For the years I was working in the tech industry, I was steadily employed (I'm on a disability retirement now.)

The only certificate I ever got was a low-level Oracle 7 DBA cert. Not one employer ever asked about that cert. Instead, they had their DBAs asking me *questions* to see what I knew. And because I'd worked with some sharp people and had good lunch-room discussions with them, I knew *far* more than that certificate course ever taught me.

My experience with "training courses" is that they run you through the same material you can get by downloading the user manuals and playing with the product. Unless you're talking something like a Cisco box that you can't just download, you're far better off using the internet for training materials, *learning* your stuff, and being able to *answer questions* during the interview process.

If you think even the most bone-headed of employers is going to take your word for it that a certification means you "know your stuff", you're off in fantasy land.

Worse, claiming a certificate means that you're going to be *grilled* on that subject if they're hiring you for it, so you'd damned well *better* know your stuff. Taking a certificate course for the sake of being "employable" is as bone-headed as renovating a house in order to sell it -- you *never* get back the money you spent on renovations, and you *never* earn as much more money as you spent on the course.

Certificate courses are all about one thing and one thing only: a revenue stream for whoever is doing the training.

Heh, since the Win95 days I used to have to flatten and rebuild my Windows gaming box every 6 months or so due to driver problems and bloat. Then the last time my HDD died I just up and installed one of the pirated/cracked Russian Win7 versions (since my OEM Win7 license was spent on that dead OS disk). It runs in Test mode and doesn't get any updates, but I haven't had any problems for well over a year now of running Steam games. Whoever pwned my system does a much better job keeping it stable and running smoothly :P

Talk about worrying about drips while the river floods. Hundreds of billions wasted on the F35's alone, and someone is worried about $35 million for satcom.

No wonder there are never any *real* cuts to the military budgets with "prioritization" like this.

Yes, look at software requirements first. FEA and CFD software can be extremely hardware specific. Cant they make use of powerful GPGPUs? Most server chassis will have great CPU/RAM but crap in the way of PCIe slots and especially GPU power plugs. What OS will the SW need to run? HP doesn't even certify "consumer grade" OSes on much of their rackmount lineup, and if you use Windows Server 20XX you often can't get the latest certified GPU drivers on the Server OSes, so you may well lose product support one way or the other. Ask me how I know.

Where are these servers/workstations going to be located? Servers are NOISY and belong in a climate-controlled server room, and then you'll need some sort of remote-access mechanism to them. Depending on latency and distance requirements, that can get pretty expensive.

If these are just headless number cruncher units, by all means absolutely use AWS (they also have some sort of CUDA farm if your software can leverage GPGPU). Then you can scale out the wazoo and pay only for what you need when you use it. Do your development work on your own mini-cluster (could be just a bunch of VMs in a workstation) if you want to keep standing operational costs down, but then farm out all of the big jobs to AWS and automatically shut those VMs down after they're done doing their thing. HPC clusters are a lot of work to design and keep running (something somewhere is always breaking once you get up past a dozen nodes or so). Unless what you're doing is classified, I doubt it's worthwhile getting into operating your own server farm, especially if you don't have one already.

Fuhrer Harper doesn't give a rat's ass about our Constitution or Charter of Rights in Canada. His government has spent millions fighting lawsuits challenging their illegal legislation on a Charter basis, only to "tweak" the legislation when the courts mandated that the law must change, but never tweaking it to comply with the Charter, only to meet the courts demand that it change.

Fuhrer Harper is busy threatening the entire nation with an impending terrorist-inspired doom if we don't re-elect the Cuntservatives this fall. Have no doubt, C-51 (the most recent spying legislation) will be challenged in court and will lose, but that doesn't stop mein Fuhrer from pushing it through like the jackboot he is anyhow.

Perhaps I have better things to do with my time than read documentation for obsolete CRAP.

Ask the people who wrote the software that doesn't exhibit the bug. Obviously it can be done.

This is not a "Unicode bug". It is a rendering bug exhibited by some applications.

So you're going to ban outsourcing, then?

Every single contract I worked on save for one required that you use the company's equipment on site due to security requirements of the job. Every single one.

This isn't some weird "breach of regulations" -- it's the norm.

WTF are you bothering with a lawyer for? Aren't you paid enough to just do your damned job and STFU? You think you're going to "cash out" with some big lawsuit?

Even if you do cash out, expect to be blacklisted by every agency across the country when they find out what you've done, and never to work again.

I've had a number of nice conversations with attorneys over the years. They range from specific real cases and current news events, to totally hypothetical events. Frequently, you'll hear "it depends on the judge". Different judges have different opinions. One may side with you totally, while another will be annoyed that you even attempt to reference a particular thing. That's the biggest thing a local attorney who knows the judge will give you.

In his case, one judge may like that he had no intention of violating the IP of the other. Another may prefer to hear that the violation was coincidental. And a third may not care and put him on the hook for a stack of damages.

Asking for legal help here and expecting an answer that can be used is totally different. An attorney doesn't have all the facts, doesn't know the jurisdiction, and would open themselves up to legal trouble.

If the advice is valid in the attorney's jurisdiction, but not the OP, he could come back and blame the attorney.

If the attorney is giving advice outside of the area where he is licensed, he can run into trouble.

If there's something significant that changes the case, then he gave bad advice.

And just like the aforementioned car analogy, a mechanic online can't give the answer to "what is that noise". That thump may be a flat tire, the bass is turned up too loud, or any number of things.

Yeah, they have the portable card readers next door in Canada.

Actually, the chip on my AmEx Blue card is TOO advanced for some vendors. The reader wouldn't take the magstripe because it somehow detected that it was a chip card, so the vendor had me stick it into the contact reader. However, AmEx just upgraded my card to the RFID and got rid of the contact reader a few months ago due to "security reasons". So... my fancy new chip card wouldn't work and I had to pull out my old FCU VISA magstripe backup card instead.

I don't know why the RFID would have less security issues than a contact patch, though, but I'm sure there are decent exploits for each... probably more interesting ones with the proximity radios.

I have no problem with forcing them to install security updates instead of letting them watch more YouTube videos.

That has always been true.

Unfortunately, the people who sign the cheques are the ones who make the decisions, and they don't make their decisions based on security concerns. Their only concern is "does it work?"

Silly me. I agree with them in most cases, unless you're talking about down-level software. If current releases of software are being broken by updates, there is a problem with the updates and/or the implementation of the APIs, because API meanings should not be changed by security updates, only major revisions of the OS.