My crystal ball might be a little wonky, but I'm pretty sure that 2015 is not the year of the AMD desktop whether they run Linux or not. I suspect Q4 is going to be another bloody quarter for AMD, apart from the console sales they haven't had any killer CPUs/GPUs for the holidays. So if YotLD happens, I suspect their Linux drivers had very little to do with it.

Well you don't have to be a psychic to know what he's thinking: "How can we get our hands on some more metadata so we show users photos they want to remember?" Do you know what marketers did when they started getting too good at recognizing changes in shopping patterns like women being pregnant and consumers felt it was creepy? They made coupons with anti-offers, like next to the baby gear they were trying to sell you they'd put a lawn mower. That way users felt it was random and then it was okay. Besides that'd probably tie in well with their advertising, what mood you're in is probably very related to what ads you're susceptible to at the moment.

Windows estimates on how long anything takes seem to be pretty random. For battery life, that seems to be exacerbated by the manufacturer's power management software as well (and I haven't figured out which lies my new HP tells, compared to the old Dell.)

We have a new program from the IT department at $DAYJOB, which puts the machine into hibernate overnight if you haven't used it for an hour or so after 7pm. (These are laptops, so the energy the company gets to brag about saving is on my electric bill, not theirs, but I've got electric heat so it doesn't really save anything.) The big impact is that the VPN connection drops, so I have to wake up the PC, then log in to the VPN, then before I do anything else, go into the browser and reload the autoproxy, so the firewall doesn't replace half my tabs with non-restorable "your proxy settings are wrong" banners. Costs me about 15 minutes extra in the morning, though I can get some of that back by making coffee while I wait.

Ooook! Don't say the M-word near the Librarian!

You're thinking of the "Bush or Chimp" website. We're not monkeys!

And as the other poster said, at least in America, calling black people "monkeys" is specifically racist; calling white people that is just a non-racial insult.

The list of sites alone is clear enough on that, even if you know nothing about them. Someone just had a little lolz with the botnet he owns anyways. TFA advise is totally bogus: They don't post the list of sites to advise people to check their accounts, they do it because it's their excuse for posting a list of x-rated stuff on a non-x-rated site. Pure sensationalism.

Or which desktop dancing nude woman they installed, or old version of flash player they use, or any other of a thousand possible problems.

Most people don't realize just how many (usually windows) PCs out there are owned by hackers. When some botnet runs an attack, we don't realize because the numbers are so big its just a statistic.

Speak for yourself. Hating on HTML and web tech because you're bad at it is the lamest of the lame excuses. My users much prefer our HTML GUI over our shitty old desktop apps

Sounds like you're hating on desktop apps because you're bad at them .... though certainly that's a common problem.

Upper management are making these arguments because they're afraid of exactly that - if they can't hire the best people, their competitors will and their company will lose out (i.e. they will lose out).

I get the feeling that the programmers who are finding it difficult to find work at the moment are those with mediocre skills

Well, enjoy that feeling. It's worth every penny you paid for it.

As for Musk, he's a big corporate player. Calling him a "programmer" these days is pretty silly. Using him to justify outsourcing basically the majority of programming jobs is also pretty silly.

Note that my employer isn't farming out jobs to foreigners because they're trying to cut costs, but because it is genuinely difficult to find the skills

Yes, it does become difficult if "too old, too unhealthy, no degree, overqualified, wrong state, bad credit" are used as stacked pre-filters. But to argue that unemployed programmers in the US are "mediocre" isn't just silly, it's ridiculous.

I wrote advisories on that more than 10 years ago, so please go ahead and lecture me.

Your home network should not allow a request with an IP that doesn't belong to it out. If I'm the router that connects 1.2.3.0/24 to the Internet, I shouldn't put a packet that claims it originates from 5.6.7.8 on the wire.

The only places where a package that isn't part of my network should be routed through is when my network is a transit network.

I know from my own experience how right you are, but that, exactly, is the problem. This "it didn't crash in 10 minutes, ship it" approach is utterly horrible. It's become industry standard instead of being taken out back to be shot, and that is a really serious problem.

People shouldn't be used to computers crashing - they should demand that they don't do so.

...when every programmer (and tech support person, and manufacturing person) in the US can get a job, that's the time for US operations to be looking for foreign help.

But since age, health, formal schooling, in-country location, and credit score are widely and consistently used to deny highly skilled US programmers jobs -- I am very confident in saying that Mr. Graham has not even come close to identifying the "programmer problem" from the POV of actual US programmers. All he's trying to do here is save a buck, while screwing US programmers in the process.

Do it his way, and the US economy will suffer even further at the middle class level as decent jobs go directly over our heads overseas, while, as per usual, corporations thrive.

This is exactly the kind of corporate perfidy that's been going on for some time. Graham should be ashamed. He represents our problem. Not any imaginary lack of US based skills.

The only thing you really need to know is - do you think they actually make them in mixed colors? Nah... they make a batch of a gazillion red beads, then blue beads, then green beads, then yellow beads... the tub is just their mix to maximize sales, they know that you'll end up with leftovers and will buy more expensive pure color packs to round it out. It's like how there's a silent conspiracy between hot dog sausages and hot dog bun makers, they avoid matching numbers so you'll always go out shopping more to make use of the leftovers. It's not exactly a coincidence when you end up with a tub full of colors you don't want.

It might be news to you, but capitalism - at least in the Russian variety and I wouldn't hold my breath on the US variety as of late - means a lot of the wealth has been accumulated on a few hands. I'm not sure that people are worse off on an absolute scale, but there's actually quite many feeling that they're worse off compared to everybody else. In Greece for example SYRIZA - the "Coalition of the Radical Left" - has been up to 27% in the polls lately. That's the birthplace of democracy, not some shithole that's never known anything different. Which I suppose is nicer than the way Germans reacted in the 1930s to the economic buttfucking of the Allies, I guess. In a dysfunctional economy most everything will seem like it's worth trying and they can be very productive in unconventional ways. Like the German war machine that nearly broke Europe's back in WWII was build by a country allegedely on the brink of bankruptcy. But money is money and guns in guns and what the lacked in the former they got plenty in the latter. Don't underestimate Russia and China just because they're not western.

"so where do we get the next generation of major league players from?"

Brown & Sharpe (now a tiny little division of Hexagon AB) used to be the preeminent machine tool manufacturer in the US.

One of my previous bosses was told by one of the Sharpes that the day the company died was the day they stopped training apprentices.

Short-term-profits-at-any-cost amounts to eating your seed corn and then sowing the ground with salt.

--
BMO