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Author Topic: Useless Conversation  (Read 3400671 times)
ezrast
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Reply #38360 on: March 12, 2019, 10:43:17 AM

Lol we couldn't figure out the metric systems and you nards want different days in the middle of the day.
To be fair, 10 is a shitty base for a measuring system. Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?
Yegolev
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2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST


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Reply #38361 on: March 12, 2019, 11:10:20 AM

You do need to follow up on that assertion. awesome, for real

Why am I homeless?  Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
ezrast
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Reply #38362 on: March 12, 2019, 12:03:51 PM

Base 12 numbers are easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, so they're better for mental arithmetic like dividing a restaurant bill.

I actually count in base 8 in real life sometimes because I can do it rhythmically (like counting musical beats: ONE two three four, FIVE six seven ten, ONE two three four, FIVE six seven twenty) and it's easier not to lose my place among high numbers. I convert the end result back to base 10 afterwards, of course.

You want to make programmers' lives easier, standardize on base 16.

Decimal has nothing going for it but finger-counting, and that's largely cultural. You can just as easily count to 12 on a hand by pointing your thumb at each finger-section in turn.
Samwise
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sentient yeast infection


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Reply #38363 on: March 12, 2019, 12:21:30 PM

+1 for octal.  That way you keep the finger-counting benefits (and you can use your thumbs as the eights place), and you don't need to invent new digits, but everything is still relatively easy to divide into various factors of 2.  Hexadecimal breaks at byte boundaries more easily, but you can't count to it on your fingers and you need to use funny letter-digits to write the numbers out.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Reg
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Reply #38364 on: March 12, 2019, 01:58:50 PM

I really liked living in San Francisco where the winter-summer day length variation wasn't nearly as drastic as it is up here in Toronto.
Abagadro
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Reply #38365 on: March 12, 2019, 06:23:08 PM

In addition, imagine setting up a conference call with multiple time zones and sending out that calendar invite.


Outlook does that automatically. Do it all the time.

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

-H.L. Mencken
Samwise
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Reply #38366 on: March 12, 2019, 08:52:52 PM

In addition, imagine setting up a conference call with multiple time zones and sending out that calendar invite.


Outlook does that automatically. Do it all the time.

Yeah, that's kinda what I was getting at with the idea that it'd be pretty trivial to adapt scheduling software to handle a timezone-less world.  We already have to handle situations that are a lot more complicated than different offices simply having different workdays.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
NowhereMan
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Reply #38367 on: March 13, 2019, 11:08:45 AM

In fairness I can imagine a single time zone being something where we would look back and think 'how the fuck did people cope before?' much like we did when national time became a thing and we all wondered how the fuck people dealt with a 20 minute time difference between neighbouring towns. China is already part way there since they just force the whole country onto Beijing time but the way of doing that has its own problems (Oh you're in the far Northwest and it gets bright at 2am in the summer and dark at 8pm? Too fucking bad in Beijing the time is fine, everyone still starts work at 9am).

I don't think that being a better solution than getting rid of DST is any argument to not get rid of DST though. We're not even calling for really changing anything, just stop changing one thing.

"Look at my car. Do you think that was bought with the earnest love of geeks?" - HaemishM
Samwise
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Reply #38368 on: March 13, 2019, 12:26:48 PM

Oh you're in the far Northwest and it gets bright at 2am in the summer and dark at 8pm? Too fucking bad in Beijing the time is fine, everyone still starts work at 9am.

This is in a nutshell why I think timezones (and the prescriptive workdays they imply) are a bad idea.  There are actually some benefits of DST in terms of maintaining a little more consistency between when the sun comes up and when you start work -- if we didn't "fall back," I'd be waking up in darkness for half the year and that'd fuck with my sleep a lot more than spending a couple of days adjusting to the one hour time change does.  DST is just a really hacky fix for that problem that has a lot of bad side effects.  (And a lot of people in a lot of places probably don't happen to get that benefit because they're getting up an hour before or after the sun regardless.)

You could get the benefits of syncing up with daylightt without DST if it were more standard practice for businesses to have "summer hours" and "winter hours" that were different, or if working hours were just in general more flexible, but our rigid insistence that NINE AM IS WORK TIME means that if you want the work day to match up with the sun, which is a constantly moving target, you have to move the entire clock, rather than just moving the work day.  That's dumb.
« Last Edit: March 13, 2019, 12:57:06 PM by Samwise »

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Polysorbate80
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Reply #38369 on: March 13, 2019, 03:12:58 PM

Random tech rant:

After getting complaints from viewers about the quality of one of our livestreams from campus last week, we discover that UStream routed distribution through a server in Amsterdam  swamp poop  Not surprisingly it got a li'l bit of buffering on the way back to Idaho...

Nothing against the Dutch, mind you.  I aim this at IBM, who also jacked our rates horribly since their takeover.  We're switching CDNs.

“Why the fuck would you ... ?” is like 80% of the conversation with Poly — Chimpy
Strazos
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Reply #38370 on: March 17, 2019, 10:58:33 AM

Nine AM start time? Sounds luxurious.

Fear the Backstab!
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Reg
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Reply #38371 on: March 17, 2019, 11:29:58 AM

When I was a lad we DREAMED of a 9:00 am start time!
Trippy
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Reply #38372 on: March 17, 2019, 11:57:52 AM

I quit a job cause they changed the rules to make us programmers come in at 9 AM. awesome, for real
Samwise
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Reply #38373 on: March 17, 2019, 12:00:06 PM

I quit a job cause they changed the rules to make us programmers come in at 9 AM. awesome, for real

Last time I had a job where I had to be in before 10AM was in high school.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
calapine
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Reply #38374 on: March 17, 2019, 12:02:46 PM

Nine AM start time? Sounds luxurious.
That. Normal for offices is 8:00 am.

Restoration is a perfectly valid school of magic!
Selby
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Reply #38375 on: March 17, 2019, 01:12:08 PM

I'm at work at 6:30AM every day... 9 or 10AM start times mean the day is already almost half over!
Rendakor
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Reply #38376 on: March 17, 2019, 03:03:20 PM

My default start time is 8am but certain customers often necessitate coming in at 7am or earlier.

"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
schild
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Reply #38377 on: March 17, 2019, 05:06:12 PM

I don’t even function until 11am.
Teleku
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Reply #38378 on: March 17, 2019, 05:44:24 PM

We did swing shifts in Moscow, and since everybody wanted to come in early and leave early, I just did the 9-6 shift two years straight.  So that was nice!

Back to 8 AM here.  Which is better than Bangkok, where the Embassy's official start time is 7 AM (and I think management did that on purpose).

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants.  He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."
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IainC
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Reply #38379 on: March 17, 2019, 08:30:42 PM

I start at 10am here in Thailand.

When I worked in Madrid, I had a period of two weeks after I started, where I didn't have to come to the office and work, but I was still on payroll so that I could find an apartment and do all the Spanish government paperwork that was needed. First day off the plane, I wander over to the office to ask when I should come in the next day to sign my contract and set up appointments for the various bureaucratic stuff.

"Oh, just come first thing in the morning!"
"Ok, when is that"
"11:30"

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Morat20
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Reply #38380 on: March 18, 2019, 08:49:33 AM

So, part of Houston is on fire.

And by "part of Houston" I mean "I can see the fire from my front yard".

And it's spread (started with one tank, spread to two, and then to eight overnight). They're clearly just trying to contain it and let it burn itself out.

About the only good news is the chemicals currently burning don't release anything too nasty as a byproduct of combustion and burn very enthusiastically and thoroughly (so no spreading pools of deadly gasses, or massive concentrations of carcinogens raining down people). And the prevailing winds are the right speed and direction to prevent even the closest neighborhoods from being filled with smoke. If you're not near the blaze proper, there's no issues with air quality. (And last I checked, they had about a dozen groups -- plus as many independent local contractors -- doing air quality tests).

Still it's a proper mess. You can see the smoke from 20 miles away, at least. And that was when it was one tank on fire.

Engels
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Reply #38381 on: March 18, 2019, 09:47:49 AM

I took an internship in Barcelona. I'd show up at 8, along with the custodial staff. The office staffl would come in at 10. The boss would arrive at 11:30 with a hangover, faff about till 1ish, then have an 'early lunch' (lunch was officially 2-4), then not be back in the office till 5,

I should get back to nature, too.  You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer.  Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached.  Buy a car with only two cup holders or something. -Signe

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Babies shooting themselves in the head is the state bird of West Virginia. - schild
Mandella
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Reply #38382 on: March 18, 2019, 01:12:04 PM

I don’t even function until 11am.

Yeah I don't roll out of bed until the crack of noon.

Also, don't burn up Morat20!
NowhereMan
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Reply #38383 on: March 19, 2019, 03:37:17 AM

My personal favourite was Malaysia, where most of the local staff would come into work at 10am (office hours starting at 9), proceed to waste time on facebook etc., until about 12 (with an 11am break for prayers). They would then go off for prayer and lunch, get back about 2 and then continue wasting time until 5. At that point they would actually get on to their emails, answer everything and get some tasks done until 8.30 or so befor finishing for the day. They would consistently complain about doing 12 hour shifts (ignoring that they started late or had breaks) and congratulate themselves on being so much harder working than Indonesians.

This would all be hilarious if you weren't sending emails at 9am and then getting a reply at 5.45 and having to stay late because fucking hell you couldn't get anything done earlier. I was lucky to not be so reliant on working with Malaysian colleagues for that kind of thing. South East Asian office culture is fun, Vietnam still very much has a siesta culture where everyone has a nap for a couple of hours after lunch.

"Look at my car. Do you think that was bought with the earnest love of geeks?" - HaemishM
Rasix
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Reply #38384 on: March 19, 2019, 10:13:26 AM

If there's one thing I'll give IBM, they really don't give a shit what hours you work. That can also come with a caveat: no one gives a shit about the hours you work, only the hours they work. Israelis will schedule meetings where you cannot possibly attend (because they don't want you to). People on the east coast will start training/educational meetings at 7am.

Also, who the hell gets coffee from Dunkin, but then brings discount bakery items from the supermarket to go with it? Fucking hell. It's the worst of both worlds.

-Rasix
HaemishM
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Reply #38385 on: March 19, 2019, 11:41:15 AM

You know who has great coffee? IHOP. Something that surprised the shit out of me.

Everything else on their menu was complete and utter shit to the point of wondering "HOW DO YOU FUCK UP PANCAKES AND EGGS?" But their coffee was some of the best at that kind of joint I've had.

schild
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Reply #38386 on: March 20, 2019, 09:24:54 AM

So, part of Houston is on fire.

And by "part of Houston" I mean "I can see the fire from my front yard".



and yet no pictures what the hell man
Cyrrex
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Reply #38387 on: March 20, 2019, 09:30:16 AM

Dude, show a little bit of sensitivity.  He might be burning to a crisp as we speak.

"...maybe if you cleaned the piss out of the sunny d bottles under your desks and returned em, you could upgrade you vid cards, fucken lusers.." - Grunk
Mandella
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Reply #38388 on: March 20, 2019, 10:35:04 AM

Dude, show a little bit of sensitivity.  He might be burning to a crisp as we speak.

Well he could have the consideration to take some pics while trying to flee from the flames -- this is 2019 after all.

(I hope you are not fleeing from the flames Morat20.)
Sky
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Reply #38389 on: March 20, 2019, 11:12:01 AM

I mean, livestreaming your own immolation would definitely get you Internet points.
Morat20
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Reply #38390 on: March 20, 2019, 08:17:58 PM

I mean, livestreaming your own immolation would definitely get you Internet points.
It finally went out. Then Shell started leaking benzene. Although in all fairness to Shell, the leak was below OSHA "oh shit" levels and restricted the immediate sector of the plant where they make the stuff, so it's not like it was sniffing around my neighborhood.


I really should move.
Abagadro
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Reply #38391 on: March 20, 2019, 08:42:25 PM

New York drink prices are bullshit.

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

-H.L. Mencken
Chimpy
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Reply #38392 on: March 20, 2019, 10:05:45 PM

New York drink prices are bullshit.

Hahaha

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
Polysorbate80
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Reply #38393 on: March 21, 2019, 07:06:24 AM

Is it like airport pricing, where buying a double means you’ve pretty much paid for the whole bottle?

“Why the fuck would you ... ?” is like 80% of the conversation with Poly — Chimpy
Selby
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Reply #38394 on: March 21, 2019, 07:13:57 AM

Yes. $15 for a double of whiskey and coke...
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