Posts made by WTFE

@Templari said:

@WTFE Ewww 1000 year old egg or however old it's supposed to be?

The name (and only in English) is "century egg". In reality it's about 30 days old, give or take.

@Silver said:

@WTFE Niiiiiiiice. That looks incredible.

Just don't ask what the black thing is and you'll be fine.

Today's lunch. This is fast food.

This was lunch:

I washed it down with:

@Shebakoby said:

Some Canadians actually have to go have important tests (MRI, for instance) in the USA because the waiting list for the same test in Canada is over 2 years now.

Ah, this old Tea Party shibboleth.

No. No, this is flatly untrue. If you want an MRI test against the advice of your doctor, then yes, you'll wait forever. But when my father had his stroke, in the depths of the wilds of B.C. (Prince George), he was in the MRI in under four hours.

I call Tea Party bullshit here.

People who need knee replacements have had to endure even longer waits (up to 5 years).

Docs or it didn't happen. ("I saw it on Fox" doesn't count as docs, just to be clear. Hell, "I saw it on an American news channel" doesn't count as docs.)

People have died of cancer before they could get some kinds of tests.

Yeah. If you don't go to your doctor for twenty-five years and come in when the cancer has already passed the point of no return, you're probably fucked. You'd be fucked in the USA too, but at least your wallet will be hoovered clean first.

So again, "docs or it didn't happen". (And again, "Fox News" or American news in general doesn't count.)

My bandwidth sucks too much for me to check if this has been posted already.

One Minute Time Machine

@HelloRaptor said:

@WTFE said:

@Ganymede said:

@Corruption said:

We were scheduled for a noon pickup. We finally got home around 2PM. I was beyond pissed and filed a complaint. Of course, that had no effect. FUCK this cheapass, moronic service.

This is what happens when you privatize what has traditionally been a public good.

You don't understand! Privatization is always more efficient, and always provides better service than publicly-funded stuff!

The Tea Party tells me this!

Hospitals in the US certainly did an awesome job as for-profit entities for a long time. A++.

See? Raptor gets it! Privatized medical care in the USA is so much more efficient than the creaky, ready-to-collapse shit north of the border! FREEDUMZ!

@Ganymede said:

@Corruption said:

We were scheduled for a noon pickup. We finally got home around 2PM. I was beyond pissed and filed a complaint. Of course, that had no effect. FUCK this cheapass, moronic service.

This is what happens when you privatize what has traditionally been a public good.

You don't understand! Privatization is always more efficient, and always provides better service than publicly-funded stuff!

The Tea Party tells me this!

@Sunny said:

@WTFE said:

Why do the son and the daughter-in-law think they have a claim on the wedding ring over the husband who actually fucking bought the thing and was wed with the woman? These people need 9mm parabellum of pain relief straight into the brainpan.

Oh, it gets way better than this.

My dad PHYSICALLY MADE THE RING for her.

OK, this convinces me. Burn the fuckers slowly with a blowtorch. @Ganymede is right.

@Kosh said:

I've been tempted, over the years, to fire up a similar-type MU*. Not sure what level of interest there would be in it. In the process of getting a HOST and server setup to putt around on, but I'd be ready and willing to do an OGR-type thing.

I have a server that could be used for that. I currently use it only to get around the Great Firewall so much of its capacity is simply unused. I'm willing to throw a user account your way and let you set up a MU*.

@AmishRakeFight said:

@Sunny

In the most innocent of intentions, I can totally see wanting your mother's wedding ring after she passes away. However, that all gets shot in the face when you take it off her immediately after she dies. Gross. Gross. Gross. Wow. I'm sorry.

I took my father's wedding ring off his finger within minutes of his dying. (Or so I'm told. I have no memory of this. There's a bit of emotional trauma fucking with my memories of the time.) Of course this is because my mother couldn't do it. I had to take it off for her and give it to her.

But…

Why do the son and the daughter-in-law think they have a claim on the wedding ring over the husband who actually fucking bought the thing and was wed with the woman? These people need 9mm parabellum of pain relief straight into the brainpan.

@HelloRaptor said:

When it's getting to the point your program won't even run in a modern OS, and by 'modern OS' we're talking about things that became common a decade ago, it's time to look at more modern options and stop clinging to the familiar comfort of your old ass bullshit.

Spoken like someone who's never watched a dozen "modern" replacements come in at ten times budget (in both time and money) and still not actually managed to replace the system that it was intended to replace.

A decade? That's what you think is old and decrepit?

I've worked on systems in the '90s where the hardware was considered "old, but reliable" in the 70s. The software was a million lines or so of assembler. But it did its job (online flight route display -- yes, this was air traffic control stuff) and it did its job well. When I was working on it (supplying stress testing of the system via a PC that was, ironically, about 400× more powerful than the system it was testing) it was supposed to have been long-since replaced by a fancy "modern" system (<sarcasm>supplied by the incomparable competence of Raytheon</sarcasm>) that used actual chips as the CPU in a multiple-processor design with all the bells and whistles.

It wasn't replaced yet, though. The Raytheon project was already three years overdue when I worked on this older system. A "modern" system with, like, a dozen 68xxx processors, modern hard drives, etc. was still spending over 30 minutes to load the test database (the spec mandated about that many seconds!), took over 2 hours to format a 40MB (yes, M, not G!) hard drive, and generally performed every task worse than the ancient, 1974-era 16-bit minicomputer. The only advantage it had was a flashier user interface. It looked very pretty in comparison to the serial terminals used on the old OIDS system, so you had a much better aesthetic experience while you waited (and waited (and waited (and …))) to get its job done.

Replacing an old information display system written for a computer that had 128KB of magnetic core memory (and that only because of a hardware hack that doubled its capacity) and displayed screens full of information about 1KB at a time was 3 years (and tens of millions of dollars) over budget with no end in sight using "modern" kit that was literally thousands of times more capable in theory. The numbers looked good … until you started actually working on it. Then it turned out that the old system was actually really fucking hard to beat.

That's one system of many I've seen go that route. There was another one via Anderson Consulting that was supposed to replace the payroll system for the Canadian government (the PSCS – Public Service Compensation System) that went so far over budget in both time and money that the government, in a stunning exception to the usual means of doing business, actually cancelled the project and sued to get all payments made on it back. It was that much a debacle. There was another where an ancient CP/M-based Z80 machine running finances for a drug store got replaced by an IBM PC-based "solution" that damned near tanked the business. (I got my first computer from that drug store; it was that CP/M machine.) In the end they actually shut down the computerized system entirely and went to a purely manual system because they couldn't replace the CP/M machine and the "modern" replacement was such a dog it was impossible to use.

I know techies love to use the latest hotness, but only a dumb businessman listens to techies breathlessly talking up their grand future vision of modern hardware and modern software. If you have a system that works and does what you need, you don't replace it. You introduce a new system iff you have clearly-identified business needs that are not being met by your existing system. And even then, you probably start by having the new system only augment what you've got until it has proven itself and can be expanded to replace.

@silentsophia said:

@Shebakoby Having worked campus IT, it's probably both underfunding and people refusing to give up things they are comfortable with (thrown in with 'but it still WORKS!')

"But it still works!" is the single best reason to keep a system in operation. I know that among techies it's all annoying that someone dares to use stuff that was around when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, but the claim that "you could replace it with modern software/hardware and it will be All Better" has been exposed as utter and complete bullshit so many times and in so many ways that smart business managers are correct to give such claims a dubious eye.

Replacing a system that works with a new, as yet untried, system is an incredibly risky venture. There are a lot of up-front costs with no conceivable return for months to years (depending on the size of the project)—and those returns may not even happen!

About three out of every four software projects are deemed failures by the people who make them (Source: Brooks), and the people making them have a vested interest in claiming that they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. I suspect, from years of observation, that were you to ask the actual end-users if the software project was a success you'd see that number rise to 9944 times out of ten thousand.

What kind of sucker places expensive bets where the people who have a vested interest in pumping up the success statistics are saying "well, you'll lose 3/4 of the time"? Why would you do that when you can use a system that is provably doing its job right now?

I wasn't joking. That "Ghetto Air" project is dirt cheap (both to make and to run) and surprisingly effective. If you're a bit more mechanically inclined and have a bit more spending money, there's a slightly more upscale version available.

@AmishRakeFight said:

I am angry because it is unreasonably hot and no one here has air conditioning.

And now you do.

This is a really exclusive web site!

! Don't click here!

Thanks for the citation. It seemed too witty and literate to be 4/8chan material.

Never really followed DC anything in my short stint in the comics scene, so I can't really comment on the Crisis line.

I just kind of caught the edge of this whole discussion of Secret Wars. What is this, the fifth "Secret Wars" that Marvel has decided to run? I mean there was Secret Wars and Secret Wars II sometime in the mid-eighties, then there was Secret War in the mid-nothings, not to mention the Beyond! successor to the original Secret Wars books. There was also a Secret Invasion series in there somewhere and now … another Secret Wars?

I'm thinking these "secret" wars are pretty fucking wide open and out in the public eye by now!

@HelloRaptor said:

Maybe the fanfiction community should stop being so utterly filled with some of the most ridiculously crazy fucking people ever? Fanficcers make MU* drama queens seem utterly tame by comparison.

@Roz: You're making me agree with @HelloRaptor. Please stop!

I've seen some seriously scary shit in MU* circles, and heard of even scarier. And none of it holds a candle to even the surface stuff when I poke my nose into a fanfic community.