orbitingpluto

Love the nub!

Trackpoints are better when in a cramped situation such as air travel. No readjusting of elbows are required when switching between keyboard and trackpoint.

Medicine is interdisciplinary.

Medicine requires engineering skills. Prosthetics? How about that metal plate holding a femur together? You think they buy that off the shelf at Wal-Mart? Engineering is without a doubt the worst counterexample you could have provided.

As for IT systems in medicine, just ignoring the digitizing of medical records, there are countless improvements that can be made in medicine at the IT level. If IT and research are completely partitioned and cannot interact, then they aren't considering the effect of IT on medicine. That means they're trending towards being a sub par institution.

And your facetious J&J example is still entirely applicable. Deunionization of support and janitorial staff has caused worse overall outcomes for hospitals. Considering how dangerous staph infections are in hospitals, you've provided another stupid example. I'd much rather go to a hospital with unionized and well paid janitorial services than one saving 20% in costs and profiting off of minimum wage janitors.

Your lack of imagination makes me hope you're not in charge of anything important.

That is the sort of attitude I would have expected to encounter from someone in the 1990s.

This link is only two clicks away from the link that you provided.

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/12/405331/ucsf-joins-multi-un...

I already did in my second paragraph.

But if you need the obvious answer: Outsourcing IT in an academic institution where ostensibly the operation of said infrastructure should be a valuable topic for research means that somebody isn't thinking.

Not to mention the issue of outsourcing out of country private data.

There are more obvious answers also. It all depends whether you're thinking about long term success or just the next quarter.

Well it's a university. Maybe the president should put in some effort?

Outsourcing IT is one of those things that seriously diminishes the academic credibility of a educational institution. Outsourcing IT is something I would expect from, say, ITT Technical Institute or Trump University.

I have problems remembering a password if I don't use it for a month or two. After 16 months, I'd probably have no idea.

Chill out. Wagner is just the go to example for divorcing art and the artist.

When I go to dilbert.com, I see a mixture of full blog entries, cartoons, and blog titles. I'm simply not entertained in his attempts at blogging.

Adams has probably gotten a bit bored pushing the same cartoon out and now conflates the value of his blog with his cartoon.

EDIT: Also compare the UX between http://dilbert.com and http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/. With CtrlAltDel, the blog is there, but you don't have to scroll by it and you can completely ignore it. With Dilbert, the blog shows up before the cartoon. It's pushed down your throat.

If you go to dilbert.com the cartoon comes part and parcel with his blog. This dissuades me from visiting the site.

I like Wagner too. But if I had to read an anti-Semitic pamphlet every time I listened to him, I wouldn't put him in my playlist.

I think that's reasonable, no?

Sounds like the NSL is for an American citizen for whom they don't have sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant. Metadata.

I've stopped reading Dilbert let alone Twitter.

Seeing him post pictures of himself acting in the role of sugar daddy to a petulant child-woman is well beyond my initial scope of interest in him.

My interest was Dilbert. It was all about making fun of the disconnect between management and employees. Ironically, his public persona is now at odds with the general theme of his work.

I suspect his original material is just the byproduct of his initial position and people emailing anecdotes to him.

When I said maximum laziness, I tend to think of things in maximizing the expected value of my time.

Crossing the border with $3-4k in electronics? Say there's a 5% chance they demand passwords & access. I don't want some nosepicker TSA agent going through my stuff. Refusal to give access means I lose it.

So E(X) is $150-200 worth of my time. That means an old i5 laptop. If I need anything I can grab an SSH key off the web somewhere that lets me get another SSH key somewhere else...

Plus, you're more at risk of your stuff being stolen when traveling anyway. You shouldn't be risking all of your data getting taken away for good. Even if you comply, that doesn't mean they won't take everything away from you. That raises the potential loss significantly.

And fuck Dilbert. I bet that guy has late stage syphilis by now. He's becoming increasingly deranged and disconnected from reality. Oh, the irony.

Why would you cross any border with electronics with data on them? Especially if you went to 33C3? Especially in this climate?

Why didn't you just SSH everything? You can easily resync your contacts/data on your phone after you cross the border. You can keep the few you must have on the recently reset phone. If you travel often, why don't you have a second phone for just this to save you time?

I'd think most of us have tech junk piling up. It's less effort to reset or have a 'travel drive' than top go through all the paperwork to (maybe) get stuff back.

Maximum laziness. If customs asks you to unlock your phone, nothing gets you through quicker then quick unquestioning compliance. (Of course the current climate is stupid and needs to change.)

Oh god. I know someone who made all of these mistakes by themselves in a certain week. And kept his job. He was pretty.

I left and found out two months later from a friend he had managed to take down almost every single server in the place for which he had access. Even the legacy don't touch systems that just boot and run equipment.

Be pretty.

There's another category. Those of us who manually did this already, are annoyed we didn't write down all the steps, but are glad to find this posted here.

What he has done is quite difficult to do these days because of motherboard availability. In some cases an LGA1366 motherboard can cost more than original retail. It's insane. But the performance is great. But if you have an older first gen motherboard, you can get a 6 core Xeon for as little as $40 on eBay. Great upgrade.

What's really insane is that you can get several 10 core LGA1567 E7 Xeons for $20 apiece. If you have a end-of-the-line recycler in your city that will custom pick stuff out of the pile for you, you can get a very scratched up electricity sucking "hog" for next to nothing.

I've told this story before, so here is the short version.

I replaced $girl in a sysadmin/programming role that would get used by other employees. According to my supervisor, she was always far more productive than me. He'd ask for an estimate of how long something would take and he'd always say, "That's too long. $girl could do it half the time."

Well, because it was my first tech job company, I sort of had impostor syndrome because of him but also thought of a way to test it out. One job we often had would get programmed from scratch several times a year and take about 2 or 3 hours to do. I cludged it into a simple framework where I could just edit the XML after the other employees started to use it. So when he asked me how long it was going to take before people could start using it I said thirty seconds.

"That's too long... $girl could do it 15..., wait, what?"

Remember the truck driver with a ~1.4 rating? She said she was a ~4.6 when she was young. That made me think that the technology had been around for awhile and that technology had stagnated.

I know it is a weird takeaway from that episode, but I found the ubiquitous social media tweaking while at work to be incredibly unprofessional and I wondered how that society could get anything accomplished... ever. And the whitewashed physical world with almost no other real technical improvements emphasized that point for me.

We have here a bunch of people complaining who have been pushed down the social strata. Instead of not being able to afford their own car or request a luxury class taxi, they now have to exist in the lowest tier. They don't like that, and, they now want, effectively, to elevate themselves above the people who have to piss in a subway station by banning them.

At a Christmas party that I went to with several people who have way more money than almost any of you, a wife of a Boeing executive referred to you complainers as "transit trash". She looks at you as you are looking at these problem people.

When assigning blame, if you aren't looking upwards to those exerting vast amounts of power, then you are probably the problem.

I made sure to call out this woman's trash talk and embarrass her. If you have power you are supposed to be kind to those below you. Without that graciousness you expose yourself as being afraid that you'll be assigned to a lower social strata. (And I take the wholesale disappearance of that graciousness in American politics as a harbinger of American decline.)

No idea. It's always the first couple files that seem to grow the data used by the app to it's monstrous size. After four or five PDFs it levels out. Another 2MB will only take a couple MB.

I upload Humbles to Google Play Books, not for primary reading but easy accessibility.

I just wish that downloading a 2MB pdf from Google Books wouldn't take 450MB of local storage.

I've also experienced issues with Humbles not uploading properly to Google. It usually takes Humble about four or five weeks to rectify the issue with the PDF.

Hopefully Microsoft included this Edge dependent intrusive and unwanted advertising into this statistic. No?

One of those subtle improvements is honoring a Ctrl-L. I like to be able to clear the screen like that.

I use bookmark keywords to get access to a cluster or folder of bookmarks instead of mousing. Also not interested in making 9000 bookmarks to reproduce bang functionality: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Plus you still have to type "bookmark" <wait> "search"

Hey!!! This works in PowerShell (non-ISE)!!!! Breaks my 112 column limit, despite a default setting of 200.

Added this to the end my Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 in my $HOME\Documents\WindowsPowerShell directory. (run: "notepad $PROFILE" in PS)

  MODE CON COLS=200
  Clear-Host (I get some artifacts)

"The IRS further justifies its request by claiming it is targeted toward a specific group of people; namely, US taxpayers who have conducted transactions with virtual currency."

How about IRS makes requests to people who live in homes worth over a certain amount of money who pay absolutely no taxes. At least my suggestion isn't a wild goose chase.

"Targeting a specific group of people," never turns out to work fairly for those targeted for some reason.

But you're using it as intended. I'd much rather type "!gi blah" or "!gn blah" than move my hands to the mouse/trackpad to click on the Google Images or News link.

Powershell users don't age gracefully, that's for sure. You'll learn some arcane long-winded way of doing something in v3 and it will be relaced with something far better. Unfortunately, you'll still have to know the old way.

As for longwinded, I hate using ACL in Powershell. Let's say you have to reestablish FullControl on a bunch of files as an Administrator and you don't have Write access. It's so convoluted and it can even fail silently. So much easier to just use icacls in a single line.

There can be several aliases for a single command.

ls=dir=gci="Get-ChildItem"

But you can't run just run "dir /s". You'd have to say "Get-ChildItem -Recurse" which can be shortened to "dir -Recurse" which can be shortened to "dir -r".

When scripting, you try to use the longform versions. With one-liners, you just sort of fall into whatever paradigm you were previously accustomed to for your first argument.

I use to dump video from a TV Tuner card into the linear frame buffer of the 3DFX Voodoo card. Instead of using the pass through cable I used two monitors. It was my first multi-monitor setup.