anonsivalley652

Does MSFT still use smartcards everywhere?

People can't see who's contagious in the early stages, so they're gambling with their lives by not taking proactive precautions before it's a widespread problem.

COVID-19/SARS-cov-2 is something to take seriously for several reasons:

- To reiterate an important point: "Healthy" infected people go around unwittingly spreading it for several days to a week, so you have no idea who's really sick. And you have no idea how many people in public actually have it at any one time. It's another reason this pathogen is so successful.

- It's a terrible flu for most.

- It can quickly turn life-threatening. A number of bodies were discovered in Wuhan of people trying to walk or drive themselves to the hospital, but they died before reaching it.

- FIXED: If hospitalization is needed, the average CFR is 16% (Russian roulette odds) and 49% for critical condition.

- There is no treatment.

It's going to be a full pandemic in 7-21 days (depending on the area), and last from 19-35 days. For example, someone already died from it within 40 mi / 64 km of where my mom lives in a rural/suburban area. You have to assume the number of infected is 10-30x the number of identified cases because the CDC has strict PUI criteria that are turning away patients. (Oh, and it costs $2000±1000 if you take the test and test negative.)

Haven't had a problem with VRBO yet. Had a place in Paris in the 1st arr. the last time.

Cool. Fruit cocktail trees are also awesome because they have multiple fruit varieties on a single tree via grafting. If you know how to do grafting, you can add additional fruits without planting more trees.

Now, if only I can figure out how to start an avocado pit or a pineapple top because several experiments have failed.

Awesome.

Columbia says they have a lifetime warranty, but a $300 running rain jacket I bought at their flagship store sometime ago they refused to repair or replace it when all of the inner liner started flaking off and it was no longer usable. I'm never buying anything from them again.

The most durable day-bag / school backpack I have ever owned was a Trager. It was needed because I went through 9 backpacks in high-school since our school didn't have lockers. Supposedly in the 70's pipe-bombs were detonated in them and the lockers created shrapnel. Anyhow, that backpack held 4-6 books like a champ. It had/has a lifetime warranty and they even replaced the zipper on a 10 year old product for free. Sadly, they're out of business now.

Nomad is much simpler.

https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad

For slightly larger teams, Cloud Foundry (PaaS) is like local Heroku and it supports Docker too. If you need actual VMs irrespective of deploying apps, it's better to run something like CloudStack (IaaS) underneath. CloudStack + KVM + Cloud Foundry + Docker is a much cheaper way to run [IP]aaS on bare metal to save money on pricey, stable workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure and Heroku. For test labs, home and dev/staging, it's fine to run used enterprise servers. It may be fine for some production use-cases with proper, Googlely-style HA too.

OpenStack =~= K8s in the over-engineered, overly-complex department.

A Mac Mini expanded with two SSDs with syncthing is superior to sneakernet because it provides replication. And, if you really want to, add a 14 TiB HC520 placed in an external USB 3 case.

Add an rsync server to get backup. Forget the cloud, most solutions are overpriced and insecure. Use TarSnap if you have absolute have to backup reasonable quantities of critical data and call it a day.

Try them all and then pick one (or two):

- SpiderOak One

- Mega (very cheap)

- Syncthing (open source)

I don't particularly care about what Tesla, SolarCity or Silevo does or doesn't do. What is concerning is handing over hundreds of millions in socialist corporate welfare that goes to waste, when that money could've helped the homeless and desperately poor who get austerity instead.

I guess it's American-made propaganda with export controls because it's considered "munitions."

Try this instead: https://outline.com/BdaeZq

Caregiving, in-home nursing care, rehabilitation and long-term care (assisted living/nursing home/hospice) should be provided by a different social safety net department because of it's specialized and complex nature that also requires licensure and auditing (making sure elderly and disabled aren't abused or neglected).

Single-payer, universal healthcare should also include (all but cosmetic and elective procedures):

- prescriptions

- mental care including therapy, psychiatry, rehab and commitment

- dental care

- vision care and prescription glasses

- hearing aids (avg cost is $3000 USD)

- mobility and safety aids for disabled and elderly

- gym memberships for people below a certain income level

- smoking, drinking and substance abuse intervention, counseling and cessation assistance (medications, tools, relocation assistance)

- weight-loss for obesity/significantly overweight with effective, tailored, holistic approaches

I'm sorry but that's wrong because that's trying to twist the meaning of words. No money, no healthcare isn't universal obviously. With no single-payer, government-funded, healthcare system, only doctors and patients who have to pay for everything themselves, that is in no way "universal healthcare."

The problem with charging poor people for healthcare is that they get sicker and sicker and then need emergency care, and that's more expensive than giving them free healthcare in the beginning.

It's unethical and classist to pick-and-choose who gets life-saving cancer treatment based on their income. Doctors with integrity would be abhorred at being presented with such a decision because it goes against the fundamental values of their profession.

Wow, that's cool. I wonder if vision, dental, medical, hospital, prescriptions and mental are all covered without fees?

The very poor in the US only get Medicaid (rarely Medicare, which requires paying into Social Security long enough).

Medicaid:

- It doesn't pay doctors, specialists and dentists enough, so they often treat patients poorly (spend less time, not thorough enough, don't order necessary tests).

- Medication is all paid-for with no co-pays (out-of-pocket expenses), but at a limited number of pharmacy brands and limited selection of medications (formulary).

- Emergency and necessary hospital care is completely paid-for.

- There is a limited selection of doctors and dentists available to choose from. Most, not all, are reviewed very poorly.

- Only one dentist cleaning visit a year is allowed even if the person needs it more frequently because they produce plaque faster.

- There are very few specialists who are assigned by the doctor, often with very, very long waiting lists. Furthermore, some specialties do away with waiting lists and make people call on a certain time at a certain day like animals for very few appointments. They make it a game to play with people's lives and waste their time.

- The choices of insurers who actually provide the Medicaid insurance is usually 1, 2 or maybe 3 in certain counties.

-----

Medicare (similar to typical US convoluted, private insurance):

- Has several confusing options, lots of rules and fine-print.

- Medication isn't covered, it needs Part D insurance or ExtraHelp.

- Hospital insurance requires enough taxes paid or paid Part A private insurance.

- Medical insurance requires enough taxes paid or paid Part B private insurance.

- Medigap private insurance can be needed to pay co-pays, deductibles, coinsurance but it doesn't cover long-term care (no LTC = $$$$), vision/eyeglasses, dental, hearing aids, or private-duty nursing.

----

It's possible to have both Medicare and Medicaid, which means good insurance but with some out-of-pocket expenses.

Maybe Medicare improved without costs, for all, would be far, far better than people dying from cancer having to go to bankruptcy court rather than finish their bucket list?

I don't want to crap all over Koreans or Korean culture, but there's one element that profoundly bothers me: the abandonment and shunning of the elderly. Many are homeless or live lonely lives in destitution and having to rely on charity food. Also, certain bridges have become notorious for mostly all elderly people committing suicide because they can't take it anymore. Korea has a lot going for it, so I hope it gets better in this regard and inequality.

The US and many other countries also need to address inequality seriously too, if not for moral reasons then for selfish, long-term GDP and consumer purchasing power reasons.

Yes, but it will take time because the acceleration is proportional to the amount present until it reaches a carrying capacity and burns itself out, or it slows in deceleration because of large quarantines / isolation orders. The problems are many:

1. The fed/state/county/local officials are placing prevention of panic ahead of telling the truth. NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said yesterday, with De Blasio next to him, that it's "only 2x more dangerous than the flu," when it's 20x-50x deadlier than influenza (because each flu strain differs).

2. Like a third-world country, the CDC is hiding information about tests performed and negative results.

3. The CDC is actively thwarting doctors from ordering SARS-cov-2 tests because of overly-restrictive PUI criteria that don't allow discretion of the doctor, so it's a virtual certainty people with COVID-19 are being told that they don't have it because some pinhead bureaucrat said so and they're going around in public infecting people before they come down with what they may assume is a bad flu.

4. COVID-19 takes a number of days to manifest itself, and it appears that people are contagious before they have symptoms, so they spread it unwittingly to potentially many others because it's so infectious.

5. Mild and moderate cases of COVID-19 won't be tested and reported, giving a false sense of the situation.

6. People who died before the SARS-cov-2 test was available haven't all been tested. There were several bodies that tested positive today in Washington state adding to the death count, but not every morgue is going to do this. Plus, it's possible many such bodies were released for burial and will never be tested.

7. It takes weeks to a month for recognition phase (the current situation in the US as of writing) to give way to initiation and acceleration phase of pandemic. I figure, based on the current trends, the US is about 2 weeks ± 4 days away from acceleration.[a, b] But, by that time, it's too late for many people because they were already infected by numerous infected people who weren't showing symptoms.

8. The poor and working class rarely have sick days and they can't afford to miss work, so they'll work anyhow. The prevalence of "F everyone, I have to take care of myself first" is what happens when people aren't paid living wages and guaranteed sick days off. And so, more people will be infected and more people will die because of greed.

----

Then, once a country begins pandemic acceleration, it may last about a month ± 2 weeks before the number of infected drops enough that it's no longer pervasive. [a]

a. Based on China's Wuhan epidemic curve as a rough, approximate model.

b. Five phases of pan/epidemics: investigation, recognition, initiation, acceleration, deceleration

Definitely. And this other one has more stats but not as much detail:

http://arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd...

The same company that poisons poor residents downstream in Crosset, AK and subverts democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Brothers_Exposed

Some certs like A+ are a game to get the candidate to memorize useless, obscure trivia that is found in someone's test prep materials.

The exploitative training/testing racket is all about creating a subscription-like dependency with planned obsolescence to get steady, easy money for more testing and more exams.

Thank the various gods for, back in the day: TestKing.

Good certifications which can be used in certain safety-critical tech jobs include the US state-by-state Professional Engineer license with a brutal and comprehensive exam process plus required work experience.

In general, better exams are free-form responses and/or a panel interview (if they still do that) like CCIE.

Yup.

My boss had an MCSE but could only operate a Windows desktop as a power user and install Windows (server). He got this cert because of the "bootcamp" where they only taught to the tests and then they took the tests until they passed them.

Meanwhile, I was deploying GPOs and scripting remote cleanups of Blaster using PsExec... zero certs and no degree.

A+ is the mark of the beast and the coming of the second-stringer.

Get an A+ certification and see how far you get. :)

I could be wrong, but you come across to me on the negative-side, like cognitive distortions or inexperience. "Some job markets" being what specifically? Game dev, for example, the most sure path to that is more general experience before and willingness to work as an unpaid intern/code janitor prior to getting a paid position.

"How": That's your responsibility to use your imagination to figure out. No one else can or should think for you or do what you need to do because then you won't internalize independence or gain self-confidence to be more capable.

I've been a hiring manager on occasion. Resumes are an advertisement that must be proven fact-checking the candidate that the can demonstrate further knowledge and calling references. Resumes are often moot in rapid-pace technology fields where demonstration of specific, current knowledge is more important.. they are only good if they can be used as advertisements to get the attention of a company and/or get attention of different decision-makers within that company.

A home lab is useful for gaining knowledge that may be tested in an interview... like how to construct an HA MySQL or Postgres cluster that can failover itself, move the vIP and prevent split-brain. Or machine learning.

In general, I had zero family, friends or legacy connections for the following to demonstrate :

At 15, I went to interesting talks and colloquia just for the heck of it, and asked questions. At one of them, I was offered a job as a dark matter physics research assistant at IBM Almaden but couldn't take it for legal reasons (15 ½ legal minimum). I was disappointed, but moved forward.

At 16, I got a pizza flipping/cashier job with zero experience because no one else was hiring (it was a recession and there lots of potential workers). Definitely a sh*t job but a job nonetheless. I had to break down every business door in the area and it was rejection almost every time, except when it wasn't.

At 17, I moved to a job in retail software sales with only one crap job on my resume by again banging-down every door to every business for 2 miles down a main road.

At 18, I started a sysadmin consultancy and built it up to 4 clients within a single building for convenience. I was doing sysadmin, netadmin and ported a Fortran nuclear reactor simulator from UNIX to Win32 and made it run 2.5x faster by disabling swap. Also, added a Cisco 1604 128 KiB ISDN router and discovered AIX was phoning home to IBM, keeping the router always demand-dialing... nothing a little /etc/hosts couldn't fix.

About 19, I took a crap-ton of (then cheap) community college classes, 5-7 at a time, and did a Transfer Admission Agreement to guaranty admission to a decent school while working almost full-time.

21, transferred to the uni and took 4 CS quarter-system classes at time. It's even more fun with a concrete math class where proofs are pages and pages. 3-4 all-nighters a week for months at a time.

At 25, I hit pause on uni and got a full-time Lead SysAdmin job at (top 5 university name) without a degree and zero certifications. They gave me all sorts of training/certs that were of mostly limited value and no importance but gave my boss an excuse to put us up in Hollywood, rent a Jag and personal-cost road-trip to Vegas on Friday. Remote-site VMware VCP training cost $10k back then, I bet it's $15-18k now... and the tests cost $3k+ now IIRC.

At 27, I moved to a biomedical informatics department doing High Performance Computing (HPC) and what would be considered now more like SRE.

A couple of years later, I bounced to finish the degree and go into enterprise consulting.

At 31, I did on-premises, generalist (SRE-like) integration and migrations at an AWS preferred partner for Fortune 200.

At 32, I delved in the startup scene, mostly earlier YC batch folks and did a smattering of consulting gigs, getting paid $10k/week. (It's best at that point to have an LLC.) In general, hang around the right coffee shops, and meeting potential clients is inevitable.

----

Here are some preparatory elements to consider:

- Put useful things on Github and/or Youtube/Vimeo.

- Scrub social media clean or close them.

- LinkedIn is essential for legacy organizations.

- Have a resume in PDF & DOCX formats.

- Have a personal site that has limited details, links to professional social sites and a captcha'ed contact form.

- Carry personal cards with email (containing name), phone number with +country code and timezone, and a QR barcode that's the vCard.

- Cultivate a pleasant, no complaints, always on-time, always deliver, can-do/will-figure-it-out attitude.

- Make them tell you "no," because never asking is a definite "no."

Hacker's Delight a zillion ways to do bit population count or over/underflow detection efficiently

Introduction to Algorithms MIT Press

Numerical Recipes algorithms for science

TAOCP

SICP

AOMP

To Mock a Mockingbird combinators are good for you

Design Patterns

First Principles of Interaction Design (Revised & Expanded)

The Dragon book

Database Systems: Design, Implementation, & Management

K&R C

Code Complete

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Software Engineering at Google

Site Reliability Engineering

-- Also, learn these, at least to a novice level: --

Crystal

Java

Clojure

Haskell

OCaml

Erlang

Elixir

Rust

C

x86 assembly

bash, JS, CSS, HTML, SQL, Python

and do Linux From Scratch & BLFS

Clickbait, misrepresenting or exaggerated headlines and weak, stretching statements anger / disappoint me because they demonstrate a lack of integrity. Also, free speech has absolutely nothing to do with what content a company chooses to display. Wouldn't a more factual headline, as mentioned on John Oliver a few hours prior to this writing, be "Fox News downplayed, misinformed viewers and trivialized COVID-19"? FN may not have yet started practicing journalistic integrity, but that's beside the point.

The internally-inconsistent premise FB is based on, keeping in touch with friends, ultimately leaves nothing new and no mystery to talk about.. and no point to ever meet, effectively creating distance from and losing friends. Isn't that an awesome technology?

For me:

Newspaper: late 70's-2002

Friendster: 2003-2005

TV: late 70's-2006

Myspace: 2004-2006

Orkut: 2005-2006

Facebook: 2003-2007

/.: 2004-2007

Flickr: 2004-2010

Radio: late 70's-2011

Twitter: 2008-2013

Quora: 2009-2013

Snap: 2012-2013

Meat agriculture & palm kernel oil (yeah, yeah no stupid comments): late 70's-2014

Reddit: 2017-2020

LinkedIn: 2004-2020

IRC: 1996-

Craigslist: 2000-

eBay: 2001-

Amazon: 2001-

AliExpress: 2016-

Wish: 2019-

Addicted to materialism, I guess.

So:

1. There are cases in over 80 countries now.

2. Evolutionary studies suggest it's been spreading about 5 weeks longer than the first recognition phase discoveries suggest.

3. The incubation period is 2 weeks.

4. A number of individuals contract it with few symptoms and transmit it far and wide.

The most reasonable conclusion is that it's going to hit almost every country hard, come back in August in the northern hemisphere, and possibly once again after that. It could be stopped at about this point, but that would get in the way of corporate profits, people flying to and fro during a pandemic and people who go out in public while sick and don't sneeze or cough into their shirt, so 10-100 million people "have to" die... potentially more numerically but less percent-wise than 1918.

The time to work remotely is now, because no one can see or tell who is infected. And after the first pandemic wave, it will be necessary to maintain vigilance for roughly 1.5-2 years.

See also:

CDC Response Framework [2014, PDF, 511 KB, 24 pages]

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/mmwr-rr6306.p...

http://coronavirus-realtime.com

PS:

The top 5 existential threats are:

a. Pandemic

b. Antibiotic/antimycotic resistance

c. a. and b. combined

d. Climate Change Emergency

e. Nuclear War (Turkey attacking Russian troops in Syria, North Korea)

The biggest thing to most reduce the risks of a.-d. is to end meat agriculture, but that will never happen because of rationalized, tribal selfishness and political concerns.

The university needs a couple shiny new buildings and the employees need a fancy retreat in Aspen, so grad students need to be happy with crumbs.

Poe's law disclaimer: sarcasm, a miraculous new technology that makes words have absolutely identical meanings in a completely humorless manner.

Striking when it's convenient is worthless. Perhaps if the students weren't so entitled, they'd understand that solidarity is important and that grades should be handled. Furthermore, you have to realize the university is punishing you to turn you against the grad students... and it appears they have succeeded. If I were an ugrad there, I'd be right there with the grad students.

I was an ugrad at another UC where 2/3 of my classes were cancelled because lecturers got jobs at startups in the dotcom times, and they made a habit of not scheduling upper-div major classes frequently enough to stay full-time for the year. haha.

My dad has a 40-year-old puke yellow Kenmoore refrigerator and 35-year-old Maytag washer & dryer.

There's 2 axises of goods to think about that differ wildly:

1. the specific brand and model - some models may have regressions or design defects

2. the model year, manufacturing date and location - quality, reliability and cost-cutting measures vary with revision, manufacturing experience and who put it together (QA/QC doesn't catch every possible contingency)

Consumer Reports used to rate individual products and sometimes manufacturers with rankings and try to estimate TCO/repairs, but when I subscribed to the digital subscription to lookup gas water-heaters and gas tankless water-heaters, there were zero reviews. Maybe they've cut-back to just rating cars and TVs? I don't know.

Are Bosch and/or Miele any good still?

Also, Kirby vacuums eat Dyson's for breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snacks.

Remember: that's just the people who both went to a hospital (say 1/20) AND were tested (say 1/5) because test kit rationing with overly-strict criteria that lack common-sense. That implies the real number of presently (as of writing) infected people in Santa Clara County is around 100-1000 (wide margin of error due to inputs).