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Tesla Driver Saves Volkswagen Driver, gets free repairs

Posted by takyon on Sunday February 19 2017, @03:43AM (#2237)
0 Comments
/dev/random

Tesla Owner Who Sacrificed His Model S To Save Another Driver Gets Surprise From Elon Musk

Mmmh, that sweet good publicity. It's even better than bad publicity.

Chevy Cruze peak range: 702 miles on 13.5 gallons of diesel

Posted by takyon on Friday February 17 2017, @07:20PM (#2235)
5 Comments
Hardware

New diesel Chevy Cruze can go an estimated 702 miles on a single tank of fuel

The 52 mpg highway fuel economy numbers apply to the six-speed manual transmission diesel Cruze, which gets 30 mpg on city streets. The car also comes in a 9-speed automatic transmission version, which returns 47 mpg on the highway and 31 mpg in the city with start-stop technology regulating the engine.

Why does the U.S. still let 12-year-olds get married?

Posted by takyon on Sunday February 12 2017, @10:27PM (#2230)
43 Comments
/dev/random

Mod journal flamebait!!!

Why does the United States still let 12-year-olds get married?

This is an opinion piece in WaPo written by the founder of a nonprofit. archive.is link because I figured out WaPo has a 5 article/month limit paywall.

While most states set 18 as the minimum marriage age, exceptions in every state allow children younger than 18 to marry, typically with parental consent or judicial approval. How much younger? Laws in 27 states do not specify an age below which a child cannot marry.

Unchained At Last, a nonprofit I founded to help women resist or escape forced marriage in the United States, spent the past year collecting marriage license data from 2000 to 2010, the most recent year for which most states were able to provide information. We learned that in 38 states, more than 167,000 children — almost all of them girls, some as young 12 — were married during that period, mostly to men 18 or older. Twelve states and the District of Columbia were unable to provide information on how many children had married there in that decade. Based on the correlation we identified between state population and child marriage, we estimated that the total number of children wed in America between 2000 and 2010 was nearly 248,000.

Turns out R2D*2pa$tramimacaronomy is doing just fine stateside, for the moment...

Panic attacks....stress....studying

Posted by microtodd on Thursday February 09 2017, @07:43PM (#2226)
16 Comments
Career & Education

I've never been a big believer in certifications. A college degree has some worth, in that I believe it taught you to think and stuff. But even then...to be honest when hiring I probably base 50% off the technical prowess you can show in conversations, whiteboards, coding challenges, and 50% in culture fit in conversations with some of the senior staff.

Well, not all employers are like that. Some place a lot of value on certifications. In fact, the metric by which you are assumed to be competent in a skillset is if you have the requisite certifications.

For my denigration of certifications, its even one step further. Although I study best practices and vendor literature, I don't believe in blindly following it. I believe in sandboxes, experimentation, breaking things, trying things out. If you told me to build a clock I would not follow a step-by-step instruction manual and build it right the first time. I'd probably throw the instruction manual away and then take apart a bunch of clocks and screw around trying to put them together until I found something that works and I'm satisfied with it.

Again, for a lot of large enterprise organizations this doesn't fit. They pay for enterprise support for a reason.

IMHO, sadly, the IT world is moving away from my approach and more towards the enterprise approach. Most of the IT market is not flexible, configurable tools for sysadmins. Instead its out-of-the-box integration tools. "Buy product X! It does Feature Y and integrates out-of-the-box with product Z!". So if you have Product Z and your employer wants Feature Y, they'd rather pay enterprise prices for Product X and you as the sysad are supposed to follow the step-by-step instructions to install and configure the application.

Hogwash, I say! How are you supposed to truly troubleshoot or performance tune such a situation? But I digress.

In the spirit of being a good team player (and my own career health), in the last year I've attained three certifications, whereas in the past 20+ years of my career I've had zero.

And I'm taking an exam tomorrow for one of the hardest ones yet, and I'm STRESSED. I mean, like panic attack stressed. Hand shaking, had to pull the car over, throwing up in the bathroom stall, can't sleep stressed. Ugh.

Come tomorrow afternoon I'll either be on a super high or....I dunno. Just resign and become an Uber driver I guess.

Elizabeth Warren Silenced on the Senate Floor

Posted by takyon on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:54AM (#2225)
27 Comments

Micron 2017 Roadmap

Posted by takyon on Sunday February 05 2017, @06:10PM (#2222)
0 Comments

You're Fired!

Posted by microtodd on Saturday February 04 2017, @11:49AM (#2220)
2 Comments
Business

Ever see a post on a forum like this? The meme, "If someone did Y at my company, they'd be fired immediately!"

I just find it interesting...in my experience, unless you're working at a mom-and-pop or startup, a big corp can *never* fire you immediately, even if they want to. Its months and months of "Improvement Plan" and "Counseling" and so forth.

In fact, when working at the larger companies I have frequently made the joke, "I wonder if I stopped working right now, how long it would take for me to get fired?". What's the bare minimum I could do to not get fired? I think as long as I sign my timecard I'm probably good for 3+ months...

Trudeau avoids poking the "grizzly bear" Trump

Posted by takyon on Thursday February 02 2017, @07:43PM (#2217)
5 Comments
News

Canada's Trudeau decides not to poke U.S. 'grizzly bear' for now

Just play it cool and use Canada's great strength: utter invisibility despite sharing a border with the United States.

Supreme Court: Apprentice Edition

Posted by takyon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @10:13PM (#2215)
7 Comments
News

Trump is reportedly going to summon two finalists for the position to the announcement, at 8 PM EST. There can only be one.

Neil Gorsuch.

2.5 GB/s, 2 TB M.2 SSD

Posted by takyon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:56PM (#2214)
2 Comments