Many years ago, I standardized on Journal in Microsoft Outlook.
Well guess what. Microsoft created Notes and Journal bceame a "legacy app." It was not possible to migrate. The deprecation of the .PST file in Exchange Server left me no way to transfer when I lease-rolled to a new laptop.
Enter Notes. As in, "notes.txt", which is exactly the same idea as todo.txt described here. Works. If this text file ever becomes machine unreadable, file compatibility will be the least of our worries.
Favorited—I'll be coming back to absorb more, as my aging semi-fluency in engineering physics and SQL doesn't help much with the notation I last saw in the 1980s.
When I click the link for this story, Edge (stop laughing. Please.) pops up "uBlock Origin works on Microsoft Edge." (It's already there, Edge, but thank you).
Edge is based on Chromium, so would that mean this breakage will eventually apply to Edge as the Manifest changes, uhm, manifest to Chromium-based products? Or is this just a Google Chrome thing?
FWIW I keep Firefox around but I have to admit I like Edge's smooth sync of bookmarks and settings across machines and even different platforms. I switched about two years ago when Edge was clearly faster and lighter. It's no longer as lightweight and there are slowly accumulating annoyances coming mostly from some Microsoft Clippy-esque attempts to make some tasks "easier" (mostly via Copilot) but I still prefer it to Firefox. My former employer/retiree benefits site, for example, won't open at all in Firefox. I've considered other Chromium based browsers like Brave but haven't (yet) been sufficiently motivated to switch. (Give Microsoft some time, I expect they'll eshit Edge eventually).
"A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” Mr. Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986."
All you need to know about the respective legacies of Carter and Reagan.
A worry about the incoming American president has nothing to do directly with the proliferation of sports gambling nor the harms it brings, but the sudden absence of formerly available data that might-just-might contradict the narrative of an industry that's unzipped its change purse and let Trump have at the mic stand inside (a horribly multi-mixed metaphor, but apt).
"That data set you got there, UC Consumer Credit Panel. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it, you know, if, say, somebody decided to publish a post tying bankruptcies to our donor's lil $300 billion enterprise here. Capiche?"
That's happened with climate data during his previous term, so expect more (of less).
The OG cloud email service, AOL, still revive it for testing now and then, from 1993.
Yahoo! account established July 17, 1996. I know the exact date because I remember a hyperlink blue headline across the top of the gray Yahoo! home page, "TWA Plane Explodes Off Long Island"
I tried a variety of configurations. The E-series was one of them, as it's advertised as "Great for relational database servers, medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics." Premium and Premium V2, tried those at larger capacities I didn't need just to get higher IOPS.
None came within an order of magnitude of a Ryzen 7600/nVME mobo sitting in my son's old gaming case.
An option I did not try was Ultra disk, which I recall being significantly more expensive and was not part of the standard corporate offering. I wasn't itching to get dragged in front of the architecture review board again, anyway.
I may have the "Ebsv5" series code incorrect. I'd look it up, but I don't have access to the subscription any longer.
What I chose ultimately was definitely "nVME attached" and definitely pricey. The "hypervisor-adjacent, very low latency volume" was not an obvious choice.
The best performing configuration did come from me--the db admin learning Azure on the fly--and not the four Azure architects nor the half dozen consultants with Azure credentials brought onto the project.
At my job at a telco, I had a 13 billion record file to scan and index for duplicates and bad addresses.
Consultants brought in to move our apps (some of which were Excel macros, others SAS scripts running on old desktop) to Azure. The Azure architects identified Postgres as the best tool. Consultants attempted to create a Postgres index in a small Azure instance but their tests would fail without completion (they were string concatenation rather than the native indexing function).
Consultants' conclusion: file too big for Postgres.
I disputed this. Plenty of literature out there on Pg handling bigger files. The Postgres (for Windows!) instance on my Core I7 laptop with an nVME drive could index the file about an hour. As an experiment I spun up a bare metal nVME instance on a Ryzen 7600 (lowest power, 6 core) Zen 4 CPU pc with a 1TB Samsung PCIe 4 nVME drive.
Got my index in 10 minutes.
I then tried to replicate this in Azure, upping the CPUs, memory, and to the nVME Azure CPU family (Ebsv5). Even at a $2000/mo level, I could not get the Azure instance any faster than one fifth (about an hour) of the speed of my bare metal experiment. I probably could have matched it eventually with more cores, but did not want to get called on the carpet for a ten grand Azure bill.
All this happened while I was working from home (one can't spin up an experimental bare metal system at a drop-in spot in the communal workroom).
What happened next I don't know, because I left in the midst of RTO fever. I was given the option of moving 1000 miles to commute to a hub office, or retire "voluntarily with severance." I chose the latter.
I have done this for years, but now gmail recipients are rejecting my email as spam. (I've gone through multiple iterations with the DNS configuration at the host, but fundamentally the IP address is tainted other customers on this provider using it to send spam. I shouldn't have to fork up for a dedicated whitelisted IP address just to get functional email). As a result now I have a dedicated @gmail.com address just for those folks and businesses.
I'm surprised the world, and most especially the tech community, embraced gmail so quickly. Yes, it's a great interface, yes, it's free, but from the start they said they would be scanning content and collecting infomation from email content. WHy are we OK with that?
This presentation is so clear I'm going to show it to my high-schooler so that she can (1) understand why Dad works on Saturday (I confess to some "heroics"), and (2) concepts she can keep in mind on upcoming projects at school, and eventually at a job.
You are 63% of my age (there's a coincidence there, do the math).
A point I haven't yet seen in the comments: how much the advancement of civilization owes to 20-30 somethings. Take The Beatles, Alexander Hamiliton, even Anthony Fauci (who had the rare reprise late in life) as examples. At around 40 I gave up any illusion I might do something illustrious, and accepted that from then on, I would just work for a living. My best work became my children, and I'm happy to have done that.
Many of the other comments line up with my own observations at this sage old age:
* more distractions (my house seems to be aging much faster than me, and taking up much more time to maintain)
* bigger responsibilities (more savings to manage with less time until retirement to fix investment errors, offspring where simple existential needs like food and diapers have been replaced by tuition, aging in-laws with real decline issues like eyesight and bad joints)
* less energy. true, and most especially I can't skip sleep like I could 20 or 40 years ago.
* burnout ( this stuff does get old, and "boring" as noted by one commenter)
* underestimating the value of my experience. Not writing that really clever code when a simpler solution will suffice, for example. The ability to tell people a realistic estimate of work, not my old optimistic "couple of days" estimate that was almost always 10x short
* ADD, not helped by social media (stay off it when working, or always) and a trying to ignore the constant stream of news (except HN of course lol). But a great help in being open to new methods where I find myself evangelizing about git to people half my age.
* exercise, fitness, diet: need to up my game after covid isolation and increasingly creakey joints. It does make a difference. In my case living in The Big Easy doesn't help.
* Did I mention sleep? Why yes I did, forgive my forgetfulness....no, actually I put it here intentionally because it is that important. Exercise helps with getting quality sleep.
I am still writing code and I "provide value" (their words) in that I can solve complex data analysis problems that come to me after co-workers reach the limits of using vlookups and pivot tables in Excel. I'm not the fastest and I'm always fighting imposter syndrome, but that's quashed whenever I catch a glimpse of production code written by pricey consultants and realize they make the same mistakes and use truly ugly workarounds even I wouldn't consider.
COVID allowed my company to put everyone on the same level. It was wonderful while it lasted.
Unfortunately, the drive to "collaboration" has sprung up again in our senior ranks, who I think felt uncomfortable not being able to lay eyes on heads. Once again the remote folks are peripheral, literally. A lot of time and bandwidth is now wasted on arguing why it's necessary to arbitrarily be in the office one or three days per week, especially for people working independently on projects. Almost every leadership town hall has employees questioning why they agian have t sit in traffic and hunt for workspace while the closest colleague—the one they do real collaboration with—is actually a thousand miles away.
/s