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Comment Buzzword worship murders KISS & YAGNI (Score 3, Interesting) 36

Live by cutting edge, get cut by cutting edge. Tech is churn and burn.

Warning: Semi-off-topic Rant Ahead

Even with "regular" software, more devs and companies are more interested in chasing buzzwords than parsimony and simplicity. The result is a moving messy target. There are tools from the 90's that dev's are 4x more productive under because they are integrated tools rather than glued-on layers, requiring about 1/4 the code per feature. You don't need to worry about "separation of UI and biz logic" because BOTH are so compact that there is almost no down-side to mixing them in the same class. The separation-of-concerns movement was to manage bloated stacks & teams better, not an evolutionary step up.

They are not web-scale and not mobile-friendly, but that turned out not to matter. Internal biz didn't need mobile after all, and we spent all that bloat and trial-and-error trying to get dual-device layouts to work right in vein. People like to tell stories about how such tools became problematic when they needed "enterprise scale", but most our internal apps are not enterprise-scale.

The assumption is often that a web/enterprise tool can scale both down and up such that it's used on smaller projects also. Wrong Answer!* That's a failed assumption, creating bloated fragile smaller apps. One Tool Size Does NOT Fit All. Internal is not external. Desktop is not mobile. Small is not Web-scale. One of the reasons the F-35 got so expensive is that it tried to be everything to everybody. Maybe one day they'll make an affordable version, but the journey was expensive and bug-ridden.

Humans, you are doing IT wrong.

* It may be possible to have the small-end and big-end tools share a lot of features, conventions, and libraries, but not be the same tool. This hypothetical set should share what makes sense to share, and separate for target size when not. Do note that lack of data volume doesn't necessarily mean "simple". Billing can get rather complex for service companies, for example, but there is typically only say 30 invoiced being generated a day, including drafts.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 2) 36

Pointless to ask without knowing what compensation he's getting.

What the deal with silicon valley jobs used to be was, you'd get a big salary, but you'd work a lot.

This info is roughly ten years old, but - I've known Seattle-area Amazon coders and sysadmins. Their contracts made it clear that they were expected to put in as many extra hours as needed, and that those extra hours might be very frequent.

They were all paid extremely well, and figured (going in) they could put up with it for a few years. However most decided they'd had enough after about one year.

Comment Why all the hate? (Score 1) 182

"Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals," DeSantis said. "We will save our beef."

Come on, nobody with an above-room-temperature IQ takes this statement seriously. And we've already seen that DeSantis has zero appeal outside of Florida. So why not let them play their silly little games there? It's comedy gold!

Comment Should walk before you run. (Score 1) 28

China should return samples from the near side first. When that secedes, then try on the far side.

Space is hard. Russia and the US had many many failed missions until they got sufficient experience. For example, US's Ranger 7 was the first successful Ranger mission*, as 1 thru 6 bit the dust; it became almost comical. (I have a draft script for a movie about the stressed Ranger team.)

Incremental is a safer bet.

* To get close-up photos of the moon's surface by taking rapid photos up until the time it intentionally crashes into the moon. Ranger was sort of like a Gatling gun of cameras in order to take and send images fast enough.

Comment Re:hmmm...could be useful (Score 3, Insightful) 112

"I like to scroll back and see clusters of tabs from months ago -- it's like a trip down memory lane on whatever I was doing/learning about/thinking about,"

If only there was some built in tool, some kind of, say, 'things you've looked at' function...a journal or diary type thing.... to keep track of what web pages you visited.

Yeah, some sort of "historical list" or something... that would be very useful.

Comment "Power users" (Score 1) 112

In my experience these folks tend to be the biggest support headaches... primarily because they tend to assume they know a lot more about tech than is actually the case; and secondarily because they convince other users of the same.

They're a lot like "tech" bloggers, but (fortunately) with a smaller audience.

Comment The most toppiest toppness ever, believe me! (Score 1) 51

> This has to be the eighth time in the last twenty years that Microsoft has declared security to be the top priority, yet nothing ever changes.

I indeed remember multiple from the past also.

"But this time it's top top top priority, not just top top priority".

I once had a non-IT PHB-like manager who would rank ALL items on my to-do list "A+" (top-most importance). I pointed out that doesn't tell me which to start on first, but the PHB replied, "If I put B's and C's, you won't be motivated to get to them."

I was about to reply, but then bit my tongue, went back to my cubicle, and slapped my forehead for 10 minutes straight. How the F do humans that dumb get to be managers? Maybe they just *sound* smart to the extra stupid managers who promoted them? Explains certain politicians.

Comment Re:I suspect this was deliberate ... (Score 2) 229

Given that knowledge isn't passed along genetically, it's silly to assume that everyone in Utah is equally adept at securing databases. Doubly so because this was a government driven project and likely done on the cheap.

We've seen plenty of stupidly-unprotected databases before. You don't have to look any further than "incompetence" to find the reason.

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