Oh... I can't believe I wrote all of that without mentioning the offshoring push. That was what finally pushed me out the door, the writing was on the wall that all development was moving overseas -- and not even to India, because India is too expensive! I spent a lot of time working with engineers in Brazil and Romania. Good people, but offshore development is painful -- and IBM's customers will feel that pain, until they abandon IBM.

Whenever I read news about IBM, I'm glad I got out of that place. When I joined the company in the mid-90s, during Gerstner's reign, it was a great place to work, and a very successful company. There were plenty of problems, to be sure, and Gerstner laid off lots of employees, but the company was focused on the future and on building new and successful business. The employees were generally treated quite well, performance was amply rewarded, and education budgets were generous and easily accessible to ensure that technical employees continued developing their skills and the culture was one of mutual support to get things done. For large technology companies, I think the approach to employee continuing skill development is something of a bellwether for the company's future.

When Gerstner stepped down and Palmisano took over, however, the company began a long, gradual slide. It became cost-obsessed and quarterly earnings-focused. Some belt-tightening was appropriate during the dotcom bust, but that actually didn't hit IBM very hard. The problem was that Palmisano's leadership team had no idea how to create new business, the IBM services group that Gerstner started and used to revitalize the company was reaching a kind of natural saturation point, so Palmisano started slashing costs to prop up profit growth as revenue growth got harder to find. Even worse, the cost pressure began to change the culture of the company, creating more internal competition which began to turn ugly.

By the time I left in 2011, IBM had become a fairly unpleasant place to work. Global Services was the worst, for example utilization targets were routinely set so high that it was impossible to take vacation time without working overtime in order to make up for it, and cost controls had squeezed out all career development funding unless you could hide it in customer contracts. Software Group was struggling and had shifted more to focus on sales rather than development. IBM has always been primarily a sales company, backed by engineering, but shifting the balance too far towards sales is a way to boost short-term profits at the expense of long-term success. I personally got caught in that shift; my job was transformed underneath me from an architecture and development role to a technical sales support role. I even hear from my friends in R&D that they were also getting squeezed hard, with increasing pressure to abandon work on any ideas that couldn't be productized within a few months.

When I heard that Ginni Rometty was taking over for Palmisano last year I just shook my head. Rometty was a driving force in squeezing services employees with ever-increasing utilization targets and ever-tightening cost structures. IMO, IBM needs another visionary like Gerstner, not another jumped-up middle manager like Palmisano, but that's what they got in Rometty. She's a smart, talented, aggressive jumped-up middle manager, but still not what IBM needs, IMO.

I'm glad I left. I really should have done it a few years before I did.

Did you miss the "use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish"?

Either that or it was an anomaly. Stuff happens... regardless of the size of the company. In fact, things like that tend to get fixed quickly and effectively at Google, more so than any company I've worked for, big or small. In general you have a problem, you file a ticket, and your problem gets fixed -- usually with surprising speed, often in minutes. Google is a big company, but it has an extensive support staff whose job is to ensure that engineers aren't distracted by trivialities.

It requires some agent to be installed on a target server which communicates back to the Puppet Master.

You can run puppet in masterless mode, against a local copy of the manifests, either managed locally or checked out from a version control repository.

Likewise with salt (my preferred choice over puppet, but both work), you can run either with a master host, or masterlessly. With salt the nice thing is, you can use the same config for both, just invoke the command differently (salt-call --local vs salt).

Infosec is no reason not to automate, just don't automate with a master server if your policies don't permit it.

The process of processing plant fiber is largely identical; but removing it from hemp is a lot more intensive than plucking cotton puffs and milling out the seeds with a mechanical comb. Once you've harvested it, you can effectively drop that shit right into what we have now with minimal manufacturing adjustments.

Ah, so the processes is identical except for all the parts that aren't. Or, to put it another way, you're just repeating yourself - are you being intentionally obtuse are are you just that clueless? And no, you can't just substitute one fiber for another with "minimal adjustments". (Again, the "Football = Football" analogy is relevant - you seem to no not realize the difference between abstraction and the real world.)
 

Who you gonna sell hemp to?

If it's so superior - lots of people. You seem blithely unaware that the fashionista are far from the only market segment. You seem clueless that the Western world is far from the whole of the world.

No, no, you cannot copyright how to make a functional object. That's what patents are for, and they run out after 20 years.

Confirmation from an American authority that Bitcoin is a legitimate form of money.

I've said it before and I've said it again because it doesn't appear to be sinking in, Bitcoin fanatics live in a serious Reality Distortion Field. The federal and state governments don't give a rats ass whether you conduct your financial transactions in dollars, Bitcoins, or jars of hamster poop - all they care about is that you abide by the regulations when you start using them for a method of exchange or start acting like a bank or currency exchange. (Which is why Ithaca Hours and other local currency systems are still around - and Liberty Dollars are not.)

If this country built a strong cannabis industry, right now, what would the benefits be?

If hemp is such a wonderplant... why isn't it, in the numerous countries where it isn't illegal, grown in gigaton quantities?
 

despite that the process of spinning plant fibers into thread and yarn is largely the same.

"Largely the same", but not really the same. (US) Football and (the rest of the world) football are largely the same too if you step back far enough - but such abstractions aren't all that useful in the real world. And you've left out the all important step of obtaining the raw fiber - look at a puff of cotton fresh from the field and a length of hemp stem fresh from the field and you'll understand why cotton was (and is) King of natural fibers.

Its good to see a BSD release picking up another major instance of commercial use. One of the obstacles the BSDs have faced is mindshare. Linux has had such an overpowering presence in the free/open world that it often overshadows the BSDs. That plays out in the commercial software that is available. If you look at high end vendor software, such as Oracle or other databases, or CAD tools, it is pretty rare to see much released for anything except Red Hat, or maybe Suse Linux. But getting the BSDs out where users are aware of it will definitely help.

I've been a Linux aficianado since 0.1, but find *bsd appealing for a number of reasons.

1. Portage version available (relatively seamless transition for playing around from Gentoo)
2. Avoids the whoile systemd debacle
3. avoids the udev debacle
4. Did I mention it avoids systemd? So does Gentoo, but if enough lemmings follow Red Hat over the cliff, then *bsd it will be...

Pretty much, yes. What's going on inside the reactor vessel hasn't changed much in fifty years. None of the more exotic designs has been much of a success. If anything goes wrong with a new design years downstream, a billion dollar plant may have to be retired early.

What's been learned is that the worst cases designed for fifty years ago weren't bad enough. It's necessary to design for bigger earthquakes, bigger tsunamis, bigger fires, bigger floods, bigger leaks, bigger airplane crashes, and bigger screwups than was thought fifty years ago. (All those things have happened.) This runs up costs. Also, decommissioning a damaged reactor is far more expensive than building it. We still don't have a place to put used fuel rods, either.

Which is the default, actually. If it's been uploading everything, it's because you explicitly told it to.

Not so much. Maybe a few years ago, but not any more. There's a pretty good mix, now. I'm 43 and most of the engineers I work with are in their 30s, with a fair number of 40-somethings and a smattering of 50- and 60- year-olds, as well as a contingent of youngsters not long out of school.

A lot of applicants, period... some good, most not. Google interviews a lot of people for every one hired.

Indeed it is. When people ask me about working at Google they always want to hear about all the perks, and those are nice, but what makes it really fun and gratifying is the people.

How so?