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Comment LOL. Weathertologist (Score 2) 684

Just like a religion, you can claim all you want and dispense with all dissent with a wave of a hand. The sad part is, we have had worse weather patterns before and we will have varied and unpredictable weather patterns in the future.

Guess what, it has always been this way. The idea you can suddenly declare THIS is more relevant than THAT or whatnot is just silly. Yet every exceptional weather issue suddenly is proof positive of your belief. Whats next, finding pictures of Al Gore on bread?

Do you realize how silly you come off with your "IN FACT" declaration. Its not fact, its theory and the one thing about weather we all know is, we cannot tell you whats going to happen one month to the next. If we could then someone should have known this was coming way off but guess what they did not.

I would love to see the model which shows no hurricanes smacking the US, record low tornado activity, followed with one week of exceptional cold. There won't be one, but it certainly won't stop the fanatics from declaring it.

Hell, over a hundred years ago we had sixty foot drifts in New York, can you imagine the insanity that would cause today?

Comment Re:Presenteeism (Score 1) 629

You are absolutely correct; it's the only way they can measure easily: your attendance. Timelines, deliverables, e-mail replies, etc are the other easier ones. Determine the quality of work, leadership, innovation, efficiency, etc need proper analysis and most managers are not able to do it.

I'm finding more and more job descriptions explicitly stating that they expect the employee to be on site and working the regular schedule.

I currently have a handful of people reporting to me and I have no issues of allowing them to work a day a week from home. I do it myself. Only time when I can get some peace and quiet to get proper work done. Life is too short, commutes are too long, and don't have budget to give people raises.
I do get the occasional comments about my team and I just ignore those.

Comment Was I the only who noticed ... (Score 1) 961

... that the journalist contact Adams a day or so after his father passed away for a story?

As distasteful Adams comments may be about wanting people dead, it's completely inappropriate to hassle someone who just his father pass away? He's mourning and probably not in a good place.

I'm sure Adams had his PR person filter the request, but still, give the guy some time!

Comment Re:Default ding. (Score 1) 361

Heh, I was referring to Project Management, as the "new line of work".

You're right though, I have about 8 outlook rules that make it very simple. I only really care about what 4 or 5 people have to say, the rest is just noise or done on a best effort basis.

When dealing with PMs I usually have one rule; one reply every four hours in an eight-hour shift, during one of my three e-mail checking windows.

Some people I reply at the end of the week, setting a delay to send the message at 5pm Friday when I know they have skipped work early.

Comment Re:Default ding. (Score 1) 361

If you don't have the skills to route my daily BS update somewhere more appropriate then your inbox maybe you should look for new line of work.

Project Management?

Seriously, one could make the argument that for a comprehensive communication skill-set, knowing who you should be engaging is as important as the actual message.

Patents

A Patent Tree Grows In Seattle 37

theodp writes "Among the featured attractions for the kids at the just-opened $10 million Bezos Center for Innovation in the $60 million Museum of History & Industry in Seattle is a 'Patent Tree'. The museum opening marks the end of a week for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that saw his personal and managerial life put on display with the release of an excerpt from The Everything Store, a new book by Brad Stone, who reveals how he found Bezos's long-lost biological father."

Comment Re:I just do not understand the market for this (Score 1) 53

Whereas with a PC, Android or iOS system you have plenty of RAM, storage and graphics capability so you can be pretty sloppy in your code and get away with it.

Man, I don't have fond memories of memory/resource management in the old PC and C64 day. Not having to deal 64k blocks for expanded memory is a good thing.

In this day and age, multi-threaded programming is more important than managing memory IMHO. I've done my share of sloppy code, mostly because I had more important things to deal with. Sometimes a nested loop does the job quickly and you can move on to other parts. I have yet gotten a bonus,programming style points and won accolades from my peers by coding beautifully or super-efficiently. It's usually scorn and jealousy. 80% of the code I've worked on, no other soul looks at.

I say use what you have at hand and get the job done. If you got 2 Megs of RAM, use them. If you save the a Meg, you're not going to have some sort of cyber consciousness thank you for using less electricity or cycles. Hell, you may have limited your application by not using all the resources available to you.

If you have the luxury of time, enhance it and make it more bug-free.

Comment Re:RIP Bell Labs (Score 1) 75

While many good people lost their job in Nortel, there was a LOT of deadwood at Nortel. Kanata has never been the same since.

We had one upgrade with Nortel telecom equipment, where I had one engineer and five (or six) project managers. You need one or sometimes even two good project managers, but never FIVE, especially when the engineer is doing all the heavy lifting (figuratively and literally). So by charging us $300/hr, we knew we were subsidizing several crappy layers of ineffeciency.

A-L may in a similar boat. There are probably people who did not keep fresh or add very little value, because they were brought in when a VP went on an empire-building spree.

Comment Re:So users still stuck in *two* walled gardens? (Score 2) 196

Good point.

Apple is setting a terrible precedent. I think I know their motivation (e.g. money, Chinese market, etc).

Let's say Saudi Arabia makes looking at dirty pictures illegal (not just immoral). Are they scrapping browsers?

No, the government needs to ensure that while using their network infrastructure the "dangerous" services and applications are blocked. Don't impose your morality and legality on citizens of other countries.

Apple is weak. They considered the cost/benefit analysis, and figured that the few hundred people who get irate about this won't matter. Chinese citizen will not stop buying an iPhone even with this app gone; they buy it for the "cool" factor not because it allows civil disobedience. Most Chinese are terrified of getting in the sights of their government. Those who have an iPhone will gladly use in the government-approved manner.

Comment That's nothing (Score 3, Funny) 93

I once experienced an DoS MitM LTE XSS attack that lasted 42 hours and had a steady stream of 105TB/ms using NetBIOS Saturation over AppleTalk techniques that spread over a redundant cluster of MBR using HPFS. Of course the victim wishes to remain in the shadows as sharing the company's identity would either harm their reputation or allow you to verify the plausibility of the incident.

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