Actually, not quite solved. It requires collaboration between the opthalmalogist/optician and the person.
I had terrible problems reading computer display screens until I worked with my optical experts and discovered the "reading" glasses are set for around an 18" focal point...but when I measure the distance from the plane of my eyes to the plane of the screen, it's about 25". If you're getting older, your "accommodation" (i.e., ability to do dynamic focusing on demand) diminishes, and so you're stuck with trying to focus about 7" in FRONT of the screen. That means the screen is beyond the point of best focus.
So, sit at your computer, in a chair you use often, with the display a distance away that is comfortable for you. Then, measure the distance between the center of the screen (irrespective of whether you can read that screen right now, or not) and the plane of your eyes (I have the measurement made with my eyes closed, so the tape measure can touch my eyelid; it helps to have a friend take the measurement for you). Take that number to your vision experts, and tell them that's you're preferred "focal distance" (the distance at which you want the best focus).
Those lenses will be useless for reading, because text will be all out of focus (too near the eye). You can have a pair of "reading" lenses, too...or, you can have bifocal lenses, which give you display-reading in the top half, and book/magazine reading in the bottom.
Incidentally, when you get older, and your lenses get "cataracts" (noticeable when oncoming cars, at night, have "startbursts" from the headlights), your lens replacement(s) will be fixed-focus at infinity, giving you great distance vision.
That's a YouTube restriction. Unfortunately, it appears that the only sites that host this film have pirated it in Ireland, and put it up only on SCAMMER sites. I would hope there would be a downloadable version available as.mp4, so we can educate others about the magnificent achievements Boole made in understanding basic logic. I believe him to be as important to the evolution of computing as I do Alan Turing (where would Turing have been without Boole???).
Irish Television, RTE, could make the film available, but apparently the developers of the documentary wish to retain total control over it's distribution. I'm hoping someone puts the pirated version up on a Torrent, so the rest of us can learn from it, too.
...but it admits to the possibilities that a) an enterprising white hat (or black hat) CAN inspect the code for integrity, logical structure, and fitness for purpose, and b) if a black hat can (or could, or does) exploit the code, a white hat can improve the code to close that security breach. Closed Source limits the potential white hats to those the intellectual property owner chooses...and they have little economic incentive to choose well or comprehensively, or ask for expensive comprehensive inspection of the code to find potential flaws, because it will increase their costs.
We ALL fully document our code, have clear specifications before we write code, use meaningful variable names and rely on IDEs...amirite?
In my case, I only program (after doing it for pay for 45+ years) for myself, and I'm creating new stuff all the time, based on experience. For example, my backup strategy. It started out as a simple script to launch Drive Snapshot. It evolved, into having multiple, cascaded backups on one partition of the computer, which are replicated automatically to my main "server" in case the computer dies. Each computer in the office uses the same central repository. It's got bells and whistles that make my job a lot easier when I experiment...if I try some new app and it trashed Windows, I just roll back to last night's backup. (I believe in 100% backups of all computers...including the server...every night, and schedule "fixit/improve it" time first thing in the morning, so I can rollback and lose nothing.)
So, personally, I now break all the rules, and let my needs dictate the code I write. It isn't specified, it's an evolving organism in my small environment.
Oh, and I'm doing all that in cmd files...might consider upgrading to something exotic, like AutoIt, someday, but I've been saying that for four years now...
Nonsense! You're just trading one O.S. for another, and one that--in the wider world--is more obscure and harder to find support for. I build Windows systems that are as reliable as Linux systems...and a LOT more secure because of regular Updates. (P.S.: I use both Windows and Linux; I don't use Mac because I don't like closed eco-systems any more than I like Monsanto's GMO seeds for the same reason: It's harder to determine what is happening inside.)
I offer free service to many older folks in my community (56 years in the business; you do the math), and don't charge them for calls less than 30 minutes. 80% of the time it's helping them figure out what to do, not fix something like a broken drive. The other day, a friend (a year older than me) asked for help, I started CHKDSK, he bought me lunch, and we had a great time. I DO charge for heavier stuff (like people who consistently do the same dumb thing...like acting as if they understand what an "Active partition" is, for example, and try to make every partition "Active"), and for initially configuring a new computer so it will remain reliable for a long time.
These off-shore services always break something that will force a new, billable call in a few weeks, so they can boost revenue. I've NEVER known any reliable, phone-support, reputable organization, unless you have an annual contract.
Kudos to you for taking care of your elders; so many adults don't.
Just one simple issue reverses the ignorant "reversal" touted above: A team of 5 five people who have to maintain bilateral, substantive communications with 4 others, has a total of 20 paths of dialog to maintain, so the project can be completed in five months..
For a team of 25, there are 25*24 paths: A total of 600. And, only one month.
So, FIRST, you have 5 programmers with 20 total dialogs going on, and it endures for five months. The alternative offered is 25 programmers with 600 paths of communication, and it all has to be done one month. When do you do YOUR thinking?
If you can't see the fallacy in that comparison, you are a typical, incompetent "business manager" who's can't write the BASIC program to print "Hello, World".
Fred's empirical observation still stands, to this day.
Unfortunately, you can't actually use much of the Internet without higher speeds. The FCC itself defines "Broadband" as 25 Mb/s and above. That's virtually a minimum threshold to do anything like generating revenue with a business that relies on the Internet.
Try it out yourself: Throttle your own bandwidth back to, say, 3 Mb/s (great ghost of DSL!) for a week and notice how little you can actually get done. Google Maps are a drag, Amazon seems like you're trying to communicate with Venus (or the Pioneer), even social media is nearly impossible. eMail is acceptable at that speed, but don't bother trying to attach anything, or your Internet service is saturated for minutes-to-hours. Now, add to that, Microsoft's demand you download Windows 10, and you've wiped out your bandwidth for a month.
It's not about being "more efficient." It's about getting the investment capital.
All Utilities are like that. When San Francisco wanted electricity at the turn of the 20th century, they first had to build the huge Hetch Hetchy dam in rural California. Next they had to install electrical generators. Then they had to string all the towers and cable to bring that electricity back to the Peninsula. Then they had to wire the streets (with industry getting first service). AFTER all that capital expenditure, they could bill for their first dollar of revenue. We don't have an economy that allows that anymore.
Respectfully: You're wrong. Even when the economics DO make sense, there is no Investor interested because they don't fund utilities.
The great deal with utilities is that they spin off big returns over decades; The downside is that it takes about 10 years to hit breakeven...and thinkers limited to a single quarter of future vision aren't interested at all, not when they can invest the same $35 Million with a doubling of their capital in just afew years through Wall Street.shenanigans. Another way the 1% screw the rest of us.
I know; I led a team here in rural California. We hired as CEO the former CFO of one of the largest financial companies in the U.S. After three months, he threw in the towel, saying, "There's no capital interested in ANY new utility business." Even he was surprised. And, local investors are keeping what they have, with no interest in seeing new competitors emerge when Internet is widely available.
Out here in rural California, virtually all the counties on the Eastern edge of the state have limited (6 Mbps) or non-existant (70% of El Dorado County, where I live) Internet service. While I laud your plan to provide service in parts of the world not served at all, wouldn't it make sense to make sure that all United States citizens have service first?
Our schools have little or no broadband. Our farmers and merchants have little or no broadband. Our local businesses can't expand markets. We have a situation where many rural residents travel 5-30 miles to cities (e.g., Folsom, or the County Seat, Placerville) to sit in coffee shops by the hour to share access to a slow WiFi connection (sure, the Airport is fast, but all customers are using the single 6 Mbps connection that Awful Terrible & Treacherous deems adequate for those "stupid farmers" (a quote from an AT&T executive I once tried to engaged on the subject; his solution: "Move the big Cities!").
...for the title, wait six months, then start circulating your resume to more enlightened companies.
I've done major consulting contracts with companies like the one you describe. They're fundamentally flawed and broken and will eventually implode. Try to find a new position in another company before the do.
...even off-world, present terrible consequences for those of us on Earth (in this case, during development, test and launch). This world was better before the "Day of Trinity," would have been better without Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, et. al., and will be better after we follow the German lead to stop using nuclear fission for energy production. Harnessing nuclear energy was a bad idea at the start, and remains a bad idea today, for any purpose whatsoever. It's just too dangerous, especially with austerians limiting the budgets for development of safer approaches and methodologies.
"Like High School???" I never got OUT of high school (1957), ended up doing long-term, high-level (CxO) consulting to more than a dozen Fortune 500 firms. You can easily confuse education with learning. The school only matters to those who are so insecure they need to affiliate with some "tribe." I met a lot of them in my day; they decided they'd had the "Best education money can buy" and then they ended up having to take orders from the consultant who never went to college for their strategic direction. I've TAUGHT at a substantial number of universities, but never had the benefit/limitation of attending one.
Go read Fareed Zakarias' book ("In Defense of a Liberal Education") and learn how to THINK, to see behind appearances, to adapt and survive. Coding, Systems Analysis, SysAdmin are skills you can acquire. Unless you remain curious (Remember Grace Murray Hopper's slogan, "Born with Curiosity." If you don't know who GMH was, you're grossly undereducated.) you're stuck doing it the way you learned in a text book...which was obsolete by the time you got it.
The other most valuable thing you can do is select your mentors well. Mine are all gone, but Eli Hellerman (at C-E-I-R) was a godsend to me; he not only helped me learn about my chosen profession (at the time of the IBM 1401 and IBM 709), but he gave me a great kickstart on becoming a thinker, and an adult.
That first-tier, untrained, script-reading, non-English-speaking person on the other end of the line got up at 5:00 pm to be ready to go to work at 8:00 pm (their time), so they can be available on the front lines all night long...and for a wage that is comparable, in their economy, to that of your local McDonald's counter clerk. Have some compassion, and they'll get you through that hellish first tier. Then, when that's exhausted, you've earned the right to ask for escalation to the "next level"...if they even HAVE one (it's usually a transfer back to the U.S. for those higher tiers of erstwhile "Technical Support").
When you're done, find ways to terminate your relationship--if possible (here in rural America, my sole ISP is AT need I say more?). When enough customers start leaving (as I did in leaving AT&T's phone service recently), you'll starting getting solicitous letters begging you to let them help you. Ignore them. These are corrupt corporations, more interested in executive compensation than customer satisfaction. Get used to that, too, because that's why corrupt politicians keep getting paid to write laws that favor those very corporations.
In other words, it's a crappy world out there and revolution appears to be the only way these retarded executives will ever get the message. Hard, but true.
Slashdot Mirror
Avoid these like the plague. See an physician specializing in vision first, and optometrist or opthalmalogist.
Actually, not quite solved. It requires collaboration between the opthalmalogist/optician and the person.
I had terrible problems reading computer display screens until I worked with my optical experts and discovered the "reading" glasses are set for around an 18" focal point...but when I measure the distance from the plane of my eyes to the plane of the screen, it's about 25". If you're getting older, your "accommodation" (i.e., ability to do dynamic focusing on demand) diminishes, and so you're stuck with trying to focus about 7" in FRONT of the screen. That means the screen is beyond the point of best focus.
So, sit at your computer, in a chair you use often, with the display a distance away that is comfortable for you. Then, measure the distance between the center of the screen (irrespective of whether you can read that screen right now, or not) and the plane of your eyes (I have the measurement made with my eyes closed, so the tape measure can touch my eyelid; it helps to have a friend take the measurement for you). Take that number to your vision experts, and tell them that's you're preferred "focal distance" (the distance at which you want the best focus).
Those lenses will be useless for reading, because text will be all out of focus (too near the eye). You can have a pair of "reading" lenses, too...or, you can have bifocal lenses, which give you display-reading in the top half, and book/magazine reading in the bottom.
Incidentally, when you get older, and your lenses get "cataracts" (noticeable when oncoming cars, at night, have "startbursts" from the headlights), your lens replacement(s) will be fixed-focus at infinity, giving you great distance vision.
There is only 1 type of rational person in the world: Those who "get" and can use Boolean logic. The rest are zeros.
That's a YouTube restriction. Unfortunately, it appears that the only sites that host this film have pirated it in Ireland, and put it up only on SCAMMER sites. I would hope there would be a downloadable version available as .mp4, so we can educate others about the magnificent achievements Boole made in understanding basic logic. I believe him to be as important to the evolution of computing as I do Alan Turing (where would Turing have been without Boole???).
Irish Television, RTE, could make the film available, but apparently the developers of the documentary wish to retain total control over it's distribution. I'm hoping someone puts the pirated version up on a Torrent, so the rest of us can learn from it, too.
...but it admits to the possibilities that a) an enterprising white hat (or black hat) CAN inspect the code for integrity, logical structure, and fitness for purpose, and b) if a black hat can (or could, or does) exploit the code, a white hat can improve the code to close that security breach. Closed Source limits the potential white hats to those the intellectual property owner chooses...and they have little economic incentive to choose well or comprehensively, or ask for expensive comprehensive inspection of the code to find potential flaws, because it will increase their costs.
We ALL fully document our code, have clear specifications before we write code, use meaningful variable names and rely on IDEs...amirite?
In my case, I only program (after doing it for pay for 45+ years) for myself, and I'm creating new stuff all the time, based on experience. For example, my backup strategy. It started out as a simple script to launch Drive Snapshot. It evolved, into having multiple, cascaded backups on one partition of the computer, which are replicated automatically to my main "server" in case the computer dies. Each computer in the office uses the same central repository. It's got bells and whistles that make my job a lot easier when I experiment...if I try some new app and it trashed Windows, I just roll back to last night's backup. (I believe in 100% backups of all computers...including the server...every night, and schedule "fixit/improve it" time first thing in the morning, so I can rollback and lose nothing.)
So, personally, I now break all the rules, and let my needs dictate the code I write. It isn't specified, it's an evolving organism in my small environment.
Oh, and I'm doing all that in cmd files...might consider upgrading to something exotic, like AutoIt, someday, but I've been saying that for four years now...
A bit harder to change a disk drive, 'tho, wouldn't you agree?
Nonsense! You're just trading one O.S. for another, and one that--in the wider world--is more obscure and harder to find support for. I build Windows systems that are as reliable as Linux systems...and a LOT more secure because of regular Updates. (P.S.: I use both Windows and Linux; I don't use Mac because I don't like closed eco-systems any more than I like Monsanto's GMO seeds for the same reason: It's harder to determine what is happening inside.)
I offer free service to many older folks in my community (56 years in the business; you do the math), and don't charge them for calls less than 30 minutes. 80% of the time it's helping them figure out what to do, not fix something like a broken drive. The other day, a friend (a year older than me) asked for help, I started CHKDSK, he bought me lunch, and we had a great time. I DO charge for heavier stuff (like people who consistently do the same dumb thing...like acting as if they understand what an "Active partition" is, for example, and try to make every partition "Active"), and for initially configuring a new computer so it will remain reliable for a long time.
These off-shore services always break something that will force a new, billable call in a few weeks, so they can boost revenue. I've NEVER known any reliable, phone-support, reputable organization, unless you have an annual contract.
Kudos to you for taking care of your elders; so many adults don't.
If not, where's the Kindle Reader open-source, like ones for PDF for Windows and other platforms?
I DO like some things in electronic form, 'cause I can store them for future reference. Books aren't just for entertainment, ya know.
Just one simple issue reverses the ignorant "reversal" touted above: A team of 5 five people who have to maintain bilateral, substantive communications with 4 others, has a total of 20 paths of dialog to maintain, so the project can be completed in five months..
For a team of 25, there are 25*24 paths: A total of 600. And, only one month.
So, FIRST, you have 5 programmers with 20 total dialogs going on, and it endures for five months. The alternative offered is 25 programmers with 600 paths of communication, and it all has to be done one month. When do you do YOUR thinking?
If you can't see the fallacy in that comparison, you are a typical, incompetent "business manager" who's can't write the BASIC program to print "Hello, World".
Fred's empirical observation still stands, to this day.
Now THAT's libel bait. I expect to see lawyers getting rich off this...until the founders of Peeple go into personal bankruptcy.
AMEN! This is the most cogent response in this entire thread!!!
Unfortunately, you can't actually use much of the Internet without higher speeds. The FCC itself defines "Broadband" as 25 Mb/s and above. That's virtually a minimum threshold to do anything like generating revenue with a business that relies on the Internet.
Try it out yourself: Throttle your own bandwidth back to, say, 3 Mb/s (great ghost of DSL!) for a week and notice how little you can actually get done. Google Maps are a drag, Amazon seems like you're trying to communicate with Venus (or the Pioneer), even social media is nearly impossible. eMail is acceptable at that speed, but don't bother trying to attach anything, or your Internet service is saturated for minutes-to-hours. Now, add to that, Microsoft's demand you download Windows 10, and you've wiped out your bandwidth for a month.
It's not about being "more efficient." It's about getting the investment capital.
All Utilities are like that. When San Francisco wanted electricity at the turn of the 20th century, they first had to build the huge Hetch Hetchy dam in rural California. Next they had to install electrical generators. Then they had to string all the towers and cable to bring that electricity back to the Peninsula. Then they had to wire the streets (with industry getting first service). AFTER all that capital expenditure, they could bill for their first dollar of revenue. We don't have an economy that allows that anymore.
Respectfully: You're wrong. Even when the economics DO make sense, there is no Investor interested because they don't fund utilities.
The great deal with utilities is that they spin off big returns over decades; The downside is that it takes about 10 years to hit breakeven...and thinkers limited to a single quarter of future vision aren't interested at all, not when they can invest the same $35 Million with a doubling of their capital in just afew years through Wall Street.shenanigans. Another way the 1% screw the rest of us.
I know; I led a team here in rural California. We hired as CEO the former CFO of one of the largest financial companies in the U.S. After three months, he threw in the towel, saying, "There's no capital interested in ANY new utility business." Even he was surprised. And, local investors are keeping what they have, with no interest in seeing new competitors emerge when Internet is widely available.
You can't get decent service, either, with the latencies and limited customer bandwith endemic to satellite economics.
Out here in rural California, virtually all the counties on the Eastern edge of the state have limited (6 Mbps) or non-existant (70% of El Dorado County, where I live) Internet service. While I laud your plan to provide service in parts of the world not served at all, wouldn't it make sense to make sure that all United States citizens have service first?
Our schools have little or no broadband. Our farmers and merchants have little or no broadband. Our local businesses can't expand markets. We have a situation where many rural residents travel 5-30 miles to cities (e.g., Folsom, or the County Seat, Placerville) to sit in coffee shops by the hour to share access to a slow WiFi connection (sure, the Airport is fast, but all customers are using the single 6 Mbps connection that Awful Terrible & Treacherous deems adequate for those "stupid farmers" (a quote from an AT&T executive I once tried to engaged on the subject; his solution: "Move the big Cities!").
...for the title, wait six months, then start circulating your resume to more enlightened companies.
I've done major consulting contracts with companies like the one you describe. They're fundamentally flawed and broken and will eventually implode. Try to find a new position in another company before the do.
Good luck!
Ping works, but there's no site there.
Mark-T: As a long-term consultant to HP (pre-Carly), I have to say yours is the as insightful as the post you reference. Well done!
...even off-world, present terrible consequences for those of us on Earth (in this case, during development, test and launch). This world was better before the "Day of Trinity," would have been better without Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, et. al., and will be better after we follow the German lead to stop using nuclear fission for energy production. Harnessing nuclear energy was a bad idea at the start, and remains a bad idea today, for any purpose whatsoever. It's just too dangerous, especially with austerians limiting the budgets for development of safer approaches and methodologies.
"Like High School???" I never got OUT of high school (1957), ended up doing long-term, high-level (CxO) consulting to more than a dozen Fortune 500 firms. You can easily confuse education with learning. The school only matters to those who are so insecure they need to affiliate with some "tribe." I met a lot of them in my day; they decided they'd had the "Best education money can buy" and then they ended up having to take orders from the consultant who never went to college for their strategic direction. I've TAUGHT at a substantial number of universities, but never had the benefit/limitation of attending one.
Go read Fareed Zakarias' book ("In Defense of a Liberal Education") and learn how to THINK, to see behind appearances, to adapt and survive. Coding, Systems Analysis, SysAdmin are skills you can acquire. Unless you remain curious (Remember Grace Murray Hopper's slogan, "Born with Curiosity." If you don't know who GMH was, you're grossly undereducated.) you're stuck doing it the way you learned in a text book...which was obsolete by the time you got it.
The other most valuable thing you can do is select your mentors well. Mine are all gone, but Eli Hellerman (at C-E-I-R) was a godsend to me; he not only helped me learn about my chosen profession (at the time of the IBM 1401 and IBM 709), but he gave me a great kickstart on becoming a thinker, and an adult.
That first-tier, untrained, script-reading, non-English-speaking person on the other end of the line got up at 5:00 pm to be ready to go to work at 8:00 pm (their time), so they can be available on the front lines all night long...and for a wage that is comparable, in their economy, to that of your local McDonald's counter clerk. Have some compassion, and they'll get you through that hellish first tier. Then, when that's exhausted, you've earned the right to ask for escalation to the "next level"...if they even HAVE one (it's usually a transfer back to the U.S. for those higher tiers of erstwhile "Technical Support").
When you're done, find ways to terminate your relationship--if possible (here in rural America, my sole ISP is AT need I say more?). When enough customers start leaving (as I did in leaving AT&T's phone service recently), you'll starting getting solicitous letters begging you to let them help you. Ignore them. These are corrupt corporations, more interested in executive compensation than customer satisfaction. Get used to that, too, because that's why corrupt politicians keep getting paid to write laws that favor those very corporations.
In other words, it's a crappy world out there and revolution appears to be the only way these retarded executives will ever get the message. Hard, but true.
...by Glenn Greenwald, with copious facts, in The Intercept: https://firstlook.org/theinter...