AyyWS

What society or culture survived by taking the high road? I'm reminded of Princess Leia's quote: No! Alderaan is peaceful, we have no weapons.

My wife and I used various warmers and threw them all out for microwaving water. 8oz is 30 seconds. 6oz is 22 seconds. It's easy, fast and reliable every time.

Kaggle is what they talk about in my industry.

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets

We were contracted because the agency lost lawsuits and had to payout and change policies. The contractor was never successfully sued, but I had to compile lawsuit discovery documents 6 times in 2 years.

I worked for a private company contracted to provide a portion of a public service and later got employed by the the government agency.

- The contractor had no budget. Our servers were out of date and we were running out of date OSes and software. We were all paid below standard and overworked.

- We had a tiny budget at the agency to buy things at the very end of the year. We ran up to date software and OSes, except for a few large complicated systems that were setup with grant money. We were all paid well below standard. I was no longer on call at all times of the day and night.

Contract awards go to the lowest bidder.

Yeah. The HIPAA data needs to be encrypted and you have to report everyone who has access and you need patient permission to share. HIPAA is bad, but ITAR violations put you in jail!

I wasn't very clear. She had a mac laptop around 1998 or so.

1. His kid was finishing high school and didn't want to move out of a small metro with limited jobs.

2. Company health insurance + family member with chronic disease.

3. He was personal friends with the VP which made his firing potentially career ending for the new manager.

There are people you meet in your career that are a privilege to work with like this guy.

> fear of being replaced

I saw the most extreme example of low competence bullying. A manager with less than 1 year of experience fired a contractor project manager who was a previous energy company CEO, turn-around CEO, and company board member/advisor. The guy was fixing some of the tangled bureaucratic work flows (which made everyone's lives better) when he got the axe.

iPhone SE, iPad, and the MacBook Air all disagree with you. I feel like this is the cheapest Apple products have ever been. My grandma had a colorful $2000 Apple laptop in early 2000s and you can get a MacBook Air now for $1000. That's a heck of a price decline without figuring inflation.

1. They grew up.

2a. Got a job and had kids/got hobbies. Stopped caring and just subscribed to Netflix like everyone else.

--or--

2b. Created copyrightable works. Joined the protectionists.

Article from 2010. Instagram was created on October 6, 2010. I bet it's related.

Do you have disaster recovery / high availability requirements? SQL server on a desktop has a lot of single points of failure.

I think we're doing pretty good:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-1990-vs-201...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-across-wes...

last 6 months job listings from itjobswatch.co.uk

Python - 23,146

Java - 19,800

Scala - 2,274

Clojure - 291

Dystopio is signing off. Find your favorite features in the new Apocalypse Wow!

Thank you for the context. Imagine being criticized for spending 6000 hours in Visual Studio.

He was a long time employee with a legacy job title "wintel engineer." A transformational ex-IBM director was finally brave enough to PIP and fire him. I think he was mostly retired while putting in 8 hours of work a quarter.

At a big telecom we had an employee that maybe closed 10 tickets in two years. He was the highest paid team member (as reported by our director) and worked remotely from an RV in Oklahoma. When he was finally discovered by our director, he was fired and his immediate manager was fired.

My family member who runs a company in China avoids bribes by pretending to be a dumb American.

I worked with a guy who was previously a big state university buyer/administrator. He said that Oracle charged around 1% of retail prices to the university.

I had the same deal at a big telecom 7 years ago. The offer lasted one month. I moved to a better position with better pay/responsibilities.

I bought a house last year that was originally built in the 90s. Buying and fixing a house is just way cheaper.

I spent half the prefab cost for land and a 3600 sq ft house.

I lived through EMC's VMware tightening their grip, killing off our vendor "reflex firewall" by restricting their use of network APIs (to boost their Nicira acquisition which became NSX), then making us pay the vRAM vtax as part of the VSPP program (public cloud), and launching project Zephyr (vCloud Air) where they directly competed with us.

RIP VMware. Been getting Novell vibes from them for the last 10 years.

My pal with a masters in math writes R and Python. My MBA friend writes .NET at an investment bank. Econ PhDs are probably making machine learning models.

Makes sense to backup user data, and script your server/app/database install and setup.

If your RTO is very short, then full backups with fast restores are best.

Pyramids were built with slave labor. Poor sanitation lead to the black plague. Imagine if they all stopped having kids, because they thought Egyptian slavery would never end and the black plague was insurmountable?

in 2015 I made a change that stopped 90% of the tickets that rolled into my team's queue. The remaining 10% were complicated real customer issues. Our entire department was closed 6 months later, because I assume our ticket completion was so low, and we were so slow to fix issues. :/

So this is like the opposite of Amazon, who rents out their previously internal only systems?