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Search - "#ibm"
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29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.
For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.
I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.
I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.
Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.30 -
My brother and I have been messing with our IBM 5150 and doing cool stuff with it. I got it to play a youtube video via telnet via my bro's mac via mplayer with libcaca (ascii video output) + youtube-dl (a youtube downloader. The mac is doing all the heavy lifting, but it is still cool to see these images on a IBM 5150, just by typing a few commands on that old keyboard... more fun projects to come with this old thing.7
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Whenever I come across some acronyms...
CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs10 -
My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.
I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.
I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.
So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.
I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.
That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.
After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.
In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.
A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.
But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.23 -
Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:
Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.
-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.12 -
Gave aways some servers today.
They had 128GB RAM and 24 cores.
I am happy actually, thoose kids is going to learn stuff and hopefully they they choose IT in the future23 -
My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server
I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.
It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.
One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.
Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.
Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.
Then, next week, it happened again.
My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.
(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).
Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.
I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."
My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.
Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.
Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.
My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.
This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...
So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.
So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.
The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.
One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.
The cleaning staff came in.
Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.
Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.
We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.
You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.9 -
Back when I was in college I had this CS professor who was by far the worst I can remember. The class was some bullshit 100 level required intro to CS course, and the guy tried to make it as difficult as possible. Beyond that, he was just a bad professor and did stupid things.
One of the most memorable things he did was give homework assignments, and then in order to collect them (it was a lecture class of about 150 people), he would have everyone pass their printed assignments to the right, and these sheets of paper traveled all the way across the lecture hall in every row of seats. It was a complete mess.
As you can probably guess, he frequently misplaced homework assignments, and many were probably lost through this ridiculous method of turning them in. Some people almost failed this ridiculously easy class because he lost their homework assignments. I think he lost like one of mine so it didn't matter much, but some other people in the class almost failed because of this. I think in the end he had to make a lot of exceptions because of this obvious trend.
Beyond that, he was an older guy who had worked for IBM, and he made that known at least once per class, usually more. "IBM this, IBM that!" So fucking annoying.
I'm glad to be long done with college.6 -
JsonX is a an IBM standard to represent JSON in XML...
Like wtf dude? What's the point in making shit even more verbose than the original XML ?26 -
Fucking 20 hour days. Third one this week.
Been at work since 6am, it is now midnight. Spent the morning fixing bush league code mistakes from "expert" onshore developers, and explaining how-to-wipe-your-ass level concepts to some rude cunt who is absolutely going to take credit for my work after I leave.
Now I'm just waiting on this slow boat scp to finish because the invalids the customer hired to manage their infra can't figure out the 3 minute exercise that is standing up a registry, so the container deployment process is fucking export multiple 500mb Redhat images as a tar and ship it across the cripplenet they call a datacenter. And of course the same badmins don't understand rsync and can't manage to get network throughput in a datacenter with a $300M annual budget over 128kbps. I guess that's fast for whatever jugaad horseshit network they're used to.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Fuck IBM. They're a cancer and at this point I question the moral compass of anyone who works for them.7 -
IBM
I have replied to them with scripts, curl commands, and Swagger docs (PROVIDED TO SUPPORT THEIR API), everything that could possibly indicate there's a bug. Regardless, they refuse to escalate me to level 1 support because "We cant reproduce the issue in a dev environment"
Well of course you can't reproduce it in a dev environment otherwise you'd have caught this in your unit tests. We have a genuine issue on our hands and you couldnt give less of a shit about it, or even understand less than half of it. I literally gave them a script to use and they replied back with this:
"I cannot replicate the error, but for a resource ID that doesnt exist it throws an HTTP 500 error"
YOUR APP... throws a 500... for a resource NOT FOUND?????????!!!!!!!!!! That is the exact OPPOSITE of spec, in fact some might call it a MISUSE OF RESTFUL APIs... maybe even HTTP PROTOCOL ITSELF.
I'm done with IBM, I'm done with their support, I'm done with their product, and I'm DONE playing TELEPHONE with FIRST TIER SUPPORT while we pay $250,000/year for SHITTY, UNRELENTING RAPE OF MY INTELLECT.11 -
My client uses a very old hosting company that cannot even support php 5.2. We urge him to switch to IBM softlayer.
My Client: I am afraid that your hosting company(IBM) will close one day.
Me: ... What?5 -
I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.
So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.
My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.
It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....
Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.
My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.
My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.
Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.
My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.
And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.
And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.
It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.
I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.
Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.31 -
If I had a dollar for every time IBM disappointed me, I would buy IBM and turn it into a company that sells dildos and fake poop so their product would be more up front and direct.3
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Imagine going back in time to 1956
to show the Inventor of the 1.5m wide and 1.7m high IBM 350 Hard Disk storage unit with a total of 5MB Storage size this...
https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/...
https://instagram.com/p/...9 -
A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:
"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"
The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.
The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.
By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....
Backstory:
The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.
The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.
In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.
They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.
When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:
They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.
Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.
It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.
At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.
So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.
From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.
We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).
The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.
So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.
Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.
Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."
The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.
A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...
Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.
Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.
HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.
The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...4 -
My dad has been working for IBM for almost 30 years now. A couple years back, when we were traveling, he just stopped and changed directions going "ooohhh"... Apparently IBM used to make atms and he just saw one and just had to make a withdrawal... 😅1
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Holy fucking shit!
We just got hit with the dumbest GDPR notice ever. IB fucking M has just managed to fucking FedEx a single fucking shitty piece of paper with a generic GDPR notice on. The fucking parcel was not even addressed to anyone except the "purchasing department".
Why on earth would some fucking corporate drone FedEx a single sheet of paper across the Atlantic Ocean?
Aaarghhhh!!!!!!10 -
With all the people showing off their setup and input devices i thought it's time to show you my keyboard...
Key features:
- mechanical keys
- sturdy af; best for ranting (survived more angry fist strokes than any device should ever receive)
- older than me and outlived 5 (!) mice
- awesome retro look
- would beat a nokia in hunger games
- best code buddy ever (and propably oldest, too)
Hope i'll be able to continue coding on it another 20 years... Someday i may gift it to my grandchildren.18 -
Started this machine for the first time after 18 years!!
IBM R51 (32 bit single core Pentium M), 1gb RAM, 40gb old mechanical hdd.
Installed Ubuntu 12 (32 bit from old iso) , installed some educational software to teach mouse n keyboard (my daughter is good in touchscreen on ipad), she is getting hang of mouse so quick, amazed how fast kids learn, wish I could be so fast too.13 -
Got this old girl from a reseller on Ebay. I wanted to know if they were worth the hype.
It was made in Aug `89, my birthday. It's almost 30 years old and will likely outlive me.10 -
TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.
So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.
In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...
I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.
Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.
Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.4 -
A few interview tips from the other side of the table:
1. Bring a laptop
I mean come up man! Bring a laptop. Especially if there was some kind of project or challenge to present. I have seen so many people do a big UI design presentation and then come in like “can I use your laptop???”. Of course you can, but your looking very unprepared.
2. Ask for clarification
Communication problems happen in business every day. Different cultures and accents can cause issues. The important part isn’t wether you understand everything said but that you ask enough questions to make sure you eventually understand. Most people just wrongly assume things and start rambling.
3. Know what kind of company you and talking to
In my case, this is a startup. We aren’t IBM or Amazon or Google. We work hard and we play hard. Work life balance is important in life but if your very first question is “work/life balance???” then you played yourself. Wait a bit, pepper it in on the sly. Just don’t ask it right away, it shows us that you aren’t ready to work harder than usual if needed. Maybe try “so how do you like working here? How are the people, hours etc?” Or something besides the first question being a bad signal.
Just some random tips for an interviewer.
From me to you, don’t make me have to tell you like DJ Khalid would ...
Congratulations, you played yourself.23 -
My desk is as crazy as I me. It's kind of a mess but it means I'm productive. Not pictured is Tux, he's coming in the mail.
....I really like IBM hardware. 🤓10 -
Lotus notes (or IBM Notes, as it is now called).
It is so efficient at frustrating you that when it hangs that it often requires its own dedicated task killer (killnotes) instead of Windows Task Manager.6 -
TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.
I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.
FF to today:
- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"
And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.11 -
Had an interview with ibm last week, got rejected because I don't have public speaking and people skills.
GG AWESOME!!7 -
Did you hear of the story of the fucked up data migration at the british bank TSB? People can't access their money for a week now. And people see the accounts of other bank custumers. The CEO had to call IBM for help.
https://theguardian.com/business/...3 -
People are still bitching about Microsoft buying Github.
In the meantime IBM buys Red Hat for 34 billion USD.
https://engadget.com/2018/10/...10 -
Does anyone have a good and free translator api I could use? I’m doing small school project and I just wanted to create text translator app. I tried yandex already, and ibm sucks since it doesn’t allow ajax request9
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Does anyone know a free hosting that support .net core web api without credit card? It’s just for a school project. IBM Bluemix only supports normal web app and azure needs credit card4
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I helped a homeless man with a really bad foot condition down the stairs to get to the subway platform along with bringing down his wheelchair. Just his luck that the elevator was out of service. The man cried and said that he wished more people like me existed in the world but the world he knew was long gone from his grasp.
My problem with that situation was that people just ignored him and look disgusted at him....since when did we as humans lose faith in each other to the point that we ultimately care about differences, status, and appearance before anything else?
Such a sad fucking world we live in today and I had just learned that he used to be a programmer and worked at IBM back in the days (he had a really old decrepit badge too and we shared some programming woes before we got on separate trains).
Bless him and fuck everyone else who stood by and watched the poor man suffer. Those people are worse than shit, they are the scum of the Earth in my eyes.4 -
I've caught the efficiency bug.
I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)
I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"
My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.
But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.
Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.
So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.
After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.
The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.
Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.
Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.
From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.
So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).
They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.
In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.
I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.
I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.5 -
Stupid bluemix console, build a translator web apps which processed by translator api services. When I pushed it, error occurred *panic begins*. Then I decided to create a default netcore template and push it. It worked. Push the former one again and it worked.
Stupid server honestly1 -
!rant
Yay just ranked 3rd in an IBM hackathon. Didn't know I could stay up for 36 hours straight and work 30 of them.2 -
IBM job requirements:
- 12+ years kubernetes experience
- kubernetes is 6 years old
IBM, never change cheered me up today
https://theregister.com/2020/07/...4 -
Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.
When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.
I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.
At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.
At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.
I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.
And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.6 -
Really IBM? Selling certificates to own employees that are valid only inside the company? A bit greedy from my point of view.7
-
Apple for it's T2
IBM for being a bitch
Oracle for being an asshole
Facebook for being a pimp
Microsoft for being Microsoft8 -
Finally Spend two fucking days debugging shit until I figured it it. Freaking stupid shit encoding problems and old data combined isn't fun. Dafuq why can't everybody use UTF-8 or Unicode or something else but PLEASE stop using some old school IBM shit codepages.
Leckt mich doch am arsch mit diesem scheiß man -_-4 -
So there's this developer I work with. Let's call him Kevin.
I am a UX designer, former Developer from IBM - but I really love design, so I made the switch. My background however, usually makes working with Developers easy.
But not this guy! I provided a clickable prototype complete with code to easily inspect with Dev tools for measurements. I provided mobile references for some screens but not all.
Kevin submits screenshots for me to review the design. Looks nothing like the prototype, so I get out my Wacom tablet and basically draw redlines over the screenshot. "No border here, 22px should be 20px, etc."
His response was:
"I need you to say exactly what you one (want?) each pages and mobile pages to look like, text size of the font, etc.
You did a lot of red marking, so I am asking for clarification."
So basically asking for red line specs. I asked a month ago if he wanted all the mobile screens, or if what I provided was enough along with the style guide. He agreed. So now I'm majorly pissed off.
Maybe it's also the fact that one of the other developers has to hold his hand, because everything he does is bad. 😡 And his lack of ability to articulate a damn sentence effectively drives me crazy. Cherry on top, I suppose.
Would love to bring this up with my boss. ♥️ And suggestions. 😍3 -
Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩
You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself
When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.
You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭
There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.
It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.
Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮
Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.6 -
!rant I'm beginning my nerd project of getting my IBM 5150 to the internet via my raspberry pi and a terminal emulator. Oh and the IBM has a 4gb (yes gigabytes) HDD in the form of a compact flash.
The pi is a model B. Even as an older pi, look at the difference in size versus performance!
The 5150 is 4.77 mhz
The Pi is 900mhz12 -
I had a meeting today with some high level technical executives from IBM and I showed them our architecture and they were impressed and said it was rare that they saw start-ups with such great architecture. As a dev with no formal education and one year experience this makes me so proud and also very proud of my team2
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Got contacted by "cosmicjs" ( https://cosmicjs.com ) to build apps using the platform and blog about said apps.
Googling them, they got articles spread all over medium, by either the co-founder or the developers, praising it to be the better wordpress and how some seemingly paid twitter posts praise it too.
Apparently "Deutsche Bank" and Volkswagen, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, JPMorganChase use it, which I highly doubt, maybe somebody here can figure out if thats actually false claims, since googling any of those together obv. doesn't return anything, nor makes it sense why they would spend such a large amount on... nothing?..
That one might be just me, but then theres those comments from themselves on producthunt, praising it, though it seems they failed to logout or something? the one co-founder seems to be praising how easy it is to install, by talking about it like an external user?.. (screenshot in comments)14 -
So, to anyone defending IBM at this point, a member of a client's offshore team used their paystub as test data. Aaaaand I was horrified by what I saw.
Their pay is less than $2/hr ($3973/yr, 300k INR).
I can't even. Not only that someone would pay so little to a supposedly degreed professional (I question the validity of that claim based on performance, that's a story for another time), but that companies feel comfortable giving full production system access to people I would not blame for taking bribes.
Fuck.14 -
Who did you guys inherit your programming skills from?
Neither of my parents are skilled with computers, and my dad can barely turn them on. My grandfather was an IBM programmer, but he died before I was ever interested in computers. While he didn't have time to physically get me interested in them, I think that's how it got into my blood.24 -
Should a developer really have to be a jack of all trades? I write code, but at work I feel like I am always getting pulled into sysadmin debacles. I am not a sysadmin or an ops person. I am a developer, not a systems guy.
If you want me to be a systems guy, then train me to be one. You hired me to write code, not to troubleshoot shitty IBM Application Servers.8 -
I was working on a very database heavy PHP app about six months ago. All database access was done directly, with hardcoded SQL strings.
I'd suggested switching over to an ORM during the upcoming major verson's rewrite, and FINALLY got approval to start integrating one.
The next week I'm told that I need to trash all the code I'd just written, since the decision to use an orm has been reversed.
The rationale? According to management, ORMs aren't "scalable enough for our application" and would "reduce developer productivity". I pointed out that we would be processing ~10 concurrent operations, maximum; I was told that the technically details didn't matter and the person I was working under had the final say because they'd worked at IBM, briefly, as an intern.
I stopped working on that project about two weeks later, thankfully.15 -
Did someone noticed that IBM celebrated the International Programmer Day with HTML???
I don't know whether to laugh or cry 😂😭3 -
The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)
-
No one wants to talk about redhat bought by IBM? 🤔
For a community that loves Linux, people sure are quiet 😂7 -
Fun day, lots of relief and catharsis!
Client I was wanting to fire has apparently decided that the long term support contract I knew was bullshit from go will instead be handled by IBM India and it's my job to train them in the "application." Having worked with this team (the majority of whom have been out of university for less than a year), I can say categorically that the best of them can barely manage to copy and paste jQuery examples from SO, so best of fucking luck.
I said, "great!," since I'd been planning on quitting anyways. I even handed them an SOW stating I would train them for 2 days on the application's design and structure, and included a rider they dutifully signed that stated, "design and structure will cover what is needed to maintain the application long term in terms of its basic routing, layout and any 'pages' that we have written for this application. The client acknowledges that 3rd party (non-[us]) documentation is available for the technologies used, but not written by [us], effective support of those platforms will devolve to their respective vendors on expiry of the current support contract."
Contract in hand, and client being too dumb to realize that their severing of the maintenance agreement voids their support contract, I can safely share what's not contractually covered:
- ReactiveX
- Stream based programming
- Angular 9
- Any of the APIs
- Dotnet core
- Purescript
- Kafka
- Spark
- Scala
- Redis
- K8s
- Postgres
- Mongo
- RabbitMQ
- Cassandra
- Cake
- pretty much anything not in a commit
I'm a little giddy just thinking about the massive world of hurt they've created for themselves. Couldn't have happened to nicer assholes.3 -
IBM. Fucking IBM. I have not heard ONE person say “We should totally become an IBM shop!” Because only people who were already STUCK with IBM when better options presented themselves still use IBM bullshit. And those people... ooooooh those fuckers are in SO MUCH denial. “Yeah but IBM does such-and-such too.” YEAH? Well your business model shouldn’t be built on businesses held captive to your antique bullshit. That shit is Stockholm syndrome. Textbook, fucking Stockholm syndrome. Don’t tell me “It used to be we could only have EIGHT character file names.” THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A THING. EVER. Fucking THINK about it. If you have to justify something based how much WORSE it used to be, that thing probably fucking sucks.11
-
I am sick and tired of big companies trying to shove their technologies down developer's throat in the name of developer advocacy. Last week I attended one of the IBM workshops which was supposed to be about ML and AI techniques but ended being solely about IBM Cloud (Bluemix), click here, click there, purchase it. I am not against developer advocacy and them trying to advertise their product but they should always keep in mind that developers won't get interested if they aren't learning any transferable core skills.
I was checking a course on Udacity about building scalable java apps. It turned out to be about Google Cloud Platform, auto scaling and nothing much. How deceiving is that?4 -
Imagine yourself being a CTO back then.
Brand new Acura NSX. No MacBooks, ThinkPads are hot. Your company has its own skyscraper. CASE tools are just introduced and they’re hotter than blockchain now. You do software architecture in IBM Rational Rose, typing on your Model M and thinking really hard about Java OOP which is very hot right now.
You have Erlang servers at your own data center. You laugh at people writing in COBOL. You excited about aspect-oriented programming.
What a wonderful time.3 -
That moment when you realize you're using a Hackintosh with VirtualBox and a CF card to install a Beta version of MS-DOS with DOS SHELL that your brother found on an old BBS forum; on an IBM 5150 from 1981.
-
So I pulled an OLD ibm out of a trailer, that is literally falling down, today. Anyway, this cpu had been rained on and been in extremes of heat, and cold, so much so that there was moss growing on it.
I pulled it out and plugged it in, with the original plug *that was rusted in*, and.. it worked. The screen and everything worked perfectly! The floppy disk that hadn't been used in over 14 years and was stuck inside the reader, worked...
Mind blown!
As the old saying goes, they don't make 'em like they used to.3 -
The challenge: a Dell Latitude XPi CD 133ST. It has a Pentium 133MHz, 32MB memory, and a 2GB HDD. I think I have some CD's with Mandrake from the late 90's. I hope. And mission impossible, an IBM Workpad z50 with a MIPS 4000 and 8MB split 50/50 between storage and program memory. Think that one will just be a large paper weight or door stop.17
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[...] great! Nice to hear from you that you've got experience using C#! Our shipping company will also need a mobile interface for our IBM AS400 relic older-than-the-pyramids server, can you do that?
Me (a little displeased about the idea of working on a pre-existing legacy server): yes sure, I'm working on a Android project right now, so I'm learning a lot about it lately, I think it's totally feasible
Them: oh, but we are using a windows mobile device
Me (wondering why they are still using Windows phone): I can look it up and let you know btw
> Windows Mobile /= Windows Phone
> Deprecated since 2010
I'm fucked.4 -
It would have been back in the 90s 🤫
I was about 8 years old I guess when I had a friend who had a Commodore64 and he loaded up the good old floppy, typed some things in and the screen started doing things, my mind was instantly triggered for “how did you do that?”.
Moving forward after that I was into gaming on consoles (sega, snes, Atari ect) and always wondered how the games were made (being pre-internet) that was not easy to find info for, otherwise I think inprobably would have ended up in the game dev world.
It wasn’t until I was about 10-11 that I finally got a PC in the house ( good old IBM 386 with 10mb HDD.. yes MB not GB for you young folk) and I was addicted from day one, MS paint, changing settings left right and Center in windows 3.11 and then when we upgraded to W95 and then W98 things got more and more interesting.
God the memories, and games (MAME32 was the best)😆
Shit now I want to find some old school games for a trip up memory lane 😂
When I was 15, I made my first website in front page (don’t judge), was a nice big walkthrough with photos and map locations for GTA 3, and since then I’ve never looked back. -
This is from the 70s. It can easily be updated to the present day, but it has a certain charm just the way it is:
Three women sat discussing their husbands and their sex lives.
"My husband's a wrestler," said the first. "He's really strong and aggressive in bed."
"My husband's an artist," said the second. "He's really gentle and sensitive."
"My husband's an IBM salesman," said the third. "He sits on the edge of the bed and tells me how good it's going to be when I finally get it." -
IBM decided to change the EOL of CentOS 8 from 2029 to 2021, then continue CentOS as useless RR testbed. What a nice attempt at forcing users into the paid RedHat version.
That's a risky move because Rocky Linux is already gearing up to replace CentOS, and the whole RedHat ecosystem could bleed out to Ubuntu, Suse, and Debian LTS. Well done, suits.16 -
Well, I'm still in 1981 Hell as far as serial connectivity goes, but we got boobs on the screen, because when we're working with DOS 5.00.2 BETA and 4 colors at a time, why the fuck not?
-
For more than 20 years Google and Mozilla becoming our lifeline ❤️thank you @google @mozilla
@firefox13 -
My first PC was a USSR clone of the IBM XT 5160-086 PC, but with a different design, and beefier RAM. I was shown a game in it (barbarian), and the next evening I really wanted to play again, so I inserted the floppy disk, booted up into DOS and Norton Commander, and was stuck. It's my first ever interaction with a computer. So i typed "computer, please give me barbarian".
I was way ahead of the time you could say :) -
Operation PiBM 5150 XT is continuing this morning!
Raspberry Pi B+ 900mhz
Raspbian Pixel Linux
LG 21:9 2560x1080 monitor
HDMI cable
/boot/config.txt updated for 21:9 monitor
Nyko PS3 USB Compact Flash / SD Reader
4gb CF card as HDD in 5150
4.77mhz IBM 5150 in like new condition
CGA Graphics and Monitor
Late 2012 Macbook Pro
HyperTerm app
USB to DB/25 (RS-232) serial adapter
Devrant Sticker5 -
This day I have received the most glorious news in e-pistolary form. For some years, I was suffering in support of a client who was, well, insufferable. My presence there paralleled the divine comedy in both essence and fact.
I opened the missive, expecting another plea to bail them out of whatever clusterfuck they found themselves in. Instead, what I found was something truly magical.
"Hey Human,
I hope this finds you well. I'm not sure if you remember a few years back, we were trying to decide between IBM Cloud and AWS. Well, after years of battling FF*, we're finally moving ahead with AWS. He failed one too many times to deliver anything visibly. After you left, there was no one left he could use to steal credit, ideas, and work.
FF is still pushing to have them use IBM cloud as a "warm backup" in the event "AWS fails." We will see where that goes.
I figured you'd like to know; you were the void in the wilderness for a long time. I don't want to think about how much time we could have saved if we had just listened.
PeeEm**"
This event represents a personal victory, albeit belated, over a few peoples' absurd amount of privilege. Towards the end, I was vicious about my contestation to the insanity of adopting a desperate hedge attempt-as-cloud offering from a failing company. Some examples:
// cloud 'strategy meeting'
Moi: What cloud platform are we looking at using?
FF: We're looking at IBM cloud and AWS as a second.
Moi: Why is that? I understand you're obligated to rep your offering first, but that decision doesn't seem to have the customer's best interest at heart.
FF: IBM cloud is a market leader; AWS isn't as good.
Moi: I see. I mean, that's the tech equivalent of the company's fleet management considering monkeys on tricycles as a strong competitor to service trucks, but I get what you mean.
// steering meeting
Director: Who can we look to as an example? Who is currently using the IBM cloud?
Moi: No one; they account for a single-digit portion of the actual cloud market. Their long game to sell you a "Hybrid Cloud," which means put some front end payload in a CDN, and buy n-frame units of IBM z servers for the DC with IBM gateway appliances acting as connective tissue. So it's not the cloud at all, really.
Director: How does it compare in cost?
Moi: It's generally 40% more expensive than other clouds, and it only goes higher as you option their software.
Director: What about Watson? I hear Watson is good?
Moi: It's a brand name. Most of the "Watson" product is just a facade on top of FOSS products like Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc.
Director: Those were words. They sounded good. FF say it's good tho so we'll believe him because we're from the same city.
Moi: *deletes Director from LinkedIn*
Moral of the story: Never trust a vendor that only recommends their products.
*FF = FatFuck - an embarrassingly rotund individual whose girth is roughly equivalent to his height. He shit his way into an IBM architect position in his mid-20s purely due to winning the visa lottery. He had fake hair glued to his head for his wedding to hide his male pattern baldness; his arrange-married wife undoubtedly cries herself to sleep after sex.
**PeeEm - the then project manager, now portfolio manager of some satellite projects. An overall decent human being, capable.9 -
Rantberry PI
Thinking about making this into a terminal that accepts a serial connection from my IBM 5150 PC for that Chroma Green authentic text based experience. ;)
Seriously though. How awesome would it be to use a circa 1981 IBM 5150 as your terminal? Lol!1 -
It was 1987. I was 13. My first dev project started with a $1,300 IBM PC XT clone I bought from a relative who was a “dealer” of PCs for some company. It took all the savings I had from birthday money and mowing lawns for several summers at $5 a pop.
My mom wanted to encourage me to learn it more in depth, and she also wanted to know more for her job as a librarian, so she bought us a bunch of books about DOS, BASIC, and Assembler.
I first got familiar with DOS and then dove into Assembler without realizing what it really was (and how much easier BASIC would be). After hours and hours of typing in what, to me, then, was complete gibberish, I grabbed the BASIC book to see what it had to offer.
I never went back to the Assembler book.
A kid at school had given me a BASIC program he had typed in from a magazine. It was a flight simulator of sorts but with a helicopter, IIRC. I loaded up that bad boy and got to hacking. I didn’t get much done with it but I did build a few other menu navigation programs to explore the language more.
That led to PROLOG, C, PASCAL, Visual Basic, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and now PHP. -
been playing with IBM watson for a while so i can assure you that you don't need to worry about Skynet.
Update: just saw google deep mind, we better start saving food.3 -
IBM is taking a shit in our mouths. I suppose we should have seen this coming, but almost our entire environment runs on CentOS. Not only will we have to find a new distro (which will probably be CoreOS with kube, bleh) but we'll have to get everyday trained up on it.10
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Employer uses IBM Software, which forces me to use Eclipse. I hate eclipse. Hate is a hard word. I'd never say, I really 'hate' a person. But eclipse, eclipse is what I hate. I can look at my smartwatch and see my heartrate rising, just thinking of how the fuck any developer on this crappy planet would ship that bullshit IDE. That saying, I'm totally fine with some bugs, using windows and so on, but eclipse... Is this a get-more-contributors strategy? Holy moly it really kills me. Hey, let's just open that maven Proj.. Oh, crash. Hey, let's install that "bug-free" version of the maven-integratio... Oh, crash. Let's do a global search over my worksp.. Oh, freezed. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! How can this be legal? I mean, seriously, most junoir devs I know, just use Eclipse, because they don't know of any other "better" IDE (VIM would be better, even notepad). Is there anyone sucking professors cocks / vaginas to get them introduce that crap IDE to students?2
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>be me, working at IBM as CC operator
>onboarding freeze, people leaving team, not enough operators
>take extra workload to sustain monitoring
>no raise
>team gets merged with other CC team(different customers)
>take over of developing full workload automation project
>no raise
>sick coworker, have to take more extra workload to cover monitoring
>get tiny raise
>coworker gets the same raise for only one extra workload
>be expected to do both programming and monitoring for the little salary
>too autistic to quit
>too autistic to confront my mamager with this
What do, devRant?5 -
Researchers were able to store 3 bits of data per cell in phase-change memory, beating the previous limit of 1 bit per cell, IBM said. PCM competes with dynamic random-access memory.
5/19/2016.2 -
Elon musk has shown himself to be a terrible person, a worse manager and someone who hasn't a clue of what a code review is. A summarily fires so many people that he can't find someone to open the doors for his big in person meeting or the vet the badges. He offers 3 months termination pay or you can work 12 hours a day 7 days a week hardcore. But none of the payroll people are around anymore either. Critical subsystems have not a single engineer left to work on them. He's paranoid that employees will sabotage the software. But I think he's doing such a good job it would be impossible to tell that anyone else was helping him.
An engineer wrote a prescient seven page report listing problems ahead including user verification. So Elon twit-fired him.
Also entirely predictable is the stress that the world cup will put on the system beginning today, I believe. He doesn't "like" microservices.
I work for the psychiatrist once who barely needed to sleep. Maybe Elon can function with 12-hour days week in week out. But it's cool to think you're going to squeeze substantially more work out of people by doubling their hours. More likely you will more than double their errors and what will that do to you budget? 50 years ago IBM determined that the best way to improve programmer productivity was to give each one their own office.
I can't believe he's whining over spending 13 million dollars a year on food. That is so far from being a strategic item. Soapbox out.28 -
!(!StrangeRant)
I want to have a program that makes programs.
----CONSOLE------------------------
$ sudo makep
(makep = make program)
$ makep > destroy the world and make that me and i are the only survivor
$ makep > select language > TrumpLang
$ makep > Please wait...
$ makep > Compiling...
Estimated time to finish: 1 million years later
(i died)
$ makep > .........
$ makep > Building...
Estimated time to finish: 1 million years later
$ makep > .........
(ok, so i wont wait 1 million years here, so lets say 1 million years passed)
$ makep > Running...
Estimated time to finish: 1 million years later
$ makep > .........
(ok, so i wont wait 1 million years here, so lets say 1 million years passed)
$ makep > Destroying...
$ makep > Finished!
$ makep > Press CTRL+F to shut down.
-----------------------------------
Earth stopped.
This computer is the only survivor.
While he was compiling, he got artificial intelligence.
He tried to survive.
Now the story begins.
The life of a computer.
Alone.
In theaters at 2018/04/01.
Buy tickets now!
IMDB / RT rated this movie 10/10
-----------
Footnotes
This movie is containing parental advisory content.
(This is sponsored by the awesome people at Turbo C and IBM)9 -
Waking up and guess the first item on my feed?
IBM research just released Snap ML framework that's supposedly 47x faster than Tensorflow. Now, i like advancements but fuck i just finished developing my Tensorflow model, and i don't want to rewrite this stuff again!2 -
IBM, because I work in there.
Well maybe it wouldn't be as bad if I didn't work at command centre. From the beginning I did my best to get a promotion, but it resulted in me having shitton of workload and no raise. Maybe it's just shitty management tho. But still. -
TFW when one of your side projects that you couldn't get approval for 1 additional resource magically creates work for 11 IBM GS assholes. Isn't application maintenance supposed to reduce headcount?
Fuck em.
🦄🔫 -
Those of you who like "The Imitation Game", you probably want to check out "Hidden Figures" (2016). It's on Netflix now.
About a team of female African-American mathematicians who wanted to "break the glass ceiling" in NASA.
- Dorothy : conquered the (recently acquired) IBM frameworks using Fortran and taught her team to program it
- Mary : appealed to court to be allowed to study in a all-white school to get her qualification to be an aerospace engineer
- Katherine : her skills in analytical geometry enabled her to be the first female African-American in the Space Task Group in calculating the momentous capsule launch into orbit
My lazy ass just can't fathom how someone who deals with so much math and pressure can still smile to their family after work. My grumpiness nature will surely turn me into a monster.
And now I know what "human computers" means.5 -
My Chromebook Pixel 2015 died yesterday. *sniff* I really liked the build quality and using crouton for Linux.
My 2nd work laptop ever was a IBM Thinkpad and I really liked that back in the day.
Now I'm looking at the Thinkpad 25th anniversary edition. Anyone have one? Thoughts?3 -
For some reason, after I graduate I always vision myself working in IBM. Anybody got some tips or experiences working there?5
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15 min till technical interview with IBM:
Trying to convince myself I’m not an imposter. 🙃
10 min after the interview:
I’m thinking how for the last 15 min of the interview they were pitching about how great the life at IBM is and why I should join.21 -
Frustration Rant!
Because old hardware means learning the hard way sometimes, I've had to purchase more goodies.
On my last update, I installed the rs232 shield which may have inadvertently been wired backwards for Tx/Rx from what im used to. I assume it is backwards to most db9 serial ports because most Arduino or other projects you would do with a pi have serial "in" connections like old routers and devices that would be "controlled" rather than the other way around. Anyway, according to a video on youtube showing a guy turning an old machine into an IRC client via raspberry pi, this shield may be swapped. That means that instead of interfacing with the old machine via a null modem crossover cable, I need a straight cable with male db9 on both ends. I unfortunately tried using the null modem crossover cable which was reversing the reversed pins all over again. I hope these next few days are more fruitful now that I've bought a straight cable and db9/25 adapter.
The good thing is that I managed to get the pi to recognize its new serial port. I also dusted off my DOS skills and my serial card in the 5150 seems to work.
I literally banged my head after nothing worked. Im hoping that the tx/ Rx is solved soon.
Oh and that AT to PS/2 adapter will allow me to use by IBM original Model M Keyboarf rather than the fun model F. -
So I've been working as an operator in IBM for a year now. Two months after my onboard our team got an onboarding freeze. Since then more than a half of the team left and more are supposed to go, soo there is a problem covering all the workload. I volunteered to take 4th customers workload (out of 4 customers our team supports) because I already knew most of the work that is done there.
At a one-to-one meeting with my manager I asked for a little raise, because I have the 4th customer, I take other peoples shift anytime they need to take a free day, I update the documentation regularly, I write scripts for coworkers for installing software/automating what can be automated (and I'm the youngest here...) bla bla, telling him that I think I do a lot for the team and I deserve it. He told me that he would rather take away one of the customers workload. I rolled my eyes and went with it.
Two days later this asshole gave a raise to a guy, who was onboarding with me, because he wanted to motivate him. That very same day he told us that it seems like two customers are going to merge into one workload.
I'm so pissed because of this. I do my best all the time so I can get promoted to 2nd level linux team (I'm kinda one foot there) but the freeze is still preventing me to go. I'm already so tired of dealing with the bullshit of customer not knowing their own infrastructure, shitstorms of tickets during changes after level 2 didn't set maintenance mode again, repairing coworkers linux boxes because they don't know better and I'm so pissed at this un-initiative dickhead of a manager that gives a raise to lazy people. -
I began exploring code and graphic design early on at about 6-7 years old. My Dad had a commodore 64 with a few games and a little handbook that had some awesome examples to go by. My Dad had at one time been a subscriber to a serial magazine for Commodore enthusiasts that featured a snippet of code in each issue. After getting into my Dad's old stash of magazines I was able to combine all the magazines and write the code from each issue to create a hangman game. This got me into computers and programming. Then we did some Logo/Turtle work as got into qbasic on our IBM machine.
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CIA – Computer Industry Acronyms
CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs
AAAAA: American Association Against Acronym Abuse.
WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW: What You See Is What You Might Get If You’re Really Really Lucky And All Goes Well.2 -
Google, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, Intel formed one team. They betrayed to the world. They are ruling the world.
I am not joking..
.
.
.
.
.
.
Then I woke up.
Damn it :-(2 -
Thinking about creating a tech news account on devRant. A little idea that just came to my mind...
The account will contain all kinds of news! (about the tech industry of course)
So for example when a company acquires another company (IBM > RedHat, Microsoft > GitHub, etc.), a well-known website/app gets new features or a company releases a new smartphone, we will inform you here!
Of course I'd need some help if I wanted to do something like this. Especially from other timezones! (I'm im Austria/Europe)
Write a comment, if you're interested in helping out! The more people, the better!17 -
I swear IBM is just incapable of making a product that doesn’t fucking suck. I am terrified of their work with Quantum Computer research...because I just know they will fuck that up too.11
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For the love of the almighty, merciful God, fuck IBM until their company is brought down in ruins! May the earth they worked at be salted, and may they be struck from all records! May the families who speak of sons or daughters who work there be stripped of their status in life, begging in the streets!
May nobody be allowed to list them on resumes! May nobody be allowed to work for them! May they be a blight, hidden like the dirtiest porn magazines!
May mother's weep when children apply to them! May father's disown!
May managers avoid them! May they be scoffed at like the fools of old!
Oh how the mighty have fallen! The scholars brought low! May they repent before the day of judgement! May the change their ways! May they weep with sackcloth before the world, begging to be spared!
Fuck them! If you can't tell, I am pissed off!3 -
My IBM 5150 doesn't have the standard IBM Asynchronous Card in it and was replaced with a Tecram First Mate multifunctional memory expansion, serial connectivity, and printer parallel card. It has more jumpers than a suicide hotline.1
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Sometime in the mid to late 1980's my brother and I cut our teeth on a Commodore 64 with Basic. We had the tape drive, 1541 Disk Drives, and the main unit and a lot of C64 centric magazines my dad subscribed to. Each one of the magazines had a snippet of code in a series so that once you had 6 volumes of the magazine, you had a full free game that you got to write by yourself. We decided to write a Hangman game. Since we were the programmers, we already knew all the possible words stored in the wordlist, so it got old quick. One thing that hasn't changed is that my brother had the tenacity and mettle for the intensive logic based parts of the code and I was in it for the colors and graphics. Although we went through some awkward years and many different styles and trends, both of us graduated with computer science degrees at Arkansas State University. Funny thing is, I kept making graphics, CSS, UI, front end, and pretty stuff, and he's still the guy behind the scenes on the heavy lifting and logical stuff. Not that either of us are slacks on the opposite ends of our skilsets, but it's fun to have someone that compliments your work with a deeper understanding. I guess for me it was 2009 when I turned on the full time DEV switch after we published our first website together. It's been through many iterations and is unfortunately a Wordpress site now, but we've been selling BBQ sauce online since 2009 at http://jimquessenberry.com. This wasn't my first website, but it's the first one that's seen moderate success that someone else didn't pay the bill for. I guess you could say that our Commodore 64 Hangman game, and our VBASIC game The Big Giant Head for 386 finally ended up as a polished website for selling our Dad's world class products.1
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You know what a fucking good place for 1000s of mp4s, pdfs, doc files, exes and svgs is? Yeah, the bloddy SVN,which mirrors to git.
And how about a ibm websphere install zip with tiny 1.3gb?
And of cause you store your fuckin perl and Shellscripts, that have been written by a plain lunatic and that are responsible for installing the crap in the repo.
What? One repo for one component? Nah, cramp like 150 different projects into on repo.
And the most important scripts have to be kept unversionized ... For reasons.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg of shit.
Btw. websphere ships its own apache2.2 and its own security lib and its own openssl compilation, with ibm java ... Filesystem hierarchy standard? Dafuq? If you want to find something it better be like where is waldo - right, IBM? And command arguements? Man pages, usable documentation, usable deployment? How did any of this ever seem like a good idea to anyone?
Go get a koloscopy with a submarine periscope, IBM. -
IBM Notes. Ultimate example of developers each working on their own bits of functionality with zero thought to how the whole thing fits together. Just need to look at the preferences page see what a mess it is.
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I got notified that tomorrow I'm gonna start a porting project from a FileNet ecosystem.
Well, I don't know what is FileNet, but at least I've enough time to study its architecture. Let's start from the official IBM page:
The FileNet® P8 platform offers enterprise-level scalability and flexibility to handle the most demanding content challenges, the most complex business processes, and integration to all your existing systems. FileNet P8 is a reliable, scalable, and highly available enterprise platform that enables you to capture, store, manage, secure, and process information to increase operational efficiency and lower total cost of ownership.
Thank you IBM, now I surely know how to use FileNet. Well, I hope that wikipedia explains me what it is:
FileNet is a company acquired by IBM, developed software to help enterprises manage their content and business processes.
Oh my god. I tried searching half an hour so far and everything I found was just advertisements and not a clue about what it is.
Then they wonder why I hate IBM so much4 -
I know this is the second rant on a row about this, but I really need to hear someone saying that IBM enterprise software sucks. Nothing works, everything heavy and slow as fuck, documentation doesn't exist, official developer's forum gives me an error on login, many IBM official pages give me a 500 internal error. And, in the end, this costed as hundreds of thousands of euro. Seriously?7
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Websphere...what a piece of shit! IBM, you really should be embarrassed. Dependency injections stops working when the injected bean is in another jar (even though it's on the class path). Works great in JBoss.
Seriously IBM...go out of business already. You are a joke and your products have never been good. -
During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.
SOLUTION
We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.
Any feedback conserning this project please?8 -
!rant seems that my raspberry pi serial idea is a little bit complex at the moment and may take a more serious turn later, but I have studied and found DOS based TCP/IP software that will allow me to use my 5150 with actual Ethernet. There are a few 8bit ISA Ethernet cards that will work in the 5150 and separate executables that will configure DHCP, DNS, and even allow me to use a terminal emulator and SSH to connect to *nix based computers over lan! I'll keep you all posted!6
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So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.
I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".
But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.
The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".
Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.
It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.
It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.
But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.
THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!
So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.
Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...2 -
Using IBM WCS (WebSphere Commerce) and our custom css theme has a !important after every single line 👌2
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I made 60 lines of modern, clean, multi threaded, optimized python3 code to deliver data from GIT to IBM ClearCase, on old Windows VM, hundreds of files (CC is file-based version control, every file has it's own change)
This calls for sauna today to definitely get rid of this dirt :)
And they said devops is all around docker nowadays :)2 -
Our team had a brilliant engineer, he made a tool that would convert IBM Assembler code to C, comments included. the comments are the assembler code. bleh
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Sooo I’m typically a proponent of physical copy of books, as I’d rather sit and read them, write and take notes. Essentially all my books turn into something out of the “half blood prince” potions book from Harry Potter.
But it’s so inconvenient as either my books are in my office or in the library at home. It ends up being something like connecting a USB... the book I need at the time is always in the opposite place I am in currently.
Also, all the books I want now are newer and none are on the used market. For a reasonable price.
So I gave in a bought an iPad with the hopes of putting the books in pdf form on it... I’ll pay for some PDFs but hey if I can get it free thru a google search then it is what it is lol.
Not sure how I’m gonna adapt to reading on a tablet, as I really prefer a physical book.. hell I still use national brand computation notebooks for all my notes. Nothing beats writing it down, AND I still have an IBM selectric 3 and Swintec, nothing beats sitting down and just letting the thoughts flow neatly on a piece of paper and then glueing it the notebook
Anyway whatcha y’alls thoughts of using an iPad as a digital library of books.. using the Apple Pencil to annotate the book. I bought the 12.9 inch as the screen size is closest to a sheet of paper
Also, I don’t read fiction all the books I read are nonfiction, reference manuals, textbooks, data sheets, user manuals, stuff like the art of computer programming by knuth, Kent beck, Robert Martin, folwler books, etc14 -
Recently I keep watching videos about these beasts.
The shipping cost is absolutely bananas🤦♂️
But I really want to get one in Mac layout.
Should I pull the trigger?7 -
So IBM finally jettisoned the cancer that was Virginia Rometty a few weeks back. They had an opportunity to move fresh blood and solid managerial background into the top slot with Jim Whitehurst (Redhat) and try and recover their flagging market share and do some sane business strategy. They passed on that opportunity and instead appointed the old guard bootlicker who overpaid for Redhat to the tune of 20x what it was worth, and signalled their intent to continue staying the course of the Titanic and it's slow inevitable trek towards the bottom of the ocean. The board wants a yes man, and they got one.
This is basically what I assumed would happen, but I have some other predications as well:
- Whitehurst will leave to a better company
- the redhatters that haven't already left will be replaced with commodity labor
- Redhat will be the least stable Linux offering 2 years after the last hatter leaves
- they will sell off most of their existing software assets to HCL/ similar consulting partners like they did with domino and websphere to stem the bleed
- the displaced in that move will either quit or be replaced
- their cloud initiative will collapse under the weight of its own stagnation and glacial pace of development
- they will attempt to salve these wounds by moving focus to global services, reducing profit loss by cutting salary costs, further diluting their eroding ability to innovate
- they'll buy at least one other trendy software company at ridiculous valuation, and sell it off within 2 years at a massive loss
- the CEO slot will start to resemble the late Roman empire with a new CEO every other week
- Redhat assets will be sold to Google inside of 5 years
Last prediction: I will be overjoyed being able to witness the death of IBM in my lifetime. Fuck them 🍻7 -
https://ibm.com/support/home/...
What the actual fucking fuck? I've spent almost two days debugging this motherfucking piece of shit.
So.
YOUR BIOS HAS A WINDOW WITH A DROP SHADOW SO VERY COOL OF YOU IBM, BUT YOU CAN'T GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER WHEN IT COMES TO BOOTING.
I mean, what's the fucking logic? I don't fucking need a nice interface to my BIOS. No one fucking does when it comes to server hardware.
This is it for me. Fuck IBM. Fuck it hard. I really hope Oracle buys you.3 -
“A system called COBOL...” got a shout out on CNN. 🙄 Blame the IT departments for cheap ass lawmakers providing funds... I hate IBM as much as the next breathing human but damn 😡😡2
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IBM makes the ABSOLUTE shittiest products. It doesn’t matter what it is. They just don’t fucking try. They don’t try anymore. I don’t know if they ever did. I am convinced that 99.999999% of the world’s problems are because of IBM’s shit. War? IBM. Famine? IBM. Gun violence in America? IBM. The BM has to stand for Bowel Movement because that’s all they are. They’re fucking shit. And you can disagree with me. I don’t fucking care because I’m right and you’re wrong. IBM. Is. Fucking. Shit.10
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A taste in college with punchcards but mostly on Commodore 64 and IBM 5050 using BASIC and dBASE II. Automated my company from paper to systems and developed many side projects. Still creating 😀
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I'm a history nut - ancient civilizations, drunken poets, how many times we fucked up and almost nuclear bombed the shit out of ourselves is my other hobbyist love. Documentaries are also my shit.
Tech history is my nerdiest niche out of those two - I highly recommend watching "Silicon Cowboys", about how Compac took down IBM. 😍1 -
Companies writing a documentation for their cloud api is similar to the 4 year old kid who draws up something and brings it to us... Either ways all we can understand from it is... Nothing.
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I really do think that the recent partnership of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and IBM on AI is the worst possible news. Things are moving towards the AI revolution and the companies behind it could possible have unimaginable power over the world. It's not a matter of when or if, but of who, and I have a bad feeling of the whos...19
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IBM Websphere stack (Rational, Portal, etc)...I had to use it in my first job in a bank. A very disgusting pack of shit software...From these days i hate IBM with passion.
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I work in a small scale company based on Kolkata, India. It's my first job and I have been working here for last 6 and half years. Now I am the technical lead there.
I love my job. I love taking new challenges which I need to solve on my own (most of the times). My working hours are 9am to 6pm. Hardly I have to stay late at office. Even if I have any client meeting after 6, I do it from home. I am never tired on Mondays, I love to join my office. I can do my personal projects after reaching home, sometimes even in the office. All these goods come with a small price, I get less salary than my friends who are working on the MNCs (e.g. IBM, TCS, HP etc). They are frustrated though, with their jobs, with their bosses, with the long working hours. I am not. Sometimes I feel bad that I earn less. But that feeling doesn't stay much longer. It goes away whenever I join the office and get a new thing to do.
I have rejected offers from many companies. That includes all the major MNCs working in India. I feel bad about that sometimes, just like currently I am feeling. One my friend (a really bad developer) is roaming in the New York city, he is there for an onsite project. I know I can't go their, at least now. And that feels bad.
What should I do? Does it make me an idiot to stay in a company for more than 6 years? Should I switch and join an MNC like everyone does? I am confused. Pretty confused.9 -
IBM Websphere Application Server... the fact that that needs to be install for other middleware to run makes me irrate my balls with a grinder...
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!rant Big ++ to all who encouraged us as we slowly shared this project on DevRant.
@qberry1 and have 1 chapter in the books with big props to DevRant
https://medium.com/@lquessenberry/...
@compSci @klonky @tachoknight @n1had @dfox1 -
WHY IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE FROM MEGACORPS??
Yes, am looking at you EMC, Oracle and IBM. Either they have tons of portals-e-delivery-shittorama or their softwares suddenly disappear for n amount of time without notice. Mix this up with broken links or CONSTANTLY REBRANDING YOUR SHITTY PRODUCTS SO YOU NEED TO HIRE A PERSONAL ASSISTANT THAT ONLY WORKS WITH TRACKING THESE PORTALS TO HELL
Also, your websites are slow as shit.
Thank you.1 -
I decided to try a new mono font in my editor, this is a relatively new font called IBM Plex.
I can hear the sounds of a 1401 crunching through the punch cards while the printing out curlies that scream THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS.
Mmmmm....I like it.6 -
Way, way back when IBM discovered, gasp, that the largest gain in programmer productivity was giving each one an office. Have also read it takes 15 min to regain train of thought after an interruption. What is pair programming doing to us and worse open offices? And phones?6
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My best mentor was at my first job at IBM. The senior dev took 2 weeks to pair program with me and get me up to speed on all the applications, tips and tricks, and the different legacy codebases. I learned more in those 2 weeks than my entire 4 years at college lol.2
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In the Global Blockchain Congress currently taking place in Kolkata, India, 'IT' officials from PWC India and IBM India start their speaks right after a popular cryptography professor from Belgium and a Blockchain entrepreneur from Brazil.
Every word these 'IT officials' uttered showed how shallow and business minded the IT managers and marketers are.7 -
IBM: "oh, you can't actually USE our watsonx garbage, you need to book a call first! yes thats right, waste your time before installing what is nothing more than a chatgpt plugin for VS code!"
yawn
simply iq destroying knowing companies operate like this
🤡2 -
Trying a new font for general use. This font was one of the options for powerline that's based on the terminal fonts from the mid 70's. It's kinda funny how much tech has changed and yet how little of it really has.
I won't use it for dev work though. That credit goes to Fira Code.4 -
I just realized something. So my company's whole release process and code management now run on mainstream tech products: Atlassian, Jetbrains, IBM and not in house/vendor crap1
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USING FUNCTIONS MMAKES MY CODE EASER TO READ BUT FOR THE SAKE OF EVREYTHING IBM AND LINUX DOING NETWORKING FUNCTIONS WITH MORE THAN ONE JOB FEELS LIKE RIPPING YOUR TOENAILS OFF!2
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This was true with the ancient IBM 6150/6151!
When you looked at the registers of the CPU with their debugger, all uninitialized registers had the hexcode 0xdeadbeef!1 -
Virgin Powerbeats™ pro:
- can’t even fit into your pocket, you have to buy special iPants™ with bigger pockets, that would be $1499, thank you
- have buttons so finicky and annoying that you’re really better off with a touch area
- silicone tips deteriorate and are prone to stay inside your ears. Uh oh, anyone but certified iOtholaryngologists™ aren’t authorized to remove them or else they would be put to Apple Jail™. The removal would be $499 per ear, thank you
- you have to be a PhD topologist to figure out how to put them back into their case
- uh oh, one bud just randomly stopped working because of a design flaw in our case, that’s User Error™, would you like to pay for a replacement with your Apple Card™?
- a feel of greasy deteriorating clamshell
Chad Jabra Elite
- a feel of a brass zippo, magnets are just perfect
- firm, real buttons. Improve then just one level and you got the feel of IBM Model M
- you press a button and you hear whatever mics are picking, no need to ever pull them out
- most comfortable buds I’ve ever tried
- small case fits into pockets of my tight booty shorts just fine
- waterproof
- sounds better than anything Noble Audio have ever done
Beats suck i guess 🤷6 -
My first exposure to computers was the TRS-80 (a.k.a. TRASH-80) my mom (the city Library Director) bought for library patrons to use. It’s data store was on a cassette tape and programs came on cartridges, IIRC.
Around the same time I was learning to do Logo and BASIC on an Apple IIe in 5th grade.
My cousin’s Commodore 64 came next and my grandma saw how my interest in computers was blooming, so she suggested I use the savings I had built up from birthday money and mowing lawns to buy an IBM PC/AT 8088 clone. $1,300 later and lots of time in my basement figuring out how to build it all from separately-shipped components, I was on my way to learning Assembler, BASIC, and DOS. -
Am I the only one, who sees ads about the Microsoft Cloud, IBM Cloud and HP Enterprise on YouTube.4
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Fucking Windows.
Everytime I update the system it acts like it got infected by yet another virus.
Everyone uses this shitty insult of an OS because one day Gates said "hurr durr look how fucking generous I am, y'all get my OS for free". And we got fooled big time.
Any E-mail I try to look up in Outlook that's older than a month doesn't exist, Excel converts anything I type into ISO-timestamps, and the most infuriating thing of all is that whenever something runs in an error, it just gives me a big
FUCK Something went wrong YOU
FUCK Ask your administrator if you have any questions YOU
FUCK Who do you think is sitting infront of the screen you big pile piece of shit software YOU
AFAIK Gates founded Microsoft as the hero mounting against the giants of its time, IBM to be concise. Looks like Microsoft lived long enough to become the villain themselves.5 -
In the last place I worked myself and my team wanted to write a couple of tests for some edge cases on our site. The response from our 'General Manager' was "we're not IBM" and that we had to be (our similar sized company I assumed) to write tests.
Needless to say I got outta there as quickly as I could! -
So just got news via comments about retarded devs leaving twilio creds. in their apps published to the app stores, attached below is an interesting snap of the document appthority has published, wonder who is getting beat up right now for leaking corporate meetings 😶4
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Coolest project I'll continually be working on.
http://jimquessenberry.com
Selling my Dad's famous BBQ sauces and rubs has been my hobby and passion for years. I'm lucky that my Dad was a computer enthusiast in the 1980's and also had a knack for marketing himself. All the while also being a somewhat famous character in the pioneering sport of competition BBQ cooking.
My brother and I shared the following machines growing up:
Commodore 64 w/ 2 Disk Drives, VicModem, & Tape Drive
Tandy 1000 Original Radio Shack IBM PC Clone
IBM 5150 w/ 20mb Hard Drive Expansion (Still Have This In Near Mint Condition)
Tandy 1000 RSX 386 with Win 3.11 For Networks
A Homebuilt Pentium 90 MHz Tower with Soundblaster and 16bit onboard video.
All that time on those machines learning various flavors of BASIC and crude graphic design got me where I am today.
That and learning how to BBQ... ;)8 -
I'm opening a case against Lenovo due to their bad warranty support. It's been over a month and a half since I reported an issue with my ThinkPad and they still haven't fixed it. The laptop was bought in September, the case opened in October and in December I still have a faulty screen with which I can't no longer work because it was frying my eyes. Note that this machine has a Warranty Extension for 3 years Onsite next business day repair.
TL;DR if you own a ThinkPad, pray that it doesn't have any hardware issues. If you're thinking about buying one, DON'T!5 -
Most people will know how the AI in 2001 A Space Odyssey came to be called HAL. By the simple expedient of taking the letters IBM and applying -- to each.
How many remember how the Windows have all come to know and love started out as Windows NT?
It came about when Digital pulled the funding for the new version of it's VMS operating system, and Bill Gates swooped in and hired Dave Cutler, who basically took all the code with him to make the new version of Windows.
And stick the finger to his former employer, incremented VMS to get WNT. -
CIA – Computer Industry Acronyms
CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs
AAAAA: American Association Against Acronym Abuse.
WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW: What You See Is What You Might Get If You’re Really Really Lucky And All Goes Well.
Credit to: http://devtopics.com/best-programmi... -
I have a LOT of Floppies but no floppy drive that works with my current Win7 machine, and my XP one is in multiple boxes for parts... so for now I can only stare at NetWare 4 to 4.2, WfW 3.11 and DOS 6-22.
Smart me made VMs on his XP machine and transferred them to his Win7 one.
I also have data tapes... now that is NEVER gonna work on my Win7 so... anyone knows how it could *possibly* work out?
Also... I got documentation on Compaq servers... those are nice.
AAAAAAND since I’m a huge MIDI nerd... I have a SC-55mkII hooked on the UM-ONE mkII and those shitty cans that I’m gonna switch (hopefully) soon for a nice pair of Cakewalks MA-15Ds.
Also, I’m looking for one of them 5150s because 80s IBM and since I also like keyboards... the one and only Model M.
Anyone can hook me up with a cheap one?rant idk what the fuck i’m doing netware random data tapes ibm 5150 wfw 3.11 sc-55mkii model m dos 6.22 long rant1 -
Coding in the brainfuck learning language is pretty funny. Or a coding challenge not for the smoothest running program but for the longest possible compilation time on an IBM Z processor.1
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Where do I start...
I have seen a QA load local code to a machine, run it and then say it was ready to deploy. Little did we know she wasn’t following the deployment process at all and didn’t even realize she had to. We were a week trying to figure out why the deploys wouldn’t work until she spoke up.
I knew a dev/founder that said to me “source control is only for large projects”, I tried to convince him and his cofounder to use github or bitbucket. Nope, they weren’t into it (fresh out of school listening to professors who hadn’t worked a development day in 20 years) One cofounder got disgruntled, thought he was doing most of the work and decided to quit, he also decided to wipe the code off his co-founders machine. I literally saw a grown man come out of a meeting crying knowing he would never gain back the respect of those mentors and advisors.
I once saw a developer create a printed ticket receipt for a web app. Instead of making a page and styling it to fit a smaller width, he decided to do everything in string literals. More precisely, he made one big long fucking strong literal and then broke it up using custom regex to add styling to different sections. We had a meeting and he was totally convinced this was the only way. In the end we scrapped the entire code and the dude didn’t last very long after that.
Worst of all! I once saw a developer find a IBM Model M keyboard and said “I’m gonna throw out this junky keyboard”. I told him to shut his stupid fucking mouth and give the the keyboard.
He did -
IBM Cloud seems to be the only cloud computing platform that has a responsive website.
Admittedly I have only used GCP and AWS, I haven't touched Azure yet. Both GCP and AWS have incredibly slow web portals that take ages to load after every single click.
IBM Cloud is the only cloud service platform when I clicked a button and it loaded the next page like a normal website. It honestly felt surreal to navigate through all of their services. I have no clue why AWS and GCP are both so bad, it reflects really poorly on their services. If they can't get their own web portals to run quickly, why should I expect their services to be fast and reliable?2 -
The other day I was talking with a guy that's been in the company forever and he was explaining to me that when he joined they would write code with a pencil and deliver it to a pool of secretaries who would type it into these special machines to generate the actual code fed into the IBM machine.
We are so fucking spoiled 🤦♂️1 -
I don’t remember exactly how old I was when my dad gave me the BASIC manual that came with his IBM XT. What I do remember is that he took it away shortly after I figured out how to put the beep command inside a for loop.
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Dad was (and is) a technic freak, I played as kid with electronics instead of toys.
I'm always interested to modify things to feel more individual (Own Skins in game, modding, ...)
This and the love to games (-> "I wannaa make my own videogame daddy") developed into a curious computer science student working at IBM that loves to learn anything related to it and I'm so freaking happy about it! ☺️ -
Software Vampire IBM strikes again. I wouldn't be surprised if RedHat turns to shit in the next few releases.1
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I'm on a remote contract (has no centraloffice at our company) and was hired to work remote.
New PM wants to reenergize culture. Everyone has to come in and no more flexible hours. Lack of space means no more dual monitors. Lack of desks means we push desks together to form a "conference table." More people working means slower internet. Three people have separate meetings? Someone can stay, someone can sit in reception, and someone is in the hall.
But hey... we can see each other now and we're all available to one another.2 -
Theregister.com is wrestling with gpus that need 700 Watts of juice and how to cool them. 50 years ago I was reading an excellent magazine called "Electronics". And I remember that IBM came up with a scheme to absorb enormous amounts of heat from chips. You simply score the underside of the chip in a grid pattern and pump water through it. Hundreds of watts per degree Celsius can be removed. Problem solved.4
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I swear the longer I use AI for auto complete in my IDE the worse it gets
today it can't even get the syntax of basic method calls right
last few weeks it was failing to rewrite code I already had in another part of the codebase and was just hallucinating confused garbage instead -- it knew what I meant but it was just not there right
when I first got it I could write comments and then autocomplete the code but that stopped working at some point and I just thought maybe I was asking things that were too complex for it, but now I'm thinking all these things degrade over time and can't not degrade for some reason
they keep claiming they don't learn but if they degrade they must be doing some sort of feedback system
I remember back when they did IBM AI and such and that stuff degraded as well, then AI fell out of fashion for a bunch of years3 -
Whoever came up with the idea that a chat application should make that god-awful, annoying, high pitched, ping sound, second in annoyance only to a mosquito buzzing in my ear; every time someone sends me a message, is destined for the seventh circle of hell.
Yea I'm looking at you IBM. At least add in a damn mute button for your application. I spent 10 literal minutes searching for a mute notification sounds button in the settings screen, which looks like it was designed in 1990 btw. Found jack.
So thanks to you lovely people, I have to mute my entire laptop and I can't listen to songs on it anymore.2 -
Of all the horrible things that could happen to a software company, which do you think is the worse one?
- greedy corporation decisions (cut here, cut there,...)
- politics (do this, do that, do NOT do that thing that'd make it fly)
?
https://theregister.com/2021/11/...3 -
Someone send help. IBM has taken over my village. They're brainwashing the children; they wont use any packages that don't end in 'd'!2
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Reading through a tutorial / blog post, getting all excited, then realizing it was dated 5 year ago, and with a completely obsolete version of the library you're working with.
Bloggers, tech doc people, and companies (I'm looking at YOU IBM) really need to at least date and version their articles! Please!
Mind you, search engines will happily serve up older code even when you're being specific (and no, I didn't mean "dance studio").
Is it any wonder developers bristle when high level management admonishes them for not "looking for help earlier"?1 -
I was at school. Should be around 7 years old. They bought some new computers: XTs with green monitors.
I saw it as asked: how can I use one of there? They answered it was just to mid school to students, so I asked to have some typewriter classes.
A few years after, when I was finishing the typewriter classes, I used a IBM 286 for the first time at a friend's house. I've been using and studying it since that day. I just loved to use MS-DOS and the 5" disks. -
Atm, the most painful tooling is Rational ClearCase for version control (wtf?!) and IBM DOORS for reqs and test specs on a Windows machine.
Productivity = -13 -
Today I installed OpenBSD on my i386 IBM ThinkPad T42. Yes, Windows XP works way better because of the drivers availability. But there is nothing quite like browsing Gopher on an old ThinkPad knowing you’re safe.3
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I wonder if IBM is aware of the irony in the fact that their application server is literally past tense?
#was -
Who from fucking IBM thought that implementing hundreds of Constants for MQ WebSphere was a fucking Good idea, when half of them can't even be used with pcf. Even when they would be usable their Documentation is like horse shit you can't find anything in there without spending half of the day looking for an explanation.
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IBM job
12 plus experience in Kubernetes.
irony: Kubernetes is a 6 year old project.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/...
actual listing:
https://intellijobs.ai/job/...5 -
I am attending a lecture about IBM mainframe computing and I have no idea about what the lecturer is talking about1
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Screw AIX! More importantly screw the IBM designer that though cache batteries were a good way to monitize their platform to help validate the service contracts. I guess it "works", but at what cost?
Just lost the last 4 business days going down this rabbit hole with a customer's server.
Edit: Quick note, yes, the customer is on track for a migration soon.8 -
Several years ago I spent over two months working out how to integrate Text To Speech and Speech To Text (TTS/STT) into any windows program I wrote in Delphi, originally for a powerful flat-file search engine. Does anyone know if TTS/STT is useful on windows 10+ or have any use?
I was thinking about redeveloping the search engine into a stand alone program which can be used as a fast and light query tool with trigger functions, it can be made into a "reply bot" or used with a server like Apache, but without the old IBM mainframe mentality being readopted as "AI" and "social media" everywhere today. low-level Independent and secure droid like systems sound more fun to develop. -
If you got job offers from Uber and IBM. Which one you would choose?
This would be my first big name company. Need advice. 🤷🏻♂️17 -
Company paying tons for retired old mainframe devs to come teach basic z/OS and to give a hands-on. Third try and they still sent a guy showing off their windows based mainframe replacements without terminal connections.
I set an pirated z/OS up and now I have to deal with 10 coworkers who apparently can't unpack a 7zip, follow basic instructions or failed to open the .torrent with files i distributed 14 days ago. Losing the will to live (in legacy tech)4 -
It’s all a blur but in 5th grade I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette player for storage at the library where my mom worked. Also an Apple IIe at school in the computer lab. My first personal computer was an IBM XT clone with an 8086 processor and dot matrix printer. I bought it after having fun with my cousin’s Commodore 64 and wanting one, but his uncle sold me on the IBM platform as something that I could upgrade over time. I was 13 when I first learned Assembler and BASIC. Big Blue Disk was my favorite subscription software with all the games and other shareware stuff that came every month in the mail.1
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Anyone living in the Netherlands? I planning to move to Amsterdam in a year from now. I obviously would like to find a job here first. Is there a job platform besides LinkedIn that people use often and have success with?
I’m a senior engineer mostly working with Typescript, Python, AWS, IBM and Google clouds, DevOps, infrastructure.
EU citizen.4 -
So I am wondering. Am I the only one who finds IBM to be a piece of crap that has slow services? I hate them so much, in that they have added so much time to my work!1
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The CTO of the company which released Websphere has the audacity of talking about simplifying deployment ecosystem.
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paypal, a company that literally makes BILLIONS per year, is going to make mit SIT and WAIT for a meager 1 year CSV transaction report printout
knowing the pile of shit that is corporate america, theyre probably running on some garbage circa 2002 IBM SQL server or some shit
god it truly is a 🤡🌎4 -
Fuck your mechanical keyboard, get a Model M. THIS BOY sounds AMAZING to type on!
https://youtu.be/HXJzmky2DaI1 -
I want to have a persistent game, where I correct all of the wrongs of the world in the past and the game then shows me how the present and future of real life would look like...
Say is the IBM Summit Supercomputer free for a telnet session? Stupid shit is playing petrus (Weather prediction) all the time...2 -
If IBM makes a product of something we use, we get it, ClearCase, ClearQuest, message broker, websphere, rational team concert, jazz source control... And a skinned version of eclipse3
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IBM Bluemix... Why in hell do you keep asking me to login, even though I just did and you said everything was OK!
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IBM: Lets release shit that doesn't work and then charge them for support! We can get twice the money!
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The one who can formatting your PC, clean your fucking PC from dead mouses and insects inside.
The one who can explain you fucking dumb why your old IBM pc cant have Windows 7 or 10.
The one who is responsible for your fucking TV satellite doesn’t work.
The one. -
I'm mostly self-taught, but there are a couple people who defined my understanding of computing
- My amazing elementary school friend whose father worked at IBM and who initially turned my interest from astrophysics towards computing. I don't know whether physics would've been fruitful but I know computing is.
- My high school friend, who taught me the basics of OOP. Though we agree on almost nothing today, his explanations about code quality defined my understanding of the matter which I then used to draw completely different conclusions
- My high school mathematics teachers, who tolerated the way I abused every tool at my disposal to construct proofs that resembled a rollercoaster, and helped me develop my own understanding of mathematics
- 3blue1brown for producing replayable videos in a similar quality to my high school maths lectures with additional stunning visuals. No content on the internet fits the way I think quite as much as that channel. -
So I just saw an ad on Twitter about a project launched by IBM and the Linux foundation that aims to recruit developers to create programs that would help in case of natural disasters.
Do you think it can really make a difference or that it's just a marketing move from IBM?
Here's the link if you're interested :
https://developer.ibm.com/callforco...3 -
For me that would be Proxmox. I know, people like it - but for no apparent reason it decided to nuke half my ZFS datasets in a pool, with no logic behind it whatsoever. All disks were tested, all came out good. Within the same pool there were datasets that were lost and some that remained.
I really don't get it. Looking at Proxmox' source code, it's more or less the command line tools and then there's the web interface (e.g. https://github.com/proxmox/...). Oh and they have the audacity to use their own file extension. Why not I guess?
Anyway, half my data was gone. I couldn't tell how or why or what the fuck even happened there. But Proxmox runs Debian underneath and I've been rather pissed about Proxmox' idea of "don't touch the host system aaa" for a while at that point. So I figured, fuck it I'll just take pure Debian then and write my own slightly better garbage on top of that. And as such the distribution project was born. I've been working on it for a little over a year now. And I've never had such issues again.
I somewhat get the idea of "don't touch the host" now, but still not quite. Yes, the more you do in the containers, the better. And the less you do on the host in terms of reconfiguration, the longer it will stay alive for. That goes for any system - more reconfiguration means usually means less stability and harder to replace. But sometimes you just have to work from the host. Like say migrating a container between hosts, which my code can do. You can't do that from a container, at all. There are good reasons to work with the host. Proxmox isn't telling that. Do they expect their users to be idiots? Only enterprise sysadmins amirite?
So yeah, that project - while I do take inspiration from it in mine - I don't like it. It's enterprise, it has the ZFS and the Ceph and the LXC and the VM's - woohoo! Not like anyone could implement that on a base Debian system. But they have the configuration database (pmxcfs), the distributed configuration database of a couple MB large and capped there, woah!
Ok sure it isn't Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or whatever, and those are definitely worse. But those are usually vendor lock-ins.. I avoid those on that premise alone :)3 -
Damn it, why I can't find the COBOL course by IBM?? It was supposed to go online this week in Coursera.8
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In banking industry it brings up security concerns. We were in the exact same situation, however using SAS+SPDE with some custom SAS and tsql queries. Our database was merely 100TB, still it was a nightmare to assure stable performance thoroughly, because SPDE could not properly handle SMT. After having 24h++ daily flow processing times, the managers have decided to rent a 6 years old IBM power 7 with dedicated processor cores, which eventually have truncated the processing time down to 15 hours. This was a time limited contract, for 6 months. I've left the company in a short while, but this made the managers to rethink buying a more up to date server, so now the daily processing flows now are around 11,5h. Long story short, sometimes a little architecture optimization does the trick.
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I'm learning Kotlin while trying out Android Things and that sparked my interest in learning more about Java platform again. I tripped upon the news that Oracle had change their commercial plans for the platform by going with the rolling release model and limiting LTS releases for paying customers.
Java SE 8 was one of those former LTS releases that was on my computer, leaving me vulnerable, despite that version still being the most compatible with many applications, and that's been on my computer well passed the date they cut off public support. And I'm, like, "WTF!?"
Luckily this is when open source shines at it's brightest. Both the home brew and corporations, such as Amazon and IBM, alike - mostly the latter - both agreed to create their own LTS releases using the OpenJDK code and all disturbing to the public FOR FREE with no strings attached and the sources opened. I'm sure Richard Stallman is smiling with glee.
It isn't a total finger towards Oracle. Java SE is based on OpenJDK with no difference between the two anymore aside from loss of LTS support from the public - that's it. So Oracle still benefits despite the retaliation. Probably?
Did Oracle learn nothing from OpenOffice? If the point was to get users to pay for security then they've failed in the long run because Java is open source. People have used that fact to create their own free distributions that bypass their paywall, making the need to go through Oracle pointless. And I'm glad. Open source aside, security is a big issue these days and the last thing people need is yet another thing to subscribe too.1 -
Life is to take decisions. Which u prefer
Google vs Shodan vs 🦆 🦆 go
Angular vs vue vs react vs other
Gnome vs unity vs KDE
Atom vs vscode vs sublime or other
iOS vs android vs other
Natives bs ionic vs react native vs xamarin vs flutter
Gmail iCloud or outlook or proton mail
Camel, pascal ,snake case
C# or Java or python
Sql or not sql
Debian , fedora ,linux mint or kali
Server side rendering or client side
Aws vs gcloud vs Azure vs ibm cloud
Firefox vs chrome vs safari
Free without privacy or ads or paid without ads or privacy
Nintendo vs pc vs ps4 or xbox
WhatsApp or telegram or other
Sleep at night or not
Coment your favorite12 -
It was in the bakery of my dad, where we always could play this mini golf game on his IBM PC. I think it was on Win95.
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What if IBM's AI is a way to gather data on a bigger scale. I see many big companies and governments relying on it rather than having their own local AI servers. What do you think? 🤔3
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Interesting NY Times article today Saturday March 26 2016 by Markoff and Lohr, "A Race to Take Control of Artificial Intelligence And the Future of Tech". Lots of C levels will read this article and ask CIO if AI on radar. Will fan the fire. Also a lot of VC action. Google TensorFlow open source. Microsoft also all in and of course IBM Watson. Google beat Go grandmaster 4-1, which is tougher than chess program. Something to keep on your radar. Have fun!
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Wanted to download Ballance (amazing game btw) to my IBM ThinkPad running XP. Wi-Fi download speed in SeaMonkey (the only modern browser for XP) was super slow, obviously, so I just opened my MacBook running Ventura, downloaded the game, and then SEAMLESSLY connected to my ThinkPad. Yes, to Windows XP. Out of the box. Good luck doing it on Linux. If that isn't convenience, I don't know what is.10
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FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKK LOOPBACK. Fuck it right in the dickhole. Fuck IBM for paying the salary on this piece of shit. Fuck all of the copy pasting I have to do, fuck the fact that it never knows what fields my type will or will not have, fuck the 4 different versions of the docs they have for each version of this dumpster fire of a framework. This is the dumbest codebase I have ever worked with, and I hate every minute of it. One last fuck, it is for the guys who came before me and chose this for our companies server. Fuck you!2
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Push a commit to Bluemix DevOps server, it starts deploying
Go out with your partner, become a parent, see your kids grow into adults, become a grand parent.
Blumix still hasn't deployed.
Why IBM? Why? -
But yeah.... IPMI is fancy.
IF PEOPLE USED IT PROPERLY
FUCK IBM
More like... FUCK <COMPANY>
USING 10 YEAR OLD SERVERS
HOW THE FUCK DO WE SUPPORT THIS
SWITCHES ARE OUT OF DATE BY AGES
WE NEED TO UPDATE EVERYTHING
Software at least anyway.2 -
!rant
If anyone has pretender.io experience with IBM http server (yeah, you read it right), would you be kind enough to share your Twitter handle for a quick chat? -
Does anyone work at IBM? I saw open Front end engineer position in my country and I was wondering what the interviewing process might be. Does it involve leetcode exercises (never done those and I’m afraid they might give those to me)?3
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I don't know how many of you uses IBM Watson api (personality insights). We use in our office. They send back a huge data known as big 5 needs etc. They find the personality of a person from his speech. like anger, happiness etc. I don't understand how they calculate them and also every client trust the data what ibm tells is correct. if it was you if you have done that feature too many questions might have come.
that's the difference between mnc and a startup2 -
I'm about to give a presentation to IBM engineers on a subject I don't really know much about and for which I haven't practice
It's going to be a nice day3 -
i just learnt how much clearcase sucks the hard way. i always used git for personal projects and am used to finding a simple solution to any problem at most one stackoverflow away, i just messed up my local repo, and experienced people could not manage to undo it. i mean come on, this is a f**king versioning software, how hard can it be to delete everything local and re-pull from remote without messing up configuration files? either clearcase has some serious design shortcomings for my understanding of a versioning software, or it is so overly complicated that nobody actually knows how to revert this mistake.2
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Competitiveness in technology. 10 to 15 years ago, a handful of companies controlled how the world would develop software (fuck you Oracle and IBM). Now there is a lot less monopoly.1
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IBM cognos, it'd take hours to install make everything in my system slow af and it being the express version you can't do shit other than work with the data already provided.
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IBM should take over making the game Jenga...since they only seem good at making teetering towers of barely functional garbage that require constant massaging and hand holding to stay up.
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Does somebody know Cognos TM1 from IBM and TM1 perspective...
Designing front ends with excel???unbelievable awful!!
Dear internship,Why you do this to me?????
Luckily my new real frontend developer internship starts in June 👍 -
Ok so I have a software quality exam tomorrow and I'm studying the theory the teacher gave us. This thing is repeting all the time that the best way to ensure quality is by using BPMS (Business Process management Systems) like Bizagi and the one from IBM, which generate software apps without coding, just defining processes. What do you guys think about this?2
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I was working on a cloud image for about 2 months and wasn't aware of expiration date of image. Now my all work is gone and I don't know how to recover my files.
Will have to do everything again. 😡😣 -
Hi!
Need to get some of your opinions about computer. I have always been using IBM/Lenovo or HP with Windows as operating system, due to work needs and policies. But, this weekend I purchased a new apple MacBook Air, and I want to know what you think about my choice. It is just for personal use, so I will continue to use my hp with win10 at work (needed for the erp system I'm consulting).
I choose MacBook Air as my personal computer because I think the hardware and chassi is a bit more premium to a pretty low cost, looking on hp or Lenovo with the same class of chassi and build is at least 150% more expensive. Let me know your comment :)2 -
According to a report from ZDNet: IBM's new toolkit give developers easier access to Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) which is a technology with promise for a number of security use cases. In case you do not know about FHE, you can take a look at My Quora Answer (https://qr.ae/pNKR2p).
"While the technology holds great potential, it does require a significant shift in the security paradigm," the report adds. "Typically, inside the business logic of an application, data remains decrypted, [Flavio Bergamaschi, FHE pioneer and IBM Researcher] explained. But with the implementation of FHE, that's no longer the case -- meaning some functions and operations will change."
The toolkit is available on GitHub for MacOS and iOS and it will soon be available for Linux and Android. -
Bluemix: Hi, here have 1 instance of your app running, with 128M memory and 1024M disk. Btw, we are gonna take a hell lot a time to get your code up and running, and we love living at the 500.
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No, I don't want to continue typing, that's the end of the curl command. JUST EXECUTE! Why you gotta give me the > all the time?
-me at my computer for the last hour
Just trying to post a .zip to IBM Watson.2 -
I'm currently taking part in IBM hackathon based on a healthcare theme and my project idea is that storing patient healthcare reports or medical research docs on the blockchain, is this idea had some potential to make a difference in the hackathon?10
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what are your views or experiences around using IBM Loopback framework as the primary back end for building a mobility startup?
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If IBM does not their new COBOL Devs to make the move to different fucking language then they are total idiot's.8
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Who do you use for IBM stack training?
Need Infosphere Data Stage, Quality Stage, and Information Governance. -
#notrantrelated
I find it hard to think what to code and what to make. Currently I'm joining a contest and I need to come up with something that would be beneficial to mainframers. I've joined IBM master the mainframe 2020.
Can you suggest me on what would be cool to make? They want something awesome. And I'm sorry for asking you guys to help me.
Any ideas will be appreciated. Thank you :)7