Posts by HandleAlreadyTaken

Re: Microsoft Interns?

Well, a Microsoft intern makes about $7100 per month (ignoring all other perks, like free laptops or whatnot); I expect lots of people would be glad to be as miserable as they are...

> If the input data set is not carefully screened then obviously it will contain biases, which in turn will influence the models. Screening of the input dataset might not be an option because of the sheer volume of data required.

If you intentionally filter the input data to get a particular result, then you'll get the result you want to get - it's a tautology. However the resulting model will be useless.

The correct procedure is not to screen the input data at all - on the contrary, you should ensure your data collection procedure is as thorough and unbiased as possible, so that it doesn't unintentionally introduce bias. If the volume of data is large enough, outliers will be averaged out, and then your model has the best chance to match reality.

Re: Changing Wallpaper can have career enhancing effects

A colleague had set his desktop background to a photo of him with his wife, on a bridge. He left the machine unlocked once, so I replaced the photo with a photoshopped version, with his wife removed (the background being foliage, the clone tool did a pretty good job).

The next day, when he turned on his machine, we all assured him his wife was only gone to do some shopping and will be back soon.

Re: The only conspiracy

>Which book?

He said, didn't he? The good one.

Re: A cynic would say

>Damnit, all analogies on tech web sites are meant to involve cars.

...it's like you've spent the last few years calling the barman a Leyland Mini, but still expect him to sell you beer at a discount.

Re: Google are cunts

>If you dont like it fuck off and never use a google service again

If only it were that simple... Unfortunately, Google will not stop tracking you, no matter whether you use their services or not. There is no way to opt out of the stalking - online or in real life.

Any number of non-Google web sites (such as, to pick a completely random example, theregister.co.uk) will call google-analytics.com, googletagservices.com, googleapis.com, gstatic.com, or who knows what other Google properties, and snitch on you. At least in the USA, Google buys or otherwise collects more than two thirds of the credit card transactions you make in brick and mortar stores. Any breath you take, any move you make, they'll be watching you.

Re: All else being equal...

The numbers I saw bandied around the internet put the difference between male and female wages between 10% and 30% (allegedly for the same work). Especially in labor-heavy businesses, having a 10 to 30 percent lower cost is a crushing advantage over the competition. So why don't all-female (including HR) companies simply out-compete the sexist ones?

Re: Changes staying the same

Here's a French site, which also provides the source of the quotation (journalist Alphonse Karr): https://www.histoire-en-citations.fr/citations/Karr-plus-ca-change-plus-c-est-la-meme-chose

Re: 3.23 & 4.21

>3.23 & 4.21

Personally, I prefer 25 Or 6 To 4

Re: "WordPerfect was the original dominant wordprocessor on MS Windows"

>Windows spelled its end, because it couldn't adapt to the new GUI quickly enough.

I was a hardcore user of WordPerfect under DOS (I still believe WP 5.1 is the pinnacle of word processors), at the point where I had pretty much all key combinations (with Shift, Ctrl and Alt too) already burned down to muscle memory.

When I had to switch to Windows, I found, much to my surprise, that most of the key combos didn't work anymore in WP for Windows. However, they did work with the WP compatibility mode of Word for Windows! I had to switch to Word because, ironically, it was a better WordPerfect than WordPerfect.

Re: Blockchains are a wonderful tool .....

>A "beowolf" has several meanings - one of which deals with clusters of processing/data nodes.

You're thinking about a Beowulf cluster. A "beowolf" is a wolf designed by Bang & Olufsen. Very slim and stylish, but at a price above industry average.

Re: Electricity

>IT related songs

I like Bad Religion's "I Love My Computer"; it reminds me of the better, more innocent days before Google and Facebook...

Re: Nothing like trashing a product

You look more like a flooring inspector.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

>Kids today can still have all the joys of working constrained bare metal on the Raspberry Pi GPU

They could, but I don't think it's as interesting to young people anymore. Around the time of the ZX-81 there was a certain energy, a certain excitement in tinkering with microprocessors, which I don't think still exist. Now it's mostly a trade, not a passion.

It's the way of the world: building your own ham radio, or stereo amplifier, or getting some old broken car and rebuilding it in your backyard used to be fun activities, if you were geeky enough. They have become unfashionable, just like building your own computer, writing your own low level code or playing World of Warcraft.

Re: Case sensor

>First HD I had in my own PC was 20MB

God yes, same here. The version of DOS I had couldn't even conceive such a large volume could exist, so I had to split the disk in a 16 MB and a 4 MB partition.

And I managed to play "The Secret of Monkey Island" all the way through, even though my 8086 PC only had a CGA graphics card *and* a green on black monochrome monitor. At some point in the game, the player gets a list of ingredients he needs to collect, written with multicolored characters. On the 4 color CGA display, different colors were merged, so the writing wasn't recognizable - only a few pixels of each letter could be seen. I didn't even realize it was just an issue with my bottom of the barrel display. I thought it was another puzzle, and the list was intentionally written in some secret alphabet - and cheerfully spent some quality time decoding it.

Fun times!

The servers were fine, but the firewalls weren't: they got a hole in one.

Re: Here's a PEP

IMPLICIT INTEGER (A,Z), REAL*8 (I,J,K,L,M,N)

Re: Killer App

>[Access not being available on Linux] may not be such a bad thing. [...] in so many cases the result far exceeds what Access was intended for, and really should been written as a "proper" application.

Agreed, but for each case where the business needs end up outgrowing Access, there must be tens or hundreds of cases where somebody who may not be a full-time developer was able to put together a small Access app that does what they need quickly and cheaply.

I sometimes need to fix something small in the house - I'm not a professional plumber, and I don't have a set of professional tools; this doesn't stop me from replacing the occasional gasket, using some generic screwdriver or wrench I happen to have around. And I disagree with the idea that wrenches shouldn't be available to non-professional plumbers because they're sometimes not the right tool for the job.

>watching an actor trying to emote

Seems to have worked for Clint Eastwood who, according to Sergio Leone, managed just two expressions: one with a hat and one without a hat.

Re: Nothing new here

From a Romanian friend, here's a catastrophically bad Google translation: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ro&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gustos.ro%2Fretete-culinare%2Fchec-cu-nuci-si-rahat.html&edit-text=

"Rahat" is the Romanian word for Turkish delight. It is also an euphemism for excrement. Google chooses the idiom instead of the main meaning, with hilarious results.

On the same page, Google's advice to " do the dick test to check if it's baking" should instead suggest to "do the toothpick test"..

Re: They could have used the "He said Jehova" excuse instead

Context doesn't matter to the offence culture. You can even get sacked if you don't use the N word at all, but say something that sounds similar to uneducated ears - see not one, but repeated examples here . I can understand why somebody would be wary.

>They literally asked for feedback on their diversity and hiring policies following a training session.

"I want someone to tell me", Lieutenant Scheisskopf beseeched to them all prayerfully. "If any of it is my fault, I want to be told."

"He wants someone to tell him," Clevinger said.

"He wants everyone to keep still, idiot," Yossarian answered.

"Didn't you hear him?" Clevinger argued.

"I heard him," Yossarian replied. "I heard him say very loudly and very distinctly that he wants every one of us to keep our mouths shut if we know what's good for us."

"I won't punish you", Lieutenant Scheisskopf swore.

"He says he won't punish me", said Clevinger.

"He'll castrate you," said Yosarrian.

"I swear I won't punish you," said Lieutenant Scheisskopf. "I'll be grateful to the man who tells me the truth."

"He'll hate you", said Yossarian. "To his dying day he'll hate you."

Re: x8, x 4, x2

>Can [gasoline] burn IN water (not on, IN)?

I have some bad news about the environment where automobiles run for you...

Re: Never going to happen.

>For the simple reason that Google et al are American companies, and if they got broken up it would mean the US would lose real dominance of the Internet.

That would imply that congresscritters care about America. Watching their activities, it doesn't seem to be the case. You're right however that it won't happen, but for a different reason. Google, well aware its whole business model is based on shaky moral and legal grounds, are on track to become the biggest spender on lobbying in the USA. As long as they keep their shopping bag full of congressmen, Google is in no danger of legislative action.

Re: Standing

>The GPL, unlike the MIT license, protects against people adding a small thing to an open-source program that might become necessary to use it - thus taking it out of being usable in its open-source form.

What are you talking about? If party A releases something under a MIT license, and party B adds some small thing to it, do you honestly believe party C can't use A's code anymore? If so, you have absolutely no understanding of how things work.

Re: LOL

>>...vulnerabilities patched in Chrome OS!"

>There's the operative word, right there.

I'll venture to say that the operative word is "vulnerabilities".

Re: Google is Evil

Don't assume Google doesn't know about you just because searches for your name come up with nothing. You have no access to their internal databases . If you could search those, you may find a lot of stuff under your Google Advertising ID. You might find out it's correlated to your home computer's MAC address, to your phone UDID and phone number, to your credit card transactions, probably your travel history (from locations of IP addresses or cell phone towers) and web access history (from Google's DNS servers) - plus who knows what else.

Re: Apparently

> Toutes vos bases appartiennent à Microsoft

Meuh non, meuh non.

Toutes vos base sont appartiennent à Microsoft.

Re: That's a weird orbit

From the images, it passed very close to the Sun - deep within the orbit of Mercury. Statistically, given the size of the Universe, that looks really unlikely. If it was an alien spacecraft, it may have used the close passage for a gravity assist maneuver - keep into a mind we only saw it on its way out, and the incoming path is extrapolated. If it was just a space rock, either we were really lucky, or there are orders of magnitude more such objects passing through the Solar system, but somehow we failed to see any until now.

Re: Of course not

You mean something like this https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/containers/ ?

These are things man was not meant to know!

>The phrase "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" is obviously lost on these scientists.

"Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow."

— Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein

Re: Gandalf of JS

Javascript?

Fly, you fools!

Re: "They looked for the password on the CD . . ."

>Need to log in to a user's workstation? The password is 1: Under the keyboard, 2: On a post-it stuck to the monitor or, if you're very lucky, written on a notepad in the top drawer under the desk.

And this can be fine, if you understand your security threat; if your attacker has physical access to your office, you have bigger problems. Passwords under keyboards can't be read by hackers in Russia or China, which are in most cases the bigger risk.

Add the fact that many companies with bad understanding of security require passwords to be at least 75 characters long, contain mixed case letters, digits, and at least two wingdings, and be changed every full moon and you can't reasonably expect users to memorize them.

> they try to scupper any hopes for MS's AWS services

I heard they'll be putting spyware on all new Google iPhones too!

Re: a teaspoon ... would weigh 15 tons.

You have those slightly completely reversed though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_versus_weight

Re: I'm touched by the weirdness of this request...

>I think Dirk Gently was the best book Adams wrote.

I agree - and I believe it shows Adams' evolution as a writer paralleled Pratchett's in some ways. They both started with gag-driven works, with little or no characterization, and with no plot to speak of beyond a flimsy framework to hang gags to - that's particularly the case for Adams' Hitchhiker books, but also for the first few Discworld books (especially the Rincewind the Wizzard series). As they both matured as writers, their later books become less dependent on gags, the plots become interesting in themselves, and the characters grow deeper and better fleshed.

Pratchett grew immeasurably as a writer - amazingly, without losing his humor; his later books are still laugh out loud funny. I think the Dirk Gently books show Adams was following a similar path. It's a tragedy Adams died so young; I think his best work was still ahead of him.

Re: Can't Believe I Read ALL these Comment's !

>Poopy face

While this reply is certainly more cogent and well argued than your article, I still can't help feeling it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi to be utterly convincing.

Re: Out of sight, out of mind

I thought it was "blind idiot"?

Re: Safer cars?

I don't particularly like black - I'll only wear it until they find a darker color.

Re: Double-edged sword?

Your question piqued my curiosity, so, since nobody seems to have answered, I went looking it up on the web; I found this rather informative article on the Royal Society of Chemistry's site: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/cs/c5cs00236b . Here's a relevant excerpt:

Nanoparticles can be formed naturally via processes occurring in all “spheres” of the Earth, [...] by chemical, photochemical, mechanical, thermal, and biological processes separately or in combination, [...]. In addition, NPs are also formed spontaneously as a result of human activities (e.g., during mining, production of wastewaters and wastes in general, and other industrial processes). A recent estimate suggests the formation of NNPs, only from biogeochemical processes alone, occurs in the range of several thousand teragrams per year (1 Tg = 1 million metric tons). Comparatively, the mass of ENPs [engineered nanoparticles] produced per year is orders of magnitude lower, in the range of several hundreds to thousands of Tg per year

> So just what has been gained by going online/to cloud?

Well, there is this thing called "the web" now; you can actually get to your data from other computers than your main machine! If you can believe it, I once went to a coffee shop IN JAPAN and I didn't have to fly my large tower PC over at all! I used a small laptop connected to the "cloud"! And, get this, I didn't even have to find a power outlet, I could do it all FROM THE LAPTOP's BATTERY!

Re: Dumb yanks

I intellectually agree public transportation should be the most efficient way; however, at least for me, the old joke is true more often than not: public transportation takes me from somewhere where I'm not to somewhere I don't want to go.