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Comment Re:Sorry but I have to bite (Score 1) 270

If you are going to go that far back should I start mentioning slavery and some bad American management practices that demonstrate that it's sorely missed? Will that hold up enough of a mirror to show how stupid your above comments are?

The US financial system fucked up the world's economy and the Greek situation, Spanish situation, Irish situation etc is an echo of it (because they blew everything on GFC bailouts and the cupboard is now bare), yet you have the gall to blame it on some sort of racial stereotype that is the opposite of reality. Greeks are lazy? You need to get out of your gated community.

Comment Either way it still gets drive-by malware (Score 0) 166

I don't know the mechanism, but IE as of 2015 is still just a single click away from infecting entire office networks with malware such as cryptolocker. Two recent events I've had reported to me were from clicking on an email link about parcel tracking (which opened IE, which then helpfully ran the malware in some way) and another to see an invoice (once again the two usual suspects of Outlook and IE).
I don't know if Firefox is immune to such a malware attack but I've only heard of it coming in via IE.

Comment Re:Interesting retort (Score 2) 98

A decade ago it was easy - post a pile of crappy jokes and karma is up to 50 in no time. Now there's apparently no karma for jokes, so the easy way to get mod points is to say X is shit and Wayland is not just for phones and tablets sometime soon but can now do everything X can now. The easy way to lose points and attract foes is to politely point out that neither is the case. Pick another trendy topic like bitcoin evangelism for similar results.

Comment Re:ignorant hypocrites (Score 1) 347

"Creativity" of software development is way overstated. It is not creative work in most cases.

Making yet another CRUD GUI is not exactly creative. Neither is any kind of usuall application you would be creating in business setting. Those mazes come presolved and you just trace line on paper.

In other cases, if you do not learn about problem being solved enough to be able to give good estimate - why are you professional? You should have business design document and technical design document and almost all gotchas covered already. What should remain is implementation itself and that is not much of creative work either - even if you have to wrestle with programing language to implement some concepts.

Comment I disagree (Score 1) 347

I disagree - no budget is going to help with time dependant issues or bottlenecks that cannot be "bought off". The most famous and trivial example is bringing a child to term - not happening any faster with ten mothers. Seasonal conditions are another. Production capacity of suppliers is another. Availability of staff is another. I'd say it's only really a major factor when comparing with projects with inadequate budgets.
Run three shifts and some time problems go away but not all of them.

Comment Make up your mind (Score 0) 347

If you want to call yourselves "engineers" without everyone laughing at you there is a need to do things like be able to schedule projects and not be afraid to put in conservative estimates for unknowns instead of what you think the boss would like to hear. If what it takes is a small pilot project to get even a vague idea of how long the real project will take then that's often a more acceptable option than stumbling in the dark until whoever is funding the project runs out of patience.
So, do you guys want to be like (or actually be) engineers or do you want to "shrug" on the job you are supposed to do and leave the time estimates to people with far less of a clue than yourselves. The latter way leads to "death march" projects and nasty ambushes where dismissal for lack of performance can come at an unexpected time simply due to others having no way to measure whether the progress to date is up to expectations or not.
Don't be afraid to take so time out to plot out a timeline and list dependancies instead of giving your boss an instant guess. An answer of "I'll have an extimate by time X" is far better than an instant wild guess of "finish the project by date X" before you've even checked who is available to do the work.

Comment Remember objective is to copy files not "computer" (Score 2) 466

USB to IDE to get to the drive, or boot off an old linux root/boot floppy like Toms rootboot disk, and ftp, or whatever the files over to something else via the ethernet connection you didn't mention (maybe because it doesn't have one), or parallel you did mention (laplink). I'm sure many others have mentioned laplink for MSDOS.
Remember you don't have to be in the native OS or even the native hardware when all you really want is the files on the disk.
Another alternative, if there is an ethernet connection, is to go full knoppix - it isn't all that hard to run knoppix on one machine as a PXE server to boot up knoppix on a machine with no cdrom.

Comment Why the sidetrack? (Score 1) 270

Last I heard, Australia wasn't located anywhere near Moscow.

Closer than the US by Abbott - when Putin turned up at the G20 the expected confrontation over the airliner didn't happen - Abbott instead quietly had a photo opportunity with Putin and Koalas then called the President of the USA a liar over fairly tame comments about the barrier reef.

However, odd diversions into irrevent sidetracks about terrorists aside, the NSA do not respect the constitution so legality does by definition not apply to the situation. They want to punish Snowden and don't care if it's done with reference to the courts or not - "justice" Chinese style.

Comment Re:Sorry but I have to bite (Score 1) 270

You've missed the point that the above poster was doing mindless ethnic profiling like the Irish jokes, Black and White Minstrels etc of the past. I suppose I should have stated it directly instead of gentle mocking.
The economic collapse in Greece owes more to a greedy few getting financial advice from Goldman Sachs and believing in a quick buck with no consequences, than a work ethic or lack of one in the majority.
It's not a Greek racial trait of laziness just as there is no Irish racial trait for stupidity despite how popular jokes about stupid Irishmen used to be in the USA.

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