dripton

I had a used 1977 Monza in high school.

Pros: It was $750, and it lasted two years.

Cons: No power despite the V8, poor gas mileage, expensive tune-ups because the V8 was squeezed in so tightly that you needed to lift the engine to change the rear spark plugs, poor handling (heavy engine, tiny tires, primitive suspension), frightening braking (weight again).

It taught me a few life lessons. First, always dig deep rather than trusting the surface impression created by marketing. Just because it has a V8 doesn't mean it's fast. Second, don't work at a company where the engineers are forced to make crap. (Any affordable car is a compromise, but shoving a V8 into a car with no room for a V8 and then starving it of air isn't compromise, it's a joke.)

A $200B company needs to make big bets to move the needle. The limiting resource at Berkshire is Warren Buffett's time. For most people, spending a few hours on a million-dollar deal is the move of a lifetime. For Buffett, it's a few wasted hours.

That's an interesting angle that I hadn't heard before. I'd still rather have a contract, just to avoid confusion about the terms of the deal.

Similarly, 16C is 61F.

Beautiful. If I were teaching the class, you'd get the A and I'd remember when it was time to write recommendations. But I remember some professors who might have failed a student for pulling something like that. Or even accused him of cheating, for "sneaking in an unapproved piece of rogue equipment." You need to pick your spots.

Current F1 rules do not allow in-race refueling. But, yeah, expensive purpose-built race cars have little in common with road cars.

I had two different employers go bust in 2002.

First one was a startup acquired by a big corporation in 2000, but they gave up on us a couple years later. How much the larger economic climate affected that, versus the indisputable fact that we were spending a lot more than we were making, I don't know.

Got another job before the severance ran out. Second one was a small startup, which ran out of cash and failed to make payroll a few months later. The owners wanted to keep going on a shoestring and offered me equity to stay, but I didn't want to take that gamble. Again, I can't say how much of that was due to the economy (harder to find investors in 2002 than in 2000), versus the fact that the company was spending money and not making any.

Got another job right away. This one was a profitable government contractor, I stayed there for years.

My first piece of advice is to always have current, marketable skills. You don't have to chase every trend, but you should know more than one thing, just in case that one thing becomes the next buggy whip.

My second piece of advice is not to put all your eggs into one basket. Salary is more reliable than equity. Savings will get you through rough times.

Tastes differ. I thought it was a fun story and a quick easy read. I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone. My wife, mother, and sister, all of whom are big readers but none of whom are really in the target nerd demographic, all liked it.

Anathem and Diamond Age were harder for me because of the depth of ideas. I had to slow down and think to get through them.

Baroque Cycle was harder because of the sheer number of characters with multiple and/or similar names, which is realistic but annoying. There's a list of characters in the back of the first book, which helps, but it's annoying to have to keep the first book handy when you're reading the others.

Stephenson does have a reputation for starting great books and not knowing how to finish them. But I think I've gotten more than my money's worth out of all of them.

Works for me in Firefox. (33.0 on amd64 Linux)

It's been alleged that having a Go-Pro camera on his ski helmet contributed to the severity of Michael Schumacher's injury.

Of course, this is very hard to prove.

I'm not so sure. Several of the most popular game platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, iOS) are effectively closed, with gatekeepers who decide which games are allowed. And those gatekeepers don't allow certain types of games on those platforms. Of course it's still possible to create whatever games you want on the remaining free platforms, but removing some of the most popular and lucrative options could make it economically challenging.

It wasn't a real on-budget surplus. It was only a surplus if you took the revenue from Social Security tax and ignored the obligation to later pay Social Security with it.

Insane in the short term. But in the long term, if they make the program less maintainable, they may prevent future improvements.

The FinCEN threshold is $10000. The article mentioned buying enough Amazon gift cards to buy a stroller. The most expensive stroller I could find on Amazon in a minute was less than $600. So I don't think we can blame the government in this particular case. Probably just a lazy clerk who didn't feel like selling that many gift cards.

A lot of government information is tied up with individual privacy. For example, Census data isn't released for 70 years, for privacy reasons. I certainly wouldn't want the IRS to release my tax returns, or Medicare to release my medical records.

Of course it's easy to abuse the citizen privacy excuse to hide things that should not be private. But you can't just make everything public without causing significant problems, either.

This may be "cheating" in some tournaments where you're expected to fairly seed your players. But it's considered totally fine in sports like baseball. In a short playoff series, if you think the other team's starting pitcher is way better than yours, it's absolutely fine to sacrifice your #4 against the #1, then start your #1 against their #2, your #2 against their #3, and your #3 against their #4. The cost is that by pushing your best pitchers back a game, they may end up getting fewer starts.

The fix when it is considered cheating is pretty simple: let an impartial third party (like a referee) rather than than the coaches seed the players.

Or maybe all the other crawlers would just claim to be Googlebot. Just like all the other browsers (partially) claim to be Netscape.

I've seen keysigning parties at a few technical conferences. Find one, preferably one that caters to programmers and/or sysadmins rather than managers and/or marketers, and which has extra space for not-scheduled-in-advance meetings. Then schedule a keysigning party and see who shows up. Remember to bring ID.

Different cable types. One analog, one DVI.

I had 3 monitors / 2 Nvidia cards working fine in Kubuntu 11.04 and 12.04. All one X session. It was easy. But that was with uniform geometry. (I had 3 identical monitors.) Haven't tried non-uniform.

My personal experience over the last couple of years:

I ran Gentoo for years, and my experience was similar to yours. I could get things to work but it took a lot of frustrating trial and error, and then periodically a version upgrade would break everything and I'd get to start over. About a year and a half ago I finally got sick of it and installed Kubuntu.

Kubuntu 12.04 + 2 monitors + AMD proprietary drivers = you get to choose between accelerated OpenGL and multiple monitor support. You can't have both at the same time. (At least I couldn't, with the video card and driver versions I had 6 months ago. I spent many hours trying, then remembered I have more money than time and bought a $90 Nvidia card.)

Kubuntu 12.04 + 2 monitors + Nvidia proprietary drivers = easy. The GUI worked, first try, no problems. The only goofy thing was that my left monitor showed up on the right side, giving me a choice between physically moving the monitors or changing the default positions in the GUI. I changed the defaults in the GUI.

Also, on my former work machine, Kubuntu 11.04 and 12.04 + 2 Nvidia cards + 3 monitors = easy. (Some cow-orkers had 2 Nvidia cards and 4 monitors, also easy.)

I haven't tried newer versions of Kubuntu on a multi-monitor box, so it's possible (but not likely) they've gone backwards.

The engineers don't necessarily have enough power for that to work. And the current engineers on site aren't necessarily those at fault for a disaster that was caused by incorrect design or construction 30 years ago.

What I would like to see is mandatory escrow of a large percentage of profits from highly-profitable, possibly-disaster-prone industries. If you go disaster-free for 20 years you get your escrowed money with interest. If not, you lose (an appropriate amount of) it.

I've had no hard drive failures in over a decade, but my first SSD (a Crucial M4) failed in about a year. I'm back to reliable hard drives.

The startup I worked for got bought by a big company, then two years later they decided to shut us down. But they wanted a fraction of us to stick around for 3 months and keep the servers running while they transitioned to the new system. And they offered us large severance checks to stick around until the end. (Basically, barely work for 3 months then get another 3 months bonus pay.)

It was painfully boring. I wrote a lot of hobby code. Learned a couple of programming languages. Read a few good books. Helped people with their resumes. Had some nice long lunches. Volunteered to fix everything that broke during business hours so that I could feel like I'd at least done something useful.

I wish I'd produced something more useful during those slack 3 months, but I was afraid that if I did, the big company would claim ownership of it.

Dreamhost. Since 2000, when they were the cheapest IMAP provider. I do have to click through SSL errors sometimes (because reverse DNS doesn't match forward DNS), and they broke my procmail setup when they upgraded something a few years ago, but I'm mostly happy with them.

If it's a Federal charge, Virginia law doesn't matter.

I've given up on LinkedIn. They had a high-profile breach less than a year ago and they're still doing insecure things like this. Either they don't know or they don't care. So I'm setting the permanent bozo bit on their company.

Do I expect this to accomplish much? Not really. But I'm no longer part of the problem.

I think I managed to close it. I had to click 4 or 5 times, but the process didn't seem to generate any errors. We'll see.

I have cancelled two out of two accounts that have tried to phish my email password. (Udacity and now LinkedIn.) "Everyone" certainly does not do it. (I know Facebook does it, but just because the slimiest big company on the web does something doesn't mean it's okay.)

Not everyone uses Gmail. The fallback is to ask for your email password. Really.