The tech industry in general only does two things, ever, with codenames:
- Create a product with a really cool codename and then completely, utterly and in every way decimate the product by changing the name in the 11th hour to something really super gay.
- Create a product with a codename so utterly hilarious that nobody will take it seriously even the name is eventually changed to Terminator or Annhilator or Huge Penis*.
* this codename is immediately invalidated for use in Microsoft projects, because Microsoft Huge Penis is arguably more ludicrous than Microsoft Bob.
Let’s examine a bit of market history, shall we?
Continue reading “The Revolution will not be televised - no, really.”
Never let it be said that Kevin Smith doesn’t have a good feel on picking up what an audience is expecting and catering to it. Also, is youtube just video FARK?
I’m really looking forward to Clerks II. I don’t give a fuck what anybody says, I’m just in it to laugh. Anybody taking it more seriously than that needs to have their head examined.
An MMO about pirates.
Stop and think about that for a minute. If that doesn’t turn your inner gamer-nerd on, I’m not sure what can. What could be better than a virtual universe in which you can actually sail the seven seas, plunder and pillage and join an RP server where you can say “Yarrr, matey!” and be IN CHARACTER.
So, what’s the catch, you ask?
It’s made by Disney.
You just said “Fuck” out loud. I heard it.
One of the things I hear at least every day on the phone is the formatted space fallacy. SCSI disks come in fairly fixed capacities. So when I’m replacing a drive, I ask something like “Is that drive a 73GB hard drive?” The customer invariably answers either “yes” if they do this shit for a living, or “It’s like 68,349KB” or some shit like that if they don’t. Then, usually, the latter person will say something like “Oh, that’s the formatted capacity.”
They’re only half right. Disk operations (partitioning, formatting, etc) do consume space on the disk. However, the space used by the filesystem is generally substantially smaller than the space “lost” by numeric conversion. Why? For a really long time storage has been rated in the metric version of the binary prefix in question.
“What in the ever-living fuck does that mean?” I can hear you asking already. So we’ll take a look at an example.
Continue reading “Stop Being Fucking Stupid: Storage Sizes”
Some months back I was alerted (via BoingBoing, IIRC) of this utility for Mac OS X called MegaManEffect. Its purpose is simple, unbelievably pointless and very fun: when a program is run, it loads the blue-bar loading screen one would see when choosing an enemy in Megaman 2, and plays the same music as well.
I thought that only Mac developers were bored enough to create a utility like that, but as it turns out, there are some awfully bored Windows developers too.
None yet for Linux, AFAIK. It appears Linux developers are busy doing useful shit like cracking Fairplay and writing codecs for vlc.
You know that odd feeling you get when you just can’t wrap your mind around something? If somebody tells you that your close family member or friend died, you react immediately. If somebody tells you that terrorists have destroyed the World Trade Center, or that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, it’s too big. Your brain locks up and you can’t immediately repond effectively.
Well, that’s kind of where I am. Reality has finally caught up with the jokes. I’m old and now effectively useless to the computer industry at large. I also don’t know if I give a shit, as I’m truly starting to hate it.
I started doing support professionally in August of 2004. Outside of a brief hiatus of 2 years in which I went to school, I have been in the support industry in some position or another pretty much continuously. Out of the last 30 years of my life, fully 1/3 of it has been spent doing end-suer support. In this time, I have seen lots of things that excited me greatly, have been fortunate enough to participate (and in a few cases, direct) some very interesting projects. In addition, I have been unfortunate enough never to get promoted above the support level largely through my own incompetence.
Support in general is a horrible industry and I would strongly encourage anyone looking to go into a computer-related field to get a college degree first, because if you do not you will likely have to start as support/helpdesk and work up. Support is basically “retail deluxe,” you deal with the same unpleasant assholes all the time but the problems you solve, instead of being easy problems like “Why don’t you have the Nikon XL-482039 SUPERMEGACAM EXTREEEEEME in stock” they are hard problems like “I managed to unplug my external raid cabinet in the middle of a disk write and now it’s broken, oh, and by the way, the last time I backed it up was to 8″ floppy if that gives you any idea how long ago it was.”
All I know right now is this: if I’m still doing end-user support in ten years, I promise everyone reading this that I will eat a bullet, and that’s probably the first true thing I have ever posted on this blog.
