I reboot my work PC on the weekends because some of the craptastic applications we're stuck with don't do well if they've been running more than a few days. Bad application development is the cause of MOST of these types of problems.
SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.
It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls), then another three to five after I log in for all the scripts, antivirus, citrix, and other crap to run before my desktop is fully functional.
Sure a MacBook Air can boot in under a minute. It also can't run most of what we use and costs WAY more than the average business computer.
HR and the suits like pieces of paper that say you know stuff. Degrees and certifications may not be good indicators of competence, but having CCNA MCSA MBA IBC TLDR after your name impresses the non-IT people who actually fund your paycheck.
Altruism didn't evolve in these robots, they programmed them to be able to share, and those more likely to share with their kin were more successful. The only way the altruism would EVOLVE is if it arose spontaneously.
This is more like saying God decided it was time for fish to get out of the water, so he gave them lungs.
aches and pains, sure. There are some practices by chiropractors which can at least temporarily relieve the problems which cause pain. The problem I have with them is that they are temporary; once you start visiting, you go back over and over for pain relief. They don't treat the underlying problem.
Disease? What disease has been cured by chiropractic treatment? Swelling of the wallet?
Deafness? Seriously?
And the colic thing has been so soundly refuted I'm just going to point and laugh.
It's possible to make friends at work. I've done it plenty of times.
Until recently, I worked with a good friend. We were friends before I took the job and remain friends. While we worked together, we spent very little time socializing outside of work. In the past year since I was laid off, we have gone back to hanging out on weekends like we used to. Remember than when you're around a friend 40-60 hours a week, you probably aren't going to go out of your way to spend weekend time with them as well. It's when you don't work together any more that you start choosing to spend time together.
Jimmy, John, you guys aren't fooling anyone. We see the looks you two give each other when you think no one is looking. We notice how you always leave work together. The company doesn't have a policy against office romance, but what you did in the copy room last week...that's just disgusting.
I live in Texas, my hometown is in Texas, and it's run by Republicans. If you think it's got anything to do with political parties, you haven't lived long enough to realize both sides do the same stupid shit for completely different reasons.
I've seen a number of minor accidents caused by people running a light that just turned red. When you "sneak through" you make those of us with a green late wait on your self-important ass to get out of the way.
Red light cameras, when used properly, are great. They do a great job of stopping the idiots who think "just one more" is okay. The problem comes when they are treated as a source of revenue: the camera warning signs get taken down (I've seen this happen in a nearby town) and then the yellow light cycle is shortened to get tickets from people who actually know the light timings. My hometown installed cameras a few years ago, and one very bright member of the city council managed to push a law through which required warning signs within xxx feet of the intersection AND mandated yellow light times according to the speed limit. Their ticket revenue went up and then back down, and the accident rate went down as well.
Likewise, anonymous speed data would be hugely useful to city planners. If people are constantly speeding through an area that has almost no accidents, they could consider raising the speed limit on a trial basis. People who drive 55 in a 45 all the time will usually drive 60 in a 50, so ticket revenue will still be there. Higher speed limits mean being able to move more cars through on the same lanes, rather than having to sink money into additional lanes when a road gets overcrowded.
It's what happens when science becomes someone's religion. Creationist groups like the ICR work the same way: start with your conclusion and work backwards, rejecting anything that doesn't support the conclusion. More and more scientists with political motives are doing this sort of thing. It's frightening.
I rather like the idea of "dumb cars" being a factor now, because it means that when the "smart cars" or their users fail to be quite so smart, the cars around them can react without being able to communicate with them. It would be quite dangerous if they all operated on the assumption that every vehicle on the road was talking to them.
There's no way of knowing how many lives have been ruined by arrests for rape, molestation, child porn, and other such crimes being publicized, then the person being released without charge. Retractions don't get nearly as much attention as arrest reports and news articles, meaning a person's name could forever be tied to a crime they did not commit and were not even charged with.
Another problem is when the media covers the disappearance of the latest missing blonde girl, and then gleefully trots out the name and mug shots of whoever gets arrested first. That person might be completely innocent, but the damage is done.
"The internet" is a vague term and isn't even what the report is about. The report is about IT operations. Sure if you combined all the datacenters in the world their carbon footprint would be HUGE, but then...let's consider the alternative. Let's start by storing all those TPS reports on paper. Billions of reams of paper, probably. We're going to need boxes or file drawers and folders to put them in. And warehouses in which to store them, which we can build to replace the forests we cut down to make the paper. Then of course there's the cost of transporting all this stuff wherever it's needed...that's a lot of gasoline. E-mail would be a lot less wasteful, but hey....Greenpeace is chiding us about producing too much pollution with our e-mail. So we'll FedEx those papers. Jet planes aren't nearly as bad on the environment.
Seriously. There are bigger things they could be tackling. If anything, Greenpeace should be pushing for MORE dependence on networking and IT and a trying to draw the world away from relying so much on paper. Fix THAT problem, then talk about IT.
I've not played SC2 enough to consider myself good at it. That said, I only play when it's with friends. There's one guy I 2v2 with regularly; we've played maybe 80-90 games together, and last I looked had about a 3:1 win ratio. If I had more fun playing the game I'd bother to actually get better at it.
Back when I cared enough about Company of Heroes to play it competitively, I was in the top 100 players as both Americans and Wehrmacht (If you play CoH and know the players from a few years back, you'll know what it means when I say I was automatching against people like Kodachrome and 12azor....and winning half my matches). These days I just try goofy strategies that make my teammates say "what the HELL did you just do?" and my enemies cry loudly on GR.org about how whatever unit I spammed is so overpowered.
CoH prior to Opposing Fronts was a far superior game to StarCraft or StarCraft 2.
Company of Heroes isn't. Granted there are times in my games where I push the 150 CPM mark for a minute or two, that's during the most intense fighting when I'm trying to micromanage a half-dozen tanks while keeping my infantry in the fight and in good cover. My average CPM for CoH is something like 30-40, and that's counting one command for each unit in a group...so a group of 3 units hits 30 cpm with one command every 6 seconds.
I despise StarCraft. I really, honestly do. This isn't some trolling to piss people off, this is me venting.
StarCraft is all about speed and memorization. In that way it's more like a side-scrolling fighting game, where the person who can execute the right combos at the right time wins. Wrong build order? You lose. Didn't mass enough units by the five minute mark? You lose. I play StarCraft 2 with some friends from time to time and I do reasonably well at it, but it's nowhere near as fun as other games. It feels more like a job. I have no desire to play it solo.
What really disappointed me from the start is how the game utterly lacks any sort of reward for solid tactical decisions. High ground? That's negated by simple line-of-sight. Every shot is a hit, and every hit scores exactly the same damage. Compare that to Total Annihilation which at least attempted to give some realism in how units move and fire and the effects of terrain. TA's engine was FAR superior to StarCraft.
StarCraft is a clickfest, the closest thing RTS has to an arcade game. And it's tainted the whole genre.
So StarCraft was a dominant game when the World Cyber Games started. That doesn't mean it originated the idea of "esports" (a term I LOATHE by the way). I was playing in for-money Quake tournaments two years before StarCraft came out.
You see overcomplicated. I see multipurpose. Sure you could build a high-speed color sorter that is much smaller and more efficient, but this guy built something that could be used for a lot more than sorting colored blocks. As a proof of concept and early prototype, it's quite good.
Parker Brothers' "Aggravation" is a family tradition. Simple mechanics + a small degree of strategy, so it is accessible to young players and fun for adults as well.
"If you were in Joe User's department, which solution would you prefer?"
Oh I'd love Joe's solution. And then when Joe was out sick for a week and the server went down, I'd hate it. And my boss would pull a fit about it. He'd gripe to his higher-ups and a big to-do would be made over "the server being down" with the crucial information that it's Joe's Server being lost along the way. By Friday VPs are dragging IT personnel into meetings to discuss why my department's mission-critical server has been down for a week. IT the has to explain why Joe has a server that's not managed by IT and answer hours of stupid, repetitive questions that prevent them from actually getting any work done.
I kid you not, I've seen almost this very scenario play out, more than once. Information is lost as it moves through the chain and the complaint takes on a life of its own, so that when it does finally come down on the heads of IT, we waste valuable time trying to convince the overeducated buffoons hired to run the place that 1) we know what the hell we're doing, and 2) this is someone else's fault because we weren't allowed to set and/or enforce good network policies.
These policies aren't dreamed up by IT crews with nothing else to do. We are tight-fisted with our networks because if we aren't, WE are the ones who pay the price. Not the suits, not the workers, and not Joe "This is MY server" User.
As has been said: if you don't want to operate under the umbrella of IT, use online services or host your own outside of work.
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I reboot my work PC on the weekends because some of the craptastic applications we're stuck with don't do well if they've been running more than a few days. Bad application development is the cause of MOST of these types of problems.
SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.
It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls), then another three to five after I log in for all the scripts, antivirus, citrix, and other crap to run before my desktop is fully functional.
Sure a MacBook Air can boot in under a minute. It also can't run most of what we use and costs WAY more than the average business computer.
HR and the suits like pieces of paper that say you know stuff. Degrees and certifications may not be good indicators of competence, but having CCNA MCSA MBA IBC TLDR after your name impresses the non-IT people who actually fund your paycheck.
Altruism didn't evolve in these robots, they programmed them to be able to share, and those more likely to share with their kin were more successful. The only way the altruism would EVOLVE is if it arose spontaneously.
This is more like saying God decided it was time for fish to get out of the water, so he gave them lungs.
aches and pains, sure. There are some practices by chiropractors which can at least temporarily relieve the problems which cause pain. The problem I have with them is that they are temporary; once you start visiting, you go back over and over for pain relief. They don't treat the underlying problem.
Disease? What disease has been cured by chiropractic treatment? Swelling of the wallet?
Deafness? Seriously?
And the colic thing has been so soundly refuted I'm just going to point and laugh.
It's possible to make friends at work. I've done it plenty of times.
Until recently, I worked with a good friend. We were friends before I took the job and remain friends. While we worked together, we spent very little time socializing outside of work. In the past year since I was laid off, we have gone back to hanging out on weekends like we used to. Remember than when you're around a friend 40-60 hours a week, you probably aren't going to go out of your way to spend weekend time with them as well. It's when you don't work together any more that you start choosing to spend time together.
Jimmy, John, you guys aren't fooling anyone. We see the looks you two give each other when you think no one is looking. We notice how you always leave work together. The company doesn't have a policy against office romance, but what you did in the copy room last week...that's just disgusting.
-Management
I live in Texas, my hometown is in Texas, and it's run by Republicans. If you think it's got anything to do with political parties, you haven't lived long enough to realize both sides do the same stupid shit for completely different reasons.
I've seen a number of minor accidents caused by people running a light that just turned red. When you "sneak through" you make those of us with a green late wait on your self-important ass to get out of the way.
Red light cameras, when used properly, are great. They do a great job of stopping the idiots who think "just one more" is okay. The problem comes when they are treated as a source of revenue: the camera warning signs get taken down (I've seen this happen in a nearby town) and then the yellow light cycle is shortened to get tickets from people who actually know the light timings. My hometown installed cameras a few years ago, and one very bright member of the city council managed to push a law through which required warning signs within xxx feet of the intersection AND mandated yellow light times according to the speed limit. Their ticket revenue went up and then back down, and the accident rate went down as well.
Likewise, anonymous speed data would be hugely useful to city planners. If people are constantly speeding through an area that has almost no accidents, they could consider raising the speed limit on a trial basis. People who drive 55 in a 45 all the time will usually drive 60 in a 50, so ticket revenue will still be there. Higher speed limits mean being able to move more cars through on the same lanes, rather than having to sink money into additional lanes when a road gets overcrowded.
Wow. Some people REALLY can't recognize a joke when they see one.
Next thing they'll be saying Obama was born in the U.S.
It's what happens when science becomes someone's religion. Creationist groups like the ICR work the same way: start with your conclusion and work backwards, rejecting anything that doesn't support the conclusion. More and more scientists with political motives are doing this sort of thing. It's frightening.
I rather like the idea of "dumb cars" being a factor now, because it means that when the "smart cars" or their users fail to be quite so smart, the cars around them can react without being able to communicate with them. It would be quite dangerous if they all operated on the assumption that every vehicle on the road was talking to them.
I once had someone swear to me they had an unbeatable password:
p@ssw0rd
They were using it on encrypted hard drives storing patient medical data. Yeah, i'll never use that company, ever.
There's no way of knowing how many lives have been ruined by arrests for rape, molestation, child porn, and other such crimes being publicized, then the person being released without charge. Retractions don't get nearly as much attention as arrest reports and news articles, meaning a person's name could forever be tied to a crime they did not commit and were not even charged with.
Another problem is when the media covers the disappearance of the latest missing blonde girl, and then gleefully trots out the name and mug shots of whoever gets arrested first. That person might be completely innocent, but the damage is done.
"The internet" is a vague term and isn't even what the report is about. The report is about IT operations. Sure if you combined all the datacenters in the world their carbon footprint would be HUGE, but then...let's consider the alternative. Let's start by storing all those TPS reports on paper. Billions of reams of paper, probably. We're going to need boxes or file drawers and folders to put them in. And warehouses in which to store them, which we can build to replace the forests we cut down to make the paper. Then of course there's the cost of transporting all this stuff wherever it's needed...that's a lot of gasoline. E-mail would be a lot less wasteful, but hey....Greenpeace is chiding us about producing too much pollution with our e-mail. So we'll FedEx those papers. Jet planes aren't nearly as bad on the environment.
Seriously. There are bigger things they could be tackling. If anything, Greenpeace should be pushing for MORE dependence on networking and IT and a trying to draw the world away from relying so much on paper. Fix THAT problem, then talk about IT.
I've not played SC2 enough to consider myself good at it. That said, I only play when it's with friends. There's one guy I 2v2 with regularly; we've played maybe 80-90 games together, and last I looked had about a 3:1 win ratio. If I had more fun playing the game I'd bother to actually get better at it.
Back when I cared enough about Company of Heroes to play it competitively, I was in the top 100 players as both Americans and Wehrmacht (If you play CoH and know the players from a few years back, you'll know what it means when I say I was automatching against people like Kodachrome and 12azor....and winning half my matches). These days I just try goofy strategies that make my teammates say "what the HELL did you just do?" and my enemies cry loudly on GR.org about how whatever unit I spammed is so overpowered.
CoH prior to Opposing Fronts was a far superior game to StarCraft or StarCraft 2.
Company of Heroes isn't. Granted there are times in my games where I push the 150 CPM mark for a minute or two, that's during the most intense fighting when I'm trying to micromanage a half-dozen tanks while keeping my infantry in the fight and in good cover. My average CPM for CoH is something like 30-40, and that's counting one command for each unit in a group...so a group of 3 units hits 30 cpm with one command every 6 seconds.
My God. It's so beautiful. An excellent argument for a small amount of chance to be inserted in to StarCraft.
The Koreans would riot.
I despise StarCraft. I really, honestly do. This isn't some trolling to piss people off, this is me venting.
StarCraft is all about speed and memorization. In that way it's more like a side-scrolling fighting game, where the person who can execute the right combos at the right time wins. Wrong build order? You lose. Didn't mass enough units by the five minute mark? You lose. I play StarCraft 2 with some friends from time to time and I do reasonably well at it, but it's nowhere near as fun as other games. It feels more like a job. I have no desire to play it solo.
What really disappointed me from the start is how the game utterly lacks any sort of reward for solid tactical decisions. High ground? That's negated by simple line-of-sight. Every shot is a hit, and every hit scores exactly the same damage. Compare that to Total Annihilation which at least attempted to give some realism in how units move and fire and the effects of terrain. TA's engine was FAR superior to StarCraft.
StarCraft is a clickfest, the closest thing RTS has to an arcade game. And it's tainted the whole genre.
So StarCraft was a dominant game when the World Cyber Games started. That doesn't mean it originated the idea of "esports" (a term I LOATHE by the way). I was playing in for-money Quake tournaments two years before StarCraft came out.
You see overcomplicated. I see multipurpose. Sure you could build a high-speed color sorter that is much smaller and more efficient, but this guy built something that could be used for a lot more than sorting colored blocks. As a proof of concept and early prototype, it's quite good.
Parker Brothers' "Aggravation" is a family tradition. Simple mechanics + a small degree of strategy, so it is accessible to young players and fun for adults as well.
"If you were in Joe User's department, which solution would you prefer?"
Oh I'd love Joe's solution. And then when Joe was out sick for a week and the server went down, I'd hate it. And my boss would pull a fit about it. He'd gripe to his higher-ups and a big to-do would be made over "the server being down" with the crucial information that it's Joe's Server being lost along the way. By Friday VPs are dragging IT personnel into meetings to discuss why my department's mission-critical server has been down for a week. IT the has to explain why Joe has a server that's not managed by IT and answer hours of stupid, repetitive questions that prevent them from actually getting any work done.
I kid you not, I've seen almost this very scenario play out, more than once. Information is lost as it moves through the chain and the complaint takes on a life of its own, so that when it does finally come down on the heads of IT, we waste valuable time trying to convince the overeducated buffoons hired to run the place that 1) we know what the hell we're doing, and 2) this is someone else's fault because we weren't allowed to set and/or enforce good network policies.
These policies aren't dreamed up by IT crews with nothing else to do. We are tight-fisted with our networks because if we aren't, WE are the ones who pay the price. Not the suits, not the workers, and not Joe "This is MY server" User.
As has been said: if you don't want to operate under the umbrella of IT, use online services or host your own outside of work.