If you're willing to divulge, since you mentioned that you'd only lose about $100 if you needed to take a day off, what's a ballpark average of how much you make for an hour of work? Are we talking $100 / hour or like (what I suspect is the case) $15-$20 / hour? If you've done all the work to get where you're at, I'm assuming you've figured out how to make the process pretty efficient; if, after having spent the time to learn and implement a reasonably streamlined approach (for which we'll assume you were paid nothing at the time but get it back efficiency-wise for all future content) you're only pulling down $20 / hour for your work, how do these guys that haven't put in that investment think they can at all do this full time as a primary income source?
It reminds me of something I heard a while ago that most drug dealers actually make less than minimum wage when you break it down - sure, some make enough to justify the risk and all that comes with it, but for 99% of the drug dealers out there, they'd be better off taking a minimum wage job and also get the upshot of not taking on the risk for such little reward. It seems to me that I must not know enough about the industry to understand what the strategy is here that gives these content creators the notion that they can make a full time living from this.
Pluto will be "back" as a planet? Funny, that. It never ceased to be one so far as I was ever concerned. I'm glad valuable time was spent catching back up to what I've known.
This is one of the "many more measurements". Basically, there are two traditionally two ways to measure the Hubble constant: from supernovae, and from the CMB. Recently (i.e. the past few years) these two sets of measurements have disagreed about the value, with the CMB measurement shooting lower, and supernovae shooting higher, and both sides of the debate having good reasons to doubt the other. This looks to be a method independent of both of the others, which is a really good thing. Not that the linked article explains this, or gives a link to the damned paper which would probably explain this itself.
44 Miles / second / megaparsec isn't a number that I at all have the slightest frame of reference for in relation to the size and vastness of the units we're talking here and I kind of doubt I'm the only one that doesn't even know where to begin getting a more firm grasp on this topic. Since I'm not at all well versed in this topic and wouldn't know if I looked up faulty estimates, could you enlighten me to the best of your understanding as to how large the discrepancy between the two measurements of the Doppler effect is and what the ramifications of the difference is? Are we talking an order of magnitude, or like, a _relatively_ small number but with the difference being whether the universe will continue to expand or run out of inertia and come back in for a Big Crunch?
+1. Units are metadata if they're not part of the object model/structure. The variable name should tell me what a thing is, not how it's configured. There's absolutely nothing about a variable name that guarantees any compile or runtime safeties to be sure that what you think you're dealing with is what you're dealing with.
I typically make my units (or "non-object-model" metadata when appropriate) a member of the class/struct/whatevs as an enum. As a bonus, in most modern languages your enum is a class that can be extended to have methods/functions so you can add support for type/unit conversion into the enum itself. The icing on the cake is that you can write fast, scalable, easily readable code by checking the units in a switch statement where you might otherwise be inclined to have a bunch of "if" statements that become messy as you must support additional units.
I'll repeat it because it can't be overstated; the buffer size should have been #defined with a meaningful name. This is a symptom of a lack of self discipline rather than buffers being difficult to code. Whoever wrote that code, and then copied and pasted it rather than creating a new function that accepted parameters for the value(s) that varied, is guaranteed to be the kind of developer that leaves bugs in everything they touch. That code should have been painful for them to write without using a preprocessor #define and then again when copying and pasting code with hard-coded values. IMHO, they either enjoy the pain or don't have the ability to learn from the pain they cause themselves.
FWIW, the GP poster is Matt Dillon. He's a well known FreeBSD/Linux kernel hacker and the founder/maintainer of DragonFly BSD and his list of Nerd Cred is legit and long. I'm sure he's forgotten more about network protocols than I ever knew in spite of my kernel patches and Samba contributions. I'd wager he's painfully aware of the ins-and-outs of NAT and IPv6 at a low level.
Don't get me wrong; that doesn't mean he might not be wrong in his evaluation of the protocol. He'd just be wrong on a much more detailed level than I could comment on with any comfort.:)
Look at LLVM as an instructive example. It's a large complex beast written in heavy C++, but there are bindings for every language you'd ever want to seriously write a compiler in.
Not a great counterexample - The LLVM C bindings are maintained by hand and all of the other bindings are machine-generated from the C bindings.
IIRC, you're involved with LLVM in some way, shape or form. How the heck do you regression test that hand-hacked stuff? I've come to realize lately that even the most trivial of refactorings can be dangerous. I suspect that the reason that the most trivial code changes are so dangerous is because when something seems trivial, we (or more accurately, I) lose perspective sometimes of the big picture and how far out things can be very loosely coupled. I'd be curious to know how you manage that kind of stuff on something that's so difficult to debug when it goes wrong and yet requires hand manipulation of certain things. Surely most of the LLVM guys are smarter than I am and I'm sure it would be automated if there weren't a darn good technical reason to have it that way.
Actually, IMHO, there genuinely is a shocking lack of technically competent managers that can effectively manage. But I also think there's a shocking lack of competent software developers.
IIRC, NET USE has an 80 character string length from the command line interface. It's a stupid limit that doesn't exist in the actual Win32 API, but the way it's exposed from cmd.exe is... special. If anyone is curious, here's the discussion around the max share name lengths, etc. that I added to the Samba CIFS client mount utility and the Linux kernel side code.
How about this scenario; the delete is triggered by events and events can fire other events. Such things can quickly become a huge tree of possible calls where you first have to figure out which listeners are even registering themselves and then figure out if you have a bug in the listener registration before you can even proceed to finding the bug in the callback / trigger / event handler / etc. I've seen uglier call trees and I'm guessing by the top level interface of iTunes that the underlying code can only be a mess.
My mother is going through the same thing in Florida. You should look into whether your state has provisions for a homestead or not. It's possible that you have some protections from losing your home.
Frankly, docker apps are the future of package management. Each app is sandboxed (like a chroot jail), and you can establish firewall-like access to the app for directories, services and such.
I keep reading this and I get the feeling everyone imagines chroot solves something. Compromise a jail, the system (a chroot) is still compromised. The database the chroot connects to might still get dumped.
Are chroots useful? Yes. Is it "more secure?" maybe.
More specifically, chroots are a single layer of security and a robust security scheme should always have multiple layers.
You never take your original job back unless you really can't stand your new one; instead you decline the offer and counter with an offer to be a part time consultant with a minimum number of billing hours per month (at previous salary X2). That being said, if you want to go back, take about 18 months and change jobs about 3 times making sure to increase your salary each time and then go back to the original job and you should be around double your previous salary. Obviously there are marginal returns on the second method once you're nearing the top of your pay scale. But at that stage, you have enough cash, you should be seeking more valuable compensation that doesn't have the drawbacks of liquid cash.
Out here I discovered the best of both worlds; the Twin Cities. Metro area, cheap suburbs, midwestern/European pacing and quality of life with a great tech scene as well as art scene. For icing on the cake, it would take me 15 to 30 minutes to take a bus to the downtown light rail train and that to the international airport for a 45 minute to 1 hour flight to Chicago if I want to catch a ball game and the Twins aren't playing. Realistically, 3 hours and I can fly from Chicago to nearly anywhere non-stop if I got the notion to do it on a whim. Also, the women out here aren't half bad.;)
I ironically just finished my second winter here. I think this is where I'm going to be buried. Hopefully a long time from now, already dead, and not under snow.
Granted, it's an acquired taste and I'm still young enough that the cold doesn't bother me as much, but the summer out here more than makes up for a month where it's legit 35 below 0 (which scale? One, then the other.). I also have the incredible luxury of working from home and underground parking, so the deck might currently be stacked in Minnesota's favor.
I've found the "phrase that pays" for the valley recruiters from fortune 50 companies that place entirely too much value on the things that I don't hold in nearly the same regard as they do; I just reply to their emails these days with (and this is all 100% true), "I have ADD and I cannot focus or do my best work in a noisy environment; I have a second bedroom that's a home office and tailored to my work style and, most importantly, is very quiet and void of distractions. I usually work from home 4 days a week, but have no opposition to my half hour commute to the office when needed, but my number one requirement for writing quality software is a quiet environment to do it from and that's non-negotiable."
Facebook actually replied to an email saying more or less that with, "so, how much do you want?" I didn't bother replying, but the fact that their value system and mine are so vastly different means that I'd never be a good cultural fit. Ditto Amazon, and to a lesser degree Microsoft. Google was reasonable, but I bombed the second interview (my top 3 locations only included the LA area since my sister and her family were living there at the time, Sydney and Dublin were my other two choices). Funny thing is, I don't think any of them could tear me away from the multiple things I absolutely love about my Minneapolis job and location with any amount of money that would be just short of me accepting to pimp myself out against my own desires. And even making half what they're offering out in the midwest when adjusted for cost of living is still a better value proposition before I add on the things that really matter to me.
Artists have a long history of colonizing places that nobody else wants, and then adding value. Locally, we have an abandoned copper mining town that artists reclaimed and made their own, with galleries and restaurants that attract locals and tourists. Displaced artists will move on to the next ghost town.
We gladly accept those artists with talent in the Twin Cities which has a great culture of technology and art. These two things aren't necessarily opposed to each other. In fact, around the world famous Walker, the art district can be more expensive than downtown Minneapolis. The Walker, of course, having the namesake of the lumberjack that funded it and essentially kicked off the art district a few generations ago. I guess, I've come to realize a lot of these issues are cultural rather than specifically geographical.
I'll take the class of old money over noveau riche hipster anytime.
I generally agree with the sentiment; but in my experience noveau riche has a really high turnover rate and sticks out like a sore thumb. Smart money finds a comfortable community below their means (however large their means may be) and keeps a generally low profile while the outrageous slobs burn it all to impress people they don't even enjoy. You kind of have to admire the show from a distance in some weird way.
If the hipsters emulated the old money they'd be able to become the old money that they rail against while not-so-secretly holding a jealous grudge. It's a beautiful disease in action. Problem is, as I alluded to, there's an endless supply of new money with no class.
For my own part, at 31 I've been miserably broke, reasonably well off, and most points in between. Money comes and goes and isn't more than a means to an end. I hope to do well and retire comfortably, but I could think of many ways I could end up broke and happy in the end. I try to do the things that lead to a more reasonable outcome though.;)
Not entirely true; the single thread speed of the processor does matter for the crucial resource that a phone lacks - power capacity. If a core is more efficient per clock (energy wise) and it can execute faster, it gets double the savings in battery life because it can shut park the CPU core faster. Granted, all of these savings are almost immediately eaten up by the size of the screens on modern phones, but I guess you could, by the transitive property of power envelopes, equate better, more efficient single threaded performance to a "free" bump in screen size.
Honestly, for the last five years or so, I've just resigned myself to the fact I need backup batteries and cables everywhere because all my devices just barely make it through a full day on a charge, but that's more a comment on my usage pattern than a knock on the device. When I consider the power I have at my finger tips as compared to my desktop just a decade ago and how much less energy I get this performance for, it's really a bargain to slap down $450 on a phone every two or three years since that was pretty much my desktop upgrade cycle at well over double the cost.
For what it's worth, her son graduated with me and we played soccer together. She was also a neighbor of mine. I didn't really expect someone to so much emotional investment in the least important part of the story. You must be a math teacher.
We're all guilty of having overpowered machines from time to time (because when we need that horsepower, there's no alternative to having it local). In a somewhat related subject, I've got triple monitors that have beautiful color... I assume. They've all got green on transparent consoles on them at about 120 columns wide. It's enough to make a graphic designer cry.
That being said, my laptop is a special order ThinkPad (i7 w/ 8 threads@~3.2GHz, maxed out RAM, 1/2 TB SSD, etc) - I think I get maybe 90 minutes on a 12 cell extended battery and I have docking stations at home and work because all that power means it ain't really portable for most definitions of "portable" (or at least for very long). Also makes a great heater during the Minnesota winter. There's nothing wrong with wanting a powerful machine, so long as you accept the trade offs you're making to have that power.
Indeed; after I dropped out of college I worked full time where I did my internship during college. One day I had a geometry problem that I was writing code for and I couldn't recall too much from my last geometry course but I still had the book. I was at the office most of that night tearing through the book and it hit me like a ton of bricks; math is really a lot of fun! I've been meaning to email my high school geometry instructor to tell her about the event since I was probably her worst student and she'd get a thrill out of the story.
I guess like one of the central themes of Tom Sawyer, if you are told something is hard work, it will be. Conversely, if you're told it's fun, that also rings true. For instance, most games these days are endless grinds sold as fun and we pay for the novelty of getting another chore in life. I actually hate most games until I buckle down and try to make the grind fun. What in the world is wrong with me?
I can burn 10 TB of disk just installing VMs for a test environment (say, a couple of clusters). I snapshot at pre-install, post-install and pre/post test. And that's for simple things like a db cluster, some test data, a couple of servers/clients and an application or three. If one of the VMs is my dev desktop, a reasonable gross rate of churn is probably in the neighborhood of 20 GB/day on that VM alone; when I start running Docker, the disk space just burns.
I work in R&D for a large company that's been a Cisco Gold level partner for 20-something years. Give me some way to contact you and I can probably ping my buddy over in Sales Engineering and get one in a couple of hours if it's a thing that can be gotten (I don't know the first thing about the hardware side of the house, but my friend went from engineering to sales - 'cause money. Can't blame him for doing less work for more pay. Even if I do... often.).
I probably actually have access, but Cisco's site is a disaster to try to navigate and that's just my small part of their dev site. Believe it or not, still better than Avaya's dev/support site. Legit offer if you want to exchange contact info. A couple people on this site have helped me out over the years and I'm fairly sure this is something that I can take care of with an IM and maybe a beer.
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If you're willing to divulge, since you mentioned that you'd only lose about $100 if you needed to take a day off, what's a ballpark average of how much you make for an hour of work? Are we talking $100 / hour or like (what I suspect is the case) $15-$20 / hour? If you've done all the work to get where you're at, I'm assuming you've figured out how to make the process pretty efficient; if, after having spent the time to learn and implement a reasonably streamlined approach (for which we'll assume you were paid nothing at the time but get it back efficiency-wise for all future content) you're only pulling down $20 / hour for your work, how do these guys that haven't put in that investment think they can at all do this full time as a primary income source?
It reminds me of something I heard a while ago that most drug dealers actually make less than minimum wage when you break it down - sure, some make enough to justify the risk and all that comes with it, but for 99% of the drug dealers out there, they'd be better off taking a minimum wage job and also get the upshot of not taking on the risk for such little reward. It seems to me that I must not know enough about the industry to understand what the strategy is here that gives these content creators the notion that they can make a full time living from this.
Perhaps his wrist & forearms are already sore from exercise.
*slow clap* Well played. It would have worked with the double play on "exercise", but that was icing on the cake.
Pluto will be "back" as a planet? Funny, that. It never ceased to be one so far as I was ever concerned. I'm glad valuable time was spent catching back up to what I've known.
This is one of the "many more measurements". Basically, there are two traditionally two ways to measure the Hubble constant: from supernovae, and from the CMB. Recently (i.e. the past few years) these two sets of measurements have disagreed about the value, with the CMB measurement shooting lower, and supernovae shooting higher, and both sides of the debate having good reasons to doubt the other. This looks to be a method independent of both of the others, which is a really good thing. Not that the linked article explains this, or gives a link to the damned paper which would probably explain this itself.
44 Miles / second / megaparsec isn't a number that I at all have the slightest frame of reference for in relation to the size and vastness of the units we're talking here and I kind of doubt I'm the only one that doesn't even know where to begin getting a more firm grasp on this topic. Since I'm not at all well versed in this topic and wouldn't know if I looked up faulty estimates, could you enlighten me to the best of your understanding as to how large the discrepancy between the two measurements of the Doppler effect is and what the ramifications of the difference is? Are we talking an order of magnitude, or like, a _relatively_ small number but with the difference being whether the universe will continue to expand or run out of inertia and come back in for a Big Crunch?
+1. Units are metadata if they're not part of the object model/structure. The variable name should tell me what a thing is, not how it's configured. There's absolutely nothing about a variable name that guarantees any compile or runtime safeties to be sure that what you think you're dealing with is what you're dealing with.
I typically make my units (or "non-object-model" metadata when appropriate) a member of the class/struct/whatevs as an enum. As a bonus, in most modern languages your enum is a class that can be extended to have methods/functions so you can add support for type/unit conversion into the enum itself. The icing on the cake is that you can write fast, scalable, easily readable code by checking the units in a switch statement where you might otherwise be inclined to have a bunch of "if" statements that become messy as you must support additional units.
I'll repeat it because it can't be overstated; the buffer size should have been #defined with a meaningful name. This is a symptom of a lack of self discipline rather than buffers being difficult to code. Whoever wrote that code, and then copied and pasted it rather than creating a new function that accepted parameters for the value(s) that varied, is guaranteed to be the kind of developer that leaves bugs in everything they touch. That code should have been painful for them to write without using a preprocessor #define and then again when copying and pasting code with hard-coded values. IMHO, they either enjoy the pain or don't have the ability to learn from the pain they cause themselves.
FWIW, the GP poster is Matt Dillon. He's a well known FreeBSD/Linux kernel hacker and the founder/maintainer of DragonFly BSD and his list of Nerd Cred is legit and long. I'm sure he's forgotten more about network protocols than I ever knew in spite of my kernel patches and Samba contributions. I'd wager he's painfully aware of the ins-and-outs of NAT and IPv6 at a low level.
Don't get me wrong; that doesn't mean he might not be wrong in his evaluation of the protocol. He'd just be wrong on a much more detailed level than I could comment on with any comfort. :)
Look at LLVM as an instructive example. It's a large complex beast written in heavy C++, but there are bindings for every language you'd ever want to seriously write a compiler in.
Not a great counterexample - The LLVM C bindings are maintained by hand and all of the other bindings are machine-generated from the C bindings.
IIRC, you're involved with LLVM in some way, shape or form. How the heck do you regression test that hand-hacked stuff? I've come to realize lately that even the most trivial of refactorings can be dangerous. I suspect that the reason that the most trivial code changes are so dangerous is because when something seems trivial, we (or more accurately, I) lose perspective sometimes of the big picture and how far out things can be very loosely coupled. I'd be curious to know how you manage that kind of stuff on something that's so difficult to debug when it goes wrong and yet requires hand manipulation of certain things. Surely most of the LLVM guys are smarter than I am and I'm sure it would be automated if there weren't a darn good technical reason to have it that way.
Actually, IMHO, there genuinely is a shocking lack of technically competent managers that can effectively manage. But I also think there's a shocking lack of competent software developers.
IIRC, NET USE has an 80 character string length from the command line interface. It's a stupid limit that doesn't exist in the actual Win32 API, but the way it's exposed from cmd.exe is... special. If anyone is curious, here's the discussion around the max share name lengths, etc. that I added to the Samba CIFS client mount utility and the Linux kernel side code.
How about this scenario; the delete is triggered by events and events can fire other events. Such things can quickly become a huge tree of possible calls where you first have to figure out which listeners are even registering themselves and then figure out if you have a bug in the listener registration before you can even proceed to finding the bug in the callback / trigger / event handler / etc. I've seen uglier call trees and I'm guessing by the top level interface of iTunes that the underlying code can only be a mess.
My mother is going through the same thing in Florida. You should look into whether your state has provisions for a homestead or not. It's possible that you have some protections from losing your home.
Frankly, docker apps are the future of package management. Each app is sandboxed (like a chroot jail), and you can establish firewall-like access to the app for directories, services and such.
I keep reading this and I get the feeling everyone imagines chroot solves something. Compromise a jail, the system (a chroot) is still compromised. The database the chroot connects to might still get dumped.
Are chroots useful? Yes. Is it "more secure?" maybe.
More specifically, chroots are a single layer of security and a robust security scheme should always have multiple layers.
You never take your original job back unless you really can't stand your new one; instead you decline the offer and counter with an offer to be a part time consultant with a minimum number of billing hours per month (at previous salary X2). That being said, if you want to go back, take about 18 months and change jobs about 3 times making sure to increase your salary each time and then go back to the original job and you should be around double your previous salary. Obviously there are marginal returns on the second method once you're nearing the top of your pay scale. But at that stage, you have enough cash, you should be seeking more valuable compensation that doesn't have the drawbacks of liquid cash.
Out here I discovered the best of both worlds; the Twin Cities. Metro area, cheap suburbs, midwestern/European pacing and quality of life with a great tech scene as well as art scene. For icing on the cake, it would take me 15 to 30 minutes to take a bus to the downtown light rail train and that to the international airport for a 45 minute to 1 hour flight to Chicago if I want to catch a ball game and the Twins aren't playing. Realistically, 3 hours and I can fly from Chicago to nearly anywhere non-stop if I got the notion to do it on a whim. Also, the women out here aren't half bad. ;)
I ironically just finished my second winter here. I think this is where I'm going to be buried. Hopefully a long time from now, already dead, and not under snow.
Granted, it's an acquired taste and I'm still young enough that the cold doesn't bother me as much, but the summer out here more than makes up for a month where it's legit 35 below 0 (which scale? One, then the other.). I also have the incredible luxury of working from home and underground parking, so the deck might currently be stacked in Minnesota's favor.
I've found the "phrase that pays" for the valley recruiters from fortune 50 companies that place entirely too much value on the things that I don't hold in nearly the same regard as they do; I just reply to their emails these days with (and this is all 100% true), "I have ADD and I cannot focus or do my best work in a noisy environment; I have a second bedroom that's a home office and tailored to my work style and, most importantly, is very quiet and void of distractions. I usually work from home 4 days a week, but have no opposition to my half hour commute to the office when needed, but my number one requirement for writing quality software is a quiet environment to do it from and that's non-negotiable."
Facebook actually replied to an email saying more or less that with, "so, how much do you want?" I didn't bother replying, but the fact that their value system and mine are so vastly different means that I'd never be a good cultural fit. Ditto Amazon, and to a lesser degree Microsoft. Google was reasonable, but I bombed the second interview (my top 3 locations only included the LA area since my sister and her family were living there at the time, Sydney and Dublin were my other two choices). Funny thing is, I don't think any of them could tear me away from the multiple things I absolutely love about my Minneapolis job and location with any amount of money that would be just short of me accepting to pimp myself out against my own desires. And even making half what they're offering out in the midwest when adjusted for cost of living is still a better value proposition before I add on the things that really matter to me.
Artists have a long history of colonizing places that nobody else wants, and then adding value. Locally, we have an abandoned copper mining town that artists reclaimed and made their own, with galleries and restaurants that attract locals and tourists. Displaced artists will move on to the next ghost town.
We gladly accept those artists with talent in the Twin Cities which has a great culture of technology and art. These two things aren't necessarily opposed to each other. In fact, around the world famous Walker, the art district can be more expensive than downtown Minneapolis. The Walker, of course, having the namesake of the lumberjack that funded it and essentially kicked off the art district a few generations ago. I guess, I've come to realize a lot of these issues are cultural rather than specifically geographical.
I'll take the class of old money over noveau riche hipster anytime.
I generally agree with the sentiment; but in my experience noveau riche has a really high turnover rate and sticks out like a sore thumb. Smart money finds a comfortable community below their means (however large their means may be) and keeps a generally low profile while the outrageous slobs burn it all to impress people they don't even enjoy. You kind of have to admire the show from a distance in some weird way.
;)
If the hipsters emulated the old money they'd be able to become the old money that they rail against while not-so-secretly holding a jealous grudge. It's a beautiful disease in action. Problem is, as I alluded to, there's an endless supply of new money with no class.
For my own part, at 31 I've been miserably broke, reasonably well off, and most points in between. Money comes and goes and isn't more than a means to an end. I hope to do well and retire comfortably, but I could think of many ways I could end up broke and happy in the end. I try to do the things that lead to a more reasonable outcome though.
Not entirely true; the single thread speed of the processor does matter for the crucial resource that a phone lacks - power capacity. If a core is more efficient per clock (energy wise) and it can execute faster, it gets double the savings in battery life because it can shut park the CPU core faster. Granted, all of these savings are almost immediately eaten up by the size of the screens on modern phones, but I guess you could, by the transitive property of power envelopes, equate better, more efficient single threaded performance to a "free" bump in screen size.
Honestly, for the last five years or so, I've just resigned myself to the fact I need backup batteries and cables everywhere because all my devices just barely make it through a full day on a charge, but that's more a comment on my usage pattern than a knock on the device. When I consider the power I have at my finger tips as compared to my desktop just a decade ago and how much less energy I get this performance for, it's really a bargain to slap down $450 on a phone every two or three years since that was pretty much my desktop upgrade cycle at well over double the cost.
For what it's worth, her son graduated with me and we played soccer together. She was also a neighbor of mine. I didn't really expect someone to so much emotional investment in the least important part of the story. You must be a math teacher.
We're all guilty of having overpowered machines from time to time (because when we need that horsepower, there's no alternative to having it local). In a somewhat related subject, I've got triple monitors that have beautiful color... I assume. They've all got green on transparent consoles on them at about 120 columns wide. It's enough to make a graphic designer cry.
That being said, my laptop is a special order ThinkPad (i7 w/ 8 threads@~3.2GHz, maxed out RAM, 1/2 TB SSD, etc) - I think I get maybe 90 minutes on a 12 cell extended battery and I have docking stations at home and work because all that power means it ain't really portable for most definitions of "portable" (or at least for very long). Also makes a great heater during the Minnesota winter. There's nothing wrong with wanting a powerful machine, so long as you accept the trade offs you're making to have that power.
Indeed; after I dropped out of college I worked full time where I did my internship during college. One day I had a geometry problem that I was writing code for and I couldn't recall too much from my last geometry course but I still had the book. I was at the office most of that night tearing through the book and it hit me like a ton of bricks; math is really a lot of fun! I've been meaning to email my high school geometry instructor to tell her about the event since I was probably her worst student and she'd get a thrill out of the story.
I guess like one of the central themes of Tom Sawyer, if you are told something is hard work, it will be. Conversely, if you're told it's fun, that also rings true. For instance, most games these days are endless grinds sold as fun and we pay for the novelty of getting another chore in life. I actually hate most games until I buckle down and try to make the grind fun. What in the world is wrong with me?
I can burn 10 TB of disk just installing VMs for a test environment (say, a couple of clusters). I snapshot at pre-install, post-install and pre/post test. And that's for simple things like a db cluster, some test data, a couple of servers/clients and an application or three. If one of the VMs is my dev desktop, a reasonable gross rate of churn is probably in the neighborhood of 20 GB/day on that VM alone; when I start running Docker, the disk space just burns.
I work in R&D for a large company that's been a Cisco Gold level partner for 20-something years. Give me some way to contact you and I can probably ping my buddy over in Sales Engineering and get one in a couple of hours if it's a thing that can be gotten (I don't know the first thing about the hardware side of the house, but my friend went from engineering to sales - 'cause money. Can't blame him for doing less work for more pay. Even if I do... often.).
I probably actually have access, but Cisco's site is a disaster to try to navigate and that's just my small part of their dev site. Believe it or not, still better than Avaya's dev/support site. Legit offer if you want to exchange contact info. A couple people on this site have helped me out over the years and I'm fairly sure this is something that I can take care of with an IM and maybe a beer.