I was at cisco during the last year and, yes, it was amazing how many silver aluminum laptops I saw 'walking around'. 100:1 or 50:1 to pc's.
while there, I took some employee training and one class was almost entirely international exchange students (there for a whole year at a time, I'm told). 99% of them had apple laptops.
its the other way around. we used to have small, simple programs that did not take whole systems to build and gigs of mem to run in. things were easier to understand and concepts were not overdone a hundred times, just because 'reasons'.
now, we have software that can't be debugged well, people who are current software eng's have no attention span to fix bugs or do proper design, older guys who DO remember 'why' are no longer being hired and we can't seem to stand on our giants' shoulders anymore. again, because 'reasons'.
no one would believe you if you went back in time and said that reagan and bush-2 would be president.
"an actor? president? you're making that up!"
(what movie was that from? doesn't matter.)
point is, with the true choice of leaders NOT being in the hands of the voters, anything's possible. if the hidden unseen rulers choose idiot-A or idiot-B, that's what we get. what: you thought we had a SAY in things? oh, how cute.
speaking as someone who is out of work, savings near 0 (been out a long time) and there is essentially no social support. I can't meet my expenses on unemployment, not even close. and when unemployed, you cannot find a new place to live; they all insist you are currently employed! catch 22.
I know what I'm talking about. I'm in that role. you are simply ASSUMING and you are, quite frankly, wrong and talking out of your ass.
america will crush you and you can't expect the US to support its people when they are down and out. why the fuck do you think there ARE homeless people!!! dammit.
people are loyal to parties BECAUSE the polticians are TOO MUCH struck against party lines.
I can't find a single republican that believes in normal thinking-person things. I won't list it, you can imagine what the R's dislike and how they are so out of touch with modern times.
they keep doubling-down on the derp, as is said in the parlance of our times (dude!).
even though the D's have some pretty bad people, I could not bring myself to vote for an R simply because the R's are even more brain damaged and simply refuse to break rank with the orders of the party.
if we could get our 'leaders' to break rank, we'd really have a chance at a return to prosperity and good times. that's not going to happen because human power-drives simply won't allow them to admit they were wrong and that Change Is Good(tm), from time to time.
people that I know that vote for D are not voting FOR a D. they are simply saying 'I cannot tolerate the batshit-crazy Rs and there's no way I want any of those fuckwads in office, if I can help it.'
I have not met anyone who is happy to vote for either party. now, they pretty much are voting for whoever is NOT on the side they hate the most.
right smack dab in the middle of silicon valley. you would think that its not impossible to get employment here if you have any experience and can code. I have tons of experience and yes, I can code. I can do a lot more than coding, but I'm happy to continue coding.
I'm not proud and I'll take nearly any job that I can physically or mentally do. I'll do a job several levels 'below' me. I don't care! if I'm helping and being productive and keeping myself indoors (ie, not homeless) I'm happy to do qa work or - fuck - even data entry. yeah, 30 or so years of software and hardware and I can't even get the most basic zoomer entry level job. of course: they see my 3 pages of resume and they won't offer me jobs 'below me'. I don't use that term; work is honorable and I'd be happy to go back to work in any way I can! but try to tell that to employers. 'you will get bored, you will leave, you wont be happy, etc. well, let me be the judge of that, ok? maybe I would be happy. and you'll get a guy who realizes what its like to be without work and who will do all he can to STAY employed, as long as the employer lets him.
I don't know what the issue is; and I don't think its one single thing. but being american born and raised and over 40 really does limit your engineering growth in the bay area. if you are from an h1b country, hey, come on in! we'll find SOME job for you. but me? no. no job for you.
sorry to vent. but people need to hear this. they should hear it so that they don't live under the false illusion that life is great and if you have a good education, good experience and good work ethic, you'll be able to stay employed. NO! its a fucking lie.
they don't unionize because they've been brainwashed by the 'extreme right' that soshalizm is baaaad! jesus would cry if we went socialist, even a little bit.
they are afraid of losing their jobs and big corp USA keeps putting fear into union folks by the same old tactics they used about 100 years ago. same shit, different day.
the workers are not smarter or dumber; they are manipulated and scared into working against their own best interests.
ie, the republicans continue to fuck us all. unions, baaaad! soshalizm, baaaad! more money for ceo's, goooood!
how cute. someone who still thinks that capitalism WORKS.
hint: we're melting down in the US, the middle class is being attacked and destroyed, the upper classes accumulate more and more of the world's wealth and most of us will NEVER be able to retire.
so, telll me again how greed makes things all sunshine and rainbows?
(btw, you sound like a CEO. probably a white, christian, conservative ceo, at that)
I've been out of work since january of this year. I am over 50, I have well over 25 years in C (c++ came later), I do hardware, firmware, networking.
and yet, I can't get a job to save my life, almost literally.
go ahead, I'm waiting; blame it on me. I didn't so this or that right, I should move to some bumfuck area of the country instead of the bay area, etc etc. yeah yeah, its all my fault. you 20 and 30somethings will surely know that I'm 'no good at coding' and so its all my fault.
but I know what the real issue is. corporations are sociopathic led by people who have that 'feature' themselves. people are to be kept around just long enough but not longer. and if you are older, forget about getting fulltime (benefits, healthcare) as you will be told 'sorry, we only have 'contract to hire' for folks like you; and btw, that's a typo its really contract-to-FIRE).
I know I'm not the most brilliant guy in the room, when I'm at a software company, but I also know that I'm never the dumbest and I can pull my weight, do my work and solve problems as good as anyone else. I'm no genius but even with over 30 yrs in tech, with a whos-who list of companies on my resume, I'm unhirable (it seems).
there is MOST DEFINITELY something really wrong about our current tech employment 'style'. the eat-and-use-them-up (then fire them) mentality is hitting people like me, first and the hardest but you'll come next, don't worry too much about that! when its your time and you hit a certain age and experience level, expect to find all that I just explained HAPPENING TO YOU.
I didn't believe it when older guys said that to me, 10 or 20 yrs ago. but now, well, I'm living it.
employers suck and they've sucked more now than they have in the last 50 or even 75 years. only the turn of the century has been worse for workers than it is now.
but hey, that ceo got himself a 2nd or 3rd boat. woohoo! I'm glad to be penniless and nearly homeless just so some ultra rich white guy can get even richer.
>Google and Samsung announcing monthly security updates
I call bullshit.
until they take security seriously (which means backporting fixes to old os's in phones) this is worse then bullshit. its acting like a real fix when, in fact, its stil business as usual. phones will not get updates if the vendor wants to force you to re-re-rebuy yet another phone.
when there is a push to keep selling you things that you already have, you will NOT get software updates or support.
the model is broken by design. apple has it mostly right (although they also actively try to force upgrades on hardware by EOLing perfectly good and working hw) but android/google fucked the chicken, here. they decided to make a monolithic system out of the non-monolithic linux base and there's no fixing this broken-by-design idea. vendors are enjoying their wild-west view of things and anything goes! consumer protection is a thing that we used to have 20+ yrs ago, but no one cares about us anymore.
looking to google to help secure things? HA! samsung? DOUBLE HA!
both are jokes when it comes to software QUALITY. such a shame, too, that such rich companies don't give time or energy to things that truly are important to users.
I'm here in the bay area, which USED TO BE a hotbed of quality and innovation. ha! now its entirely a sweatshop where unskilled foreigners (who will do just what their are told and march to stupid/fast schedules that don't allow for proper design or testing) are the norm. software is a factory job, now. if you question things, you get fired. if you try to fix broken processes, you get fired.
all that matters is cheap and fast-to-market.
I have zero faith in software or even hardware products these days. such a shame. but at least those of us in the biz know this and so we are not surprised at total lack of security in ANYTHING anymore.
put my banking online? right.... medical files online? yeah, sign me right up. what could possibly go wrong?
I can update a proper linux system. apt-get update (etc etc) and I'm good. it could be a 5 yr old linux install, 10 yr even more. it will still get security and major bugfixes.
android? yeah, right. my nexus one (go ahead, laugh at the old guy with the ancient phone) has not had an update for over 3 years now; probably more than that. 2.x distro from cyan and even they stopped doing updates. I have no time in my schedule to learn android internals well enough to do this myself (I could do it for linux, but I have no desire to waste time on phone crap, too many other things to get done). and so, I am running quite old software on a mobile computer and unless I pay for new hardware (my old hw works fine, still) I can't get updates.
this is the main reason why I hate google so much. they totally messed up on the whole android build/deploy/update system. its not linux, its not separatable (gfx and kernel and ip stack all are comingled, like a college-hire might design, sigh) and you can't update just the parts you need. its a whole update or nothing at all. HOW UTTERLY STUPID.
I wish I could get to love apple gear. then again, they EOL their old products, too, and so I'd have to keep rebuying hardware just like android guys are forced to do.
I may just go back to dumb phones again. this is ridiculous. a mobile computer with wireless access, a lot of my personal info on it and yet no update mechanism at all. essentially its abandonware. hundreds of dollars and I have a device that won't ever get updated even though there's not a single good reason for that.
what I can't figure out is: was google stupid or smart when they planned this? I tend to think they were both; stupid due to having too many kids onboard who don't understand the longevity of embedded systems in the real world; and smart since they force people to keep re-re-rebuying things and that must make their hardware partners very happy. they also can ignore older hardware and save time on multiple forks and build trees. but it was all the wrong design for END USERS. we are the ones who get screwed by this.
I cannot ever forgive google. they could have kept linux clean on the phone and allowed users to update ip-stack, kernel, etc. but they put a lot of effort into NOT allowing this and we all pay for it with security problems; and ones that we won't ever be able to fix, either, unless we do the work ourselves (which is not acceptable for an embedded system).
and in most of the US, its borderline illegal to even MENTION JN in court. judges will kick you out, lock you up, threaten you, try to scare you. voire dire does all it can to try to reject jurors that even KNOW what JN is. and if you tell them during VD that you don't know what JN is and then later, they find out you do, you are in contempt.
its all neatly stacked up so that your CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS are not vocalized or listed or communicated to you.
"nice liberty you got there; would be a shame if something were to happen to it"
you are far too trusting; and you have zero reason to trust thives and robbers and villians.
go ahead and trust the spooks. hey, enjoy! ignorance is bliss.
but to trust anyone from those orgs, now that we truly know the mentality of those in control, THAT's what the definition of crazy-talk is.
zero cred. sorry, but anything from the spooks is untrustable and probably always has been. the fact that they act like they are trying to 'help' just makes matters even worse.
and the old chestnut about 'but its open source!' means nothing. how many of us are truly qualified to read and understand well-crafted back-door and unsafe code? given how many security breaks we have in every bit of running code mankind has ever written, I would say that almost no one can truly be sure that the source you are reading is really safe and has no ill side-effects. systems are very complex. even experts can be fooled; and with agencies that have more money than god, they can afford to hire and retain the 'best' (and most evil) minds in existence.
go ahead and trust them. but I won't. not in a million years.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at cisco during the last year and, yes, it was amazing how many silver aluminum laptops I saw 'walking around'. 100:1 or 50:1 to pc's.
while there, I took some employee training and one class was almost entirely international exchange students (there for a whole year at a time, I'm told). 99% of them had apple laptops.
its the other way around. we used to have small, simple programs that did not take whole systems to build and gigs of mem to run in. things were easier to understand and concepts were not overdone a hundred times, just because 'reasons'.
now, we have software that can't be debugged well, people who are current software eng's have no attention span to fix bugs or do proper design, older guys who DO remember 'why' are no longer being hired and we can't seem to stand on our giants' shoulders anymore. again, because 'reasons'.
I think Romans invented massive debt...
see where it got them?
uhm, someone named romani went to the house??
anyone old enough to remember the iOpener? (I have one still in a box, anyone want it? it has been modded to run linux; 2.0 iirc).
https://commons.wikimedia.org/...
keyboard had a pizza key on it. not much else memorable about that failed marketing experiment.
(and that's a $100 that I'll never see again. oh well. it was a different world back then)
you fell for the trick-question.
there isn't a single serious politician in the US who is leftist. that died well over 20 years ago, perhaps even 30+.
we have ultra right and middle right. that's about it.
no one would believe you if you went back in time and said that reagan and bush-2 would be president.
"an actor? president? you're making that up!"
(what movie was that from? doesn't matter.)
point is, with the true choice of leaders NOT being in the hands of the voters, anything's possible. if the hidden unseen rulers choose idiot-A or idiot-B, that's what we get. what: you thought we had a SAY in things? oh, how cute.
you're funny. do you have a schedule for your stand-up appearances?
you are wrong.
speaking as someone who is out of work, savings near 0 (been out a long time) and there is essentially no social support. I can't meet my expenses on unemployment, not even close. and when unemployed, you cannot find a new place to live; they all insist you are currently employed! catch 22.
I know what I'm talking about. I'm in that role. you are simply ASSUMING and you are, quite frankly, wrong and talking out of your ass.
america will crush you and you can't expect the US to support its people when they are down and out. why the fuck do you think there ARE homeless people!!! dammit.
people are loyal to parties BECAUSE the polticians are TOO MUCH struck against party lines.
I can't find a single republican that believes in normal thinking-person things. I won't list it, you can imagine what the R's dislike and how they are so out of touch with modern times.
they keep doubling-down on the derp, as is said in the parlance of our times (dude!).
even though the D's have some pretty bad people, I could not bring myself to vote for an R simply because the R's are even more brain damaged and simply refuse to break rank with the orders of the party.
if we could get our 'leaders' to break rank, we'd really have a chance at a return to prosperity and good times. that's not going to happen because human power-drives simply won't allow them to admit they were wrong and that Change Is Good(tm), from time to time.
people that I know that vote for D are not voting FOR a D. they are simply saying 'I cannot tolerate the batshit-crazy Rs and there's no way I want any of those fuckwads in office, if I can help it.'
I have not met anyone who is happy to vote for either party. now, they pretty much are voting for whoever is NOT on the side they hate the most.
right smack dab in the middle of silicon valley. you would think that its not impossible to get employment here if you have any experience and can code. I have tons of experience and yes, I can code. I can do a lot more than coding, but I'm happy to continue coding.
I'm not proud and I'll take nearly any job that I can physically or mentally do. I'll do a job several levels 'below' me. I don't care! if I'm helping and being productive and keeping myself indoors (ie, not homeless) I'm happy to do qa work or - fuck - even data entry. yeah, 30 or so years of software and hardware and I can't even get the most basic zoomer entry level job. of course: they see my 3 pages of resume and they won't offer me jobs 'below me'. I don't use that term; work is honorable and I'd be happy to go back to work in any way I can! but try to tell that to employers. 'you will get bored, you will leave, you wont be happy, etc. well, let me be the judge of that, ok? maybe I would be happy. and you'll get a guy who realizes what its like to be without work and who will do all he can to STAY employed, as long as the employer lets him.
I don't know what the issue is; and I don't think its one single thing. but being american born and raised and over 40 really does limit your engineering growth in the bay area. if you are from an h1b country, hey, come on in! we'll find SOME job for you. but me? no. no job for you.
sorry to vent. but people need to hear this. they should hear it so that they don't live under the false illusion that life is great and if you have a good education, good experience and good work ethic, you'll be able to stay employed. NO! its a fucking lie.
more bullshit.
they don't unionize because they've been brainwashed by the 'extreme right' that soshalizm is baaaad! jesus would cry if we went socialist, even a little bit.
they are afraid of losing their jobs and big corp USA keeps putting fear into union folks by the same old tactics they used about 100 years ago. same shit, different day.
the workers are not smarter or dumber; they are manipulated and scared into working against their own best interests.
ie, the republicans continue to fuck us all. unions, baaaad! soshalizm, baaaad! more money for ceo's, goooood!
how cute. someone who still thinks that capitalism WORKS.
hint: we're melting down in the US, the middle class is being attacked and destroyed, the upper classes accumulate more and more of the world's wealth and most of us will NEVER be able to retire.
so, telll me again how greed makes things all sunshine and rainbows?
(btw, you sound like a CEO. probably a white, christian, conservative ceo, at that)
they are running the latest version of systemd!
I've been out of work since january of this year. I am over 50, I have well over 25 years in C (c++ came later), I do hardware, firmware, networking.
and yet, I can't get a job to save my life, almost literally.
go ahead, I'm waiting; blame it on me. I didn't so this or that right, I should move to some bumfuck area of the country instead of the bay area, etc etc. yeah yeah, its all my fault. you 20 and 30somethings will surely know that I'm 'no good at coding' and so its all my fault.
but I know what the real issue is. corporations are sociopathic led by people who have that 'feature' themselves. people are to be kept around just long enough but not longer. and if you are older, forget about getting fulltime (benefits, healthcare) as you will be told 'sorry, we only have 'contract to hire' for folks like you; and btw, that's a typo its really contract-to-FIRE).
I know I'm not the most brilliant guy in the room, when I'm at a software company, but I also know that I'm never the dumbest and I can pull my weight, do my work and solve problems as good as anyone else. I'm no genius but even with over 30 yrs in tech, with a whos-who list of companies on my resume, I'm unhirable (it seems).
there is MOST DEFINITELY something really wrong about our current tech employment 'style'. the eat-and-use-them-up (then fire them) mentality is hitting people like me, first and the hardest but you'll come next, don't worry too much about that! when its your time and you hit a certain age and experience level, expect to find all that I just explained HAPPENING TO YOU.
I didn't believe it when older guys said that to me, 10 or 20 yrs ago. but now, well, I'm living it.
employers suck and they've sucked more now than they have in the last 50 or even 75 years. only the turn of the century has been worse for workers than it is now.
but hey, that ceo got himself a 2nd or 3rd boat. woohoo! I'm glad to be penniless and nearly homeless just so some ultra rich white guy can get even richer.
you must be young. I'll just leave it at that.
>Google and Samsung announcing monthly security updates
I call bullshit.
until they take security seriously (which means backporting fixes to old os's in phones) this is worse then bullshit. its acting like a real fix when, in fact, its stil business as usual. phones will not get updates if the vendor wants to force you to re-re-rebuy yet another phone.
when there is a push to keep selling you things that you already have, you will NOT get software updates or support.
the model is broken by design. apple has it mostly right (although they also actively try to force upgrades on hardware by EOLing perfectly good and working hw) but android/google fucked the chicken, here. they decided to make a monolithic system out of the non-monolithic linux base and there's no fixing this broken-by-design idea. vendors are enjoying their wild-west view of things and anything goes! consumer protection is a thing that we used to have 20+ yrs ago, but no one cares about us anymore.
looking to google to help secure things? HA! samsung? DOUBLE HA!
both are jokes when it comes to software QUALITY. such a shame, too, that such rich companies don't give time or energy to things that truly are important to users.
welcome to the race-to-the-bottom.
I'm here in the bay area, which USED TO BE a hotbed of quality and innovation. ha! now its entirely a sweatshop where unskilled foreigners (who will do just what their are told and march to stupid/fast schedules that don't allow for proper design or testing) are the norm. software is a factory job, now. if you question things, you get fired. if you try to fix broken processes, you get fired.
all that matters is cheap and fast-to-market.
I have zero faith in software or even hardware products these days. such a shame. but at least those of us in the biz know this and so we are not surprised at total lack of security in ANYTHING anymore.
put my banking online? right.... medical files online? yeah, sign me right up. what could possibly go wrong?
I can update a proper linux system. apt-get update (etc etc) and I'm good. it could be a 5 yr old linux install, 10 yr even more. it will still get security and major bugfixes.
android? yeah, right. my nexus one (go ahead, laugh at the old guy with the ancient phone) has not had an update for over 3 years now; probably more than that. 2.x distro from cyan and even they stopped doing updates. I have no time in my schedule to learn android internals well enough to do this myself (I could do it for linux, but I have no desire to waste time on phone crap, too many other things to get done). and so, I am running quite old software on a mobile computer and unless I pay for new hardware (my old hw works fine, still) I can't get updates.
this is the main reason why I hate google so much. they totally messed up on the whole android build/deploy/update system. its not linux, its not separatable (gfx and kernel and ip stack all are comingled, like a college-hire might design, sigh) and you can't update just the parts you need. its a whole update or nothing at all. HOW UTTERLY STUPID.
I wish I could get to love apple gear. then again, they EOL their old products, too, and so I'd have to keep rebuying hardware just like android guys are forced to do.
I may just go back to dumb phones again. this is ridiculous. a mobile computer with wireless access, a lot of my personal info on it and yet no update mechanism at all. essentially its abandonware. hundreds of dollars and I have a device that won't ever get updated even though there's not a single good reason for that.
what I can't figure out is: was google stupid or smart when they planned this? I tend to think they were both; stupid due to having too many kids onboard who don't understand the longevity of embedded systems in the real world; and smart since they force people to keep re-re-rebuying things and that must make their hardware partners very happy. they also can ignore older hardware and save time on multiple forks and build trees. but it was all the wrong design for END USERS. we are the ones who get screwed by this.
I cannot ever forgive google. they could have kept linux clean on the phone and allowed users to update ip-stack, kernel, etc. but they put a lot of effort into NOT allowing this and we all pay for it with security problems; and ones that we won't ever be able to fix, either, unless we do the work ourselves (which is not acceptable for an embedded system).
I can see it now:
"Slashdot: Bad Hair for Billionaires; Stuff that still does not matter."
and in most of the US, its borderline illegal to even MENTION JN in court. judges will kick you out, lock you up, threaten you, try to scare you. voire dire does all it can to try to reject jurors that even KNOW what JN is. and if you tell them during VD that you don't know what JN is and then later, they find out you do, you are in contempt.
its all neatly stacked up so that your CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS are not vocalized or listed or communicated to you.
"nice liberty you got there; would be a shame if something were to happen to it"
is it, at least, good old amercian 60hz hum or that evil commie 50hz variety?
grow a pair! you think caving in and helping your daugher rot her brain with stupid tv is a GOOD thing?
parents. taking the easy way out, because.....reasons!
so far, the overwhelming feedback I'm reading is 'aww, poor babies. they don't like a taste of their own medicine'.
as they say down south, "well, bless their hearts!"
(and I mean that. very truly and deeply.)
you are far too trusting; and you have zero reason to trust thives and robbers and villians.
go ahead and trust the spooks. hey, enjoy! ignorance is bliss.
but to trust anyone from those orgs, now that we truly know the mentality of those in control, THAT's what the definition of crazy-talk is.
zero cred. sorry, but anything from the spooks is untrustable and probably always has been. the fact that they act like they are trying to 'help' just makes matters even worse.
and the old chestnut about 'but its open source!' means nothing. how many of us are truly qualified to read and understand well-crafted back-door and unsafe code? given how many security breaks we have in every bit of running code mankind has ever written, I would say that almost no one can truly be sure that the source you are reading is really safe and has no ill side-effects. systems are very complex. even experts can be fooled; and with agencies that have more money than god, they can afford to hire and retain the 'best' (and most evil) minds in existence.
go ahead and trust them. but I won't. not in a million years.
every sysadmin I talk to disables selinux.
you tout that as a GOOD solution to security? *laughs*