State: Answers were erased on 14,220 STAAR tests | www.mystatesman.com:
State officials are threatening to reconsider a $280 million contract with its testing vendor after answers to 14,220 state standardized tests were erased because of a computer glitch last week.
Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they're still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody's pretty sure they're important parts.
Every project I’ve ever worked on has this smell somewhere.
People like to think Microsoft is the dean of proprietary software companies. Nonsense! Microsoft is making serious investments in open-source software. Apple, though, now there’s a company that likes to lock down its code.
Apple’s Swift Comes to Linux - ZDNet
Likes to lock down their code? WTH? Pay attention to that which you critique. The OS is open source, the compiler has always been open source, WebKit is open source, the core frameworks are open source, and they publish all changes to GPL code as they should. Seriously, what’s your standard here, especially when comparing to MS?
The issue is larger than the folks running the show can fix. Their members vote based on what they see as talent. Their membership is not at all diverse. Even this, though, isn’t in their control. They mainly have A-level members with some scattering of Bs. Folks at that level trend towards the pale end of the spectrum as a product of the viewership’s perceived preferences (“Ain’t no white family going to see a movie with a black lead!” uhh, Lethal Weapon? The Matrix? A hundred others?)
The silent trade: universal objective ethics in action:
Once upon a time, back during the Age of Exploration, there was a marvellous practice called the “silent trade”. It was a solution to a serious coordination problem between groups who had no languages in common, or distrusted each other so much that they refused to come within range of each others’ weapons.
I do love interesting bits of trivia.
… it could always be Mac OS 9.
An introvert raising an extrovert child might make for an interesting sitcom. I’ve spent the last two days at home with the boy on vacation and I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve answered every question he’s asked for the past two hours with “meh”.
It’s like he exhales in English.
I’m working an intermediary library in Python that turns a fair number of normal databases and database-like stores into simple key-value stores. There’s a long story of why, but it does it have an actual use case outside of “because I can” (though, the symlink backend is pure, unadulterated “because I can”).
For the SQLite store I was running into transaction issues here and there. At seemingly-random times data wouldn’t save or I’d get an error saying a transaction hadn’t been started when I tried to commit. So, I did some research.
I really hate this trend of posting everything as g’damned images for the sole purpose of making it easier to repost on crappy social networks where the users are too lazy to do anything but scroll.
What makes it even worse is when good content is locked in the stupid. A couple of years ago, Dorkly wrote a nice bit of humor about the Death Star architect but posted it as an image. That makes it damned-near impossible to read on anything other than a computer or tablet (which is not where most people are these days).
Once upon a time I had a Linux box acting as a home server. It was nice.
Then I wanted a home internet gateway/router and put it at the network edge. That, too was nice.
Then it was slow. Given where it was, that made everything slow. So, I rebuilt it as something bigger than it needed to be and put a SATA RAID in it, a dual Intel server NIC card, and installed Plex server on it. Then it was very nice.