Posts by Bluck Mutter 46 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2022
While there may be some (a grain or two) of truth to that, the laws they (the BOFH's) follow involve critical thinking, reasoning, well thought out implementations, due care and risk mitigation.
Rather a crusty old BOFH with an ssh session than some fancy devops guy in a suit with his mates Jenkins, Puppet, Ansible and co along for the ride
Bluck
That does bring up an interesting point.
IT staff with lack of skills exist everywhere but in an onprem situation (at least in my experience) this is weeded out with stringent testing and change control:
(1) dev->test->qa->staging->prod (noting not everyone has staging which is typically a full sized clone of prod including hardware... great for performance testing)
(2) the change being done goes through a change control board which approves the initial change and reviews it after each deployment level noted above
I get the feeling in the cloud space and with this new fangeled devops that a single person is "judge jury and executioner" and changes get stuck in with little oversight (like the multitude of failures due to mangled DNS and other configs that we have seen)
I think they are taking the "move fast and break things" mantra a little to seriously.... great for a startup but not for a BAU/production situation.
Bluck
"Hands up those who remember the days of the Service Bureau. and later timesharing. And why we don't do that anymore."
That's were I started.....back in the late 70's.
Company had a full suite of accounting/inventory management software and cause only the big boys could afford their own inhouse systems, this company sold the applications and the bureau services.
Part of the "magic" (much like this new fangeled cloud stuff) was the back end partitioning with related system resource accounting to bill a customer for actual usage and not just a flat fee.
Ahh... those were the days.. when I was slim and trim and I could drink all night!!!!
Bluck
Well back in the day (which wasnt that long ago) onperm was all there was (plus outsourcing but you still did the operations) and companies coped very well with system resiliency.
I spent 45 years in the onperm space as a server/database consultant to very large organizations and as far as I can remember in the onperm space you never had crap like storage (say S3 buckets) being left wide open for the world to steal from cause wide open was the default config or a customers entire data/servers/backups being deleted cause accounting lost a payment or customers thinking XXX service meant remote failover but it didnt so they went down hard for weeks or a DNS change unrelated to your systems taking them offline or ... (I could go on forever).
The BIG difference is your on perm team CARES about the systems they manage... cloud teams not so much.
It's way easier to setup local/remove fail over, setup and test backups, setup and test database/SAN replication etc when you have the primary servers in a room just down the hall from you... rather than trust a cloud 3rd party stack/personal to do it.
Bluck
So I am retired now and have been buggering around (2 years now) writing some relatively complex software (in C++ on Linux) for long term personnel use.
One thing (two actually!!) I did need which I wasn't prepared to write was Speech to Text and Text to speech.
So you hit the web, look around and try different applications in this space.
Many are written in Python so out of interest (in case they are The One) you install them.
Talk about a shit show of stuff downloaded from unknown sources to make it run. Not 100's but 10 to 20 which means the application will not run in a year or two once some dependency goes dead.
I managed to find both a STT and TTS application written in C/C++ that are totally reliable (esp STT), standalone, can be recompiled without need for any outside resource and in the case of STT, the model is local and doesn't make use of some cloud resource.
Some were in rust and had a similar profile...downloading stuff from places unknown,
What I like, being an old timer, are languages were the complete set of features/functions exist locally (even if some utility/library initially were download/compiled). This means you are isolated from 3rd parties.
Bluck
"Rust might appeal to companies who think they can shorten or even skip some bits of the software development process because Rust will take care of stuff they used to have to manage with reviews, testing and, you know, good SW engineers."
Indeed.... combine this attitude with MVP and [FR]Agile and we have a trifecta of "goodness".
Time to market is king now (just look at the shit show of half baked stuff coming from MSoft like Recall)...so whatever time can be shaved in whatever way keeps the exec's bonuses flowing.
While there have been many reasons for changes in software development methods over the years (I am old so have seen it all...like Jackson Structured programming from the 70's) but I think (like many other things) the Internet changed it all.
In the old days, sending a patch meant mailing a physical media so "time to repair" was long...thus you had to release a Maximum Viable Product.
Now if you screw up in your rush to release an application/app **...no issue...just send a patch that is auto installed in minutes via the Net...so no need to invest any up front time in getting it right the first time.
Bluck
*** given I am old an application is different from an app...SAP is an application, tiktok is an app
I made it to 57 before they laid me off (i retired at that point)
Was a Global Lead Consultant of a real hands on group (not power point jockeys) that did work that no one else could (within or outside of IBM...in the Unix/Linux space).
Basically I was the next on the list (spreadsheet sorted by salary by age over 50... select top 10%) ***
Of course this highly complex spreadsheet never took into account what the group brought in... millions per year per consultant.
So after a year this highly specialized woldwide group was gone (cause everyone else in the group left)...and all that revenue lost.
But hey.... I was gone from the spreadsheet!!.
Bluck
**** also probably considered was the groups skill set wasnt in any of the new initiatives that were so highly prized (shit like blockchain)
well...they seem to be winning at the moment
I hope that the spirit/courage of MLK still lives in enough peoples hearts in the US and that they find a way to force change/throw out these bums.
There certainly appears to be no courage in Congress and the [un]Supreme Court.
Bluck
By the US (supposedly a Western Democracy) going down this fascist path, it provides a blueprint to other Western Democracies that you can't let the right wing nut jobs gain any level of traction.
This was seen recently in Canada where the Trump lite Conservative Party of Canada have tanked in the polls.
I hope this plays out in the EU.
On the negative side, it will give great heart to RWNJ's in other countries but obviously we know why it worked in the US... the RWNJ's took over an existing major party...much harder for a small RWNJ party to ascend to a get elected (esp. in countries where the electoral system has real checks and balances)
Bluck
Imagine all those social media posts going back to ~2015 (when Dump first started running) that were critical of Dump.
Join that to these DHS etc databases and you can expanded the hate to not only illegals but people that will now be considered "dissidents/terrorists" (like those students that took part in peaceful protests on private [university] property) and as I noted below, they will get hoovered up.
Make everyone fear the "machine" and you control thought which is part of the goals of a Fascist state.
I note that they want to force the states to us federal mandated voting machines.... I wonder if these will have a backdoor to flip votes as needed? (or report who didnt vote the right way?)
Bluck
Agree... it's racial purification wrapped up in a bogus "national security" flag
The "interesting" thing about this US administration is they are a potpourri of different ideologies that have coalesced together to pursue their non-overlapping end goals.
The common binding theme of course is hate...although I would put this tariffs shit in a special category... it's just one crazy fuckwits idea of how to run an economy (the fact it might also hurt non-white's/liberials/shit hole countries is viewed as an advantageous byproduct)
Bluck
So lets say this $30m sausage machine manages to find 1+ million people to deport... and of course we know it will hoover up innocent people and hard working/law abiding/tax paying illegals that would make much better citizens than any MAGA voter.
The issue this iteration of Nazi's have is:
1- they don't have anywhere to house them on US soil for temporary staging (and Gitmo isn't an option)
2- they don't have anywhere to send them (given many countries wont accept them)
3- they cant instantly build prisons in El Salvador to house 100,000's of them
4- they can't fly enough planes to meet the supposed target of 1 million per year
5- they can't ultimately afford to do any of the above (El Salvador is billing Uncle Sam $6mil for 300 prison cells)
Now what I state is purely an unemotional/logistical response to this grifting deal to the arsehole named Peter Thiel and doesn't represent my personal views/distaste/revulsion of that pack of inhumane wankers that is contained in the shit show of this current US administration.
Bluck
ASML sells all that nice expensive litho to the new US factories... cashes the cheque then waits a little.
Just before they golive with the new US factory, due to EU National Security reasons, ASML can't provide any ongoing support to the litho.
As we know, that would make the factories dead ducks as without the ongoing support that only ASML can provide, the systems go out of spec and yields crash.
A nice FU to Uncle Donald.
In relation to US product boycotts, the only thing in my life (and that of my wife) that is US branded is Coke-Cola but I am trying to give up the addiction.
All my computers I buy are always "A grade" 2nd hand (and would be made in china anyways), we have never had any subs like netflix, disney+ etc, don't in fact watch any TV, don't do movies, never had/buy amazon, LInux is the only OS we run, use startpage/duckduck/startmail, use dumb Chinese made mobile phones, don't have shit like facebook, twitter etc.
We do have Qobuz (french) as a music streaming service and buy local for food and general consumables as well.
We are about as far away from a modern consumer as you can get.....if I could just give up Coke......
Bluck
Worked for Sequent in the US back in the day and had a customer with a vertical stack of 6 NUMA-Q compute units.
These were located close to a large UPS and the NUMA-Q system would randomly crash.
We did all we could: monitored the incoming power, replaced boards, memory etc.
Not sure what triggered the eureka moment but after exhausting everything else we focused on what might cause external EMF/EMI interference and with the UPS being so close, it was an obvious candidate.
Now the UPS was a big bugger and its chassis was thick as a brick so no obvious EMF/EMI but right at the bottom was a 2 inch high perforated vent that went all around it with numerous vertical cutouts.
So we setup a monitor and low and behold, at certain times (for reasons not explained but maybe related to the batteries) a large amount of EMF/EMI would blast out.
While the radiation pattern was wide it wasn't very high but it was in the perfect place to corrupt the active memory in the lowest NUMA-Q compute unit and cause the crash.
Solution was simple....move the rack a few feet away and never another issue.
Bluck
All this talk about manufacturing returning to the US was based on punishing tariffs being in place for decades, to allow the manufacturers to recoup the costs.
But as expected, the massive tariffs are now on hold so it basically undermines this "initiative"
And as we all know, the various reasons stated for these tariffs were all self-contradictory so we will end up with basically the status quo(*) after a period of massive disruption.
I have to think that the EU vote maybe tipped the scales and forced the capitulation and I hope they hold onto this position.
Bluck
* I have to think that Trump (due to ego) is in a death spiral with China.... he can claim victories with the supposed 70 country that are kissing his arse but the sum of their trade imbalances is a rounding error in the scheme of things... the big players are staying in the fight.
It surprises me when reading these types of threads and in relation to old buggers like me that have been coding for decades that someone like me would use AI.
If you are an old bugger then surely like me you have a large set of standard routines/templates etc that you have developed over the years that you reuse/rework as needed...you should seldom come across a new thing you have never seen before?
And if you do get something newish, you surely have some routine/template that is close enough to be reworked.
The advantages are numerous:
- the code routine/template is in a style you know
- the code routine/template is proven to work
If you are an old bugger and don't leverage what you have done in the past then.......
And I cant think of anything more jarring then cutting and pasting in some 3rd party code in a coding style that doesn't fit yours.....I have a very strong style that suits me and would hate to compromise that with some AI BS.
Bluck
Re quality of IT today.
I am retired (but still program for the joy) and started my career in 1976.
Back then there were no online resources, you had a dry manual for say FORTRAN or 'C' with detailed examples for each language structure. No IDE's, online resources erc.
So if you were doing something new that had any degree of difficulty you had to really think and experiment to arrive at code that did the job, was fast and hopefully elegant. Thus you really learned your craft cause you basically lived in a vacuum.
Today, it would appear that a lot of programming is cut and paste from some resource so no deep thinking involved. So maybe this contributes to what you see as a general lack of talent?
Bluck
The problem with the analogy (C is the new COBOL) is it ignores the ecosystem that COBOL resides on:
- mainframes whose design is for zero downtime where upgrades (hardware/software) can be done on the fly
- it's friends like IMS, JCL and CICS which are core to running a COBOL application
Few still running COBOL legacy applications can exist outside of this ecosystem whereas 'C' is free standing....Unix, for example, was ported to scores of different CPU architectures as has Linux.
Thus the reasons for COBOL's stickiness is totally different to 'C''s stickiness.
The other point is COBOL, FORTRAN and C came to exist in a vacuum.. they become entrenched because they were good, no alternatives existed over time and they kept evolving over time to meet needs.
But now we live in an environment where new compiled languages pop up basically every week and thus it's impossible for anyone of them to gain traction.
Rust is touted as the successor which might be great for a new green field development but it wont help in the large body of existing C projects, both commercial and FOSS.
So if the author means C will still be running the world in 50 years time (as COBOL does in many industries like banking) then they are right.
Bluck
Much conjecture about what it takes to do new stuff inside the US Gov (which I have when I was a World Wide Lead Consultant for a US company that has had 7+ decades of involvement in US Gov computing).
Examples of work included:
- migrating apps and databases within the US Fed Reserve that handled $US 4 TRILLION PER DAY of transactions
- migrating databases within the US Army used to handle all procurement/deployment of everything from toilet paper to tanks
So stuff that was the life blood of these org.
Example of stuff I couldn't do/needed to do
- no bringing a laptop or cell phone onto the premises
- you start the onboarding process (gaining access etc) a month before you start to allow time for security checks
- when installing say the OS, database software or other software on a new server NOT ON A NETWORK yet, you are not allowed to do it... a fed IT person must do it even if they have never installed the software before (so you guide them)
- They will procure the software needed themselves from the vendor
- If you are using any software that hasn't been fed certified then add 2 months to your start date to allow them (via NDA) to review the source code
- you are not permitted to logon to the new system until it has been setup by a fed IT person after which you are given limited access (except in my case where I would have complete access to the target database cause that's the only way you can move a database)
- when you went to the toilet, a fed IT person would escort you to the toilet (and also when entering/leaving the building)
- outside phone calls were done from designated rooms (where I am sure someone was listening in)
- your provided work station had physically disabled USB port, no cd drive
- your provided work station could only see the systems that you had permission to see,network wise (over and above user logons)
Now I get Felon Musk and his band of Jerry Man had some dubious auth from the Orange Fuckwit but you don't rock into a fed IT office and just do stuff no matter who you are or how many times you have done similar work (as in my case) or whether you are a fed IT person from another department who might have the required clearance.
So bringing in their own server was the only expedient (and illegal) way to do what they needed to do.
And as we generally all agree... its coup.
Bluck
The irony in all of this is the US has spent tens and tens of trillions of dollars over the last 50 years "protecting the fearful American People" from all the nasty foreign people out to destroy it and it's "democracy" (total doesn't include the additional trillions wasted on boondoggles like the "War on Terror") and yet, in the space of two short weeks two blokes (with a handful of others) have basically destroyed whatever democracy the US had and will continue to do so.
The mid-terms don't matter cause even if for some reason the Dem's get control of both houses, the damage is done.... there will be nothing left.
Trump, Musk etc are working outside of the US democratic frame work which has no response...just like a deadly virus the body has no immune defense against.
As an outsider married to a US citizen (but residing happily since 2008 in one of those nasty lefty, liberial social democracy countries so hated by MAGA), we sit here and watch as the US experiment crashes down without a shot being fired.
The world will keeping on chugging along without the US and never again will it be trusted by any other nation to act responsibly.
Bluck
Come in packages and I am sure this is the only chip packaging The Unstable Genius is aware of.
Making chips (aka wafers) is one thing but what about the packaging.
So you have two insurmountable issues: building fab plants and building packaging plants.
But we all know he knows more about semi-conductors than anyone else so as many have pointed out all of this onshore capability wont happen overnight (or for years)
And while it cant happen it would be interesting to think that if it did, the EU could prohibit ASML from maintaining the US facilities as a retaliatory move soon after they go online... rendering them dead in the water.
Or given ASML can only make so many systems per year and they are back ordered, the US can wait their turn in the queue. Existing and long standing customers take priority.
I do wish that country blocks (say all South American countries) had adopted an "all for one, one for all" strategy prior to 20 Jan. Its easy for the Bully Arsehole to pick on smaller countries with regard to tariffs but if they worked together and enacted a collective tariff response when an individual country was threatened then the pressure goes back on the Fascist Pig.
Bluck
I think many companies, especially those with a monopoly or major market share don't care anymore about quality.
Consumers are trapped to a high degree now, much more than in the past so they just have to suck it up (crap products, half backed products, crap services, products that become obsolete quickly etc) .
And these companies know it...so lets increase Cxx pay by killing 10,000 employees with AI... the companies end users don't matter any more.
Bluck
the 60's space race with this AI race.
The space race was government driven with national pride at stake so wasn't commercially driven and within the two countries playing the game, there were no competing interests, no splitting of investment money, technology etc. Thus they (the US) reached their goals.
Plus, given the investment needed and the lack of egotistical and narcissistic super billionaires in the 60's only a government had the resources to fund a trip to the Moon.
The AI race has no such unifying features. It's different factions splitting the investments, each with competing computing platforms and end goals.
Thus it's chances of success are reduced.
And I would venture to say that the challenges of putting a person on the Moon in the 60's with the primitive hardware, software and systems they had available is a far more impressive achievement than if/when AI actually becomes generally useful (aside from some niche edge cases)
Bluck
Putting systemd aside, my simple selection criteria for a Linux desktop is if after I remove flatpak, snapd and pulseaudio (and it doesnt install jack instead ***) then it's a candidate. And a recent criteria is it runs under X11.
Lots of desktop's cant survive the removal of pulseaudio so I am currently very happy with Zorin.
My tested backstop once all desktops fail all these steps/criteria is Debian server, Fluxbox and tint2. Or if systemd becomes intolerable, Devuan server, Fluxbox and tint2
Peter
**** sure you can just brute force delete pulseaudio and jack binaries (if jack is installed instead) but to me it a philosophical test of the desktop developers.... can I get a pure ALSA only environment without getting nasty
The other thing is solve the fundamental issue the application will do in a prototype before layering.
Writing a music player... get the basic audio player working at the command line before writing the GUI/database.
A classic example of this in a real world enterprise situation was a MAJOR bank spent 2 years rewriting a mainframe app in Java (with an Oracle backend) only to find that it wouldnt scale and so the application was abandoned.
Not hard to mock up some production like transactions (after doing an initial database schema/data migration from DB2 to Oracle... which was my role ) and seeing if the Java/Oracle interface could sustain the required throughput.
I was called in after they had been doing the Java development for 1.5 years and now needed a production copy of the database for testing. This should have been the first thing done....prove the migration can be done, prove you can do it in the downtime available and provide a real world test bed for developers to use and provide a real world test bed to validate scalability before wasting 2 years of work.
Not related to the question at hand ... or is it? There is more to computing than pure technical skills... basic common sense also is relevant and maybe that is getting shorter in supply.
Do they have a course in common sense at school?
Bluck
The issue with AI is not AI itself (be it good or crap)... its the use cases that our Tech Overlord Betters want to push out to other callous individuals in control:
1- grabbing all our personal data to profile us (yeah we want that)
2- attempting to sell us tat in a more efficient way (yeah we want that)
3- firing workers and replacing them with AI to increase 'C' suite bonuses (yeah we want that)
4- enabling the spread of more crazy untruths to further diminish our collective critical thinking abilities (yeah we want that)
5- placing such functions in the hands of the few so the majority suffer (yeah we want that)
6- Ignoring copyright etc and thus stealing the hard work of humans to enable the enrichment of the few (yeah we want that)
7- ...
Add your own examples as need
Bluck
For a linux distro to qualify for my use cases, I do three simple things:
- remove/delete snap
- remove/delete flatpak
- remove/delete pulseaudio/jack audio
If they are still working after that they get tested.
KDE is now so tied into pulse, removing pulse removes the KDE desktop,... there are others as well. Remove "plank" and the related desktop gets blasted. All very strange.
My daily driver now is Zorin but with the pending apocalypse of desktops not using X11, I am now testing debian server with fluxbox and tint2 for my specialized app stacks. Will still use Zorin after the apocalypse for dev/test but deploy on debian server with fluxbox and tint2.
Peter
I spent 42 years in IT before I retired (prompted in some degree to my dislike for cloud).
The last 25 years of my 42 years was dedicated to moving (as a consultant) large scale customers between differing Unix platform and laterly from Unix to Linux, in the applications and database space.
Now we are talking large customer's "crown jewel" apps/databases and here you hit a huge quandary. Simple example: two "crown jewel" Oracle databases (running on prem) that do two phase commits over dblinks between each other. In the old "on prem" days, you would migrate one database, let it bed in then move the other safe in the knowledge that the two phase commits were across a local LAN.
What do you do for a cloud mig: only move one and now your two phase commits are across a WAN or take the risk and move BOTH mission critical apps/db's to the cloud at the same time?
Extend the analogy and look at a system (say a telco) where you have systems taking raw data acquisitions from switches and then doing some ETL into say the billing systems, the CRM systems and other related databases.
Aint gonna work (a onperm/cloud split) so what do you do in the rush to "save" money by moving to the cloud. Hence my retirement..intractable topologies that some CIO (looking for the next bonus) will force into the cloud... not something I wanted to be involved with.
Bluck
Following on from the comment re 1.475 billion ICE's in the world, the secondary issue (cost being the first) for the owners of say 1 billion of these cars is that the ICE's they have can be fixed, the owners can get parts for decades old cars so they can keep them running and they can do the work themselves or at some cheap local shop
EV's not so much.
Firstly, EV's are very much "software defined" cars so when some computer based hardware or software component fails, the owner is screwed. The cloud based servers go off line...the owner is screwed. Do we think the car companies are going to keep the cloud services up for decades... don't think so.
Secondly, will the owner of a decades old EV be able to get a new battery to keep it on the road.... very much doubt it.
Poorer people (the vast majority of ICE owners) not only need access to cheap second hand cars but also cheap second hand cars that have a good supply of parts and can be fixed at home or by a local shop.
As this isn't (and may never be the case), the dream of a world where most cars are EV's is dead in the water.
Bluck
Being an old Unix head, starting 1981, I well remember the REAL Sequoia Unix system from the mid 80's.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/327010.327218
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~david/papers/ieeecomputer1988_sequoia.pdf
To quote the second article:
"Sequoia has implemented its own proprietary kernel that offers a superset of the functionality of Unix System v"
Obviously being fault tolerant it needed to add stuff to Unix to support this.
Bluck
In fact, for HP and IBM, the cloud eat their lunch in two ways.
Firstly their server divisions lost market share as companies moved from onperm Unix to the cloud.
But also because cloud computing is built on Linux, HP and IBM servers had no role in the cloud expansion so they were hit with a double whammy.
AIX/P-Series was (and still is) the leading Unix offering after HP lost its way with Itanium and Oracle purchased Sun and AIX/P-Serietis (like Z-series) still has a role for those mission critical apps that cant be moved to the cloud/linux but sales will be small and based on upgrade cycles and not organic growth.
Bluck
So I worked there for 15 years (last year was 2019), was brought in as a Lead Consultant to spearhead a small division, grew to 30 consultants worldwide.
The type of work we did (wont detail) was unique in the industry and when you needed us, you really needed us...extremely large companies/govt agencies with mission critical work loads.
Got RA'ed in 2019...my boss didnt even know, wasn't consulted but once you are marked for death, that's it.
The sole criteria for my redundancy (actioned by some faceless bean counter) was that I was old (59) and was paid a good wack. Termination time. Reason for termination confirmed via a finance insider I knew.
Belonging to a disbursed world wide group meant the money trail/income recognition for our work was opaque but if the faceless bean counter had done his job, he might have noticed, for example, that for the last two month project I did, I was billed out at $US 1 million and the customer (a top 3 multi-national insurance company) was only too happy to pay that to get them out of a big hole.
So it wasnt as if I didnt have skills, was useless or not bringing in the dollars.
Fast forward 1 year and all the rest of my group had left of their own volition. If I could be let go then they easily could be so better to leave on their own terms.
IBM closed the division down and doesn't offer that service any more (cause the skills needed didn't exist in India), noting that the work we did was equally as applicable to onperm and cloud... so not a declining legacy service issue.
Summary: Due to a spread sheet jockey using a simple formula of age and salary, IBM lost a unique consulting group that was extremely profitable.
Bluck
I am retired, was a programmer and have spent the last year, on and off hacking the crap out of Kodi (the media player).
Created a clean sheet GUI (45,000 lines of new Kodi GUI code) as well as 25,000 lines of additional C++ code to meet my visual and functional requirements.
The main issues with this is the way Kodi works (via a message bus where multiple programs read/write/execute in response to the same message) and finding which C++ program(s) need to be changed. For example, a recent objectively simple change need 12 programs to be modded with 99% of the coding time being spent on finding which programs needed to change. Doesnt help when there are no code comments.
Now all the examples I see in comments on various forums from currently employed programmers about using LLM's for coding are related to generating simple snippets of code.
There is however, no way (IMHO) that an LLM could do what I have done with my Kodi hack (not saying I am special as other humans could do what I have done).
The point is, programming is hard, especially when modding existing code (such as simple stuff as "what value does this variable actually hold").
I dont see any way, even with a detailed spec, that an LLM can modify AND TEST program changes needed to any sufficiently complex application.
As an aside, I am old enough to have worked when there were no readily available sources of sample code...so you had to sink or swim. I get the sense (rightly of wrongly) that lots of programmers today just steal code off the web and thats what these LLM's do...so nothing gained.
Bluck
When ever the topic of AI comes up, I always consider that the "thing" these expensive, energy intensive LLM's are trying to emulate (our brain), needs the equivalent of 20 watts to run.
When LLM's can run on 20 watts AND do improv comedy then they might actually have something to crow about.
Bluck
I started my programming career in 1977 and retired in 2019.
My comment is not specifically about agile but for old blokes like me, you could have a meaningful career knowing one language (COBOL,C) or maybe two (C then C++) or three (C then C++ then Java)... noting the serial rather than parallel nature of language acquirement.
We did have interlopers like Pascal come along (and then recede) but the "issue" I see today is that languages/frameworks are breeding like rabbits, which fragments the gene pool and forces dev's to have to have wide but not deep knowledge of many languages/frameworks.
Check out a dev job requirements list today and you need to be an expert in 10, 15, 20 languages/frameworks/devops tools
That to me, more than agile ***, is a major part of any issues today... this layering of dev stacks where the dev potentially only has a passing knowledge of many.
I personally moved into many different app types/languages during my career but that was by choice and each self made move meant I could immerse myself in my new "calling" and become competent in the new chosen language/app space.
I would hate to be a dev today, being forced to learn new "stuff" poorly to keep a job/get a new job/stay relevant.
Bluck
*** Although I like to use Fragile and Scum for Agile and Scrum.
Indeed you are a very wise and perceptive person and thanks for defending me in my absence.
I 100% want to go EV but found, at least with NZ power costs (which keep on rising) that changing this early on in my ICE ownership cycle didnt make financial sense.
To give you an idea of the sh*t storm power prices are in NZ, some commercial operators (saw mills, manufactures etc) are closing up shop cause their bulk power prices have gone up 600% (yes six hundred) in four years.
Domestic isnt that bad but its still going up and up despite > 80% of NZ power coming from renewables (mainly hydro and geo).
Bluck
forgot to add... the reason for only 35mpg is cause I live in a very hilly area so fuel efficiency take a hit (as does tyre wear**)... when running on the flat on a highway its 50mpg.
Them there are some very steep hills.
Bluck
** tyre wear (eat a front set each year as it stands) would be accelerated with an EV (due to increased weight) as would reduced range due to hill climbing but couldnt factor that into my cost of ownership calcs.
Did the math on this recently (based on $NZ).
EV car I liked was $70k but had a price dropped to $50k cause the werent selling... so interest rekindled.
With trade in of four year old petrol car with 60k KM on the clock (so average 15k KM per year), I was looking at $35k to go electric (would pay cash)
Crunched the numbers and based on total cost of ownership of both (fuel/leccy costs, maintenance, home charging only on leccy) it would take me 15 years before I would start making money on the EV car.
Which is to say I was saving only $2300 per year running the EV over the petrol car. Petrol car efficiency is 8l/100km (35 mpg, imperial)
So petrol it is for the next 8 years until I come to purchase a new car.
It seems, based on my experience, that changing to an EV early on in a petrol cars ownership cycle makes no sense.
Bluck
What I have never seen mentioned in all the comments is this: If CS have such crappy development/deployment processes how do you (the end user) know that their software actually works against threats?
Do they have a test suite that ensures all known/existing threats are still detected for each deployed change or do they only do a unit test for the latest threat they are adding, assuming that whatever change they are making doesnt cause issues else where?.
That, to me, is the biggest outcome of this: Does their software actually work in 100% of cases.
I worked on a mission critical software product (not in the threat management space) used by extremely large international companies and government depts. world wide as a one man band: design, developed, test, deploy, implement and no matter what change I made, no matter how small, I did a full system test. The product had 12 modules for different source and target end points and a full systems test for any specific module took a week.
Yes, unlike CS, I had the luxury of time (i.e. wasn't driven by the need to do rapid deployments against new threats) which means CS should have extremely robust test suites to validate the code works against all known threats. But do they?
Bluck
So I am a reasonable competent C/C++ programmer, developed large and complex mission critical "close to the box" green field applications, have good work practices etc etc.
Retired early at 59 and thought once I got through a small back log of personal stuff I would contribute to some FOSS projects that tickled my fancy.
Downloaded the code for some of these to look around and basically ZERO inline comments.
This was a total turn off.. code bases of 1 million+ lines of code with no inline comments makes it basically impossible to find your way around and self learn.
Sure if I joined the project they MIGHT have some roadmaps as to what is what but after banging away working at the coal face for 42 years, I dont then want to face the same in a FOSS project.
Sure I expected there would be a learning curve but lack of inline comments says something (a lot) to me about the development ethos of the projects.
Peter
"It's obvious if you think about it. Leave the blue ticks be, and give the people who paid a blue dollar sign."
That would need a new column in a database and new code added to process said new column.
Twitler has fired anyone who could do this so they have to reuse the existing column/code and hence cant distinguish old legacy from new paid.
Bluck
Yes, Zorin out of the box defaults to a windows type layout but you can (as I have) configured it to be menu-less (aside from settings which really arent menus, just categories)
I have my most frequent apps icons at the top and in the left corner you can drill down on the rest, listed in a flat, menu-less alphabetical style.
I have a quite a few less frequently used apps but the left corner menu-less drill down still only covers two pages so a single page down/page up easily navigates you across them and makes them easy to select.
In the right corner I have time/date and the system drop down (network, lock. power off and settings).
No other Linux desktop can be configured this way (I have tried them all) and so, in my opinion, Zorin is a 3rd layout choice as it can be setup with no menus needed.
To me, menus are counter productive and Zorin fits my work style.
Bluck
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