ShabbyDoo

10 ms·

31.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
A few years ago, I bought a LaserJet 4200 used via EBay for < $200. Huge, probably sucks down a bit too much power in standby mode, and sort-of noisy. However, IT JUST WORKS. Because this series still is in offices all over (and a sou
32.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
I understand the cultural allure of a single event -- pizza, beer afterward, etc. If a company wants to allow all employees to participate, why not have a demo day every couple of months where teams could present stuff they worked on durin
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
At one company where I worked, the advertised benefit to employees was, "You get to choose what you build for the company! You can INNOVATE!" Not these words, but this was the message. If you want to take initiative to improve
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
In total contrast, I once worked for a staid, rural insurance company where the majority of employees were middle-aged with children. "Flexible" hours meant that one could arrive at work anytime between 6AM and 9AM. Clearly, the
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
I'm glad this article implies that employees need not stay up all night, as Facebook Hackathons seem to promote. Such events are heavily biased toward the participation of the young and childless who have few mandatory scheduled respo
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
An interesting lack of selection bias which I had never considered. I presume that those choosing to be career officers opt-in or at least are chosen based on desire/talent/etc.?
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Gladwell notes how military culture differs from civilian culture in Korea. Surely, differences of similar magnitudes exist in the US. I wonder how the US military has changed culturally over the past few decades. As an outsider, I have p
38.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Imagine if Snowden had deployed a bunch of redundant crawlers of various news sites likely to cover him and quote him directly when he speaks. Their activity would be nearly undetectable in the traffic of the NYTimes, CNN, etc. He could c
39.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Let's say he has N friends who have agreed to help. He doesn't want to allow any single individual to have the power to act alone and release information. And, he doesn't want to require all N of them to act together. What
40.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
A couple weekends ago, I drove with my two young children to a restaurant 20 minutes from our house only to learn that it, a mom-n-pop operation, was closed for a couple of weeks. I suppose I could have called ahead to confirm my presumpti
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Yes. JVMs are slow for short-lived program executions compared to native code. By default, Hotspot does not compile a method until it is executed 10K times. Most libraries in the Java ecosystem are written to optimize performance over a
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
I would like to know by what mechanism a powered parachute flight over a feed lot might result in humans consuming unsafe food. Presuming mad cow disease inducing "pellets" even could be produced, the pilot could have dumped some
43.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Let's say that someone sat for the JEE and ranked quite poorly. Who would know this person's actual ranking? Presumably, given the existence of the secret code for checking one's score, not all rankings are made public. Do
44.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
A problem I see with many of these sorts of questions is that they often require the candidate to have some supposedly common knowledge which is not required for the job itself. Cryptic word games surely are much more difficult for a non-n
45.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Interesting. I had presumed that the pilot would be violating some FAA rules, as I might be myself. If the pilot had a commercial rating, I presume the more costly maintenance requirements required of commercial carriers would apply here?
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
I'm interested in finding planes leaving from Cleveland to Chicago on Sunday/Monday and planes leaving from Chicago to Cleveland on Thursday or Friday. I'm flexible on airports. Furthermore, I don't even mind a seat on
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Given that flight crews have government-mandated work hour limits and most crew members are paid hourly, it would take a lot of WiFi and drink sales to make-up even the labor costs of an artificially lengthened flight.
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Via eBay, I bought some 50's thru 70's era Chicago SunTimes vintage 8x10 file prints. Apparently, someone acquired their physical archives? The skill of photo journalists in those days was astounding. There were beautifully composed phot
49.
by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
My name might be "Mud" a a previous client because I recommended MongoDB and implemented a first-rev persistence interface based on my presumption that this issue would be fixed in the near-term: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3253
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Whenever I read an article drawing conclusions about the world based on interviews with those attending a school reunion, I consider the inherent selection bias. If I'm an unemployed 60-something, I might consider a class reunion to be a g
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Rather than using a hex editor, one might consider a tool like Soot from McGill's Sable group. It includes a DSL for dealing with bytecode: https://github.com/Sable/soot I had looked at Soot some time ago because of Dava, the Java decomp
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by ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Southwest apparently uses Row44 for in-flight WiFi. When it even works, it's absurdly slow. So slow that I'd gladly take a dial-up modem experience instead. On top of this, the company insists on slapping up a banner on the top of every
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by ShabbyDoo 14y ago
"but you can much more easily upgrade the set-top box with new features every one or two years whereas there's very little reason to get a new TV less than once every 5-10 years." This is the same problem I have with car audio (source,at le
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by ShabbyDoo 14y ago
I was told by a taxi driver in Chicago that bureaucrats love complaints from taxi patrons because they can extract bribes from the drivers to resolve them.
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by ShabbyDoo 14y ago
Were they discriminating against the individual or the likelihood that they would not be able to find a paying passenger in the immediate vicinity of the endpoint? Let's say they believed they would have to drive back to Manhattan for thei
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by ShabbyDoo 14y ago
I don't have a huge problem with your suggestion although I wonder if several competing Uber-esque services would solve these sorts of problems much more efficiently. The idea of "fair" prices is a difficult one because the definition of t
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by ShabbyDoo 14y ago
You probably are correct. Initial regulations likely were earnestly enacted for the public good. I believe NYC implemented the medallion system (the first in the US?) because it was concerned that taxis would become so numerous that they
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by ShabbyDoo 14y ago
"This is why we have regulations that attempt to provide some of the symmetry required for fair exchange." In the case of Ebay, Uber, Airbnb, etc., technology can replace regulation as a means of providing power to the previously disadvanta
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by ShabbyDoo 14y ago
Your driver sounds quite clever and profit optimizing. I had thought a couple of weeks ago about whether Uber should somehow allow drivers to specify destinations for more efficient routing. As a customer, what do I care of the guy 1/4 mi
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by ShabbyDoo 14y ago
One thing of many in Uber's favor is that its customers are of relatively high socio-economic status, and the company treats them well. When they hear that the company is being sued by the taxi industry, they take note. It's personal. Tax

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