I say this as a 46-year-old... I'm able to find plenty of opportunities with most companies up here in Portland, and regularly get recruiters calling from Utah, Texas, Nevada, numerous East Coast locales... they actually want the experience.
Silicon Valley is chock-full of startups and Type-A corps, and they only want one thing: disposable slaves.
It's far easier to convince a a kid with a still-crisp CS degree (and way too much student loan debt) to work 90 stressful hours a week for a pittance.
It's much harder to convince someone with sufficient experience and a family to do that... life is way too short to become the personal bitch of some IPO-seeking asshole.
In all too many cases, I totally agree. Here in Portland, the whole brogrammer/hipster thing is in full-force... most of the tech types I have worked with in the past (and now) only hang out with other, similarly-successful professionals with similar tastes.
However, this is not always the case. As evidence I present, well, my situation. I commute into the city from a small town in the foothills of the Coastal Range... I rent the place. My neighbor across the street is a single mother who works at the grocery store. Her neighbor works at the local excavation company maintaining heavy equipment. Another neighbor lives on disability and grows a frig-ton of weed in his yard (welcome to Oregon). One is retired but she babysits kids for a bit of extra dosh. Another is busy as hell trying to build up a small landscaping business so I rarely see him these days. Yet another is a postman, spending most of his income on alimony and child support. We all spend quite a bit of time hanging out on each others' porches, BS'ing around an open car hood, sharing local gossip, speculating on each others' hunting/fishing skills, etc.
I think the only neighbor I have who is even close to my income bracket is someone I rarely see and hardly ever talk to... dude's hipster to the core, but not really an asshole. Lives too far off to hang out with easily, so I rarely see the guy.
I'm not really sure. I say this because I've seen what happens when this happens. I watched as a consultant said something like 'OMG let's replace Puppet with Salt!' just because he hated Ruby, loved Python, and happened to use Salt on his personal dev machines. Note that he did all this over my objections.
Long story short, the consultant is long gone. The company he did that to is now desperately looking for someone who knows how to use Salt in a production environment (because the guy they trained to admin a Salt environment had up and left). I suspect that it's going to cost them a very pretty penny to either get one or train one now, and they're not exactly known for generous paychecks.
(I'd left this company long ago, but recruiters gonna recruit, and when I heard from one as he was detailing this predicament, I nearly doubled over laughing.)
Now that PuppetLabs has destroyed everything by making puppet 4 incompatible with puppet 3, I'll take a look at ansible.
Most of that "incompatibility"? It's not like it's that hard to upgrade. To be honest, for most of it? If (for instance) you haven't quoted your strings all this time (and if you haven't kept your booleans non-quoted), then it's more your fault than theirs; clean your shiz up.
(...and seriously, they even include future parser in the later 3.x versions to check for all that shit beforehand, so it's not like nobody got warned for something like 6-9 months in advance...)
that Red Hat is controlling or attempting to control the direction of Linux subtly and not so subtly. Where Red Hat goes, so goes Linux in many ways.
Not exactly seeing folks cast off VMWare for RHEV - and they've had that for awhile now.;)
It'll be interesting to see what they do with Ansible; I just hope they don't bork it up. I use Puppet mostly everywhere I've been (with one exception that had Chef, but I live in PDX so your mileage may vary), but Ansible does get used here and there, and seems pretty solid.
Maybe it'll be an impetus for Puppetlabs to step up its game (like that C-compiled variant they've been working on that runs hella faster, for starters.)
All true. However, all but one condition is rather limited in scope and depth, with most of it installed in limited metropolitan areas (cities like London excepted).
The cell signal is about the only thing that can be truly, well, sorta tracked... depending on how locked-down your phone is and what you have turned on. If you have GPS running and the world's loosest permissions, yeah you can be tracked to the square meter. If you have reasonable privacy controls turned on and GPS off unless absolutely needed, the most they can get at any one time is triangulated from the towers - after a subpoena is granted to get that info. Note that even this triangulation doesn't work so hot once you get out past the suburbs and into the sticks...
The ideal? Given that parts of my own commute has zero bars on any phone and runs through mountainous terrain, well, good luck with that.
So no matter what we are going to attach cars and the "street" to the Internet? That's a good idea?
This is the crux of what I'm thinking. Then again, why is it such a good idea to hard-wire a car with network connectivity in the first place?
What I mean is, why not build something that you can plug a phone into and use the phone's connection (assuming you need 4G that damned badly in your car)? Rig the bluetooth in said car so that you have to specifically authorize a given phone, and you're done... Hell, my wife's 3-year-old Kia Soul does this.
This way you don't have the stupid planned obsolescence... in a friggin' *car*.
True to a point, but the costs in those costs are one-time (as opposed to ongoing), tend to pay themselves back in other aspects (such as longevity), and don't involve the loss of privacy along the way.
In all seriousness though, it is evolving, albeit slowly. Take for instance the experts-exchange.com website. Up until recently, you just open the Google cached page and scrolled to the bottom, where you saw the entire conversation. That changed sometime last year (two years ago? I forget.)
But yeah, I'm sure that content-sellers will still by necessity leave a hole open somewhere for a good long time - you just have to figure out where that hole is (usually by mimicking Googlebot, etc) and pop in if you want to see what's inside w/o the need for paying up.
I am curious as to how the pr0n sites deal with it, though - the curiousity stems from the fact that the competent/popular ones were traditionally at the forefront of anti-circumvention measures.
It gets even worse, if you're on rural internet (which is often capped pretty hard) - definitely not fun to watch one's bandwidth cap approach even faster on a monthly basis. My solution? Delenda Windows Est - I don't feel like paying extra in ancillary costs just to use a friggin' OS.
...even in the latter case, a 'doze VM with networking disabled will run that precious little snowflake app. I've done that for years to run old CG applications that I can't bring myself to part with (well, down to one CG app for UV Mapping tweaks, but still...)
GP most likely meant that you set up a box running a transparent proxy in your house (running NotWindows(R), natch), force all traffic to go through it, then put your whitelists/hosts/etc on that.
Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop
on
KDE Turns 19
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· Score: 1
Oh lord yes... and don't get me started on the need to compile half the binaries you wanted/needed, not to mention the dependency chains from Hell that you occasionally stumbled across.
Today, most binaries install with just a click or two. You don't have to beg a publisher to come out with a Linux version of something (because it's either already there, you run it with WINE, or you just run it in a VM).
As for Linux on the Desktop? Nowadays, the "desktop" is irrelevant - outside of us geeks, hardcore gamers and the occasional impoverished family? Everyone else uses laptops or tablets nowadays - some of the younger folks don't really go beyond their smartphone. Hell, I use my last desktop as a home server for backups, printing, media, and general mass storage. I gave away my old dual-G5 PowerMac and junked my white-box gaming rig eons ago... and my power bill is grateful for it. I use my MBP laptop and my wife uses an iPad, no sweat. I'm looking to replace my last remaining desktop, but this time it's going to be a hyper-efficient shoebox with a bit of CPU, a bit of RAM, and a shitload of storage. Home server and all that.
I may bother building a gaming rig while I'm at it, but honestly I've got too many other hobbies nowadays to bother (not to mention that my home is Windows-free... why would I want to screw that up?)
Anyrate... desktop? Yeah, I remember those days. I doubt they'll exist for much longer, though.
Before Facebook and PMs, there was the rumor mill. Anyone who has lived in a small rural town grows up instinctively knowing this. Of course everyone publicly scolded the unnamed-but-known-to-all town gossips - but they had all the juicy bits that kept everyone else entertained/titillated/shocked, so it was all passed around on the down-low anyway.
Perversely, you get more privacy in the big city, because there, folks don't give a shit about their neighbors beyond some small circle, and there's too many to keep track of if they did.
Except totalitarians aren't going around shooting up schoolrooms or theaters.
Hint: They don't have to, not when they can march you out to the edge of town, line you and your family up alongside a handy trench, and *then* shoot you in a more orderly manner.
I just assumed it was a way of differentiating the old IT guy who wrote hundreds of unmaintainable scripts to support his or her complicated web of ad hoc infrastructure from the new guy who understands sane development practices.
Yes, and no.
The 'new guy' is finding a way to take all of that scripting, making it consistent and maintainable, then using it in a way to automate the shit out of as much as possible.
Many of the results are apparent even now - CI/CD that can (in competently-run cases) remove the need for outage/go-live windows just because somebody wants to patch something or add a feature. Need 30 new servers to bolster the web farm? No problem - less than 30 minutes later, there they are - running and identically configured. Some jackass accidentally turns a server into a snowflake? Fixed five minutes later, automatically. Dev team is coming up with something new? Let the DevOps guy handle integrating it to the infrastructure and in enforcing IT standards so that you don't have to. While he's there, he can act as a liaison between the dev teams and the infrastructure guys. Something breaks at 3am due to shit code... guess who is going to know that, and get it fixed, way faster than the typical server monkey?
It's not a silver bullet, but damn it works well when it's built well.
Here's the trick - the sysadmins are not obsolete (but there won't be a need for nearly as many of them). The devs are not obsolete (but now they can do more with what they have). Also note that you don't need a massive cfengine/puppet farm in every company... it only makes sense under certain circumstances (usually companies who host massive web-based software), and makes none in others.
The old guy stopped learning IT in the 1990s. The new guy understands when you want to run your app in a docker container.
1) Docker is a glorified x86 version of Solaris Zones with a few tricks added on. 2) Docker is not always necessary, useful, or even wanted. Sometimes it gets in the way. 3) There are a few cases where Docker is nice to have, and even useful... but outside of a dev's laptop, they are few and far between, as it should be.
(...now Foreman + vSphere? That can get useful in a hurry.)
Otherwise, first sentence? Not always. I was a sysadmin in the 1990s... Now I script, automate, play babysitter, troubleshoot, pimp-slap the occasional junior admin or dev when necessary, and generally do everything I can to automate the shit out of everything that can sanely be automated. That last part scares both dev and sysadmin alike (and not a few network admins), but it's merely evolution. Anything less is just a buzzword.;)
It's a simple supply and demand problem. It would be like running out of handicapped spaces, and you're pissed about the idiots who bought handicapped equipped vans.
Umm, no. Unlike buying an EV, being handicapped isn't really a choice.
When the fix is so simple, and can be monetized, and app driven as well, the amount of Slashsillieness applied is a bit funny.
Agreed. Wanna charge up? get out your credit card. Otherwise learn to plan your route accordingly.
Dunno... up here in Portland, I've lost count of the prime parking 'chargers only 'cuz we're teh environmentalz!!!!' spots that sit empty most of the time, even during peak shopping/working hours.
Wouldn't mind having the EV owners pay for the privilege, though, because if they don't, the rest of us do (the stores aren't installing the things out of the goodness of their hearts, you know, and they have to recoup the costs somewhere).
1) I don't care what RMS does with his toenails... it's his code and writing that I care about.
2) Who ever said that Torvalds "never does wrong"? Dude's not perfect, but he's managed to keep the kernel going strong this far. By comparison, what have you done?
Given the downmods each of us got in the pile, it seems this is a contentious issue.
Personally, I disagree with your assessment, but that said, I am aware that one person's fair assessment followed by a harsher and unequivocal reply if the assessment is rejected, may easily be seen by another as undue abuse.
I make no apologies for the list, because it reminds me exactly of a typical USAF flightline. Doing something dumb or misguided will get you a direct and to-the-point talking-to; first logical and fair, but increasingly harsher if you continue to resist even listening.
The reasons why are different but just as serious: in the kernel, screw-ups in design and/or direction can eventually destroy the kernel's usefulness and flexibility. On the flightline, screwups in procedure or behavior will eventually get you killed.
The harshness against any whining and/or backtalk in either case is not just someone being a turd - it's a reminder that there are reasons for things being as they are, and any proposed changes had better have a damned good reason up-front.
Agreed. The only machine-type game that has any kind of consistent hope is playing odd/even on a roulette wheel with a single "0", which gives you a 48.6% (or so) chance of winning (a "00" on the wheel drops your chances to to 47.4%). Any other game that uses a machine will only get worse from there.
At least with single-deck poker (and no card-counters) you have some sort of chance... but only if you know what you're doing and are more skilled than your opponents.
Actually, since the information they have is essentially the same, it's more like a slot machine tech working at one casino making slot bets at another. There's still a chance that the guy will lose, but his odds are way better than most, especially if he knows of certain bugs in certain machines and can leverage them.
It's a big reason why folks like the Nevada Gaming Commission demand that technicians not gamble at all (IIRC, it came in the wake of a technician exploiting a bug by way of a palmed magnet back in the 1990s(?) or so.)
Slashdot Mirror
I live in San Diego.
...therein lies your problem, methinks.
I say this as a 46-year-old... I'm able to find plenty of opportunities with most companies up here in Portland, and regularly get recruiters calling from Utah, Texas, Nevada, numerous East Coast locales... they actually want the experience.
Silicon Valley is chock-full of startups and Type-A corps, and they only want one thing: disposable slaves.
It's far easier to convince a a kid with a still-crisp CS degree (and way too much student loan debt) to work 90 stressful hours a week for a pittance.
It's much harder to convince someone with sufficient experience and a family to do that... life is way too short to become the personal bitch of some IPO-seeking asshole.
In all too many cases, I totally agree. Here in Portland, the whole brogrammer/hipster thing is in full-force... most of the tech types I have worked with in the past (and now) only hang out with other, similarly-successful professionals with similar tastes.
However, this is not always the case. As evidence I present, well, my situation. I commute into the city from a small town in the foothills of the Coastal Range... I rent the place. My neighbor across the street is a single mother who works at the grocery store. Her neighbor works at the local excavation company maintaining heavy equipment. Another neighbor lives on disability and grows a frig-ton of weed in his yard (welcome to Oregon). One is retired but she babysits kids for a bit of extra dosh. Another is busy as hell trying to build up a small landscaping business so I rarely see him these days. Yet another is a postman, spending most of his income on alimony and child support. We all spend quite a bit of time hanging out on each others' porches, BS'ing around an open car hood, sharing local gossip, speculating on each others' hunting/fishing skills, etc.
I think the only neighbor I have who is even close to my income bracket is someone I rarely see and hardly ever talk to... dude's hipster to the core, but not really an asshole. Lives too far off to hang out with easily, so I rarely see the guy.
I'm not really sure. I say this because I've seen what happens when this happens. I watched as a consultant said something like 'OMG let's replace Puppet with Salt!' just because he hated Ruby, loved Python, and happened to use Salt on his personal dev machines. Note that he did all this over my objections.
Long story short, the consultant is long gone. The company he did that to is now desperately looking for someone who knows how to use Salt in a production environment (because the guy they trained to admin a Salt environment had up and left). I suspect that it's going to cost them a very pretty penny to either get one or train one now, and they're not exactly known for generous paychecks.
(I'd left this company long ago, but recruiters gonna recruit, and when I heard from one as he was detailing this predicament, I nearly doubled over laughing.)
Now that PuppetLabs has destroyed everything by making puppet 4 incompatible with puppet 3, I'll take a look at ansible.
Most of that "incompatibility"? It's not like it's that hard to upgrade. To be honest, for most of it? If (for instance) you haven't quoted your strings all this time (and if you haven't kept your booleans non-quoted), then it's more your fault than theirs; clean your shiz up.
(...and seriously, they even include future parser in the later 3.x versions to check for all that shit beforehand, so it's not like nobody got warned for something like 6-9 months in advance...)
that Red Hat is controlling or attempting to control the direction of Linux subtly and not so subtly. Where Red Hat goes, so goes Linux in many ways.
Not exactly seeing folks cast off VMWare for RHEV - and they've had that for awhile now. ;)
It'll be interesting to see what they do with Ansible; I just hope they don't bork it up. I use Puppet mostly everywhere I've been (with one exception that had Chef, but I live in PDX so your mileage may vary), but Ansible does get used here and there, and seems pretty solid.
Maybe it'll be an impetus for Puppetlabs to step up its game (like that C-compiled variant they've been working on that runs hella faster, for starters.)
All true. However, all but one condition is rather limited in scope and depth, with most of it installed in limited metropolitan areas (cities like London excepted).
The cell signal is about the only thing that can be truly, well, sorta tracked... depending on how locked-down your phone is and what you have turned on. If you have GPS running and the world's loosest permissions, yeah you can be tracked to the square meter. If you have reasonable privacy controls turned on and GPS off unless absolutely needed, the most they can get at any one time is triangulated from the towers - after a subpoena is granted to get that info. Note that even this triangulation doesn't work so hot once you get out past the suburbs and into the sticks...
The ideal? Given that parts of my own commute has zero bars on any phone and runs through mountainous terrain, well, good luck with that.
So no matter what we are going to attach cars and the "street" to the Internet? That's a good idea?
This is the crux of what I'm thinking. Then again, why is it such a good idea to hard-wire a car with network connectivity in the first place?
What I mean is, why not build something that you can plug a phone into and use the phone's connection (assuming you need 4G that damned badly in your car)? Rig the bluetooth in said car so that you have to specifically authorize a given phone, and you're done... Hell, my wife's 3-year-old Kia Soul does this.
This way you don't have the stupid planned obsolescence... in a friggin' *car*.
True to a point, but the costs in those costs are one-time (as opposed to ongoing), tend to pay themselves back in other aspects (such as longevity), and don't involve the loss of privacy along the way.
Call the paywall a tax on network illiteracy?
In all seriousness though, it is evolving, albeit slowly. Take for instance the experts-exchange.com website. Up until recently, you just open the Google cached page and scrolled to the bottom, where you saw the entire conversation. That changed sometime last year (two years ago? I forget.)
But yeah, I'm sure that content-sellers will still by necessity leave a hole open somewhere for a good long time - you just have to figure out where that hole is (usually by mimicking Googlebot, etc) and pop in if you want to see what's inside w/o the need for paying up.
I am curious as to how the pr0n sites deal with it, though - the curiousity stems from the fact that the competent/popular ones were traditionally at the forefront of anti-circumvention measures.
It gets even worse, if you're on rural internet (which is often capped pretty hard) - definitely not fun to watch one's bandwidth cap approach even faster on a monthly basis. My solution? Delenda Windows Est - I don't feel like paying extra in ancillary costs just to use a friggin' OS.
...even in the latter case, a 'doze VM with networking disabled will run that precious little snowflake app. I've done that for years to run old CG applications that I can't bring myself to part with (well, down to one CG app for UV Mapping tweaks, but still...)
GP most likely meant that you set up a box running a transparent proxy in your house (running NotWindows(R), natch), force all traffic to go through it, then put your whitelists/hosts/etc on that.
Oh lord yes... and don't get me started on the need to compile half the binaries you wanted/needed, not to mention the dependency chains from Hell that you occasionally stumbled across.
Today, most binaries install with just a click or two. You don't have to beg a publisher to come out with a Linux version of something (because it's either already there, you run it with WINE, or you just run it in a VM).
As for Linux on the Desktop? Nowadays, the "desktop" is irrelevant - outside of us geeks, hardcore gamers and the occasional impoverished family? Everyone else uses laptops or tablets nowadays - some of the younger folks don't really go beyond their smartphone. Hell, I use my last desktop as a home server for backups, printing, media, and general mass storage. I gave away my old dual-G5 PowerMac and junked my white-box gaming rig eons ago... and my power bill is grateful for it. I use my MBP laptop and my wife uses an iPad, no sweat. I'm looking to replace my last remaining desktop, but this time it's going to be a hyper-efficient shoebox with a bit of CPU, a bit of RAM, and a shitload of storage. Home server and all that.
I may bother building a gaming rig while I'm at it, but honestly I've got too many other hobbies nowadays to bother (not to mention that my home is Windows-free... why would I want to screw that up?)
Anyrate... desktop? Yeah, I remember those days. I doubt they'll exist for much longer, though.
This, right here.
Before Facebook and PMs, there was the rumor mill. Anyone who has lived in a small rural town grows up instinctively knowing this. Of course everyone publicly scolded the unnamed-but-known-to-all town gossips - but they had all the juicy bits that kept everyone else entertained/titillated/shocked, so it was all passed around on the down-low anyway.
Perversely, you get more privacy in the big city, because there, folks don't give a shit about their neighbors beyond some small circle, and there's too many to keep track of if they did.
Except totalitarians aren't going around shooting up schoolrooms or theaters.
Hint: They don't have to, not when they can march you out to the edge of town, line you and your family up alongside a handy trench, and *then* shoot you in a more orderly manner.
My definition of DevOps is: DevOps is the process of removing all friction between the developer and customer value.
You need to treat friction as technical debt: file a bug and work on it!
Quoted for visibility.
I just assumed it was a way of differentiating the old IT guy who wrote hundreds of unmaintainable scripts to support his or her complicated web of ad hoc infrastructure from the new guy who understands sane development practices.
Yes, and no.
The 'new guy' is finding a way to take all of that scripting, making it consistent and maintainable, then using it in a way to automate the shit out of as much as possible.
Many of the results are apparent even now - CI/CD that can (in competently-run cases) remove the need for outage/go-live windows just because somebody wants to patch something or add a feature. Need 30 new servers to bolster the web farm? No problem - less than 30 minutes later, there they are - running and identically configured. Some jackass accidentally turns a server into a snowflake? Fixed five minutes later, automatically. Dev team is coming up with something new? Let the DevOps guy handle integrating it to the infrastructure and in enforcing IT standards so that you don't have to. While he's there, he can act as a liaison between the dev teams and the infrastructure guys. Something breaks at 3am due to shit code... guess who is going to know that, and get it fixed, way faster than the typical server monkey?
It's not a silver bullet, but damn it works well when it's built well.
Here's the trick - the sysadmins are not obsolete (but there won't be a need for nearly as many of them). The devs are not obsolete (but now they can do more with what they have). Also note that you don't need a massive cfengine/puppet farm in every company... it only makes sense under certain circumstances (usually companies who host massive web-based software), and makes none in others.
The old guy stopped learning IT in the 1990s. The new guy understands when you want to run your app in a docker container.
1) Docker is a glorified x86 version of Solaris Zones with a few tricks added on.
2) Docker is not always necessary, useful, or even wanted. Sometimes it gets in the way.
3) There are a few cases where Docker is nice to have, and even useful... but outside of a dev's laptop, they are few and far between, as it should be.
(...now Foreman + vSphere? That can get useful in a hurry.)
Otherwise, first sentence? Not always. I was a sysadmin in the 1990s... Now I script, automate, play babysitter, troubleshoot, pimp-slap the occasional junior admin or dev when necessary, and generally do everything I can to automate the shit out of everything that can sanely be automated. That last part scares both dev and sysadmin alike (and not a few network admins), but it's merely evolution. Anything less is just a buzzword. ;)
I believe that some (most?) models do come with locking mechanisms, if only for safety/liability reasons.
It's a simple supply and demand problem. It would be like running out of handicapped spaces, and you're pissed about the idiots who bought handicapped equipped vans.
Umm, no. Unlike buying an EV, being handicapped isn't really a choice.
When the fix is so simple, and can be monetized, and app driven as well, the amount of Slashsillieness applied is a bit funny.
Agreed. Wanna charge up? get out your credit card. Otherwise learn to plan your route accordingly.
Dunno... up here in Portland, I've lost count of the prime parking 'chargers only 'cuz we're teh environmentalz!!!!' spots that sit empty most of the time, even during peak shopping/working hours.
Wouldn't mind having the EV owners pay for the privilege, though, because if they don't, the rest of us do (the stores aren't installing the things out of the goodness of their hearts, you know, and they have to recoup the costs somewhere).
1) I don't care what RMS does with his toenails... it's his code and writing that I care about.
2) Who ever said that Torvalds "never does wrong"? Dude's not perfect, but he's managed to keep the kernel going strong this far. By comparison, what have you done?
Given the downmods each of us got in the pile, it seems this is a contentious issue.
Personally, I disagree with your assessment, but that said, I am aware that one person's fair assessment followed by a harsher and unequivocal reply if the assessment is rejected, may easily be seen by another as undue abuse.
I make no apologies for the list, because it reminds me exactly of a typical USAF flightline. Doing something dumb or misguided will get you a direct and to-the-point talking-to; first logical and fair, but increasingly harsher if you continue to resist even listening.
The reasons why are different but just as serious: in the kernel, screw-ups in design and/or direction can eventually destroy the kernel's usefulness and flexibility. On the flightline, screwups in procedure or behavior will eventually get you killed.
The harshness against any whining and/or backtalk in either case is not just someone being a turd - it's a reminder that there are reasons for things being as they are, and any proposed changes had better have a damned good reason up-front.
HTH a little.
Agreed. The only machine-type game that has any kind of consistent hope is playing odd/even on a roulette wheel with a single "0", which gives you a 48.6% (or so) chance of winning (a "00" on the wheel drops your chances to to 47.4%). Any other game that uses a machine will only get worse from there.
At least with single-deck poker (and no card-counters) you have some sort of chance... but only if you know what you're doing and are more skilled than your opponents.
Actually, since the information they have is essentially the same, it's more like a slot machine tech working at one casino making slot bets at another. There's still a chance that the guy will lose, but his odds are way better than most, especially if he knows of certain bugs in certain machines and can leverage them.
It's a big reason why folks like the Nevada Gaming Commission demand that technicians not gamble at all (IIRC, it came in the wake of a technician exploiting a bug by way of a palmed magnet back in the 1990s(?) or so.)