Randommer/Interestinglier/Weirder - now more of everything for the same low price!

[Raithe]

https://www.tumblr.com/whiteshipnightjar/740784061857071104/zoozve-my-beloved

"we don't live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club" has to be a great takeout comment from that

[Gorth]

I sometimes come across these as recommended videos. I think they've done a good job at fixing the speed, frame rate and colorize some of these old clips from the late 1800's and early 1900's...

 

A personal favourite of mine, the last known footage of the Bismarck (movie shot from the perspective of the accompanying Prinz Eugen)

 

[majestic]

 

Yeah, Imma gonna go have some nightmares now.

[Raithe]

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth

Edited April 25 by Raithe

[Malcador]

Mexican morning TV is/was good stuff.

[Gfted1]

[Raithe]

https://archive.org/details/DontBeaS1947

"Don't Be A Sucker" -  A 1947 short film made by the US Army, in an attempt to teach US Citizens how to avoid falling for a certain type of people....

Admonishes Americans that they will lose their country if they let fanaticism and hatred turn them into "suckers." "Let's forget about 'we' and 'they' -- let's think about us!" In the context of the emerging Cold War, this film appears paradoxical.

[Gfted1]

TSMC's Lithography Machines Have a Remote Kill Switch in Case China Invades | Extremetech

[majestic]

https://www.iclarified.com/93724/icq-to-shut-down-on-june-26-after-28-years

Well, there goes a part of 'net history.

[Malcador]

7 hours ago, majestic said:

https://www.iclarified.com/93724/icq-to-shut-down-on-june-26-after-28-years

Well, there goes a part of 'net history.

Was a great IM tool, still recall my UIN, sadly 8 digits so not cool

[Raithe]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/microsofts-new-recall-feature-will-record-everything-you-do-on-your-pc/

 

"We used to call that spyware..."

[Gorth]

7 hours ago, Raithe said:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/microsofts-new-recall-feature-will-record-everything-you-do-on-your-pc/

 

"We used to call that spyware..."

Windows 1984 indeed

[Raithe]

BBC - Mount Everest: Eleven tonnes of garbage taken off Himalyan peaks

It took troops 55 days to recover the rubbish and bodies from Everest, Nuptse and Lhotse mountains.
It is estimated that more than fifty tonnes of waste and more than 200 bodies cover Everest.
The army began conducting an annual clean-up of the mountain, which is often described as the world’s highest garbage dump, in 2019 during concerns about overcrowding and climbers queueing in dangerous conditions to reach the summit.
The five clean-ups have collected 119 tonnes of rubbish, 14 human corpses and some skeletons, the army says.

[Hurlshort]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjll01220yeo

This story confuses the heck out of me. Is Wells Fargo evaluating employees by how often they jiggle their mouse? Why is that an important metric? 

The whole "try and look busy" philosophy makes no sense to me. Did you get your job done? Great, then it shouldn't matter how long you were jiggling your mouse.

[Raithe]

 

[Gfted1]

The 1st 'major lunar standstill' in more than 18 years is about to occur. Here's how to see it | Space

[majestic]

On 6/14/2024 at 5:12 PM, Hurlshort said:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjll01220yeo

This story confuses the heck out of me. Is

What a treasure trove of fun this article is.

Quote

A spokeswoman for the firm said: "Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour."

Really, a bank? A bank demands ethical behaviour from its employees? That has to be the joke of the century. Oh, wait, they mean towards the bank and their bottom lines and bonuses, not towards customers.

People shelling out 10$ for mouse jiggling software is also hilarious, that is something you can just download a free Python script for.

On 6/14/2024 at 5:12 PM, Hurlshort said:

Is Wells Fargo evaluating employees by how often they jiggle their mouse? Why is that an important metric? 

The whole "try and look busy" philosophy makes no sense to me. Did you get your job done? Great, then it shouldn't matter how long you were jiggling your mouse.

Speaking strictly from a very limited efficiency and personnel cost perspective, it makes perfect sense. If employees work only half their time and still get their jobs done, you can either assign more work to them, or fire half the staff. If someone underperforms, you can replace them with someone who does not. Never mind that in real life application and depending on the job done it is much more complicated (to cite an infamous example, like rating developers on written lines of code), but when has such minutiae ever stopped middle management and upwards from doing something dumb in the name of maximizing profits?

Obviously this assumes we are not talking about piece-work, where, for better or worse (well, mostly worse for everyone involved), task completion can be readily measured, but for that one does really not need to keep track of mouse movements. In a banking environment, that would probably only apply to jobs that were replaced by automation twenty years ago, although, who knows. Back during my school days we had a simulated bank to work at, where most of my time was spent going through huge chunks of accounting orders on paper and posting money transfers in the bank system. Somehow I doubt that banks still employ Oompa Loompas like that, but who knows. Bank often still run on ancient COBOL software.

Edited Thursday at 02:11 PM by majestic