When are people going to stop buying products that they feel the need to jailbreak instead of buying unlocked or open alternatives?

As soon as my employer decides to offer a choice other than "windows or IOS", I'll take it.

Until then, jailbreaking remains the only option.

governments come and go, just ask the ottomans

That's nobody's business but the Turks.

I start on one of the islands. I prefer iceland since it usually picks up greenland easily.

No, the best part is that NASA were able to prove 1000 times more accurately than the Chinese that the "engine" produced NO thrust and that there are some inaccuracies that they haven't eliminated.

...By arbitrarily ignoring the design used by not just the Chinese, but also the British, and coming up with their own entirely different and untested version. "Hah, we've proven that your Bugatti Veyron can't do 0-6 in under 2.5 seconds, because we tried it in our Ford Fiesta and it took over 9 seconds!".

Wee bit of "Not built here" syndrome, I wonder?

I suspect he's ok with that (if not with the way you phrased it).

I've heard of lazy, but this takes the cake. Or maybe, in your case, has the cake delivered, not to your front door, but to your sofa.

An 'unboxing' is only half of the modern way of reporting on new hardware. The more interesting question in this case is "will it blend?"

It is only simple because you speak English. You need to widen your cultural perspectives.

Sorry, which culture has come begging the other to employ them?

Maybe you should take that as a hint as to which of us needs to change their perspective.


And for the record, I vehemently oppose the indentured-H1B program (particularly while we have above-average unemployment and college-educated CS grads working as Barristas). I've worked with H1Bs before, and although skill-wise I've found them basically comparable to middle-of-the-pack Americans (not saying much there, but I wouldn't call them totally incompetent), the exact cultural barrier you describe made them nearly useless. They'd agree on a detailed spec for a printer driver, and three months later, proudly show off a photo editing suite. Okay, not quite that bad, but getting good work out of an H1B requires daily (or more) handholding and walking them through the same shit over and over and over. And at the end of the project, I could have just done it (and my own work) faster without the extra body in the way.

Sorry but DevOps requires you upgrade all servers at the same time very fast, with no regard to individual server ordering.

Did you mean NetOps? DevOps refers to a development paradigm. If your development paradigm risks actual user-impacting down-time, you need firing ASAP.
Assuming you meant NetOps, can they live with provisioning me at least four (dev, test, UAT, and training) clones of the entire production environment? No? well then, they can make their case to the CTO whether inconveniencing them or our end users will have more of an impact on the bottom line. If the CTO says "go", hell, I'll code right in the production environment - Oh, you wanted that mortgage payment to go through this week? Bummer!

Developers should never have the power to affect end users. If they do, it represents a failure not on their part, but on the entire IT corporate food chain, all the way to the top. Choosing customer-facing downtime over a few more terabytes and VMs amounts to corporate suicide.

It takes two to fail to communicate. You should not be asking questions that require a direct "yes or no" answer. In many cultures, that is considered rude.

Sorry, what part of paying you to do a job requires me to give a shit about whether or not your failed third-world culture doesn't like answering direct fucking questions?

"Rude" does not apply. Breach of contract, however, does. I just wish more companies would catch on to this before they decide to outsource, rather than paying extra for literally nothing more than a built-in scapegoat for any and all problems.

Many of have absolutely nothing to do with Enterprise resource planning in our day-to-day lives. A lot of us don't care about a strategic business unit. Most slashdotters are in the field of making software, not babbling almost-but-not-quite-meaningless business jargon about software.

I agree with you in general, but in this case, if you don't know those acronyms intimately, I can safely say you have zero ability to provide a useful answer to the underlying question.


As for the question at hand - They seriously use Access and Excel as the interface? Fire them now. Access and Excel have their place, and enterprise level data access ain't it. Buy a working ERP package that meets your needs, and spend your in-house development time on integrating with something that meets 95% of your needs rather than trying to bolt functionality on to a piss-poor 50% solution.

Although you might at first prefer to work with the Devil you know, the biggest problem with extending what you have now will rear its head when you try to upgrade it to the latest version, and find that virtually all your customizations have broken. Even if you pay your vendor to make those customizations, you may have somewhere to point a finger, but you can still expect months of pain telling them which parts of their own damned software they broke and need to repair.

Hi, I'd like to create an account. Oh, you need my "real" name and address? Sure:
George W Bush
Walker's Point
Kennebunkport, ME 04046

Oh yes, please do sign me up for advertisements from your partners! And I love newsletters and can't get enough insurance offers.

He got similar results to a $1000 product, and told everybody how to do it.

I think the problem we have here comes from the comparison to a $1000 product as little more than a red herring.

He strapped a (replacement) HEPA cartridge - A well-proven technology for removing particulates from the air - To a fan. He basically made a "ghetto" HEPA filter. I have little reason to doubt it would work.

I would, however, question how well that $1000 filter performs compared to a sub-$50 Holmes/LG/Honeywell/etc filter. If Talhelm managed to get the same performance from just a replacement filter for one of those strapped to a fan, I would expect "not at all" as the answer.

So we should certainly credit him for his real "discovery" here - That expensive consumer-targetted air filters don't do any better than the Wallyworld special. Anything beyond that amounts to marketing for his new company manufacturing something even crappier than those Wallyworld specials.

The ACM shouldn't bother trying to attract that type.

I think you missed the point of Vint's complaint - They don't, thus their steadily declining relevancy to anyone outside of academia.

What's hard to understand about this, seriously?

The part where someone apparently doesn't understand the difference between a name and the thing itself, and that the thing itself doesn't always "own" its name.

Seizing Iran's TLD as part of a judgement against Iran makes exactly as much sense as seizing the assets of the Iranian American Society of Engineers and Architects, solely on the basis that it contains the word "Iran" in its name.

As TFA specifically points out, seizing ".ir" doesn't just affect the government of Iran. It affects thousands (millions?) of privately-owned subdomains. Imagine enforcing the same ruling against the US - Not just talking about ".us", but pretty much the entire set of legacy TLDs. Does it make sense that "amazon.com" suddenly belongs to some litigious asshat because of the inadequacy of US foreign policy? And as TFA also points out, ICANN doesn't even have the ability to do this unilaterally (they only directly control root server L), and trying to do so could well trigger as schism.