Yuh huh. Tell me, who did you think was going to win the election? Was it Hillary? Did you go to sleep that night absolutely certain that you'd wake up to President Hillary? So... what gives you such faith in your current political analysis?
Well, rich people don't have to use the internet. A lot of these guys don't realize that not being rich means that you don't have the same things or opportunities that they do. That's why they tend to think that people on welfare have it so good -- they don't realize that having $2 a day to feed your family means that your family might not be eating for a couple weeks out of the month. They just assume that the pantry will magically be well stocked, the way theirs is. Yes, you don't NEED to use the internet! You just have your help do it! Adjusts monocle disapprovingly
Mine was a TI 99/4A the folks got at Christmas, 1983. The price had just been reduced to neighborhood of $50 as the computers had been discontinued. Reputedly due to the power supply having a tendency to catch on fire. I played video games on it for a while but quickly got into BASIC programming for it. The next year, my parents shelled out for the cartridge for it that would allow you to do assembly language programming on it. As I recall, my success with that was limited to moving a sprite around the screen with a joystick, but that wasn't too bad for a fourteen-year-old with limited reference materials. Started taking programming languages in high school a couple years later, and their Apple 2 machines put the ol' TI to shame. But I still get nostalgic for it.
And then you'd graduate and go to work for some big company, where you create some cludge code without proper understanding of underlying concepts, and collect a nice fat paycheck for doing it. Funny how that works...
Apparently the support line was the top rated one in the industry early on, but the penny pinchers started pinching pennies. When I got there, they would pretty much support you for life if you'd ever bought OS/2 or an IBM PC. They started out with screeners taking the call initially and then transferring it to level 1 support, but they did away with the screeners and added that responsibility to the call center guys. They also got a lot more picky about you having a set amount of support per license key and they started enforcing that. And they also added a 900 number, which apparently got a fair bit of traffic. They did have a network support team as well, and that covered all the shifts. Those questions were queued up and answered as they came in, and the guys who answered them were considered to be "level 2 support" if I remember correctly.
Around the time Windows 95 came out, there was a push for all the people in the call center to get the "OS/2 Certified Engineer" rating, but IBM shut down OS/2 before anything much came of that. I got mine at the '95 Comdex, while doing volunteer support for Team OS/2. Still have the little plastic card...
But yeah, most of the level 1 guys didn't have any experience with OS/2 and a few didn't have any experience with computers, when they started. About 90% of the problems that came in were for similar issues though -- printer stuff and video problems seemed to be the most of them. I still have the command line command to reset the video drivers to VGA burned into my brain. I could actually fix your shit for a wider range of problems, if you were lucky enough to get me, but fixing your shit is time consuming and I was frequently in trouble for not answering as many calls as I was supposed to be. A lot of the techs just wanted to throw a reboot-requiring command at you and make you go away so they could keep their numbers up.
I've been wondering if you could just push a bunch of mass from the asteroid belt to it and start one up. Granted, we won't be pushing mass around like that any time soon, and the hippies would still complain that we're "disrupting the planet's natural ecosystem", but that sounds like a fun project to me.
Back in the day, while working at the call center for an international company, we had one specific customer who logged some ridiculous number of hours on the support line for a machine he bought at Sears. At some point this company had enough and put out a support-center-wide memo instructing the technicians that the next time the guy called, we were to instruct him to take the machine back to Sears and get a refund. At some point you just have to cut your losses and move on, though the big-ass company displayed a lot more patience than this little company did.
I've seen a number of companies try to go down the virtualization route. Not only does it never work, it's one of the first signs the company is on the decline. You'll spend two years implementing some Citrix environment that everyone hates and which never perform correctly or have the software that you need to get your job done. Then the company will have a round of layoffs and quietly sweep the whole Virtual Environment thing under the carpet. They won't get rid of it, because that would involve admitting the CTO was horribly wrong, but no one will ever actually use it for anything.
It used a lot of COM/DCOM to get its job done, though, and there are implications for creating long-term persistent system objects with those things, that aren't released when you close applications. So you could end up tying up a system resource until you rebooted, if your application crashed in the process of using an object. System-level objects look good on paper, but there they really don't handle failures very well, most of the time.
I got it working on a 386sx with 4 MB of RAM and a standard VGA card. Linux would run on the system as well, but I never could get X11 running well on it and ended up just using terminal mode, with one of the virtual terminals dialing up gate.net and running slirp. OS/2 had a number of artifacts from Windows, so even though it was preemptively multitasking, one program could type up the system event queue. They came up with a workaround for that, but it never really worked all that well. So if you really wanted OS/2 to shine, you had to install it on a multiprocessor system. That version of OS/2 created an event queue for each processor, so you could tie event queue up and the system would still be responsive. We did a pretty impressive demo at the '95 COMDEX in Atlanta on a massive Compaq quad processor 486 with a ridiculous 16MB of RAM, running 4 videos in 4 different video players without slowing the system down.
Funnily, even though OS/2 sported newfangled "threads", very few IBM applications used them -- most IBM OS/2 programs were pure windows ports. Ironically, if you ran the windows versions of those programs, you could run them in separate memory spaces so that the programs couldn't interfere with each other when doing processing in the event-handling thread. So Windows programs ran better on OS/2 than they did in windows and better than OS/2 programs ran in OS/2. You could format a disk and run a print job at the same time, as long as you did it from the command line. The GUI versions would tie the system queue up, so you could only do one at a time.
Well that could also be intentional -- get rid of any shred of useful talent in a division and then spin the rest of that division off as "underperforming." Your stock options soar and it doesn't affect your bottom line when that new company quietly goes under.
Yeah, I worked the noon to 9 shift at IBM Boca for a while. About half the time, the afternoon rain storm would blow in a bit early and I'd get drenched walking from the car to the building, which they kept at 72 degrees all year round. The next couple of hours usually consisted in trying to avoid slipping into hypothermia and dying in the building.
Last time I left was in 2005 in Colorado. At the time, they would just throw a bunch of people in a room. They were nice enough to throw up some half-cube walls so we could face the wall and get some semblance of a distraction-free environment. They still think they can pay well below market rates just because they're IBM, even when they're hiring you on as a third party contractor and even though their FTE benefits program is only marginally better than the third party contracting houses are offering these days.
I'm actually not entirely sure about the controls on the plane. I'll have to check my sim to see if they have a Twin Otter. I often sit near the pilot in a twin otter, so I know the gauge layout reasonably well. I have a simple joystick/throttle setup, so that doesn't really map well to the controls of any plane I've ever seen. I suppose you could say in the flight sim I mostly fly VFR and don't look at the gauges that much.
Ah well, as to that, Eagle Flight and Google Earth VR blur the edges of your field of view while you're moving, which seems to help immensely with it. I get the most queasy with the flight sim when I'm looking at a point in the distance about 50 degrees or more to my left and right while flying. Once I figured this out, I just stopped doing that and as a result was able to fly a plane without a problem.
I tried Elite Dangerous VR briefly, but found it to be entirely disorienting. A large part of that was not knowing the controls or mapping them properly to my joystick, I think. I'm not sure if it would help if I played the game some time without it -- the gaming system is set up in a shared area of the house, so I can't just set up camp and play for hours on it. I'll be building another system for myself when I have the funds to do so.
Interestingly, with a steering wheel and pedal system, I can play a racing game reasonably well, but find that going above 80 mph on the track makes me rather uncomfortable. I believe that the game is actually entirely TOO realistic in VR. Likewise, I can tell you, specifically, that Mount Wingsuit is not a realistic wingsuit simulation, and I'm not sure any VR-based wingsuit game would be. The developer seems to have put very little consideration into the wisdom of learning to fly a wingsuit by throwing one on and then jumping off a cliff. I've only ever flown one out of a plane, but I can do that reasonably well and don't approve of training yourself to fly into the side of a cliff over and over again until you figure out the controls. Moreover, with their controls you have to look almost straight up in order to see the horizon. This gets uncomfortable very quickly. While I do have to look up-ish to see the horizon while flying my wingsuit as well, the angle on my neck is not quite as severe and gravity is pulling me from different directions then when I'm standing with the VR headset on. And I only ever do it for at most 90 seconds or so in the sky, whereas I might want to play that game for half an hour or so. When the new wingsuit tunnel opens in Stockholm later this year, I'll have to visit and see what it's like to fly the wingsuit for 4-5 minutes at a time. I imagine it will take a good bit more effort.
Youtube came into being because it was less annoying than scraping megabytes of video off netnews or specialty FTP sites. Now that they're effectively the only game in town, they're increasing the annoyance factor in using it. This opens a window for a less annoying service to come along. You can bet that if anything comes along that starts showing hints of popularity, Google will again relax the Youtube standards.
I have a Vive and really like it -- being able to stand up and walk around in an area seems to largely prevent the motion sickness I'd heard about. I have a flight simulator that I have to sit down to play, and can make myself queasy with that in a matter of seconds, and I usually don't have a problem with motion sickness at all.
The most fun thing to do with it, though, is to have guests over and introduce them to VR. The most played games in my library are The Lab's archery demo, fruit ninja VR and the space pirate trainer. Some of the other titles I've tried are well executed, but a lot of the VR games on steam right now are just crap.
The last time I flew from Denver to Phoenix, the round trip ticket was around $70. I can't even get to the Colorado border without paying that much in gas alone. And if I had wanted to go to Hawaii, well, that would have been a significantly more difficult drive.
I say that too, but recently flew from Denver to Phoenix and back for less than it cost to park my car at the airport for the three days I was gone. The round trip ticket was neighborhood of $70. I was quite surprised at how comfortable the flight was, there was ample room for the couple of items I'd carried on and I cleared the TSA checkpoints with a minimum of fondling. I enjoy that drive, too, and have done it a couple of times, but I can't drive it for anywhere close to the cost of an airline ticket along that route, even with parking and the cost of a rental car at the far side factored in.
Well, the passage of time was universally observed by the same set of side effects; time passes and the sun rises and sets, the stars come out, the moon progresses along its course and the seasons change, which it was probably very useful to predict. What these things have in common is that they are questions of geometry, moreover questions of geometry that involve things happening in spheres. The planet rotates 360 degrees (approximately, depending on where you're standing) every 86400 seconds, and as it progresses along its path the stars and other planets behave mostly predictably. These values are consistent no matter where on the surface of the planet you stand and have been observed by our ancestors as long as we've been around. We learned to navigate by them, and to predict the seasons. Those who did these things had much better odds of survival than those who didn't, to the point that by the time humanity was starting to develop civilizations, we were already designed to do those things. If we ever take to the stars in an appreciable way, we'll have to discard the planetary artifacts in the measurement of time, but we already have the tools to do so.
So really, it's not all that much of a coincidence. Every so often someone comes along and suggests that we should replace our system of measuring time with something more... elegant. But those people tend not to examine the reasons that gave rise to the way we measure it now, and such attempts inevitably come up short and ultimately fail.
Yes! And time is so problematic because the simulation is being run on a massively parallel system. While each processor is able to handle the physics and timing of a small area reasonably well, keeping time synchronized for the entire universe would slow the entire thing down far too much. Moreover, since the project was designed as a simple demonstration of how to convert hydrogen to plutonium over time, making an effort to do so was deemed unnecessary. We also had a problem with some particles being uninitialized upon creation and going off at a very high velocity, so the top speed in this particular universe simulation was capped to prevent anything too untoward from happening.
The simulation has been running reasonably well for the amount of effort put into it, although there are still some issues of localized processors crashing when mass values in specific locations go too high, and some number of processors have been having to synchronize their timing signals across boundaries for reasons we do not currently understand. There is also the minor issue that eventually the plutonium degrades back to hydrogen, along with everything else, but we had no intention of ever allowing the simulation to run that long anyway.
In a company full of IT professionals, it'd probably be at least as secure if not more so. I seem to recall that it's been shown that there's no security benefit to forcing people to regularly change their passwords if those passwords have not been compromised. If security is that much of an issue, two-factor authentication really isn't that hard. They had at least a couple of systems that would reject passwords for being "too long" or reject specific characters from passwords, which just added that much more insult to the injury, for those of us in the company who actually knew a bit about security.
I worked for a company recently where I had well over a dozen separate systems, each with their own password requirements. There was no keeping track of your passwords and in some cases your user IDs on their systems. The end result was that a lot of people just kept their passwords in text files somewhere, and often just requested password resets every time they logged into that system they only logged into a couple of times a year. About half the systems I had to interact with were not connected to the internet, making it impossible to use a password manager for them.
Just to add insult to injury, those fuckers started adding third party web sites for services like project planning and some employee incentives. And those third party web sites also had their unique password requirements. I eventually arrived at the conclusion that most of their employees were so busy maintaining their passwords that no other work was getting done inside the company.
Slashdot Mirror
Yuh huh. Tell me, who did you think was going to win the election? Was it Hillary? Did you go to sleep that night absolutely certain that you'd wake up to President Hillary? So... what gives you such faith in your current political analysis?
Well, rich people don't have to use the internet. A lot of these guys don't realize that not being rich means that you don't have the same things or opportunities that they do. That's why they tend to think that people on welfare have it so good -- they don't realize that having $2 a day to feed your family means that your family might not be eating for a couple weeks out of the month. They just assume that the pantry will magically be well stocked, the way theirs is. Yes, you don't NEED to use the internet! You just have your help do it! Adjusts monocle disapprovingly
Mine was a TI 99/4A the folks got at Christmas, 1983. The price had just been reduced to neighborhood of $50 as the computers had been discontinued. Reputedly due to the power supply having a tendency to catch on fire. I played video games on it for a while but quickly got into BASIC programming for it. The next year, my parents shelled out for the cartridge for it that would allow you to do assembly language programming on it. As I recall, my success with that was limited to moving a sprite around the screen with a joystick, but that wasn't too bad for a fourteen-year-old with limited reference materials. Started taking programming languages in high school a couple years later, and their Apple 2 machines put the ol' TI to shame. But I still get nostalgic for it.
And then you'd graduate and go to work for some big company, where you create some cludge code without proper understanding of underlying concepts, and collect a nice fat paycheck for doing it. Funny how that works...
Around the time Windows 95 came out, there was a push for all the people in the call center to get the "OS/2 Certified Engineer" rating, but IBM shut down OS/2 before anything much came of that. I got mine at the '95 Comdex, while doing volunteer support for Team OS/2. Still have the little plastic card...
But yeah, most of the level 1 guys didn't have any experience with OS/2 and a few didn't have any experience with computers, when they started. About 90% of the problems that came in were for similar issues though -- printer stuff and video problems seemed to be the most of them. I still have the command line command to reset the video drivers to VGA burned into my brain. I could actually fix your shit for a wider range of problems, if you were lucky enough to get me, but fixing your shit is time consuming and I was frequently in trouble for not answering as many calls as I was supposed to be. A lot of the techs just wanted to throw a reboot-requiring command at you and make you go away so they could keep their numbers up.
I've been wondering if you could just push a bunch of mass from the asteroid belt to it and start one up. Granted, we won't be pushing mass around like that any time soon, and the hippies would still complain that we're "disrupting the planet's natural ecosystem", but that sounds like a fun project to me.
Back in the day, while working at the call center for an international company, we had one specific customer who logged some ridiculous number of hours on the support line for a machine he bought at Sears. At some point this company had enough and put out a support-center-wide memo instructing the technicians that the next time the guy called, we were to instruct him to take the machine back to Sears and get a refund. At some point you just have to cut your losses and move on, though the big-ass company displayed a lot more patience than this little company did.
I've seen a number of companies try to go down the virtualization route. Not only does it never work, it's one of the first signs the company is on the decline. You'll spend two years implementing some Citrix environment that everyone hates and which never perform correctly or have the software that you need to get your job done. Then the company will have a round of layoffs and quietly sweep the whole Virtual Environment thing under the carpet. They won't get rid of it, because that would involve admitting the CTO was horribly wrong, but no one will ever actually use it for anything.
It used a lot of COM/DCOM to get its job done, though, and there are implications for creating long-term persistent system objects with those things, that aren't released when you close applications. So you could end up tying up a system resource until you rebooted, if your application crashed in the process of using an object. System-level objects look good on paper, but there they really don't handle failures very well, most of the time.
Funnily, even though OS/2 sported newfangled "threads", very few IBM applications used them -- most IBM OS/2 programs were pure windows ports. Ironically, if you ran the windows versions of those programs, you could run them in separate memory spaces so that the programs couldn't interfere with each other when doing processing in the event-handling thread. So Windows programs ran better on OS/2 than they did in windows and better than OS/2 programs ran in OS/2. You could format a disk and run a print job at the same time, as long as you did it from the command line. The GUI versions would tie the system queue up, so you could only do one at a time.
Is it a problem, if no one notices? Most code can be optimized more than it is, but if everyone's happy with how it works, what's the problem?
Well that could also be intentional -- get rid of any shred of useful talent in a division and then spin the rest of that division off as "underperforming." Your stock options soar and it doesn't affect your bottom line when that new company quietly goes under.
Last time I left was in 2005 in Colorado. At the time, they would just throw a bunch of people in a room. They were nice enough to throw up some half-cube walls so we could face the wall and get some semblance of a distraction-free environment. They still think they can pay well below market rates just because they're IBM, even when they're hiring you on as a third party contractor and even though their FTE benefits program is only marginally better than the third party contracting houses are offering these days.
Maybe they just figured out how to get rid of a bunch of employees without having to pay severances or unemployment.
I'm actually not entirely sure about the controls on the plane. I'll have to check my sim to see if they have a Twin Otter. I often sit near the pilot in a twin otter, so I know the gauge layout reasonably well. I have a simple joystick/throttle setup, so that doesn't really map well to the controls of any plane I've ever seen. I suppose you could say in the flight sim I mostly fly VFR and don't look at the gauges that much.
I tried Elite Dangerous VR briefly, but found it to be entirely disorienting. A large part of that was not knowing the controls or mapping them properly to my joystick, I think. I'm not sure if it would help if I played the game some time without it -- the gaming system is set up in a shared area of the house, so I can't just set up camp and play for hours on it. I'll be building another system for myself when I have the funds to do so.
Interestingly, with a steering wheel and pedal system, I can play a racing game reasonably well, but find that going above 80 mph on the track makes me rather uncomfortable. I believe that the game is actually entirely TOO realistic in VR. Likewise, I can tell you, specifically, that Mount Wingsuit is not a realistic wingsuit simulation, and I'm not sure any VR-based wingsuit game would be. The developer seems to have put very little consideration into the wisdom of learning to fly a wingsuit by throwing one on and then jumping off a cliff. I've only ever flown one out of a plane, but I can do that reasonably well and don't approve of training yourself to fly into the side of a cliff over and over again until you figure out the controls. Moreover, with their controls you have to look almost straight up in order to see the horizon. This gets uncomfortable very quickly. While I do have to look up-ish to see the horizon while flying my wingsuit as well, the angle on my neck is not quite as severe and gravity is pulling me from different directions then when I'm standing with the VR headset on. And I only ever do it for at most 90 seconds or so in the sky, whereas I might want to play that game for half an hour or so. When the new wingsuit tunnel opens in Stockholm later this year, I'll have to visit and see what it's like to fly the wingsuit for 4-5 minutes at a time. I imagine it will take a good bit more effort.
Youtube came into being because it was less annoying than scraping megabytes of video off netnews or specialty FTP sites. Now that they're effectively the only game in town, they're increasing the annoyance factor in using it. This opens a window for a less annoying service to come along. You can bet that if anything comes along that starts showing hints of popularity, Google will again relax the Youtube standards.
The most fun thing to do with it, though, is to have guests over and introduce them to VR. The most played games in my library are The Lab's archery demo, fruit ninja VR and the space pirate trainer. Some of the other titles I've tried are well executed, but a lot of the VR games on steam right now are just crap.
The last time I flew from Denver to Phoenix, the round trip ticket was around $70. I can't even get to the Colorado border without paying that much in gas alone. And if I had wanted to go to Hawaii, well, that would have been a significantly more difficult drive.
I say that too, but recently flew from Denver to Phoenix and back for less than it cost to park my car at the airport for the three days I was gone. The round trip ticket was neighborhood of $70. I was quite surprised at how comfortable the flight was, there was ample room for the couple of items I'd carried on and I cleared the TSA checkpoints with a minimum of fondling. I enjoy that drive, too, and have done it a couple of times, but I can't drive it for anywhere close to the cost of an airline ticket along that route, even with parking and the cost of a rental car at the far side factored in.
So really, it's not all that much of a coincidence. Every so often someone comes along and suggests that we should replace our system of measuring time with something more... elegant. But those people tend not to examine the reasons that gave rise to the way we measure it now, and such attempts inevitably come up short and ultimately fail.
The simulation has been running reasonably well for the amount of effort put into it, although there are still some issues of localized processors crashing when mass values in specific locations go too high, and some number of processors have been having to synchronize their timing signals across boundaries for reasons we do not currently understand. There is also the minor issue that eventually the plutonium degrades back to hydrogen, along with everything else, but we had no intention of ever allowing the simulation to run that long anyway.
Perhaps they should just require the parents to go through school again, seeing as how it didn't seem to stick the first time.
In a company full of IT professionals, it'd probably be at least as secure if not more so. I seem to recall that it's been shown that there's no security benefit to forcing people to regularly change their passwords if those passwords have not been compromised. If security is that much of an issue, two-factor authentication really isn't that hard. They had at least a couple of systems that would reject passwords for being "too long" or reject specific characters from passwords, which just added that much more insult to the injury, for those of us in the company who actually knew a bit about security.
Just to add insult to injury, those fuckers started adding third party web sites for services like project planning and some employee incentives. And those third party web sites also had their unique password requirements. I eventually arrived at the conclusion that most of their employees were so busy maintaining their passwords that no other work was getting done inside the company.