Mon. July 16, 2018 – should it matter?

By on July 16th, 2018 in Random Stuff

Almost 80 and only 6 am… not a good sign for penguins….

Should what you do in your private life matter when it comes to your work life? This is a question that seems to be working it’s way through the public consciousness at the moment, with the vocal minority answering YES, and H3LL YES.

What does this say for society? Does it mean that for the instagram/twit/overshare generations there IS no private life, so every moment is fair game? Does it mean that with the ability to work any where, we are working EVERYwhere, and so fair game?

Or is it just the lefty prog worldview written large, where no one is holy enough, everyone needs to be denounced lest they denounce you first, and self excoriation is the word of the day?

A serious question- suppose you or a loved one has been shot in the head. The best brain surgeon in your city is a despicable human, with a terabyte of sick porn on his office pc, but the guy has the hands of god himself when it comes to putting brains back in the bowl… do you care what he does to relax? Or do you just want your kid’s life back?

Why does anyone care if Joe Businessman holds any particular belief if he’s good at the business?

Suppose the world renowned cave diving rescue doctor DOES live in Thailand so he can have ‘houseboys’ around as Musk accuses. Consider that the Thai don’t think that is an unusual or bad thing. A dozen people are alive today because of him. Is there balance? Can people with morally questionable lives do moral acts? Who are WE to judge?

Is there a ‘private life’ anymore or are ALL of your actions and beliefs fair game for public scrutiny and condemnation? Should they be?

nick

74 Comments and discussion on "Mon. July 16, 2018 – should it matter?"

  1. JimL says:

    My $0.02 – it should not matter in general, though specific cases may make a difference.

    I work with some pretty liberal folks on a daily basis. I only know this because of other forums or things they’ve said on the side. While I don’t hide the fact that I’m of a libertarian/conservative bent, I don’t flaunt it either. We just get along. In general, that’s how it should be.

    One friend occasionally fries my chickens with her political posts. I will occasionally rebut in the comments. We don’t agree, but we are willing to discuss. We’re both pretty good at what we do, so we don’t let that kind of thing get in the way.

    Where it makes a difference? I don’t know. But I won’t rule it out out-of-hand. There are no absolutes.

  2. Ray Thompson says:

    My $0.01 cents (I am cheaper than JimL). Yes, it does matter but shouldn’t matter.

    The problem comes from the lawyers. If someone working in a company does something that affects a customer the lawyers will pounce like the vultures they mimic. Now the company’s butt is on the line for hiring a person with issues and will get sued. The person committing the offense will probably have little equity for the blood suckers to acquire. So the lawyers will attack the company. Companies have to show they did due diligence before hiring the person or be on the hook for a large settlement.

    There is stuff in my past that would make me unemployable by today’s standards. Not that any of what I did, or said, affected my work or work ethic, or ever would. I was young, stupid, and an idiot in my youth. Those are long in the past.

  3. dkreck says:

    Well, no longer young.

    (aren’t we all?)

  4. JimL says:

    Cheap bAstage. @Ray’s right, of course, but I hold that I am as well. It should not make a difference. But it does when the lawyers get involved.

  5. Chad says:

    Years ago my mother worked as a medical office manager for an ophthalmologist. The guy was one of the leading retinal specialists in the country at the time. Unfortunately, the guy was a complete ass and was very abusive to his employees. However, I can remember my mom saying, “The guy is a jerk, but if I ever have a serious eye problem I wouldn’t want anyone but him to take care of it.” Brilliant doctor but horrible human.

    Celebrities are a good case study. As people they’re mostly pieces of shit. However, you learn to love their acting ability and the characters they portray and separate that from their personal lives. If I refused to watch anything starring a celebrity who is a liberal idiot and abuses their celebrity to soapbox the prog agenda, then I’d never watch any television shows or movies because that describes most everyone in Hollywood.

    I worked with an intern at a large regional bank and she was advised by her school’s career services office to delete (well, it doesn’t really delete – nothing online does anymore – but suspend) ALL of her social network accounts from the time she started applying for jobs until she had been hired and her 90-day (varies by company) probationary period was over. She did too as did most of her fellow interns.

    On the flipside, our legal and HR departments where I work now recently had training for managers doing hiring that strictly informed them to NOT google any of their applicants or attempt to find their social media profiles. It seems that can open the door to allegations of discrimination. That is, the manager may see on the applicant’s social profile all of the things they’re forbidden from asking in interviews (are you married, how old are you, what’s your religion, etc.). Tthe managers were all told to resist the temptation to cyberstalk their applicants and new hires.

    People don’t surprise me much anymore. Get access to enough people’s browser histories and private chats and you quickly learn that it’s impossible to predict the “sickos” and they outnumber the “normals” 10:1. If I’m patronizing your business it’s because of what you do professionally. I could care less what borderline illegal porn gets you off, how much you hate some ethnicity, or whether you’re a raging SJW. I’m looking to patronize your profession not be friends.

  6. nick flandrey says:

    “I’m looking to patronize your profession not be friends. ”

    This is not what we are currently seeing though. We see the FOUNDER of a pizza empire hounded out of his job and company for something taken out of context and used ACTIVELY against him. He says he simply said “we don’t use language like xxxxxxx” and then an agency used the “xxxxxxxx” to attempt to coerce and extort him.

    His mistake was in apologizing when he should have gotten his truth out immediately and aggressively. You CAN’T apologize enough for the mob.

    n

  7. Greg Norton says:

    We see the FOUNDER of a pizza empire hounded out of his job and company for something taken out of context and used ACTIVELY against him.

    The long knives were out for Papa John long before that phone call.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/papa-john-slams-nfl-following-national-anthem-protests-2017-11

    And Schnatter was well known as being a vocal opponent of the ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare. That’s probably the real origin of his media trouble.

    I’m surprised he remained active with the business this long. Isn’t the Dominos founder in a monestary? Maybe Papa John will follow suit.

  8. nick flandrey says:

    Yeah, all those organizations cutting Papa John’s loose are so full of it. You don’t end a profitable deal over something like this. It was clear they were looking for an excuse to cut those contracts loose.

    n

  9. Greg Norton says:

    Yeah, all those organizations cutting Papa John’s loose are so full of it. You don’t end a profitable deal over something like this. It was clear they were looking for an excuse to cut those contracts loose.

    The rapid rise of Papa John’s always mystified me. The pizza tastes funky IMHO.

    My guess is that a lot of entities were regretting ties with the chain for reasons other than the founder’s political views. It seemed to come out of nowhere overnight in the early 90s — suddenly every work event had their pizza.

    Was it a BJ Klinton thing like Krispy Kreme? Did Monica and BJ recite from “Leaves of Grass” over Papa John’s?

    I’m old enough to remember when the reality of the awful taste of the product sank in and Kenny Rogers Roasters imploded in this country. Papa John’s might implode faster.

    I won’t be sad. Back at CGI in December, our division cheaped out on our holiday lunch, with the synchopants turning it into a DIY pot luck, and I remarked, “You know things are bad when they won’t clip a few coupons for Papa John’s.”

  10. Chad says:

    Back at CGI in December, our division cheaped out on our holiday lunch, with the synchopants turning it into a DIY pot luck

    I can think of few things more disgusting than a potluck. I’ve proudly skipped out on every “food day” and potluck they’ve tried to have at my various employers over the years. The horrors I envision of what happens in people’s kitchens at home scares the hell out of me.

  11. MrAtoz says:

    Just another manic Monday for the ProgLibTurdians. Hitler-Stalin, er, tRump-pUtin have a summit and the World is going to end. Again. Yeah, tRump should go poke his finger in the Bear’s eye. If the Dumbocrats get slaughtered in November, it just might be the end of the Dumbo Party. Ever their feckless leader, Tom Perez, says Commie Girl is the future of the Party. Run with that. Biden, Cankles, Warren, Harris for President! Lol!

    Pizza Hut deep dish meat lovers is my favorite delivery pizza.

  12. Greg Norton says:

    I can think of few things more disgusting than a potluck. I’ve proudly skipped out on every “food day” and potluck they’ve tried to have at my various employers over the years.

    I’m not sure how it is at CGI in general, but the ex-Cop/ex-Army diversity-hire member manager in charge of our group had a serious case of rectal lumber insertion and religiously followed company dogma. Failure to be present at a few social events would result in “Sgt. Hulka” dinging your annual review score.

    Sgt. Hulka was eventually “encouraged to spend more time with family”, but that happened after I left. That’s the fact, Jack!

    I needed the job, and I’ve had worse management situations in tech. Still, I made a point of citing Sgt. Hulka as one of the reasons I left during my exit interview. Maybe I contributed to his departure, but I don’t feel a bit of guilt. He went a bit overboard pursuing his own promotion and positive reviews.

  13. RickH says:

    Wandering through the Amazon Prime day deals.

    Lifestraw for $9.99 https://amzn.to/2LqoG1n

  14. Jenny says:

    Prepping today.

    Before work this morning I reviewed and updated my ‘home characteristics’ on my home owners policy. I increased our coverage for rebuild and adjusted some other things. By tweaking the deductible and some other things I kept the overall cost down.

    I am more confident in our ability to recover if we have a personal catastrophe with the house.

  15. Ray Thompson says:

    Before work this morning I reviewed and updated my ‘home characteristics’ on my home owners policy

    I review all my policies once a year with my agent. I want to make certain that I am well covered. As in full replacement plus 25%, temporary lodging for a year, replace contents at current value not depreciated value, etc. Beyond a certain point the additional coverage is not much more expensive.

    I also carry a million dollar liability policy that covers my home, automobiles, boat and me and the spousal unit in general. Fairly cheap but worth the extra coverage. Auto coverage is maxed out on limits for liability.

    Between homeowners, auto, liability, boat and a rider for my camera equipment I pay his company about $200.00 a month.

    My biggest fear is that one of us will tap the bumper of some looser and the cretin will attempt to make the event his/her retirement plan and sue for millions. Based on experience from some guy my wife bumped, scratched his bumper. Three weeks later we get a letter from his lawyer demanding we pay $25,000.00 as determined by his company. I wrote back a snarky response that only courts can determine award amounts and to contact my insurance company as they are familiar with dealing with scam artists. Insurance did pay $2,000.00 in medical bills, demanded copies of all the medical records for the prior five years for the client and told the lawyer to pound sand on any other amount. If he disagreed file papers in the courts. Never heard another word from the lawyer or his client.

    Yeh, they are out there. Consider an auto accident as good as winning the lottery. There is also the scammers that will get on your property and “trip” themselves and demand money. Had that happen to me. Told the person to leave as they were trespassing and the next person they would talk to was the police. They left.

  16. lynn says:

    “Trump and Putin’s love-in: U.S. president calls Russian leader’s denial of election meddling ‘very powerful’ then rants about Hillary’s emails and his own victory – and Putin says he wanted Trump to win and laughs about the golden showers dossier”
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5958569/Trump-lauds-new-opportunity-U-S-Russian-cooperation-Putin-shows-hour-LATE.html

    So if Trump is 6’3″, does that mean that Putin is 5’6″ ? And I am being generous.

  17. lynn says:

    Before work this morning I reviewed and updated my ‘home characteristics’ on my home owners policy. I increased our coverage for rebuild and adjusted some other things. By tweaking the deductible and some other things I kept the overall cost down.

    I’ve got my 3,450 ft2 home insured at $168/ft2 if I remember correctly. Adding on the gameroom and bathroom at $190/ft2 in 2015 really opened my eyes as to the rebuilding costs of a home. My deductible is 1%, so I get to eat the first $5,800 of any disaster. Liability is $500K.

    I’ve got the office and warehouse insured for $100/ft2. That is probably low. Liability is $1 million. Deductible is 1% except it applies individually to each building, the office building deductible is $5,500, the warehouse is $2,750, etc.

    I also carry an personal umbrella liability policy of $2 million. Costs $250/year. Covers anything my home or car insurance liability does not cover except, I just found out that it does not cover my commercial activities so I need to get a commercial umbrella policy also. Sigh.

    You really need someone with deep pockets to stand in front on you if you own any assets at all. Mr. Deep Pockets will ensure that they do not get tagged first. I have been sued before for rental property and my insurance company defended me plus filed a countersuit on the person for fraud. In the end, the insurance company gave her $1,000 and told her the next time they would file criminal charges.

  18. lynn says:

    So Amazon’s website also crashed once today. Amazing. Mr. Bezos is probably talking to his people and Oracle today in slightly elevated tones. For those who do not know, Amazon uses Oracle Sparc Cpus and the Oracle database. I think that it is thousands of Oracle databases but, who knows ?
    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/16/amazon-suffers-glitches-in-opening-minutes-of-prime-day.html

    I’ve met a dog like Jaja, a golden doodle. She was a neat dog, about 70 lbs. Super friendly as long as mommy or daddy was around.

  19. ITguy1998 says:

    Looks like Amazon is still having some issues. I can’t get to the login page to login to my account.

  20. ITguy1998 says:

    I can think of few things more disgusting than a potluck. I’ve proudly skipped out on every “food day” and potluck they’ve tried to have at my various employers over the years. The horrors I envision of what happens in people’s kitchens at home scares the hell out of me.

    Preach!!

    I despise company gatherings. My current company has a few each year. A chili cook off. Meh. A Thanksgiving lunch, in which the company buys turkey and dressing, and everyone else brings a dish. I do go get turkey, skip all the bacteria filled dishes brought from home, and scamper back to my office to eat in peace. The third one is pig out day. I’m not kidding. It’s the week after Thanksgiving. People bring anything they want. It’s like the Golden Corral, only worse. I hide under my desk that day.

  21. lynn says:

    Well, today sucks. I had a meeting with my electrocardiologist at lunchtime and he is going to do a heart ablation surgery on me in a couple of weeks. I have been having lot of afib (atrial fibrillation) lately and he gave me the choice of doubling my Rythmol or doing the surgery. I asked him what to do and he said the ablation since the additional Rythmol will make me even more tired and probably won’t work. He added that I am in good health now and this is a good time to do this.

    That is assuming that I pass the echo-cardiogram that I had today, the nuclear stress test next week, and the esophageal probe to map my heart and check for heart fistulas (yup, a foot down the throat). The actual surgery will be three hours under general anesthesia using two arterial catheters in my groin in the Hermann cath lab, one for the camera and one for the cauterizing tool.
    https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/cardiac-ablation/about/pac-20384993

    I asked about the downsides and he said the surgery has a 2/3rds success rate. He has performed over a thousand ablations and has only had one person die. The guy developed an esophageal blockage after the surgery and died three weeks later. The guy was already in bad shape before the surgery.

    My father-in-law had the surgery four years ago and it was a total success. My aunt has had the surgery three times with a failure each time. I am planning for success.

    Hey, my doc is a Rice grad:
    http://www.houstoncardiovascular.com/thomas-e-hong-m-d-cardiac-electrophysiology/

  22. DadCooks says:

    My wife had heart ablation surgery more than 30-years ago. We had to go to Spokane WA to find an experienced specialist. It was really costly back then but there were no insurance hassles. She had a truly serious case of Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome that was getting progressively worse. I have no doubt that she would not be with us today if she had not had the surgery.

    Best of prayers and thoughts @lynn. It’ll not be fun but you will find that you will recover quickly and feel better than you can remember.

  23. lynn says:

    Got electricity ? It may become scarce in Texas Tuesday. I saw 100 F in my car on I-69 driving back from the medical center at 230 pm. Of course, the freeways are always hotter due to the concrete and wasted heat from the vehicles.
    https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Texas-approaching-electricity-use-record-13079639.php

    The current demand is 70,370 MW. Ercot is running with about 7% reserve online power. That is not good, we used to run at a minimum of 10% reserve online power when I was at TXU.
    http://www.ercot.org/

    People do not understand that the electricity that we are using was just generated a moment ago and sent to you at the speed of light.

  24. lynn says:

    My wife had heart ablation surgery more than 30-years ago. We had to go to Spokane WA to find an experienced specialist. It was really costly back then but there were no insurance hassles. She had a truly serious case of Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome that was getting progressively worse. I have no doubt that she would not be with us today if she had not had the surgery.

    Excellent ! Good to hear that it worked for your wife. I have never heard of Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome. Isn’t it amazing how different we all are yet we continue to thrive ?
    https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/wolff-parkinson-white-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20354626

    Yeah, afib (and tachycardia) are nothing to mess with. A friend of mine, a WWII vet (still alive at 95), has had several strokes due to heart afib problems. He could not have the ablation surgery due to lung blood clots over the years from flying high in his B-24 to get away from the Japanese Zeros. He is totally amazed that he is still alive after having his plane shredded three times so the afib and strokes are just a part of life to him.

  25. MrAtoz says:

    People do not understand that the electricity that we are using was just generated a moment ago and sent to you at the speed of light.

    You mean electricity isn’t from unicorn farts like liberals say?

  26. Miles_Teg says:

    Is the guy MuskRat accuses of being a pedo actually one? Is there any firm info?

  27. JimB says:

    Potlucks! Love ’em, but then, I like to live dangerously. Always enjoy eating something I have never had before. No, I don’t enjoy the really exotic stuff, but this is the USA.

    As for liability insurance, a random ~20% of my neighbors are just crazy enough to “deal” with interlopers and scammers, if ya know what I mean: “connections!” seem to work as a deterrent, and cheap.

    Or, maybe the heat is getting to my brain. Plausible deniability.

  28. nick flandrey says:

    Musk is assuming a white male expat living in Thailand is only there for teh butt secks.

    n

  29. RickH says:

    Re: afib: I’ve had it for over 15 years; mine is ‘paroxysmal atrial fibrillation’ – no cause found, it just happens.

    I now use Flecanide to control it; works well. (Used to use Rythmol and others before, but they became ineffective over time.) Switched to Flecanide about 5-7 years ago, and it is controlling things well.

    I get the occasional skipity-do-dah, for which I take an extra Metoprolol to help it settle down. Usually lasts about 1-2 hours. Other than that, current drugs working well.

    Had a visit with the cardio guy earlier this month. All is well, although he thinks I should change from full-strength aspirin to a blood thinning drug. Says my ‘score’ (for possible stroke) is at a ‘2’ due to my type 2 diabetes and age. Haven’t changed over yet. Used to take warfarin, along with the regular blood tests, but the new drugs don’t require the INR tests. Still figuring out the drug coverage for the three he recommended.

    But, the Flecanide is working well to control my afib. YMMV.

  30. nick flandrey says:

    When the news of Anthony Bourdain’s suicide broke, someone in a comment asked what he’d said about the Clintons….

    Turns out, a lot and none complimentary. The conspiracy minded might take note of that.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-16/bourdain-piece-sht-bill-clinton-entitled-rapey-gropey-grabby-disgusting

    n

  31. JimB says:

    They. Are. Not. Like. Us.

    Thank FSM.

  32. nick flandrey says:

    Popo are on the scanner with Clint up in the helo (again) looking for someone in the Fifth Ward area of Houston.

    gonna be some drama

    n

  33. CowboySlim says:

    You mean electricity isn’t from unicorn farts like liberals say?

    Nope, mine comes from solar panels out in the desert and AlGore says it is 1/10 the cost of that made my CH4 combustion.

  34. mediumwave says:

    Suppose the world renowned cave diving rescue doctor DOES live in Thailand so he can have ‘houseboys’ around as Musk accuses.

    Retired lawprof Ann Althouse:

    “BBC writes that Unsworth is considering suing. I think this is a situation where Unsworth must sue, because the defamation is so severe and so specific that failure to sue leaves a cloud.”

    If Unsworth IS a “pedo” and sues, he loses megabucks on legal costs. If he isn’t and doesn’t sue, then, as Althouse implies, his reputation is destroyed.

    And the whole kerfuffle is apparently because Unsworth said some unkind things about Musk’s submarine.

    Nicely played, Elon!

  35. lynn says:

    You mean electricity isn’t from unicorn farts like liberals say?

    Nope, mine comes from solar panels out in the desert and AlGore says it is 1/10 the cost of that made my CH4 combustion.

    Solar power is price competitive with natural gas with a 50% incentive payment from the feddies. 2.1 or 2.5 cents/kwh if I remember correctly.

  36. nick flandrey says:

    Don’t know what this guy did, but the cops want him bad…

    n

  37. Greg Norton says:

    So Amazon’s website also crashed once today. Amazing. Mr. Bezos is probably talking to his people and Oracle today in slightly elevated tones. For those who do not know, Amazon uses Oracle Sparc Cpus and the Oracle database. I think that it is thousands of Oracle databases but, who knows ?

    I haven’t touched SPARC hardware in nearly 20 years. They still make those?

    When the first Pentium III systems hit in the late 90s, it was pretty much “Game Over” for SPARC. The first Athlon 64 with x86_64 and the GCC compiler support was the final nail in the coffin.

    SPARC hardware was cr*p by the late 90s. Sun protected their product line with NDAs, salesmanship, and the STL license.

  38. lynn says:

    Re: afib: I’ve had it for over 15 years; mine is ‘paroxysmal atrial fibrillation’ – no cause found, it just happens.

    My afib is caused by heart damage from a coronary artery spasm incident back in 2009. My diagnosis, no doctor wants to venture what happened to me. My right coronary artery is occluded (fancy doctor speak for plugged) and the back side of my heart muscle is dead. Maybe since birth, nobody knows when it happened.

    I am in the early stages of congestive heart failure. Flecanide seems to have the same issues of Rythmol, “In the long-term, flecainide seems to be safe in patients with a healthy heart with no signs of left ventricular hypertrophy, ischemic heart disease or heart failure.”. Oops, failed that test.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flecainide

  39. lynn says:

    “AIR QUALITY ALERT: Heavy African dust expected to blow back into Houston through Tuesday”
    http://abc13.com/weather/air-quality-alert-light-haze-from-african-dust-now-in-area/2245790/

    I was wondering what the crap in the air was as I drove up and down I-69 to the medical center. I had no idea it was going to be this visible.

  40. mediumwave says:

    Is there a ‘private life’ anymore or are ALL of your actions and beliefs fair game for public scrutiny and condemnation? Should they be?

    A positive consequence of the public scrutiny and condemnation is that the scolds, gossips, and other nosey parkers self-identify, thereby exposing themselves to marginalization.

  41. lynn says:

    I haven’t touched SPARC hardware in nearly 20 years. They still make those?

    When the first Pentium III systems hit in the late 90s, it was pretty much “Game Over” for SPARC. The first Athlon 64 with x86_64 and the GCC compiler support was the final nail in the coffin.

    SPARC hardware was cr*p by the late 90s. Sun protected their product line with NDAs, salesmanship, and the STL license.

    When Oracle bought Sun, they got the Sparc ownership. IIRC, the number one user of Sparc’s is Amazon. Oracle created the 64 bit Sparc with embedding many of the database instructions in the cpu. The result is an incredibly fast database, make that many databases. Amazon is the largest database in the world, right ? Oh wait, I forgot about the NSA.
    https://www.pcworld.com/article/3187576/servers/its-not-the-end-of-sparc-chips-yet.html

    I’ve got a Sun Sparc upstairs that I have not booted in 20 years. The last time I booted it, the hard drive was making this horrible sound like a whale going deep. And I never got the source code off it for one of our products.

  42. lynn says:

    “Amazon Down? Major Fail on Prime Day 2018 (Amazon Responds)”
    https://www.tomsguide.com/us/amazon-prime-day-crash,news-27620.html

    Wow, I am shocked. I would have not thought that their traffic today would be more than pre-Christmas Eve traffic.

  43. lynn says:

    “How to cut the cable yet stay within your bandwidth cap”
    https://www.cringely.com/2018/07/16/how-to-cut-the-cable-yet-stay-within-your-bandwidth-cap/

    Nothing new here except that Sling apparently sucks.

    And the cringe needs a pair of rabbit ears.

  44. lynn says:

    “Trump calls off Cold War II”
    http://www.wnd.com/2018/07/trump-calls-off-cold-war-ii/

    “Pat Buchanan responds to John Brennan vitriol with Patrick Henry quote”

    Man I miss having OFD around to bring up the good Buchanan columns. Now I have to go look myself.

    Hat tip to:
    https://drudgereport.com/

  45. nick flandrey says:

    Cops think they found their guy, and are “going in the front” to get him. Still no idea what he did….

    n

  46. lynn says:

    “Global PC shipments grew 1.4% in Q2 2018, first time in 6 years”
    http://www.osnews.com/story/30576/Global_PC_shipments_grew_1_4_in_Q2_2018_first_time_in_6_years

    “Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer. Lenovo in particular saw big gains (its highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2015), although that’s largely due in part to the inclusion of units from its joint venture with Fujitsu.”

    Versus what, a billion smart phones and tablets in the same quarter ?

    The PC consumer market is still dying. But businesses will continue to run PCs as the content creators cannot easily use phones or tablets for the same.

  47. JimB says:

    “When the first Pentium III systems hit in the late 90s, it was pretty much “Game Over” for SPARC. The first Athlon 64 with x86_64 and the GCC compiler support was the final nail in the coffin.”

    Agree. SPARC workstations were polished, but the competition ate their lunch. Way back when, we had Sun, DEC, Silicon Graphics, and HP. All had their strengths, and we used them. Then, I went to sleep (actually, got away from that game.) When I woke up a few years later, I saw that Wintel had taken over. At first, I thought it was just to save money, because those proprietary UNIX workstations were expensive to support. What surprised me was that, stripped of the proprietary environments, apps ran surprisingly well on Wintel. Game over. Well, except for something I saw that was developed exclusively for RISC systems teamed with minis: it ran very well, and Wintel likely could not have pulled that off. But, it was $big. Never underestimate Wintel, but I preach to the choir.

  48. JimB says:

    BTW, I read this site almost every day, but just lurk. It is the single best site I know of. I often look at other sites, and they always remind me of the depth of intelligence and refinement here. Keep up the good work! Although I still miss RBT and OFD, there is always something stimulating here. Thanks to all.

  49. nick flandrey says:

    Thanks JimB, lately comments have been down a bit, and I was getting nervous. Thanks for stopping by and for commenting.

    nick

  50. nick flandrey says:

    Well, the police didn’t get their guy. Raided a flop house motel, but the suspect wasn’t there.

    n

  51. nick flandrey says:

    Whatever Trump said with Putin, it sure has the deep state running around with their hair on fire….

    One called for a military coup, one accuses trump of treason, even McCain spent one of his last few breaths chiming in, with a blatant falsehood.

    Oh, maybe it was the Putin comment that $400M got funneled to Hillarity C….

    n

  52. Greg Norton says:

    Agree. SPARC workstations were polished, but the competition ate their lunch.

    The Sun hardware was poorly designed cr*p by 1999. We knew it at GTE, but everyone was under NDA not to talk about it. The only real alternative suitable for our needs, SGI, was worse.

  53. nick flandrey says:

    Ah, he’s a suspect in the shooting of a Metro bus driver, and then “the mattress store thing” later……

    They are currently reviewing video from the no tell motel…

    n

  54. Greg Norton says:

    “Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer. Lenovo in particular saw big gains (its highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2015), although that’s largely due in part to the inclusion of units from its joint venture with Fujitsu.”

    Kaby Lake finally gave people a real reason to upgrade.

    The jury is still out on Thunderbolt, but USB-C and 32 GB support are real upgrades vs. what Intel had been cranking out for the previous 4-5 years.

  55. Greg Norton says:

    One called for a military coup, one accuses trump of treason, even McCain spent one of his last few breaths chiming in, with a blatant falsehood.

    Wait until McCain croaks and his wife is seated in the Senate to keep the Murkowski-Collins-Deep State stranglehold in place on the chamber.

  56. JimB says:

    “Thanks JimB, lately comments have been down a bit, and I was getting nervous. Thanks for stopping by and for commenting.”

    Now I feel a little guilty 🙂

    Although quantity might be down a little, quality is right up there. I was going to mention names, but I would likely forget some, and embarrass myself, so let’s just leave it there. And, I should have mentioned missing Jerry Pournelle. The world just isn’t the same.

    Speaking of missing people, I also miss Daniel Rutter of dansdata.com. He lives on in Twitter, but it just isn’t the same. Writing longer articles is a dying art.

  57. JimB says:

    “The Sun hardware was poorly designed cr*p by 1999.”

    Probably so. I am not disagreeing, but I was reaching all the way back to the early to mid 90s, IIRC.

    I forgot to give an honorable mention to Apollo, mainly for their token ring networking, which worked well in our environment. Ethernet, of course, took over, co-invented by Metcalfe.

  58. nick flandrey says:

    Three articles in our local fish wrap, worth at least a skim if you are interested in the titles.

    https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/katy/news/article/Active-shooter-drill-at-Katy-private-school-13078887.php

    “teachers are actually the true “first responders” to any dangerous situation at a school. He said law enforcement agencies such as the Harris County Sheriff’s Office are reaching out to school districts and offering information about what to do in an active shooter scenario.

    “We want all the teachers to be there so they can see what it looks like,” Sgt. Brawner said. “Teachers need to take this very seriously.””

    —-

    https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/spring/news/article/First-responders-in-northwest-Harris-County-gear-13078447.php

    “First responders in northwest Harris County are ready to help residents who are stranded in high waters with the help of high water rescue vehicles, boats and training after flooding in recent years by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Tax Day flood in 2016 and Memorial Day flood in 2015.”

    ““We’ve learned a lot lessons, one of which is we needed boats. We can roll wheelchairs right on these boats,” Herman said.”

    I’ve seen many new boats and high water vehicles out behind local fire stations as well.

    —–

    https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Metal-detectors-spark-intense-debate-in-Santa-Fe-13074200.php

    [Santa Fe is the district where we had our most recent school shooting, South and East of Houston]

    “I never thought in a million years that metal detectors would be more controversial than arming teachers and that conversation.”

    “The metal detector issue is one that divides a lot of people,” Lambert said. “Some people who grew up with them in their schools say they made them feel safer, others say they made me feel like a criminal. People just bring really different mindsets to that issue.”

    Transportation Security Administration investigators found that agency’s personnel, metal detectors and X-ray machines failed to catch about 70 percent of fake guns and weapons officials tried to sneak onto airplanes in 2017, an improvement from the 95 percent failure rate logged in 2015.”

    “Dorn and two other school safety experts said they worry that a focus on metal detectors could distract from other, less visible solutions, such as threat assessment and creating a school culture in which students are encouraged to report classmates’ potentially violent behavior.

    ” it’s a lot easier for a principal to point to a fortified entryway, additional cameras and, perhaps, more metal detectors to appease the community’s call for what is, in essence, a security blanket.””

    And again, no one is talking about making the response more effective, increasing resilience, and improving survivability with bleeding control, effective fighting back, or less than lethal responses.

    nick

    added- there is no security plan that can keep someone from attacking a school. Harden the school enough, and the sniper will just shoot kids at recess from across the street. Fences don’t stop bullets very well. Or the attacker will get serious with sarin gas, or an inflammable fluid, or bombs. That’s why the RESPONSE and recovery need to be emphasized, you can’t control the adversary, but you can control your response to him.

  59. lynn says:

    https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/spring/news/article/First-responders-in-northwest-Harris-County-gear-13078447.php

    “First responders in northwest Harris County are ready to help residents who are stranded in high waters with the help of high water rescue vehicles, boats and training after flooding in recent years by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Tax Day flood in 2016 and Memorial Day flood in 2015.”

    ““We’ve learned a lot lessons, one of which is we needed boats. We can roll wheelchairs right on these boats,” Herman said.”

    Hey, I need one of those boats for my house. Just in case I do not get out early for the next flood of my neighborhood. Or just so I can zoom around the neighborhood and see what is flooded.

    And that wheelchair stuff is dire. When my brother’s neighborhood flooded, one of his boys went door to door (almost to Ech’s house !), wading in 3 to 4 ft of water, checking on people. He found an 85 year old lady sitting in her house in 3 ft of water in her wheelchair. He carried her out to their house and got her evacuated. People in wheelchairs do not have the ability to leave their homes easily in emergencies.

  60. Greg Norton says:

    When Oracle bought Sun, they got the Sparc ownership. IIRC, the number one user of Sparc’s is Amazon. Oracle created the 64 bit Sparc with embedding many of the database instructions in the cpu. The result is an incredibly fast database, make that many databases. Amazon is the largest database in the world, right ? Oh wait, I forgot about the NSA.

    Oracle has a decent database product and salespeople who are good at what I call “hookers and steaks” marketing.

    Ellison bought Sun to fight the Java API battle with Google in court. He’s playing an incredibly long game there, but if he prevails, the tech industry will be turned upside down.

  61. nick flandrey says:

    Occasionally I think I might be getting a feel for the Japanese people, or at least some sense of how the weird is very normal there. Then I read something like this:

    http://www.atimes.com/article/man-arrested-for-killing-friend-by-blasting-compressed-air-up-rectum/

    A man was arrested in Japan on Saturday after a prank – shooting compressed air deep into a workmate’s rear end – ended in tragedy.

    But the crime, while bizarre, is far from unique in Japan, where a common childhood practice may explain a succession of adult deaths and injuries in recent years – all related to anal assaults with air compressors.”

    “The culprit: childhood finger enema?

    While it might be considered common sense not to attack a friend’s bodily cavity with an air compressor, there are cultural precedents for similarly invasive practices in Japan. The island nation is home to a dastardly childrens’ prank known as “kancho.”

    Kancho is a performed by cheeky Japanese kids. In it, the child clasp the fingers of both hands together to form an imaginary gun with which they poke their unsuspecting victim in the anus, while yelling: ”Kan-CHO!”

    The word “kancho” comes from the Japanese word for enema.

    The practice of assaulting co-workers’ rear ends with air compressors appears, essentially, to be a dangerously equipped variation of this well-known and rude, but often overlooked, childhood prank. “

    n

  62. lynn says:

    Speaking of wheelchairs, my brother-in-law was terminated by UPS today. So much for 30 years of loading trucks and doing anything they wanted in the 5,000 person facility. He managed to call into the office from his rehab nursing home, only to get told that he needed to call his shift supervisor at midnight since he worked the midnight shift. The union steward came to see him at the rehab place and told him that he had filed a grievance at the UPS warehouse in Dallas where he works. My wife’s sister is also talking to an attorney to file a family and medical leave lawsuit against UPS. This nightmare has been going on since the first of May.
    https://employment.findlaw.com/family-medical-leave/what-is-fmla-faq-on-federal-leave-law.html

    The question is why did UPS deny his conversion from short term disability to long term disability ? The union steward said some of the paperwork did not get filed properly and that UPS refused to wait until my BIL is out the rehab. My SIL is not very good with paperwork.

    BTW, my BIL is doing better but has lost the ability to walk due to the spinal cord damage. They are teaching him to walk again but it is going incredibly slow. And he is having to wear one of those long plastic cervical collars to support his neck and head. He tries to rip it off at nighttime. My wife spent the night with him last night in the rehab place so her sister could go home to sleep for the first time in weeks. When he tried to rip off the collar, he had no idea where he was or who she was. And he married her sister 30+ years ago.

  63. Greg Norton says:

    I’ve got a Sun Sparc upstairs that I have not booted in 20 years. The last time I booted it, the hard drive was making this horrible sound like a whale going deep. And I never got the source code off it for one of our products.

    The Solaris C++ compiler was awful. The only reason to use it was the STL license.

    During an interview on the West Coast, one of the interviewers, a former Sun engineer, speculated that using the Solaris C++ compiler probably meant a 60% performance penalty for our massively threaded product at GTE.

    I said, “Hookers and steaks”. The engineer laughed. “You have no idea what it was like at HQ back then.”

  64. lynn says:

    The Solaris C++ compiler was awful. The only reason to use it was the STL license.

    We used gcc and g77 on the Unix boxen: Sun, Apollo, RS/6000, and HP-UX. All awesome machines in their day. For the various Vaxes, we used the awesome Vax Fortran 77 and C compilers. We had four of those DecWindows VaxStations for a while. Good machines but no virtual memory so they crashed when they ran out of ram. Which happened with us weekly. We had all of these machines hooked together on 10base2 (10 mbps ethernet) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cheap 386 PCs running Windows 3.11 killed them all off in the early 1990s.

  65. Greg Norton says:

    Cheap 386 PCs running Windows 3.11 killed them all off in the early 1990s.

    Yeah, around that time I made Ethernet boards at Jabil which were destined for NEC 386 Windows machines going into Fedex depots.

    When (not if) they liquidate the last Sears stores, I guarantee that the demo crews will pull working WFW 3.11 machines out of the buildings. The PCs were still key parts of the infrastructure when I worked for what used to be the IBM/Sears Advantis joint venture at the Death Star.

  66. Greg Norton says:

    Speaking of wheelchairs, my brother-in-law was terminated by UPS today. So much for 30 years of loading trucks and doing anything they wanted in the 5,000 person facility.

    Time for another strike, but, unfortunately, I think it would be fatal for UPS in the face of improved competition from Fedex, USPS, and even Amazon itself. Both UPS management and the union know this. Everyone learned from the last strike.

    The Death Star was smart when they bought Bugs Bunny’s studio a few weeks ago. The Federal court case drug things out in a contract renewal/strike year until only the Midwest union was left at the negotiating table. Midwest was the region that Steve Jobs helped break in 2009, the last serious strike year.

  67. Clayton W. says:

    He found an 85 year old lady sitting in her house in 3 ft of water in her wheelchair. He carried her out to their house and got her evacuated.

    BZ! I hope the community commended him. I wish the local news would report more stories like this, as we often need to be reminded that there are good people out there as well as evil.

  68. lynn says:

    Speaking of wheelchairs, my brother-in-law was terminated by UPS today. So much for 30 years of loading trucks and doing anything they wanted in the 5,000 person facility.

    Time for another strike, but, unfortunately, I think it would be fatal for UPS in the face of improved competition from Fedex, USPS, and even Amazon itself. Both UPS management and the union know this. Everyone learned from the last strike.

    His supervisor was/is about 25 at most. Amazing. My BIL is basically a mule to the guy.

    The Death Star was smart when they bought Bugs Bunny’s studio a few weeks ago.

    Huh ?

  69. lynn says:

    He found an 85 year old lady sitting in her house in 3 ft of water in her wheelchair. He carried her out to their house and got her evacuated.

    BZ! I hope the community commended him. I wish the local news would report more stories like this, as we often need to be reminded that there are good people out there as well as evil.

    It was during Hurricane Harvey. These stories were the norm at the time. So many of them that the amazingness faded for a while.

  70. Greg Norton says:

    His supervisor was/is about 25 at most. Amazing. My BIL is basically a mule to the guy.

    Age discrimination was one of the reasons I walked out of my job in Seattle.

    The new job would prefer that I was 25 and female, like the other recent new hire in our group, but they are less overt about it than my Seattle management.

    The Death Star was smart when they bought Bugs Bunny’s studio a few weeks ago.

    AT&T closed the Warner Bros. purchase.

  71. SteveF says:

    If I refused to watch anything starring a celebrity who is a liberal idiot and abuses their celebrity to soapbox the prog agenda, then I’d never watch any television shows or movies because that describes most everyone in Hollywood.

    In fact, I don’t. Not because of the off-screen retardation of most actors, though cutting into their payday is a nice bonus, but because the writing or direction is so bad. I can’t turn off the analytical part of my brain, so suspension of disbelief breaks in every action movie, and if it’s not that then it’s the SJW virtue signalling and other garbage that makes the movie or show unwatchable.

    Failure to be present at a few social events would result in “Sgt. Hulka” dinging your annual review score.

    When I worked for Teledyne Brown Engineering, one year raises were based on membership in the company softball team. Not officially, of course, but that’s how it worked out. The manager who founded that office of TBE and built it up to a couple hundred people got cancer and stepped aside. The flunky who stepped in apparently read some parody of “How to Be a Manager” seriously.

    and AlGore says it is 1/10 the cost of that made my CH4 combustion.

    And if you can’t believe a Nobel Prize laureat, whom can you believe?

    When my brother’s neighborhood flooded, one of his boys went door to door

    Kudos to him.

    A handful of times I’ve come across someone, usually an old person, who’d fallen down or gotten stuck somehow or was otherwise in a situation they couldn’t get out of, couldn’t do anything about, and probably wouldn’t survive if left there. I always helped them, of course, but every time was struck by their acceptance that they might die there. That is utterly incomprehensible to me — I cannot imagine myself just giving up under any circumstances. You know that rock climber who got trapped and cut off his own arm? That’d be me. (Though for an alternate view, my confidence that I can overcome, fix, or escape any situation leads me to putting myself in peril time and again. A number of people have told me I’m committing a slow-acting suicide. Mostly I tell them to get bent, but I suppose it’s possible they’re right.)

  72. MrAtoz says:

    WTF Mr. SteveF? Formatting gone crazy.

  73. SteveF says:

    Fixed. The problem was entirely due to Russian interference and had nothing to do with me screwing anything up.

  74. nick flandrey says:

    The russians did it… the universal escape clause of 2018

    n

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