Does your agreement typically say anything about the quality or effectiveness of the training? Because I'll train my local-job-destroying replacement, but he might end up with some interesting ideas about needing to regularly "git filter-branch" as part of routine builds, and about how everyone is doing unversioned server-side configuration these days.

Who cares if the market is not there yet? We will get nowhere in any field if we let details like that stop us.

That has to be one of the most (though likely unintentionally) hilarious things I've read all day - and the rest of the week will have to work hard to top it. Asteroid miner wannabees are in the same situation as someone setting up to injection mold iPhone cases in 1897 - it's not that the market doesn't exist, it's that practically none of the enabling technologies exist (for the case or the phone) and that someone lacks the capital to create them let alone even the foggiest clue what they actually are.
 
It's not a chicken-and-egg problem, it's a delusion and cluelessness problem.

Right. Google Shopping was originally a price comparison service. There was no charge for being listed. Then it was changed to an paid ad service. All the links on it changed to Google ad links. Our Ad Limiter browser add-on, which hides all but one Google ad per search result, then started limiting the number of shopping results displayed. We finally allowed more ads to show through on explicit Google shopping pages.

Now, Google Shopping results have changed again, so that they look like real search results. They even have additional Google ads, with the light tan background. But in reality, every result on a Google Shopping page is a paid ad.

Google Voice is just the old Grand Central service. Google has done very little to it since they bought the company.

• It's horribly inefficient of network bandwidth. You have to read several megabytes of data to find out that you have no new messages.
• The phone numbers used are purchased from some third-tier phone reseller that doesn't have good access to the US phone number database. So some carriers don't recognize Google Voice numbers as accepting SMS.
• The interface to the service uses both XML and JSON on the same page, and any program that talks to it must parse both. "Conversations" have unique IDs, but individual messages do not, and it's tough to extract new messages exactly once. You have to page through screen after screen of stored messages, and explicitly archive inactive conversations to declutter the output.
• All those problems have been outstanding for years.

If you want to deal with phone and SMS messages from a program, look at Twilio. It's not free, but it actually works.

It may depend on the accents and speech patterns of those who call you, but I find that GV transcriptions generally do a reasonable job of giving me the gist of the message. I'd say I have to actually listen to the message maybe 30% of the time, and even then it's usually just to clarify the details.

Asteroid mining would sell raw materials and water to other space ventures, private or public.

That's a nice theory... But the elephant in the room is the fact that there aren't any such ventures currently. Nor are their likely to be any of sufficient size to support an asteroid mining venture for decades, if not centuries.

Best explanation I've seen of Software Group's current business model.

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.)