Posts by a_yank_lurker

Slurp and Calendars

Slurp will be late for Halloween this year but hopefully not late enough to ruin Christmas. But they may ruin many a Yank's Thanksgiving given the atrocity that every new release is.

Yawn

Slurp seems to be late to the party and overhypes their dismal 'solution' as an all encompassing panacea. Many have a love-mostly hate relationship with IM clients in the office as they a source of easy harassment when having to send an email or horrors actually walk to the person's desk would be more appropriate. The worst abuse is when one is going through their morning hate mail to see what is causing their hind quarters to burn and some pings with a question about an email just as you begin to read them. I have them ask about something that was assigned to me overnight which I had not even had a chance to review with expectation that I could give an intelligent answer about it. Teams just another moronic excuse to needlessly harass people and cause a drop in productivity.

AI means

Artificial Idiocy means racism by another means. AAE or other variations are not standard English (define that) but they are valid dialects. So if you write using a dialect AI will flag you as a ... aka idiot, moron, etc. Because it is done by AI it has to be objective (really?) </snark>

Misuse

Stack Overflow is not a bad resource when used correctly. However copy/paste an answer from a question is never best use. The best use is to see what kind of code works for a specific problem. The problem needs to be read carefully because I have found often they are similar to my question but enough different that the answers are not quite what I need. But they can point me in the right direction particularly when then point out a function in the standard library I was unaware of that might do the trick. Also, pay attention to the dates of the post as that might tell you if the answer is applicable to the language version you are working with.

To me the problem is misuse of a resource not the resource itself. Remember code snippets are intended to be examples of how to do something not the what you should do in production code.

Fantasy Land

Computing devices are a mature market for all devices. Unless a device is near death there is often no compelling reason to replace it. The replace cycle will stretch out and eventually flatten out. Any growth in the market will be because of overall population growth not new 'features'. 5G will take time to roll out and current phones often work well enough there is no pressing need to get a 5G phone for most.

My prediction is a continues slide in units sold for a few more years until the sales matches the replacement rate. Then any growth will be minimal with quarterly peaks and troughs that may be somewhat seasonal.

Point of the trade war

Lost in this is the point of the trade war with China is force China to abide by international norms or make it expensive to source from China. Realistically only a fraction of the jobs moved from China will migrate back to the US but many will migrate to other countries in the region really hurting China but boosting countries like Viet Nam or India; the jobs will somewhere. That is assuming China does not cave in.

Digging Your Own Grave

Discovery is by its nature somewhat broad and given a global policy would have come from the C-suite rummaging around in their communications is relevant. Trying to narrow it is going to anger any fair mind jurist and raise a strong suspicion that you are hiding something from the court. Not a recipe for winning a case. The quickest way to lose a case is to convince the court you are hiding something even if it is only hinted at in the evidence available.

Fortunately

I started reading this putrid idiocy on an empty stomach. Artificial idiocy will not be anywhere near capable enough in 500 years let alone 5 years to understand the nuances of a problem. As long as there is Slurp's Spyware-as-a-Service call centers will be around. (Don't get me started about the stupidities I have to deal with the company's Bloat box on an almost daily basis).

Fishing or Phishing

While this is civil trial in a UK court my general understanding of Common Law is a witness who is subpoenaed must show up in court If the side subpoenaing them decides not to call them they do not testify. It sounds like these witnesses, if subpoenaed, would have been subpoenaed by Lynch's team and they were not called. If HPE's shysters want them to appear ask for subpoena but I suspect would sink more rapidly than a lead balloon.

Names

Does Slurp want the printable ones almost suitable for young children or the unprintable ones for their Spyware-as-a-Service Bloatware?

If...

If being an idiot were a crime the gallows would be busy.

Depth of Knowledge

I am reminder of an observation about accident rates have an inverse U with organizational size. Very small and very large organizations have low rates (for different reasons) while mid-sized organizations have the highest rates. Something suggests that very small organizations are relatively immune because their size means the IT staff is not dealing with a complex situation and backups are relatively easy to do and test. Very large organizations actually have dedicated experts. But mid-sized organizations have enough complexity that doing backups, etc. requires more skill and knowledge that is somewhat hit or miss but they do not often have dedicated experts to do these tasks. Thus the optimum target size for a municipality or company are the ones with enough complexity but are likely not to have staff with the required depth of knowledge in all areas.

What Suckerberg fears

The stonewalling is probably because the researchers will discover that Suckerberg's flunkies are the greatest purveyors of objectively fake news in the world.

Options

One option is to treat Fraudbook and Chocolate Factory as public utilities, they can make a profit but they are under government oversight but not necessarily broken up. Apple and Amazon are more interesting cases as the breaking up either really makes no sense as they do not dominate their industries (hardware and retail). Otherwise it split them up and see how the pieces fair.

Meaning?

What does 'certified driver' really mean? If it means Slurp has thoroughly tested it and examined it then you have one set of expectations If it means Slurp has verified the hash matches what the vendor says the hash is then there are one set of expectations, at least for the nerds. However, what does the average user think? I suspect they think more along the lines of the first possibility, Slurp is actually thoroughly testing it. Thus there is a source of confusion because Slurp is being coy about what they really mean. But that is nothing new for Slurp where they imply one thing in their shyster but it really means something else.

Practical?

It seems like something that is easily defeated by many companies with good security practices. For a home delivery, it might slurp up some access but most people know what they order and from whom. So an unexpected package should set off alarm bells.

Repairable Kit

My limited experience with notebooks is they are poor idea at best. Too much is sacrificed on the altar of battery life and light weight to make them reasonably repairable. I have a few aged laptops (2 bought new, 1 bought used). I have replaced battery packs on all them, real easy to do as the pack comes out easily. None of these devices are light weight and they all have mediocre battery life. A little more heft to make parts accessible and replaceable goes a long way.

It's a Start

Now if Slurp can get rid of more their useless garbage the world would be a better place.

Technical Issue

Since balloons are not steerable it strikes me as this is not a particularly effective method of deploying sensors. If the wind is blowing in the wrong direction they could either end up in say Mexico or not monitoring the area intended. Effective balloon spotting in WWI used tethered balloons so they would not drift away. A blimp or dirigible would be more effective as they are steerable and could be kept on station better.

Some Infighting?

While I doubt the actual JEDI arrangement is fundamentally biased in a legal sense. Its size makes it biased against mid-size players like the Minions. It is not a specific technical issue but scope of the contract and whether someone like the Minions could put together a workable package. If the scope is broken up, then more mid-size players will be able to bid on the various pieces. Give the scale of the project, I am not sure if this is necessarily a wise choice as the idea was to have one point of contact to yell at not 5 or 10 points who could blame shift.

Physical Access

It seems many potentially horrific hacks require physical access to the device. If someone can gain physical access you have serious issues than a hack because the perimeter has been thoroughly penetrated. In this case there is a lot more someone can do to a plane if they can get to it or anything else. The bus may be insecure internally but unless you are talking about making the plane a giant radio controlled model it is not really that important. What the researchers never said was other than physical access how would one access the bus while in flight.

My Drive

Cleaning out a box in a closet recently I found an external 3.5 inch floppy drive but no floppies. I do not know if I still have any floating around, haven't seen any floppies in years. Never worked with 8" ones and did use 5.25" ones at first.

Rant about Slurp

This is nothing new with Slurp, they must have thought they could get a some new TLA approved slurpware out without anyone noticing.

Magnitude

Only a couple of orders of magnitude too low. And Suckerberg should executed for crimes against humanity.

Fixation on Ignorance and Immaturity

Silly Valley has a fixation on youth because they do not have the experience or maturity to know they being had. The work environments are toxic even if the pay is excellent. Youth will put up this until they burnout and have very little to show for except some resume fodder at best.

Right

Not enough should be 10x. Plus the Chinese treatment for the executives.