626 karma · joined May 30, 2011
I live in Portland, Oregon now. Without going into too many details, we have an expensive pension program. Many feel that the pension program is too generous, and there has been a lot of thought put into how we can fully fund both pensions and everything else. Last year there was a bill in the Oregon Senate (SB1049) that proposed some modest changes to how pensions work. It passed with bipartisan support, and the public unions went nuts. They said they'd never support a candidate who voted for SB1049.
Last month we had our primaries. The most important primary was the Democratic primary for the Oregon Secretary of State. If the governor were to step down for any reason (to take a cabinet position in the Biden administration, for example), the SOS becomes governor. Someone who opposed SB1049 joined the race at the last minute, got over half a million dollars of union money, outspent her candidate, and won the election.
This is just one of many examples. Even though the unions are only spending a couple of million dollars per year in Oregon, they're really smart about it, and as such, they get what they want. In the Secretary of State race they hit a home run. For half a million dollars, they pushed their preferred candidate through and sent a message that if you oppose them in any way, it will be a career limiting move.
The reason I mentioned that is because I think it is a good contrast to what we're seeing today. With smart leadership, we would have a better chance of solving this problem. But people are enraged and not thinking clearly. And there's no reason to believe that these riots are going to be more successful than the Baltimore riots, the Ferguson riots, the Oakland riots, or even the Rodney King riots.
You can listen to live audio. You can watch replays of games. In fact, you can watch replays from 22 different camera angles. You can watch condensed replays. You can even watch live preseason games. But you can't watch live games that matter.
Just as you (hopefully) get to choose how many hours you work, your coworkers also get to choose how many hours they work.
I'd ask yourself two questions:
1: Are you happy with your current work/life balance?
2: Can you achieve your career goals at your current workplace while maintaining your desired work/life balance?
If the answer to either of those questions is "no", you should have a conversation with your manager.
1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons
2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home
My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing what I've been up to lately. It's been a huge win for me for a few reasons:
1: Everyone uses email, so I can reach with friends and family who don't use Facebook. I think my grandmother is my biggest newsletter fan, and is always encouraging me to publish more frequently.
2: I'd rather share a well-written email (with lots of links to my self-hosted photo gallery), than a series of short status updates that may or may not be read by people I want to keep in touch with. Also, a lot of the information I share in the newsletter I wouldn't share on Facebook. Not because it's super private or anything, but I'm not going to post a status update that basically says "My living situation is pretty good right now. I'm renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and my commute is fantastic!"
3: I never really enjoyed checking Facebook, but I did it out of habit/addiction. Quitting cold turkey has made me a happier person.
The feedback I have gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. I got a number of really good responses to the newsletter in which friends and family provided similar updates. It even inspired a friend of mine to write his own newsletter. These responses were great, and much better than any information I would have gleaned from Facebook.
The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook. For the most part, it hasn't been a problem, except for the time I missed an invitation for a week-long hiking trip in Glacier National Park. I should probably cancel my Facebook account, but I'm not ready to do that yet.
Edit: I should add I don't use TinyLetter. I instead send out a mass email via gmail. It has worked well so far, but I don't have a good way of adding subscribers except via word-of-mouth. Maybe I should investigate TinyLetter.
According to [1], that works out to ~$285,000/year in 2015 dollars.
I had never considered that the same problem exists in academia, but apparently it does. Hamm has donated tens of millions to the University of Oklahoma, and it's pretty obvious he's trying to use his money to influence the direction of the University. I'm surprised it isn't working.
1: Did they re-encode the input? Or just repackage it?
2: I'm unfamiliar with EvoStream, but if it is ingesting RTMP and outputting HLS, why did Globo need to bother generating an HLS manifest? Couldn't they just use the one EvoStream created?
I think with the ACA, some small business can claim a tax credit for providing health insurance to their employees, but I'm not 100% sure about that part.
My high school had an introductory programming class. Most students hadn't done any programming before, yet there were a couple of students who quickly understood the concepts and could solve weeks worth of assignments in a single day, whereas the rest of the class struggled. Those students, for whatever reason, were able to learn programming much more quickly than the average student, and I believe those students they'd see a greater return on their investment of hard work.
Here's another anecdote: do you know any experienced engineers who work 12 hours a day and still struggle to do relatively easy jobs? I do. Talent is an important piece of the puzzle. Hard work is also an important part of the puzzle. Both are important.
Rather than just issue DMCA takedown notices, it might be useful for the University of Illinois to provide students with access to private git repositories. Of course, I suspect many students have drank the "github is your resume" kool-aid and would be less likely to use private repositories.
In John Markoff 's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book's title is from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track) he reveals that the world's first online transaction was a drug deal:
In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-n...
If you're looking for another challenge, HEVC content can be found here: http://www.elecard.com/en/download/videos.html
Decades of research have gone into media compression algorithms, and they claim to get a 20% improvement for free. I'm skeptical.
I don't run OSX, so I can't try out their binary, which they're distributing via email only. I challenge the Cram team to losslessly reduce the size of "The Simpsons Movie – 1080p Trailer" by 20%, available here: http://www.h264info.com/clips.html
First, it's rude. The owner of the second website has to deal with the burden of hosting traffic on your site and gets nothing in return. In this case, the blog kept downloading an image from siliconpr0n.org, effectively DoSing the website and taking it offline. Horrible. Hopefully tomorrow everything is back to normal and the owner of siliconpr0n.org isn't stuck with a massive bill from his host.
Second, there's no guarantee the image will stay online. Maybe the directory structure on the site will get reorganized or something. Maybe the website will go offline for good, only to get picked up by a domain squatter. Maybe the owner of the website will decide to change the direct-linked image to something else you weren't expecting. You have no idea.