So was I, until grandpa beat me to it ...

I would think that Blizzard on your resume is more valuable than Blizzard as your employer (for those low-level, anyone can do it, "fry cook" jobs).

Got get a better job and stop bitching about the crap pay you are making now. This is the IT field. There are literally 1,000's of open positions that pay better than what you are probably making right now as a customer support person or tester or whatever. Hell! Move out of California where the cost of living is what's killing you!

I don't even care about the cross-platform aspect. I refuse to use GTK for anything GUI-related under Linux not do I use the Glib for anything either. Qt (GPL or not) handles everything I need and it does so in a clean and elegant manner.

That, in a nutshell, is the very reason why Qt is popular. It is a very good C++ framework that supports those projects that require something solid and dependable, either GUI or back-end, and just works.

Plus, it's all C++ and is pretty damn easy to read. All of those GTK/Glib C-structs-as-objects crap gets VERY messy after a short while.

You are not wrong.

We had a bunch of "greenhorns" who graduated from Galvanize who only knew node and Javascript. Some of them thought go was a good idea. It took us two years to clean up their mess and, yes, we used Java. All back-end stuff was rewritten in Java (where needed) and React for front end access where needed. Java was chosen because those of us with years of experience wanted to standardize on something stable that could leverage the largest available resource base to just get the work done.

And here in the USA ... "The government is not coming after your guns!"

And yet ... every left-leaning Democrat running for office has come out and stated, clearly, plainly, that they are, indeed, coming after your guns.

How's that PATRIOT act's expiration coming along?

How's the effectiveness of the TSA?

Should we blame Congress of gross incompetence or unbridled malevolence?

As an automation engineer, it is my job to do, essentially, what Cringley is stating. We are trying to reduce staffing due to overlap of duties and automation of mundane and tedious processes. There are, however, a few roadblocks with even this small goal:

1. Management has no clue what they are actually asking for with automation
2. There exists no solid definition of what those processes entail that require automation

The first point is addressable but not without a great deal of politics and empathy where managers and their staff see automation as their own career demise. For what it's worth, I personally feel that many of these people and entire teams SHOULD be replaced with automation. Sometimes I ask myself, "how did this person ever get hired for their job?"

The second point ties into the first one and represents an uphill battle to have the same people who are afraid of being "automated away" define what their processes are and how we can remove the burden of a tedious and repeatable process from their plate.

Regardless or Cringley's beliefs, automation is going to take a very long time to cull the nerd herd.

I think pthfdr was referring to "customizing" it. Configuration, using default settings, takes seconds (if that).

Customizing YOUR desktop for the perfect experience takes a bit longer ... I'm currently going on 15+ years :D

Hm .. by that measure I can call both of you kids.

Now shut up and get off my lawn!

YouTube and Facebook already have taken down dozens of hunting videos and groups.

COBOL followed a couple of years later by BASIC and 6502 assembler (Apple ][)

Well, THIS janitor has been around this business for 40+ years, not because I'm working towards retirement, but because, like many, I'm working at something that continuously challenges me and fills me with joy when I do something I like.

Now get off my virtual lawn!

You gain more knowledge by doing the work and not always by sitting in a classroom with 30 - 100 people all trying to pay attention to an instructor that may or may not be more than 1 page ahead of the class in the (outdated by the time it's printed) textbook.

Your mileage may vary but in my 40 years of consulting I know that my experience has taught me more than any college course ever has. This includes concepts such as operating systems, compilers, databases, parallel programming, etc.

I deal with incredibly incompetent "engineers" from a certain populous Asian country who arrive here on H1-B's and cannot seem to "engineer" their way out of the box they were taught to be in. They all have degrees from some hometown "prestigious" university and they all claim to have "5+ years of experience" but in truth I doubt they have half that. There are exceptions but those exception usually actually have 5+ years of experience and have learned, FROM EXPERIENCE, to be better, competent engineers.

Yes, we only had two VIABLE candidates.

Jill Stein? Nutjob
Gary Johnson? Moron (What's Aleppo? REALLY?!)
Evan McMullin? Who?
Darrell Castle? Who?
Harambe? Sadly, the better choice but he's dead.

So until we get intelligent people to run for political office (which is an oxymoron to say the least ... why would an intelligent person WANT to hold public office?) then we will be forever stuck with choosing the lesser evil.

1. update MakeMKV
2. rip movie AND ALL BONUS CONTENT (my favorite part of the BluRay)
3. ffmpeg to convert (x264, AC3)
4. Download subtitles (subscene.com)
5. Deploy to PLEX or NAS
6. Enjoy!

Learned this method after buying my 4th copy of Finding Nemo on DVD that my kids wore out in the DVD player. Now they can watch whatever movie they want, that I actually own on BluRay (or DVD) as many damn times as they want.

I had an interviewer once ask me what the most efficient method was for finding the largest integer in an array of integers was that did not exceed a given threshold. He was a mathematician and was wielding his Big-O pants that day. His solution was to take the array and put it into a hash map and then use the index of the hash map to determine the answer to the problem.

My solution was to sort the array in-place and use a simple binary search on the resulting array; in assembler; if fewer clock cycles than it took him to put the array into a hash table.

Suffice to say my solution wasn't what he was looking for even though it was the fastest solution to his specific problem and, yes, I know that there is a difference between "most efficient" and "best performing", however, sometimes they can be the same thing.