all datacomm companies are in bed with the spooks. cisco is just like all the others, not special in that regard.

I joined cisco in the early days, back in the early 90's. I was there a short time, then left, and recently came back; so I see the new cisco and do remember the old 3 building cisco. they are not even close to the same company anymore.

I enjoy being there but its more about my group than the company. company wise, I see a lot of bad designs and bad decisions and a lot of young kids who have no business writing or supporting routing software. but like all other valley companies, most work is farmed out to india to the lowest price bidder and the results really show this ;( even locally, you won't find many americans working there and the attention to detail has been long gone. its a young employees company and experience is not really valued, again, like most other bay area companies.

there is a lot of cool stuff going on, but they have lost their ability to stay focused and deliver world-class software like they once did. its now a body shop with very few visionaries left. sad to see that happen.

fear.

control.

keeping you from challenging authority.

pretty much, just that.

(oh, and security theater, too.)

ALL of our founding fathers would be arrested as terrorists.

they fought their own country, the English.

now, we agree with their views, but if the TLA's had their way (and congress, and the president and, well, all the courts, too) they'd be marked as 'bad guys' and would have little to no freedom.

odd, how that turns 360, huh? ;(

as a guy over 50 who has analog meters (triplett, simpson, stuff like that) that are nearly as old as I am, I can say with confidence that you have no idea what you are talking about.

digital meters tend to fail more! they are more complex, and unless you buy very good ones, they will suffer 'cap problems' (esp. if made in china, which nearly all things are, these days).

otoh, buy a used meter of the type I described and as long as it was not hit by a truck, it will likely work and out live YOU.

springs fail? never saw that happen. bushings fail? again, never saw that happen.

I would guess, based on your very high UID that you are a youngster and never really used or lived with such gear before.

probably better to just remain silent than to speak up and tell everyone how much you don't know.

right.

you're only allowed to do illegal things and lie about it AFTER you are hired by the fbi.

does anyone seriously believe that 'law enforcement' is about fighting the good fight and standing up for what is right, anymore?

I have lost 101% confidence in our system's ability to do what's Right(tm). it seems only the stupid or brainwashed would want to work for the government goons.

and of course, goons is basically what they have, now, anyway.

2 words: parallel reconstruction.

FBI is a corrupt org, as are all the top-level 'law enforcement' orgs.

they have no right to call the kettle black, so to speak...

they break any laws they want and they use 'ends justify the means' along the way.

pathetic!

And desktops and laptops last more than 8 to 12 years,

NOT in a corp environment, they don't! 2 or 3 yrs, tops. corps do a 'refresh' and buy new gear (cheaper than supporting older stuff).

and every company I've been at in the bay area, for the last 10 yrs at least, has mandated windows (sometimes giving mac a choice) but they NEVER run linux on the desktop. juniper ran freebsd on the desktop for its engineers (2000 timeframe) but that's the exception, not the rule.

corps keep paying the MS tax. happily, it seems.

MS is not going away. they may not get consumers to rebuy pc's so often but corps do, that much is true.

well, how do you make playlist with a filesystem?

really? that's your question?

% cd somewhere; find . -print > playlist.txt

or equiv.

yeah, that was REAL hard. filesystems suck for audio playback.

oh wait, NO THEY DON'T.

I try the 'desktops' every so often, but I keep getting annoyed and go back to very old fvwm1 (emulating twm. no, not kidding).

very light weight, no huge process list from hell (like all desktop linux's these days) - just the window manager, the x server and some other minor things. makes fast systems truly fast, and slower systems quite acceptable.

what do I run on a rasp pi or beaglebone? yup, fvwm1 and no 'desktop'. makes those tiny systems usable. does not need a lot of memory or disk footprint.

18 months, huh? you think that's long enough?

I still have my N1 phone and its still in nearly new physical condition. bugfixes and security updates stopped several years ago. should I throw it out? even CM is not updated for this phone.

otoh, I have pc's that are more than 10 yrs old, STILL SECURE and STILL able to be updated.

fuck google. they are children with a short attention span. they make linux look like something worse than MS or apple (even MS and apple give more updates than google does on older hardware.)

any site that demands I disable ad-blockers is not a site I NEED to visit. so, its self-filtering.

(what's the problem, again?)

do you live here (bay area)? I do. been here several decades.

the valley does NOT want talent. what do they want? CHEAP LABOR. quality is not important, insight is not important, even code quality is not important. speed and price is all that matters.

I wish I was kidding... ;(

I recently moved and had CC for the previous year I was in my last place. I used a vpn almost all the time and my line stayed up pretty much 100%.

this year when I moved, I transferred CC to my new place and I continue to run a vpn. I now notice, for some reason, that after a few hours, I get a loss of ping to anything. if I stop my vpn, the default router is still unpingable. what 'fixes' it is to reboot the cable modem (and my access pfsense router, which then gets a new dhcp primary addr) and then things are good again for a few hours.

not sure if this is related, but if I don't use a vpn, the line stays up for days and weeks at a time. when I use a vpn, I get a few hours at a time.

might not mean a thing, but then again, it might. I can't quite tell yet. what I am planning on doing is designing/building a reboot/test loop so that my line will stay up even if I'm not home to notice that it went down.

I had to do that kind of thing with pacbell dsl about 10+ yrs ago (their alcatel, aka crash-catel modem was at fault back then; but same thing happened - I'd lose connectivity and only a reboot of the modem would bring it back again).

its not convenient but if this keeps my line alive, sigh, well, this is what I will have to do.

I ran zfs on freebsd for a few years but gave up on it. at one time, I did a cvsup (like an apt-get update, sort of, on bsd) and it updated zfs code, updated a disk format encoding but you could not revert it! if I had to boot an older version of the o/s (like, before the cvsup) the disk was not readable! that was a showstopper for me and a design style that I object to, VERY MUCH. makes support a nightmare.

I've never seen this in linux with jfs, xfs, ext*fs, even reiser (remember that?) never screwed me like this before.

the system also was very ram hungry and cpu hungry.

I'm still not convinced its good for anything but serious users who have a GOOD backup/restore plan. updating a disk image format and not allowing n-1 version of o/s to read it is a huge design mistake and I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind it, but until that is changed, I won't run zfs.

obsolete?

if you use drives as shelf-spares or backups, then this is a MAJOR problem!

I have drives that are 10+ yrs old and while I don't spin them up very often, I do expect them to still work years from now as long as I give them a spin-up every so often, to keep them in shape.

a drive that fails just sitting there, unused, is NOT something I want to buy! or own.