The Downward Spiral (a company WTF)
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@Mason Wheeler said:
I got invited to speak at a conference in Australia a few weeks ago. The international flight was well over 12 hours. I brought along some books (Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy--well worth reading BTW) to keep me company. An e-reader (even a Kindle) would never have lasted that long, even on a battery, but the books did just fine.
The new ones that are tablet PCs wouldn't, but mine's a 2nd gen. It gets 20+ hours off a battery charge.
Do not speak of what you do not know.
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@blakeyrat said:
The new ones that are tablet PCs wouldn't, but mine's a 2nd gen. It gets 20+ hours off a battery charge.
My book has infinitely worse battery life than your reader.
But I'll still be reading it long after yours has died.
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@serguey123 said:
@MiffTheFox said:
Exactly! How are hobos meant to keep warm by going and sitting inside a Kindle in the winter?Also you people complaining about physical book collections haven't ever heard of public libraries
But but... what about hobos?[ inb4 'Have you never heard of Kindle Fire?' :-) ]
@serguey123 said:
@MiffTheFox said:
Libraries aren't dying, they're being killed, entirely deliberately.maybe I'm just not enough of a bibliophile to "understand".
No, not really, I used to go to public libraries all the time when I was younger and when my own collection grew to big I donated most of it to them. I consider them a great idea but unfortunately they are dying along physical books.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
I got invited to speak at a conference in Australia a few weeks ago. The international flight was well over 12 hours. I brought along some books (Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy--well worth reading BTW) to keep me company. An e-reader (even a Kindle) would never have lasted that long, even on a battery, but the books did just fine.
The LAX->Oz flight is about 14 hours, but if you are spending all of that time reading/watching media then you are screwing yourself pretty badly with regards to jet lag. The flights I take typically leave late at night (11PM) and once the flight is in the air they feed you and put you to bed. As you are traveling against the earth's rotation you get a long night, so even if you sleep badly on a plane, you will have a lot of time to sleep badly. Then when the flight arrives AM in Oz and you are waking up from , your body clock is in the right place to reboot in a new timezone. I have no problem doing US->Oz and working most of the day I arrive.
However the Oz->US leg sucks as you are traveling with the Earth's rotation and you get a short night. You leave Oz mid morning and arrive earlier the same morning in LAX. Thus it is much better to ignore media/reading as much as possible and get as much sleep as you can.
Sleeping at the right time helps with recovery from jet lag. And doing so means your fancy device doesn't have last the entire flight. Plus airlines have been putting USB ports in seats for the precise purpose of recharging devices. And worse case scenario is that you watch the in-flight entertainment - which has come a long way since the days of a badly projected movie (last flight I was on I watched the seat back video booting linux)
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@OzPeter said:
Plus airlines have been putting USB ports in seats for the precise purpose of recharging devices.
Really? Which airlines? I have *never* seen USB ports in airplanes before. One time, at the Delta terminal in Salt Lake City, I saw USB charging ports at the terminal, which was actually pretty cool, but inside the plane? Never. And I think I've been on one flight once where they had AC power available to plug a laptop into, but they don't seem to have gotten around to putting that in on the planes that do international flights (ie. the ones that need it most.)
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Dude he was just bragging about his book's battery life, he wasn't SERIOUSLY SUGGESTING doing nothing but reading for 12 hours.
Cripes. People on this forum...
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@OzPeter said:
As you are traveling against the earth's rotation you get a long night, so even if you sleep badly on a plane, you will have a lot of time to sleep badly. [...] However the Oz->US leg sucks as you are traveling with the Earth's rotation and you get a short night
Erm, going with rotation means longer nights. Does the flight take you across the Atlantic or Pacific?
I have also never flown before, so I have no opinion on the availability of electricity and entertainment on planes.
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@dhromed said:
Erm, going with rotation means longer nights.
It's called the International Date Line, goober.
ERM!
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@blakeyrat said:
It's called the International Date Line, goober.
That doesn't influence the length of a night, you goober.
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@dhromed said:
@blakeyrat said:
It's called the International Date Line, goober.
That doesn't influence the length of a night, you goober.It does for people on the plane. You take off (numbers approximate because it's been years) frmo LAX at like 7:00 PM, fly 15 hours, land at 10:00 PM. It's like the exact WORST form of jet lag.
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Also I am a giant fucking goober with respect with to night and day lengths because I just realized my thinking error.
I need a vacation.
But not too far away by plane.
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@blakeyrat said:
It does for people on the plane. You take off (numbers approximate because it's been years) frmo LAX at like 7:00 PM, fly 15 hours, land at 10:00 PM. It's like the exact WORST form of jet lag.
US->Oz - You take off at 11pm local time from LAX and 14 1/2 hours later you arrive in Oz at about 9am local time. You have an extended night >8 hours.
Oz->US - You take off at 10am local time from Oz and 16 hours later you arrive in LAX at about 6:30am local time. You have a short night ~6 hours.
Going East->West is much easier than going West->East
And the international dateline has squat to do with flight durations. The same long/short day thing happens even flying coast to coast in the US
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@blakeyrat said:
...expensive, bulky, stinky, easily-damaged, and the ink rubs off.
So are women, but you don't see me trading them in for a Fleshlight.
Yeah, I dunno. Logically, I know ebooks are superior, but I just can't give up physical books. But then I'd rather have a simple cellphone than a smartphone and I use the Linux desktop, so I'm clearly pretty out-of-touch with technology.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
An e-reader (even a Kindle) would never have lasted that long, even on a battery, but the books did just fine.
WTF. An e-ink Kindle should be able to last for days of heavy use without charging.
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@dhromed said:
I have also never flown before, so I have no opinion on the availability of electricity and entertainment on planes.
How the hell has a man in his 30s never flown before? Have the Dutch not yet invented a windmill-powered plane?
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@morbiuswilters said:
Have the Dutch not yet invented a windmill-powered plane?
No, the Wright brothers did, and it's normally just called a propeller.
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@ip-guru said:
Also the kindle is less than ideal for refrence manuals
Interestingly though most reference manuals I have are in PDF form.
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@dhromed said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Have the Dutch not yet invented a windmill-powered plane?
No, the Wright brothers did, and it's normally just called a propeller.
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@ip-guru said:
@blakeyrat said:
People who say they "like the feel" of physical books are idiots. Physical books are expensive, bulky, stinky, easily-damaged, and the ink rubs off. Fuck physical books.
Although this is a bit extreme, I am keeping my physical books on the bookshelf ( where possible i have a kindle version to read to prevent damage).
Also the kindle is less than ideal for refrence manuals
Are you a doctor and/or lawyer from the Monty Python's Flying Circus?
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@Mason Wheeler said:
I got invited to speak at a conference in Australia a few weeks ago. The international flight was well over 12 hours. I brought along some books (Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy--well worth reading BTW) to keep me company. An e-reader (even a Kindle) would never have lasted that long, even on a battery, but the books did just fine.
Any Kindle except the Kindle Fire (which is an LCD display rather than eInk) lasts FAR more than 12 hours. My Paperwhite gets somewhere around 40-45 hours of usage per charge (with the light about halfway on). An older Kindle without a light will consume even less power.
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Fahrenheit 541: The temperature at which... bismuth melts... approximately.
Sorry.
I'm just really into bismuth.
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@superjer said:
Celsius 451: Approximately 123.45C above the melting point of leadFahrenheit 541: The temperature at which... bismuth melts... approximately.
Sorry.
I'm just really into bismuth.
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Kelvin 541: Also close to the melting point of bismuth.
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@MiffTheFox said:
Kelvin 541: Also close to the melting point of bismuth.
Rankine 541: Quite comfortable, actually, although I wouldn't mind a few R less.
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Passenger 451: Wesley Snipes has put on a bit of weight.
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I am bumping this back up because I'd like more comments on the actual WTF and not this bickering about books and abridged stuff. As I said the one I submitted to the story had a "cast of characters" and everything, with more anonymized names, and includes other details like "Paul" constantly taking half days because he didn't feel like working (usually when we wanted a meeting. Once his excuse was "My dog had heatstroke after a walk" and another time he claimed to have blacked out at lunch) yet never being fired, or the constant "We just do what the boss tells us to do" attitude.
I could very easily name the company but it wouldn't do much good since they're local, and they like to threaten to sue for bad publicity (you might remember this company from another thread I posted about a co saying they wanted to subpoena Glassdoor for names of people posting bad [truthful] reviews so they could sue them for breach of contract).
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@blakeyrat said:
Yeah, I'm reading the latest Jared Diamond right now. Kindle is the best thing I ever bought for my brain.
A Kindle is *NOT* a book. My library has over 500 books which are pre-WWII and a few are from the 1800's.....it was my inheritance from a great-uncle (in both senses of the word)...Plus a ton (actually it would be interesting to weigh them!) of more recent tomes.
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@TheCPUWizard said:
A Kindle is NOT a book.
It's... it's not? OH SHIT I GOT RIPPED-OFF!!!
@TheCPUWizard said:
My library has over 500 books which are pre-WWII and a few are from the 1800's.....it was my inheritance from a great-uncle (in both senses of the word)...Plus a ton (actually it would be interesting to weigh them!) of more recent tomes.
Do you ever post anywhere without being an insufferable braggart? Hey why don't you tell us how Intel gave you a sneak preview of some prototype chips and how successful your business is. Ass.
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@ObiWayneKenobi said:
In '11 I joined a local software company that had numerous awards (Fortune 500, Top 50 Young CEOs or something like that, Best Place to Work, etc.) and was fairly close to my home. In the interview with the senior developer and CTO
What the fuck Fortune 500 company did you find with a single senior developer and where the CTO knows line developers exist, nevermind interviews them? Anonymization is helped by big companies look like their numerous smaller, more anonymous brothers, not small companies look like the major leagues.
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Th@Weng said:
@ObiWayneKenobi said:
In '11 I joined a local software company that had numerous awards (Fortune 500, Top 50 Young CEOs or something like that, Best Place to Work, etc.) and was fairly close to my home. In the interview with the senior developer and CTO
What the fuck Fortune 500 company did you find with a single senior developer and where the CTO knows line developers exist, nevermind interviews them? Anonymization is helped by big companies look like their numerous smaller, more anonymous brothers, not small companies look like the major leagues.That was actually a typo on my part, I meant Inc 500 (at one point) not Fortune 500. Which isn't nearly as prestigious as I've had two WTF companies that proudly proclaimed being part of the Inc 500.
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@ObiWayneKenobi said:
I am bumping this back up because I'd like more comments on the actual WTF
On-topic discussion? On these forums?
@ObiWayneKenobi said:
"We just do what the boss tells us to do"
I have caught myself following this thought process from time to time recently. I think it derives from a sort of CYA attitude. "Ours not to reason why. Ours just to do and die". That sort of thing. I don't like it, and I'm disappointed to note that I seem to have picked this habit up from a colleague who I otherwise really like.
Your story feels very familiar to me. I left my previous job after a similar amount of time because of similar WTFery: stupid usage of SVN, terrible code, anti-modernisation sentiment from management etc. Once people are leaving in frustration about the way things work, the writing is on the wall.
After three failed deployments in a row due to code quality
This is happening to us more and more right now. It seems many of my colleagues are in the habit of changing code, not testing it even a tiny bit, committing, and pushing. IMO, the problem with trying to "fix" code quality is that it's just a symptom. The real problem is a shitty team, and the only real fix for that is a new team.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
Really? Which airlines? I have never seen USB ports in airplanes before. One time, at the Delta terminal in Salt Lake City, I saw USB charging ports at the terminal, which was actually pretty cool, but inside the plane? Never. And I think I've been on one flight once where they had AC power available to plug a laptop into, but they don't seem to have gotten around to putting that in on the planes that do international flights (ie. the ones that need it most.)
Most airlines have them on all their longhaul flights in business class and above, and some have them in at least part of economy on selected routes. It depends a lot on the model of the plane (newer planes are more likely to have the sockets, of course) and the airline too, as different airlines have different levels of interior trim; when you check in online, check the plane type and look it up on the web and you can find out where the power sockets are on that exact model. There are whole sites devoted to this sort of thing, and I've found them easy to use and quite relevant. (Also, plane-based power sockets are virtually always using US socket standards in my experience. Come prepared.)I've never noticed a USB charger port though. Not saying there aren't any, but I've not noticed them.
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@dkf said:
I've never noticed a USB charger port though. Not saying there aren't any, but I've not noticed them.
You've got to have some level of trust in the airport to use one of those. At a DefCon a couple years ago, someone demoed dropping a black-hat charging station in a public place. Instead of a straight AC->USB deal, there's a computer in the middle. You plug in for a charge, it starts running every known mobile device exploit it can. I think they were targetting default SSH installations on jailbroken iThings.
Someone else pointed out that you could also rig the station to randomly overload the charge and fry the device. Because assholes, that's why.
I'm not aware of any sort of "safe mode" or "firewalled USB" app or piece of hardware. I suppose someone could make some money selling a USB port condom.
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@GNU Pepper said:
This is happening to us more and more right now. It seems many of my colleagues are in the habit of changing code, not testing it even a tiny bit, committing, and pushing. IMO, the problem with trying to "fix" code quality is that it's just a symptom. The real problem is a shitty team, and the only real fix for that is a new team.
In our case we HAD a good team, and one bad apple (the old curmudgeon guy) who was there for a while and had the boss' ear. I lamented the fact that if he had been a good senior dev he could have been more of a BA/PM type and talk to the users (since he co-wrote most of the system) and the rest of us could have done the real coding as we four (me, junior, senior, webguy) had great chemistry and made a great team. Instead, the other guy was lazy and didn't want to learn, and was afraid of new things because he thought he wouldn't be able to keep up (and he wouldn't have; he didn't even have a computer or internet at home!) so instead he sabotaged everything because he knew the CTO valued his opinion more than the rest of us combined.
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@Lorne Kates said:
@dkf said:
I've never noticed a USB charger port though. Not saying there aren't any, but I've not noticed them.
You've got to have some level of trust in the airport to use one of those. At a DefCon a couple years ago, someone demoed dropping a black-hat charging station in a public place. Instead of a straight AC->USB deal, there's a computer in the middle. You plug in for a charge, it starts running every known mobile device exploit it can. I think they were targetting default SSH installations on jailbroken iThings.
Someone else pointed out that you could also rig the station to randomly overload the charge and fry the device. Because assholes, that's why.
I'm not aware of any sort of "safe mode" or "firewalled USB" app or piece of hardware. I suppose someone could make some money selling a USB port condom.
A very real problem... The first half ("malware") is easy to solve just use a cable that has power pins, but no data pins. The second ("fry") is harder, but not much; a resistor and zener is all that is required. I dont know of any commercial ones, but (if you have minimal skills with a soldering iron) it is easy to build one.
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@TheCPUWizard said:
A very real problem... The first half ("malware") is easy to solve just use a cable that has power pins, but no data pins. The second ("fry") is harder, but not much; a resistor and zener is all that is required. I dont know of any commercial ones, but (if you have minimal skills with a soldering iron) it is easy to build one.
A more clever implementation would have the USB 'cable' actually be a smart device with a host on one and and a device on the other - and it only passes through the handshake for "I'd like amperage on this port, plz!" to enable fast-charging.
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@ObiWayneKenobi said:
he didn't even have a computer or internet at home
Well, that's the first time I've ever heard of that. Wow.
Until today I'd have thought that not owning a computer would be fatal to a career in software. I guess if I was going to have an assumption like that challenged, it would probably happen on these forums. Fucking hell.
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@GNU Pepper said:
@ObiWayneKenobi said:
he didn't even have a computer or internet at home
Well, that's the first time I've ever heard of that. Wow.
Until today I'd have thought that not owning a computer would be fatal to a career in software. I guess if I was going to have an assumption like that challenged, it would probably happen on these forums. Fucking hell.It's not fatal if you know just enough to get by, and you're lazy and don't want to learn anything new, and you know that you have job security at a company that discourages improvement and where you have the boss' ear to shoot down any improvements (which you will do, because you don't want to learn it). I think he DID finally get internet at some point, and once he actually stated that he was reading a jQuery book, but during my time there he was still totally resistant to change and would hack out garbage and then spend weeks fixing the bugs because he didn't have the balls to tell the CIO that it would take some time to do correctly.
The CIO was a real piece of work though. PHP script kiddie with some network experience and a great BS artist. He would lie to people's faces and tell them one thing, then do something else behind their back. We would determine what fixes/tasks would go into a release, and he would go behind everyone to this lazy guy we're talking about and get him to throw in "one more thing" even if he was already swamped with work. His bonus was directly related to the IT budget (from what I heard, anything not spent on the budget WAS his bonus) so we had to beg and plead to get some good tools. He hired a creative director that was decent (not great) and then later had the marketing manager fire him (didn't have the guts to do it himself), after changing the org chart so the director reported to her and not to him anymore (but he took a hand in everything related. So he was in charge of the marketing department as well as IT).
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@TheCPUWizard said:
The second ("fry") is harder, but not much; a resistor and zener is all that is required.
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@GNU Pepper said:
@ObiWayneKenobi said:
he didn't even have a computer or internet at home
Well, that's the first time I've ever heard of that. Wow.
Until today I'd have thought that not owning a computer would be fatal to a career in software. I guess if I was going to have an assumption like that challenged, it would probably happen on these forums. Fucking hell.
I do have a computer at home, several actually but no internet, I cancelled my subscription because it was a waste of money for me and anyways in my country internet speed is shitty at best and downright unusable at average.
