A friend of mine did a MS degree on Social Media, Geography, and GIS in disaster recover. Which required Geography, Programming, Social Media, Sociology, Database, and at least an intuitive understanding of Topology. Go ahead, tell me now Geography isn't STEM.
Posts by EarthDog
451 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2014
Infosec still (mostly) a boys club
Soaring costs, inflation nurturing generation of 'quiet quitters' among under-30s
Tuesday 27th September 2022 19:01 GMT
Not quiet quitting, work to rule
Basically what they are doing is not taking on responsibilities which are not in their employment contract. They contract being the *maximum* the *company* negotiated. they are not shirking duties or quitting, they are in fact meeting their responsibilities. If the company wants more than that they should either pay more or staff up.
They are not slackers or evil. The people who go "above and beyond" are suckers.
Google Maps, search results to point women to actual abortion providers
Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
Mars Express orbiter to get code update after 19 years
Amazon fears it could run out of US warehouse workers by 2024
Tech hiring freeze doesn't mean people won't leave
Foxconn factory fiasco could leave Wisconsinites on the hook for $300m
The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around
Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’
Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests
Oracle really does owe HPE $3b after Supreme Court snub
Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved
Thursday 12th May 2022 22:07 GMT
Re: Arrogance and rude behavior are rampant in just technology circles?
In the shows I have seen Gordon was always kind to armatures. He often encouraged them and took time with them. The people who thought they were hot "stuff" and pretended to know more than they did were the ones who garnered his wrath.
So is it often in the tech world where self promoting charlatans with questionable skills can destroy open source paradigms in a short time. Unless corrected. And they should be run off.
Thursday 12th May 2022 21:47 GMT
High Standards
oft times the person with high standards who has to always "slap the wrist" of sloppy half bright monkeys who don't take standards seriously is branded the jerk, when it is the sloppy people who are the jerks. The sloppy people will create rework, breakable software (or other stuff), difficult maintenece, and basically just an ugly piece of work.
Hooray for the jerks.
Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C
Tuesday 26th April 2022 20:12 GMT
Re: No moving targets
*The thing is, most of the new stuff was added because real people were using crazy workarounds to achieve what the new features add (if it could be done at all).*
That's a clear cut case of using the wrong tool for the job. This is because too many people do not have more than one tool in their tool box.
The pattern I have noticed is
1) Everyone uses programming language pLangX. It's a job requirement. But bloated or ill suited to many tasks.
2) Someone decides to clean up the situation and comes up with pLangX++ which works as intended.
3) Early adopters who understand the intent like it and begin promoting it.
4) As it gains adoption it shows up in job requirements books, training courses etc. begin to appear
5) Schools start teaching and managers hearing success stories begin requireing it.
6) pLangX++ gets pushed into areas it wasn't intended for and so new features are added.
7) eventually it becomes a bloated mess.
8) repeat cycle.
What a bunch of bricks: Crooks knock hole in toyshop wall, flee with €35k Lego haul
Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles
A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal
We asked you how your biz introduces new IT systems – and here are the results
Friday 19th November 2021 21:07 GMT
THis can be dangerous.
From the article: *nearly half (44.6 per cent) of the direction came from the IT world: after all, they’re the ones who know technology best and, more relevantly, they know what tech (and therefore what products) are there to be bought*
Knowing the technology does not grant anyone special knowledge of the business ant The role of tech is to support the business. To do that they must understand it but in my experience companies love silos. Asking techies to understand a business is often much to ask for. The people to ask are the grunts doing the day-to-day work and their immediate supervisors, with some input from upper management for long term direction. But an attitude of "IT knows best" shouldn't be reinforced.
There's something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs
There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression
Monday 15th November 2021 22:07 GMT
Re: Voted with my feet
Most of the jobs I've had revolved around w*king. The very important project that you worked furiously on for 5 weeks and then are told there would be a 180 degree change of direction rendering the last 5 weeks as nothing more than a furious w*king session. Then of course meetings....
Apple is beginning to undo decades of Intel, x86 dominance in PC market
ChaosDB: Infosec bods could pull anyone's plaintext Azure Cosmos DB keys at will from Microsoft admin tools
Keep calm and learn Rust: We'll be seeing a lot more of the language in Linux very soon
Cisco warns 'unintentional debugging credential' left in some network switches can be abused to hijack equipment
Chinese server builder Inspur trains monster text-generating neural network
Thursday 28th October 2021 21:36 GMT
Do they even know what the Turing Test is?
Here is the definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
Excerpt from the wikipedia article * a three-person game called the "imitation game", in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players. *
So no, generating text is not the Turing test. The AI has to be able to hold it's own in a conversation which will then lead a human to infer the correct gender the machine is supposed to be imitating. Or the machine asking questions to humans to infer the humans genders.
First, stunning whistleblower leaks. Now a shareholder lawsuit lands on Zuckerberg's desk
IPSE: More than a third of freelancers have quit contracting since IR35 reforms
Boeing's Starliner capsule corroded due to high humidity levels, NASA explains, and the spaceship won't fly this year
Devuan debuts version 4.0 – as usual without a hint of the hated systemd
Nine floors underground, Oracle's Israel data centre can 'withstand a rocket, a missile or even a car bomb'
Brit builders merchant Travis Perkins opts for Oracle after ERP disaster with Infor
Former SAP leader's lawsuit claims she was canned for pushing corporate diversity
Tuesday 5th October 2021 19:20 GMT
Re: "Nothing to stop them"
There are many things wrong about your comment.
1) You ignore the potential impact of culture. If you are socialized into reading "girlie" things you will. Women who do conform to that standard femininity are often punished for it.
2) In this day of modern equipment there less of a need of muscle mass in construction. But women heavy equipment operators don't seem to be common.
3) You make the assumption that diversity and excellence are at odds with each other. There is no evidence for it. This is a glaring bias.
4) Women forced to take time off is a failure of policy. Bias against people who take time off for family or health reasons is a social problem.
5) IQ tests tend to be biased to upper and upper middle class men as that is who conceived of the concepts in the test and wrote them.
6) Do I need to mention the wage gap? Women are clustered in helping professions which pay less. Meanwhile scams such as investment banking, which produces nothing, are higher paying and male dominated. Preparing the next generation or helping the sick is seen as lesser value.
Anecdote. When I started in the IT and Software at the Uni in the 80's our classes and the first few years after graduation the numbers were close to 50/50 male to female. Something happened to skew the numbers. It wasn't due to lack of ability.
Anecdote: a freind of mine was hired into a company to do GIS development. She had an MS, her name on a couple of papers, wrote several chapters in a text book, and quite frankly was the smartest person in the room. Eventually she was forced into field support and then quit due to being frozen out and given only grunt work to do. I doubt it was due to ability.
Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC
Monday 4th October 2021 15:19 GMT
So basically the conversation should go like this:
You: we need hardware and software for a mission critical reasons.
Manager: oh, we don't have a budget for that.
You: I can lash together something from my personal kit.
Manager: Great!
You: Since it is my kit I'll have to have you sign a contract where you indemnify me and hold me blameless and a monthly lease of BIGNUM money.
Manager: How much money do you need in that budget?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
