ncphil

22 ms·

151.
by ncphil 5y ago
This is a really important point that underscores the persistent tech education gap that exists across our economies. Mike Duncan observed some time ago that our politicians can barely handle e-mail on their own, making them particularly vu
152.
by ncphil 5y ago
Plus 100 for pandas. It is a truly amazing library. If I need to do some exploratory data analysis with it I'll often do so in a Jupyter notebook, but always make sure serious coding happens in a real editor like vscode. But things rea
153.
by ncphil 5y ago
Wow. Just wow.
154.
by ncphil 5y ago
Really. Who doesn't get how cheap our politicians come? Old joke about Spiro Agnew (Nixon's VP who had to resign because he took around $30,000 in bribes while Governor of Maryland years before): When Armstrong set foot on the Moo
155.
by ncphil 5y ago
It is. Before becoming a sysadmin I was a lawyer for 12 years. Never had trouble with interruptions while on my feet in court (except for my adversary, or the judge), but it was a real problem when drafting contracts or auditing complex est
156.
by ncphil 5y ago
The terms for both patent and copyright are way too long. Instead of increasing over the years as we advanced further into the Digital Age, they should have been gradually decreasing. The whole point of the US patent and copyright system is
157.
by ncphil 5y ago
OK. So my work laptop and phone only get access to the guest VLAN at home, where hosts are completely isolated from the default VLAN where my family's personal stuff lives. Now that I'm no longer on any on-call list the laptop get
158.
by ncphil 5y ago
?
159.
by ncphil 5y ago
Some here have advocated taking legal action, although I wonder if they bothered to read Notion's terms and conditions beforehand ( https://www.notion.so/Terms-Conditions-4e1c5dd3e3de45dfa4a8e... ). There's a lot in
160.
by ncphil 5y ago
This is probably my worst error as well, one that I've kept repeating for over 20 years. Making the effort to maintain professional relationships over time, especially when inconvenient, is the number one piece of advice I'd pass
161.
by ncphil 5y ago
"a completely explainable, and frankly oredictable, trajectory and goal that ked to... changes such as the removing of the headphone jack, etc." Bad taste? Narcissistic corporate executives... with impractically bad taste? :-) Ye
162.
by ncphil 5y ago
Yep. They've been planning that for awhile, hopefully a case of "leading by example". For me hardware keys (U2F) with TOTP as a backup are really essential. I've purged SMS where I can. Unfortunately, too many (like bank
163.
by ncphil 5y ago
Fixing infrastructure won't get done because the people in charge are too stupid, lazy and greedy to fix it. Most of them are so wealthy they're completely insulated from the consequences of their actions (or inaction, as the case
164.
by ncphil 5y ago
Sidetone. The essential hardware feature that Blue Yeti and few others get right. I've had one on my wish list for a while. On the main topic, as a boomer who suffered through office work for decades (the dictation system in my first j
165.
by ncphil 5y ago
It isn't the stupidity of the US military that's the problem. It's the stupidity and greed of their "civilian" leadership (most of whom come from general or fleet officer ranks). Back in the 1958 Ike denied requests
166.
by ncphil 5y ago
... and NASA has never admitted to the failings identified by Tufte (or Feynman in the Challenger investigation, for that matter). I own the pamphlet this PDF is the electronic version of, because I thought Tufte earned that copyright (not
167.
by ncphil 5y ago
Bitwarden. With U2F keys and Authy on a mobile for backup. Accept no substitutes.
168.
by ncphil 5y ago
No. It does. It takes a public resource (spectrum) and privatizes it, and when coupled with light or no regulation leads to negative social and economic outcomes as the result of the usual race to the bottom of service levels with its atten
169.
by ncphil 5y ago
... back then, lots of projects were saying referential integrity was an operations problem. That was rubbish, and they knew it. Same for multimaster replication. Fortunately we're past that now. But I like MongoDB for its document mod
170.
by ncphil 5y ago
Shocking! TWC Internet was pretty good here, at least they were technically competent. The field service people were pretty good too. But our bill was slightly different every month. Never got any explanation for that. Eventually, Internet-
171.
by ncphil 5y ago
NetManage! Or WFW 3.1 and win32 extensions to run NCSA Mosaic. Good times.
172.
by ncphil 5y ago
No. Just no. It was the "branding" of Agile by consulting companies and publishers as a product they could sell is what got us into the sh*t show we're now in. Same has happened with REST and everything else the marketers to
173.
by ncphil 5y ago
Making an electric or gas company a government entity would at least provide a chance to prosecute its corrupt operators for official misconduct and criminal fraud (see the slow moving train wreck called CalPERS, some executive frog-marchin
174.
by ncphil 5y ago
It's your company's fault because their leadership (you know, the one percent) got on the neoliberal, supply-side, tax cutting, privatization train ahead of the rest of the population and then worked like hell to condition everyon
175.
by ncphil 5y ago
Spent the first 10 years of my IT career driving towards greater control over the systems we managed, because "the reason the service is down is that someone else (usually a vendor) didn't do their job" was never an excuse. T
176.
by ncphil 5y ago
Looks like some kind of group policy now prevents me from running WSL on my work machine. In the past Hyper-V bluescreened the peculiar Win 10 build my company uses, making WSL2 (and Docker Desktop, for that matter) a no-go. WSL1 still work
177.
by ncphil 6y ago
Really good essay, that I've passed on to my college student (in simulation programming) children. There's real wisdom in there, no matter how long the author has been coding, there's no doubt some mileage has been racked up.
178.
by ncphil 6y ago
I've got a recurring calendar item that prompts me to go up and check for updates every week, and I do what it says because after over 25 years in sysadmin I _know_ that the first time I ignore it I'm going to get stung. With Mikr
179.
by ncphil 6y ago
Agreed. My only gear is an EdgeRouter-4. Unlike the Mikrotik it replaced you have go up, find the latest fw file, download and install (that Mikrotik router wasn't designed to handle 1 Gbps and at the time the next step up cost more th
180.
by ncphil 6y ago
Wide angle "lens" (done in software). The cheap security cameras I use at home do it by default. Not as obviously distorted as a real fisheye lens, but still effective.

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