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wantoncl

Re:Larger Pacific Striped Octopus on Thursday September 10, 2026 @06:46AM (#49641498)
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Re:LinkedIn CringeBot 3000 on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @07:29AM (#49270728)
I first tried "Getting your ass rimmed" without knowing that was appended to all the generated texts. Got an extra chuckle before I figured that out.
> Also: it's a one lane road and "over taking" is not possible.

I've eaten some hamburgers at Krystal's that definitely overtook whatever else was in front. Some folks have had the same or similar effect from White Castle, although I never have. Chipotle on occasion moves things along rather briskly too. No fruit or green leaves in any of them.

It may be that it's not a digestion thing, but some other factor they have that accelerates the process.

Re:Buttplug MCP on Friday May 30, 2025 @07:19AM (#44135035)
FizzBuzz will become an especially relevant interview question.
This reminds me of driving home after seeing The Matrix in the theater in 1999. I was on the parkway wondering why everything was moving so slowly, not quite bullet time but definitely slow.

I look at the speedometer and I'm doing 95-100 mph on Southern State Parkway. I then had the "snap" and slowed back to normal. Everything felt even slower, the sensation lasted for about an hour after I got home.

Inception also had a strange drive home after, not speed, but the trees didn't seem real, the sky, everything was heightened, almost dreamlike. It had rained too, so there was some more similarity to the movie, minus the car chases and rollovers.

> The laws of thermodynamics pretty much guarantees this anyways does it not?

Yes, but:

http://www.thelastquestion.net/

Re:Obscure Islands I Find Interesting on Sunday February 09, 2025 @07:42AM (#42990322)
> And now you've just got lots of different complications, like that seawater is very corrosive.

Is it as corrosive as lightning? All space elevators will encounter that problem pretty regularly.

We've been running cables under the ocean for over a century now, there's ways to address seawater corrosion and intrusion.

By Grabthar's hammer, I hope so.
Re:Universal Jointing for Submarine Cables on Saturday October 19, 2024 @05:18PM (#41890849)
> How does the fusion splice process take place deep under water?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter

Pffft, run Crysis in 8K
Re:Butts Are Difficult on Sunday July 21, 2024 @12:29PM (#41026189)
> You are either speaking hyperbolicly or lying. Bluetooth is very stable these days.

Bluetooth as a network protocol, that might be stable. Bluetooth interactivity is not stable or even usable in many cases.

It's not just in cars and other non-computer interfaces, good luck trying to pair a non-Apple device with an Apple device. If you say "it works on my computer", congrats, you're the only one. And also speaking hyperbolically.

No, we are more modern these days, I shall send a sternly worded telegram!
> Do you have any examples of companies building Hadoop clusters for amounts of data that fit on a single machine?

I was a SQL Server DBA at Cox Automotive. Some director/VP caught the Hadoop around 2015 and hired a consultant to set us up. The consultant's brother worked at Yahoo and did foundational work with it.

Consultant made us provision 6 nodes for Hadoop in Azure (our infra was on Azure Virtual Machines) each with 1 TB of storage. The entire SQL Server footprint was 3 nodes and maybe 100 GB at the time, and most of that was data bloat. He complained about such a small setup.

The data going into Hadoop was maybe 10 GB, and consultant insisted we do a full load every 15 minutes "to keep it fresh". The delta for a 15 minute interval was less than 20 MB, maybe 50 MB during peak usage. Naturally his refresh script was pounding the primary server and hurting performance, so we spent additional money to set up a read replica for him to use.

Did I mention the loading process took 16-17 minutes on average?

You can quit reading now, this meets your request, but in case anyone wants a fuller story:

Hadoop was used to feed some kind of bespoke dashboard product for a customer. Everyone at Cox was against using Microsoft's products for this, while the entire stack was Azure/.Net/SQL Server...go figure. Apparently they weren't aware of PowerBI, or just didn't like it.

I asked someone at MS (might have been one of the GuyInACube folks, I know I mentioned it to him) to come in and demo PowerBI, and in a 15 minute presentation absolutely demolished everything they had been working on for a year. There was a new data group director who was pretty chagrined about it, I think they went into panic mode to ensure the customer didn't find out.

The customer, surprisingly, wasn't happy with the progress or outcome of this dashboard, and were vocally pointing out data discrepancies compared to the production system. Some of them days or even a week out of date.

Once the original contract was up, and time to renew, the Hadoop VP now had to pay for the project from his budget, and about 60 days later it was mysteriously cancelled. The infra group was happy, as our Azure expenses suddenly halved, and our database performance improved 20-25%.

The customer seemed to be happy, they didn't have to struggle with the prototype anymore, and wow, where did all these SSRS reports that were perfectly fine come from? What do you mean they were there all along?

Just don't use solarflare, it completely garbles your traffic. Even fucks up the error correction.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425112/quotes/

DS Andy Wainwright: You do know there are more guns in the country than there are in the city.

DS Andy Cartwright: Everyone and their mums is packin' round here!

Nicholas Angel: Like who?

DS Andy Wainwright: Farmers.

Nicholas Angel: Who else?

DS Andy Cartwright: Farmers' mums.

The Far Side.

THAT ought to make the results more interesting.

Re:Mass producing the most expensive rice cooker [video] on Sunday November 05, 2023 @10:35AM (#38151997)
Not if your pan of boiling water automatically shuts off when it's done cooking.
https://youtu.be/8QWne13R_j0

There's an additional prediction in there that's eerily accurate/Simpsons did it.

Re:Moonbase Alpha Travel Tube Details on Thursday November 02, 2023 @11:15AM (#38114683)
> update some of the CGI

There was no CGI used in Space: 1999, it's all practical model and optical effects. And as far as I can tell, it was all done on film, even though it was a TV show, so all of the effects shots could be rescanned for HD, or possibly even 4K.

Re:How to Move Your Google Photos on Monday October 30, 2023 @08:50AM (#38068829)
To offer a counterpoint:

https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

Around the 3:30 mark, while discussing Notre Dame Cathedral, consider how useful all those photos (and however many taken since) would be in its post-fire reconstruction.

Would anyone present at that demo in 2007 think there were too many photos, especially if they knew it would burn down?

No, just some black monoliths on the surface ;)
Re:The Elements of Style [pdf] on Monday August 28, 2023 @07:28AM (#37292442)
And contains a grammatical error even before the introduction. ;)
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease on Sunday August 13, 2023 @05:43PM (#37114838)
As I recall, when Seymour Cray would buy a new car, he'd pick the first car on the left as he entered the dealership.

After 2 or 3 purchases, the dealer habitually put the most expensive car in that spot.

NYC bike messengers. And rollerbladers. Not sure how it is now, but in the late 90's they were exactly as the other poster described. Fail to yield, swerving in front of buses and flipping off the drivers if they honked. Utter contempt for everyone else. I was in far more danger of getting injured by them than any vehicle, and this was Manhattan traffic.

Plenty of stories of grandmas getting knocked down by rollers and bikers in Central Park back then too.

Re:OKTO35 3D-Printed Analog Film Movie Camera on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @10:16AM (#35802675)
> Regarding film development, I'm not familiar with 8mm specific requirements, but if the author is able to develop color 35mm film, which is not that easy in my experience, he should be more than able to develop at least B&W 8mm film?

8mm/Super 8 film cartridges are not entirely easy to open, and you pretty much have to destroy them to get the film out. It's also difficult to find film reels that fit them by width, plus 50 feet of film length. They were never intended to be developed at home, but always in a machine (and exclusively by Kodak).

I don't remember Super 8 being available in negative emulsions either, it was always chrome/slide/transparency since you'd project the original film.

Re:The closest black hole to the Earth – now only 1560 lya on Wednesday April 05, 2023 @09:14AM (#35453592)
And Charles Messier.
Review of the keyboard:

https://youtu.be/gziZnhxcFrk

And same reviewer on an original Space Cadet:

https://youtu.be/oDozftThFMw

NSFW language here and there.

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