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It’s no mystery that Hillary Clinton often acts as if she is above the law, and when accused will follow her hubby’s example of playing dumb. And when asked pointed questions, her responses (“What difference does it make?”) fall flat and fail to inspire confidence. But one of her recent snarky comments was actually inspiring[…..]
The post Remington Tweet Takes a Swipe at Hillary appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.
I’ve often lamented that the iPhone is a beautifully-crafted object that we must hide inside a protective case. But Structures Engineer Nathan Cobb refuses to cover his up, presumably because he appreciates structures. So how does he manage to keep a grip on his slippery phone? Well, like this:
Okay, so the product is somewhat silly, but it’s only a dollar for two pairs. (Edit: At press time, the Early Birds have run out and it’s now $3 for two pairs.) Cobb needs your help!
The Lil Grits that you see in my pictures and the ones in my video were all handmade. I laminated the silicone film and the adhesive with a spoon and cut the Lil Grits by hand with a hobby knife. That’s fine for making a few sets here and there but producing larger quantities is going to require a much larger spoon and custom tooling.
This one may or may not make it; though the target’s just eight large, it had barely cracked $2,000 at press time. There are, however, still 18 days left to make Lil Grits happen.
via Core77
This Smartphone Anti-Slip Solution Has the Best Kickstarter Video Ever
Based on Bad Lip Reading’s version of the first Republican presidential debate, we vote Ben Carson and Ted Cruz as co-presidents, Scott Walker’s hair stylist as vice-president and Mindy as Treadmill Pooper. America!
via The Awesomer
Republican Debate Bad Lip Reading
Nerf’s new Apollo and Zeus Rival blasters are some of the most innovative additions to the toy line in decades. And while they can fire foam rounds at an impressive 70 MPH, there’s still room for custom upgrades as YouTuber LordDraconical demonstrates by making the Zeus fully automatic.
Just pull the trigger and less than a second later all 12 foam balls in the Zeus’ magazine will be unloaded on your opponents. It makes for a devastating attack, but it also means you’ll want to carry a few extra magazines with you into battle.
This mod isn’t for beginners, though. In this video LordDraconical walks you through every step, but his upgrades include everything from swapping in new trigger switches, to replacing all of the Zeus’ internal wiring, to upgrading the blaster’s batteries to a lithium polymer alternative that gives the flywheel motors a lot more kick.
There’s always the risk you could damage your new toy in the process, but the payoff seems totally worth it in this case. Your co-workers will love living in terror while working in range of your cubicle—trust us.
via Gizmodo
Guy Upgrades Nerf’s New 70 MPH Rival Zeus Blaster To Be Fully Automatic
Let’s say you’re trying to tackle this whole retirement thing, and that means it’s time to beef up your savings. If you’re looking into an individual retirement account (IRA), you’ll have to decide between a traditional or Roth IRA. There are a number of factors that go into picking the best option, and this calculator can help you decide.
Traditional and Roth IRAs are different in quite a few ways, but it mostly comes down to this:
We’ve told you the ins and outs of how IRAs work, so you’ll want to thoroughly research which option is best for you. But this calculator can at least put you in the right direction. You enter in details about your tax rate, savings rate, expected savings return, and so on. From there, the calculator tells you how much you can expect to earn (considering taxes and return) with one type of IRA over another. You’ll even get graphs that show a side by side comparison.http://ift.tt/1D59DEr…
In order to work, the calculator asks you to plug in your expected retirement rate, and of course, that’s just an estimate, so this isn’t an exact science. Still, it’s a helpful tool because you can adjust the amounts and see just how much you’d earn with each option. You can also see how those numbers change as your tax bracket changes.
Give it a try for yourself at the link below.
Roth IRA vs. Traditional IRA | Dinkytown
via Lifehacker
This Calculator Will Help You Decide Between a Roth or Traditional IRA
You almost have to feel bad for Isaac Newton. Despite all of his groundbreaking discoveries in mathematics and physics, his accomplishments have just been eclipsed by a man named James Risner who has somehow bent the laws of the universe to build an infinitely-looped spiral model railroad.
Powered by what appears to be seven HO-scale locomotives, Risner’s creation also works in reverse. But based on our scientific calculations, which are in turn based on the science we learned from the original Superman movie, leaving this setup running in reverse for too long will undoubtedly start to turn back time. [YouTube via Geeks are Sexy]
via Gizmodo
You Can Watch Forever But the End of This Infinite Model Train Will Never Arrive
We skipped a week with this column, but this week, I want to talk about the variations in the stormtrooper costume. Not all stormtroopers are the same, and between each film, there’s minor differences that need to be taken into consideration when building your costume.
I’m just thinking about Stormtroopers this week, but there’s other variations, especially when you look at Clone Troopers, Sandtroopers and others. Between the production of each film, the stormtrooper costumes that were used were changed up in small ways.
Take a look at the examples from the three original trilogy movies. Can you spot the differences?
A New Hope:
Empire Strikes Back:
Return of the Jedi:
They’re subtle, but they’re there. In A New Hope, the frown on the helmet is grey, with black in the middle. The holster is on the right, the hand plates are trapezoidal, and the lenses are a greenish color. In The Empire Strikes Back, the frown is entirely black, the eyes are greyish, the hand plates have changed to clamshells and the holster is on the left. Finally, in The Return of the Jedi, the black frown and hand plates are still there (you can’t see them in this picture), but there’s a trim around the edges of the chest plate. There’s some other minor differences in decals that are too hard to see in these images.
These are admittedly very minor differences between each movie, but it shows an interesting thing that happened between each production: they didn’t recycle parts, but changed them up little by little. Thus, when you put together a trooper, you can’t just pull a reference picture from any of the films: the troopers change each time. Trapezoidal hand plates with an all-black frown or trim around the edges of the chest? Not accurate to any of the movies.
For my purposes, I’m going with the troopers from The Empire Strikes Back. So: black frown and new hand plates for me!
Once George Lucas decided to follow up A New Hope with a sequel, he financed it himself. As a result, many of the original stormtroopers costumes that were used in the first film were brought back for the second. When production began, the team reused the ‘stunt’ helmets (those not used on the heroes), and made some changes. The frown was painted entirely black, and the hand-painted details on the helmet – at the temples, next to the eyes, at the back of the head, at the ears and the stripes – were replaced with vinyl duplicates.
More recently, costume historians have discovered that there were some additional costumes cast for Empire Strikes Back. Early in the film’s production, a total of seven stormtroopers were required during the carbon freezing scenes. Later on, however, the scenes required additional stormtroopers. To fill the demand, the film’s costume designer, John Mollo, indicated that they began creating plaster casts off of the existing sets of armor in existence.
Mollo’s notes also indicated that they assembled the suits a bit differently: they ordered new eyes and liners for the helmets, and used elastic and rivets to hold the shoulders in place. Other straps were put into use to hold the suits together a bit better – probably due to feedback from the actors who were involved in some of the early scenes.
Later, for Return of the Jedi, entirely new stormtroopers were constructed for filming.
We’ve already begun seeing pictures from Rogue One hit the web, and no surprise, there’s stromtroopers in this film. Unfortunately, the pictures are a bit too far away to make out any real details – the only thing that I can see for sure is that these stormtroopers do have trapezoidal handplates, rather than the curved ones. Once the publicity of the film ramps up, we’ll likely get some close looks at the costumes, and see how they line up with the ones from a over four decades ago. Once that happens, we’ll have an entirely new designation of stormtrooper: The RO TK.
Top photo credit: Ashley Fraser.
via Gizmodo
So You Want To Join The Empire: Movie-Accurate Troopers
Earlier this year, Intel promised to make an effort to hire more women and minorities, and by the looks of things, the company’s making good on its word. Its latest move? Pledging $250,000 per year for three years to three Navajo Nation high schools in Arizona, in hopes of inspiring kids to become coders. Intel engineer Jolene Bengay (above) announced the company’s project during an event honoring the Navajo code talkers of World War II. "We know that if we’re really going to fill in the (talent) pipeline," said Intel’s Diversity initiative deputy director Barbara McAllister, "we need to aggressively address the gaps in that talent."
The money will help support the Science Foundation Arizona’s "Code Talkers to Code Writers Initiative" and will be used to train teachers how to code, so they can teach their students in turn. Intel’s Native American employees will also be dropping by to help out, though probably not that often, as there are only 266 in the company.
Source: USA Today
Tags: coding, diversity, intel, navajo
via Engadget Full RSS Feed
Intel pledges money to train potential Navajo code writers
Apple plans to release a new version of the company’s Magic Mouse and Bluetooth wireless keyboard that will use Bluetooth Low Energy and include integrated batteries, according to new filings with the US Federal Communications Commission. The new peripherals will eschew the AA batteries currently used in favor of USB-based charging. Both will use Bluetooth 4.2 with Bluetooth LE, which should result in dramatically longer battery life….
via MacNN | The Macintosh News Network
FCC filings reveal new Bluetooth LE keyboard, Magic Mouse
As we all know, good DBAs are a dime a dozen. They’re easy to replace and the cost of replacing them in terms of lost productivity, downtime, recruiting, training, etc is minimal. You may even suspect that your DBA(s) aren’t very good since there is occasional downtime and people complain about the systems running too slowly. Firing people is icky so we’ve identified 8 great ways to encourage your DBA to leave.
8. Specialize Their Role
Nothing puts more pressure on a DBA to perform than being a specialist. A specialist is the only person who has access or knowledge to do something, which means everyone else is going to be coerced into learned helplessness and apathy. Oh, and the bystander effect will run rampant when something goes wrong. “I’m sure the DBA is working on that.”
Yep. You definitely want the DBA’s role to be specialized so they’re properly isolated and all the blame falls on them when anything goes bad. Certainly don’t want developers and other operations staff to be competent with the database!
7. Institute Change Control
Since you’ve created a specialized DBA role in which all database responsibility rests on the DBA(s) you might as well take the next step to institute strong change control. Since the developers have no responsibility for database performance problems they create, they’ll write code recklessly and figure it’s the DBAs responsibility to fix it. To solve for that all code changes must be reviewed by the DBA before shipping to production. No changes can happen during business hours. And there will be no changes during critical times like the Super Bowl ads or the holiday shopping season, period.
We’re fully confident this’ll solve all the outages, but as a delicious side effect of this, we’ll also rub the DBA’s nose in a bunch of menial, thankless reviews of code and applications they don’t understand, which should incent them to leave right away.
6. Mismatched Control And Responsibility
Nothing punishes a DBA better than being responsible for systems they can’t control. Naturally, item #7 is designed to create the illusion of control, so when they protest, we can point to that and say “what do you mean you have no control over what queries are running in production?” The DBA is not only wholly responsible for database performance, but also for delays in front-end development and feature roll-out.
5. Make Them A SPOF
If you only have one DBA by instituting #8, 7 and 6 above you’ve done a great job of creating a single point of failure. Even with multiple DBAs you’ve created a team of SPOFs. You can add insult to this injury through promotions. The smartest management move I ever saw was when an overworked DBA (let’s call him Atlas, because he held the world on his shoulders) was promoted. I mean, the man just wouldn’t quit. He was in the office at 2am every week doing the things that management insisted couldn’t be done during work hours, he never got to leave or turn off his cellphone from October through January, and this had gone on for years. Clearly a promotion to DBA Manager was the only way to make him quit. Did it work? Sure did, it only took a week.
4. Give Them Great Tools To Do Their Job
As the VP of Technology, it’s clearly your job to tell the DBA what tools they need to do their job. Make sure you do that. Remember, any production MySQL issue can be properly diagnosed by staring at thousands or tens of thousands of time series charts of SHOW STATUS counters in five-minute resolution, so Cacti or Graphite ought to do the job just fine. If they insist on more than that, you can pretend you’re bending over backwards by giving them Nagios or statsd. These create an illusion of database performance monitoring by creating mountains of false alarms tied to ratios that don’t really mean much.
3. Make Sure Developers Can’t Self-Service
Whatever you do, don’t let the developers get their work done by themselves. The DBA can’t truly be a SPOF if the developers can get stuff done without them. You need developers to go to the DBA with every little database-related request. This will impress upon the DBA their essential role in the organization and how they’re failing to live up to it and need to leave. Coincidentally, using Cacti or Graphite for monitoring will help ensure all DB-related questions can only be answered by the DBA.
2. Insist On Root Cause Analysis
There is always a single root cause. Five whys. It’s a human error problem. Who is the human error? The DBA is. The DBA’s very existence is an error. If there are outages, downtime, sluggish performance, delays in code release the root cause has to be database performance and that is the DBA’s responsibility 100%. Creating a revolving door DBA position will guarantee that the people responsible for the database don’t know much about the system because they just got here. Not that that’s an acceptable excuse.
1. Work-Life Balance Is Overrated
You get the most out of your people by driving them hard. No one ever got good results on the battlefield by handing out Kleenex. No matter how many developers you have, 1 DBA is plenty; in fact try to make it a side responsibility for one of your systems admin folks. If they whine about their burdens, tell them to just work harder. Your DBA should be online or in the office after hours, and if they’re not they’re slackers and should be replaced anyway. Stress, guilt, all encompassing responsibility, shame, and failure are powerful motivators, too.
Conclusions
Remember: as an IT Manager/Director/VP you need to have a scapegoat, and your DBA should be that scapegoat. By placing the DBA in an impossible situation, giving them full responsibility for keeping the systems up and running, and keeping them from having collaborative tools that allow developers to self-service and take responsibility for being the first line of defense against bad queries, you’ll always be able to tell your boss that the reason for the problem is poor database administration.
The alternative to using the DBA as your scapegoat is to have that responsibility fall on you! You might have to take responsibility for building or licensing collaboration tools that allow the whole team to function more efficiently. You might have to build a culture of shared responsibility and teamwork. And, while doing so might improve speed, innovation and help attract and keep top drawer developers, it requires change and change is hard.
Much easier to just churn through DBAs.
via Planet MySQL
The 8 Best Ways To Lose Your DBA