You guys are slipping and got scooped this morning. I usually hear about these things on the local news-traffic-n-weather radio station 2-3 days after I read about it on Slashdot. This story must've languished in the queue for a long time.
``We're being awfully slow about teaching people to adopt passphrases''
Maybe because there's so many websites out there that still limit your password/passphrase to a fairly short maximum number of characters. If I wanted to use something like `correcthorsebatterystaple' I'm usually not allowed to. Especially when using commercial sites, you are, all too often, limited you to a short -- and often numeric-only -- password (PIN, actually).
... in alkaline batteries as well. I can't count the number of devices -- electronics remotes, label makers, etc. -- that I've had damaged or destroyed by leaking alkaline batteries (I'm talking about you Duracell). While they don't explode and force planes to make emergency landings or anything like that but, if you can't take the device apart and clean it out with baking soda, vinegar, and an old toothbrush, they can still kill whatever they're installed in.
``wingnuts running the show in both parties because reasonable people won't speak up.''
I think that the reasonable people do speak up. The trouble is that the press doesn't cover their input to the discussions. We end up only hearing from the extremist crazies because that's what the press thinks will attack more ears and eyeballs and sell more advertising.
``The synergies between storage and security never really emerged, in part because in many firms, particularly large enterprises, they are managed by different internal teams.''
How could this have possibly been a surprise to the people responsible for pulling off the merger? How large and thick the blinders must have been for this to not be recognized until after all the money had been spent during the acquisition and the obligatory layoffs of the redundant took place?
``... his Red Hat ties mean we're stuck cleaning up his messes, and this VT replacement will be yet another mess for the first two years.''
That makes a good argument for adopting a distribution that has a history of supporting older versions for a couple of years after release. Once systemd consoles make it into major distributions and screw up for a year or two before they're fixed, you can continue to use your pre-systemd consoles.
I like how they're calling this an experimental feature. Hasn't pretty much everything that LP has managed to get into mainstream distribution releases (most infamously PulseAudio) been pushed out to production while it was still experimental?
If it means anything, a couple of years ago, doing a search on the internet for "R" was almost useless. Now entering just ``R'' into a Google search brings back , as a suggested search string, ``r programming language''. And as the first entry in that list. Seems to me that means it's not exactly ``unpopular'' when Google is suggesting it in the list of suggested searches. Of course, it could be that this article is the reason for ``r programming language'' percolating up in the list of suggestions.
``R is something used by statisticians and scientists; if you get hired solely as a programmer (rather than a scientist/analyst) to do R programming, your job is likely to clean up other people's messy R code. Can you make money with any of those languages? Sure, but the job may not be quite what you expect or what you are used to.''
While I've found R to be useful for analyzing/plotting/etc. system performance data I haven't seen any actual job listings in the past couple of years that required `R' experience that were not actually looking for someone with a background in biostatistics. I.e., they weren't programming jobs but for folks with backgrounds in medical/genetic research who would be using R at those jobs. I can see where R would be useful for working with financial data . Wonder if Wall Street might be a good place for someone with R experience to find work?
``so we all don't have to keep half-a-dozen different versions of it lying around''
Sounds like my experience having to keep 4-5 Java runtime environments on UNIX systems to support older code that nobody had the time to rewrite to be compatible with the runtime du jour. Figuring out how to keep those old runtimes up to date every time some bozos (*cough* politicians *cough*) decided to monkey around with daylight savings time was, oh, so much fun.
Seriously... is this what some people believe is holding back wider Linux adoption? There's already more than enough FUD in the press and on the web in articles about Linux providing too many choices now without adding a server and desktop edition for the naysayers to complain about.
Autoplay, shmautoplay... I'd be thrilled to figure out how to access/. without the auto-refresh crap. I am fine -- more than fine, in fact -- clicking on the page refresh icon myself thank you very much.
Re:You are of no value to the company, you're a to
on
IT Job Hiring Slumps
·
· Score: 2
The GP poster was probably not being overpaid. It's just that in the current market and the high applicant/open-positions ratio, employers can low-ball on salary and desperate, unemployed IT folks will accept any offer.
I have some cordless phones that have served our household well for a number of years. The original batteries lasted a couple of years before they wouldn't hold much of a charge. I was able to work via the cordless phone via the speakerphone for over an hour before the batteries gave out. Now, a couple of replacement batteries later, I consider it a good day if I can stay on a phone call for, say, 20 minutes and that's using a battery that's only a couple of months old. It almost makes me wonder if they're not selling used batteries. With the replacement batteries costing $15+, it's not likely that we're going to do it any more. The missus is the last major user of the cordless phones and she's switching to mobile next month. The crappy battery life is one of the reasons she's switching.
I have worries that I'll run into the same battery rip-off with my laptop. And those batteries run upwards of $100. Given the track record of the supposedly equivalent batteries we've been finding for our phones, I'll probably go with an original manufacturer battery for the laptop.That's probably no guarantee but I'm guessing they won't be as bad as the third-party batteries.
... but I have more trouble
reading text that is squished
into the tiny window of
an e-reader. Having to manually
scroll interrupts my reading
and I tire of the experience
quickly. Maybe that has
something to do with
their reduced comprehension.
My favorite commercial software error message fiasco was when I was asked to figure out where a cryptic error message was coming from. The message had no prefix telling which component of the software package was issuing the message. The message did not appear in the appendix where error messages were listed. When I grepped for the error message in the application's "bin" directory it turned out that all the binaries contained the error message; even utility programs that had nothing to do with the operation that was generating the error. It turned out that all of the executables contained all of the potential error messages that might be issued by any of the executables. (An insane use of an "#include" directive or something similar.) So much for the high quality of commercial software and documentation.
The best -- and last -- commercial software that I think had really thorough documentation was back in my IBM mainframe/mini and DEC mini days. You really couldn't fault the documentation that came with those systems at all. Except, maybe, the quantity of it; some serious shelf space was required.
``It's apparently far cheaper to just muddle along with a problem for years and years and years. Or at least until the company tanks.''
Or the people who constantly point out the problem leave the company in frustration. No more complaints... no more problem. It'll be a while before the replacement hires (if there actually are any) re-discover the problem and begin complaining about it.
I would welcome with open arms and tears of joy a Firefox release that could survive a day -- heck, even half a day -- without crashing. It's such a joy to come back from grabbing a cub of coffee or lunch to find that I have to restart effin' Firefox and reload all my tabs again.
``Currently, the office is being managed by former Googler Michelle Lee, who was appointed deputy director in December. Earlier this month, Republican Senators led by Orrin Hatch (R-UT) sent a letter to President Obama that praised Lee but that also described the current UPSTO management structure as `unfair, untenable and unacceptable for our country's intellectual property agency.' ''
Knowing the business-ass-kissing^W^Wfriendly nature of your typical Republican Senator, I think the way to read that last bit is that the Republicans were unhappy that any restrictions are still in place on patentability and that they'd like the PTO to do nothing more than rubber stamp their campaign fund benefactors' patent applications and the quicker the better.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys are slipping and got scooped this morning. I usually hear about these things on the local news-traffic-n-weather radio station 2-3 days after I read about it on Slashdot. This story must've languished in the queue for a long time.
I cannot recall a single vulnerability assessment meeting at work where an Adobe product didn't come up.
``We're being awfully slow about teaching people to adopt passphrases''
Maybe because there's so many websites out there that still limit your password/passphrase to a fairly short maximum number of characters. If I wanted to use something like `correcthorsebatterystaple' I'm usually not allowed to. Especially when using commercial sites, you are, all too often, limited you to a short -- and often numeric-only -- password (PIN, actually).
... in alkaline batteries as well. I can't count the number of devices -- electronics remotes, label makers, etc. -- that I've had damaged or destroyed by leaking alkaline batteries (I'm talking about you Duracell). While they don't explode and force planes to make emergency landings or anything like that but, if you can't take the device apart and clean it out with baking soda, vinegar, and an old toothbrush, they can still kill whatever they're installed in.
I think that the reasonable people do speak up. The trouble is that the press doesn't cover their input to the discussions. We end up only hearing from the extremist crazies because that's what the press thinks will attack more ears and eyeballs and sell more advertising.
How could this have possibly been a surprise to the people responsible for pulling off the merger? How large and thick the blinders must have been for this to not be recognized until after all the money had been spent during the acquisition and the obligatory layoffs of the redundant took place?
That makes a good argument for adopting a distribution that has a history of supporting older versions for a couple of years after release. Once systemd consoles make it into major distributions and screw up for a year or two before they're fixed, you can continue to use your pre-systemd consoles.
I like how they're calling this an experimental feature. Hasn't pretty much everything that LP has managed to get into mainstream distribution releases (most infamously PulseAudio) been pushed out to production while it was still experimental?
That's the law in Illinois, too.
I see that, too, and I think in many cases it's drivers trying to stay out of the right lane that's been beat up by overweight trucks.
I, too, found it curious to call R ``unpopular''.
If it means anything, a couple of years ago, doing a search on the internet for "R" was almost useless. Now entering just ``R'' into a Google search brings back , as a suggested search string, ``r programming language''. And as the first entry in that list. Seems to me that means it's not exactly ``unpopular'' when Google is suggesting it in the list of suggested searches. Of course, it could be that this article is the reason for ``r programming language'' percolating up in the list of suggestions.
``R is something used by statisticians and scientists; if you get hired solely as a programmer (rather than a scientist/analyst) to do R programming, your job is likely to clean up other people's messy R code. Can you make money with any of those languages? Sure, but the job may not be quite what you expect or what you are used to.''
While I've found R to be useful for analyzing/plotting/etc. system performance data I haven't seen any actual job listings in the past couple of years that required `R' experience that were not actually looking for someone with a background in biostatistics. I.e., they weren't programming jobs but for folks with backgrounds in medical/genetic research who would be using R at those jobs. I can see where R would be useful for working with financial data . Wonder if Wall Street might be a good place for someone with R experience to find work?
Sounds like my experience having to keep 4-5 Java runtime environments on UNIX systems to support older code that nobody had the time to rewrite to be compatible with the runtime du jour. Figuring out how to keep those old runtimes up to date every time some bozos (*cough* politicians *cough*) decided to monkey around with daylight savings time was, oh, so much fun.
... a `Professional' and `Home' edition as well?
Seriously... is this what some people believe is holding back wider Linux adoption? There's already more than enough FUD in the press and on the web in articles about Linux providing too many choices now without adding a server and desktop edition for the naysayers to complain about.
Autoplay, shmautoplay... I'd be thrilled to figure out how to access /. without the auto-refresh crap. I am fine -- more than fine, in fact -- clicking on the page refresh icon myself thank you very much.
The GP poster was probably not being overpaid. It's just that in the current market and the high applicant/open-positions ratio, employers can low-ball on salary and desperate, unemployed IT folks will accept any offer.
Hopefully, you meant that the employers weren't looking at GPAs and not that the people who weren't learning the material were still getting As.
But still only offering what, in other times, would have been considered an entry-level salary.
I have some cordless phones that have served our household well for a number of years. The original batteries lasted a couple of years before they wouldn't hold much of a charge. I was able to work via the cordless phone via the speakerphone for over an hour before the batteries gave out. Now, a couple of replacement batteries later, I consider it a good day if I can stay on a phone call for, say, 20 minutes and that's using a battery that's only a couple of months old. It almost makes me wonder if they're not selling used batteries. With the replacement batteries costing $15+, it's not likely that we're going to do it any more. The missus is the last major user of the cordless phones and she's switching to mobile next month. The crappy battery life is one of the reasons she's switching.
I have worries that I'll run into the same battery rip-off with my laptop. And those batteries run upwards of $100. Given the track record of the supposedly equivalent batteries we've been finding for our phones, I'll probably go with an original manufacturer battery for the laptop.That's probably no guarantee but I'm guessing they won't be as bad as the third-party batteries.
... but I have more trouble
reading text that is squished
into the tiny window of
an e-reader. Having to manually
scroll interrupts my reading
and I tire of the experience
quickly. Maybe that has
something to do with
their reduced comprehension.
My favorite commercial software error message fiasco was when I was asked to figure out where a cryptic error message was coming from. The message had no prefix telling which component of the software package was issuing the message. The message did not appear in the appendix where error messages were listed. When I grepped for the error message in the application's "bin" directory it turned out that all the binaries contained the error message; even utility programs that had nothing to do with the operation that was generating the error. It turned out that all of the executables contained all of the potential error messages that might be issued by any of the executables. (An insane use of an "#include" directive or something similar.) So much for the high quality of commercial software and documentation.
The best -- and last -- commercial software that I think had really thorough documentation was back in my IBM mainframe/mini and DEC mini days. You really couldn't fault the documentation that came with those systems at all. Except, maybe, the quantity of it; some serious shelf space was required.
Dang. I've previously posted a reply before reading this comment and have no mod points.
Or the people who constantly point out the problem leave the company in frustration. No more complaints... no more problem. It'll be a while before the replacement hires (if there actually are any) re-discover the problem and begin complaining about it.
Well... at least they were spelled correctly.
My opthamologist. Due to my very poor vision (something like +14 diopter correction, if memory serves) she highly strongly cautioned against Lasik.
I would welcome with open arms and tears of joy a Firefox release that could survive a day -- heck, even half a day -- without crashing. It's such a joy to come back from grabbing a cub of coffee or lunch to find that I have to restart effin' Firefox and reload all my tabs again.
Knowing the business-ass-kissing^W^Wfriendly nature of your typical Republican Senator, I think the way to read that last bit is that the Republicans were unhappy that any restrictions are still in place on patentability and that they'd like the PTO to do nothing more than rubber stamp their campaign fund benefactors' patent applications and the quicker the better.