WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

Bill_Dimm's comments

Bill_Dimm | 8 years ago | on: Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

I don't think "100% in-house techs" is right. I have Comcast Business and my line was recently cut (probably an accident by apartment maintenance). The tech who came out and put in a temporary line was from Comcast, but he said a contractor would come out at some point in the future to put in a permanent one (hence, he could not guarantee that I could get a notification when it would happen).

Bill_Dimm | 9 years ago | on: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.

Along those lines, maybe they'll fix the very broken email alerts for group postings. For quite a while, my experience has been that if I have it set to weekly digests I do get them weekly as expected, but if I set a group to daily digests I get nothing at all. So I get nothing at all for the groups that I have the most interest in. I opened a support ticket about it but got nowhere with it. I don't know if this impacts everyone or just some subset of users, but I've seen others complain about it.

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders with a Ph.D

Here is the breakdown for the quants at the bank I worked for in 1995-1999 (I may have forgotten a few people):

Cornell physics PhDs: 3

Harvard physics PhDs: 2

Princeton physics PhDs: 2

Univ of Penn physics PhD: 1

Other physics PhDs: 2

Cornell applied math PhD: 1

Other applied math PhD: 1

Cornell mechanical engineering PhD: 1

Univ of Chicago finance PhD: 1

So, if by "dropout" you mean that they didn't complete their PhDs, then no, that's wrong. If by "dropout" you mean people leaving physics, then yes, it's very common (especially for theorists -- all physicists on the list above where theorists except maybe one or two).

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: Why the CDC Tracks Wireless-Only Households and Their Risky Behavior

DSL is available without telephone service, at least with Verizon in Pennsylvania. It is called "dry loop DSL." 3 Mbps / 768 kbps is costing me more than the price they are advertising for 50 Mbps / 50 Mbps FiOS (which I can't get) without contract. So it exists but it sucks, and I'm not sure you actually save much (or anything) by getting DSL without telephone service.

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: China to begin two-child policy

About 20 years ago, when I was a grad student, I attended a colloquium where the speaker (a physicist, for better or worse) had computed the number of people that the planet could support if everyone consumed natural resources at the rate that Americans do. His number was 2 billion. I don't remember who the speaker was and I don't know what assumptions he made -- I don't know how much error there might be in his result or how improvements in technology might change it. If his number is even close to being right, "global populations will peak in my lifetime" isn't even close to being adequate unless you expect the bulk of the population to be satisfied with remaining poor while a small proportion of the population devours the planet.

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun

Neat. It would be helpful if you could go in the opposite direction (enter RGB values and get the name of the closest color). I find that when I'm making a chart or graph and I cook up some color in GIMP, I don't know how to refer to that color in the text of the document that references the chart.

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: Block and Unsubscribe

In a similar vein, but with physical mail, I made a donation to the local PBS TV station years ago during one of their fundraisers. They sent me a postcard with my name misspelled in a way I had never seen before. I then received solicitation mails from several other charities with the same misspelling. Nothing says "thank you for your donation" like being sold out for a few extra dollars. I never donated to them again.

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: Lawrence Lessig wants to run for president in an unconventional way

> Except I've never once seen such a claim actually made by any politician. So at the very least it seems likely to stand out.

Marco Rubio made a claim like that on Meet The Press two days ago.

> I intentionally have no access to the donor list

That would require doing away with the $50,000 per plate fundraising dinners.

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child

Sidenote: I tried sending the link to my brother's work email and it was blocked by Symantec.cloud email filtering. I don't know if that means that Symantec is blocking links to spotthedrowningchild.com due to detecting malware there or whether Symantec email filtering is just garbage.

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: DHI Group plans to sell off Slashdot and Sourceforge

it seems like it's a pretty important part of being a slashdotter to hate on the staff

I wouldn't go that far. I was on Slashdot for a very long time and witnessed many changes of ownership. Sure, there are always a few people that will grumble when anything is changed, but I don't think any of the ownership changes caused that much uproar before Dice came along. Auto-playing video ads of models walking down runways on Slashdot? Adware/malware bundling on SourceForge? Dice made it really clear that they didn't have an ounce of respect for the community. I think the bulk of the community would have tolerated reasonable efforts at monetization, but Dice went way beyond reasonable.

Bill_Dimm | 10 years ago | on: China stocks drop over 8%

The China market is pretty limited in reach; not many foreigners and not even many institutional investors

How much money do Chinese investors have invested outside of China? If they bought Chinese shares on margin, they may end up selling assets globally to cover.

page 1
more