Disney / ABC is pretty smart. The 35 people are sure to keep looking around the job market (which is much better in NY and CA than in FL from the last round of ~250 layoffs) and eventually leave anyway. If they leave voluntarily, Disney doesn't have to pay them the severance package at all, which is likely equivalent to an extra few months' salary. A small price to pay for the goodwill from this "Hey, maybe Disney does have a heart" headlines.

Heh, been there, though I think when it happened to me it was actually with the support of upper management to try to get as many of us to leave voluntarily before our pension vested at the 3-year mark ;-) . It was fine, though, I made more than enough money changing jobs to cover that, and at a less frantic pace where I "only" had to work 40-hour weeks with an almost negligible oncall schedule for a change.

While I'd encourage you to put yourself somewhere that you could watch this train wreck from afar... hopefully you are well-versed in your CYA-fu so this guy doesn't have the opportunity to throw you under the bus for something. Esp. if you're already going to go through the added stress of going for a degree. Hope you can get what you need out of this company in time, but don't be afraid to start shopping beforehand, your next employer could have the same or better educational assistance!

Good luck!

No, just a VM with the demo world. It relied on some pretty ancient mods from the minecraft 1.4 days for the python plugin (to get events in/out to Linux), and one of the named block scripts. Also some bash loops to poll the monitoring system for events to feed into minecraft.

I'd hope one of the more recent bukkit scripting engines make it much more straightforward to do IPC to the rest of the system... it seems like minecraft could be a somewhat natural environment for making 3D control panels. I've seen a few people hook up their minecraft boxes to arduinos so they could toggle their lights and stuff with redstone circuits, but not as many as I would have expected.

Er, yes! But just want to point out that MSVC++ is/was "in house" as far as MSFS is concerned ;-)

Yeah, for my part, I did my MS thesis in python about 10 years ago, and packaged the entire thing onto a Knoppix LiveDVD. It had a lot of dependencies (python 2.7, psyco JIT that only worked on 32-bit python, lp_solve, glpk, ... heck I even included a (barely) working openoffice and the latex used to regenerate the paper.

I think it's aged OK so far. Though now I'd have to migrate everything over to python 3 using the pypy JIT compiler (not sure if it runs as fast as psyco did yet), but I think the other pieces should still work, mostly. My old environment would be too obsolete to try to do any serious new work in. But I suppose it's nice to know that I could still reproduce my results *somehow*.

Counterpoint: MSVC++

CSB: so I briefly worked on MS Flight Simulator a few years ago. It was interesting working with code that was older than Windows, but it was still there (under a whole bunch of C++ shims).

Yeah, that's why I actually liked that scene, even though it was derided for being a GUI, the thing they used was better than the generic hollywood SFX for computer stuff. I was actually interested in 3D FS managers back in the day... I think that was also about the time Steve Jobs had been ousted from Apple and was doing interesting things with NeXT.

CSB: for one of the hack days at work, I made a minecraft interface to our web servers, sorta inspired by that scene. So my kids could monitor server health with redstone torches, restart services with levers, visualize user traffic with sheep dispensers, and deploy new releases through the pipeline with minecarts.

Haven't seen any of the other sequels, but all I really want to know is if they have a worthy successor to the "this is UNIX... I KNOW THIS" scene? Because even sequels are guaranteed to regurgitate those moments because that's what the audience expects. And they expect the expected. What I mean to say, is I've got expectations, dammit. Albeit low ones.

C'mon people, I waited all day and I still have to post this for you?

https://xkcd.com/353/
which all of course ends in:
https://xkcd.com/521/ (mouseover text)

As a python guy, I lol'd the first time I had to maintain some ruby and found that the rubocop linter makes it more persnickety about whitespace than python is.

Just making some predictions on how the discussion thread will go, at least the ones that aren't whining about whitespace.

Furthermore, I kinda have always fallen into a hybrid of the 1) - 2) system so I can upgrade *something* every 2 years instead of 4 and still save money overall while also collecting a larger pile of spare parts to build extra lower-end boxes.

When building a new system, I typically get the best motherboard I can, and the cheapest half-decent CPU available for it.

Then in two years after the CPUs have hit the market, I'll throw in the second-best CPU available for that motherboard (the first-best usually still carries a premium). Bonus points for finding something off of Craigslist.

The most recent time I did this was pretty nice... I went from an Athlon II X2 (with 1GHz HT2.0) to a Phenom II X4 (with 2GHz HT3.0), which doubled the memory bandwidth. So even though the core clock went up less than 50% from 2.2Ghz to only 3.2Ghz, I ended up getting more than a 100% improvement in frame rates for my games, even the single-threaded ones that couldn't make use of the additional cores. And the poor sap from Craigslist that I bought the Phenom II X4 system from had it in an older motherboard that only supported HT2.0, so he was missing out on the extra memory bandwidth. I put my old CPU in his motherboard, so that's a better match now.