Best posts made by tonyshowoff

Just got ready for a lunch meeting I have scheduled for Friday, then I realised it was Wednesday.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

Ship hits wall of Panama Canal renewing design concerns
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-36891142

I get more clearance in a phone booth than modern ships get in the Panama Canal.

My American VPN went down briefly and my wife was like "I was watching orange is the new black on netflix and it stopped" and so I had to figure out what was going on. Only the most important tasks first around here.

I created a new topic for this since it's long.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

Clinton campaign 'hacked' along with other Democratic groups
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-36927523

I don't see why Americans bother, the Electoral College creates a 5% chance that the unpopular person will win. I love the utterly moronic excuses people are told as to why it exists, like:

1. Without it then politicians would only campaign in the big cities, it forces them to spread out. Well, considering only 7% of Americans live in cities over 1 million people, that makes no mathematical sense. And I guess it's better they need only campaign in swing states then? In the last election the candidates only visited 18 out of the 50 states, and most of those were less than five times, and half of them only once, and their focus wasn't even the biggest states.
2. It gives small states the same power as big states or makes the big states less powerful. So, votes count more if you're in a small state and that's good? What?

It's basically the inverted pyramid of doom for voting, and just like that tons of people praise it. I'm shocked and horrified when "liberal" and "conservative" politicians and media pundits praise it as anything other than stupid.

It's uniquely American that the idea that people in cities should have less voting power than those who aren't, even though the Electoral College has nothing to do with that. It reminds me of Americans often believing Daylight Saving Time is because of farmers, as if they need the time to change in order to plant/harvest better.

The real reason it exists is to be undemocratic and unfair, really, no seriously, read about it on Wikipedia. Yes, I know Wikipedia is not a "source", but .. sidebar: ever notice how when people agree with something on Wikipedia, it's a source, but when they disagree suddenly Wikipedia is unreliable? Fascinating.

Every American election plenty of Americans criticise it as undemocratic and unfair, and I agree, especially because basically nobody on Earth does it this way, because it's so inefficient and stupid. However, the American media loves to defend it and when others criticise it in op-ed pieces or whatever, the comments come out of the woodwork of people defending it because of "big cities" and "small states," reasons which aren't even true nor logical.

For a country that prides itself on being a democracy (even though it isn't one) they sure make a lot of excuses for the electoral college as being superior and a better way to do things. If I may steal someone else's great analogy: "if sport games had a 5% chance that the team with less points won, Americans wouldn't stand for it," no they'd lose their damn minds over it, but when it's an election, it's a good thing.

I don't think America could survive another election where someone who lost the popular vote actually wins, because it's become so polluted with identity politics, and they've lied to themselves and their kids so much that every vote counts that it could cause a huge constitutional crisis when it happens again, and it will. The recount stuff in Florida is nothing compared to the looming crap storm.

I tell Americans:

1. unless you live in a swing state, your vote for president literally has no value what so ever.
2. a vote for a third party candidate will only help the one you hate the most, i.e. all those morons saying "we're gonna send a message to Washington by voting for Jill Stein [or] writing in for Bernie Sanders," are actually only going to help Trump, and nobody will get the message just as they didn't in any previous election year, nobody listens to you, because nobody cares.
3. you don't live in a democracy, stop saying it, you're only setting yourself up for disappointment. I'm not saying it's a dictatorship, and actually America is one of the freest countries in the world, but that doesn't mean you're in charge.
4. There is no defence for the Electoral College, get over it, it's stupid, knock it off you look really dumb when you play this game.

None of this matters anyway, the parties are the same, and as I say (stealing from someone I know, actually): find me five things that both parties either haven't done or promised to do, something they disagree on fundamentally. Obamacare and Abortion don't count, and in fact, I can't even think of one thing.

It's laughable and pathetically sad that in America two right-centre parties are considered "far left" and "far right", but then again I've spoken to a few Americans who have told me in no uncertain terms that despite me being from a formerly communist country that "Obama is a communist/socialist, I know because <dumb ass reason>."

If you disagree with my post, don't just vote me down, defend yourself. If you vote me down without comment then you're ... just uncool, I'd never do that to you. I don't vote people down ever anyway.

P.S. Post not checked for typos or grammatical errors, I don't care enough.

@JaredBusch said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@LilAng said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

maybe a show car?

That is a parking garage on the other side of the window.

i always wonder how they put the cars in the mall.

They drive them through the doors.

Clearly they take the escalator.

@wrx7m said:

I hate when vendors gate their pricing.

If they don't tell you how much something costs right away it means it costs too damn much.

I always called it the menu icon, "hamburger icon" is weird to me, sounds like an emoji. In fact I don't recall ever seeing that until the first time I saw you say it.

@Carnival-Boy said:

AJ's girlfriend: "Does my bottom look big in this dress?"
AJ: "Yeah, it looks huge"

Depending on one's cultural background, it may be a complement. If my wife asks if her butt is big, I know to say "yeah baby I love it." And yes, I do. I'm guessing though, AJ gets in hot water instead.

Bread and Milk, is that a tradition or something? Sounds more like a Lenin poster

Pfft show off!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Good job

@scottalanmiller said:

We are going to roll it out for the lab. Overkill for the purpose, but why not have a place for people to collaborate live in the lab?

Well, we've got an older internal system and that's why I'm waiting to replace it, no real rush. If you have nothing, then obviously it's definitely the way to go. It's very impressive. Anything to help knock slack down a notch for being so damn overinvested in.

This whole thing is a culture shock to me

@thanksajdotcom said in 100 lbs and Falling:

@tonyshowoff said in 100 lbs and Falling:

@thanksajdotcom said in 100 lbs and Falling:

@tonyshowoff said in 100 lbs and Falling:

Pfft show off!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Good job

Aren't you technically the showoff? It is in your name...

Hey, don't label me by my name!

Yes I am though

Lol I didn't, you did. I didn't create your account! ROFL

Hey, I'm just named after my great-great-grandfather, Chuck Showoff, part-time lion tamer and part-time used wagon salesman.

@scottalanmiller said:

Installing this thing appears to be a nightmare. Their docs for FreeBSD and Ubuntu are both wrong and those are the only OSes that they appear to have docs for.

I had a hell of a time myself, it was like pulling teeth. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the docs were wrong, glad it wasn't just me.

Forks used to only really happen when developers disappeared/got bored and moved on, or there was some sort of political reason to fork the project (Oracle buying Sun is a more recent example), but or the more rare "we edited the code base so much we've basically forked it by default," but you're right, now people fork on a whim instead of just branching the code and merging later. That's what version control is for!

@scottalanmiller said:

@DustinB3403 said:

@travisdh1 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

The IT job market continues to tighten as companies find it harder and harder to find workers with the skills that they need.

Really? Wonder how many HR types would claim I'm not qualified just because I don't have a cert?

Yeah I've never understood that about certifications either. Sure if you work for a Citrix or VMWare or even an MSP who supports such software you want to say "we have certified professionals on staff to assist"

But as a hiring manager who needs someone with proven experience, a cert is just toilet paper when it comes to it. Prove it by doing what you say, not by showing me a piece of paper.

I've never seen anyone hire (or not hire) on certs. Literally, never.

People on Spiceworks are real die had believers in certifications mean you can get a good job with good pay, no matter how many damn threads there are explaining experience is more important in IT than pretty much anything else. That and switching jobs fairly often, another thing most of them are too afraid to do.

This is true really on most IT forums, there tend to be roughly 20% people who have the skills to be in IT and 80% pretty incompetent, and within that I'd say about 10% are dangerously incompetent and will laugh at you if you point you passwords that are "so easy they're impossible to guess" are a bad idea.

I blame schools like ITT Tech, a school which costs almost as much as an Ivy League school but gives you almost no real world knowledge and most companies don't take it as a serious education,; I always throw CVs and résumés with ITT Tech or similar schools in the trash.

Plenty will disagree, even on Spiceworks I've been physically threatened by an ITT Tech student who said he'd kick my ass for saying his education was useless. I say, bring it on, it's still useless.

So now the market is flooded with tons and tons of people who don't know anything and many don't want to learn anything, they think they're smart because their grandmother once praised their computing ability because they changed her video card. You can find these people as the ones who are trying to hang on to VB6 and Windows XP, not due to corporate requirements they cannot control, but because "they're the best!" and they violate every security protocol there is to keep things the old way.

And they drive down the market prices. When I started in this industry even people at entry level made probably at least 3x what they do now. Of course, if you bring this up, there's always the jackass who says "well, I make $80k a year, so everyone else must as well so your facts don't matter!"

Meanwhile nobody's hiring at that even for people with great experience. If you have niche skills most of that 80% avoid (see all of the "I'll never bother with Linux" posts on said forum), and you get lucky, yes maybe you can pull it off, but it's not like it was even 10 years ago, and all of the crappy rip off schools are making it worse, and all of the self-diluted people who think they know everything are also poisoning the well.

The only reason I go to Spiceworks is for that 20% of talented people, I want to help them learn and learn from them, I try to avoid the other 80% who are "experts" on HIPAA but spell it HIPPA every single time.

I think saying "diet and exercise" really is meaningless unless you describe what that even means (@JaredBusch did though, I'm just saying when people say that in general), and I hate tracking things, I really despise any extra effort; I am truly lazy. So, here's my story.

I got up to 375lbs and just did Atkins, didn't even bother exercising until after I lost the weight. Atkins works if you stick to it and continue to essentially stick to low-carb (under 50g of carbs per day for me) for good, eat a lot of fat (especially saturated), etc. I've never been more healthy, had better blood pressure, etc.

I did notice the biggest thing was getting off the sugar soda, switched to diet, and I found that I liked Diet Mountaindew the most, it seemed to taste most like the regular, plus sugar free redbull as well, which does have like 3g of carbs though.

The hardest was avoiding bread since I'm just completely in love with pizza, so I have it every once in a while. The second hardest was drinking enough water, 4 litres a day, which was hard at first but got easier.

I don't worry about salt or anything either, especially since I drink a lot of water. I hate lettuce, so I eat spinach instead, but I still have a hard time with vegetables in general.

What I liked was that so much protein allowed me to gain some muscle too whilst doing nothing, it was kinda weird, though I do have a genetic predisposition to muscle gain, and most people don't have this. Though most people who stay on Atkins or some form of it tend to report at least some muscle gain.

My main problem is that I've got a gene for overeating*, i.e. not being able to realise that I'm full. High fat helps a lot with this and also usually what I do is figure out how much I want to eat and just cut that amount in half, seems to work ok, no measuring or any BS like that. Fat doesn't make you fat, though most Americans seem to think so, but then again if what you ate directly correlated to what was in your body, then I guess I got a lot of bacon and hamburgers in my arms **.

*I had my genes analysed that's how I know this.
**I feel a lot of guilt about not keeping kosher, but I just eat bacon, no other pork products

In the end it doesn't matter what sort of diet or surgery you get if you don't change your life style. Plus also when it comes to exercise, stuff like running and walking doesn't really burn many calories. In fact, human beings are so efficient at running that we burn like 150 calories per mile, which is garbage.

If you want to ramp up weight loss, what eats fat more than anything else, is muscles. Lift weights, free weights, just get some crappy ones from a yard sale or something, don't waste money when you don't to.

Plenty of people get the surgery and just gain it all back slowly, because they go back to eating carbohydrates, and that's something to consider if you're genetically inclined toward type 2 diabetes (like me, and possibly you too), that your body will basically convert all sugars (carbs included) into fat, and counting calories will only work if you're running on like 700 calories a day for you, it certainly didn't work for me and was pure hell. Counting calories does work for about 25% of people though, so it may work for you.

I feel awesome. I lift weights like I used to in college and now I'm getting more attention from the ladies, and a few dudes too, but hey, a complement is a complement. My wife is still on my ass about vegetables though.

Just gotta stick to it.

@JaredBusch said in Spiceworks let go 12% of their workforce today:

@Grey said in Spiceworks let go 12% of their workforce today:

@JaredBusch That's not surprising when they've alienated their user base. The same base that's been telling them that things weren't right.

I agree, not surprised at all. I am interested to hear what 12% were let go though.

Me too, and on the user base issue, I've noticed some of the simplest feature requests have been in the queue for many years, that's pretty pathetic, even we aren't that lazy and I'm known for being pretty apathetic toward user desires.

SW ad that shows up almost every page load now, I must have given it a billion impressions by now:

It's like he's jumping out at me like Clippy.

Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds

Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation's strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average.

While tech workers have thrived, employees in the middle of Silicon Valley's income ladder have been hit hardest as their inflation-adjusted wages declined between 12 and 14 percent over the past 20 years, according to a study from UC Santa Cruz's Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the labor think tank Working Partnership USA, which examined the economic impact of technology companies.

Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found. Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth.

Editorial: I've been saying quite a while that the wages are down but I just get shot down a lot by SW-warriors and the Valley toxic waste run off all insisting they're all making the big bucks. I'm sure they'll all say they're just exceptions to this report. I think nine out of ten of them are just liars.