OliverJones

13 ms·

61.
by OliverJones 4y ago
Now it's time to address the root cause of this mess. Make the patent examination system better at vetting claims and looking for prior art. It's too easy to get patents issued. (Said he, who has a few patents to his name.) I don&
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by OliverJones 4y ago
"anklebyters"! I learned a useful new word today. Thanks.
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by OliverJones 4y ago
I wish this were available for my power grid vendor. They send me emails in hot weather begging me to turn off my oven and ac. I know they send similar emails to much bigger power users too. It would be very nice if they had this data avail
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by OliverJones 4y ago
We're talking about long-term archiving here. That means centuries. My brother the archaelogical archivist of ancient (~2000 years BCE) mesopotamian artifacts has a lot to say about archival formats. His raw material is mostly fired cl
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by OliverJones 4y ago
Hey, I gotta idea. The ocean covers up stuff we want to see. So, let's just boil off the ocean. Why, oh why, doesn't high-end project management training include case studies of mission-critical systems in large long-lived organiz
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by OliverJones 4y ago
State-funded reviewing of food businesses already exists, and has for decades. Check for the health department certificate in a restaurant or cafe. It's usually posted near the cash register.
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by OliverJones 4y ago
'Cmon. "MIT" didn't propose this. A group of researchers affiliated with the Institute proposed this. It's an idea. Not a budget request. Let's not blow it out of proportion.
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by OliverJones 4y ago
Interesting observations. Some obvious consequences: Hospital visitors and staff should never use patient toilets, ever. Patients should use their own toilets only. Staff gets clean scrubs after any visit to a toilet, helping a patient or
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by OliverJones 4y ago
And, just for good measure, here's Frank da Cruz's multilanguage Unicode compilation in many languages of the phrase "I can eat glass. It doesn't harm me." https://kermitproject.org/utf8.html Handy
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by OliverJones 4y ago
Benzene and similar flat aromatic carbon-based compounds are mutagenetic (cancer- and birth defect- causing) because they can slip between base pairs in DNA and disrupt replication. I wonder whether graphene, itself a flat carbon compound,
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by OliverJones 4y ago
You and Torsten are right. Write the freakin' book. Write the next page or two before knocking off for the night. The tools don't matter as long as you and/or an editor can polish the work and then mung it as needed for publ
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by OliverJones 4y ago
Hey Facebook. People are sick of sifting through the bs on your service. They're sick of going to the trouble of posting pictures of their puppies without knowing you'll show those pictures to their friends, if your algorithm deci
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by OliverJones 4y ago
Traditional highly intense low-pay professional jobs (university teacher, social worker, clergy, for example) have, at least in some cases, sabbaticals as part of the career and compensation scheme. Sabbaticals have the express purpose of l
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by OliverJones 5y ago
Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or Dodge In Hell" has a subplot driven by a news-story-generating AI run amok. The AI uses reader engagement as the metric (along with really great natural-language stuff). But it doesn't have an
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by OliverJones 5y ago
Bah! The Postgres gang didn't invent this word. I know a bunch of devs, at Apollo Computer Inc., who used the word "framis" for a similar purpuse back in 1989.
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by OliverJones 5y ago
When you decide to work in any field where technology meets creativity, you commit to learning new things every day for the rest of your life. So, learn to learn. Learn to be mentally agile: to change your mind-set as you explore fields and
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by OliverJones 5y ago
Latitude and longitude are, in fact, real-world data items. As a guy who sometimes uses them for stuff like store-finders. I'm lucky to live in a region with latitude about 45 (temperate northern hemisphere) and longitude about -70 (we
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by OliverJones 5y ago
Net bandwidth is somewhat similar. During the first dotcom bubble back in the 1990s, the colocation companies (predecessors to today's cloud companies) sold bandwith based on peak bandwidth usage. It was called the 95/5 plan. It
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by OliverJones 5y ago
WordPress has, of course, the lion's share of MySQL deployments by server count if not by row count. Yes, WordPress isn't the latest and greatest stuff. Yes, it's <bad thing> and <another bad thing>. But such is t
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by OliverJones 5y ago
> The semantic web is not a technical problem, it's an incentive problem. True. Demonstrable in the health-care IT world. Think of electronic health records. My personal portable electronic health record would either be a bunch of
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by OliverJones 5y ago
There's one exception to the equivalence of SQL on the one hand to XML or JSON on the other hand. The point of SQL (and other DBMS paradigms) is to give access to data that's orders of magnitude bigger than the RAM in which the a
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by OliverJones 5y ago
This is their studio PRODUCTION standard. It has very little to do with the exotic capabilities, or not, of each viewing endpoint.
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by OliverJones 5y ago
This means Netflix operates as a production and post studio for their many and talented film-makers. The stuff with the red N on the poster -- some of it is REALLY good -- uses Netflix-operated handling. Any video production goes through a
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by OliverJones 5y ago
Go for it! You can have a really wonderful career in our trade. I sure did. Consider the long term. Your uni work will take you roughly half a decade to get through, maybe a little less if you hustle. Your career will last roughly half a ce
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by OliverJones 5y ago
> I wish I had practiced law for the past 7ish years instead, because at least all of my skills would still be relevant. Hah! Not so. I've been a dev for a long time, and my spouse a lawyer. Back when we were both fresh out of schoo
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by OliverJones 5y ago
Businesses deceive themselves when they think they measure user satisfaction. There's a thing out there called "net promoter score." That's when somebody asks you "would you recommend our business to a friend?"
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by OliverJones 5y ago
"see the numbers?" This story is from a life insurance company. It doesn't say "the death rate is up overall". It says "our policyholders are dying at an astonishingly high rate." And it is indeed a very
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by OliverJones 5y ago
Some people thrive in a process-oriented engineering culture. I don't, and it seems you don't either. Be true to yourself: find other work. When an interviewer asks, "why did you leave", answer "I learn more and do
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by OliverJones 5y ago
"How to read an error message." This would help countless people new to development. Lots of systems (I'm looking at you, Java) throw up vast splats of tracebacks. Others chunder out great chunks of poorly digested code. Some
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by OliverJones 5y ago
Copyright 2002. Predates a lot of understanding in molecular genetics. Just sayin'

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