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Comment Re:Book Sales != Books Read (Score 1) 63

Exactly this.

I used to buy comics every week and read them. They stacked up to 2-6 inches. I was up to $75/week and decided to stop.
In the 20+ years since I haven't been able to get into reading comics again. When I look to buy, I'm not easily interested. When I do buy, I might not read it. That's a hobby that has sailed on for me.

I still buy other types of books. ebooks are good for novels. Put them on your phone and you always have it with you. If it draws you in, you'll make time. Until then, it's ready in your pocket.

Computer books have really declined. I once had half the O'Reilly catalog. All of that type of info is now online, for free and searchable. The last few physical books I purchased were obsolete within a year. As a devops type, reading is a huge part of the job and the info is not in books anymore.

For my hobbies, I still read books. One is woodworking. Lots of the info has moved on to blogs or youtube. I do hand tools and archive.org has tons of historical books and I can also purchase PDFs for some of the books I buy. For every physical book I have on woodworking, I have 20 ebooks from archive.org and have a local search setup for all of them.

Comment What about non-OSS? (Score 1) 50

AI has lots of data about OSS. Source, working programs, guides, blogs, git/svn logs.

How would it work on proprietary code? Especially code that doesn't use lots of OSS (how much is left nowadays?)
Would it have enough data? This could be an argument against OSS being less secure.

Comment Re:Linux can be trusted (Score 1) 124

I remember when people joked that Emacs stood for "Eighty Megs And Constantly Swapping"

The trope is for 8 megs. My 486 motherboard couldn't go beyond 16MB and adding 8MB was > $2000.

Linux would run, with X11, on 4MB. So double the RAM and emacs still caused swapping.
Luckily, web browsers came out and made emacs look frugal with RAM

Comment Wish Amazon did driver safety training (Score 1) 42

UPS has a standard training program for drivers.
When the drivers get their route, UPS has eliminated left hand turns, avoided stop signs and other things. It makes the route safer and reduces fuel usage. They were using route mapping before GPS, before internet, before the 80286 existed.
Because of their scale, when gas got to be more than $1/gallon (90s), they were experimenting with CNG until the gas price came down again.

When I pass a UPS truck doing a delivery, it's usually off the side so it doesn't cause a driving hazard.

Amazon doesn't do any of that. Its left up to the contractor. So is all liability
During delivery, they are not off the side, often hidden around the corner or placed before a corner and causing a blind spot. It a gamble going around because of where they chose to stop the truck.

Amazon will never do anything to improve the safety of delivery for the drivers or the general public. They will never let their franchises get big enough or profitable enough to justify the cost of anything like what UPS has done through the years.

Comment Stomach size decreases (Score 2) 112

Sometimes I could work on diet and my stomach would shrink. I couldn't eat as much. But I was always hungry and ate the same portions. My stomach size increased

With these meds, I no longer have the constant hunger. Before, couldn't really tell when I was full. Now I can hear the signal.

I'm changing habits, switching portion size tracking what I eat and keeping within a calorie budget. Its been a game changer. I hope I can continue it when I'm off.

Comment Re:Eye Opening Breakdown (Score 1) 33

I wonder how much of their server products and office products are not cloud nowadays?

How many companies switched from running Exchange in their data center to outsourcing the email server? How many are big enough to justify the IT costs of running an email server? Keeping up with security against minor and state level actors. Purchasing the bandwidth to ingest spam that come in alonside legit emails.
How many colleges and Universities no longer run email servers for students and staff?

The market to run those private copies has shrunk too. What can't you do on a phone or tablet or a computer's web browser (being win, mac, linux, chromebook). The capabilities are increasing too. Emulators can run in web browsers. And CAD systems.

Comment Spreadsheets are brilliant and risky (Score 1) 82

When I 1st used a spreadsheet, I was studying engineering. I was doing something like https://www.omnicalculator.com...

It took 60 seconds to enter all the numbers on a calculator. I needed to iterate over it to find the right material/diameter/etc. I could have written a program in BASIC or Fortran. Then I'd need to think about input, output, loading/saving a file.

A spreadsheet let me change 1 number and iterate. I didn't have to program anything except the formula. I wasn't even doing muliple lines! Spreadsheets are a decent UI for math and lists.

This was DOS days and I might've used Lotus or Multiplan. There were so many varients of spreadsheets back then. Lotus Improv on NeXT looked innovative.

If there was competition, maybe we'd get something with a similar UI to a spreadsheet, but that was easier to debug, could scale like a database.

Comment Re:Thanks for the push to Linux (Score 1) 103

Unless you have very specific software requirements likely for engineers and the like. Most white collar workers these days can probably do almost all their work on any device with a web browser.

Many college students can do everything they need on a phone.

In fact, there are many things that only exist as apps on a phone.
Most of use can still choose iPhone or Android.

Linux has really become the way for servers. Many Linux devs use Mac & homebrew instead of Linux too.

How many Linux only desktop apps are there (I remember ones for all the Unixen with CAD, FPGA, etc)

What is keeping the apps on Windows or Mac? And driving them to iPhone/Android instead of Web?

Comment Why python perl (Score 1) 86

Perl 4 was great. Instead of all different versions of awk (awk, nawk, gawk), shell (some had functions, some didn't, bash wasn't everywhere nor was ksh. csh varied too!) on the different Unices, you had a tool that could work the same on all of them. Plus lots of modules. Perl 5 continued this

Eventually the Unices converged to Linux and the GNU versions of awk, shell, etc. And python came & caught up to Perl's modules. Perl got mired in Perl 6.

With python, there is an enforced style so everyone reads the same way. There is usually an obvious way to do things.

Perl's motto is "There's more than 1 way to do it" and I think many of the books/perl programmers go out of the way to prove it.

I do enough puzzle solving in my job. I want my programs to be obvious and easy to understand 6 months later.

Comment Swearing at a construction company? (Score 1) 105

I'm sure that was a milder choice of words than is usually spoken at that company

I had a UK manager explain that when he had bad news for his boss, he had to carry a plastic model of the poo emojii when he delivered it. Childish and boorish. Him for talking about it, worse for his boss(s).

We are led by donkeys.

Comment Re:Power failure (Score 2) 175

In the Northeastern US, we get snow storms. Snow can build up on trees, etc and take them down. Some trees are near powerlines too.

In 20 years, I've lost count of the number of times power was out more than 2 days. There is usually a power outage once a year. I remember one that lasted a week and a coworker with an hour commute had no power for 3 weeks. One time, the neighbor's tree across the street fell on the power line. The power company had things back in 24hrs, but it may have been 36hrs.

However, yes, we don't worry about powering up computers. They're on a UPS that shuts everything down after 5 minutes and I don't have to worry about a crash. I also have a generator to power heating, the fridge and a few appliances. Before I had the generator, I would worry about if there's enough heat or do I need to go to family in another area that has power.

Comment Re:Phones with wheels (Score 1) 147

At least phones have a consistent UI.

Cars used to be fairly similar. High/low beam on the floor, emergency brake on the floor (some had a center lever)
Blinker on the left. Wipers... on the dash or on the right like the blinker
Radio in the center w/ volume on left, tuning on right w/ 5 buttons for favorites
Heating, fan, defrost varied a bit more, but it was usually in the center.

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