They're pretty much running this like a call center. Computers have let us monitor everything. And yes call center workers are monitored down to the minute. They have qualities and expectations that vary depending on the industry that have to be met or disciplinary measures are taken that eventually can lead to your being fired. Missing time can lead to the same. Taking lunch or break time to go to the bathroom,. LOTS of people work under these conditions in the US.

My one real Bully Boss I had a bad feeling about in my interview but I *needed* the work. He would stare you in the eyes, for uncomfortable lengths of time. It wasn't just an interview tactic, he did it a LOT. IDK if he was trying to establish some sort of dominance or if it was some sort of psychological move, or what but he did it with most if not all of his direct reports. I learned to not avoid it and serve it right back after a couple months. He'd also do things like randomly stop by my office and ask "So why am I paying you today?" I started keeping task logs and he never listened to more than 2 or 3. He did this with others as well but stopped asking me after I actually answered him a few times. Bullies are really only interested in easy targets and if you're not one or if their tactics stop working, they move one. I heard he harder on the Sales Team. I probably got glossed over because he didn't really understand IT. Because of that I was pretty much in charge of anything that plugged into the wall. He also negged on people a lot and not in a joking way. He just wanted to see how you reacted. He once told me about how he judged men by the watch they wore, he had a palm-something I don't remember. He said that my not wearing a watch drove him nuts and he probably shouldn't have hired me because of it. I ended up quitting when I moved out of the area.

So my suggestion is to be aware of whether or not dominance is even an important thing to the person. Most people don't consciously care. Do they "hold court" or do cheap shot dominance stuff like have an aggressive handshake, stare you in the eyes, persistently intrude in your personal space bubble, or do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. Also a preoccupancy with status symbols: watches, cars, what your house is worth, etc.

Take this for what you will, my sample size is 1.

I started off in Comp Sci but switched because it was mostly too removed from things people actually do. Examples of this include "Discrete Structures for Comp Sci." This was an entire semester of algebraically proving algorithms correct for sets of numbers most often infinity (they always work). Another important area of study was Search/Sort algorithms and their n^2, N*log2(N) etc. No one even back then was sitting around deciding to use a shaker sort over a heap.

Now I get that everything will be somewhat out of date, it takes 2-3 years to publish a textbook. But our library was terrible. We had Comp Sci books that literally my dad could have borrow. From the 1970s! None of the big C++ Bible style books and networking was almost non-existent. The were still teaching token ring and 10base2 even though no one was using it anymore at that time. Granted hubs were still a thing but that would change to switched LAN in a couple years.

When they did try and teach something current it didn't work. I remember the day I decided to quit comp sci. I was in a Object Oriented C++ class. Cutting edge stuff at the school. We literally typed in a simple program from the textbook and got a compiler error that there were too many compiler errors. That's when I realized "this is bullshift" and switched majors.

This is a 1982 film that juxtaposes the natural world with modern (for 1982) living. There are no characters or dialog just an interesting statement made through cinematography and music written by Philip Glass. It's still extremely relevant today as the scale of the problem it explores visually has only increased. Historically it's one of the first big pieces that shows "Hey, we might be a problem."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4MXPIpj5sA

Turning an SE/30 into a linux box was little bit of a thing about a decade ago. Around this time I ran an Apple Network Server ANS/200mhz using Yellowdog Linux, a PPC based linux distro that shuttered in 2012.
http://www.ydl.net/board/
Back then you could shoehorn the distro onto a SE/30. It was about the earliest mac that you could do much of anything with. I think it was the first mac to have an ethernet board available (10baseT!) so anything else would need to run a PPP connection to networked PC or serial -> network appliance, which at that point, meh.

Waaay back in 1999 I installed Redhat 5.1 on a 486 dx4 100mhz PC. Had to use floppy because the CDROM was so old it wasn't ATAPI. It took a while to compile a kernel in those days. Linux was so cool because all you needed was any old PC, a 3C905 ethernet card and you could have a web/email/ftp/ssh/file/print/etc server up and running after only a couple hours of swearing. :)

Boxing, red box, blue box, black box. You might not have had one, but you knew someone who did.

War dialing to find other modems listening in your area.

Kermit, Xmodem, Ymodem, Zmodem

Using a hole punch or exacto knife to turn single sided floppies into double sided.

That your x86 box was nothing compared to a SGI, Dec Alpha, or Sun workstation.

That email took longer around Christmas because every email server was choking on dancing Santa GiFs.

Browsing the internet with lynx and reading email with pine.

I'm new to Bitcoin but I've Seti@home'ed a lonnng time ago and done gene folding so I get the distributed CPUs thing. What I'm missing here is why. If I understand it correctly all these processors are essentially looking for rare numbers and when they find one they're give a Bitcoin. Do these numbers have an actual value to science or math or is it just manufactured scarcity? Does all this do anything worthwhile or are bitcoins essentially tokens of luck and wasted electricity? In all that I read about Bitcoins nothing suggested that anything useful is being created by all this cpu time and energy spent crunching hashes. I kinda hope I'm wrong and someone clues me in.

For those musically inclined DIY slashdotters, PAIA has been around for ever. Theremins, tube preamps, effects pedals, analog synths, they could keep you busy for years! They have all sorts of neat kits.
http://paia.com/

Don't be too jelous, it took me the better part of a week to get yellow dog Linux to boot on it.

More like the hp/cisco blade/switch backplane. Imagine if we just had to plug processing, memory, storage, etc resources into an urea high bandwidth transport. Something like a super motherboard.

Well, mostly. I checked the case, mobo, and disks. See I plugged in a scsi3 disk into a scsi2 adapter, but the ebayer that sold me the scsi3 disk failed to mention is was a LVD scsi3 disk and that was apparently enough to blow one of my channels. After that I got what I needed off the disks and mothballed it as a printer stand. When I chucked it I did pull the CPU card, the cache memory and the ram just in case anyone ever needs it for a museum piece.

I had an Apple Network Server that I got for $75 from a company that lost the AIX disks for it. I pimped the processor and RAM and stuffed the drive bays full of scsi goodness. I ran it until about 2005 when I switched to RAQ2 which was actually more powerful, had more hd space, and used less power. I used the ANS as a print stand until about a year ago when I needed more space and replaced it with a tool chest cabinet.

It saddens my that there is this tipping point where it becomes more wasteful because of power consumption to keep using old technology. It would be completely against tech companies' bottom lines, but the earth would love it if we could create an upgradable platform with a multi-decade usable lifespan while still being efficient.

Sheet mang, I know that cat from back in the CALUG 2004-ish days! Hit me up man if you catch this.

when was the quality of discourse ever good? Back in before 2000 there were a goatse.cx links all over the comments and you needed to don an asbestos suit before replying to anything.