Early adopter = shit won't work. No exceptions.
That's a rather shallow interpretation of the situation. Yes, when you're on the bleeding edge, you tend to get cut. You don't expect the provider to take a machete to you.
Early adopter = shit won't work. No exceptions.
That's a rather shallow interpretation of the situation. Yes, when you're on the bleeding edge, you tend to get cut. You don't expect the provider to take a machete to you.
Anteater: I can't sleep. I have indigestion from eating all those fire ants before bed.
Wife: You'd better take an ant acid.
@mott555 said in The game of "Spaghetti Servers":
Suddenly I don't feel quite so bad about putting a folder on my Western Digital NAS which is mounted via NFS on a virtual machine which services it out as an FTP site.
No, no, you're on the right track. Just add a few hundred more servers and you will be right where we are.
Boy, that would kill my preferred hold. #NoWrappingFingers
There was this joke about a woman who locked herself out of her car. She was telling her friend how she had to call her husband to bring a spare key, but after calling him, she discovered the passenger-side door was unlocked.
"What did you do?" the friend asked.
"What do you think I did? I locked the door."
Expected first employee feedback:
What the fk? Swearing at Work? Well fk me backwards with a telephone pole, the fascist fkers are trying to make me improve my fking language. No fking chance, fk-faces; this is an infringement of my fking right of free speech. Fking power-crazy a****les have their heads up their fking aes; don't have a fking clue how fking ridiculous it is to fking expect me to do this. Like I give a fk: there's no way you're making this my f**king problem!
Assorted random thought:
This site's new title, "The Daily That's Interesting", just doesn't have the same ring, somehow.
Three hard of hearing women on a bench:
First one: "It sure is windy today."
Second one: "It's not Wednesday, it's Thursday."
Third one: "I'm thirsty, too. Let's go get a drink!"
If you're talking about the anthropogenic climate change model, I thought they were far too busy overfitting to get their graphs to model historic behaviour to bother overmuch with future behaviour, and continually cite the likes of A1FI and RCP 8.5 as canonical truthful doomsday scenarios which will happen without any substantive backup (hint - neither will, since they rely on things that are currently reducing, staying the same or even increasing.)
There's data for the past, so one can do analysis. There's no data for the future, so one can only model. Models require assumptions: if we assume X happens then we can expect Y result. (It's not like we have another planet where we can quick try out all the different assumptions.)
I'm amused by the reaction to modelling in the denier crowd. Humanity models all kinds of things: weather, population, financials, strategy for wars, buildings, bridges, tunnels, and even computer programs. (In the latter case, that's what you'r doing when you benchmark, or project production loads, or growth of memory or disc storage.)
Of course, modelling can be based on good assumptions or poor; and it may be difficult to know what assumptions to make. Assumptions can be abused deliberately, as when Wall street firms project the performance of your 401K. (When did you ever see one of those projections that said your 401K performance would suck?)
It's legitimate to question climate models on some grounds. One might even say the models are abused, as an argument point. But to say modelling itself is bad? Foo.
There's also some areas that are more easily challenged than others. The idea that CO2 doesn't cause warming is idiotic; global warming heat capture is based on a simple equation: this much CO2 captures that amount of heat. That CO2 is increasing...pretty much any idiot can test that. That human activity is the cause of the increase is easy to show; it's a simple matter of, "Can the ocean absorb the 32 billion tons of additional CO2 produced annually by humanity?" (No.) "Can it absorb what is produced by natural processes?" (Yes.)
Where it gets gray is questions like:
Hence all the differing projections like A1FI and RCP 8.5, as different assumptions are fed into different models.
...when talking about division by zero, "undefined" is the usual word.
Sorry, mixed in the computer lingo. (Vader voice: Pray I don't change it to "NaN".)
@ben_lubar said in Win10 is becoming the biggest spyware ever:
I'm not sure how cloud clipboard would help me,
I see your mistake: you assume it is meant to help you. But it's actually only meant to help Microsoft, Microsoft's business partners, advertisers, marketers, NSA/FBI/DEA/etc, your local police, your boss (uses timeline to find out how well the slaves are working), and so on. It could go on to help Chinese and Russian hackers as well.
With all that helping, if it actually managed to help you too...huzzah!
@Maciejasjmj said in Win10 is becoming the biggest spyware ever:
It's not the 1990s, and you no longer need to know what an IRQ is or what an EMM is for to write a letter on a PC. How is opening the computers up to people who wouldn't be able to understand how they work a bad thing? So what if Grandpa has no idea what a URL is if we can use the technology to make it so that he doesn't have to know?
I can understand the motivation to make Windows accessible to people with an IQ of 40. My IQ is a tiny bit higher than that and I really resent being condescended to; the attitude that, "You don't know what you want because your IQ is 40, so let me fix your incompetence..." and, "Powerful tools are dangerous to people like you with an IQ of 40..."
Latest example is Visio. People with an IQ of 40 wouldn't understand object styles so they deleted the facility. So if I want my connectors to have fillet corners, I must set that individually on each one...and if I should subsequently use a built-in style it will 'correct' my 'inappropriate' choices.
@Jeff Atwood said:
Am I now obligated, on top of providing a completely free open source project to the world, to pay people for contributing information about security bugs that make this open source project better? Believe me, I was very appreciative of the security bug reporting, and I sent them whatever I could, stickers, t-shirts, effusive thank you emails, callouts in the code and checkins. But open source isn't supposed to be about the money⦠is it?
I see this as kind of a problem of understanding. Was he obligated to pay? No, and the people shouldn't have expected payment. It shows a lack of understanding of the nature of open source to expect a developer from one of those projects to come up with money.
But--and this is the hard part--were they obligated to report the bug for no payment?
I've seen this same error several times lately. One of the most glaring of these was a statement by someone (during the doxxing scandal) along the lines of, "Candy loves her body, loves to show it off, posts nude pictures on the web all the time; there are nudes of her everywhere. So why should Betty have a problem with her nudes being leaked on the web?"
People make different choices and have different likes and dislikes. Candy's free-wheeling nature in no way obligates Betty to be the same way, do the same, or enjoy having having her pictures flung to the wind. On a smaller scale, Jeff's commitment to open source does not obligate the bug contributor to have the same commitment.
The bug contributor's error was functional: It was stupid of him to assume that anyone in the open source community could pay for his discovery of a bug. That's like expecting a reward for returning a homeless man's jacket.
But Jeff's error is more fundamental, assuming that the bug contributor has a duty where, in fact, no duty exists.
It normally works, but not (apparently) when the export hangs β¦ which is the one case when you pretty much absolutely need it to work, of course.
I should have been clearer in my statement, because this is exactly my frustration: I've observed nowadays that cancel buttons do work...except when the associated process hangs. Hence my frustration: I very rarely need to cancel a working process.
Continuing the discussion from NULL: the worst mistake of computer science:
It has festered in the most popular languages of all time and is now known by many names: NULL, nil, null, None, Nothing, Nil, nullptr. Each language has its own nuances.Some of the problems caused by NULL apply only to a particular language, while others are universal; a few are simply different facets of a single issue.
NULLβ¦
subverts types
is sloppy
is a special case
makes poor APIs
exacerbates poor language decisions
is difficult to debug
is non-composable
Assertion (based on Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe):
βThe story so far: In the beginning
the Universe wascomputers were created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.β
Frustration with NULL is a symptom. The real world is messy...very messy. First go read Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (if you haven't already) and then we'll proceed.
Back now? Great. Here's your job: Make a program that handles every possible name (or lack thereof) in the world, so it can be stored with the canonical "Person" object.
Sound a bit hard? Of course it does. Because the world is messy. See, we like to imagine that our programs will be neat and clean, without all these nuisance decisions we're always having to add.
Won't happen. Because programs are about the real world.
Let me give you an example: I work for a healthcare system, and we havehad our own registration product. Naturally, it required the patient to have a name. But some patients don't have names. See item 40, and also this quote from the comments in the article:
@Mahmoud Al-Qudsi said:
An example for number 40, please ;-)
@Patrick said:Someone born into slavery in the Sudan, a woman born in rural China, an American baby recovered after being born into a toilet, a feral child, an amnesiac, etc, etc.
Back to our registration system. When the first [amnesiac/toilet baby/unconscious victim with no ID] floated into our ED, well, that stupid edit on the name field was a problem wasn't it? So our users invented a name (like "John Doe", but something else, I don't remember it now). That name is on, literally, hundreds of thousands of accounts. And we've had to program for it, (IF NAME = 'DOE, JOHN' THEN PERFORM SPECIAL-BILLING...). And then the system started getting touchy about the fact that we had four "DOE, JOHN" patients in the system at the same time, so we started doing "DOE, JOHN A", "DOE, JOHN B" and sometimes the registration person had to go through several names to find one that wasn't in use right now. And then one day, a real person named "DOE, JOHN D" walked into the hospital...and we already had a fake person with that name in the hospital.
The real world is messy. Deal with it.
NULL is a halfway decent solution for messiness. Deal with it. Coming up with nonsense like "Optional<T>
" just kicks the can down the road. Ultimately, you still have to deal with it.
Note: I've had my opinion revised since I wrote the above paragraph. Optional<T>
has a definite value and I can see using it in many cases. It does not solve the null problem entirely, and it doesn't solve the messy world entirely. But it would help, by explicitly informing the programmer that a value is optional.
If you aren't willing to deal with the real world, why are you a programmer?
So, what proposals do we have for more easily dealing with messiness?
A QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.
A QA Engineer walks into a bar.
Orders a beer. Gets "invalid numeric value."
Orders 0 beers. Gets
Orders 999999999 beers. Gets a stack overflow.
Orders a lizard. Gets a bill for $NaN.
Orders -1 beers. Gets a bar of soap.
Orders a sfdeljknesv. Gets a software testing joke.
Boss: How long will it take to do <X>?
I once had a boss that did something similar. I called it the "Dating Game" because the objective was to get you to say the date he had in mind..
Boss: When can you finish project X?
Me [doing a quick calculation based on 640 hour estimate]: I should be able to have it done by May 1.
Boss: What about if I assign another resource to the project?
Me: Well, then, we should be able to finish by March 1.
Boss: What about if I assign two additional resources to the project?
Me: Well, then it should be done by February 10th or so.
Boss: Great! Let's get going.
Of course there will be no additional resources; you will be slaving by yourself. And, inevitably:
Boss: But you promised me this would be done by February 10th?!
Hapless programmer (other people, I never actually had the nerve to do this.): Well, you promised me two additional resources.
Boss: I don't remember that. I remember you were going to work on it, and promised to have it done by February 10th.
@Hanzo said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:
Just using general knowledge and watching Ami movies and series got me 80%. Can I become president now?
boolean eligibleForPresident = person.isCitizenByBirth() && person.age() >= 35 &&
person.cumulativeResidence() > 14;
boolean canBePresident = eligibleForPresident &&
( person.isBillionaire() || person.getBillionaireFriendsList().size() > 1);
So @LB_ posted Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones. That linked to a story about MaxMind choosing a farm in the middle of Kansas as their default "somewhere in the United States but we're not sure where" return.
That in turn links to MaxMind's What is my IP address? page, which includes a geographic marker.
I am nukeable. This is how I learned that:
MaxMind missed me by an estimated 3,333 feet (1016 meters) so if a nuke were sent to their marked spot, I would be toast. If you find you are nukeable, it should give you a whole new perspective on data sharing. If you aren't, it should give you even more perspective to realize that they will miss you and nail some other poor sap. Maybe even that farm in Kansas.
@FrostCat said in The Official Funny Stuff Threadβ’:
Funny stuff: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160819-00/?p=94125
Someone--I guess a Rust dev--complained about a Windows feature they were using that, it turns out, they shouldn't have, and ended his comment with "Thanks, Microsoft." Microsoft employee's response: "Let me get this straight. You intentionally invoked undefined behavior, and now youβre upset that the undefined behavior isnβt undefined in the way that you like, and somehow thatβs Microsoftβs fault."
@Erufael said in The Official Funny Stuff Threadβ’:
@FrostCat Must be new to the company. Everyone knows everything is Microsoft's fault!
That's entirely wrong. It's always the user's fault. You read the @FrostCat post, and the Microsoft employee's response. All Windows behavior is intentionally undefined: if you use it, you're using it wrong.
I think maybe your computer is now a member of the Korean bot army.
@DoctorJones said in The Official Funny Stuff Threadβ’:
I named my first pet "Ab", but none of the sites will take it (too short). Fortunately, my next cat was "Bartholomew."
I totally made this up. My first pet was...you really didn't think I'd tell you, did you?
I used to do LAN parties when they were a thing. So much time spent taping down network cables, this would have been amazing. Need a device to remove it again though, that took almost as much time.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could run it in reverse?
(Resultant) force is rate of change of momentum. In a bird strike, that force is quite high because of the large difference in velocities. The force would be considerably higher if the plane encountered an anvil flying the in the opposite direction at the same speed, but the probability of that's pretty low.
That's really good to hear. Because, I swear, Wiley E. Coyote has one of those darned anvils in the stratosphere, like, every other minute.
http://digitalsynopsis.com/buzz/codebabes-web-development/Learn How To Code And Watch Your Instructor Undress As You Progress
"It was so great...didn't learn a thing."
I told this in another blog and decided it needed to be told here as well (it deserves to be told).
The setting is Salt Lake City International Airport. I am watching the baggage handlers outside the window. There is a baggage cart that kind of looks like a bin on wheels, and they are loading it by throwing in bags. Underhand. From a distance of about twenty feet. Seriously.
The handler takes each bag by the handle, swings it back and then forward, underhand, releasing it at the point on the swing where the resulting trajectory will carry it into the cart. Wheee...crash!!!
Which pretty much proved every rumor I ever heard about baggage handling--I was amazed.
You want to hear something REALLY scary?
You are so dated.
Today, low-light + IR hi res (1080p at least) cameras at the entrance take your picture and run facial recognition from 100 meters and iris scan recognition against government databases of known criminals--from 32 feet away. Camera systems exist that can read your fingerprints at 20 feet.
32 feet: Iris Recognition: the New Fingerprinting?
2 meters: AIRPrint performs ranged fingerprint scanning, won't let the terrorists win
100 meters: Nighttime Face Recognition at Long Distance: Cross-distance and Cross-spectral Matching (PDF)
Now that's spooky.
He'll have spent more time either travelling or pissing about with airports than he would have actually enjoying Berlin.
Well, yeah, duh. My experience is that's true for pretty much any vacation shorter than 10 days. (Okay, yes, I'm being hyperbolic.)
But I make this trip to Wyoming every once in a while (from Orlando, Florida) and travelling or pissing about with airports kills a full day. Going up, usually from 4 AM to 2 PM and, coming back, from 10 AM to midnight. So for a 7-day trip, I just spent 28% of my trip days in a car, in an airport, or on a plane...basically a third of my trip because I'm worthless the first day after getting to Wyoming.
Anyone who travels from the UK to Berlin to be there for a few hours is Doing It Wrongβ’.
That's because you're a glass-half-empty type. You're focused strictly on the goal of getting from Sheffield to Stanstead. He, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to have an adventure for nothing but some additional time. Yeah, he could have spent, what, 12 more hours cleaning his garage or something. Instead, he got in 4 hours of sightseeing in Berlin for 12 hours additional time not cleaning the garage.
He thought it was fun: Therefore he was Doing It Rightβ’, stop trying to rain on his parade.
No More Funeral Strippers
Why would they hire strippers? Hoping to get a rise out of the dead?
@cartman82 said:So basically, he's being offered to work for free,vying for a chance to eventually buy some of their oh so valuable stock, on the off chance their crappy startup survives.without a chance of any further compensation because the startup will foldvying for a chance to sink his money into their crappy stock so he can lose his money along with all the other investors.We all know that version's more likely.
it'll probably fold having spent all its money on an outside contractor at exorbitant rates. a contractor that will be found, on investigation, to be owned or controlled by the former CEO...
Sounds to me like he's being paid negative in the long run, because even if the mess floats, all he gets is dividends. This is, without a doubt, the worst employment offer I've ever heard.
I don't know why you're arguing about who's responsible. People got poisoned, willfully. And it's a big political hot potato. So look at all the politicians pointing:
Prediction: no one will be held responsible.
@accalia said in π§ The Official Spam Emails Threadβ’:
@aliceif said in π§ The Official Spam Emails Threadβ’:
The German country code is +49, btw.
and Cuba's international dialing code is +119 (or was.... i think they might have changed it as you will see...)
I remember that because we had an office system that had to dial 9 to get an outside line, then if you wanted to dial cuba you dialed 119[NUMBERS]
but.... if you DIDN'T pause for long enough between getting the outside line and dialing the country code the PBX picked up that you had dialed 911 and completed the call (so if you need to dial 911 you don't need to remember to get the outside line. that's actually required of phone systems)
I lost count of how many times people accidentally called 911 instead of calling their contacts in cuba.... but when we started faxing them things got interesting as instead of apologizxing for the wrong number the police showed up in person becuase the fax didn't pause, got caught by the special 911 rule and no one was on the line to say it was a misdial.....
"91" is basically the worst PBX outdial code for the US. I worked for a company that had that code, but my team were located in a refurbished house (direct phone lines). You would not believe how many visiting coworkers dialed 911 trying to call long distance. (I remember warning someone before letting them use my phone...they still did it.)
The company redid its PBX and changed it to 91 for local and 90 for long distance, because the local authorities threatened to fine them per call if they didn't change it. Helped a bit, I guess.
But now I work for the parent company. Brand-spanking new buildings, all new phones, 91 outdial code. (Partial mitigation: you don't dial the 1 for long distance anymore.)
See, now this right here is a solution only Microsoft could come up with.
They added scripting to nearly every product they ever made...insecure VB scripting. Then, rather than make the scripting secure, the solution is, "Well we just won't allow people to share documents anymore."
Documents which are, inevitably, intended only for sharing, since the whole point of writing a document is for business communication.
So what about SharePoint? Those documents are made by another computer. What about internal email? I am always getting that (paraphrased) notification, "Oooo...this document from your Accounting department might be unsafe because it's from another computer!" warning all...the..time. So I assume all of those documents will be blocked now as well?
All from a company that beats up on Java, Chrome and Adobe (at least) because, "They aren't secure!"
What makes a wiki suck?
I know this is bad, but the first answer I though of when I saw this question was, "Users."
I encountered one of those evil cats, when I was a kid, six or seven.
I was at my grandparent's place and they had a whole raft of half feral kittens around. I wanted to catch them all and pet them, but of course they were having none of that. In the end, I caught one, who promptly let out a howl of fear.
Out of nowhere, the tomcat appeared and jumped up onto my torso. His head was about even with the bottom end of my sternum, his front paws were wrapped around to my back, and he started digging. When I let go of the kitten to deal with him, he let go of me.
Fabulous set of scratches on either side of my back. Unusual for tomcats to defend a kitten like that, but I had the marks to prove it.
@Maciejasjmj said in Why is it "disgusting" to drink breast milk?:
Seriously, is it worse to eat meat of a random woman than of a random cow?
So a suckling baby is committing cannibalism? Wow, that's a stretch. I think your comparative needs work.
Ok you win, if only because we have run out of (strict) trigonometrical thingies to play with without leaving the arc of the story
I don't know; I think maybe there's room for a joke about the sec's and also cosec's. Then there's versin, which sounds interesting, and we shouldn't forget vercosin and covercosin, both of which sound utterly obscene.
Then there's exsec's, which I guess you have with your ex.
The "have her's": haversin and havercosin, which are, well, I'm not sure what to make of them. These are about the "spherical law of cosin's", which seems worthy of a how-to book all its own.
Then there's the duals. I've been using the function names, but these are usually actually pronounced "sign" rather than "sin". Which gives us, to borrow from this page: "Haversine? I don't even know 'er."
@CoyneTheDup said:Orders 999999999 beers. Gets a stack overflow.Alternative result:
Our QA engineer is missing since the day of the downtown beer flood incident. Possibly drowned. Last sign of life: text message "Test failed - can't abort".
I didn't call it a "stack overflow" for nothing.
Well, now I want to know, darn it. Did he have his little umbrella? Stupid newsless story.
I bought a new bicycle a few years ago, and to my mild surprise it came with a battery-powered taillight despite having a dynamo in the front wheel hub to power the headlight. The logic of this escapes me entirely, except that maybe the manufacturer wanted to save on a few metres of wiring.
Considering relative prices of copper and plastic, it might be justified.
Actually, I suspect they are thinking of safety. It's good if the tail light stays on, even if the dynamo is stopped, such as if you're parked on the edge of the road.
@anonymous234 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
A programming language that compiles to a 3D model of an Analytical Engine, or any other mechanical computer, that is then either run inside a physics simulator or 3D printed.
Already done, sort of. Ada Lovelace created an algorithm (pic below) that was designed to be run by the Analytical Engine. It's a sort of machine code and references variables, so just target that with your compiler.
@Arantor said in Is ruby dying?:
So if Ruby is dying and .NET is dying and PHP is dying, does that mean the future is NodeJS? Because if it is, fuck that noise.
No...
Java is the winner. Oh, wait...
https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/35u5bv/is_java_dying_as_a_programming_language/
<mutter>Buncha youngsters, think FORTRAN and COBOL are passe, expect their favorite language to be the winner forever...</mutter>
@wharrgarbl said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@dkf said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
It's a similar problem to what you have with electricity supply and sewerage service
And for some reason, I have zero problems with electricity and sewerage.
Electricity utilities don't generally have the power to choose which TV's, refrigerators, and new innovations (pop-up hot dog cookers) you can plug in and use; nor are they in the position of telling the hot dog cooker manufacturer to pony up $$$ if they want their device to work in consumer homes.
Likewise, sewage utilities don't get to demand you use their inferior model of faucet; or make you pay extra if you want to use another model.
ISP's do have that power, which is the main part of the problem.
@dkf said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
@CoyneTheDup said in Net neutrality non-neutrality:
Because, using 25MBps as the standard, 50% of the people in the U.S. have access to 1 provider (access to no more than 2, 70%); and the only way the consumer can reach the services is via that ISP; and the only way the service can reach the clicks is via the same ISP.
And that's the actual problem, compounded by the way that in some places the ISPs are lobbying like hell to get local governments and state governments to erect various barriers to stop new competitors from arising.
But exclusive franchises (monopolies) are not the whole problem. Having multiple providers, none of which provides all the services you want, merely forces you into the lesser-of-evils selection process.
Exclusive franchise is a problem, but the bigger problem is ISP ability to prevent you from connecting to services.
@boomzilla said in βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
25 volunteers repeatedly jumped on a cracked panel to test its durability
I don't follow. Are you saying that's a bad idea? Seems to me that if it didn't shatter, it's pretty durable.
My mother told a story once about a truck driver for an oil company drilling rig. There was a bridge behind our house, in sight from the windows. She said he zoomed by the house (they all drive like maniacs) then slammed on the brakes and stopped just short of the bridge.
He got out of the truck and walked to the middle of the (100+ foot long) bridge. Then he jumped up and down on the bridge 3 or 4 times, then went back, climbed in the truck and drove across.
We always thought that was a phenomenally bad idea. But, hey, if it was good for a bridge, why not for glass bridge panes?
Also: note that they did not say the cracked pane was hanging over the cliff when the volunteers jumped on it.
You can make it large so it can contain more tiles,
The silly thing is that, the last time MS used tiles was ........ Windows 2. They discarded tiles for the separated window motif in Windows 3 because no one liked tiles. I guess every broken concept comes around again after a while, huh?
Is it a MySQL server using the Blackhole storage engine ?
That's like the coolest engine ever. No duplicate keys, no bad index performance, nothing.
The only thing is, now I want a Whitehole storage engine, that always has the data you need properly indexed, even if it was created in Arcturus.
I once endured a major rage-session because I had the utter temerity to highlight some important text in red, in an email message. Serious rage. Rage that made you want to flee.
I'm still careful to use magenta instead of red.