The Lance J. Technoweb

I was helping a friend install the "Examity SB" software for proctored exam taking. What a mess! I'm not complaining about the concept of the proctored online examines. It is the quality of Examity's client software implementation and associated process that is nothing short of an embarrassment. Examity's software and process design flaws can turn the test-taking process from "stressful" to "idiotic nightmare". "Examity SB" is one of the worst "professional", publicly distributed software packages I've seen in years. A Rant for the Ages. Adobe Flash? Please! First, Examity's website suggested that I download and install the obsolete Adobe Flash software system. Since Adobe Flash is dangerous from a computer security perspective and unavailable, I decided to download the native SB application. Just as a data point, my organization decided to sunset our use of Adobe Flash for user-facing pedagogical software developme...

 Today I read this on the Motley Fool in relation to Starlink: With Comcast offering 200 mbps for under $50 in metro locales in the U.S. you might not think [Starlink will be successful]. Why is the Motley Fool telling us this fabrication about Comcast pricing?  Motley seem to be merely repeating the words of a Comcast marketing strategy, not the pre-tax price customers actually pay.  Clearly no writer or editor for the MF is actually a Comcast ISP customer.  The sloppy editor will exclaim that the MF article is, on the surface, correct - in my "Metro Area", Comcast's claim is that they charge for 200 Mbps service at $49.99.  $49.99 is under $50.  But that number is incorrect, as Comcast fully states that the $49.99 is the price for a subset of a multi-year contract. The overall monthly cost is far, far higher. Comcast fully admits in their fine print that the fee for 200 mbps service is actually $92.95... not including other profits that show up ever...

Many people think that they don't upload much data, but that's not true. On the Internet, every item you look at something on the Internet requires upload data packets along the way, and a single item can require the upload of thousands or even millions of confirmation packets of data. It's a fundamental aspect of how the modern Internet works. The email, the youtube video, and merely browsing the web requires a lot of uploaded data. Well here's the dirty secret: A slow "upload speed" results in slow confirmation packets, which results in slow Internet. And ISPs like Comcast only talk about selling you "download speeds". Sadly, even Comcast's "Performance" 200 Megabit service is throttled to a 6 Megabit upload speed. That's great for 1999, but in today's internet? Performance? Hardly. So forget about dumping more money to Comcast to fix the problem, as the Comcast "pay more money for speed" is primarily about ...

I started programming way back. In those olden days I was working close to the hardware - on machine language code (assembly languages). Bits were important: shift left, shift right, AND/OR/XOR. And memory pages were important too: fitting an important routine within a 256 byte page of RAM could really help performance. Today, life is different. Instead of choosing a memory address, Programmers allocate objects . If a programmer is storing a boolean, a boolean object is created. Who knows how that's represented under the hood, but it certainly isn't represented in one bit of RAM. Most programmers don't even use the bit-wise operators offered through the programming languages given to them. Sure, some do. But most do not. And so now we get into our prefixes: kilo, mega, giga, terra, and peta (and beyond, I suppose) Many programmers still want these prefixes to be based on powers of 2. One kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2^10). One megabyte is 1024*1024 bytes (2^20). Etc. It...