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Comment Without sleep? (Score 1) 40

Debiak coded for 10 hours on minimal sleep

Is that guy a cat who needs to nap every 2 hours?

FWIW, I once participated in a coding contest at my university in the early 90's that lasted 72 hours (the first prize was a full scholarship, which I didn't get :)) I ran on coffee and speed for the full 72 hours, then collapsed on a couch and slept until someone woke me up to come get my third prize (a Solaris license).

10 hours non-stop coding sounds like a normal day at the office trying to wrap up a project.

Comment Re:less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score 3, Interesting) 79

I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).

LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990s, it feels familiar to me. There is a ribbon interface, but I've only tried it a few times before remembering why it is I actually don't like the Word ribbon.

Comment been there done that, educate yourself (Score 2) 79

I've spent time on the difficult end of black-boxing a BINARY file format. You jokers with your XML and LABELS have it faaaaaar too easy. Here, I'll tell you my secret:

Gather as many saved files as you can, from as diverse of a group as possible. (there is NO upper limit, literally grab as many as you can) Write a short little test script to import and then export every single one. Then compare the export with the original. Refer the mismatches to the dev. I had over 1,000 test files in my suite, and in the initial release only a SINGLE flag was missed, because of all those test files, nobody implemented that feature and the dev guessed the storage would be the same as EVERY other one. (it turned out to be quite unique)

Oh and as for XML depth.... it's RECURSION. It literally does not care if it's 5 levels or 200 levels deep. (unless your IDE has a truly pathetic stack size)

So it's not difficult. QYB.

Comment that is of course complete BS (Score 4, Insightful) 60

Unfortunately, since the coding technology that was used in the previous app version is different from what is used in the new app, it is not possible to recover word lists.

Oh it's most definitely possible, but they have no convenient place to put them since users can't login anymore, and so they're just going to label it as "impossible" to get people off their back. (data conversion is relatively easy to do, I do it occasionally)
And if they honestly are saying they think it's "impossible", some PHB is being lied to or there's some severe incompetence afoot.

We might see a class-action for this. It's always risky just "deleting" a "lifetime" service without at least re-branding.

Comment Re:Congrats to Linux Devs and Distros! (Score 1) 146

Does a Windows game run 100% in WINE?

YES! Many happy users of Proton on Steam Deck will answer in the affirmative for many games. This is what Valve's 30 percent cut of Steam sales pays for.

If *Nix was just a simple drop-in replacement without all the config issues that require an hour of reading to fix

As if Windows 11 doesn't have its own host of "config issues that require an hour of reading to fix."

Comment Re:I told my kids all along to ignore career advic (Score 1) 189

The college degree loan thing was already becoming a problem when I was an undergrad over 20 years ago. It was fine when one might be borrowing $5000 per year as even entry-level college grad jobs that actually used degrees paid enough to make repayment of those loans doable, but the trouble was that far too many truly entry-level jobs started preferring college degrees when they didn't really contribute, so more and more demand for college degrees among people drove up prices for the limited seats. Which led to a balloon in both traditional colleges increasing their programs and their tuition, and for-profit colleges springing up to try to get in on the act.

Comment Re:Walk right in and ask for an application (Score 1) 189

Funny, I got a good job in the late nineties doing just that. I was cold-calling and I got hired onto the quality assurance team for a specialized software product. Unfortunately despite the company not being a dotcom they were in investment-building mode and the investor got cold feet so they went under anyway, but it was a good job and the people who hired me did so based on or technical conversations when I cold-called.

My current job I got by having experience with this team when I was at a different employer. They liked me enough they asked me to interview when a prior teammate retired.

Comment Re:Temp work FTW (Score 1) 189

I've seen some temp jobs work out well, but I've seen others where it was not so good.

Temp-to-hire where the employer actually really does intend to hire-on, and uses the temp-process to get to know candidates before making offers is fine. It's actually not a bad idea if basically everyone is on the same page. Temp agency needs to be ready to move people around if various employers do or don't like candidates, and temp-employees need to understand that there could be periods of downtime, and might themselves need to ask the agency for alternate placement if they don't like where they're temping.

On the other hand I've seen temps that were abused very heavily, because regular employees didn't want to do shit-jobs or didn't really want to work at all, with no intent on actually hiring. I've also seen rather odd people working as temps because even in a temp-to-hire arrangement the business didn't like some of the temps but still needed work to be done so kept them around for longer than normal just to complete the task before releasing them.

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