Well, we know it's not going to be a Pink Floyd "Pulse" CD at this point.

I was going to say one of those solar lawn lamps, as at least one of them would have gotten lucky and gotten an exceptionally long lasting battery and solar cell.

But this trumps it. Or a solar calculator, though whether that is "working" when nobody is pressing buttons is up for debate -- and if we grant that, any stupid lithium cell powered musical greeting card can still be consdered to be "working"

Yeah I too think the technology has devolved over time. Certainly it is next to impossible to find a competently written manual for most things these days. There's no actual contract from vendors as to what's an actual feature and what's just an implementation side effect, software hits the marketplace with things broken that should not even have gotten *to* the QA department, much less past it, and there's no shortage of glossy brochures deceiving the high level managers into believing that everyone is using newer technology than you are with none of the issues/glitches that are causing your organization grief.

I do, however, worry about the data entry skills of the latest generation. You'd think being raised with tech would make them understand the importance of consistency and accuracy, but if my anecdotal experience is accurate they are even less thorough than the older people who had the excuse of not being familiar with the technology.

You'd be better off taking modern meat back in time and selling it for mint condition 1958 and earlier coins.

Or side-and-rear-mounted lights that illuminate the road beside you, and a V2V communication bus that allows headight systems to cooperate to light the road and not shine in other driver's eyes.

I actually find this research more realistic and practical than self-driving cars.

Yep, and start aiming their rearview mirrors to shine back in the asshole's face.

No honestly, why these boneheads can muster the balls to tailgate me and turn on their highbeams, but don't have the balls to cross the double line and pass me is a total mystery. I suspect they are just satisfying some repressed passive-aggressive pathology. Because I sure as hell am not going to speed up no matter how much of an idiot they make of themselves.

Sales of Pepsi on my part rose when the regional Coke distributor stopped shipping Splenda Coke to what seems like all of New England.

I don't buy too much into "aspartame bad, mkay" (though I suspect it may be more likely to cause me headaches, anecdotally, but then my initial trials of Zevia were not promising on that front.. more data needed there) but Splenda tastes MUCH better once your taste buds adapt to it, and even though I prefer Coke over Pepsi I made the switch because compared to Diet Coke, even store-brand splenda sweetened soda tasted better. I still drink regular diet coke in restaurants or when the grocery store (frequently) runs of of alternates.

Sales of Pepsi on my part fell to 0 when, last year, the regional Pepsi Distributor decided all of New England had to go without Pepsi One.

Sales of Price Chopper store brand are up, up, up, at least where I shop. Yes I went there. Was forced to really.

Meanwhile I watch cases of vanilla-vita-lemon-yuk variants of these colas sit on the shelves untouched and wonder why distributors think nobody was buying the Splenda. Maybe they got their bar codes mixed up.

It is not silly at all to order that. A double big mac combo with a diet soda is 1260 calories. With a sugared coke it is 1580. At a calorie budget of 2000-2600 calories per day for a sedantary male, saving that 320 calories is the difference between being able to eat 760-1320 calories at other meals, or having to scrimp by on 440-1000 for the entire rest of the day.

Not to mention the coke has a high glycemic index. The fries and white bread may be partially balanced by the meat, but add sugar and that balance is going to get way out of whack.

Almost all apps depend on a least the store. Very few offer sideload download links that do not requite google creds.

Bull. I know plenty of very good sysadmins who have to google every time they need to use ifconfig. Just as there are plenty of BGP jockies that would't know the first thing about setting up dchp snooping. Their talents lie elsewhere, is all. There's a large variety of specialization in IT these days.

Skip the CCNA and just read some topical books. I've been working networks my entire career and every time I crack a CCNA book, I get 2 chapters in and decide to go read something that is actually useful instead. Most of the things CIsco seems to think every network admin needs to know are job-specific skillsets you'll probably never use and can be picked up when and if they are needed as long as you've put in your time. Or whatever flavor of the month monstrosity they are pushing on their customer base as a "must have" just because they are the only ones who have it (though they seem to have stuck with IP SLAs longer than a month.)

CCNA is basically a prerequisite for SE training, not really worth the time of anyone who doesn't have to answer questions all day from sundry customers. Also required for nwteork admins who for job-market reasons need to stoop to working for PHBs, but IMO you're better off working for an employer who waives that requirement when they see your years worked.

Certainly CCNA is not the best thig for SAs in particular. Learn in this order: ARP, IP subnets, iptables, rudimentary tcpdump/tshark and VLANs, and you'll be more than capable of escalating tickets to networking competently.

If they keep the email flowing and the databases up, I don't care that much that the SA's cannot tell the difference between a UUID and an IPv6 address. It's my job to do the latter.

That's because Microsoft's definition of "Network Adminstrator" is someone who administers AD servers.

Or perhaps not even that, as causality was not established.

I thought this thread was about cannabis? Who's got a ahort term memory problem now?

You're not just reducing entropy when you do that. When you iteratively feed back the same hash over and over you increase the odds that you'll fall into an internal cycle in the hash, and the number of inputs in the cycle can be much much rarer than the number of inputs in the path to the cycle. Though more modern hash functions tend to be designed to reduce the impact of that.