On Fri, 08 Jun 2012 23:24:24 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>> There is no magical "tool" which can correctly guess what is hidden
>>> behind a solid object.
>>
>> No, but if you have a picture that shows what's behind a solid object,
>> then you can in fact mask out the object.
> 
> Sure. That I can believe. Doing it from just one photo isn't so easy.

I never claimed it was done from one photo.  Apparently I wasn't clear on 
that point.

>> That's not been my experience.  It is possible to seek out the
>> important facts before making a decision.
>>
>> Business intelligence systems do exactly that, in fact.
> 
> Doesn't BI involve paying vast sums of money to /collect/ the necessary
> information?

Not always (in my experience, not often).

BI involves collecting sales data and information about purchases in a 
lot of cases.  That's data that retail establishments and sales forces 
have as a result of actually selling stuff.

>>> Statements like this make me wonder where this vast endless source of
>>> "easy" counter-examples is... It's as if the entire world knows
>>> something that I don't.
>>
>> How to properly use google?<scnr>
> 
> You laugh, but this is actually non-trivial.

Not in my experience.  But then again, when I was in high school selling 
software and computer books, I was often amazed when people would grab a 
book of the shelf and just flip through it to find what they were looking 
for, rather than looking in the index or TOC first.

I always would start doing word association on the topic and go straight 
to the index.

>> Well, there's also the question of your unwillingness to go where the
>> work is
> 
> I live in a city with a population of 200,000 people, and an
> unemployment rate well below the national average. /Clearly/ there are
> jobs here. I just need to find them.

You've also stated (in the past, maybe it's changed) that you hate living 
there except that it's logically laid out and you can find stuff easily.

But yeah, there are probably jobs there, just perhaps not in the fields 
you're interested in.

When you start filtering by too many criteria, you end up with no 
options.  The logical thing to do when that happens is to relax some of 
the criteria, such as where you're willing to look or what you're willing 
to take as a job.

>> or your unwillingness to believe that anyone on the planet who works a
>> "normal" job makes enough to live on.
> 
> Uh, when did I say that?

It's been a couple of years probably, when you and I were talking about 
it being good for you to move out of your mum's place.  You asserted that 
it simply isn't possible for anyone to make enough money to buy a house 
or rent a flat, regardless of all evidence to the contrary.

>> Heck, I was laid off last May.  I didn't work again until October, and
>> it's been contract work ever since.  A couple of really tight months
>> financially, but we haven't lost the house and are still paying all the
>> bills.
> 
> Then clearly you are a far better person than I am.

I had a reasonable severance package, and my contract rate is decent - 
not outstanding, but decent.  There are some things we're not willing to 
give up, like eating out fairly regularly (which is expensive).

> One time my sister got laid off. 5 days later, she was on the phone
> complaining that of the 3 written job offers she had received from the 5
> interviews she attended, she couldn't decide which one sounded the
> nicest.

I had hoped for a situation like that.  It didn't happen.  I actually had 
an interview the week after the layoff, but I was so badly out of 
practice that I blew it by starting a conversation about pay and 
benefits.  That comes when an offer is made, not at the start of the 
conversation.

>>>> Oooh, he's got teeth, this one does. ;)  That's a fair question.
>>>
>>> Back atcha. ;-)
>>
>> It always makes me smile when you take a stand on something.  Even when
>> the stand isn't necessarily logical in my view.  You have changed in
>> that regard, and it's a good change.  :)
> 
> It's good to be righteous. It's not so good when you're actually wrong.
> :-/

It's good practice.  The stakes ultimately are pretty low here, so it's a 
largely safe environment to try stuff out and see what works and what 
doesn't.

"Practice makes perfect" and all that.

>>> So there's a lot of people /on/ the site.
>>
>> And it stands to reason if it were a waste of time, people wouldn't
>> spend time on the site, would they?  (The point of LinkedIn isn't to
>> waste time, it's to build a professional network.  Facebook, OTOH, is
>> essentially there for people to waste time on so they can be the
>> 'product' sold to advertisers - the two aren't really equivalent).
> 
> Yeah, I'm really not seeing how Facebook is still in business. It must
> cost /millions/ to run all those servers. And yet, their idea of
> "targeted adverts" is about as precise as a blunderbuss. It just seems
> like some day somebody is going to figure out the emperor's magical
> invisible suite is actually non-existent...

It may well - I understand they use SSD storage exclusively (local 
company here in Utah called Fusion-IO provides the hardware, 
apparently).  It's all about advertising, apparently.  Dunno how they 
manage it with ad blockers and things like the fb purity, but I figure 
that's not my problem.  If it goes away, I likely won't miss it.

>>> For example, how do you know that "millions" have found it useful?
>>> Not, say, "thousands"? The number of people on the site is not
>>> necessarily the number who have actually found it beneficial.
>>
>> It stands to reason that if it weren't beneficial, people would stop
>> using it.  After all, you didn't find it beneficial, and you stopped
>> using it.  That's actually a perfectly natural reaction.
>>
>> So are you assuming you're the only one who stopped using it because
>> you didn't find it beneficial?
> 
> We'd need to see numbers for how many people signed up, and how many
> people subsequently left.

Perhaps.

> My profile is still live on the system. It looks like I'm still a
> Linked-In user. And yet, I haven't used it in 3 years. So don't use /my/
> presence as an indicator of usefulness.

Well, you also only have 7 connections, IIRC.  One of the useful things 
to do, though, is to have someone you know introduce you to someone they 
know.  That's how I ended up with an interview in Portland - a colleague 
of mine in Florida knows the HR person at the company I applied to, and 
he introduced me.  Within 2 weeks, I had an in-person interview.  Sadly, 
they didn't feel that what they wanted out of my presentation was 
provided by what I presented to them, and they were looking for a 100% 
match.  They even said I was very well qualified, but that I "didn't 
follow the instructions given" and "didn't show an appropriate amount of 
enthusiasm and investment in the company".  The former I fault myself 
for, for assuming I understood their instructions (and not insisting 
earlier in the process of being told what I should be prepared to present 
on); the latter, I fault them for, because corporate enthusiasm is 
something that can be taught, and to reject a candidate because they 
weren't bouncing off the walls about your product/service even though 
they're highly qualified in the field is just silly.

> How many of the other profiles are ghosts? I guess that's the opportune
> question...
> 
> Regarding Facebook: How many of those profiles are for somebody's cat?
> ;-)

Far, far too many.  I've got a friend on Facebook who has a page for her 
African Grey parrot and for her dog.  I think her cat also has one, now I 
think about it.

Jim

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