ghaff

He had a real burr in his saddle about IBM. But there were some stories related to Rometty that I initially assumed were at least highly embellished. But people I knew there assured me the reality was as over the top as they sounded.

Tangentially related... Back when I was a product manager for fairly large old-timey computer systems, it took a while for me to wrap my head around the fact that all these super-smart digital designers basically didn't know jack about anything remotely related to AC power. I needed to talk to the mechanical/power systems people directly.

Living in a 200+ year old house, I've seen a lot of this first-hand through both planned and unplanned renovations and repairs. In my experience, some contractors are better able to deal with all the uncertainty than others and, if you find the right people (which I have again), hold on for dear life--and, of course, be prepared to write some substantial checks and make potentially expensive decisions.

Had a kitchen fire caused by an appliance in the middle of the night a couple of Januaries ago. Was a complete nightmare to deal with which basically ended up redoing much of my interior because of smoke. Insurance covered a lot, but it took a lot of time and something north of $50K out of pocket.

You've had this fragmentation of attention. Many of the main computer magazines had essentially destination columnists whether writing under their own name or a pseudonym--which periodically passed to a new writer (which in Cringely's case was a matter of some controversy at one point). The latter were often written in a sort of gossipy style intended to make the reader feel that they had an inside view of a company or an area of technology.

It was a different time.

Well, maybe some of Ridley Scott's.

Anytime someone is at a company for less than a year and "departs," rightly or wrongly I assume there was some lack of meeting of the minds. I've known professional friends in that position but never asked about details.

6-12 ft. C-band satellite antennas that piggybacked on unencrypted programming traffic certainly existed. My neighbor had one and I did some research but decided it wasn't worth the effort /money when I moved in. Whatever broadband cable company did eventually wire me up a few years later; this was in the late 90s. And I'm about 40 miles west of Boston.

Maybe revisionist but what most people think of as "cable" was broadband cable (maybe DirecTV, launched 1994) with lots of commercial channels. They don't think of having a 12 foot antenna scouring the sky for signals.

There was certainly some earlier cable, e.g. HBO, if you could pickup broadcast, that predated channels like CNN.

When I had to get a lot of work done on my house after a kitchen fire (appliance but not a smart one), I told pretty much everyone involved "nothing smart." (OK, the new dryer has a moisture sensor but that's it. Didn't have much that was smart anyway aside from a couple of Alexas that I use rarely.

I think there was also a novelty around a lot of smart devices that just didn't translate to much real world benefit. And in my case here, there was also the matter of having more pressing issues than fussing with smart lights and the like--like rewiring a substantial portion of the house when various walls were open..

The math does pencil out for Boston to New York. I'd be an hour to my local airport, arrive 2 hours in advance (could cheat a bit with an early flight--it's taken me almost 2 hours to get into Boston near rush hour--especially given basically a commuter flight but a good hour drive in), probably an hour for a shortish flight, baggage claim (if relevant), then transportation into the city.

Were I amenable, which I'm generally not, could probably drive 4 hours from my house into the city. (Almost always take the train.)

One of the things I didn't realize until relatively recently was that a lot (or at least some) of the re-used Wagner opus came from Tannhauser rather than the Ring Cycle.

It has very little to do with security though. I usually go through security in 5 minutes at my home airport. I do leave a lot more time than that partially because my car company sort of insists on it. (Of course, the car company is another cost.)

Honestly, it would be faster and possibly cheaper for me to drive to Manhattan than take the train--in which case security doesn't enter in at all. And certainly for two people. But I hate driving into Manhattan.

I'm not sure I disagree. I don't have numbers but, anecdotally, you sure hear a lot of "But flying is such a hassle" which is sorta true but not sure how much more than it's ever been especially if you're willing to pay a bit more. I'm not sure how many people translate that into "So I'll just drive 1,000 miles instead."

In Europe (and the US Northeast Corridor), I do favor trains to avoid going to and dealing with airports, but they're no panacea either. And I say this as someone with the various passes that make flying easier.

Netflix is definitely the service that's closest to my bubble. Sometimes I then see something I'm interested in but I don't watch a huge amount of video and Netflix has gotten really pricey.

A lot of (good) series are also just fresh and different when they land. They're not as fresh in Year 2 much less any subsequent years. Yes, sometimes they can build on a serial story but, personally, I lose interest in most TV series after a bit. I realize others have a different mindset where they hate not being able to live with their favorite characters for more or less forever.

While there is certainly some (very) expensive real estate outside of Boston, to a much greater degree than San Francisco, you can actually get a house within a drive for an evening event that's pretty reasonable to a much greater degree than the Bay Area.

Very early on. The real growth of cable aligned with the growth of stations like MTV, CNN, WTBS, etc.

Along with more channels; many cable adopters got perfectly good OTA signals. And I used it for many years. It just became not a good value for me at one point.

TiVo et al. helped somewhat. But at one point I realized I hadn't watched anything on my TiVo in months and the landline on my triple play Comcast plan wasn't worth the cost as a backup or because I had to train my dad to call my fricking cell phone.

I get way more video than I have time to watch and I do monitor things so if I'm really not using a service I can always drop it. I care very little about having access to EVERYTHING which I never had before streaming anyway. If I really miss anything, it's DVD by mail.

I can not pick up anything with an antenna, cheap or otherwise.

I'm at the foot of of a hill that's between me and where broadcast antennas are 40-50 miles away. I had no TV when I moved in until Comcast eventually put in cable. The seller had even tried putting an antenna up in the attic which did no good. So I would need to subscribe to a live TV streaming service which isn't worth it for me as I don't really watch sports much.

But I'm glad you're so confident of your knowledge of my situation.

I didn't go this year but my local town library has a book sale where books go for something like $10/bag. I donate some books to them throughout the year. There are still a lot of books available on the last or second to last day of the sale. I'm sure a huge number get pulped.

I still pay less than when I had a cable bundle with the caveat that, then, I didn't have premium channels and, now, don't have live TV. In my personal book, I'm still ahead in the game.

Well, it's not an unreasonable assumption that RHEL will continue to be maintained even if we don't go down the whole CentOS path which I won't on a public forum. But, yes, there are always dependencies. There's certainly no guarantees that any of the ~rebuilds will still be around in n years.

I might have avoided the option value phrasing. But both sentences seem pretty ordinary to me and something I would write. But agree to disagree.

Personally, I make at least some things I write more personal but, yes, that tends to be somewhat frowned upon in corporate blogs.

The first tech book I did with a publisher, I was pretty much told that I needed to break things down more with subheads and the like. And I was already doing some writing of whitepapers and blogs with my then-employer which had a somewhat similar structured style. Certainly very different from Dickens, Trollope, Collins, etc.

I'm not making a value judgement, but modern writing on technical topics has generally been steered toward digestible formats whether or not LLMs are involved.

Until I left, I was on social media and style committees at my former employer and there was a lot of data-based evidence around keeping things (in various multimedia formats) shorter and easier to consume. In fact, we mostly got away from writing white papers at all in favor of shorter pieces.

I just don't see the "LLM-speak" here at all, for example. And I'm very tired of people who throw around the LLM-power critique as an easy criticism when there's no clear basis for it. It's lazy and stupid.

There are certain styles for a post like this that some people may not like but things like subheads and what would be, by historical standards somewhat clipped writing are just how writing in this content is mostly encouraged theese days. I'd just add that when people do post long-form New Yorker pieces there's plenty of whining about getting to the point.

Because existing buildings like the Art Institute of Chicago are obviously illusions. </s>

My objection is mostly personal. I have or can make reason to go to SF. LA, less so.

So use Ubuntu. Why do you care if other distros consider it too risky given different business positions/models?

There's also not a lot of money in Canonical for someone (Oracle) to sue for. Red Hat (now IBM/Red Hat) and I guess even SUSE is a different equation. Red Hat just wouldn't touch ZFS because of licensing.

As I wrote, they're adaptable. But there's a difference between true pack animals with an established hierarchy and being solitary but being open to other cats and species. Certainly, some cats are more pack-like (lions) and others are, or are more open to, being largely solitary.