The upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it.
Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)
At launch you had 3 themes (blue, green, and silver) as well as classic where you had all the customization of Win2k's settings. Later on (SP3-ish) you got a zone orange/dark theme which was nice.
To do more you either used WindowBlinds or just grabbed a patched UxTheme32.dll which would accept unsigned theme files. Once you did that you had an almost silly number of options to try out from various web sites.
Screw USB, seriously. The U stands for Universal, and its far from it. Add on the fact that USB-IF keeps making new standards and causing havoc along the way, and as an additonal effect are adding extra cost to any system because of their fuckery
All of the power negotiation crap that came with USB3, and the constantly changing standard... it wont be long before USB goes the way of SCSI and we end up with 60pin cables with 20 different stanards of operation
5 9's is like 7 minutes a year. They are breaking SLAs and impacting services people depend on
Tbh though this is sort of all the other companies fault, "everyone" uses aws and cf and so others follow. now not only are all your chicks in one basket, so is everyone elses. When the basket inevitably falls into a lake....
Providers need to be more aware of their global impact in outages, and customers need to be more diverse in their spread.
These kinds of outages continue to happen and continue to impact 50+% of the internet, yes, they know they have that power, but they dont treat changes as such, so no, they arent aware. Awareness would imply more care in operations like code changes and deployments.
Outages happen, code changes occur; but you can do a lot to prevent these things on a large scale, and they simply dont.
Where is the A/B deployment, preventing a full outage? What about internally, where was the validation before the change, was the testing run against a prodlike environment or something that once resembled prod but hasnt forever?
They could absolutely mitigate impacting the entire global infra in multiple ways, and havent, despite their many outages.
They are aware. They don't want to pay the cost benefit tradeoff. Education won't help - this is a very heavily argued tradeoff in every large software company.
What do you imagine would be the result if you brought down cloudflare with a legitimate config update (ie not specifically crafted to trigger known bugs) while not even working for them? If I were the customer "responsible" for this outage, I'd just be annoyed that their software is apparently so fragile.
I would be fine if it was my "fault", but I'm sure people in business would find a way to make me suffer.
But on a personal level, this is like ordering something at a restaurant and the cook burning the kitchen because they forgot to take out your pizza out of the oven or something.
I would be telling it to everyone over beers (but not my boss).
Call me when AI can manage to write a regex that i would write, to parse a complex string, rather than some ridiculous mishmashing of nonascii chars that you need to talk to an ancient shaman to decrypt; or when AI can actually recognize contextual hints enough to know what the fuck im talking about, and not produce a writeup of things no longer relevant; or when it stops hallucinating and giving made up answers just to give an answer (which is far worse than saying i dont know, from a human, or ai)
AI has some uses, but the list of things it cant do is longer than the list of things it can.
Being able to explain a thing to someone non-technical is an important social requirement. If you have to explain a problem or project to a C-level and you go off the rails with technical stuff, or get deep in the weeds of some part of it, without being asked, youre going to get deer stares and no one in the room is going to understand you. Similarly, if you as an engineer, go too technical when explaining things to an admin or jr, then you are also going to get deer stares and no one is going to understand you, or they will get frustrated.
You can be a """"rockstar"""" engineer and still not be a good fit because you cant sanely explain something to someone not at your technical level.
Id hardly call this ageism. The person went from being part of engineering on a major space faring project to managing a callcenter. Thats like going back to zero on the career ladder, as far as engineering is concerned. I would have also been questioning whether or not their skills have collected dust, were still relevant, and most specifically why they went from engineering in aerospace to managing a callcenter, and why they want back into engineering again (probably hates callcenter).
