HR folks have always been this clueless. Years ago I was applying for a job as a VMS system manager and they wanted to know if I knew anything about DCL. About on par with the recent job ads I've seen for Sr. UNIX administrators that need to know shell.
Indeed... Isn't the right-most column of your Facebook news feed page enough real estate for ads without having to sprinkle them in with the updates that you want to read? I don't recall noticing ads within my timeline. At least not yet. It'll be time to begin raising Holy Hell when that happens.
Rupert Murdoch's WSJ has long been a champion of the working man. It'll be a cold day in Hell when you read a story in the WSJ about how it was wrong for managers to take a huge bonus after screwing the workers. I'm guessing that you actually believe that there's a vast liberal bias in the media, too.
``But I have to wonder how much you know about what they can do then, or if you're just spouting off biases and rare occurrences.''
I never said I didn't need a cellphone. What I've found -- after all the research I've done and my own usage pattern -- is that I don't need today's "smart" phone. I really don't need all that stuff in my pocket. My phone send/receives texts, voice messages, and... that all I need it to do. It's been decades since I needed to do trigonometry while I was walking down the street. If I wanted to manage all that compute power and the associated data I'll do it on the lab in my basement, thank you very much. I don't need to do it (again) on a device that is, frankly, a poor substitute for many of things you listed. Ever try using a cellphone for sports photography -- heck, any kind of photography for that matter -- on a sunny day? GPS? Yeah my phone has it but it's really not a navigator (no turn-by-turn feature but then I learned how to read a damned map when I was in grade school) and I turn it off for privacy reasons. A grocery list? Hmm... a simple notepad in the kitchen does that job just fine. Any updates can be added by the shopper by using their cellphone as, um, a phone. Saving my data on someone else's server/cloud? No thanks; I've been following the news and feel pretty strongly vindicated on the choice I made years ago.
BTW, I find it's the adults with smartphones who act like self-absorbed jerks. Look around any restaurant while people ignore each other at their tables each one spinning through their phone menus and ignoring their dinner partners; I doubt they're looking at the restaurant's menu online. It's pathetic. Adults who get into their car and are on the phone before they've even started the engine, flipping through menus while they're attempting to back of of their driveway. I really don't want to be part of that scene. The simple device works fine for what I need it to do. Yeah, I've participated in conference calls using my simple cellphone but I've never been in a situation where I needed to have a conferencing center in my pocket. As seldom as I'd need to use it it'd be a waste of money (surely I'd be paying for that almost completely unneeded feature).
``You're like the guy who wanted to cling to having a typing pool.''
Typing pool? Cripes! I've never had the luxury of having access to one of those; our engineering group did their own document creation though we did have a professionally-trained guy who did the CAD work we needed and created the publication-quality illustrations for conference papers, etc. Unless you want to count the CPT systems that my department used back in the early '80s but my only involvement with that technology was to devise a way to transfer all the legacy documents created on that system to a PC-based system where they were sucked into WordPerfect for reformatting (rather laboriously as you can imagine) by the people who used to use the CPTs..
I feel that anyone who judges people by their cellphone is about on par with the development manager who (when interviewed in a computer rag years ago) stated that he'd pass on a programmer who drove a standard transmission because that person didn't use the automated tool that was the automatic transmission. Asinine reason IMHO but no more so than basing a hiring decision on the candidate's choice of phone. Unless you are hiring people to be writing software for cellphones you're missing out on potentially good employees by basing a hiring decision on such shallow criteria.
Of course, having said all this, one of these days I actually will be buying a smartphone. Not because I really need all those features you find so valuable but because I will likely have no choice. In my case it'll be because I was out on my bike and the semi-smart phone bounced out of my jersey at 25-30 mph, shattered when it hit the asphalt, and I'll find that I can't buy that phone any more. I'm on my third or fourth of that model and I haven't seen it on the shelves for a while. My replacement phone will probably have the fewest number of add-on apps anyone's ever encountered, though.
``If you haven't at least used twitter, or don't have a smartphone how tech savvy and current are you? Well.. if you just moved to this country and you don't have a job and don't have a cell phone then no big deal. If you have lived here for 5 years and don't have a smartphone I have to wonder about your nerd cred (depends on the job).''
So you judge someone's worth by the toys they choose to carry around with them? As someone whose computing background encompasses most of the major platforms used going all the way back to the Altair and who chooses -- because I have much more important things to spend my $$$ on than an overpriced toy that makes most people self-absorbed jerks and a target for a mugging in nearly every major city -- to own a cellphone that is nowhere near advanced enough to be considered "smart" (Hell, most people would call it a "burner phone"; I only carry it for emergencies) all I can say to those comments are: "Jeebus... What a shallow person you must be." Please tell us who you work for so we can all avoid that company like the plague.
``So what happens once someone accidentally drops a wrench on a PDP machine?''
That's easy: buy yourself a new wrench.
In a former life, I've built, disassembled, and rebuilt PDP-11s (34s, 44s, 70s, and a their Q-bus equivalents) more times than I care to remember. You rarely needed an actual wrench for anything... Oh, wait... yeah, you used a wrench to adjust the feet on the racks to keep them level. But that was pretty much it.
``I imagine the software defined data center to be a Fantasia-like world where Mickey is the IT staff and the brooms are networking, storage, compute and security.''
Has the author actually seen Fantasia? Mickey's attempt to control the brooms turned out to be a disaster. I imagine the software-defined data center as being a boon for consultants (the Sorcerer?) who come in and clean up the ensuing mess that the Corporate Mickeys create.
One suspects that the software defined data center is going to have so many knobs and levers that nobody will be able to effectively control it all. Maybe not even the Sorcerers. Touch one knob and affect -- quite probably adversely -- a half dozen other knobs and levers.
... your mother told you that watching too much TV was bad for you? If you're so desperate to watch a cable show that you need to ``borrow'' someone's HBO or Netflix account, you've got a problem. Go outside and play.
(Yeah... our household is cable-free; has been since '92.)
I saw a report on RT last night where an interviewee stated that there were on the order of 90,000,000 documents defined as classified in some way or another in 2011 alone. ($DIETY I hope I remembered that wrong because that number is astounding.) There's can't possibly be that much information generated in that year that needed that kind of protection. Unless, of course, the Govt. is employing some sort of needle-in-a-haystack, Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-warehouse-style classification where you classify pretty much everything to make it more difficult to determine just what is the ``secret'' wheat amongst all that chaff. At some point, though,nobody's allowed to talk about anything that the govt. does because it's all classified.
``To be fair, this program is currently legal. I don't think it will pass Constitutional muster if it ever hit the courts, but that hasn't happened yet.''
Yeah. It's legal because the U.S. Govt. says it's legal. The justification for this supposed legality is, of course, contained in a classified document. So we're just supposed to trust the govt. on this. IMHO, the govt. hasn't earned that level of trust on this.
``The appropriate course of action would be to challenge this law in the courts rather than releasing classified data.
This was tried already a few years ago, AFAIR, in response the secret room in the AT&T facility on the West coast. The case was thrown out because they couldn't prove that they were spied upon by a secret spying program.
Or that the CFO isn't terribly good at determining the appropriate level of funding for the IT group. S/he's likely under pressure to cut costs wherever possible and could actually have little to no clue how much money they really should be spending on IT. Does IT report to Finance in this company? (That's never been a good sign in my experience, especially if the company's business is not finance-related. Keep your resume up to date.)
Failed IT projects are hard to miss, though. A few are probably inevitable but if failures are typical, that should be a red flag to the IT manager's superiors. If it's not then there are problems that are bigger than just the IT manager.
It may have seemed evil -- especially for those of us who worked with that guy and had to read his code -- but there was actually a purpose for his coding style: it was supposed to save disk space. Really. Unfortunately, the savings were miniscule compared to other things one could do to save space. Like instruct the XEDIT editor (this was back in my VM/CMS days) to not add the sequence numbers to columns 73-80 while working with the file. There were file compression utiliities that worked much better when they didn't encounter those useless numbers. If memory serves (and I'm pretty fuzzy on this not having used it since the early '80s), there was even a CMS filemode number that caused files to be saved on disk in a compressed format and I recall writing macros to remove the sequence numbers from files that had them inserted by an editor user who didn't know the trick to disable them. Ah, the weird crap we had to do back then.
I used to work with a guy -- years and years ago -- that discovered that the IBM FORTRAN compiler would allow you to omit spaces. Having to read his code littered with statements like "DO10I=IBEGIN,IEND,IINCR" was a pure joy. On the other hand, I've long avoided diving into Python because I cannot see why anyone would want to consider whitespace as a language element.
Interesting. I only see a single FF process (V21.0). There are (currently) 41 threads being reported by "ps -efL" but I haven't seen any correlation between threads and tabs. I have noticed that when that count gets up into the mid-40s that things slow down noticeably. Perhaps there's a kernel parameter that could be altered to ease that problem.
``Let me guess, you have adblock or Skype extensions installed?''
Nope. I do rely on Ghostery and NoScript.
when FF still gets itself in a state where it cannot print without resorting to crappy badly-scaled bit-mapped fonts that look like they were imported from an old Pet computer.
I never experienced this.''
I seem to get burned by this about twice a year. I never know when it's going to occur but it's likely related to a browser crash. The real pisser is that there seems to be no way to fix this without creating a whole new user profile and there's no means of migrating your personal data from one profile to the new one. Which makes sense, in a way, since someone could copy that information from your computer and have access to your account/password information for all the web sites you use. On the other hand, that information is password protected so you'd think there'd be a way to allow you to import it so long as you supplied that password in the new Firefox instance. No... I don't plan on using some off-site synchronization utility where my data is on a disk that I don't control access to. If that's Mozilla's idea of convenience, I'll pass, thank you. I'm in the process of implementing a fix that tars up the ".mozilla" tree every night and keep a week's worth (or more) of those archives. Then when the print function goes awry, restore from one of the saved archives to see if it fixes the problem. Plus, maybe having those archived trees will give me enough to compare -- pre-print-screwup and post-print-screwup -- to see what file(s) are being corrupted.
``I disagree, Chrome did it wrong. And that's why the memory usage is so poor.
Firefox is still working on it, getting processes for the plugins and one for the UI at large and one for the content in the tabs basically. I wish they'd put more thought into that, rather than waste energy on stupid bullshit like this.''
Agreed. While I'm not a Chrome user I was rather hoping that FF would have done something more substantial like breaking out tabs as separate processes as Chrome does over this mostly cosmetic change. As for Chrome being a memory pig: I hadn't heard that before and I'm not sure how it could be any worse than Firefox's appetite for memory. I have three FF windows open with (maybe) 30 tabs total across all of those windows and I'm showing around 1.25GB of memory in use. When it gets much higher than that FF slows to a crawl and often I'll need to switch to a console to "kill -9" the FF processes. I need a new and probably-not improved user interface like a hole in the head.
And a new user interface is not a big priority when FF still gets itself in a state where it cannot print without resorting to crappy badly-scaled bit-mapped fonts that look like they were imported from an old Pet computer. The only fix seems to be to wipe out your FF configuration and reconfigure a new FF environment from scratch. (Including all your saved passwords and, gosh, isn't it fun re-visiting all the sites you had saved passwords so you can get them re-saved in FF's password vault. I've got over a 100 of these that'll have to be re-entered now since FF managed to crap on its configuration a couple of weeks ago.)
I might have to reconsider allowing Comcast into the house if this is true. (That servers are allowed, that is.) When they started offering internet access in our neighborhood (years ago) they were a**holes about servers and port filtering as though their customers were all going to set themselves up as professional spammers.
Having a business account wasn't always a guarantee of being allowed to operate servers with the ISPs in our area. I gave up arguing with one potential ISP that would not allow servers about why one would really need a business account with static IP address if it they weren't going to be associated with servers. It was like talking to a wall.
Technology corporations love change, though. That's why they have such big marketing budgets: to convince us that we need their latest and greatest toy and to be parted from our cash for the privilege of owning it.
``I've used Emacs since before many IT people today were born.''
I learned by accident. My first IBM-clone (Columbia 1600) shipped with a software suite that used the Emacs keyboard mappings. Later when I wound up using a Tektronix workstation, the standard editor was Emacs and I was right at home.
(Remember: We hide because we use Emacs and they use vi.)
``The best advise I can give to you is to not give into proprietary hardware just because it is shiny and new. You'll find yourself replacing everything every two years, and pouring money into the coughers (sic) of corporations. You'll become more dependent on the grace of other companies, and at the mercy of others.
All I can say is: Spot F**kin' On. If it isn't broken why am I constantly being reminded that I need to replace it. Are these hipsters who always have the latest technological doodad going to be able to retire after having spent their entire working lives shelling out their paycheck for the next cool toy that Corporate Marketing has convinced them they need?
Hell... I thought it was now the definition of "lame" to be standing outside the Windows or Apple store waiting to be milked for the newest shiny and over-priced toy. Now we have another generation worried that they'll be left behind or somehow unemployable if they aren't seen with the newest smart phone.
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HR folks have always been this clueless. Years ago I was applying for a job as a VMS system manager and they wanted to know if I knew anything about DCL. About on par with the recent job ads I've seen for Sr. UNIX administrators that need to know shell.
Indeed... Isn't the right-most column of your Facebook news feed page enough real estate for ads without having to sprinkle them in with the updates that you want to read? I don't recall noticing ads within my timeline. At least not yet. It'll be time to begin raising Holy Hell when that happens.
Yeah... thanks for that chuckle.
Rupert Murdoch's WSJ has long been a champion of the working man. It'll be a cold day in Hell when you read a story in the WSJ about how it was wrong for managers to take a huge bonus after screwing the workers. I'm guessing that you actually believe that there's a vast liberal bias in the media, too.
I never said I didn't need a cellphone. What I've found -- after all the research I've done and my own usage pattern -- is that I don't need today's "smart" phone. I really don't need all that stuff in my pocket. My phone send/receives texts, voice messages, and... that all I need it to do. It's been decades since I needed to do trigonometry while I was walking down the street. If I wanted to manage all that compute power and the associated data I'll do it on the lab in my basement, thank you very much. I don't need to do it (again) on a device that is, frankly, a poor substitute for many of things you listed. Ever try using a cellphone for sports photography -- heck, any kind of photography for that matter -- on a sunny day? GPS? Yeah my phone has it but it's really not a navigator (no turn-by-turn feature but then I learned how to read a damned map when I was in grade school) and I turn it off for privacy reasons. A grocery list? Hmm... a simple notepad in the kitchen does that job just fine. Any updates can be added by the shopper by using their cellphone as, um, a phone. Saving my data on someone else's server/cloud? No thanks; I've been following the news and feel pretty strongly vindicated on the choice I made years ago.
BTW, I find it's the adults with smartphones who act like self-absorbed jerks. Look around any restaurant while people ignore each other at their tables each one spinning through their phone menus and ignoring their dinner partners; I doubt they're looking at the restaurant's menu online. It's pathetic. Adults who get into their car and are on the phone before they've even started the engine, flipping through menus while they're attempting to back of of their driveway. I really don't want to be part of that scene. The simple device works fine for what I need it to do. Yeah, I've participated in conference calls using my simple cellphone but I've never been in a situation where I needed to have a conferencing center in my pocket. As seldom as I'd need to use it it'd be a waste of money (surely I'd be paying for that almost completely unneeded feature).
Typing pool? Cripes! I've never had the luxury of having access to one of those; our engineering group did their own document creation though we did have a professionally-trained guy who did the CAD work we needed and created the publication-quality illustrations for conference papers, etc. Unless you want to count the CPT systems that my department used back in the early '80s but my only involvement with that technology was to devise a way to transfer all the legacy documents created on that system to a PC-based system where they were sucked into WordPerfect for reformatting (rather laboriously as you can imagine) by the people who used to use the CPTs..
I feel that anyone who judges people by their cellphone is about on par with the development manager who (when interviewed in a computer rag years ago) stated that he'd pass on a programmer who drove a standard transmission because that person didn't use the automated tool that was the automatic transmission. Asinine reason IMHO but no more so than basing a hiring decision on the candidate's choice of phone. Unless you are hiring people to be writing software for cellphones you're missing out on potentially good employees by basing a hiring decision on such shallow criteria.
Of course, having said all this, one of these days I actually will be buying a smartphone. Not because I really need all those features you find so valuable but because I will likely have no choice. In my case it'll be because I was out on my bike and the semi-smart phone bounced out of my jersey at 25-30 mph, shattered when it hit the asphalt, and I'll find that I can't buy that phone any more. I'm on my third or fourth of that model and I haven't seen it on the shelves for a while. My replacement phone will probably have the fewest number of add-on apps anyone's ever encountered, though.
So you judge someone's worth by the toys they choose to carry around with them? As someone whose computing background encompasses most of the major platforms used going all the way back to the Altair and who chooses -- because I have much more important things to spend my $$$ on than an overpriced toy that makes most people self-absorbed jerks and a target for a mugging in nearly every major city -- to own a cellphone that is nowhere near advanced enough to be considered "smart" (Hell, most people would call it a "burner phone"; I only carry it for emergencies) all I can say to those comments are: "Jeebus... What a shallow person you must be." Please tell us who you work for so we can all avoid that company like the plague.
Aw... cut him some slack. One of those posts was supposed to be a tweet.
Dang! I guess I'll need to keep looking for someone who needs a couple of Q-bus wire-wrap prototype boards. (Freebies I got back in the '80s.)
That's easy: buy yourself a new wrench.
In a former life, I've built, disassembled, and rebuilt PDP-11s (34s, 44s, 70s, and a their Q-bus equivalents) more times than I care to remember. You rarely needed an actual wrench for anything... Oh, wait... yeah, you used a wrench to adjust the feet on the racks to keep them level. But that was pretty much it.
Cost. Decent bandwidth is crazy expensive. Hell, in some areas, crappy bandwidth is expensive.
Has the author actually seen Fantasia? Mickey's attempt to control the brooms turned out to be a disaster. I imagine the software-defined data center as being a boon for consultants (the Sorcerer?) who come in and clean up the ensuing mess that the Corporate Mickeys create.
One suspects that the software defined data center is going to have so many knobs and levers that nobody will be able to effectively control it all. Maybe not even the Sorcerers. Touch one knob and affect -- quite probably adversely -- a half dozen other knobs and levers.
... your mother told you that watching too much TV was bad for you? If you're so desperate to watch a cable show that you need to ``borrow'' someone's HBO or Netflix account, you've got a problem. Go outside and play.
(Yeah... our household is cable-free; has been since '92.)
You're kidding, right?
Indeed.
I saw a report on RT last night where an interviewee stated that there were on the order of 90,000,000 documents defined as classified in some way or another in 2011 alone. ($DIETY I hope I remembered that wrong because that number is astounding.) There's can't possibly be that much information generated in that year that needed that kind of protection. Unless, of course, the Govt. is employing some sort of needle-in-a-haystack, Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-warehouse-style classification where you classify pretty much everything to make it more difficult to determine just what is the ``secret'' wheat amongst all that chaff. At some point, though,nobody's allowed to talk about anything that the govt. does because it's all classified.
Yeah. It's legal because the U.S. Govt. says it's legal. The justification for this supposed legality is, of course, contained in a classified document. So we're just supposed to trust the govt. on this. IMHO, the govt. hasn't earned that level of trust on this.
This was tried already a few years ago, AFAIR, in response the secret room in the AT&T facility on the West coast. The case was thrown out because they couldn't prove that they were spied upon by a secret spying program.
You forgot the <snark>...</snark> tags.
Or that the CFO isn't terribly good at determining the appropriate level of funding for the IT group. S/he's likely under pressure to cut costs wherever possible and could actually have little to no clue how much money they really should be spending on IT. Does IT report to Finance in this company? (That's never been a good sign in my experience, especially if the company's business is not finance-related. Keep your resume up to date.)
Failed IT projects are hard to miss, though. A few are probably inevitable but if failures are typical, that should be a red flag to the IT manager's superiors. If it's not then there are problems that are bigger than just the IT manager.
It may have seemed evil -- especially for those of us who worked with that guy and had to read his code -- but there was actually a purpose for his coding style: it was supposed to save disk space. Really. Unfortunately, the savings were miniscule compared to other things one could do to save space. Like instruct the XEDIT editor (this was back in my VM/CMS days) to not add the sequence numbers to columns 73-80 while working with the file. There were file compression utiliities that worked much better when they didn't encounter those useless numbers. If memory serves (and I'm pretty fuzzy on this not having used it since the early '80s), there was even a CMS filemode number that caused files to be saved on disk in a compressed format and I recall writing macros to remove the sequence numbers from files that had them inserted by an editor user who didn't know the trick to disable them. Ah, the weird crap we had to do back then.
I used to work with a guy -- years and years ago -- that discovered that the IBM FORTRAN compiler would allow you to omit spaces. Having to read his code littered with statements like "DO10I=IBEGIN,IEND,IINCR" was a pure joy. On the other hand, I've long avoided diving into Python because I cannot see why anyone would want to consider whitespace as a language element.
Interesting. I only see a single FF process (V21.0). There are (currently) 41 threads being reported by "ps -efL" but I haven't seen any correlation between threads and tabs. I have noticed that when that count gets up into the mid-40s that things slow down noticeably. Perhaps there's a kernel parameter that could be altered to ease that problem.
Nope. I do rely on Ghostery and NoScript.
I seem to get burned by this about twice a year. I never know when it's going to occur but it's likely related to a browser crash. The real pisser is that there seems to be no way to fix this without creating a whole new user profile and there's no means of migrating your personal data from one profile to the new one. Which makes sense, in a way, since someone could copy that information from your computer and have access to your account/password information for all the web sites you use. On the other hand, that information is password protected so you'd think there'd be a way to allow you to import it so long as you supplied that password in the new Firefox instance. No... I don't plan on using some off-site synchronization utility where my data is on a disk that I don't control access to. If that's Mozilla's idea of convenience, I'll pass, thank you. I'm in the process of implementing a fix that tars up the ".mozilla" tree every night and keep a week's worth (or more) of those archives. Then when the print function goes awry, restore from one of the saved archives to see if it fixes the problem. Plus, maybe having those archived trees will give me enough to compare -- pre-print-screwup and post-print-screwup -- to see what file(s) are being corrupted.
Agreed. While I'm not a Chrome user I was rather hoping that FF would have done something more substantial like breaking out tabs as separate processes as Chrome does over this mostly cosmetic change. As for Chrome being a memory pig: I hadn't heard that before and I'm not sure how it could be any worse than Firefox's appetite for memory. I have three FF windows open with (maybe) 30 tabs total across all of those windows and I'm showing around 1.25GB of memory in use. When it gets much higher than that FF slows to a crawl and often I'll need to switch to a console to "kill -9" the FF processes. I need a new and probably-not improved user interface like a hole in the head.
And a new user interface is not a big priority when FF still gets itself in a state where it cannot print without resorting to crappy badly-scaled bit-mapped fonts that look like they were imported from an old Pet computer. The only fix seems to be to wipe out your FF configuration and reconfigure a new FF environment from scratch. (Including all your saved passwords and, gosh, isn't it fun re-visiting all the sites you had saved passwords so you can get them re-saved in FF's password vault. I've got over a 100 of these that'll have to be re-entered now since FF managed to crap on its configuration a couple of weeks ago.)
I tried that function back then and all it did was tie up a browser tab until I closed it down. Did it ever work?
I might have to reconsider allowing Comcast into the house if this is true. (That servers are allowed, that is.) When they started offering internet access in our neighborhood (years ago) they were a**holes about servers and port filtering as though their customers were all going to set themselves up as professional spammers.
Having a business account wasn't always a guarantee of being allowed to operate servers with the ISPs in our area. I gave up arguing with one potential ISP that would not allow servers about why one would really need a business account with static IP address if it they weren't going to be associated with servers. It was like talking to a wall.
Technology corporations love change, though. That's why they have such big marketing budgets: to convince us that we need their latest and greatest toy and to be parted from our cash for the privilege of owning it.
I learned by accident. My first IBM-clone (Columbia 1600) shipped with a software suite that used the Emacs keyboard mappings. Later when I wound up using a Tektronix workstation, the standard editor was Emacs and I was right at home.
(Remember: We hide because we use Emacs and they use vi.)
All I can say is: Spot F**kin' On. If it isn't broken why am I constantly being reminded that I need to replace it. Are these hipsters who always have the latest technological doodad going to be able to retire after having spent their entire working lives shelling out their paycheck for the next cool toy that Corporate Marketing has convinced them they need?
Hell... I thought it was now the definition of "lame" to be standing outside the Windows or Apple store waiting to be milked for the newest shiny and over-priced toy. Now we have another generation worried that they'll be left behind or somehow unemployable if they aren't seen with the newest smart phone.