
Re: What am I missing here?
"If you use a third party module you download it, put it under your source code control, and be prepared to maintain it yourself."
Or, just fork it.
10507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
"pulls the same stunt"
exactly - age discrimination, ESPECIALLY in a society whose average age is significantly increasing, is a *MAJOR* future problem.
The only reason I can think of that might motivate people into "getting rid of" older people is the desire to hire 'cheaper' starving grads with way less experience. But you get what you pay for when you do that.
Seriously, I plan on working until I'm dead. If being over 'nn' years old screws your employment opportunity, something's wrong. I would think that capability would outweigh any other factor, in a SANE world anyway, and knowing which button to press often saves MANY hours of experimenting to find a solution (particularly one that's typically obvious to an experienced, OLDSTER employee).
damn younguns, OFF MY LAWN!
"equipment not having the approved NSA backdoor"
NO, no, no. Gummint doesn't WANT any back doors! Not for THEIR stuff, anyway. [what the REST of us end up with, that's completely different].
What it _REALLY_ is: a 'Not Invented Here' thing. At least, for equipment used in secure systems.
That way U.S. laws can apply, and prevent manufacturers from sneaking in any kind of spying (or back doors) that create security problems. There could be the threat of jail time and/or YUGE fines for breaking security relied on by gummint systems "by design".
Netgear has its OWN problems, *ARROGANCE* being one of them. They used to claim that their multi-antenna single-radio 802.11g solution from ~2005 was 'MIMO'. [what a joke!]
/me points out that MIMO requires multiple radios and multipath (and the '802.11N' spec).
I wouldn't recommend any NETGEAR solution for gummints, either. Yeah, they'd probably go with Cisco...
"As most Core and Xeon processors are in sockets, it would be possible to do a one-for-one replacement"
last I checked, an older (replacement) 'Core Quad' costs more than Intel's faster/better "latest" quad-core CPU. Economy of scale and all of that.
swapping out the motherboard, RAM, and CPU together might actually cost less.
"from a high of nearly $20,000 in mid-December to under $7,000 in early February"
this sounds more like a ponzi scheme than investment, WORSE than commodity margin trading [how George Soros earned most of HIS money as I recall].
Here's why: Suppose "Old George" decides he wants to break the bank on Bitcoin the way he did on the GBP a few years back. So he slowly buys up Bitcoin when it's not doing much, and encourages others to do so [through perhaps nefarious means, advertising, whatever] until the price is driven artificially up. THEN, he decides to SELL OFF his assets, driving the price DOWN. He makes a bit of money. The price is driven SO LOW it's way below what he paid for the bitcoin from before. And his piece of the pie was SO LARGE, it makes a YUGE difference in the market price.
THEN, he waits a bit for things to calm down, and starts buying again. The price goes back up, he's got the same number of bitcoins as before, but he MADE A BOATLOAD OF CASH by manipulating the market.
Does this look ANYTHING like what has happened recently, not just with Bitcoin, but in the U.S. Stock Exchange?
These methods are well-known. Yet, investors STILL get manipulated into behaving like cattle. Go fig.
post edit: I just thought of this description: Sell HIGH, buy LOW.
A while ago I saw what appeared to be a 'google earth' drone taking photos of the neighborhood. It made one HELL of a noise doing it, like a swarm of angry giant wasps or something similar.
Flying a few hundred feet in the air, it was noisy enough that I went outside to see what the hell was making all of that noise, looked up, and saw it hovering in one spot for a bit, then move a couple o' hundred feet, then hover for a bit more, etc.. yes, when it was near my house, I gave it the finger. Hopefully showed up in the google earth photo, ha ha ha.
"I'm assuming the Resume Assistant is going to genericize your resume to make it as machine-readable as possible."
Doubtful. It's most likely going to focus on the kinds of things you do NOT want highlighted in your resume like favoring education over actual experience, or work history over your demonstrable skill set. it's the kind of things that H.R. weenies focus on, which is NOT the kinds of things that IT managers focus on.
How "they" read resumes:
H.R. weenie - it has the right key words and tricky phrases in the right order where I don't have to search for them, with education prominently placed at the top of the list so we can filter on it
IT Manager - this guy knows how to code, understands what a network is, has xx years of experience doing things similar to what we want, and isn't just some new graduate that specialized in "academia" instead of "getting work done on time and under budget"
It's an ongoing problem to find a creative way of getting the hiring manager to look at your resume instead of the typical clueless H.R. weenie that thinks 'networking' is using people you know to get a job. Of course that last part helps, too, but isn't what the job requirements in IT meant...
And it's a fair bet that Microshaft's HR department isn't much better than any OTHER megacorp when it comes to filtering resumes for hiring managers...
toxic soil? well... not exactly.
I found THIS article which says that Mars' soil contains perchlorates.
FYI - perchlorates can be 'burned' to release OXYGEN. Mixed with water, they'd react with other things in the soil, kind of like bleach. The ultimate result would be "oxidized things" and some kind of chloride salt. Keep in mind Earth's oceans are filled with salt, too.
So it looks like a lack of water for an unspecified LONG period of time has resulted in some nasty salt compounds in the soil. No surprise.
As for me, I'm rather happy that it was PERCHLORATE discovered in the soil. Wash it really well, distill the water back out, and the result can be "reacted with something" to release OXYGEN. Sounds like a WIN to me!
"The boffins paint a nasty picture and just killed a thousand dreams"
well, there's still the possibility of terraforming, but that would take a LOT of effort with tech we don't have yet.
The best theories I've heard suggest that Mars lost its magnetic field because of a mostly-solid core. If the core were liquid, mars would have 'van allen' belts too, and its atmosphere would (mostly) still be there.
Without volcanos you don't replenish your atmosphere. Mars doesn't appear to have active volcanos in any significant amount, not like Earth.
So: to "fix" Mars, you need to melt its core. How to do that? Oh, I dunno, maybe a few hundred ATOMIC BOMBS or something like that. It is, after all, a planet, and melting its core would require quite a bit of energy.
Mars has a LOT of evidence of flowing water and thicker atmosphere at some point in its history. Nowadays, it's almost a vacuum as far as atmospheric pressure goes. You'd need some pretty strong pumps to suck that in and make it 15psi for human aspiration (assuming the O2 levels were correct). Pure O2 would have to be at least 3psi, just sayin'.
Anyway, the 'past life on Mars' stuff has mostly hinged on the idea that at one time in its history Mars was a LOT more Earth-like, and I tend to believe that the science supports this.
As for terraforming, you'd have to fix the core first. THEN, "borrow" gasses from someplace, and transport it to Mars, plant some, uh, plants, get some algae to grow in bodies of water, and there ya go.
""developers" are expect to be "full stack" - back-end, front-end, this JS framework, that ORM, these server architectures, those cloud infrastructures, agile methodology, continuous integration and deployment"
well... ONE aspect of software development is "that".
There are OTHER areas, however, that show a LOT more promise. And from what I can tell, there are a LOT more of THESE:
* microcontrollers and embedded - this is where I decided I should focus most of my attention. it's working.
* 'traditional' GUI applications - yes we still have them, and a lot of them need maintenance
* Mobile - a lot of noise here, but there are still some good opportunities. A "mobile app" that goes with an enterprise solution, for example, is a nice add-on for the enterprise system, and an opportunity for devs willing to learn how to code for that mobile platform. The Android Dev environment is free...
* new product development - a 'jack of all trades' might do well in this environment. You wear a LOT of hats.
Doing IT slave-labor for a large mega-corp is NOT the only job out there. MOST jobs are created by small businesses, in need of a 'jack of all trades'. Getting short-term gigs through a labor-pimp (aka contracting agency) is a good start for this kind of thing, and PROBABLY earns you more money and gives you more [unscheduled, though] free time than a traditional 9-5 wage-slave job would.
And 'Agile' can go PACK SAND.
Stress and deadlines: These are the realities of the business world. Young-uns need to adapt or they'll be 'Natural Selected' out of the work force, ya know?
It means you "code for the deadline". It means you ONLY work on those features that are necessary, and get them 100% right, by the deadline. Hit the 'quicky' stuff first. Do what makes it look like you're accomplishing something as soon as you can. THEN you can negotiate with the people who underplanned the project and say "look we've got this much done now, but we need more time to do the bells/whistles".
This has been going on in the engineering world for, like, FOREVAR. It's not a snowflake-friendly "safe place". It's a cutthroat profit-motivated world of competing interests, and NOT meeting the deadline might be the same thing as capitulating to your competition...
And of course there are budgets, sales force overpromising things, managers squeezing the timelines too close, and so on. And at the mid-level you sometimes have to "manage the managers" a bit...
"The day they said that developers got shoved into the back seat..."
not quite so fast. Windows development was well supported until Ballmer took the helm in the early noughties.
It was the ".Net Initiative" where everything started to go horribly wrong. It's when Micro-shaft decided to DRIVE everything THEIR way [not lead, DRIVE, like cattle].
Prior to this point we had:
* DevStudio '98 with its keyboard-friendly resource/dialog editor
* LOTS of 'backward compatibility' via shippable components, so that the 'latest thing' could be installed onto an older version of Windows [with some limits, obviously].
* MSDN docs could be loaded onto your computer or private LAN, avoiding intarweb performance problems
* Windows beta programs in which Microsoft actually WORKED WITH YOU for hardware and software compatibility.
Since then, we have:
* DevStudio that's 2D flat/ugly and _STILL_ requires too many 'mousie-clickie' gyrations to do just about ANYTHING in the dialog/resource editing department, and has a somewhat clunky UI. It gets in the way too much, supposedly while trying to "help".
* MSDN docs that can no longer be loaded on the local computer. It's *Cloudy*. Oooohhh!
* An Operating System that FORCES YOU to update it, spies on you, and shoves ads in your face by default, and ALSO tries to strong-arm you into using a "cloudy" login.
* 3 major paradigm shifts since then: The '.Net runtime' with C-pound, 'The Metro', and UWP. Not to mention Silverlight or a couple of other 'flash in the pan' fads that went nowhere and were abandoned. And rumor has it, they want to ABANDON THE WIN32 API by 2022...
* A toll-booth to anyone who wants to support their devices (or write software-only device drivers) on Windows [starting with Vista] - the certificate requirement
* A schizophrenic attempt to embrace/extend/extinguish Linux that doesn't really implement Linux
* A windows 10 beta in which ONLY "the fanbois" were "listened" to by Microsoft (and, towards the end, opposition was SILENCED)
HAL is to IBM as VMS is to WNT
One of the key engineers for VMS was a major architect of NT 3.0 [but I think he was a kernel guy, no so much on the userland/shell end]
I guess someone already mentioned Dave Cutler - assuming it's the same guy I'm thinking of [can't remember his name]. I remember him being mentioned at a dev conference for the win '95 beta, so that would have been around December of 1993
"Instead, we have to resort to pastebin.com."
!!!
reminds me of something that happened at a microsoft developer conference back in the 90's.
MS put a bunch of computers all over the halls, with NT 4 on them. I noticed that most of the command line stuff (including CMD) were disabled. But there was some demo software available and I wanted to mess with the sample code (some HTML pages) when I got home [the conference was in my home town]. So I ran FTP from the start menu, and FTP'd a couple of files to a web server. That is when I discovered that the '!' command in Microsoft's console mode FTP client got you a shell. I went into it, snickered, then exited. I'm not sure if I was "seen" or not, but it stopped working by the next day...
yeah, someone blocked copy/pasta to the host via the clipboard in the RDP client. Let's just use a pastebin instead!
" Every one of those Win7 machines is a sale they haven't made."
Wait until they figure out that Micro-shaft (via Win-10-nic) is the one killing their sales figures...
it was obvious when win 7 machines sat next to win 8 machines in stores, and the win 7 machines outsold the win 8 machines by (as I recall) better than 2:1.
But you can't bitch-slap Micro-shaft with "obvious" and get them to accept it. They're too busy being arrogant and telling the customers what they're gonna accept. And self-shooting their own feet.
"If MS had actually asked enterprises what they wanted"
If MS had actually asked *EVERYONE* what they wanted (that's not a 4-incher, aka someone who sees the world through a 4 inch screen) we'd have had Win 7 v2. WIndows 7 was the _LAST_ time Micro-shaft listened to customers and responded appropriately.
But Micro-shaft is currently in self-shoot-in-foot mode, and won't listen to customers any more. Expect more of same, subscription level, and [from what I heard 3rd hand] ABANDONMENT of the WIN32 API by 2022.
"Developers Developers Developers Developers" - whatever happened to THAT?
"Windows 10 'Bog Standard' regularly loses sound playback and/or recording ability, as a result of a 'background' driver update"
This makes it NOT a candidate for doing things with media production software like Cakewalk (also making a compelling case for getting a Mac for that kind of stuff).
/me points out that while doing music-production-related things on XP or 7, I would always make sure that windows update was tuned off. Of course _NOW_ it's ALWAYS off, but that's for different reasons...
" they would have had a much more compelling product"
it's a fair bet that Micro-shaft *NEVER* wanted to give you the features you highlighted in your post, even for the "you paid through the nose for it" Enterprise aka 'executive' aka 'First class seating' version.
In other words, paying extra to NOT be tracked/advertised-to/force-upgraded
OK so the Enterprise LTSB version has lipstick on the OINKY end, then. And maybe a string of pearls to go with it. But it's still A PIG. Oink. And it has the 2D FLATSO interface, and "The Metro"-ness, and UWP-ness. Right?
well, I just recently had my phone line repaired. It had a broken wire. sounded like 100 cats scratching on a door. Took 3 weeks since there have been fires, mudslides, and heavy rains somewhat recently. The tech was friendly enough, and got it done in a couple of hours. but yeah, 3 weeks? And my phone line is the "bad luck line" at the very end of the loop. My neighbor's phone line goes "the other way" to the phone company building. But I think a big part of the problem is that AT&T can't really replace the lines. they're scheduled to be placed underground. Thing is, they have to do a 'poor neighborhood' for every 'well to do neighborhood' they do, because, governmentium. There's been a budget for putting the lines underground for DECADES. And yet, it's only a fraction complete. yeah, GUMMINT gumming things up.
Not all AT&T's fault, at any rate. [but we all hate the utility companies, regardless]
during that time period, my AT&T cell phone and 2nd land line worked just fine.
"Mainly due to the elimination of the personal exemptions on taxable income ($4K per person)"
FUD. the personal deduction was INCREASED. If your taxes went up, you must've been purchasing things that the rest of us were effectively paying for. Well, I guess YOU can pay for it yourself, now.
I'd prefer a 100% FLAT tax, with a per-person deduction that is teh same for everybody. NO deductions, NO loopholes, NO different rates for married/single. FLAT. That's actually FAIR. And with that kind of system (see what Forbes wanted to do a few years ago) the lowest income earners would pay ZERO.
Anyway, being a believer in supply-side economics, just like JFK, Reagan, and now Trump, I would expect to see gummint revenues INCREASE, and then we'd be able to pay off Obaka's $9 trillion or so of accumulated extra DEBT.
/me recognizes that you have to get legislation passed by Con-Grab, and it's not always easy to get it all right in the first phase. So what we have NOW is a compromise of what could actually get through Con-Grab.
if I had the time to devote to it I'd start on the guitar part right away, and add the 5 or 6 Freddy-like vocal tracks [I think Freddy used to do all of the harmonies himself]. Interesting thing I've discovered, Freddy's overbite was a key factor in his vocal sound. I've actually tried using an ace bandage around my lower jaw, to temporarily re-create the overbite, so I can do a good Freddy impersonation. it sorta works... but is painful.
(no, seriously, I _DID_ try that, with only limited success, and I'll never try it again).
"I have been flash free for about a year now"
HTML5 has been around way longer, and I set "the default" in my browsers for it because I _had_ to. Flash plugins on FreeBSD have always been flaky and when some changes made GNASH stop working, and GNASH development was basically abandoned, I gave Flash the big middle finger and now disable it, everywhere. It's been several years, now... really since HTML5 was on Youtube.
[a 2015 article says that youtube "now streams HTML5 by default" and that youtube had support for HTML5 back in 2010 - that would be about right, yeah]
"The mind boggles what Flash should be doing preinstalled on a server in the first place."
This entire situation boggles the mind!
Keep in mind that in S. Korea, they used to require ActiveX to do ANY kind of online banking. This is partially the fault of the USA, since prior to the late 90's, encryption technology stronger than 60-bit DES couldn't be exported. in the mean time, S. Korea developed its OWN system for banking, USING! ActiveX!! Yes, it's way MORE insecure than Flash.
And so I have to wonder whether or not, in 2018, banking transactions are STILL using something *like* ActiveX, but via Flash instead... and is THAT the target of the Nork cracking activity??
I'm being lazy and not googling for all of this, so my apologies ahead of time if I got any of these details wrong. Old brain cells sometimes have parity errors.