Yeah, I've looked into it, and it's just easier to import a reliable Asian housewife these days than build a reliable smarthouse with the devices built in Asia. For one, the statistical chance of the housewife burning the place down with the kids inside and running away with the poolboy is at least one standard deviation lower.
scrib
@scrib
Best posts made by scrib
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RE: Which is the bigger WTF?
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RE: Conversations overheard
So this conversation is going on again? Really?
First, suggesting that the majority of mac users are in any way technically proficient is less accurate than saying all mac users are neckbeards, skinny women with platelet deficiencies and the fat women who would rather be (either of) them. Mac users are idiots, first and foremost. This usually keeps them from trouble since Apple is good at keeping everyone in the plastic balls pen.
The ones that get into trouble are the mildly technically proficient. They are at the stage in their technical knowledge equivalent to guys that just learned that putting their dicks into things is fun. So they go ahead and do so...enthusiastically. And when their dicks get stuck without being ripped off they end up having to call a genius who ends up selling them a replacement dick. And maybe, if they're lucky, some lube.
That's not to say MS isn't guilty of bending over forwards and spreading its cheeks for Enterprise customers, leaving everyone else with a mess to clean up. They are, after all, being paid real well to do so.
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RE: Smashing the Vegetarian Vaccination Binary! #BecauseScienceIsStillAThing
Well you don't want to buy more non-GMO salt at once than you're going to use. Think of all that salt that'll go bad and you'll have to throw out.
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Dental admin software
I should just stop at that and let everyone fill in the blanks.
Just about any small market/small business software is going to be a collection of WTFs a mile long. So compared to some, this one is pretty innocuous. Yeah, that's like saying, "compared to murder, this other thing isn't all that bad."
It started a couple of months ago when I was tasked by a client to install an update to their dental admin software. The first thing that jumped out at me was that the software was a beta and sent out to "knowledgeable" offices. My client didn't even understand what that might mean but insisted that I install it. In a bout of professionalism I called the developer/publisher/pusher to verify that the version is stable enough to put it on the receptionist's machine. To paraphrase them:
"Don't do that, that version's been recalled. Destroy the disks, we'll send new ones with a stable version."
So, OK. SpITy Sense™ did well by me. I inform the client about the snafu and they become impressed. I ignore the fact that they didn't listen to me, as this is a new client and they have to be slowly drawn into the certainty that I really do know better than them in matters of IT and when I say no it means no.
Fast forward to last week and the client is calling me back with a little package of CDs and "manuals" in their hands, asking me if I could pretty please update them this time.
Well, the software needs to be updated some time. They happen to be on the previous major release, which aside from the fact that the company is going to stop supporting the upgrade path very soon, it doesn't scale with the DPI on the desktop. I'm hoping the new version does because that will mean I can change the DPI instead of the resolution to non-native on the LCD screen of the receptionist who keeps on complaining about headaches and tired eyes.
Smallish reason to improve things, but the office is already paying for it anyway.
But a couple of things which didn't register last time jumped out at me as I prepared the installation.
It's on CDs. Two CDs. The total size of the package is 724MB. 55MBs is for the user manual, plus another 33MBs for change notes and >100MB of MDX for a simplified database with the ability to show images of teeth. All the PDF files require Adobe Flash (they're interactive!) and could have been dropped down to a couple of megs. So, seeing as they passed 650MB making their manuals fancy and unreliable on systems where flash player is not allowed (the only sane policy), they put it on two CDs.
Neither Flash nor Reader resides on either CD...and it gets better.
Now, you would think that the software would have pretty low requirements if it's on CDs instead of a DVD. After all, that suggests the company expects to sell to people with pretty old hardware. So minimum system reqs should be in the P4 range, right?
Well, no. Core 2 Duos@3.0 GHz. With 4 GB RAM and 80GB hdd for the client.
Remember the PDF files that need Flash to navigate? Those alone make the reception i3 slow down to a chug. And that computer only has 2GB as it's 32bit Windows anyway. It does, however, run the previous version, which has the same requirements, decently.
So why that much RAM? I haven't used it enough to know. No reason whatsoever as far as I can see for a DB program like this, but it fills me with dread to find out how bad their memory management is. The time it takes to move between records and the HDD accesses involved aren't promising. Then again, the requirement might be there to make it possible to read the manual and open the program at the same time.
Then there's the server, which handles backups and other tasks in the office. It has all of one client for this software, which is a good thing because the recommendation for the server is 8 gigs if it has 2 or more clients. Luckily the minimum is 3 for 2 clients, so 2 gigs for 1 client should be enough.
However, on running the sys-requirements program, although the processor is a pretty solid Xeon @ 2.5 GHz, the program starts blaring warnings because it demands...2.6GHz.
It all goes on like this. The most minor WTF I've found is that autorun.exe has fixed pathing so you can't use it to install off of other media. Luckily the setup files seem to have relative pathing. I wouldn't know if this holds true all the way as I decided to do a bit more research in a couple of VMs before committing to an actual install.
But you know what may in fact be the best part? That the primary prep for installing an update is to...make a copy of the program directory. And this is important because all the patient data is stored in the directory path under /Data/DATA.
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RE: Pro-Gamergate is pro-life
Desert Bus is probably a better game than Depression Quest.
Trying to top each other over what horrible game is a better game than Depression Quest is a better game than Depression Quest.
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RE: Windows shutdown script fustercluck
This is a respectable forum.where civilized conversation taking place. why are you trying to degrade it? wtf is wrong with you?
You are quite right, sir or madam. I shall amend my post forthwith!
Edit: The post has been amended! May it better suite the refined cultural atmosphere of these forums. You have my sincere ablutions and hopefully they may in some small way make up for my prior transgressions, good fellow internet citizen.
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RE: STOP DOING THAT!!! </b>
I was recently walking a customer over the phone on running Teamviewer so I could check out what her computer was doing (it had been six months and four malware programs since I last dealt with her). I had her type the name teamview in the Start screen and then asked her to press enter. She asked me about the little stick with a circle (magnifying glass), and if she should press it. I said no, just press enter.
Next thing you know she's asking me what to do after describing the 8.1 search page. I was ready to scream.
Later, once I'm in, she keeps on taking over the mouse and tries to run the search for Teamviewer again, trying to show me what she did before because I obviously couldn't figure it out. It was one of the few instances where I actually told a client directly to calm down, stop talking, and do exactly as I say.
Just not using tab and enter on logon screens is something I have to stand and watch so often and the minutes add up.
They have no ability to discover usability shortcuts. The funny thing is that the people who do that tend to also be the ones that use the computer all the time. They just happen to use a specific program or set of programs -- in exactly the way they were taught how to use it/them and god help you if you tell them a different way because it took them long enough to get to the minimum level they've mastered.
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RE: STOP DOING THAT!!! </b>
Seeing a designer reopen the same file six times because they can't be bothered with minimizing the CAD program window while checking something on the internet makes me hurt inside. Bonus points for doing it on a workstation that they insisted they had to have but never even cause to sweat.
Finding a bunch of personal pictures (some very personal) on the receptionist's desktop in the downloads folder because apparently things which are downloaded to a computer are all temporary or something.
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RE: Conversations overheard
I'm not sure if you're trolling or if you're stuck in one of those time pods @blakeyrat keeps talking about. KDE and Gnome both automount USB devices, and will optionally open a file manager for you. This is even true if you use one of the hardcore distros like Slackware.
It was true not too long ago. Still, if you want, I can claim to hold to a journalistic form of argument: it's not that my points are actually true or accurate, it's that they argue towards a greater truthiness.
There was a time in my consulting-side career where I made decent money cleaning up PCs for exactly this reason.
"I don't know how that virus got on here!"
Checks internet history for torrent, long list of pages appear."I don't know why the computer won't work! It must have been something you did! Remember when you said you'd improve it a bit."
"So it broke right after I worked on it?"
"No, but how else would it have stopped working."
Turns out AHCI was switched to IDE in the BIOS -- on an SSD equipped machine. Checks internet history, finds sites which purport IDE is faster than AHCI and how to change it.Free software (legal or not) is like free advice. Sometimes it's a deal, other times it's too expensive.
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RE: Representative documentation
+1 that's actually really helpful, I sometimes struggle for how to word things to not give the impression the other guy is a moron and give benefit of the doubt
Yeah, for me every time I give benefit of the doubt I'm bitten in the ass.
For instance, the one time I don't ask the client that has worked with me for years and who usually is on the ball whether the router was plugged in. Or I do ask and assume a client knows which is the router and which is the modem when he or she tells me all the lights are on, and I get there and neither of them are on.
And that is why if I'm forced to make an on-site call I'll ask for way more than the two minutes of me looking at an all-on-one printer's front to press the button that says "Auto Answer" is actually worth. If they don't want to engage their brains and lie to me over the phone that they did check the front and button light is on they should pay for it.
/rant
Latest posts made by scrib
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RE: Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
Oh thank the flying spaghetti monster! You've saved and improved the human condition — just not necessarily in the way you think you have.
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RE: Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
It's the same as every other commodity in that increased demand enables scaled-up production that drives prices down steeply.
And for what it's worth, it can get smaller to work more efficiently. How does 57W out of a 1cm² chip grab you?
That number looks awesome, and I suppose under optimal conditions it'll be just that. My point, however, was about the thermal limits imposed by area. In a given area only so much light falls down. In essence, you can use half or even a fifth the area of current conventional systems to produce the same amount of electricity, but you'll never be able to surpass that. Laws of thermodynamics and all that.
Scientists at Airlight and IBM envision the HCPVT system providing sustainable energy to locations around the world including southern Europe, Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the southwestern part of North America, South America, Japan and Australia.
So even this system, which is so very efficient, is seen as being limited by it's own developers in where it can be best deployed.
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RE: Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
I believe that didn't apply to solar panels for a long time. But if you want to say that suddenly, after decades of stasis, the price has gotten an order of magnitude better, and the product has possibly had a dramatic increase in quality, I'll admit that's possible, but someone needs to show hard numbers.
How much high-quality Chinese stuff do you have?
Solar is different than other silicon because it can't get smaller to work more efficiently. Perhaps this is one of the problems computer people have getting around the idea that better silicon production always results in better cost/yield, conflating Moore's Law with the silicon itself.
While there have been some advances in silicon cells, the most promising area of research appears to be graphene and/or printable cells. With printables you get a lot lower efficiency but higher yield per dollar spent. With graphene you can theoretically get good yield, but it's right now very expensive to make the stuff in the quantities needed. Either way, you still have to have a decent installation with collection point, inverter, storage, and constant maintenance.
Really, the tech right now is only slightly more viable than fusion (with a much lower payoff and needing to build up a completely different infrastructure), so we'll have to wait and see.
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RE: Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
Loads of sunlight. Except for the weather usually being cloudy where I live anyway, which is a whole 'nother thing. We get more cloud than the Pacific Northwest. And more rainy days.
Wind and tidal power make more sense than solar for us. (Hydro would work too, except we've got the wrong geology and topography. The big reservoirs we have are mostly for drinking water.)
Yeah, the thing is that having sunlight isn't quite enough if the atmosphere above you is filtering out lots of various portions of the infrared spectrum. It can be OK, under certain circumstances, but most places in the EU are not really viable. For instance, that the Germans are trying for solar has more to do with politicians who think all sunlight is the same and those who would suck off at the public teet than any engineering basis. Nothing could be funnier except if the Scandinavians tried it.
Hydro is a big deal in Canada, and accounts for about 90% of power generated in some provinces. But most of Canada is pretty much tapped and has to resort to other sources. Wind was proposed as one of those, except that no one has been able to make the wind blow harder (but not too hard) during peak hours. So more gas plants it is.
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RE: Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
But (assuming by methane we're referring to biogas not natural gas) the carbon in that CO2 didn't use to be underground in fossil fuels. It used to be in living plants (and I mean last month, not millions of years ago) and before that it was ... CO2 in the air, exactly as much as it is now.
First there's the amount of land you need to produce either biogas or biofuel and not planted with forests or food crops, followed by highly inefficient collection, and ending with fertilizer runoff and all the other farm pollution problems except now you've got way more farm. If you took out fossil fuels from the mix, you might still get more energy than you put in, but you definitely wouldn't get a whole lot more.
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RE: Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
The EU is closer to the Sahara. It's bigger than the whole of Australia, and gets plenty of insolation. There are also some solar power plants already in Spain. (Won't be fitting solar panels to my current house though; it's really not cost-effective where am due to a combination of extreme cloudiness and very low sun angle for much of the year.)
Most of the EU has a higher latitude than the most populous parts of Canada. True, Canada is screwed by having the Canadian Shield, which pretty much means it (and the northern states of the US) can get arctic weather express delivered like it was about a week ago, The important takeaway is that much of the EU is stuck at latitudes that do not get the sun needed for efficient PV.
Get this through your head -- if the pollution generated to produce a PV panel* is greater than what it would have saved during its entire operational life in that area (and I believe all PV panels have to be replaced every 20-25 years, depending on environment), then you, as the user of PV, are actually more evil than me as the user of hydrocarbons. Even more so if you did get it subsidized.
*Which is substantial, but I haven't seen anyone try to compare it apples to apples to hydrocarbons.
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RE: Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
There are some great renewable sources and the solution is a mix of each. Wind, tidal, geothermal, hydro, different solar (not just photovoltaic), even burning hydrogen or methane or ethanol, off the top of my head.
For just electricity? Yes, maybe. For electricity and everything else fossil fuels are burned (not processed like for plastics), which is many times worldwide electrical generation? Then no, if you ever want to see the human species pull the poorest of us out of the worst conditions. There's no way to drop the entire (or even majority) world economy on all of that. Hydrogen is great, but needs to be created through either electricity or a catalyst (which can take even more energy to produce) -- lots of it. Methane and ethanol still release CO2, ethanol at a higher rate per unit of work than gas.
Current fossil fuels are about the most efficient return for energy used to acquire because it externalizes the cost of initial oil production to the planet, like much of everything else we do (a metric ton of iron ore is worth about $120 -- look at the price of a weight-set and think about that for a minute). Uranium would be the most efficient but we would rather have thousands, if not millions, die from coal dust inhalation, well explosions, wars to secure wells, radiation exposure from burned coal, etc, than hundreds or less be exposed to some radiation from nuclear waste.
With green tech there's always so much handwavium. People say they did the math and then think that that's solely the only problem. No one in these discussions takes into account the true energy cost of producing PV on the scale they want. It's like someone who only knows HTML dictating what can and can't be done in C#.
The math espoused upthread isn't enough, because averages don't work like that IRL. We don't get to pick perfect spots for putting panels, because it will have secondary effects. Plus any PV installation which is subsidized is, you know, being paid for by everyone. Just because you have not paid for it yourself, or have had the cost greatly reduced, doesn't mean the cost is disappearing.
And the kicker? The way things like this work, most often the people who can most afford panels in the first place are the ones to install them.
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RE: Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
Assuming we amp up solar energy consumption so that every square meter of land is covered in panels, that excess energy can be stored losslessly, and and that every day is full sun (not quite the case in Alaska), 0.75kWh/day/m2 across 9.857 x 1012 m2 yields a shockingly large number - about 576,000 times more than consumption. Granted, that estimate is a little too far on the sunny side of things.
Aside from being an insane level of sunny butsumption here, I'd like to point out that you're suggesting to cover at least 1/576,000th of the US in panels. Have you considered the energy cost of producing all of them? Or storing the energy when there's no sun? How about the price of energy when trying to pay off for all those panels?
It's not happening.
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RE: Pro-Gamergate is pro-life
256 shades of gray
6 Bits of Luminescence Information minus 14 Reserved Values
I knew I was in over my head as I watched Hanzo Gray write the server program not even in assembly, but binary.
[size=7]WTFs intentional.[/size]
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RE: Excel is hard. Actually, no, coding is hard.
That just gave me a flashback to playing around with SAS/C in high school on the Amiga. I was programming crappy MUI (Magic User Interface, a UI skin library, donchaknow) toolets, and the way to interface with the Workbench UI was something like that. Most of the details completely elude me (so I'm probably wrong in some way here), except that I learned that UI programming is something I prefer to avoid at all costs.