* Posts by jgarry

39 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2015

Devs see red after not seeing Big Red on Stack Overflow database poll

jgarry

Re: Really?

https://xkcd.com/386/

jgarry

So update already

They've added Oracle and apologized. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/361588/take-the-2018-developer-survey/361597#comment546628_361597

Google and its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week in full

jgarry
Mushroom

Re: Just to clarify

Put this in your favorite search engine: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”

Amazing new algorithm makes fusion power slightly less incredibly inefficient

jgarry
Mushroom

Rule 0

Do not make a fusion explosion.

AI bots will kill us all! Or at least may seriously inconvenience humans

jgarry
Mushroom

You don't have to worry until

China stars manufacturing killer drones in the middle ea....

Oh crap.

Dear racist Airbnb host, we've enrolled you in an Asian American studies course

jgarry

Re: not EVERY single regionlism or language

Well, here's two guys: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Attacker-Gets-Light-Sentence-in-Fire-Pit-Beating.html

The discrimination rules are different if you are renting out a room in your house: http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/discrimination.shtml

And yes, Big Bear is 100 miles east of LA. If you go west from the LA airport area, you'll be in the ocean. Big Bear even has the Time Bandit pirate ship: http://www.bigbearboating.com/pirate_ship.html

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

jgarry

rulez

1. Always follow instructions exactly.

2. Never follow instructions exactly.

3. See rules 1 and 2.

As you stare at the dead British Airways website, remember the hundreds of tech staff it laid off

jgarry

Re: RE "You can't print your return check in till you have landed on your outbound journey"

Flew Southwest a week ago, sHite site wouldn't respond to phone for return boarding pass. Screw apps. Took an hour to get a warm body to fix, phone battery anxiety

That 'Trump lawyers threaten teen over kitten website' yarn is Fakey Fakey McFake Fakeface

jgarry

Re: Trademarks

They need to be actively used to prevent being abandoned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights

Spammy Google Home spouts audio ads without warning – now throw yours in the trash

jgarry
Linux

Billy Bass

They'd sell a million http://www.instructables.com/id/Animate-a-Billy-Bass-Mouth-With-Any-Audio-Source/

Russian! spies! 'brains! behind!' Yahoo! mega-hack! – four! charged!

jgarry
Stop

Latvia?

"Latvia? LATVIA??? You want us to authorize money to be sent to LATVIA????"

http://www.orafaq.com/usenet/comp.databases.oracle.server/2004/11/03/0251.htm

Telepresence robot 'hackable' – security researchers

jgarry

Next will be the Double Penetration Robot

Rap for chat app chaps: Snap's shares are a joke – and a crap one at that

jgarry

A very smart rich guy explained the stock market to me. It's not Vegas. It's Wildebeests.

Everyone run this way! Everyone run that way!

Feds cuff VW exec over diesel emissions scam

jgarry

Re: UK Loves VW

You can google it, the fraud is that owners paid extra for "clean" diesel and didn't get that. So they lost that extra money. In the US, owners also got compensated for the lower resale value when the issue became public. There's some complaints about people having sold the cars cheap, and the new owners unjustly enriched getting the free money.

Snowden: Donald Trump could get pal Putin to kick me out of Russia

jgarry

because

Count the generals and right-wingers tRump is putting together. They want to make an example of people who promise to keep US secrets and then break that promise.

How would we know if anyone were killed because of the information released?

Critical thinking? HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA! https://xkcd.com/386/

AI can now tell if you're a criminal or not

jgarry

Hmmm... yep

http://i.perezhilton.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/gettyimages-5102665641__oPt.jpg

Silicon Valley VCs: We're gonna make California great again – on its own

jgarry

Re: What about Texas?

First hit on a google, no, they can't secede: https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/24/can-texas-legally-secede-united-states/

Of course, "What's the point of a revolution without general copulation copulation copulation " - The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

Coding will win you the election, narcissistic techies boasted to Hillary

jgarry

Re: It's all PR

Thanks for your kind words. I've also noted the various majors in similar discussions elsewhere, regarding the more narrow Oracle DBA field. Just off the top of my head, noted guru's are a couple of math majors, a couple of electrical engineering majors, history, priests (!), musicians, biochem...

Of course, I was in danger of a much longer rant, to explain more of the money and music things, but this is just a comment section, after all.

I've also gotten people pissed at me elsewhere when I point out how bad self-taught user's code is (where "bad" might be tens of thousands of dollars embezzled from lack of basic accounting controls), and some of the downsides of spoon-fed kid's programming classes.

It won't make any difference when all our communication devolves to emoticons. :P

jgarry
Meh

It's all PR

And that's not all bad.

Education is big business, and it's going to be funded either privately or publicly. Private funding rarely works for the masses, so it's going to be political. It's easy to make PR a whipping boy, but it is necessary to get people on board with funding the education. From our viewpoint (I make some El Reg readership assumptions, of course), these coding stunts are silly. But what really happens?

I'm in Southern California, which is slightly different politically than bubble-land, but does have things in common, particularly what was called "Proposition 13," a "tax-revolt" from the start of the Reagan era, cutting the increase in property taxes that fund schools. People will argue with me, but I think it is evident that that was a big part of the reason for the decline of California public schools.

So schools have had to scramble to fund things, and many things have been cut, such as music education. Some places have a variant of STEM called STEAM, where the A is for Arts. Local school boards can convince the public and politicians to fund such things.

My kids went to what is considered a crappy school district, if you just look at the gross achievement numbers. But those numbers don't tell the whole story, as there is a bifurcated distribution - a whole lot of average kids, and a group of bright kids. The latter often come from children of, say, Qualcomm, Rockstar, Genentech technocrats and so forth who live in the various bedroom communities.

So the school board can say they are supporting STEAM, and have some excellent preparation to feed into universities for those tracks. They can also leverage magnet school funds, which are to create good schools in low income areas. My kids have gone through magnet schools, and the results have been excellent.

There is a lot of dependency on individual leadership (ie, optimistic principals) in the schools, so results can be uneven. For example, they built a new STEAM high school, but it was weak on everything except the A, so my older boy went to the older school, where again there was a bifurcation - his peers were all really smart, too. Over the course of several years, the STEAM school switched gears to an actual more technological focus, and now my younger boy is already programming games and learning proper UI's and preparing for AP exams.

When people ask me, as a decades-long techie, if they should major in CS, I tend to say "no." Most of the real-world work really requires domain expertise elsewhere, the stuff taught in CS programs is useful in only a few. A lot of the programs are moving towards particular frameworks or fads, which is really the opposite of what should be taught, which are the basics of logic and clear thinking. Particular skills will come and go, and only representative skill sets should be taught, so people can adapt to whatever is big when they are actually working.

So even though we can be haters on individual silly stunts, the STEM concept serves a good purpose and really should be supported. You just never know who will benefit from just one little sparkle on a unicorn.

Twitter trolls are destroying democracy, warn eggheads

jgarry

You know it's bad when...

South Park hits the nail on the head better than the eggheads. For those who haven't seen it, google: South Park troll

US judge rubber-stamps Volkswagen's 'Dieselgate' settlement

jgarry

Aaaaaannnndddd...

The people who sold their cars are getting screwed, while the people who bought those cars are getting a windfall?

Oracle DB admins urged to swap their gas guzzler for an electric car

jgarry

OK, car analogy

From what I've observed, a postgres project is like paying a dozen engineers for two years to build a transport device, verses going out and buying a truck.

Not to mention the maintenance costs.

Dem-owned-crats: Now its congressional committee is hacked

jgarry

Funniest would be

If there really was a Guccifer, and he got the tools by spearfishing the GRN "This is Putin, please give Guccifer access to hacking tools."

Reg readers battle to claim 'my silicon's older than yours' crown

jgarry

Re: Amiga 1000

I have an Amiga 1000 that works. I have two pdp-11's, one of which may work if I turn it on (11/23 modded into a 23+ back in the '80s, RSTS/E - one of these days it will be Ready...) and the other would need some fiddling (11/73 rescued on way to dumpster), with CIT-100's and LA-120.

One Ring to pwn them all: IoT doorbell can reveal your Wi-Fi key

jgarry

Re: Doorbells? Who needs doorbells?

Put on shorts.

Take stinky food garbage outside.

Family member walks by, sees door unlocked, locks door, walks out of earshot.

Freeze while pounding on door because you don't have a doorbell any more.

Volkswagen blames emissions cheating on 'chain of errors'

jgarry

Given the realities of large corps, I don't think Occam's Razor applies, but consider:

What if the general spec was "maximize power when accelerating, minimize emissions when in some constant mode?"

You might honestly come up with engine management software that does that - cause and effect flips because most of the test conditions are constant, like "on dynamometer, hold at 30kph for n seconds."

Of course, someone still might have noticed that and gone "haha, that fools the test specs too!"

Big mistake, Google. Big mistake: Chrome OS to be 'folded into Android'

jgarry

Hey, open source, ElReg can write their own. Call it reflux.

Use a Delorean as a mascot.

Dad who shot 'snooping vid drone' out of the sky is cleared of charges

jgarry

Re: Bullit County

For those who think random shotgun pellets falling from the sky into your eye aren't dangerous, consider two things:

There are a lot of pellets scattered semi-randomly

Pellets are round pieces of metal, so terminal descent velocity is not exactly feathery

Now google for shotgun pellet in eye injury images.

Now do the math: http://www.shootingillustrated.com/articles/2012/9/24/its-the-math-stupid/

Cisco: The day of PCs is passing, cloud storage will dominate by 2019

jgarry

Problem is, any logical progression will be messed up by people monetizing it. Or to be precise, attempting to monetize it.

So we have the largest search organization trying to do that with advertising, and the largest organization by capitalization attempting with subscriptioning and closed systems.

The problem is, they are benefiting from excessive economic profit, without reaching any equilibrium.

That's always going to be a problem when using market forces to allocate infrastructural resources. Greed considers regulation and fairness damage and routes around it.

The world will change, but chaotically.

Google stock buy-back: You'll groan when you realize where that $5,099,019,513.59 figure came from

jgarry
Thumb Up

Larry Ellison $49.3B

Alphabet class C stock market cap: $450B

You're right, they do have more money than God.

Dell buys out EMC in mega-super-duper $67 billion deal

jgarry

Re: If i was in charge of Dell

Since you asked about memristor: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2015/10/09/hp-sandisk-reram-memristor/1

VW: Just the tip of the pollution iceberg. Who's to blame? Hippies

jgarry
FAIL

Re: Well DUH!

Ford sold Volvo to the Chinese 5 years ago.

Twitter sued for 'reading' private direct messages

jgarry

Read the effin' TOS

Right there, section 5, "Your Rights" "...By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."

"...you grant us... license... to... modify... such Content in any and all media or distribution..."

Of course, with lawyers and adhesion contracts, it's white there in black and right, or what's left.

What should we do with this chunk of dead air? Ofcom wants to know

jgarry

Re: How on earth...

Well, if you would step out of the manure you are standing in, you might realize that farmers consider it a fixed cost, but using the proper analytics changes it to a variable cost you can cut by 25%. See http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2014/jul/17/aquaspy-drought-farm-water-conservation-monsanto/ for just one example.

Obi: These ARE the 'droids you're looking for

jgarry

Re: You can take the man out of Marketing...

Well, since throwing up in your mouth is gastric aspiration, the man has succeeded.

Second Ashley Madison dump prompts more inside-job speculation

jgarry

“Their public servers and their corporate networks are probably completely disparate and are unlikely to be co-located..."

Oh come on, some dumb-ass startup isn't going to put everything in the "server room?"

As to the 10% female; look at any whorehouse, patrons v. workers.

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

jgarry

Just a little to the left and I can buzzcut that Guard

Would YOU make 400 people homeless for an extra $16m? Decision time in Silicon Valley

jgarry

Sell 50M keep airspace put trailer park on top.