Agreed, it's not is if Slack causes these problems by itself. But in my workplace, it's an additional medium that encourages a culture of immediacy and interruption. Slack did not create that culture (I received "urgent" e-mails before Slack and I still get them after Slack), but now instead of N ways to interrupt me, people now have N+1 ways.
In my fifteen years on the current job, I've *never* been told I need to be on call 24/7, that I was expected to answer email outside working hours or that I should call in on vacation. Probably one of the reasons why I keep working here.
You're fortunate. At my current job, I've set strict limits with my coworkers - I don't have any push notifications turned on, I refuse to install Slack on my personal phone, and I don't check e-mail when I'm not at work or on weekends. However, I'm probably the only person at my company who behaves this way, and it gets noticed and called out as being "inflexible".
f someone chats with you in person, or you have an in-person meeting, does this immediacy "destroy your mind"?
Um, yes? I can't the stand the constant "Got a minute?" questions, where someone walks up to your desk and interrupts whatever you're doing (thanks, open floor plans). Or a string of meetings with a half hour or hour between each, so that you don't really have enough time to get into a flow in between.
At my company, Slack fosters an "always-on" culture that fosters the expectation that people should always immediately respond to any request (even when not at work), and in my case, takes away from the ability to sustain focus on any complex problem for more than a few minutes. It's terrible, and I hate it.
While they don't actually use punch cards, a lot of the data seems like it's from that era - fixed width, all caps, space padded... feels very mainframe-y.
That said, Nielsen also has networks report TV programs with unique numeric "program codes", so it's not like they (or other people using their data, like me) rely on the program strings to group by program.
First of all, load management systems for consumers are almost always voluntary and opt-in.
Second, I've never heard of a consumer load management system that dealt with dishwashers and washing machines - first, because these typically are minor power consumers compared to heating and air conditioning, and second, because yes, you shouldn't interrupt them mid-cycle.
It's not like demand management shuts down your entire house. That's more like a rolling brownout, which is precisely what demand management tries to avoid.
Maybe you're thinking of variable rates, which encourage people to use energy intensive devices when the rates are lower - like starting your electric dryer, which is a large consumer, when you go to bed at night, rather than at 3 PM in the middle of July.
It's amazing to me how people who have absolutely no idea how electricity works or how it is generated and delivered suddenly become experts on everything from RF radiation, privacy and security of IT systems, energy efficiency, and utility infrastructure.
Smart meters aren't evil.
Differential rates for solar power the customer generates versus electricity consumed from the utility don't really require smart meters, either, at least not the kind commonly deployed. Plus, the vast majority of homes and businesses where smart meters are being deployed don't generate their own power, so it's silly to suggest this is the intention for deploying them.
Actual reasons for deploying smart meters include better demand monitoring and management, fast and accurate outage reporting so that service can be restored more quickly, and better customer service - since you as a consumer can now find out exactly how much you're using and when.
I had a smart meter when I lived in Connecticut, and I loved it. I wrote a script to log in to my utility's website and get my daily consumption data, so I could track my consumption over time and make energy-conserving decisions. We also had natural gas, but in my best month I was able to lower consumption to 186 kWh, about a fifth of the US average.
I now live in New Jersey, and our so-called 'ratepayer advocate' is rabidly anti-smart meter because she doesn't want to permit any increase in utility bills, even to pay for infrastructure investment. It took Hurricane Sandy to convince her to allow some infrastructure improvements that PSEG had been asking for a long time, but still no smart meters.
While I think this has changed over time, initially I think some statisticians were suspicious of techniques coming out of computer science, e.g. SVMs. And still, machine learning is a rather niche field of statistics that requires a fluency in CS that many statisticians don't have (or need). Check out this discussion.
Of course there are some statisticians who are also good CS people (think Trevor Hastie and Rob Tibshirani). And a lot of stats people have great domain knowledge in their areas. But I think "data science" is supposed to be the combination of stats, CS, practical programming ability (e.g., cleaning and manipulating large datasets, which is definitely not part of traditional CS or stats education), ability to communicate results effectively, maybe throw in some visualization, knowledge of how to query databases, and domain knowledge to interpret what data mean. Also, some types of data (e.g. text with the aim of NLP) are pretty infrequently touched upon in stats education.
That said, I get the sense that a lot of places looking for "data scientists" are actually just looking for business intelligence people.
Yeah, soldering SMT is not that hard, at least for the larger packages and pitches. The no-lead stuff is hard without specialized tools, but with a decent iron, flux, good light, and a loupe you can accomplish a lot.
My strategy is to prototype on a breadboard, and use breakout boards for the SMT components. Then when the design has been thoroughly tested, design a PCB that either accepts the larger SMT stuff directly, or accepts the breakout boards. Requires lots of care in design, and all my projects have been relatively simple, but if you're patient, the result is good and not very expensive.
I've tried the print and etch process, but the pitches you can achieve are not small enough to make it worthwhile for me. The whole point of getting away from perfboard was to use SMT, and in my experience it's too easy to mess up small traces when etching at home.
The article doesn't say. A ping flood? Attempted DOS? Attempt to connect to telnet port?
Sorry, but this guy is clearly exaggerating the number in order to try and get more money. Kind of like when Darryl on The Office wrote on his resume that he had overseen the "shipping of 2.5 billion units of paper material." I.e., pieces of paper.
You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.
