Recently the USPA was talking about stuff that kills skydivers. It's almost never just one mistake. It's a chain of mistakes where one single good decision anywhere in that chain would break the chain and prevent entirely preventable deaths. In the case of this story, if it had actually happened, which it didn't, the decisions made to violate best practices all along the chain (IE, running your bash scripts as root or as any user ID that has authority to delete anything on the file system, not pushing just pushing your backup data to isolated storage, not having numbered sequential backups, etc) would be so egregious that the story would simply be an example of Darwin at work. The conversation would go "Oh hey, did you hear about that guy who designed his system so badly that he was able to delete the whole fucking thing with one mistyped command? Yeah, the council of sysadmins voted to kill him. Said it was for the good of the species."
Funnily, none of those things on their own will actually kill your productivity. What will is jumping on the bandwagon of the month without giving everyone time to get used to whatever process you put in place. And the thing about organized crime is, if your manager is bad, you just kill them. So I suspect that a lot of organized criminal enterprises might actually end up being nicer workplace environments than many of the companies that I've worked for in the past. And although their retirement packages might suck, they couldn't be any worse than corporate America right now.
Ugh. It's not even that. Couple years ago I got pulled into a job maintaining some moldy old X11 code. I mean shit from the Motif/CDE days. I was curious about updating the UI bits, so I looked into the current state of affairs. The only thing that's really changed in the couple of decades since I last looked at X11 programming was QT, and if you want to use QT, you have to drink ALL their kool aid. We were specifically running the X11 program on a server and pushing windows across the network to Windows boxes running Hummingbird, which only made matters worse. That's a use case everyone says doesn't matter, but which a lot of companies are still using (apparently.)
One thing I did see was that every few years someone gets a bug up their ass about how shitty X11 is and tries to make a replacement for it. Their replacement usually ends up having fewer features or more complexity. Usually both. And also never gets adopted by anyone.
Until this situation changes, Linux on the desktop isn't going to go anywhere.
Damn it Google, just pick a fucking language already and make it an option as an alternate to Javascript on the browser. Anything strongly typed and notably lacking in magic goddamn bullshit (Looking at YOU, Ruby) would be better than what we have now.
They saw Futurama's eyePhone episode and decided to get the drop on Apple. Little do they know, Mom's Friendly Robot Company will acquire them both in the near future.
You could get a whole plate of deep-fried shrimp and some pretty good horseradish seafood sauce for cheap in their cafeteria in North Carolina. That was actually a pretty big incentive to show up for work.
I did some contracting work for them in the '90's but thought they'd all been devoured by rabid weasels after GE Finance went away. The fact that many of my old appliances has their logo on them is a complete coincidence. So, what's ol' Generous Electric been up to, lately?
Either our corruption laws are good enough, or we're a lot better at hiding our shit. Or maybe you just openly form a corporation here and blatantly set up your tax haven office with 1 guy in Ireland. Perhaps a combination of all three.
Mmm. Looking at the odds, Cruz takes the Republican nomination in a contested election, Hillary beats Sanders 51% to 49% and Trump/Sanders goes on to beat Hillary and Cruz in a massive write-in landslide in the general election.
I reckon it'd allow it to cut loose on its own. That might be the big win there. The couple of times I've had problems with my parachute, it was pretty clear immediately that something was wrong. But we do get the occasional fatality where someone thought they could fix it and ended up fighting it into the ground. Of course, that's all fun jumping. Things are a bit different in the military world.
For most people, even if they identify with a religion, it's not a huge part of their lives. They mostly just want to live their lives and not have to worry about exploding on any given day. Or getting shot. Those hopes are easily dashed by a tiny percentage of assholes. Occasionally it's the assholes in power, sometimes it's just other assholes. Doesn't matter if the assholes are fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians or the Chicago city council. What the people need is a clear identification of the assholes causing their misery. Once they realize the assholes are the source of all the shit they have to deal with on a daily basis, I'm sure they'd be happy to fuck those assholes on their own. Leastwise, I like to think so.
Satisfaction with Congress won't do much good if there's not a viable replacement. Democrats are probably not going to kick a Democrat out of office and Republicans are probably not going to kick a Republican out of office. Third party candidates will continue to see single-digit numbers in the polls, if they are lucky. IIRC one of the more popular third parties in the last state election here got.6% of the vote. And that's in a state where Independents outnumber Democrats and Republicans, combined. Pretty much the only way you'll see a swing is if discouraged voters stay home and don't vote.
In Trump's case, if he doesn't get the nomination he can always take his toys and his racist followers and screw up the presidential election for the Republicans. Depending on how vindictive he's feeling, he could also screw up the Congressional ones for them. Seems like a shitty position for Republican leadership to be in, but that's kind of what they get for not taking him seriously six months ago and coming up with some more appetizing candidates. I mean really, another Bush, the chick who drove HP into the ground and a handful of other bland dudes that no one likes very much? Fuck those guys.
Oh well, at least we know with Trump's popularity that it's the people speaking and not the money of a couple of cocks from Witicha. No matter how much money gets involved and no matter how shady the back room dealings are, it won't be enough to affect the course of this election.
I was just thinking that someone really should write a bot that just spews the stream of consciousness straight from 4chan. I'm sure Microsoft will be pleased with the results. Especially since the last bot they turned on more or less did exactly that.
They lied about just about everything this time around -- the number of phones they wanted unlocked, the fact that there wasn't any alternative to having Apple write some new software for it, whatever that shit was about a deadly cyber pathogen on the phone, and it still looked pretty bad for them. Clearly they just didn't lie enough. Next time they should say that if the phone's not unlocked, everyone will get super AIDs. Maybe that would be enough for them to get their way with their clearly illegal and unconstitutional demands.
What? The whole POINT of the for-profit prison system is to maximize profits. Charging ridiculous rates for phone calls is clearly a win-win for them. If the prisoner happens to commit another crime and wind up back in prison, well, CHA-CHING!
Don't like it? Well Bernie's promised to put an end to the for-profit prison industry. No one else seems to be campaigning on it.
Oh you must have been working for the last company I worked with. They had some left over schwag from the golden days when they were still doing the convention circuit that they handed out one day. Then HR read us the riot act about wearing the comapny T-Shirts we'd gotten. "Kidnapping risk," they said. I wanted to do a PSA for them. Like "Please don't kidnap their employees. All the folks who actually knew how to accomplish anything left the company when it went public. Between the culture of ineptitude implemented by the new CEO and the brain drain to other companies, you'd just set your own nation-state's program back a decade if you actually got anything out of their guys. Try kidnapping some Google employees instead. Thanks!" Rumor has it some Russian hackers had hacked in once, and felt so bad about what they found there that they actually fixed several of the systems before logging out. But hey, at least the company was able to pay a huge amount for a shiny new headquarters. I guess they're actually starting to move into it now that they've taken care of that little asbestos problem they were having.
Slashdot Mirror
Recently the USPA was talking about stuff that kills skydivers. It's almost never just one mistake. It's a chain of mistakes where one single good decision anywhere in that chain would break the chain and prevent entirely preventable deaths. In the case of this story, if it had actually happened, which it didn't, the decisions made to violate best practices all along the chain (IE, running your bash scripts as root or as any user ID that has authority to delete anything on the file system, not pushing just pushing your backup data to isolated storage, not having numbered sequential backups, etc) would be so egregious that the story would simply be an example of Darwin at work. The conversation would go "Oh hey, did you hear about that guy who designed his system so badly that he was able to delete the whole fucking thing with one mistyped command? Yeah, the council of sysadmins voted to kill him. Said it was for the good of the species."
Funnily, none of those things on their own will actually kill your productivity. What will is jumping on the bandwagon of the month without giving everyone time to get used to whatever process you put in place. And the thing about organized crime is, if your manager is bad, you just kill them. So I suspect that a lot of organized criminal enterprises might actually end up being nicer workplace environments than many of the companies that I've worked for in the past. And although their retirement packages might suck, they couldn't be any worse than corporate America right now.
One thing I did see was that every few years someone gets a bug up their ass about how shitty X11 is and tries to make a replacement for it. Their replacement usually ends up having fewer features or more complexity. Usually both. And also never gets adopted by anyone.
Until this situation changes, Linux on the desktop isn't going to go anywhere.
This was a marketing maneuver all along, wasn't it?
Damn it Google, just pick a fucking language already and make it an option as an alternate to Javascript on the browser. Anything strongly typed and notably lacking in magic goddamn bullshit (Looking at YOU, Ruby) would be better than what we have now.
They saw Futurama's eyePhone episode and decided to get the drop on Apple. Little do they know, Mom's Friendly Robot Company will acquire them both in the near future.
You could get a whole plate of deep-fried shrimp and some pretty good horseradish seafood sauce for cheap in their cafeteria in North Carolina. That was actually a pretty big incentive to show up for work.
But Grindr is still OK, right?
Probably, if you can actually fit it in the blender. If it's thin enough, you might be able to fold it before blending.
I did some contracting work for them in the '90's but thought they'd all been devoured by rabid weasels after GE Finance went away. The fact that many of my old appliances has their logo on them is a complete coincidence. So, what's ol' Generous Electric been up to, lately?
Either our corruption laws are good enough, or we're a lot better at hiding our shit. Or maybe you just openly form a corporation here and blatantly set up your tax haven office with 1 guy in Ireland. Perhaps a combination of all three.
Mmm. Looking at the odds, Cruz takes the Republican nomination in a contested election, Hillary beats Sanders 51% to 49% and Trump/Sanders goes on to beat Hillary and Cruz in a massive write-in landslide in the general election.
I reckon it'd allow it to cut loose on its own. That might be the big win there. The couple of times I've had problems with my parachute, it was pretty clear immediately that something was wrong. But we do get the occasional fatality where someone thought they could fix it and ended up fighting it into the ground. Of course, that's all fun jumping. Things are a bit different in the military world.
For most people, even if they identify with a religion, it's not a huge part of their lives. They mostly just want to live their lives and not have to worry about exploding on any given day. Or getting shot. Those hopes are easily dashed by a tiny percentage of assholes. Occasionally it's the assholes in power, sometimes it's just other assholes. Doesn't matter if the assholes are fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians or the Chicago city council. What the people need is a clear identification of the assholes causing their misery. Once they realize the assholes are the source of all the shit they have to deal with on a daily basis, I'm sure they'd be happy to fuck those assholes on their own. Leastwise, I like to think so.
In Trump's case, if he doesn't get the nomination he can always take his toys and his racist followers and screw up the presidential election for the Republicans. Depending on how vindictive he's feeling, he could also screw up the Congressional ones for them. Seems like a shitty position for Republican leadership to be in, but that's kind of what they get for not taking him seriously six months ago and coming up with some more appetizing candidates. I mean really, another Bush, the chick who drove HP into the ground and a handful of other bland dudes that no one likes very much? Fuck those guys.
Oh well, at least we know with Trump's popularity that it's the people speaking and not the money of a couple of cocks from Witicha. No matter how much money gets involved and no matter how shady the back room dealings are, it won't be enough to affect the course of this election.
All the speed, efficiency and security of Microsoft developers combined with the GUI design acumen of the guys who made Unity. What could go wrong?
I was just thinking that someone really should write a bot that just spews the stream of consciousness straight from 4chan. I'm sure Microsoft will be pleased with the results. Especially since the last bot they turned on more or less did exactly that.
No problem! We can just create a cell phone that looks like a gun, so the cops can tell the difference!
They lied about just about everything this time around -- the number of phones they wanted unlocked, the fact that there wasn't any alternative to having Apple write some new software for it, whatever that shit was about a deadly cyber pathogen on the phone, and it still looked pretty bad for them. Clearly they just didn't lie enough. Next time they should say that if the phone's not unlocked, everyone will get super AIDs. Maybe that would be enough for them to get their way with their clearly illegal and unconstitutional demands.
Should have just stuck to quietly replacing every instance of the word "strategic" printed with the word "satanic."
Don't like it? Well Bernie's promised to put an end to the for-profit prison industry. No one else seems to be campaigning on it.
Oh you must have been working for the last company I worked with. They had some left over schwag from the golden days when they were still doing the convention circuit that they handed out one day. Then HR read us the riot act about wearing the comapny T-Shirts we'd gotten. "Kidnapping risk," they said. I wanted to do a PSA for them. Like "Please don't kidnap their employees. All the folks who actually knew how to accomplish anything left the company when it went public. Between the culture of ineptitude implemented by the new CEO and the brain drain to other companies, you'd just set your own nation-state's program back a decade if you actually got anything out of their guys. Try kidnapping some Google employees instead. Thanks!" Rumor has it some Russian hackers had hacked in once, and felt so bad about what they found there that they actually fixed several of the systems before logging out. But hey, at least the company was able to pay a huge amount for a shiny new headquarters. I guess they're actually starting to move into it now that they've taken care of that little asbestos problem they were having.
Ficus tree leans a bit too far left for my liking.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't actually born in the USA. I think he was born in Loompa land. It's pretty clear that he's a Ooompa Loompa.
I hear Vladimir Putin kind of likes the guy.