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tcrews

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Never worked well and we turn it off in our Vagrant boxes.

If you need 3D support in a VM on your workstation, use VMware Workstation 12... it's awesome (but Vagrant support sucks).

Having been on the receiving side of GSoC students, I'd say 90% of them come from poor countries and are looking for the money. I've seen some that weren't students at all and seemed to be working for "consulting" companies already.

I've been working remotely for 2 years now and my team has people from all over the world. People mostly talk on IRC but not a lot (about important stuff) and there is a HUGE number of periodic meetings. I can't stand them. What's worse, every time things start to appear to be going off track, the initial reaction is to always set up a new periodic meeting about topic X... this is supposed to bring people together but useful interaction never happens on meetings (too many people trying to save face). It's horrible.

When talking to external partners, our management brags about having a remote team with people from all over the world, but I don't think they understand how to make this work.

Sometimes I feel we should all be in a single office because of this, but then I remember other companies have figured this out so I don't have to feel bad about wanting to work remotely.

That's unfortunate. Nobody likes to feel cheated at work.

I'd suggest to try and remediate the situation first. Try to cancel the insurance and get your money back if possible.

If that doesn't work and working there isn't that great anymore (no friends, not learning much, career dead-end, no perspective of higher salary, etc).. I would look for another job if I could afford that financially.

In big corporations, as much as your boss may like you and the work you do, his/her hands might be tied: no leverage with HR, they have a "problem" to deal with, since official channels have been used to complain.. now that might be making him/her look bad to other higher ups, etc.

Best of luck.

Two years ago, two colleagues from China came to visit (South American country) on a business trip (mostly training and technical discussions).

I took them to a nice restaurant after a day of meetings. I said something about the censorship being bad after they said they couldn't access some websites I mentioned.

They answered a nervous "It's ok" and an awkward silence followed. I sensed they had a lot of things to say about that but even 6000km+ away from China, they still didn't feel comfortable voicing any concerns.

It helps to have actual real life experience under your belt when making such claims. You seem to be parroting what countless rants have already repeated without much content.

Weren't they (Golang core team) only recently considering removing golang from StackOverflow like they own the thing?

It seems like a pattern of trying to enforce the unenforceable.

I can relate to that and part of it is probably because we don't want to be left out, we don't want to miss the latest technology that will make us obsolete, etc.

1) Reading HN all the time creates a false sense that things are moving much faster than they really are.

2) I'd suggesting reading "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" and it'll remind you your time is finite

https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving-Counterintuitiv...

2006 - The company I joined as first employee couldn't pay my salary and offered a cut of the server consulting business (which was done 100% by me alone). Each month they would find excuses to avoid paying it. A new owner bought part of the company and was determined to review my deal. It wasn't making me a lot of money, mainly ensuring I got paid market rates.

2009 - After almost 4 years at at a support role at IBM, I wanted a change. They sold me on some architecture role that ended up being about collecting requirements for small SOA projects. After 3 months, my people manager wouldn't let me apply for a job at their Linux Tech Center and said I had to wait at least another year. Plus the director wasn't happy LTC was trying to "steal" other projects' staff and it was unlikely they would even consider. Since I had gotten the maximum performance rating every year, I thought they should be more considerate. Gave a 2-day notice and left. Manager threatened me, saying I would never work for IBM again in my life.

2011 - Team lead was a dick and consistently make me look like a inexperienced fool in front of other teams. He wouldn't touch the infrastructure for fear of breaking it and would constantly fight other teams, trying to hide our issues. I felt it was wrong. One day he refused to acknowledge a ton of errors we were causing and I confronted him. He said I should leave if I wasn't happy. I gave my 30-day notice to our manager. The team lead called me saying I could leave in a week if I wanted (he would talk to my manager to cancel any fines). Before leaving, I updated all our 500+ servers to the latest firmware version that was know to fix a lot of issues. Got thank you notes from other teams for a while.

2012 - project to modernize all servers from aix/VMs/hpux to Linux got cancelled at Motorola after Google bought it. Nothing else to do there and we all know what happened. Stayed 10 months. Nice people but it was like working at a graveyard.

2013 - I guess that IBM manager was wrong after all. Got a job working with Linux at IBM. Left for better pay and more benefits. The team was excellent.

2015 - Left top 5 global food company. They treated us really good but their technology stack was horrendous and they didn't care. I felt it was setting my career back. How would I explain to a recruiter that was working with 10 years old technology? I really miss them though but this is a fast paced industry.

2015 - still here... Lack of clarity around projects is a concern but pay is good, remote work and they are nice people.

VirtualBox 5.1.8 10 years ago

Better shared folders and 3D acceleration would be a good start. They are completely broken and/or missing important features.

The community has no interest in maintaining VirtualBox, mostly because of Oracle. It's a dead project just like OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, etc. One day, enough customers will stop paying Oracle for it, they will look at community contributions (rare to nonexistent?) and will close the project down rationalizing it as they did all the work. The reality is, they don't know how to steer open source projects and have no desire to do that anyway (separate private bug tracker? write access to repository only to Oracle employees? harsh email replies and comments on bug reports?).

It's on life support and will stay like that for a little while. Unfortunately, it's the only hypervisor that vagrant supports decently and it works on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux (as opposed to using KVM on Linux, xhyve on OSX and Hyper-V on Windows... for someone considering building vagrant boxes).

It's sad but completely expected.

VirtualBox 5.1.8 10 years ago

I pad for the VMware plugin and the support was awful. It's supported on a best effort basis.

The horrible VMware plugin is what's making us stick to VirtualBox, even though everybody hates it (shared folders and 3D acceleration being the worst areas).

3D acceleration on VMware Workstation 12.1 is awesome (60fps inside the VM in OpenGL) and it let's me use the VM as a full desktop without even noticing I'm on a VM. Shared folders performance is also 10x better than VirtualBox.

Unfortunately, I have to use vagrant for work and that means my VMware install is dormant... and vagrant's VMware plugin license was wasted money.

VirtualBox 5.1.8 10 years ago

VirtualBox is in maintenance mode. Nothing cool has happened in the past few years. This release is not noteworthy.