darkandbrooding

Did you intend to reference "It's a wonderful life?" When I read your comment I imagine a tiny child in Jimmy Stewart's arms, exclaiming the joys of capitalism ;-)

My employer fits your first criteria precisely. Turbo and Stimulus provide exactly as much interactivity as we need. The appearance is that we're trying to avoid Javascript. The reality is that we are (successfully) minimizing context switching when working on the code base.

I freely admit that I pulled numbers out of a hat, just to help me visualize the problem.

I was curious and did some math. A five minute zoom call is not realistic; you probably need 15 minutes per person. If my math is correct, and if no one was even a minute late, it would take 225 hours to lay those people off sequentially, assuming 24/7 meetings. If you had 15 managers making those calls, it would still take 15 hours to complete all calls. Let's call that three business days, during which no other work gets done anywhere in the company.

I once worked at an employer who performed five rounds of layoffs in the space of a few months. I cannot recommend that method.

I agree with you, the 900-wide bandaid was the only practical option.

I recommend Godot ( https://godotengine.org/ ). It solves many of the problems you suggested.

You and (other person) started your lives on different dates, in different places, in unique circumstances; you are statistically unlikely to end those lives at the same time and place. If the two of you appear to be following the same path for a portion of those lives just enjoy the company while it lasts. There is no single, universal measure of success, so the fact that one person's achievements exceed your own in one area is cause to celebrate that other person but not a reason to feel bad about yourself. Be better than you were yesterday, be kind to those around you. Your story (hopefully) has decades left to tell. It probably includes major characters that you haven't even met yet.

Apt sidesteps this problem because Debian-based releases are not rolling releases. Unless you install a custom PPA, if you are running Ubuntu 18.04 and you "apt-get install postgres" you will always get version 10.x. The major version number will not get bumped for Ubuntu 18.04.

If want to use a version of postgres other than 10.x, you can either use a different version of Ubuntu or install a custom PPA.

Apt's target audience is systems administrators. Homebrew's target audience is independent developers who might need to have four different versions of Postgresql installed simultaneously on their laptop, because they maintain Rails/Django/Node apps for four different clients who are each unwilling to upgrade for whatever reason.

IMO homebrew is "messy" because it is trying to solve a harder problem. If there is such a thing as an average enterprise software developer, I would argue that homebrew is trying to solve problems that the enterprise developer does not have.

That is my preferred solution and I think it works great. I have persuaded a couple of coworkers to switch, but only a couple so far.

Containerized Postgres is a real win, but running OpenLDAP (+ custom schema) as a containerized application has measurably improved my quality of life. Kudos and great gratitude to the people behind https://github.com/osixia/docker-openldap

There is one single feature of homebrew that regularly bites my coworkers. You can refer to software by name@version ("brew install postgresql@11" or "brew install postgresql@12") and there is no confusion about what you are installing; or you can refer to software by name only ("brew install postgresql") and the version number is calculated to be "most recently released." (v13 at the time this was written.)

Hypothetically I have two machines that I want to build out and give to developers. One machine arrives on Monday. My script runs "brew install postgresql" (no version), because of when I ran that script postgresql@10 gets installed. Tests pass, I hand that machine off to a new developer. The second machine arrives on Wednesday. I run the same script, but because v11 of postgres was added to homebrew on Tuesday, the second machine receives postgresql@11 even though the first machine received @10. Same script, two days apart, different major version of postgresql.

Yes, I can write my scripts carefully to avoid this. But consider this scenario: a new developer encounters a problem, tries to solve it themselves, finds a seemingly helpful blog, and ends up with postgresql@13 and node@15 when everyone else in their team is using postgresql@11 and node@12. Now tests are failing, but only for this one developer and only locally...

https://github.com/The-Complete-Guide-to-Rails-Performance

I learned quite a bit about ruby memory mgmt from the above. Free text, pay for video tutorials IIRC. The course was authored by Nate Berkopec.

https://www.youtube.com/user/nateberkopec

I also found "the well grounded rubyist" to be very helpful.

https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-rubyist-thir...

Just adding to the choir. This is a great tool. I prefer using open source software when possible, but I also like to pay for the tools that makes my job easier. The developer is aiming at corporate, volume licensing and I understand how a Patreon account would run counter to their business strategy. I wish there was a 'small dollar donations' channel, though. I like this tool enough to throw them some regular money.

I won't presume to answer for the OP, but my (remote conference attendance) pet peeves include: I have printed out important information (but forgotten to email it); let me use the whiteboard that is mounted on the same wall as the camera to illustrate a concept; I will speak exactly loud enough so that only people in the room can here me; I will use the free tier of some conferencing service, and start the call fifteen minutes early so that the connection drops halfway through the meeting.

Almost thirty years ago now, driving around on a hot summer day with a couple of friends. One guy puts a punk mix tape in the player, and the guy with a college music scholarship was aesthetically offended. "Anyone could make this music," he complained.

The other guy nodded in agreement and replied, "that's the point."

A .psd file is not an end-user asset. I can think of no use case where someone would point a browser at a hosted .psd and expect that binary file to render as an inline image.

A .psd file was, for a good chunk of the past twenty years, the "de facto standard" file format for teams or entire departments of graphic artists who spent all day, every day in Photoshop. I once worked for an online ad agency and Photoshop was used more often, by more people, than MS Word and Excel combined. The Network Effect was in full force. Graphics teams at three different companies cooperating on the same campaign would assume that their counterparts were using Photoshop, and would expect to send and receive .psd files. Man, Adobe must have been printing money in those days.

If you worked in print publishing, digital publishing, advertising, marketing, there was probably a graphics department of people who spent all day in Photoshop... and an IT department that was constantly trying to add new server capacity as fast as those artists were consuming it. Back when we measured server storage in GB, not TB, fifteen different versions of the same massive PSD file could cause real heartburn.

This article is rhetorical slight of hand, written by a man who directly benefits if history takes a kinder view of the GW Bush administration.

The author asserts that GW Bush is smarter than [the typical reader]. Howard Gardner describes nine different types of intelligence. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc... ) Is GW Bush smarter than me in every metric? I am skeptical. Is he smarter in only some out of nine categories? If so, the the statement "is smarter than you" is missing a dependent clause.

The article relies on anecdotal evidence from biased sources. People who were invited into the administration based on loyalty and ideology all think that GW Bush is super smart? That is both unsurprising and unconvincing.

The author slams the cultural biases of the coastal elites, while indulging in his own.

"He is an intense, competitive athlete and a “guy’s guy.” His hobbies and habits reinforce a caricature of a dumb jock, in contrast to cultural sophisticates who enjoy antiquing and opera. This reinforces the other biases against him."

Bush 41 was an athlete. GW was a cheerleader. I understand that the whole point of this essay is to rewrite history but know your limits, man.

I readily concede that a group comprised entirely of smart individuals can make bad plans, or execute a good plan so badly that the outcome is the opposite of what they intended. If your best intentions regularly have calamitous results, does that matter when judging your intelligence? I would argue that it does. If you declare Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to be existential threats; let North Korea get The Bomb; dramatically strengthen the regional influence of Iran; and turn Iraq into a hellscape whose only export is terrorism, does your alleged intellectual superiority provide any solace?

The author mentions an anti-Texas bias. Having spent decades in close proximity to Texans, I would like to make an observation. There are Texans, and there are Texan Secessionists. I have found the former group to be open, generous, hospitable people more often than not, and frequent contributors to art and culture. The latter group never miss an opportunity to remind you, "Texas can secede if we want. It's in our constitution. We were a Republic before we were a state."

Want to understand the term "Ugly American?" Spend a couple of years listening to Texans act like they're doing you a favor by not seceding.

Interesting experiment, but two groups seems like a too small a sample.

If moderation is done by humans, you could simply prove that one moderator had a worse morning than the other, or that through luck of the draw Group A went to a sympathetic moderator while group B did not. That could demonstrate individual bias, but not institutional.

If moderation is automated, how do you control for the weight of keywords, phrases, etc? Maybe Group A was full of statements that almost threw a flag but not quite, while Group B contained mostly innocuous wording but (only) one phrase that actually got flagged.

If both groups were designed to be unpleasant, but various "blacklist" words and phrases are weighted differently, Group A might have achieved "flagged" weight while group Group B was "flagged -1." One might have scored 99 pts vs 100 for the other, but the visible difference is that one remains visible while the other does not.

Thinking out loud, now... let's say that Facebook does have a political bias. How do you prove that Facebook's financial success is despite that political bias, and not because of it?

Is it possible to have a monopoly on digital socialization? If you can't declare Facebook a monopoly, and therefore subject to greater regulation, then your only lever over Facebook is social pressure, presumably in the form of bad press and boycotts, which will reduce their advertising revenue. How do you prove that the existing political bias is leading them to sub-optimal revenues?

Would you join a company in whose purpose you don't believe?

I find it rare for people to take an opportunity with a company they don't feel good about, regardless of how much they might like the interviewing manager. IMO those who do accept such an offer are just resume surfing, and weren't going to stick around regardless.

I have also been using that app and I am very happy with the results. I had a couple of false starts, but now have gotten into a nice rhythm. The trick is to not judge or criticize yourself during data entry. Analysis is a completely separate phase.

Seeing a few months of data really helped me think differently about my diet. My mother programmed all her children to be "comfort eaters," and when I saw that the bulk of my too many calories were coming from "comfort foods," it helped me tackle the situations and stress responses that triggered non-nutritional eating.

I am not suggesting that MyFitnessPal is the only tool/process/technique that could lead one to these revelations. It is the tool that led me to those revelations, so I am a happy customer. (Also not affiliated.)

Consider Sendmail as a cautionary tale. One more than one occasion I have seen a busy sysadmin manually edit a .cf file and forget to backport the edit to the .mc file. The next time someone regenerates the .cf from the .mc you have a vanishing edit.

Yes, the sysadmin was clearly at fault. No, this is not a deal breaker, as seen by the longevity of Sendmail. But a config file that gets pushed through a preprocessor has a more complicated life cycle than a "static" equivalent.

If your organization has comprehensively embraced ansible/chef/puppet/etc this may be a non-issue, because all of your configs might be generated. Just food for thought.

Please forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you, but the lament you make about open source software seems to me to be more about distributed systems. It is an interesting observation, and now that you've pointed it out I can observe the pattern at past and present employers. But I have seen that pattern on internal software, written by the company for the company. This makes me think the problem is an architectural one.

I hesitate to comment about the relative velocities of open source vs proprietary software because I do not have enough experience with commercial, third party software. My sample size is too small, but I'm inclined to agree with you.

I don't disagree with your Machiavellian conspiracy, either, but I've worked in marketing and advertising so I know that some of the villains are on the payroll. Maybe there needs to be a third category? There's open source software, written by someone who has no particular relationship to you. There's commercial software, written by someone who has a positive economic relationship with you. And then there is ... corporate?... software, written by someone who might think they have a zero sum relationship with you.

I can't remember the man's name now, but I once read an interview with a NYT gossip reporter who worked up until the 1950s. He said (and I'm paraphrasing from memory), "gossip is rich people dealing with problems that money can't solve."

Apparently the modern incarnation of gossip reporting took shape during the Great Depression, and was a way to humanize people whose fortune and fame made their lives seem wholly separate from their fan base. Gossip permits a person to live vicariously through the celebrity, and creates the illusion of something more inclusive than a simple producer:consumer relationship.

Oh man, now you've triggered my OCD and I feel pedantic.

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/

In the early 2000s, the Zope community felt that Zope 2.x had grown long in the tooth, so they decided to create a new, modern code base that they called "Zope 3," initially released in 2004.

Zope 3 was not backward compatible with Zope 2.x, nor with the impressive ecosystem of Zope 2.x plugins, and for years there was confusion about the direction, momentum, and relative importance of those two parallel projects. Zope 3 never gained any significant traction, because in adopting a "component architecture" they decided to use XML to connect those individual components, and it felt like you spent more time writing XML than Python. IMO this was a strategic mistake.

In 2005 the Django framework was released. In 2006, Ruby on Rails was released. After a couple years of confusion about the Zope roadmap, developers now had multiple options. You couldn't sell management on new Zope 2 apps, Zope 3 wasn't ready for prime time, and Rails was a significantly(!) more productive environment than Zope 2. (Django presumably is, too, but I have no Django experience and so cannot say.)

In 2010, the Zope community renamed "Zope 3" to "bluebream" to clarify their messaging, but that was after six years of ambiguity. Developers moved to other tools and frameworks, and Zope's developer community shrank until it no longer had a critical mass of developer interest.

Are you making the Nagios host pull (via NRPE) or are you asking the individual hosts to push (via NSCA)? I am trying to solve a similar problem. Given a dynamic population of hosts, each of which has a variable life span, I think that asking individual hosts to query their own state and then push that to a "monitoring receiver" is the most scalable, sustainable approach. At least, that's the theory I'll be testing this week.

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge 30th president of US (1872 - 1933)

The use of [Debatably Volatile Term] (hereafter DVT) is poor branding for a project or product, unless the cultural baggage associated with DVT aligns with the purpose of the project/product.

Assume that DVT has different connotative definitions to different audiences. If some of those connotative definitions are negative, then the use of DVT as a brand name will repel people who primarily associate DVT with that negative connotation.

Let's say that you decide to publish a project, and you choose a DVT that has positive connotations to you. If people point out that DVT has negative connotations they are not necessarily associating you with those negative connotations, they might merely be pointing out the weakness of DVT in branding.

I think it's a terrible, terrible design. I was working on a new Retina Powerbook last week, and I pushed the power key within my first ten minutes. It should not be trivially easy to bring your productivity to a screeching halt.

The soldered RAM is annoying - I'm OK with my computer being a complex tool, not an appliance. The excuse of the soldered RAM to up-sell if you want 16 GB of memory is insulting. The power button is idiotic. Apple wants me to pay three grand for a laptop that can be turned off instantaneously by an overly curious pet?

Really?

Really?

Apologies for communicating my thoughts poorly. I was confident that the integration was intentional.

I had intended the trivia about gmail:chrome integration as a way to illustrate the parent's opinion that Apple controlling the user experience on the iPad is, ultimately, a moot point.

If Apple cannot prevent the distribution third party browsers (note: see caveat in comment above), and they cannot prevent other apps from invoking those third party browsers, then Apple cannot prevent a company with sufficient drive and resources from creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem on top of iOS. All they can do is raise the barrier to entry, to increase the likelihood that smaller players will build on top of the iOS ecosystem, rather than do an end-run around it.

Just in case there is any ambiguity, I am glad that Google is innovating (to the extent that they are permitted) on top of iOS. I tend to buy Apple gear because I think that Apple makes very good hardware, and I use OS X because it's a desktop-centric Unix that runs software from Adobe and Microsoft, and lets me watch videos from Netflix and Amazon.

As someone who has used Apple services since iTools debuted in 2000, I think that Apple's services (iCloud, iTunes, etc) are strictly "ehh." I'm glad to see the competition. If Safari usage numbers tank as a result, well, that's a solvable problem.

Very interesting. Thanks!

I have Gmail and Chrome installed on an iPad. HTTP links in Gmail open in Chrome if that browser is installed. Just FYI.