Not a tall tale. Then again, this is the same in-law who bought a five-bedroom house for $1M in the Gilroy foothills (30 miles south of Silicon Valley) that had a 20-foot tall wire fence to keep the mountain lions out of the backyard.
[...] troll.
Thank you for your confession, as I only troll trolls on Slashdot.
I see several IBM-ers on my LinkedIn saying they were recently laid off.
I had an in-law who got laid off as a full time employee and then got rehired as a consultant by IBM, making more money and working fewer hours than before.
I'm 47 and work in government IT. Most of my coworkers are in their 60's and 70's. As long as Microsoft products exist in the enterprise space, no one is retiring soon.
I once got fired from a web design company, where I was working as a web designer, because every time the boss came around to snoop over my shoulder, he noticed I had a web browser open to some website, and clearly wasn't doing any work.
I worked at a company where management installed software that allows them to look at any desktop in the company. One day my manager came running over because I had Amazon opened in a web browser on my desktop. He started to telling me that I could be written up for browsing the Internet until he noticed that I had a breakfast burrito from the roach coach in hand. Company policy does allow employees to browse the Internet during breaks. I told him to bugger off. Since the company next door had an open wireless access point, nearly everyone got a PDA to browse the Internet on without alerting management.
Asymmetric warfare... just like the many small speedy boats used by the iranian navy vs. big cruisers, aircraft carriers etc. of the US Navy and allies in the persian gulf.
Or mines. Nothing inspires more confidence than escorting U.S. Navy warships following an oil tanker into the Persian Gulf because there wasn't enough minesweepers available.
15,000, actually. Or just 1,500 and spend the remaining $2,7M on booze for the victory party.
A $20 drone would be smaller than a $200 drone and may not be a big enough target for a Patriot missile to lock on. Launching 15,000 drones might be a logistical nightmare for the attacker.
I had a manager who wanted me to be his drinking buddy and friend after work. I don't drink (I go through a six-pack in six months) and had enough friends outside of work. He accused me of not being a team player and I accused him of being unprofessional. No one else in the department wanted to be his drinking buddy. After trying to get his boss fired in an epic management battle, he got fired for gross misconduct. Since then I'll bail out of any job interview where the hiring manager indicates that he wants a drinking buddy and friend after work. These people are always shocked that someone might object on professional grounds.
If you think that all you actually do is coding, then either someone else is doing the programming and you're just doing the job of a data entry clerk, or you're clueless about Software Engineering and good design, and/or you are missing a whole lot of understanding about what you're actually being paid to do.
I don't think you will find too many Software Engineers coding a PowerShell script to ping 80,000+ workstations and write the results to a spreadsheet.
That "Level-entry" salary of 30k in SV is quite unbelievable.
That's $30k for certified techs. Uncertified techs make minimum wage ($20K per year). You may find it unbelievable but I worked those wages at the beginning of my technical career.
I live in the midwest where 120k can get you a 2000 sq.ft. house with an acre and the entry level salary for techs that can do desktop and network support is 45k.
No employer has ever offered to move me out to the Midwest.
If that is your metric for a "not bad" OS then what does a "bad" OS look like?
Running the OS on minimum hardware spec and then discovering that it runs slow with Minesweeper. Minimum hardware spec is a marketing department lie. Always go for the recommended hardware spec or better.
Any other OS made in the last 15 years seems to be able to do fine with a dual core processor and 1.5GB of RAM for web browsing except Windows.
Hardware is cheap. Live a little. I got a new motherboard for $50, an AMD eight-core processor for $100, and 8GB RAM for $50. On the opposite extreme, I got an Intel dual-core Dell laptop for $200, SSD for $50 and 8GB RAM for $50. Both runs Windows 10 just fine.
Ye gods. What company or institution still had Token Ring in place as recently as 13 years ago? I thought all of that had vanished with the miles of 10base2 and coax.
Stock brokerage company. For financial transactions, Token Ring was adequate. When the powers to be decided that everyone should watch a financial TV channel from their desktop, they had to switch over to Ethernet for more bandwidth. The building itself was brand new and wired for Ethernet, but the company had coaxial cable installed. I guess that was cheaper than getting Token Ring switches that accepted twisted pair cables. The Token Ring cards could accept either coaxial or twisted pair.
So two high school graduates who never learned token ring didn't know how to setup or convert token ring environments.
They got an instruction sheet with a half-dozen steps. The last step is to verify that the Ethernet cable connection was working was to view the TV video app. They didn't complete that last step. If they did, they would have caught their mistake of plugging the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring card instead of the motherboard Ethernet port.
But the old man who took a course and paid for it does?
I can follow instructions. I can also tell the difference between coaxial and twisted pair connectors on a Token Ring card, and an Ethernet (twisted pair) connector on the motherboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Found the big city slicker.
I live in San Jose, the third largest city in California and the tenth largest city in the U.S. So, yeah, I guess I'm a big city slicker.
Are you going to the alamo drafthouse type theaters and ordering a pitcher of beer, or something?
If I drink in public, it's because someone else is driving, I'm having a large steak and it's amber ale. The last time that happened was in Las Vegas.
Yep, we have stopped going to the theatre for most movies.
Going out to the movies is the only time I get out of the house. Otherwise, I'm staring at my computer screen while working on my $1B app idea.
Perhaps you should layoff the popcorn?
I can only afford a large drink these days.
It now cost $35 per person for ticket and popcorn to see a late night movie.
You tell a lot of tall tales [...]
Not a tall tale. Then again, this is the same in-law who bought a five-bedroom house for $1M in the Gilroy foothills (30 miles south of Silicon Valley) that had a 20-foot tall wire fence to keep the mountain lions out of the backyard.
[...] troll.
Thank you for your confession, as I only troll trolls on Slashdot.
I see several IBM-ers on my LinkedIn saying they were recently laid off.
I had an in-law who got laid off as a full time employee and then got rehired as a consultant by IBM, making more money and working fewer hours than before.
[...] but now(!) is also too old to work in tech.
Define "too old" to work in tech?
I'm 47 and work in government IT. Most of my coworkers are in their 60's and 70's. As long as Microsoft products exist in the enterprise space, no one is retiring soon.
Well damn, too bad there's no way to stop companies from filing people full of pesticides, hormones, and lab chemicals.
I don't think Trump has the FDA slated for elimination in the 2018 FY budget. Maybe next year.
I guess you'll just have to live with everyone getting uglier, stupider, and more conservative.
FTFY
There's still no chicken in chicken nuggets.
You've drifted into management speak. Impossible means impossible. You can't do impossible tasks because they're impossible.
Not for a miracle worker.
I once got fired from a web design company, where I was working as a web designer, because every time the boss came around to snoop over my shoulder, he noticed I had a web browser open to some website, and clearly wasn't doing any work.
I worked at a company where management installed software that allows them to look at any desktop in the company. One day my manager came running over because I had Amazon opened in a web browser on my desktop. He started to telling me that I could be written up for browsing the Internet until he noticed that I had a breakfast burrito from the roach coach in hand. Company policy does allow employees to browse the Internet during breaks. I told him to bugger off. Since the company next door had an open wireless access point, nearly everyone got a PDA to browse the Internet on without alerting management.
I stand corrected. I had to enable digit grouping on Microsoft Calculator to notice the missing zero in my calculations.
Asymmetric warfare... just like the many small speedy boats used by the iranian navy vs. big cruisers, aircraft carriers etc. of the US Navy and allies in the persian gulf.
Or mines. Nothing inspires more confidence than escorting U.S. Navy warships following an oil tanker into the Persian Gulf because there wasn't enough minesweepers available.
15,000, actually. Or just 1,500 and spend the remaining $2,7M on booze for the victory party.
A $20 drone would be smaller than a $200 drone and may not be a big enough target for a Patriot missile to lock on. Launching 15,000 drones might be a logistical nightmare for the attacker.
[...] for companies that cant afford Patriot Missiles?
The last thing we need is to have companies, most likely corporations, arming themselves with Patriot missiles.
For the price of a Patriot missile, the enemy could have bought 1,500 drones to overwhelm air defenses with multiple targets.
If you want to be the hero in the department, clean up other people's messes — the impossible jobs that no one else in the department wants to handle.
I had a manager who wanted me to be his drinking buddy and friend after work. I don't drink (I go through a six-pack in six months) and had enough friends outside of work. He accused me of not being a team player and I accused him of being unprofessional. No one else in the department wanted to be his drinking buddy. After trying to get his boss fired in an epic management battle, he got fired for gross misconduct. Since then I'll bail out of any job interview where the hiring manager indicates that he wants a drinking buddy and friend after work. These people are always shocked that someone might object on professional grounds.
Ugh. Shit like that is why I won't even consider any Microsoft-based jobs.
Microsoft has indirectly been paying my salary for the last 20+ years. I doubt that will change for the next 20+ years.
If you think that all you actually do is coding, then either someone else is doing the programming and you're just doing the job of a data entry clerk, or you're clueless about Software Engineering and good design, and/or you are missing a whole lot of understanding about what you're actually being paid to do.
I don't think you will find too many Software Engineers coding a PowerShell script to ping 80,000+ workstations and write the results to a spreadsheet.
That "Level-entry" salary of 30k in SV is quite unbelievable.
That's $30k for certified techs. Uncertified techs make minimum wage ($20K per year). You may find it unbelievable but I worked those wages at the beginning of my technical career.
I live in the midwest where 120k can get you a 2000 sq.ft. house with an acre and the entry level salary for techs that can do desktop and network support is 45k.
No employer has ever offered to move me out to the Midwest.
If that is your metric for a "not bad" OS then what does a "bad" OS look like?
Running the OS on minimum hardware spec and then discovering that it runs slow with Minesweeper. Minimum hardware spec is a marketing department lie. Always go for the recommended hardware spec or better.
Any other OS made in the last 15 years seems to be able to do fine with a dual core processor and 1.5GB of RAM for web browsing except Windows.
Hardware is cheap. Live a little. I got a new motherboard for $50, an AMD eight-core processor for $100, and 8GB RAM for $50. On the opposite extreme, I got an Intel dual-core Dell laptop for $200, SSD for $50 and 8GB RAM for $50. Both runs Windows 10 just fine.
Ye gods. What company or institution still had Token Ring in place as recently as 13 years ago? I thought all of that had vanished with the miles of 10base2 and coax.
Stock brokerage company. For financial transactions, Token Ring was adequate. When the powers to be decided that everyone should watch a financial TV channel from their desktop, they had to switch over to Ethernet for more bandwidth. The building itself was brand new and wired for Ethernet, but the company had coaxial cable installed. I guess that was cheaper than getting Token Ring switches that accepted twisted pair cables. The Token Ring cards could accept either coaxial or twisted pair.
An extra 60 bucks! Wowzers!
An extra 90 bucks (time-and-a-half was $22.50).
So two high school graduates who never learned token ring didn't know how to setup or convert token ring environments.
They got an instruction sheet with a half-dozen steps. The last step is to verify that the Ethernet cable connection was working was to view the TV video app. They didn't complete that last step. If they did, they would have caught their mistake of plugging the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring card instead of the motherboard Ethernet port.
But the old man who took a course and paid for it does?
I can follow instructions. I can also tell the difference between coaxial and twisted pair connectors on a Token Ring card, and an Ethernet (twisted pair) connector on the motherboard.