Posts by Fehu

Is this what passes for a Job Fair at Kaspersky?

If you can't beat them, hire them.

Or get them sloppy drunk.

Nothing on there worth stealing.

Except maybe some pictures of his latest mail order bride, and you can download those for free.

Apples and people that are orange

By lumping Brexit and cheeto jesus together Kotkin muddies waters that are already muddy. Extreme positions exist in both camps, Progressives and Conservatives, but in the states the fact that a Republican has crossed party lines and voted with Democrats on any issue will get that Republican bounced out in the next election by their own party. It is almost impossible to believe anyone that has done any research would not be aware of that. If Kotkin is just talking about people on forums, what does that have to do with anything? He probably doesn't even know when he's being trolled.

Dell has a software division?

..... Oh, so do I and I'll sell mine for $1.5 beelion. That'll buy a bunch of brewskis.

Made the cardinal mistake.

Nice guy. Too bad he thought he could do the right thing without someone in authority coming down on him like a ton of bricks. Look at what's on other people's hard drives and if you find anything illegal do screen prints and send it via snail mail to the authorities after you've removed all evidence that you were ever there or ever touched the envelope. And send it to multiple agencies while telling them you did so they won't just pretend not to know. Governments at all levels are like the eye of Sauron. Once it fixes its gaze on you, you're pretty much toast.

Kind of like the Peter Principle

As a company gets larger it makes more stupid decisions: Open source tool in place 9 years; decision is made to move from physical server to virtual; idiots can't configure VM's correctly so app that previously handled everything thrown at it starts to crash on a regular basis; instead of correcting the bad configuration, a new app is brought in that will be leased at $500K per year that does not do everything that the old app did, so we're still looking for the second app to buy or lease. Lots of times when someone tells you how much they spent for that shiny new thingy, they're just telling you that they have more money than sense.

Ahh, targeted marketing...

I noticed on several sites when I clicked on links to read about the latest escapades of some of the escapees from the Republican clown car, an add for a medication targeting clinical depression would come up along with an admonition that I needed to tell my physician about my suicidal thoughts. Sorry, wrong party. I'm just reading for the laughs.

Quiet PC

I must have one of those quiet PC's! That way I'd enjoy playing one of my several favorite first person shooters while wearing headphones that much more. What? What was that? Just another hand grenade followed by several AK-47s. Aiyee! Air strike!

Obvious

Doctors always think that they're the smartest guy in the room, so if you tell them something like, "You need to use a password longer than 3 characters." They're just going to ignore you. When was the last time you removed someone's spleen on purpose? Second, they're so cheap they squeak when they walk.

"All your files are exactly where you left them"

But you still won't be able to find them, because "Windows".

Agile - Another Gigantic Ignorant Losing Exercise

First, the golden age of the developer only existed in very large and usually dedicated software companies. Most of us that have worked in medium to small companies have been developer, SysAdmin, Database Admin and whatever else had to be done to get a project up and running. At one company I was the EDI department. Not just a member of the department, the entire department. That made vacations difficult.

Second, Agile is just a bunch of jargon applied to the way most Linux and Unix programmers work anyway to try to get Windows devs to be more productive. Unfortunately, it's now moved into the workplace, so we have Agile environments where you don't get an assigned desk or cube, you have to reserve your work space for when you plan to be in the office. It's now wonderful sitting in a strange area surrounded by marketing types yelling into their cells as I try to debug code someone wrote years ago. You can always make a bad idea worse if you apply it to something that it has nothing to do with.

Maybe they were going for Sequel

Technically literate people do themselves and no one a service by constantly coming up with acronyms and aphorisms to obfuscate processes and terms that are already hard for lay people to understand. SQL Server becomes Sequel Server; MySQL becomes MySequel and the poor, newly hired pointy haired boss has no idea what you're talking about. Say what you mean and mean what you say. How hard is that?

Level 3? Seriously?

Consider the source. No pun intended.

SharePunt?

Hard and fast rule: anything that's marketed as being pretty good at doing everything probably isn't very good at doing anything.

Physcial time travel: not possible

For one thing because time is not physical. It's just a unit of measure. And the one little phrase that so many seemingly intelligent people gloss over in conversations such as these, the amount of energy necessary would approach infinity. Same thing as traveling at the speed of light. Apparently, some people don't get what infinite means. As the subject for movies that we all agree are just ways to waste some time, it's fine. As a subject for serious study? Come on, guys. You've already answered the question. Why keep asking it?

The pints all I need to travel to any space-time continuum I desire.

Already bought two. Will probably buy another soon.

Do I use our Samsung Chromebooks for real work, development, reports, etc? No. But checking email and checking the real story behind news you see talking heads trying to explain without having to get up and go to the home office is very useful. The Chromebook is not a fire breathing desktop gaming machine, but only a fool would buy one thinking that it is. But it's extremely good at doing what it was intended to do. Many windows laptops can not make that claim.

There are many paths to programming.

My B.S. is in Psychology, but in my senior year I found myself spending more and more time in the computer lab writing programs to analyze data from studies my classmates were doing and playing backgammon against the mainframe. At that time, my wife would not let me change majors again so I finished the degree and went back for an Associates in Data Processing. Programming is like the ultimate Skinner box. You try a little something and the results pop up on the screen and you get the reinforcement. And you think, "I wonder what would happen if did this?" And you try it and again you get reinforcement. Of course, people who don't get reinforced don't see it as quite so much fun. That's where skilled programmers who can guide new students come in. And let's be honest, all education is not equal. At my first job as a professional programmer I sat next to a guy with a B.S. in CSC that couldn't format a floppy disk. I had to write a batch file to do it for him to stop him from asking me how to do it every day.

The brewsky is for the best kind of positive reinforcement.

Awww, the good old days...

I'm going on 13 years of working primarily in Linux at my real job. My boss tells me which distro we're going to use and supplies the media that's installed on our servers. At home, I have one machine that has the open source version of our company's supported distro on one machine, a copy of Ubuntu on another and two Chromebooks. I have a gaming machine running Win 7 and that's about all I have time for. Gone are the days when I would download a new distro about every other week and try it out. I think that's what they mean when they talk about a market maturing. I still visit DistroWatch.com occasionally, but I'm kind of afraid of wiping out something that's working and I might need for work just for curiosity. And isn't Miller really saying that the distribution mechanism is changing more than that interest in Linux is lessening. The first distro I ever downloaded was over a 56K modem. I'm kind of glad we don't have to do that anymore.

Simple solution?

Don't the dudes in question have some prohibition about pictures of a certain "prophet"? The service in question simply edits their pages to display a small picture of said person and, wala, being the totally OCD'd, can't get past the small crit types that they are they implode. Apart from that, being slightly familiar with the powers of even the lowliest SysAdmins, I find it hard to imagine that anyone could put any content on a server that I had scripting privileges on. These protestations that "There's nothing we can do to stop it." ring hollow.

Define suspicious

I've worked for more than one company that's asked me to spice up my code to make it look like the company was making less money than they actually were and wondered about my health when I said no. I think the real reason the American Mafia is in decline is because normal business has made them redundant.

M$ more lawyers than engineers

A few years ago I worked for a company that caused me to have to communicate with people that I thought were developers at Microsoft. Invariably, these "developers" would refer me to section and paragraph of such and such contract to help answer my technical question. Apparently, it has gotten worse there not better.

No

We find ourselves having this discussion over and over again:

You remember that horrible thing we told you would happen if you forced us to do that thing we told you we should not do? Well, it happened. No, we can't just reboot the whole network. It doesn't work that way. I'll have to get back to you. All my other phones are ringing now.