is not an engineer, and he isn't a licenced professional either giving professional advice, just someone that is cranky over street light behavior like any other citizen.
I've always found it odd the whole professional association and the required dues and the possible abuse with little oversight but their own, however in the absence of anything else it is useful enough that it gets a pass I guess. There are other professional associations as well, and while they don't seem as big a deal as the engineering one, in many senses it seems like a self perpetuating racket that only exists because it is useful to have someone else maintaining standards and policing members.
Well simplified welfare, which is probably the first step to UBI. Presumably the "minus half of any income he or she earns" is targeted at the general application, not this specific one. By that I mean that if applied to me for example, I already have a job, so I would only get half. Presumably all the targeted households are already on welfare. What this study will likely point out is a lack of willingness to work for the "minimum" wage job, because you can't really live on that in the first place, this will be another piece of information that is needed however to eventually be successful. The base wage in the area will need to increase to entice anyone to work for it might be something else that is learned.
"Ontario now spends approximately $9 billion specifically on Ontario Works and ODSP each year"
That is what they are trying to replace. The disabilities piece is likely because of ODSP, which I assume stands for Ontario Disability Support Program or some such.
Anyway there are a LOT of thing that need to happen for UBI, and they are not going to happen with a 50M experiment. Changes would have to be made to the tax code, including the federal level which isn't even really discussed here, and various other interacting programs of tax credits etc... Anyway we'll see how successful this is at gathering information... Anyway as mentioned earlier in a post there are a host of other tax related things that are impacted by marital status, so it is probably hard to get away from that entirely regardless.
Well there are already benefits to which that happens to. Also they never say "married", it says families. While each province in Canada has a slightly different definition of what "common law" is, the Federal Government in terms of taxes considers it anyone you have lived with for one year more less romantically. There is no "its complicated" on your tax form. There are certain benefits for very low income groups that go away as soon as that happens, presumably because they have additional support, shared bills, etc.... I know because it happened to my girlfriend, who looks at me like it is my fault (never mind that I spend way more that the couple hundred dollars should would have received).
Anyway would be interesting as to what their actual definition of "family" is (perhaps it means with kids). Regardless, this isn't really universal or basic, but it is an attempt to collect some data I guess. Governments have spent 50M on much stupider things. One of the communities is Lindsay, to which I went to school eons ago, however I remember that I was blown away by the place apparently being the single mother capitol of Canada... I know the school I attended was something like 30 guys to 1 girl, so it wasn't that, they were all local. Could be they are targeting those "families", where it isn't really all that reasonable for the mother to work in the first place, and may not have the supports to do so anyway. That would be my guess. So it isn't like two people are getting less money, it is more aimed at a "single" person with a baby gets a bit more because well they have a baby to take care of... I think other than some in favorable situations, one of the larger groups of welfare recipients would be single mothers, it also is one that isn't about to resolve itself very quickly, and further it is likely to have more beneficial results of support (i.e. the child gets a decent chance in life to succeed),
That is the MAXIMUM amount of money they can get. Presumably they can get much less money also, depending on their situation. Just like those sales you see where it says SAVE up to 80%.... where 2 items are 80% off and everything else is 15% off...
In this case if he got those emails and disseminated the information to networkBoy *prior* to receiving HRLegal confidentiality training I'd argue it was of no fault of his own!:p
Ahhh, I suspect that is why my "tap" functionality has a limit (found that out a couple weeks ago). Makes sense, as I think the cap is like 100$, so sure someone might run around with a bunch of cloned or stolen cards, however at 100$ per tap, they would have to use it a LOT to actually steal any amount of money (in a relative sense from a bank). Using it so much, probably means they get caught also.
That said, the whole business plan for the service seems to be flawed in so many ways. 1st of all, most people I know want to use LESS cards, not more to take advantage of the rewards program. 2nd with VISA/MC already having a monopoly why would they want to participate? 3rd with card companies why would they want you to be able to use other cards, again why participate? 4th while consolidating might be useful, that would likely break terms of contract, or they would re-write the contracts so that it does. 5th people with 20 credit cards are likely the ones that are highest risk to default in the first place, making the service undesirable.
In all, I can see why no one wanted to invest, and it failed. How they spun it to get the initially 9 million is a a mystery to me (unless they got significant buy in from MC/VISA and/or a number of banks etc..).
The ISP's lobbied for the ability of data Caps, then they wanted to selectively take advantage of not using Caps for their own services for a competitive advantage for their own benefit... Live by the Cap, Die by the Cap I say! They want to have their cake and eat it...
For the most part, 2 or 3 companies own everything in the Canadian telecommunication world, so them doing this (other than international impacts) really is a more less level playing field between them. That said, there are other smaller players, that don't own the infrastructure, or multimedia conglomerates, and as such would be at a significant disadvantage.
As is they are all a bunch of crooked bastards really, and anything the CRTC can do to reign them in is a good thing. What was likely their business plan was to not use Caps to promote their services for *a time* and then at a certain point once they have built a customer base, they would change the terms of your agreement to make the data apply to your Cap again, it's what they do. They can't help it. It's like that parable about the scorpion hitching a ride on the back of a frog to cross the river, only to sting them halfway across, and when asked why they did it the answer is "I'm a scorpion"...
It is worth noting that unless they used wholly inconsistent methodology, even if it wasn't the best method for testing, how did Subway's results (which were repeated with the same results) so different than all the other fast food results? The headline might not have been as "correct" or as "nuanced" as it could have been, however when was the last time you saw ANY science related journalistic reporting that actually was, that didn't try to make a more sensationalist title than perhaps it deserves? Heck I'd say almost all of them, even on Slashdot (which is supposed to be technology focused).
It is very likely the CBC will pass the buck as a defense saying that they were only reporting the results as given to them, that they are not the experts, and if mistakes were made it was that of the lab that did the analysis.
At which point it becomes a back and forth as to if the lab should have done the analysis in the first place, the specifics of what was reported by the lab VS what was reported by the CBC, etc... So no not an open and close case I don't think.
As to the idea that the CBC somehow had a grudge or bias against Subway is laughable.
As someone who lives in Canada, I've noticed that Subway has posted a lot of posters and material at their stores refuting the CBC claim, so they obviously take it very seriously. As to damages and how much effect this might have on Subway's bottom line, I don't think anyone that is going for re-processed chicken at fast food restaurants are all that particular about what they eat in the first place. There will be some impact to be sure, but I would bet it isn't all that much. However Subway has a lot to gain by taking them to court, one for the PR, and two they can likely settle the case where CBC will retract/correct/clarify their statements in a positive way for Subway. Indeed it will probably prompt CBC to do the whole thing over again (lab/story), and should it work out for Subway a lot of positive news for them.
That said, I take the results from the independent labs in the story with a healthy grain of salt. As perhaps they are positioned better to make better analysis than the CBC methods, one of the whole points of the story was having the CBC randomly select product. From the sounds of the story (didn't say specifically) it looks like Subway sent samples to the lab, which very well may have been cherry picked or altered. The analogy I would use is from the crooked video card industry sending samples for review that might not be the same as what you might buy in a box in a store...
I got all the math I needed for my degree, although just barely. They were with the exception of one other course (which I attended exactly one class, which was a movie, and wrote the final exam at the end of the year. I passed, but it wasn't very pretty). all my lowest scores. Indeed I ended up taking a lot of them that I could in my final year and being the oldest guy in the classroom other than any mature students...
The question of math and computer science is a long debate on Slashdot. Generally speaking I'd say for the most part (like 90+ percent) no one uses it in any really meaningful way)... That said I think some schools are now offering different streams of study with other focuses and less math. I've been working in field for almost 20 years now, and haven't used much of any of it other than statistics.
At any rate, my bigger problem was a disparity in our high school system at the time more than anything else (other then 8am classes). The University I attended was in a province that at the time had a grade 13 in high school, as opposed to only grade 12 in the province I attended. They have since abolished the practice, however at the grade 13 they offered advanced math classes that were "pre-university", which of course they expected you to have that background on day 1. Not having any such background I was lost for a large chunk and forever behind.
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Just to be clear Ontario's electricity system has been screwed up for a VERY long time. Long before the Liberals came in with the whole Green idea. The whole privatization of the industry was a mess (may have been a mess even before that). I recall having a "Debt Repayment" line on my bill for years. The system while likely mismanaged by government when it was owned by the crown. The transfer to private (sort of private anyway), was mismanaged, and it is actively being mismanaged by the "private" corporation. At any rate I think you would have to go back a very long way (1970's maybe) and across all political parties before you find some semblance of it running "well". Probably only then because it cost a huge amount that the government just subsidized and ate the cost in tax dollars to run. Anyway I find is very funny that it is somehow the current political party that is somehow behind it all the power woes... It is laughable. Heck there were specific laws that had to be put in place to prevent electrical distribution companies from ripping off people in Ontario it was so rampant after privatization... Never mind the CEO and Exes of HyroOne all paying themselves millions, or any number of boondogles, including gas plants, nuclear refurbishment, and a host of other things every couple of years. But sure lets blame the current political party for everything...
Two things.
1) Canada electrical consumption is more than the US because of climate. i.e. it is cold here much of the year unlike much of the US. A better comparison might be some other Nordic countries (Finland, Norway. Sweden, etc...). Though I wouldn't be surprised if we're much high than them, likely due to resource abundance.
2) The increase of power cost has little to do with "Green Energy" and more to do with energy contracts signed (for 20 year terms I believe) by government with private sector. It was my understanding that this was over inflated to promote economic growth in the sector... So it is entirely artificial, and more an aspect of economic development than it is of actual energy generation. The false idea they had was this would bring jobs and generation, but largely only the later as all the stuff is built elsewhere and shipped in. The only jobs created are short term construction jobs, and a handful needed for maintenance.
Exactly the same. One of my biggest pet peeves was exactly the mp3 transfer and music library. Every so often for what seemed like no particular reason it would un-link my library from my file structure. A quick google showed that the issue had been around for years. So long in fact that a 3rd party of free developers created a tool to re-link your files. However every release of iTunes would "accidentally" break their tool, after awhile the developers eventually gave up trying to keep up. Apple had no intention of fixing it, because it only effected those files not bought through iTunes (surprise, surprise), they they really didn't have the incentive to do anything about it (other than you know keeping users happy). They did have a function within iTunes to re-link files, however it worked only ONE file at a time, and iTunes would un-link hundreds at a time. Making it just work enough to be annoying as hell and to try to influence people to buy everything through iTunes.
After a few years of that I got a Samsung and never looked back. It seems absurd to lack the functionality to simply copy files from one to the other directly. As mentioned I had a few run ins with the backup functionality of iTunes, which indeed seemed to work quite well, but they probably kept that clean to cut down on support calls and such to save money. At any rate their whole business model didn't seem all that user centric as much as it was to try and monetize their users. I've since gone with a LG and I am even happier with than than the Samsung (which was horrible on battery).
Well I know running iTunes on my Windows desktop is what made me ditch my Apple phone and go Android, so perhaps Microsoft is banking on that...
The backup function of iTunes worked well I found, but not much else. Broken by design.
Just wait until Apple (or some other corporation) is valued at 7 Trillion and see what happens...
OK I was going to write something funny and stupid, but when I looked up the Wiki page for some additional information I found something much more interesting. They make a launch patch seemingly for every single launch, of which there have been a lot! Some are hilarious, others sort of menacingly inappropriate, others just cool artwork. Honestly some of them could be a bit more ambiguous if they are supposed to be "classified" spy satellites... I mean when your patch is a sailing ship with an angry looking eye over top, I mean people can guess the purpose... Also did they all go to evil art school? Apparently not all of them, because some look like they were designed by a 10 year old and MS paint. Interesting to look at anyway!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think what NASA is trying to tell Trump is that sure they can possibly get to Mars while you are President, however we'll need about the same amount of money spent on the F-35 Jets in order to do that (1.5 Trillion?). Give us those kinds of resources and we'll get you there in no time!
The studio tried to sign a "contract" with a blackmailer/extortionist? Are they really surprised he signed with a fictional name? How can they not think it is a joke?
Somehow I think this deserves to be made into a Netfilx series, where brain dead executives that only understand one way to do things, and the befuddled criminals that have to deal with them, "Uh you want us to sign a contact? For blackmail. You want us to sign a blackmail contract? We use handles, and are asking to be paid in untraceable bitcoin currency, and you want us to sign a blackmail contract... as what? The Easter Bunny? Hey I'll do you one better..."
I'm thinking making the hackers either British al a Snatch, or possibly Russian gangster types with appropriate accents. The studio should be the ivy league Hollywood type, with a bit of valley accent. Show can be called "That's so Meta" or something... Once completed leak episodes themselves as from a fictional hacker group for fun and profit...
Never mind stuff that isn't reported because it is running in a VM.
Was having a pickle of a time trying to remotely troubleshoot wtf was going on with a client. They were trying to access a corporate application remotely, using a VPN though the corporate firewalls and network, using Citrix (more less a virtual desktop), and their print and network locations within the application were having trouble. They were running "Windows 7"... However after a lot of digging (bc the client doesn't really know), I found that they run everything off a NAS, and were actually running the application off a Windows XP VM on Windows 7, using ancient unsupported Citrix drivers... Anyway got them going again without making them change too much (though I recommended that they do soon)... Just a lot of networks and virtualized environments to crosstalk for what should be a moderately simple operation. It was a "your kidding me right" type of initial conversation... (There was a lot of "why are you doing this" in my conversation)
Though I have seen plenty of purpose built ancient hardware and or software, but it usually isn't connected to any network so who cares. Usually to support some piece of hardware or software that is old but too expensive to replace right away. Seen plotters, specialty printers, large format scanners etc... There used to be one huge scanner (gone now) that ran of an old Windows 95 box I believe, and it worked great, however the problem with with it not being attached to the network was that transferring the huge images it produced was more than a bit of a chore. Heck I have an old laptop (it's not that old) to support one application, because that is all it will run on... Did analysis on the cost of replacement of some old software once, was (a lot) cheaper just to buy all the users specific built laptops than to re-engineer...
The real problem isn't COBOL as a language. It is understanding huge highly customized systems that have evolved over decades of changes and being familiar with them enough to be effective. The problem is in many cases no one keeps IT staff on anymore. They are seen as a commodity. Everything is done by consultants now. In many cases it is the same old consultants, so it works for a time. However when they are gone, things get exponentially more difficult to try and maintain.
I had a laugh at your last sentence, pretty much the entire industry in a nutshell!
This. Add to that a lack of documentation, or if you had documentation it would be thousands of pages, not all of it even relevant anymore.
I maintain a number of legacy systems, while not COBOL (I did take COBOL in school ages ago), it doesn't really matter a whole lot what it was developed it. The larger problem is that the system was likely designed to do something very specific, then over the years has been altered and re-altered by who knows how many people (some good, some not so good, none of which are around anymore), to try and keep up with changing business rules. In some cases due to technology limitations these alteration need to be "creative" in order to try and deliver on some requirement not easily done by the platform in use. In a lot of cases the underlying DB structure makes little to no sense anymore because the system does something a lot different than what it was intended for. Half the time you are left guessing why a certain thing was done a certain way at some point in the mists of time. Yes these systems would be extremely hard and expensive to replace, which is basically why they have hung around for so long.
I have one current project to try and modernize a particular system slightly and it has been a nightmare. Every time we change something it breaks 6 other things many of which seem totally unrelated on the surface, then we fix those things which breaks other things, repeat ad infinitum, and it just gets more and more complicated. In many cases part of the problem is that we're doing things from scratch (re-inventing the wheel so to speak), which if we were using other technology would basically be built in to start with. The system itself is almost 30 years old, and I think it is starting to reach it's development saturation point, meaning it is only going to become more difficult (and expensive) to continue to make any changes, at which point management will have to decide if they are finally willing to bite the bullet and migrate to something a bit more reasonable. That said I've literally been actively championing that for the last decade, yet here we are... On a more humorous note, the other day I was testing very deep (in an attempt to break the aforementioned infinite development loop) and found part of the application that I have no idea what it does, and so far as I can tell does nothing (though seemingly nothing to do with my project). Curious I went through old documentation from the late 90's and found that even then it's function was "unknown", anyway I had a bit of a laugh at that at least. Literally no one has known what that function does for the better part of 20 years, and yet it is still in there.
Another non-COBOL related, but similar issue is at one point I was complaining about the output of a particular system because it feeds into several systems I have to try and maintain. After a bit of investigation (and it took awhile to even find someone that has been around long enough with this bit of knowledge), I found that the system in question is even *older* than any of my other systems, written in FORTRAN, nobody knows how it works anymore (other than it does it's thing and presumably spits out seemingly correct numbers), and no one is willing to touch it with a 10 foot pole for fear of breaking it... So I am stuck dealing with that for the foreseeable future. Not sure if FORTRAN programmers are easier or harder to find than COBOL, but even back in the day I never took FORTRAN in school. I'm sure that will be an interesting project when someone has to eventually deal with it...
It probably took a lot of work to award that program, get it started, and perhaps a lot of good work was happening. Perhaps NASA though that either the Constellation Program might come back under some other name, or that the next political masters might go forward with it etc... They probably hoped that the project might be saved, so they kept the project on a low burn, risk managing the fact that the money might be wasted in the end, in an attempt to salvage the project. When the reviewed the project it probably became clear that it wasn't going to go anywhere, or that at this point the risk of continuing to throw good money at bad and they likely canceled the contract, saving most of the money that would have been spent.
This is one of the major problems any government agency in any democratic country with large multi-year long term projects. Every election could mean the project failure due to political interference in one form or another. I've seen plenty of projects simply canceled because it was started by some other political party. I've also seem projects "cancelled", tweaked a bit, re-named for the political party of the day, and continue on successfully.
We are so far away from a "moon base" it is ridiculous. Simply supplying it would be a nightmare. Never might actually getting there, never mind actually constructing something, never mind about a million other things... I don't see it happening in my lifetime.
Although 22 minutes seems like an awfully specific number so it must be true!
It is also the exact same time of a TV show minus commercials... coincidence? I think not!
Anyway I think common sense is more insightful that a lot of the rhetoric.
I've always subscribed that butter was better for you than margarine. I mean come on.
As for sugar, I've always thought that was by far the more dangerous dietary issue.
Bodies just not built to handle the amount of refined stuff we pump into it on a regular basis these days and it is hard to avoid.
As the saying goes, everything in moderation.
Or give legal advice somewhere you are not licenced to practice law... Plenty of examples.
However I think the distinction here was if he was actually giving professional advice. In reality he was just a citizen complaining about street lights.
The association could have simply said like; while we do not consider you to be a professional engineer seeing as you are not licenced to practice, have paid any professional fees to our association, or registered as an engineer within this state, we appreciate your concerns and will consider your input, thank you. Then promptly threw his complaint in the garbage like a normal person. Fining him 500$ bucks is a bit on the nose.
At 500$ it really isn't a cash grab so much as it is a middle finger and telling him to fsck off.
While not an engineer myself, I've had to deal with the the issue. Where I live there are similar legal limitation, some of which are silly, others not so much. Basically not only do you need to have the education to be called an engineer, of which there are only certain types, to which I believe "software engineer" isn't one of them anyway, but you also have to belong to the professional association (which I assume OSBEELS is in Oregon). The reason they pursue it is that A) likely they don't consider a "Software Engineer" to actually be an engineer of any sort, and B) professional dues to which all engineers pay to be licenced. The fees, at least where I'm from, aren't trivial and there are plenty of folks that try to get around it, usually individuals (as opposed to those with firms or companies). Even if the degree is from abroad, that usually isn't an issue as the association usually has a certification process, though that might be lengthy or costly, I don't know.
Typically from my perspective it is used most often when it is stipulated by law that a certain thing needs to be reviewed, signed off, or otherwise inspected by an engineer to ensure that it was (whatever that is) was done properly. By stating that it needs to be done by an "engineer" means that the people doing that work have to meet certain criteria in order to be able to do the work. I've had to deal with some legislation that didn't specify an engineer must to the work but rather "qualified individuals" (likely for flexibility in areas where getting an engineer might be difficult), which to be honest was a huge PITA, because some manager then needs to review the qualifications of each person, and in many cases don't want to, because if something goes wrong, well they were the ones that said so-and-so were qualified to do the work. It was later changed to only allow engineers for simplicity.
That said, in this particular case the guy was obviously just complaining about freaking street lights, and the association was trying to make a point (we don't consider you an engineer) while at the same time shutting him up from complaining anymore. Pretty stupid if you ask me. I don't think the association was really in the right here. If his complaint ever went to court (which it probably never would), at that point they could easily argue that no, he is not an engineer, and he isn't a licenced professional either giving professional advice, just someone that is cranky over street light behavior like any other citizen.
I've always found it odd the whole professional association and the required dues and the possible abuse with little oversight but their own, however in the absence of anything else it is useful enough that it gets a pass I guess. There are other professional associations as well, and while they don't seem as big a deal as the engineering one, in many senses it seems like a self perpetuating racket that only exists because it is useful to have someone else maintaining standards and policing members.
Well simplified welfare, which is probably the first step to UBI. Presumably the "minus half of any income he or she earns" is targeted at the general application, not this specific one. By that I mean that if applied to me for example, I already have a job, so I would only get half. Presumably all the targeted households are already on welfare. What this study will likely point out is a lack of willingness to work for the "minimum" wage job, because you can't really live on that in the first place, this will be another piece of information that is needed however to eventually be successful. The base wage in the area will need to increase to entice anyone to work for it might be something else that is learned.
"Ontario now spends approximately $9 billion specifically on Ontario Works and ODSP each year"
That is what they are trying to replace. The disabilities piece is likely because of ODSP, which I assume stands for Ontario Disability Support Program or some such.
Anyway there are a LOT of thing that need to happen for UBI, and they are not going to happen with a 50M experiment. Changes would have to be made to the tax code, including the federal level which isn't even really discussed here, and various other interacting programs of tax credits etc... Anyway we'll see how successful this is at gathering information... Anyway as mentioned earlier in a post there are a host of other tax related things that are impacted by marital status, so it is probably hard to get away from that entirely regardless.
Well there are already benefits to which that happens to. Also they never say "married", it says families. While each province in Canada has a slightly different definition of what "common law" is, the Federal Government in terms of taxes considers it anyone you have lived with for one year more less romantically. There is no "its complicated" on your tax form. There are certain benefits for very low income groups that go away as soon as that happens, presumably because they have additional support, shared bills, etc.... I know because it happened to my girlfriend, who looks at me like it is my fault (never mind that I spend way more that the couple hundred dollars should would have received).
Anyway would be interesting as to what their actual definition of "family" is (perhaps it means with kids). Regardless, this isn't really universal or basic, but it is an attempt to collect some data I guess. Governments have spent 50M on much stupider things. One of the communities is Lindsay, to which I went to school eons ago, however I remember that I was blown away by the place apparently being the single mother capitol of Canada... I know the school I attended was something like 30 guys to 1 girl, so it wasn't that, they were all local. Could be they are targeting those "families", where it isn't really all that reasonable for the mother to work in the first place, and may not have the supports to do so anyway. That would be my guess. So it isn't like two people are getting less money, it is more aimed at a "single" person with a baby gets a bit more because well they have a baby to take care of... I think other than some in favorable situations, one of the larger groups of welfare recipients would be single mothers, it also is one that isn't about to resolve itself very quickly, and further it is likely to have more beneficial results of support (i.e. the child gets a decent chance in life to succeed),
"receiving up to"
That is the MAXIMUM amount of money they can get. Presumably they can get much less money also, depending on their situation. Just like those sales you see where it says SAVE up to 80%.... where 2 items are 80% off and everything else is 15% off...
Is what my lawyer father always told me...
In this case if he got those emails and disseminated the information to networkBoy *prior* to receiving HRLegal confidentiality training I'd argue it was of no fault of his own! :p
Ahhh, I suspect that is why my "tap" functionality has a limit (found that out a couple weeks ago). Makes sense, as I think the cap is like 100$, so sure someone might run around with a bunch of cloned or stolen cards, however at 100$ per tap, they would have to use it a LOT to actually steal any amount of money (in a relative sense from a bank). Using it so much, probably means they get caught also.
That said, the whole business plan for the service seems to be flawed in so many ways.
1st of all, most people I know want to use LESS cards, not more to take advantage of the rewards program.
2nd with VISA/MC already having a monopoly why would they want to participate?
3rd with card companies why would they want you to be able to use other cards, again why participate?
4th while consolidating might be useful, that would likely break terms of contract, or they would re-write the contracts so that it does.
5th people with 20 credit cards are likely the ones that are highest risk to default in the first place, making the service undesirable.
In all, I can see why no one wanted to invest, and it failed. How they spun it to get the initially 9 million is a a mystery to me (unless they got significant buy in from MC/VISA and/or a number of banks etc..).
How I read this.
The ISP's lobbied for the ability of data Caps, then they wanted to selectively take advantage of not using Caps for their own services for a competitive advantage for their own benefit... Live by the Cap, Die by the Cap I say! They want to have their cake and eat it...
For the most part, 2 or 3 companies own everything in the Canadian telecommunication world, so them doing this (other than international impacts) really is a more less level playing field between them. That said, there are other smaller players, that don't own the infrastructure, or multimedia conglomerates, and as such would be at a significant disadvantage.
As is they are all a bunch of crooked bastards really, and anything the CRTC can do to reign them in is a good thing. What was likely their business plan was to not use Caps to promote their services for *a time* and then at a certain point once they have built a customer base, they would change the terms of your agreement to make the data apply to your Cap again, it's what they do. They can't help it. It's like that parable about the scorpion hitching a ride on the back of a frog to cross the river, only to sting them halfway across, and when asked why they did it the answer is "I'm a scorpion"...
Perhaps.
It is worth noting that unless they used wholly inconsistent methodology, even if it wasn't the best method for testing, how did Subway's results (which were repeated with the same results) so different than all the other fast food results? The headline might not have been as "correct" or as "nuanced" as it could have been, however when was the last time you saw ANY science related journalistic reporting that actually was, that didn't try to make a more sensationalist title than perhaps it deserves? Heck I'd say almost all of them, even on Slashdot (which is supposed to be technology focused).
It is very likely the CBC will pass the buck as a defense saying that they were only reporting the results as given to them, that they are not the experts, and if mistakes were made it was that of the lab that did the analysis.
At which point it becomes a back and forth as to if the lab should have done the analysis in the first place, the specifics of what was reported by the lab VS what was reported by the CBC, etc... So no not an open and close case I don't think.
As to the idea that the CBC somehow had a grudge or bias against Subway is laughable.
As someone who lives in Canada, I've noticed that Subway has posted a lot of posters and material at their stores refuting the CBC claim, so they obviously take it very seriously. As to damages and how much effect this might have on Subway's bottom line, I don't think anyone that is going for re-processed chicken at fast food restaurants are all that particular about what they eat in the first place. There will be some impact to be sure, but I would bet it isn't all that much. However Subway has a lot to gain by taking them to court, one for the PR, and two they can likely settle the case where CBC will retract/correct/clarify their statements in a positive way for Subway. Indeed it will probably prompt CBC to do the whole thing over again (lab/story), and should it work out for Subway a lot of positive news for them.
That said, I take the results from the independent labs in the story with a healthy grain of salt. As perhaps they are positioned better to make better analysis than the CBC methods, one of the whole points of the story was having the CBC randomly select product. From the sounds of the story (didn't say specifically) it looks like Subway sent samples to the lab, which very well may have been cherry picked or altered. The analogy I would use is from the crooked video card industry sending samples for review that might not be the same as what you might buy in a box in a store...
I got all the math I needed for my degree, although just barely. They were with the exception of one other course (which I attended exactly one class, which was a movie, and wrote the final exam at the end of the year. I passed, but it wasn't very pretty). all my lowest scores. Indeed I ended up taking a lot of them that I could in my final year and being the oldest guy in the classroom other than any mature students...
The question of math and computer science is a long debate on Slashdot. Generally speaking I'd say for the most part (like 90+ percent) no one uses it in any really meaningful way)... That said I think some schools are now offering different streams of study with other focuses and less math. I've been working in field for almost 20 years now, and haven't used much of any of it other than statistics.
At any rate, my bigger problem was a disparity in our high school system at the time more than anything else (other then 8am classes). The University I attended was in a province that at the time had a grade 13 in high school, as opposed to only grade 12 in the province I attended. They have since abolished the practice, however at the grade 13 they offered advanced math classes that were "pre-university", which of course they expected you to have that background on day 1. Not having any such background I was lost for a large chunk and forever behind.