``The only people who care about the internet of things are the people trying to tell us how awesome the internet of things will be.''

And telling us what backward, mouth-beathing Luddites everyone is who isn't racing to jump on the IoT fanboi bandwagon are.

Well, seeing as how the soon-to-be-former Disney IT folks were being forced to train their replacements, Disney had to know they were in a bad situation. Imagine the fix Disney would have been in had everyone told them to stuff their 2-3 month's salary bribes^Wseverance and boxed up their personal items after that initial meeting and there'd had been no knowledge transfer? One can only hope that someday, somewhere an IT team will band together and tell their employers to keep their paltry severance and walk out the door. (And, hopefully, straight to the press.)

I've trained my replacement before. Or I should say I trained my replacements before. My sysadmin job was sliced and diced to be done by multiple "teams". User account management? Separate team. Storage? Separate team. Backups? Separate team. You get the picture. Another admin and I conducted more than one online training session for each of these teams and those were followed up by two (count 'em!) in-person visits by several members of each of the teams. After my end date came around, the outsourcing company hired me on as a contractor (at about the same as I was making but I actually made out pretty well since the contract work was entirely remote and I had zero transporation costs). For the better part of four years I was still doing most of the work that was supposed to have been farmed out to these teams. Everything these teams were supposed to be doing was taking 2-3 times longer as tasks would sit and sit and sit in the queue until some manager got me involved. It was rather pathetic. Cost savings? Where? Well, I guess my previous employer didn't have to pay out my bonus anymore and I wasn't taking paid vacation time.

I worked for a major aerospace company back in the early '80s and at least part of the IT operation there was unionized. So it can happen or at least it could before money equaled speech.

``In 2009 Bill Gates sat before the US congress, and explained that the tech industry was suffering from huge shortages, and desperately needed more foreign guest workers. At the same time, Microsoft was laying off thousands of US workers.''

And, no doubt, not a single one of those simpleminded Congresscritters called him out on the hypocricy.

\begin{snark}

If we're unable to reproduce and dying off from testicular cancer, there will be less pressure on the food supply that will be dwindling as the pesticides kill off the bee population and the plant pollenation function they perform. The humans that are left can do that pollenation by hand when the bees are all gone.

See... it's all good!

\end{snark}

I can recall when an entire Linux -- not "pared down" -- ran in "as little as" 16MB. (No X Windows; server only.) It was the Anaconda installer that forced me to upgrade systems to 32MB. (At least temporarily; after getting Linux installed I could pull out that extra memory.) Of course, this was a "few" years ago. Nowadays, I have more memory than that in my old Laserjet. What's limiting these devices to have only 32MB? Power?

Try taking that with you to the bank when you try applying for a loan after your credit has been trashed by an identity thief. See how far along the loan approval process that letter gets you.

WTF are you supposed to do with a damned letter? Feel all warm and fuzzy that they care?

``...they might wonder if the sheet is upright or upside down.''

Um... surely you're thinking of APL.

Yeah... Let's make "security through obscurity" the law of the land.

That'll help so much.

Effin' idiots.

...I have a key to an old Sun 6-drive desktop disk enclosure on my keychain though I'm not sure why. (I do still use two of those boxes but I haven't needed to get inside them for a few years.) It just seems like I won't lose it if I keep it with the rest of my keys.

A bunch of CEOs and their deep-pocketed investors want to increase their profits by driving down the cost of labor and want to do that by bringing in (basically) lower-wage indentured servants.

Call me when there's some real news on this front.

``IF THE JOB DOES NOT CONSIST MOSTLY OF DOING MATH AND REQUIRE THE WORKER TO BE LICENSED BY THE STATE, IT IS WRONG TO TITLE IT "ENGINEER!"''

You forgot the people who actually drive trains. An old friend of mine is that kind of engineer.

The argument over who should be called an "engineer" has been going on since the '70s. At least. It's only gotten worse over those 40+ years. Lately, it seems to be the job-title-enhancer of choice by employers who aren't willing to offer a higher salary. "Maybe they'll like a fancier title... We'll call them an engineer."