Posts by Trevor_Pott

Re: Strange Minority

"plenty, until guided away from it at school age toward more "feminine" subjects"

Bullshit. Women are not guided towards more "feminine" subjects at all. They simply make better judgements about what they want to do for a living and realise that IT is a pretty shit way to make money.

As a general rule women don't make good drones. They're independent, they question authority. They work well collectively and the modern woman under no circumstances subordinates herself well. With those characteristics you'll have a miserable time in IT.

If you want to work in IT you need to be a good drone. Capable of solving problems on your own, absorbing knowledge on your own time, but also ready and willing to have every single person in the company - from the CEO to the janitor - walk all over you all day long. You need to be ready to have completely unreasonable stresses and demands put upon you as a matter of course and be required to be subordinate, passive and cater to the egos of everyone.

I know of no woman who would put up with that shit. They have had decades of having their own empowerment drilled into them and if they do choose IT they sure don't last long.

IT is for delta males. Those who have spent a lifetime learning that their position in the hierarchy is at the bottom. Since males are naturally (and here I mean genetically as well as culturally) far more driven to accept - even require - a hierarchical command structure then men who have been taught they are the deltas are far more likely to accept it.

The short version is this: with the exception of the massively specialised positions in our industry IT workers are the modern servitor class. Women have been taught their whole lives never to put themselves in that situation. SO when you do see women in It they tend to be very specialised and very, very good at their jobs.

Good fucking luck convincing women to sign up to be part of the servitor class willingly. I think they rather enjoy working anywhere else...and good on 'em for that.

Re: If you think you aren't to blame for all of the world's problems..

Whoah. Check your privilege there, bro. There are so many other groups (Google "cis") that you forgot to cast aspersions on. You clearly don't even know enough about the trials of others to even know who to blame!

Re: So?

"With perfect equal opportunities, the mix would be the same as the mix of eligible applicants."

This is IT. The % mix of elligable applicants is heavily skewed towards white and asian males. Do you honestly think that there are 50% women applying? Or 50% black people? Or whatever ethnicity it is that is supposed to "win" today?

All we have is the current mix. Nobody has posted the % mix of elligable applicants for the entire history of the company, thus allowing us to make rational judgements about not only the current mix of applicants, but the current mix at the time individuals were hired. Senior positions, for example, require senior people.

That your current applicant mix to the company's lowest ranks might have a given diversity formula has no bearing on how the senior leadership should look. By and large senior leadership in IT is white and male (or asian and male) because those are the guys that started the industry, and they're still around. So your most senior people are still going to reflect the imbalance of their times.

If your goal is a "proper" racial/ethnic/gender/lifestyle/whatever mix then you're just going to hamstring your company. The goal should be hiring the best qualified for the job, regardless of any other considerations. And anyone taking anything else into consideration (such as race/gender/etc) should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Checks and balances should exist to ensure they can't take such things into account. That way no biases (either "positive" or "negative", depending on your point of view) can come into play. (In theory. There's always something.)

Of course, if equality isn't your goal, then by all means, string up white males.

Re: I always find it horrifying

"rape as part of the deterrence"

Is a fucking war crime.

Re: THe problem with the FBI...

"so that Obama could attack the norks?"

You really think he's that eager to lose another war? Or anyone else in his administration? What kind of gluttons for punishment do these yanks elect?

Simple middle ground solution: all patents from insolvent companies are handed over to a special holding company that immediately makes them available on a FRAND basis to all comers. The revenue is then devoted (after operating costs) to a pool of money used for grants given to researchers or those looking to attend higher education. No corporate shenanigans allowed, but no abuse allowed either. It strongly encourages everyone to license via FRAND.

Re: Wrong side of somebody

ALMOST A DECADE AGO and it wasn't like it was exactly an earth shatteringly fantastic Linux experience on it.

And? It's not like Sony have changed in that time. They still release an unlimited stream of proprietary formats and refuse to license their stuff reasonably (which results in anyone who buys into their proprietary crap getting screwed when there is no wide adoption and/or Sony jacks the price up.) Sony still are a member of the MAFIAA, urging copyright maximalism at every turn and actively working to prevent any sort of rational compromise.

I could go on and on. The point is: Sony isn't run by "good people". Or even "mediocre people". It's run by bad people. People who aren't satisfied with making good money, they're so greedy they have to put time, effort and money into desperately trying to control everything...and in the end it has not only earned them the ire of many a hacker, but it is is absolutely costing them their business, as customers have been leaving them in droves for years.

Weep for the innocent milled masses who work at Sony, but not for the death of the company, nor the unquestionably evil executives. Their unchecked greed and hubris are what led Sony to this. Compassion and sympathy for the body corporate are unwarranted.

@ John Sanders

Marcus Hamilton: Why do you keep fighting? You just signed away your role in the Shanshu. There's nothing in it for you anymore.

Angel: People like you, who don't care about anyone or anything, will never understand the people who do.

Marcus Hamilton: Yeah... but we won't care!

Re: it's called supply and demand

"I for one haven't taken a taxi since I discovered Uber. I'd rather walk."

It's so nice that you have that option. Not all of us do. Also: it's so nice to see that you so blatantly support "rich people and those with means first" as opposed to any form of attempt to treat people as equal based on a shared basic humanity. Bank accounts uber alles. May your blade chip and shatter.

Re: I'm not seeing the issue

Yeah! Fuck the poor! Woo! Rich people first! Fuck yeah, capitalism!

Ass.

Re: Why? Because you trust your government?

"if I told all my friends they have to learn and implement PGP if they want to email me the latest joke or get my latest musings about where to go for dinner, I'm pretty sure my mailbox will be suddenly barren"

You say that like it's a bad thing.

"As for data encryption, well I don't see that my personal data is worth it."

But each person places a different value on their data. Also: you're presuming in this statement that "the man" isn't simply on a fishing expedition looking for reasons to throw people into the fire.

As Cardinal Richelieu said: “give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I’ll find something in them to hang him by.”

Better safe than sorry, mate.

"I have firewalls and AV that have protected it up to now, if The Man wants to see it, not much I'll do will keep him from it for long."

That's a completely wrongheaded approach to this problem. You are absolutely correct in that you have no ability to keep a dedicated state-level actor out of your data. At the end of the day they can deploy physical assets to tap your data and at that point you're right fucked.

But the point here isn't to prevent the MIB from sneaking into your house while you're out. It's to raise the cost of fishing expeditions and automated searches for dissidence so high that they become non-feasible for state-level actors to engage in. Or, at least, that they go burn some other witch instead of you.

You're not going to stop 007. But you might stop the local council from abusing their access to meta-ECHELON and using the fact that you put out one too many bags of garbage to hit you up with a fine.

Or maybe you engaged in some "extreme" rumpy pumpy in front of a window with the blinds open. It's bad enough the local puritans in power could probably throw you in the brig for a lifetime. Why give them the power to slap you with an "internet pedo child molester" lifetime tatoo because you also happened to be streaming it to likeminded folks elsewhere?

I've accidentally been e-mailed XLS dumps containing the entire customer records database for a company, including tens of thousands of credit card numbers*. In how many jurisdictions could I be burned as the witch simply for being the recipient? I can think of three off the top of my head, and that's three too many!

By raising the bar for automated snooping by state actors I am raising the cost of automated witch hunts. As someone who qualifies as a witch to oh, so many groups, I'm very interested in keeping their costs as high as humanly possible.

*fortunately I was the only one who got this mail, and it never left the corporate firewall so we were able to deal with it internally, but still...

Re: a nice try....

"It's massive overkill in almost any situation other than trying to protect the operations in your world-conquering volcanic lair."

Why? Because you trust your government? Because you honestly believe you're above suspicion?

Why should we share your level of naivete?

Re: Burn, Baby! Burn!

It's such a cool picture. Josh Folland has one in his lab. It's huge and awesome.

Thankee sir! And a Happy Holidays to you and all the readers as well. :)

"The emails *must* contain a treasture map because there *must* be bodies buried, because it's the MPAA, and they're mafia and they're always trying to break the internet, right?"

You're learning!

"But a $60n a year corporation sues the democratically-elected Attorney of the USA's and "progressives" cheer?"

Damn rights. Because - surprise, surprise - Google is actually a far less horrible option than the MPAA. You're a brand tribalist for the dark side Andrew: a standard bearer for asshats so shitty that in comparison Google look like the good guys.

Before you break out your patent penting trademarked "freetard" and attempt to label me an abolitionist, think again. Balance is the key between the opposites here. But if there is to be only one side, if an extreme must win because neither side will compromise, then I will stand with the freetards.

Copyright maximalists are the enemy. They are to be fought, no mater who that makes me allies with in the meantime. Once you have identified the enemy, you fight them without compassion, sympathy or mercy. War is hell: it's best over with quickly.

And make no mistake: this is war. And the copyright maximalists will lose.

Re: Only in America

"Do you remember voting for Larry Page?"

Sure I do. Every single time I pay my Google Apps fee. Every single time I set another browser's homepage to Google.ca. Every single time I choose Hangouts over Skype.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Google is a choice, with just as narrow a set of shitty options as my vote.

May Google's lawsuit against this corrupt A.G. be the first amongst many as the entire world take advantage of the treasure trove of Sony's hack to bring the MPAA down a few pegs. That's not to say Google don't deserve a swift kick in groin as well, but I hate them a hell of a lot less than I hate copyright maximalists.

To be perfectly, crystal clear about how I feel: I really wish there was a god. Just so copyright maximalists could burn in hell for eternity. Very few things would benefit humanity more than legalizing the use of copyright maximalists for fuel.

Maybe once they're out of the way we can work on workable solutions. Until then, go Google! May the least shitty option win.

Re: Dirty

But think of the kids!

Re: Brought to you by...

"No WindowsX issues, no bash problems. Nowt to see here."

I don't allow bash for any user and I don't even have X installed. They're servers. Why the hell install that crap? So, um...yeah. Nothing to see here...

Re: Catastrophic?

"Why catastrophic? It means that instead of getting results from a wide array of sources, Spaniards have to go directly to the news sites they know to get their news."

Or they just use news.google.com and get news from "not Spain". There are a lot of Spanish speaking countries out there that are not Spain. Like the US, as one (fairly large) example.

There's no reason to assume that Spaniards are going direct to eh website of Ruper Murdoch's Spanish Inquisition directly any more now than they were before. Strikes me you use Google News specifically when you don't want the spoon-fed neural pablum, but actually want to find out what the hell's going on.

Re: Hypocrites!

"There are definitely websites that are getting more traffic now that Google News has closed."

Yeah, non-Spanish news sites.

Mate, if you aren't on Google you don't exist.

@DrXym

"And a sizable number are extremely favourable of it. "

So the sizable number of people who agree with us should kowtow to the sizable number of people who agree with you because...well, because what, exactly? You have a bigger stick?

"Which may explain why Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, RHEL, OpenSUSE, Debian and Ubuntu all support or are in the process of supporting it."

No, they're in the process of supporting it because nobody in the Linux world has the financial resources to fight Red Hat on this. Nobody. Red Hat has played this very well; so many components are already dependent on systemd that maintaining shims or creating alternatives is a massively financially burdensome project to undertake.

Worse, the various teams under Red Hat's control seem to be planning, one by one to "integrate" with some level of dependency upon systemd. So the number of projects that have to be worked around, shimed or outright replaced is going up.

If you want a GUI on your Linux distro at all, you're pretty much fucked already. And it won't be long before those looking for a server OS are going to have to clean fork GNU/Linux away from systemd/Linux in order to keep free of it.

Any distro that wants to be commercially viable does what Red Hat says and hopes Red Hat doesn't turn their eye upon them and try to put them out of business. And that's the end of it today; Red Hat controls too much. Nobody else has any real leverage.

Linux functioned because no one group ever accumulated too much power, so relying on eachother's good will was backed by some plainly pragmatic reasons why everyone had to cooperate. That's gone now, and with it both the presumption and any pretense of goodwill.

Commercial interests are all that matter int he systemd/Linux ecosystem.

"So what? Those are all interrelated things."

Do one thing and do it well. The reason being not only to avoid gigantic monolithic entities with 2M lines of code, but so that no one person or group gains lock-in class control of the ecosystem.

Well, shit...

"It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened in the world of Linux."

Yes, it is. Never before has an entity other than the kernel team held so much power that it amounts to a minimum of a veto, more realistically the final word on what will happen within the ecosystem. Through systemd's growing scope and lock-in, Red Hat holds that power They control Poettering and he controls systemd. Red Hat also control a number of other critical projects, many - most- of which are now or have announced plans to become reliant upon systemd.

Nobody has had this kind of power over the Linux community before. Not even the X team.

"if you don't like it, use a dist which does it the old way."

Which is what people are saying they will do, and advising others to do. So why get your panties in a bunch about it? People are allowed some semblance of choice and/or freedom, but only so long as they don't exercise it in public or attempt to make their case to others?

Man, I hope noone in your family every comes out of the closet. Your inability to accept that other people may value things that you don't - and may not value things that you do - would probably make that a pretty brutal affair.

Re: systemd vs Play Services (was: play the ball not the player?)

"It doesn't really *benefit* RH to 'own' init (not that we do; even if you accept that Jude person's point that there are ~10 core contributors to systemd, half of those don't work for RH). That's not much of a selling point to any of our customers".

First off, systemd is more than init, even now...and there are publicly stated aims to take it a hell of a lot farther yet.

Secondly, Red Hat "owns" systemd in that they employ Poettering and Poettering is the individual driving that project. Anyone who gets in his way will be smacked down with extreme prejudice.

Thirdly, it absolutely does benefit Red Hat to make as much as possible within the Linux ecosystem completely dependent on something they control, as it gives them the ability to wield far more influence within the community than they could simply through the developers they employ. Control the frameworks and you control the ecosystem.

Lastly, you make the rediculous assumption that Red Hat only acts in the interests of it's customers. Just becuase something isn't what Red Hat's customers want doesn't mean it isn't in Red Hat's interests. Look to Microsoft for some great lessons in this: Microsoft regularly acts against the interests of it's customers, developers, partners and staff because it gives Microsoft leverage, the ability to create lock-in and/or dependance or allows them to move people away from less profitable models to more profitable ones.

Red Hat aren't the good guys any more.

More's the pity, as I really am not all that good at any of the other distributions. Walking away from Red Hat is meaning learning the nuances of Slackware (and possibly this new Debian fork) instead of relying on decades of Red Hat knowledge that has become so deeply integrated it's autonomic.

But there's more that matters in this world than commercial interests and I still care about more than maximizing my own revenue. Pity that's not a sentiment much shared any more.