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Comment Lost opportunity? (Score 1) 319

Back when I was in the 'front line' teaching before a class, ABET, SACS and other Certs were pushing for competency-based education and assessment, where you would grade the 'victim' on what they could demostrably do with tangible results. From what I'm reading either that pathway went bust or Rometty is full of it and looking for yet another profiteering scam.

Submission + - MS Azure on the fritz, takes down Office365 admin services

courcoul writes: Apparently since ~8:15 EDT, managing your Office365 domain has become a compllicated pursuit. Extremely difficult to log in, if at all. The rest of the services appear to run ok, when logging into https://portal.office.com/ but if you should try and go into the Admin service, an "Our services aren't available right now" banner is all you get. It appears the underlying issue is the Azure backend, as mapped out in http://downdetector.com/status... where the extent of the widespread failure is apparent. I guess we'll need lots of patience.

Comment Yes and no (Score 1) 196

Back in the heady days of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space race, as a non-English-native speaker, I was fascinated how the lexicon smartly evolved to include succinct, precise and short nomeclature of every part, procedure or metodology of the new evolving technology. Lexical engineering at its best, if you will. In that spirit, maybe it is the time and the place to do the same with these new and growing computer actions. But beware of going overboard and overburdening the language with a clog of senseless gobbledygook unfanthomable by most.

Language is supposed to aid in communicating, not segment the population into elites.

Comment Was, is and will be a BAD IDEA (Score 1) 435

In the long gone '60s, Sony's researchers found out how to simulate 3D as we know it nowadays. A comprehensive study on how it worked and any side effects was ordered. The results were disturbingly negative and social responsibility prevailed over profit & greed. The technology was buried and disappeared. 40 years later someone rediscovered the tech or simply came across the old files. It was the same old dangerous shit. But times, they are a'changing, and the old responsibility was long gone. Everyone jumped on the 3D bandwagon, public health be damned. But it failed in the marketplace as the old Sony researchers had predicted: it was bad for you and the effect wasn't worth the risk.

I guess if true 3D laser holography doesn't evolve to an accesible level, in 20-30 years we'll see this shit rise again like an immortal coackroach. A few links for your enlightment:

http://www.audioholics.com/edi...
http://www.strabismus.org/all_...
http://www.techrepublic.com/bl...
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/08...
http://www.livescience.com/496...

Comment Re:Grace Hopper's resistance (Score 1) 126

Of course, if you didn't like COBOL, there was always Fortran to fall back on. An engineer's wet dream, total nightmare and mystery for the rest. Or there was Assembly Language for the narcissistic masochists: "this inscrutably undecypherable code is mine, mine, mine, even if it kills me with a terminal ulcer".

Comment iGadgets to the rescue (Score 1) 230

iOS 9.3 or so and on suitably new hardware (iPhone 6 or newer, equivalent on the rest of the zoo) came with Night Mode that filters out blue wavelength emmision on the screen within the specified nightly interval. Start time, end time and the amount of filtering adjustable.

Of course, that did not prevent scads of iGadget users perennially on autopilot to start moaning & bitching about how their fancy-shmancy screens had gone yellow, the night after they had willy-nilly upgraded their iOS version without READING THE MANUAL FIRST.

Comment Start small, learn to optimize (Score 1) 515

An HP-25c in high school. The need to make the most with 50 instructions really made you code carefully. Then off to Engineering in college, where Fortran was inevitable. Short while later, Pascal came along, in an IBM 370 mainframe, of all places, till the Apple IIs came out. Always had the illusion of learning VM/370 assembly language, never got around to it, but did go to 6502, 6800 and 68000. Thanks to Engineering, managed to avoid Cobol like the plague. Later years would bring Scheme, Prolog, Smalltalk and even a dabbling in Ada. Not to mention Rexx and its inheritors, the scripting languages of the Bourne, C, Korn and now BASH shells. Which led to C and the rest of that menagerie. The Swift-y bird is winking at me...

Comment MS is the blame (Score 2) 568

In the industrial world where liability exists and is rigorously enforced, engineers who build software and hardware systems are respectable individuals with strict and comprehensive training, theoretical and practical, very worthy of the title and our gratitude in creating and advancing much of the infrastructure that makes our life easier (and in some cases, possible). A former student of mine works in GE's aircraft engine division (which makes the Dreamliner's engines, amongst others): if the effort he puts out guaranteeing that the software that makes such an engine run achieves a better than 99.999% reliability can't be called advanced engineering, then nothing can or ever will.

Microsoft's infamous greediness in the consumer marketplace, OTOH, led the way many years ago to a cheapening in the public perception in what we are entitled to expect from something we pay for. Doesn't do what you wanted it to, or fails when least expected? Well, did you not read the EULA?? It says that's a what it is and you accept it as such. And if you don't like it, well... the software isn't even yours. We just let you use it for a fee, but we decide who can or cannot play with our ball. And since all thisway of doing business has never been challenged in court and concluding with a jurisprudence-establishing jury verdict (all such cases 99.99% of the time end in settlements with no acceptance of guilt or responsibility), things will not change.

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