I worked at an NRC institute from 2002-2011. It was a fantastic place though it had faults. Each Institute was a mini-fiefdom in which the respective Director Generals held all the power. A lot of blue sky research was done, however in reality a lot of it would be considered "mental masturbation"; papers were published but never referenced. Or papers would be whipped up so people could attend conferences in nice locales . For too long NRC acted like an academic environment where money didn't matter: there was always a new bag of money next year.

Many Institutes had overlapping work with other Institutes but didn't collaborate. In fact the way the IT infrastructure developed was also very silo'd, it was next to impossible to work with other sites because of various local policies.

NRC has needed a good kick in the ass for a number of years. Previous presidents talked the talk but did nothing. In the end the Old Boys Club endured. The current president has been given his orders and is executing them. He's collapsing ~15 years of pain into ~3. Much of the blame for this should be put on the previous presidents.

That all said, I'm not a big fan of everything that is going on, but if you look at this as a soft reset for NRC, things will get better.

Bottom line: if anyone at NRC says things were Just Fine before, they are delusional or lying.

The three martini lunch is dead?

I've been happy with Wickr. No ties to the company, just a happy user. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/wickr-self-destructing-secure/id528962154?mt=8

My roommate does the same in his Optima actually, I just picked SD because it seems to be the common choice among OEMs for nav storage these days and in my experience is more durable than USB drives.

I've killed a few USB drives in the course of normal use where while I've heard of them I've never seem an actual dead SD card. I'd expect the actual internal memory to be similar, so I can only imagine the difference comes from the physical form and possibly simpler interface.

And the hundreds of thousands of Chrysler MyGig systems with ordinary 2.5" laptop hard disks contained within are failing in massive quantities, right? Or any number of other manufacturers offering hard disk based storage in their entertainment system. Or the thousands of custom-built in car PCs rigged up by enthusiasts, until recently often equipped with full desktop disks for capacity reasons.

FYI, the "freezer trick" is a common way to coax some last remaining life out of a hard drive that won't spin up. They seem to like the cold, since one that doesn't work at room temperature in my experience has about a 20% chance of coming back to life if frozen. More than once I've rescued data with a USB cord running out from my minifridge.

Or we'll skip the hard drive altogether, SSDs are well under $1/GB for non-performance applications (which media storage in a vehicle certainly fits within). Since when did they care about vibration or the sort of temperatures cars are tested for? Hell, for the role a SD slot would be more than sufficient. Then not only is it practically indestructible media but it's entirely user swappable, allowing easier loading of content and trivial upgrades down the line.

Anyone who's used MyFord Touch or Cadillac Cue for more than a few minutes knows that the idea of these systems being heavily tested is laughable anyways. Supposedly old Sync was nicer and I haven't had any problems with Kia's Sync-derived UVO system, but I haven't used any of the others to really compare.

When our daughter was born I took a month off to be home. Coffee and sleep deprivation was the order of the day, but I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat.

I was a bit surprised to see C and C++ but no Objective-C support.
If Blackberry is really hoping to get those "killer apps" ported over, supporting Objective-C would seem like a no-brainer.

I'm especially happy for npppd and OpenSMTPD. I have them both on running and find them simply excellent. Now that they are 'production worthy', more people can use them without jumping through a few minor hoops.

npppd works very well for getting a VPN working with a stock iOS device.

For a moment it sounded like Steve Jobs going on about a rejection.