Posts by Notas Badoff

Next year in wallmerica

A world-wide organization I'm a member of finally set next year's meeting, in Washington, D.C. The only way this makes sense to me, is that it will be so short a distance to go protest outside the Capital.

"You're attending a conference on 'religion' and 'violence'? Denied!" I'm not sure even the Canadians will be able to get there, to talk about their amazing work on non-violence and conflict resolution.

It may just end up being a two venue teleconference after all. (Hmm, I think that's the see-through wall Trump has been talking about?)

Deep time

Talk about Easter eggs. Is it possible that the definition of Unix time was influenced by someone French? La Marseillaise anyone?

Wo is me

Chinese pinyin for 'I' is 'wǒ'. Anybody remember if in the "product trademarking wars" Chinese companies simply tried working around the trademarks by using 'wophone', 'wopad', etc.? wophone.com seems null-terminated. (Mebbe Apple bought it?) wopad.com is for sale. wophone.net is too. Guess discerning customers wanted the "real thing" or not at all.

Codiocracy

If someone ever wants to do movie along the lines of Idiocracy about code, development, projects, benevolent dicks for life, etc., there's a big part in it for this guy. Just doesn't *know* when he's being stupid kinda describes the casting, right?

You will appreciate what *we* say you should appreciate!

Recently Google 'updated' Google News to a new ~visual~ format. Each news item is now a 'card', with picture and headline and a few more bits, each 'card' about a half screen high. Material design? The total effect is a long line of billboards I have to walk down with a lead foot on the pagedown accelerator.

This isn't design. This is ego-ridden grandiosity repainting the screen using norovirus.

Have they tried...

turning it off and on again?

As in the site simply not serving those images for awhile, and then noting to enquirers that 'free' does have limits. 14 years and the users aren't amazed that the site is still there, might just need a little moola and 'free' has limits? It never occurred to them that they hadn't ever actually supported the delivery of their pictures?

Common sense has become noticeably rare.

Shootout at the OK court

At some point the transnational companies are just going to have to challenge all the authorities together to find a workable common sense solution.

My feeling is it would be a wonderful gesture (how many fingers?) for Google to say - okay, now searches for horse products will result in displaying only "Sorry, Canada says no".

That will give people a starting point for discussion. I could not predict where the discussions would end up, or when.

"Suspicion Deflection"

Oh if only they'd named it "Drop Bear" then they could believably claim it was one of them Asian nation states!

(Yeah, yeah, I know, but the American public wouldn't remember 'continents' ...)

Hey, what's that smell?

" Astronomers will continue to check the results to see if other comets exhibit the same behavior."

They do. This article already said "... and that other comets also emitted similar emissions."

And another article at phys.org also mentions "To verify their results, they tested readings from three other comets, as well, and found similar results."

So comet poots raised a stink cuz they didn't know who dunnit. Now we'll be watching for those 'cropdusting' jokers.

Some edits

"Next year, Boeing is planning to do some test flights with an autonomous airplane, albeit one loaded with pilots and engineers rather than passengers valuable people like executives."

"The industry is also facing a severe shortage of pilots people will to work for low pay under insane conditions, so Boeing every company is looking for a high-tech solution."

The above is a generic statement that fits *every* industry these days, yes?

Missing the point

"... that in order to right lighten the ship at her newly severed enterprise company, employees need ..."

Isn't that much clearer now?

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Microsoft/IBM/HP are where they are now because of where their best (former) employees are now...

Scads!!

"... blaming the delays on "a higher than anticipated demand" from its newly combined customer base."

Really? So allasudden you're getting 3 or 5 times the number of transactions than you've ever seen before? Is there any possible reading of that statement that doesn't make people guffaw?

If PR people can't identify embarrassing phrases, what were they trained to do?

... and one for you.

So if I've have one account for family, and a different one for work pursuits, and another for boring dev-related stuff, and a completely different one with a piquant and misleading username for boasting about my nefarious activities, I just give them the first three? That'll be helpful to them, right?

Actually, I'm thinking giving them the dev-related (nerdarious?) accounts should be required for all H-1B visas. Even if no guarantee they're good at dev, at least it's evidence they can successfully pretend to competence?

Fuzz testing

Since you Simon zeroed in on that word again I think I'm thinking what you're thinking, that the absurdity would have been even more transparent if they'd said "... accelerate the benefits of cognitive rational technology services for our clients around the world."

Or intelligent, or beneficial. Actually any of the other words that managers might actually understand would serve also. As it is re: management 'cognitive' is a foreign word to them, almost best defined as "what you ain't."

P-p-p-p-pull my finger

Oh c'mon, get three font designers together with a hip-hop artist and they'll shred this argument to pieces with a catchy rap diss to boot. The only similarity I can see is the near match in color. And that just says it doesn't have to be the color green - blue is a color made for lawyers! (Apologies to those who remember the Samsung S3 launch)

Side effects

And here I was going to congratulate you at how your background processing somehow made FireFox run more smoothly, using much less CPU.... Oh dear, why is it running better?? An April Fools trick by Mozilla?

Foresight

Somehow I think it is a 'likely' that this judge has never been further east than Martha's Vineyard. Nor will they ever.

Bots... bots who need data / Are the luckiest bots in the world

The Chinese bot creating 100s of articles undoubtedly was just massaging the masses of data about Olympic events, competitors, times, rankings, etc. into easily scannable tables and lists. Wu-hu bot!

Contrast that with economics numbers. Even more voluminous and impenetrable. You could format it for display however you like, but that isn't really going to help anyone read it except for some economists. You need analysis of complex interrelated data, and with respect to higher-level understanding of how all the relationships affect each other, before the meaning of developments becomes clear(er).

Simply spewing a larger quantity of data about car crashes, pistachio prices, murders and missing cats is not going to inform people. It is going to leave more confusion in its wake. Which is going to allow every motivated blogger and radio personality to fill the gap with their own self-serving analyses.

More real data without valid neutral interpretation at the source will expand fake news.

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