Posts by Glen Murie

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

Stupidity and Groupthink

This feels like a team of marketing tools making a godawful stupid mistake in the throes of groupthink, and deep inside what sounds like a corporate culture of 'keep your head down and never question management.'

Which as a potential customer says to me: "Never give these bozos your business. They are clueless nimrods who think they're clever when they're actually stupid." Sure they're getting publicity, but it's the kind of publicity that will drive away a lot of customers.

They had to get the lampshade hats made by a crafts-person or costumer, and rent/buy the dresses, and hire the models and then blithely blunder through (I assume) the shocked and confused response to the idea by the promotional models they hired. Or maybe they wanted branded cocktail dresses, didn't give themselves enough time, and thought the lampshades were a smart workaround for their bad planning.

I'm sure the women in the lampshades were quite amused when they got the job. Go to a motor vehicle show of any flavor and you'll see much worse, so if these women have done more than a dozen conferences they've already seen much worse. From a brief troll through the news sites it seems booth babes (promotional models) are much less common than just five years ago. Good riddance.

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

Re: Outlook/Exchange ?

Likewise, and it's calendar support for Gcal is just fine.

Outlook doesn't play well with Google Enterprise, and Exchange doesn't play well with anything non-Microsoft.

It's as if these are huge monopolistic corporations trying to keep a lock on their customer's data and services instead of providing a functional product....

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: WordStar

I would have DREAMED of having a floppy disk! In my day we had to exchange cassette tapes, and adjust the tension because each of our tape players was slightly different from the other!

Sam Altman sues builder over $27M flooded, sewage-hit 'lemon' of a mega-mansion

I love the irony of Altman getting screwed over by the consequences of deregulation and weak government. If the city and state departments responsible for regulation and oversight of projects like that were well run and well funded and given some real teeth to punish miscreants Altman would have been a lot less likely to have landed in that position.

Re: The Midwest

Comparing the Midwestern United States to San Francisco is like comparing Western Europe to London. There's a vast difference in politics and culture from state to state and city to city.

Living in Madison, WI is a very different experience from living in Columbus, OH for example.

I spent a week living in SF on a work visit, and it was kind of a 'meh' experience. Golden Gate Park and museums were good, but lots of cities have good museums and parks. There are unique sights like Alcatraz, but once you've seen them once there's little point in going back.

What boggled my mind was how bad the traffic was in San Francisco. I went in expecting to be able to use my feet and transit and an e-bike to get around, and was bitterly disappointed.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Just maybe?

Managers are in something of a bind there.

If they fuck off and stay out of the hair of people who don't need managing it's hard for them to justify their inflated salary.

Or they don't fuck off and do actual work which is HARD (because they'd have to do BA/PM or hands on work) and RISKY (because they'll be a threat to other lazier managers)

I've seen so many good managers get laid off like that.

When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?

Re: Is any of that code copyrightable?

And any of us who've been doing this for more than a few years have seen the results of an overconfident amateur (and BEEN that overconfident amateur) mashing together boilderplate and copy-pastes from various blogs and forums until something does what it's supposed to. Mostly.

Then the business case changes and they modify the code with thoughtless and expeident copy-pasting.

And seven years later management is asking why the system is crashing constantly, consuming three times more user licenses than the number of people using the system, and the consultant brought in to fix the mess is bleeding from their eyes and screaming.

Tesla nearing shareholder vote to grant Musk $46B

Re: We'll always be together in Elon's electric dreams

Executive pay tells you how effective Corporate Governance is in general.

Musk is hardly alone in being awarded gigantic pay packages while their decisions drive the company into the ground.

Executive boards are often an old boys network of upper crust types scratching each other's backs.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90209537/the-web-of-board-members-that-link-american-corporations-mapped

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

Re: Colour wheel?

I can see a group of clever people tailgating each other in, or copying each other's badges and badging each other in. To the system you look like you're in the office three or four times more than you actually are. And since these policies are usually inflicted on peons only, the managers won't know because they'll be WFH all the time. Just like so many of them did pre-pandemic.

I can also see Dell getting their asses sued off applying this policy to a disabled person who has to work from home, and has specific acommodations set aside for them in their employment contract.

Big brains divided over training AI with more AI: Is model collapse inevitable?

And power requirements. Don't forget the massive amounts of power required.

Moore's Law only says the processors get faster, not cooler and more energy efficient.

Tech titans assemble to decide which jobs AI should cut first

Re: Retraining?

You had the training and life experience to notice the 'albeit lacking in several areas' whereas these goons want to replace people like us with an underpaid and poorly trained young person who won't have the experience or knowledge to notice when the algorithm is skipping steps or hallucinating.

AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of surveyed executives

Re: Gainfully employed writing Cobol

Considering that CICS was released in the sixties there's a good chance that SOMEONE hallucinated it! :D

User rats out IT team for playing games at work, gets them all fired

I saw something similar

A long time ago I was involved in a large scale project where I and a number of contractors were assigned to do the grunt work of training users, swapping boxes, and occasionally running scripts. Because we were all giant nerds we looked at the scripts, and fixed them when they misbehaved.

The scripts were in plain text, and ran under an account username: george and password: jungle.

The account had full admin rights, so we promptly went about giving our crippled network accounts full admin rights so we could do our damned jobs. This in turn brought us to think: "This company contracting us has an in house security team with soundproofed offices, safes, and locked doors to which that team has the only keys. What the hell are these idiots doing that they haven't caught on to us yet?"

So the other members of my team (more technically competent than I) hacked into the PCs of the security team and found Quake and Doom. We never did rat them out, since our own misdeeds would have been uncovered. For all I know, they're still playing LAN games and neglecting their jobs two decades later.

IT recruiters warn over migration caps

So Here's a Question

How many of us have been writing and calling to our elected representatives about this? For that matter, how many of us have been getting together to protest? If a hundred unemployed geeks showed up with signs outside firm X noted for off-shoring every week, and got the media on the story, wouldn't that embarrass them into hiring local talent?

I know I never have, nor has any other IT worker I've known, that's been screwed by outsourcing and the many MANY unethical and cruel tricks that have been played on us by employers.

Do we have anything like a professional association or *GASP* trade union that isn't an obvious mouthpiece for large software companies? No, we do not.

The sad reality is that we're all too defeatist and apathetic to do so, and will be until the pressure on our finances as a group rises to the point where we've found ourselves painted into a corner.

There's one major difference

The engineering trades are highly regulated, and there are many professional associations that support and oversee the engineering fields. It's understandable, and a fine thing, because if one of you guys f--- up a bridge or a piece of machinery people will die.

For the most part, our field is not so well regulated, and our professional associations are generally mouthpieces for the big software companies like Microsoft. Unlike engineering, our field is young. When comparing engineers to IT workers you're comparing apples and oranges.

What happens with H1-Bs (the American equivalent of this situation) is that there are diploma mills in places like India that churn out people that can just about manage cut-and-paste programming. They can make the equivalent of a bridge made out of popsicle sticks and rubber bands and management won't care. It will crash, it won't be well documented (or documented at all) and the more qualified American workers end up collecting food stamps or working at grocery stores.

Also, beware of slagging people for spelling mistakes, because you look like an idiot when you misspell you're as your.