I wonder how many people who throw the work tulip around actually have any idea what it is about? Because just by reading the Wikipedia page makes it clear that most people never got past the headline.

Gold can not scale. Limited amount, it has to be verified and processed; that takes time and money to do. Ever look into gold? You pay overhead costs in actually trading in gold plus you have to pay to securely store and transport any sizable amount of it.

How did gold become the foundation of everything until the banksters finally took over?

Abstract trading; not actual gold exchanges done on top of the real thing. Also, money was created ON TOP of gold and that is where all the action happened.

When you see other kinds of money float on top of bitcoin then you will see it scale. I see no reason why it can not become a kind of digital gold as long as the encryption holds up.

Gold is and hasn't been worth as much as we've made it for centuries. We based a system around it and that made it valuable. It has a silly jewelry value but that isn't what made it so expensive.

With futures trading and bigger banks involved... interesting times are coming. (not exactly a good thing; it's more of a curse but it is not dull)

sad news for you, according to our best model of gravity (General Relativity) objects don't fall to earth, the surface of the Earth indeed accelerates up to those objects which are in free fall, following a space-time geodesic.

The best CIO I've met was a music major, he even played in a symphonic orchestra for a while. He got started in IT because he wanted to design his own DSP.

Some people are a lot more than their diploma.

quote: The vibration from those large SSD drives might shake the computer apart. I think you don't understand what is inside a solid state drive. The only thing moving inside them is electrons and charge states. And the voltages are low enough that electro-magnetic effects are pretty trivial.

Tulips is another way of saying I'm too dumb to understand technology, and I feel bad because I'm missing out on the next big thing. Just let them go...

You know the tulip thing is mostly myth right? And whenever anyone mentions it they are merely displaying their ignorance for both the original Tulip story and complete lack of understanding of disruptive technologies
I miss the days when comments were from people who actually knew the subject matter....

You were using Debian? So switch to Devuan. I did and I really like it.

As for old fartness, my first exposure to unix was trying to port Unix to a Motorola 68K based VME bus system in 1982. Eventually my boss gave up on it and we got Charles River Data Systems M68K based Unix computers. Things never went well with the larger project this was part of, but I transferred to another division before anything really hit the fan.

There's a widespread belief in IT that test code and UI are easier than other coding tasks.

It's completely false. Both are harder than other coding tasks. Your senior devs tell you to assign these projects to junior devs because they don't want to do them. They don't want to do them because they're much harder than other coding tasks.

It's win-win for the senior devs: they get easier work, and when the junior devs struggle, it makes the senior devs look even better. "oh, man, they can't even write a test suite. Well, I guess I should get the big bonus this year."

Put your best devs on test and UI. Put your junior devs on the simple stuff: backend work.

I don't think this is an IT problem, I think this is a people problem. Recently we paid an obscene fee to get a report from one of those big management consulting firms. The report had the logo of one of our competitors in the footer, and they made a typo in all instances of our company name in the text. And they sent it 2 weeks late.

Sometimes it feels like I'm in a video game and a majority of people around me are NPC.

Musk explained it by extending the light of consciousness to other planets. A person can interact with the environment, experience it, like a robot cannot. You can send a robot for you to Hawaii but its not the same as you going there yourself. That however does bring up a another point though, mars sounds like a rather odd place to be, rather cold and nasty and with suffocating air, but I digress.

Musk probably has the most viable technologies to actually do it, since its one man with some money who wants to make this happen in his lifetime, rather than a large lumbering organizations like the government which tends to lose focus on the goal, run by committees were an individuals aspirations are subservant to an organizational morass, and was hamstrung by nonsensical congressional mandates etc.

That's something only Congress can do, and as we all know, they are the opposite of Progress. They are the real problem with NASA funding. All the President can do is provide a goal so that Congress can fight over which districts get the pork that makes the goal happen.

Not enough bandwidth in the overcrowded free spectrum (tragedy of the commons emerges in urban areas with healthy WISP market). Wifi great to cover rural areas tho (both long haul and last mile).

Also stop calling it mesh, its a buzzword at this point. Just WISP.

The problem US wired broadband is facing now is pains most of civilized world went through 10-15 years ago. Worst part is that FCC stance is just a spin on correct market shape - the desired endgame result. But they skimp over how you get there, which is always a disaster. The skewed market wont fix itself just by suddenly deregulating (the arguably already shitty regulation).

US needs to do what rest of the world did - deregulate slowly, and only as a "reward" for improving competetiveness of market - first, force ISPs to open the door, on federal level, demand they sell local loops and coax docsis channels at fixed prices (simply by copying market prices from europe), allow competition to slowly build their last mile infra, and don't listen to retarded arguments like "theres no need for parallel last mile". There is shitton of need - incubent telco copper is ancient and neigh useless and no, they wont install more if there's no competitor. The more last mile (glass) bandwidth, the merrier. Less aggregation and oversubscription for the end user.

My theory is that it was created by a national actor with the intent of crashing national economies

That is simply ridiculous. It was an experiment. No one could have foreseen what it has become. Even with its original vector, the politics got in the way and totally changed the shape of the beast. To consider that it was created, KNOWING that it would hit this price point, that it would grow this large, that it would have these problems, that there would be this mania, is patently absurd.

I like to think that stuff like that is mostly the work of paid shills.

I think we want to view the history of women in tech through shit covered lenses. I always told people that computers were always women, maybe I just liked the way it sounded but while looking up historical programmer salaries I stumbled across something at nasa that says that isn't really true. I'm uncomfortable that I can think of women who would fling accusations of sexism in my workplace that would get taken very seriously. But feel fortunate that I don't currently work with anyone like that. Certainly women experienced sexism in tech but I think tech may have been better to women than most other careers.

Here's that nasa article : https://www.nasa.gov/feature/w...

I've posted this before on related stories, but I think it bears repeating: Once the uncanny valley is definitively conquered and rendering becomes cost-competitive with a live actor, I predict we're going to see a return to the old "studio system" of the silver screen era. Only, instead of a bunch of utility actors and a few big stars whose lives are micro-managed by the studio, we're going to see studios and production companies coming up with their own virtual cast and headline stars. No union worries, so scandals, no practical limits on how much "on set" time a given character can give. (no child labour laws!!!) Absolutely everything about a character being micro-managed and massaged according to the latest polls and trends. Popular characters never have to age, they can't hold a production hostage demanding a bigger cut of the proceeds and can be "fired" incredibly easily and comparatively cheaply.

What is going to be interesting are the lawsuits over the use of the likeness of some dead celebrities. Is there any studios that still have movie rights to Elvis? Would his estate disagree? Could an actors estate sue on the grounds that a given production was one that the actor would never have been caught dead in? (see what I did there?)

A month or so after I was "promoted" from lowly developer to "Systems Infrastructure Manager" during a whole-scale move from an old green screen AIX based system to a brand new in house custom rewrite in modern tech, we had some of the new replacement hardware onsite and being built up (although the replacement applications werent ready to go, but thats not important to this story).

One friday, the UPS support contractor came in to do his servicing of the UPS - that went well, he finished up and switched it back from "bypass" to "protected". That triggered a surge on the electrical supply to both server rooms, which took the AIX box off line. Due to the nature of the green screen application, there was no way for it to be high availability - the data couldnt be replicated in real time, it didnt even talk to anything other than its own binary database files...

A few hours later, the corrupted AIX box was restored and ready to go - by this time, the company (a busy call centre) had been on manual processes for the entire afternoon. On the advice of the UPS contractor, who said the surge was probably the result of too much load on the UPS at the time, we decided to do a full shut down of the entire system, switch the UPS back over into "protected" and bring everything back up - so we waited until 6pm and did just that...

At 6pm, I threw the switch - and promptly looked over my shoulder at the comms racks behind me in the server room. The comms racks were billowing smoke. The comms equipment was burning. Before I could react, I heard loads of loud pops and bangs - both inside the server room and outside it.

Another surge. This one did real damage - a dozen network switches dead, over 40 PSUs in the servers dead, one server dead outright, and loads of call centre desktops went (loudly) pop.

Panic time. UPS contractor called back in - they gave the UPS a clean bill of health and promptly left, disavowing any responsibility.

The board of directors shat themselves - at that point we didnt know the ultimate damage count, but suffice to say the company was dead in the water to any observer.

Cue a desperate night of testing servers, pulling dead PSUs and swapping redundant PSUs between servers so that each server had at least one good PSU. Comms equipment was harder to solve, having to get some expensive switches from our local shop to tide us over. Desktops were bought from the local consumer PC store to give us enough desktops to run the company.

Ultimately, we were back up and running for 8am Saturday - it wasn't pretty, but it was up and running. 3 of us in the IT tech team worked through the night scraping the bare minimum together.

My predecessors DR plan was fleshed out to the point of "we have a DR site" (a commercial site a town over that we had a contract to use - no equipment there, no plans for how to fail over to it etc etc).

So, on to the management failure....

It just so happens that one of my things "to do" on the following Monday was to submit my DR plan for the "new world infrastructure" to the board, who were having their quarterly board meeting the following week (10 days after the company almost died). It was a modest one, but required some equipment outlay to make any DR event as smooth as possible - kept the same contract with the off site unit etc etc.

They turned it down, said it wasn't needed.

I quit the following week.

This is a fallacious point.

Up until circa 2006, the majority of ISP industry understood that their customers pay them for access to the whole internet. And that their role was to ship those bytes to the customers as fast as possible.

Then, a particular moron in the US uttered the immortal phrase "the internet is a series of tubes", and all hell started breaking loose. Soon, we had customers finding themselves unable to use services on the links they paid for, including BitTorrent, Netflix, etc. From this point on, ISPs seemed to start throttling whatever the hell they wanted, and started attempting to extort additional money out of the companies producing the content being demanded by the ISPs' customers.

This brings us to the present. The ISPs have seen the huge amounts of money to be made off the network, and seem to believe they are entitled to more money above and beyond what their customers are paying them for access. Without competition, there is no natural "free market" economy that will force good behaviour on these huge companies, thus net neutrality is required to avoid the Cable-isation of the internet (i.e., avoid the Facebook + Video Streaming package, or the Slashdot + Netflix streaming bundle).

The internet survived up until the laws were passed purely based on the inexperience of the telecom companies in exploiting their stranglehold. The amount of lobbying effort they are putting into getting these laws repealed should tell you everything you need to know about their intentions moving forward...

A place I worked bought thousands of ink jet printers.
Mistake #1. Not getting a supplies contract
Mistake #2. They were a name brand printer will known for clogging cartridges and breaking. (I don't want to get sued so no, I'm not naming names.)
Mistake #3. Bought a long term support contract and paid for it in advance.

Result - they rented warehouse space to store the printers until the warranty ran out multiple years later.

Bitcoin is open source and the current limitation is more politic than technological limit. 1 mb per 10 minutes is a joke... I can be increase a 1000 times each with little change... Bitcoin Cash will release that soon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's way cheaper to run it on Azure. Gee I wonder why?

2020 is when we'll vote again for president. Plenty of down ticket elections are coming up beforehand, and people need to get off their asses and then down to their respective voting precinct to help decide these. The down ticket contests matter so much more long-term as it is their winners that are in the pipeline for gaining more power down the road.

This. These programmes take a decade or more to come to fruition. President's last at most 8 years, although didn't Trump say he would only do 4? Anyway, too long for the current administration to take credit.

An awful lot of people are buying BTC with credit cards, and I would wager a large number of them are doing it with funds they don't have. Put $10,000 on your Visa, way 3 months, sell for 10X the amount and party! Right?

Wow, that is really bad. Tim S.

So demand better politicians who can't be bought. Use whatever constitutionally protected methods you have at your disposal to tell the tyrants in government that the American people will not stand for this.

Or keep bitching on the internet and see how nothing ever, ever changes.

The solution to corrupt politicians isn't unelected officials doing an end run around the politicians. Because then all you get is corrupt unelected officials. Fix the problem at the source or die trying. Stand up for your rights and put your money where your mouth is.

Bet you won't though.

I'll see your Oracle ERP and raise you one Peoplesoft, a true marvel of software engineering, where database tables have intuitive names such as PSPRSMDEFN or PSFLDFIELDDEFN (those are real names).

Runner up: anything from ASG.

Nothing if you've had enough sex while you were alive!

In what way is telling ISPs to not screw around with the data packets transmitted across their network "heavy handed regulation"? Is it an especially onerous process for ISPs to not install special equipment and software that prioritizes network traffic?

(Jeebus, he is such an idiot.)

What ISPs? My options are Comcast or paying way more for a high latency satellite connection. There's no competition most places.

The "Big Five" tech companies are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Only one of them uses Windows as their primary OS.

Which one? Asking for a friend...