Revenge?

by Bryan

12 comments

1 Kryten42 { 03.31.14 at 7:45 am }

If all goes well over the next couple months or so, I may be able to help solve all that kind of trouble. Wish i was in a position to do so now… for both our sakes. *shrug*

Still, I’m over the worst of the cold & viral infection finally, and just did a couple hours work for the first time in a Month, which went (surprisingly) well. I suspect because I was able to actually enjoy a good coffee for the first time in weeks! Coffee makes work much easier! 😉 LOL

I even have a Pinterest pin board about Coffee! Or, I should say, “Coffeeeeeee!!” 😆

2 Bryan { 03.31.14 at 11:40 pm }

Welcome back to the world, m8! It still sucks.

Every time I look at a news site, I fail to see much worth talking or writing about, even if I had plenty of time. Abbott seems to be on a tear with changes. He seems bent on annoying enough people to lose the next election, to the point that the ‘party faithful’ are complaining. He’s acting like a CEO, not a politician, and the politicians are becoming alarmed. That seems to be the up-and-coming trends among PMs these days.

I appreciate the offer, but things are working out, not as quickly as I would like, but it’s happening.

3 Kryten42 { 04.01.14 at 3:58 am }

Awww… But I need a good guinea pig m8! 🙁

Hmmph! We’ll see… When it’s up & working, of course. 😉 I learned my lesson! 😀

Did some more work today. 🙂 I’m happy that I now have WP-MU up & running on my cloud! Next, I’m working on a script to create a variety & number of sites (10, 100, 1000, 10000) to see what performance issues are, and to fine tune load balancing etc. Should be ready to test in a week. Have to create some dummy SQL data, and a CSV file with dummy user details, email, pwd’s etc. for the script to use. I have 150 dummy WP-MU themes ready also (and they work with BuddyPress too).

I got an annual Elite Developer account with WPMU DEV (that cost me a bundle, $556!) But they are the #1 WP-MU developers on the ‘net, and was the fastest way to get it done. And long term, the cheapest way. 🙂

My cloud KVM server system is mind-bogglingly fast! 😀 It only has 2 vCPU’s, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB SAN disk + 45 GB RAID 10 Backup storage for base system ISO image & two full (20GB) snapshots (or more if less SAN space is used). It’s costing me 9 eur/mth max (if running 24/7). I shut it down when I don’t need to do anything & just have to pay for storage space (< 5 eur /Mth). That includes 1 TB outgoing traffic / mth. Incoming is free! 😀

And it's fully scalable per instance (think server, and I can add many more instances) to 12 vCPU's, 16 GB RAM & 100 TB SAN storage! That costs about 69 eur / mth + 72 eur / TB / mth for SAN storage. That sounds like a lot, but isn't compared to others! 🙂

Phew! I must be feeling better. 😉 Been awhile… 😀

PS. You can find my pin's about Coffeeeeee! Food (including low-carb), Grumpy Cat, & Graphics/Fonts/Web Design on Pinterest. Just need a free account (can use facebook or a throwaway email like gmail, so long as you can receive an email to verify). 🙂 http://www.pinterest.com/kryten42/

I was spectacle of Pinterest at first, but now I find it useful to keep track of, and sort, things I'm interested in, and that I can easily share. It also allows for private (secret pin boards) where I put things of interest for my work that I can share with others I'm working with (like WPMU DEV, Tesla Themes, & iWStack). I haven't had it for long, & already have 45 public followers. I may start a Cult! The Cult of Kryten42! 😈 😉 😆

4 Kryten42 { 04.01.14 at 11:01 am }

I was spectacle…? WTF? *sigh* I hate that auto-spell checker in FF!

“spectacle” –> “skeptical”

How it managed to stuff that up I’ll never know! I’m pretty sure I just swapped two letters (my usual error, some kind of dyslexia has set in). *shrug*

5 Bryan { 04.01.14 at 11:17 pm }

Sorry to deprive you of a test case, but I needed to get back to work quickly.

The new router has really expanded the range of my WiFi, which makes me a happy camper. I may still get a range extender for my Mother’s house, but I can put off the decision for a while.

The prices you’re quoting almost make me wish I needed those resources – almost. That has the potential for a lot of work, which I can’t deal with at the moment.

Pinterest id the perfect use for my ISP email address. After it is verified I can go back to ignoring it. Don’t expect to see me quickly.

6 Bryan { 04.01.14 at 11:19 pm }

That spelling checker is a brilliant piece of software, compared to the T9 assist on my cellphone.

7 Kryten42 { 04.02.14 at 2:17 pm }

I was only joking about the guinea pig bit. 😉 I have more than enough for my needs actually. LOL At least I get something back from all those dev sites I signed up for last year! 😀

Actually, you might be surprised at just how easy it would be. 😉

Don’t worry about Pinterest. It’s not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. 🙂
My pin boards seem to be popular for some reason. *shrug* People are weird! 😉 LOL

Good luck m8. And try to relax a bit. Sure, the World’s going to hell… But we may as well enjoy the ride. *shrug* What else can we do? 😉 😀 At least we have one advantage over the <30's gen. We got to do and see and achieve things, and we are on borrowed time anyway. 😉

8 Bryan { 04.02.14 at 10:46 pm }

Hell, I’ve been on borrowed time since 1969, but you are right about the lack of real opportunity for the young people today. We could get a good education for next to nothing, and you could live comfortably with a minimum wage job, even think reasonably about buying a house, if you watched your expenses.

The world is a meaner place today.

9 Badtux { 04.02.14 at 11:08 pm }

The world is a meaner place today.

The core problem is the end of growth.

I saw that coming when I was a teenager in the 1970’s. The entire system seemed set up such that the only way it would work would be if the economy kept growing faster than the population. Companies had to grow or die because otherwise their corporate debt would catch up with them and kill them. Cities had to grow because that was how they outran the decline of their housing and commercial building stocks due to natural aging. The American dream of doing better than your parents could only happen if the economy grew faster than population growth. Significantly faster, if it were going to be a noticeable difference. Yet it was clear that the planet simply didn’t have the resources to do that forever.

Well, we hit the limits of growth when we hit the limits of oil. And nothing in the American system was set up to deal with that. Except for in the South, where there were generations of crackers with plenty of experience in no hope, no future, and blame the ni**ers. And that mentality spread, though the identity of the people to blame changes and shifts depending on who it’s currently fashionable to demonize. So the South has won, and this country is a meaner and more vicious place because of that.

I don’t know what happened elsewhere. Just what happened here in the US. Odd that I could see what was going to happen when I was a teenager close to forty years ago, yet nobody else seems to see, or care. It drives me crazy, sometimes, how people are willfully blind to the reality around them. On the other hand, I suppose if they weren’t they’d be burning sh*t down, so…

10 Bryan { 04.02.14 at 11:57 pm }

Manufacturers didn’t upgrade; R&D was scaled back; corporations started milking every nickel out of their existing products; innovation moved to other countries. If were had begun shifting to less carbon-based energy after the Oil Embargo, we would be in better shape today.

This is when the corporations stopped thinking long-term and starting thinking and planning for ever shorter time frames. Everything is in a holding pattern because the people at the top stopped thinking about the future and only worried about their here and now.

11 Kryten42 { 04.03.14 at 3:57 am }

I knew there was a problem in the late 80’s when I was *assigned* to work for GD ostensibly to manage security for the Aussie FB-111 upgrade program, including Pave Tack (Ford Aerospace AN/AVQ-26) and some other upgrades that were *super* secret (and hence my involvement because I happened to have a degree in Industrial/Design/Electronics Engineering). Three of us were selected (two from RAAF and myself) and since they who upgrade program was an *Assie Personnel only* deal, we had to spend a year being trained by GD/Ford. The program was said to be part of a Masters in Aeronautical Engineering @ MIT. It turned out that the course was so tailored to GD’s requirements, it was all but useless for anyone else. When I returned to Aus, the Uni’s here refused to acknowledge that we had a Master’s in Engineering, even from a prestigious school like MIT. In the end, they settled for “Master’s Equivalent”which is meaningless in any real terms here. I discovered that it was the norm in the US higher ed system for Corporations to have certain courses modified to suit their requirements, and many students I spoke to thought it was a good idea as it pretty much guaranteed a job @ XYZ if you took a course at a Uni that XYZ funded or influenced in some way. I thought it was a really BAD idea, and so did all the Aus Uni’s. It’s why many American’s that came to live/work here that had degrees/masters, had to go back to Uni and do (what are refereed to here as) a Bridging Course.

It’s also a reason why even Silicon Valley, one the greatest innovator in the World (arguably) isn’t any longer. I was reading this:

Apple, Google, Adobe And Intel Have To Face The Music Over Collusive Hiring Practices

…
As we’ve discussed for years, part of what actually made Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is the ease with which employees could switch jobs, often between competitors. Multiple studies have made it clear that greater job switching within an innovative industry is actually much better for that entire industry. With job shifting comes important cross-fertilization of ideas, allowing the bigger breakthroughs to happen faster, opening up new opportunities. Without that kind of job shifting, knowledge gets stuffed into silos, and overall innovation gets held back and stymied. In fact, if you look at the success of basically all four of the companies in this lawsuit, you can point to evidence of how the easy shifting of jobs was a key part of important breakthroughs that created tremendous opportunities and innovations (hell, two of the three members of Intel’s founding team were once part of the traitorous eight, who left Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild Semiconductor — only to go on to form Intel, AMD and a bunch of others). Job hopping, poaching employees and the like often get a bad reputation, but the research is pretty clear that it was a key factor (according to some, the key factor) in allowing Silicon Valley to become a hub of innovation.

Hopefully, the end result of the DOJ efforts and these class action lawsuits is to maintain an innovation economy where job hopping and information sharing is empowered, rather than hindered.

yeah… good luck with that! I wouldn’t hold my breath. *shrug*

12 Bryan { 04.03.14 at 11:03 pm }

Local community colleges offered tailored courses for specific employers which are usually recognized as certificate or associate degree [if it is generic enough] programs, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone attempting to claim one of these programs was worth a graduate degree. The core reason for advanced degrees is the thesis and the defense of the thesis. You have to add something to the knowledge base to be awarded an advanced degree.

The DoJ is not going to do anything significant to any large US corporation, no matter how criminal the conduct is. What’s the point, they can expect a 5-4 vote to let them off from the current Supreme Court. Corporations have all of the right and none of the responsibilities of real people to the 5 conservative Catholics who control the US Supreme Court.