Minor deity seeking employment

The primary issue is that a TS SSBI is averaging around a year to complete due to the backlog. So having an existing clearance will get you fast tracked in a lot of places.

actually, any clearance takes a year… But you are right - DC needs citizens with clearance right meow.

I don’t know what you did at Ubuntu, but if you have a compsci degree from an accredited 4 year university, and the aptitude to program, i suggest getting into Salesforce asap, as this field is on fire right now, particularly for citizens:

The backlog on a Secret is 4-6 months right now.

Indeed!

Sorry to hear about the recent turn in your fortunes. Best of luck finding something suitable.

I currently have 540 xterms open, if that says anything, plus a couple dozen virtual private servers in lightweight containers, my dotfiles are managed in a revision control system, and I think Richard Stallman has been right about a lot of things even if he does have a whole closet of tin-foil hats. :slight_smile:

While I feel for people who are mourning Unity, it’s not exactly going to disappear… it just won’t be developed by the company any more. It’s like if I came down with a bad case of “hit by a bus” syndrome, it wouldn’t mean people had to stop using bistro. I personally never liked Unity though, particularly the new version 8 because it involved switching from X11 to Mir. Mir is widely regarded as a huge mistake, and would even interfere with my ability to do simple things like typing or clicking because it lacks network transparency.

I’ve mostly stayed as far as possible from Unity, though I have occasionally chatted with its developers. At the beginning, Unity’s goal was to make “a universal desktop for everyone”, from the oldest grandmother to the geekiest hacker. The team solicited input from people who weren’t using it, to find out what they needed. So one day at a sprint I sat down with them and was like “okay, let me show you how I use a computer…” About 45 minutes later they stumbled away with headaches, and nobody ever mentioned “universal” again. The official project goal changed to “a friendly desktop for humans”.

LOL, they should know better than to encourage me. :slight_smile:

Really though, I consider the entire project to have been a mistake from the beginning. It was created because Gnome 2 became Gnome 3, and everyone disliked Gnome 3 for the same reasons nobody liked Windows 8. So the company had to decide whether to maintain Gnome 2, switch to a UI people disliked, or take some other approach. And for reasons I’ll never understand, they took the most expensive option, creating a brand new UI from scratch, and then gave it exactly the same issues as what they were trying to avoid. Within the year, Ubuntu lost its top spot on the distro popularity rankings, a position it had held since birth 6 years earlier. Linux Mint took over, continuing along Ubuntu’s original path, and is still more “ubuntu” than Ubuntu itself these days.

Then there were some other big mis-steps. Ubuntu One, the Dropbox and iTunes clone, was a dumpster fire from beginning to end. The whole Amazon-search-in-dash thing really pissed people off. Mir was so controversial that Intel started rejecting patches related to it. Pretty much the entire developer community left. On the server side, cloud efforts went really well and are still pretty awesome today. But the desktop side of things really shot itself in the foot.

In the beginning, Ubuntu took the best the community had to offer, put it together into a coherent well-curated package, and made things “just work” by default. Everyone loved it. Other distros were terribly fiddly and inflicted a great deal of unwanted choice on people. Meanwhile, Ubuntu pretty much just did what everyone in the community wanted, and it was great. But over time it gradually changed from not inflicting choice to not allowing choice. It became more and more like the proprietary systems people were trying to get away from, and it lost a great deal of community good will and “mind share”.

The phone was initially very popular, raising more money than any other crowdfunding campaign in history. It promised to do what people have wanted since before “smart” phones existed — to finally make a phone which can do exactly the same things a desktop can do. Of course, the campaign ultimately failed due to not meeting its astronomical funding goal, and everyone got a refund. I suspect this was probably intentional, a way to demonstrate interest to other companies without actually incurring any concrete obligations. But people really wanted it.

We had this mature, robust, versatile platform people relied on for daily work, and promised to bring it to the phone. But instead, the company made a brand new incompatible platform with most of the same problems as Android or iOS, and tried to get people to migrate to it. To encourage that, it then started migrating the desktop to the same janky platform. Totally the opposite of what people wanted, so it’s no wonder it failed. I mean, really, who wants yet another iPhone clone?

Anyway, I’m not surprised I got kicked out. I haven’t been at my best there, because it’s difficult to watch something one used to love being slowly torn apart. I think the most difficult incident was a presentation given by a former VP at a sprint, intented to be motivational. I don’t need to go into details, but I went directly to my room afterward and cried.

But I am surprised at how many amazing people are being laid off, with more coming every day — particularly those who aren’t even involved with the dropped projects.

At least for me it’s a kick in the pants to go do something healthier. :slight_smile:

The most motivational, inspiring thing I’ve heard lately was Eben Moglen’s keynote speech at LinuxConf.au, which kinda makes me want to go save the world. His speech has been on my mind almost daily now for two years. The man is an absolute rock star, and he is almost single-handedly responsible for my career still being legal in the US.

BTW, I feel a disclaimer is appropriate: None of what I say about this stuff is official. I’ve mostly been an outsider without access to the “inside scoop” on anything. For quite a while it was my job to listen to the community and be their voice within the company, but I never really got to interact with upper management much or know what they were doing. I was, as usual, kind of an alien, and I don’t speak in any official capacity.

Also, it’s a bit ironic to be leaving just as the change I’ve suggested all along finally happened. It’s probably a better direction for Ubuntu… but I doubt they want a smug, arrogant goddess hanging around rubbing their noses in it.

Sorry for writing a book here. I hope at least some of it was interesting. :slight_smile:

“I hope at least some of it was interesting”

Yes, it was! Unity to me provides an excellent desktop for “daily no-brain” use, I do not use it for work. As long as I know how to use the command line and can install some extras to customize the desktop it has worked out fine for me. I do realize that a lot of the public this desktop was meant for do not use the command line, and will not be interested enough to find out there are a lot of ways to customize unity. The kids find it easy to use on their old thinkpads, incomprehensible to me though, that I have to use wine to install Scratch (2) for them to use, but that is not Ubuntu’s fault.

I would have bought the phone, and no doubt loved it, if I ever felt that it was ready for real-life use, and that ubuntu was 100% behind it. I never got that feeling. I got the controversy around MIR, seems so odd for Ubuntu to alienate itself from what seems like the entire Linux community, which in itself is Linux’ no 1 selling point, in my eyes at least.

Never a good thing to be forced to move on, especially with the financial concerns of unemployment, but maybe it was time anyway. Best of luck anyway, no doubt you will find something more interesting to do.

Elchund

Hi TK
Nothing worse than that feeling of being blindsided - it’s a real devaluing feeling.
Allow yourself some time to kick the dirt and be pissed off but the secret is not to stay in that phase for too long before you start thinking ‘onwards and upwards’.

Humans are very resourceful especially when they’ve been thrust into a situation that needs quick thinking. Think of all the skills you have and where your specific industry is heading and be open to anything and keep trawling your network

A lot of systems and apps are moving out of data centres or on prem and into the cloud - maybe the clouds are for you ?

Positive thoughts only

Regards

A good read though. Maybe they feel they need sojers more than innovators.

Yeeeeeeah…… yeah. I’m still trying to figure out how this seemingly obvious point was missed while making high-level decisions.

Perhaps. I probably should have gone cloud-side ages ago. I’ve had my own private cloud for about a decade, though I’ve gotten a bit behind on recent developments. But I have this bad habit of sticking around long after I should have moved on, going down with the ship, so to speak. It’s not even that I don’t smell what’s in the wind, I just feel obligated to not let people down.

Good luck to you!

How about adding some lyrics to your song?! :sunglasses:

I am your average Joe when it comes to flashlights. I have been given the gift of writing poems and philosophical quotes,probably why I was hoping/waiting for some lyrics!!

Hah, the first version had some lyrics. I could show you, but then I’d have to kill you.





I normally only listen to instrumental music, since lyrics all sound like a foreign language to me.

Anyway, have you heard the joke about the guy who played a country song in reverse? He got his job back, his wife back, his truck back, and his dog came back from the dead. If I added words, it’d be kind of like that… only not in reverse.

Ok,but I do not get this part.

“Hah, the first version had some lyrics. I could show you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Let’s see… on that list, I’ve done 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 21, and 23.

Salesforce seems much like Oracle, in that it’s a huge wad of proprietary stuff duct-taped together with its own deep and detailed history. It’s kind of its own world, relatively isolated from the outside. Like, someone had a good idea, made a successful project for it, and then everything plus a kitchen sink crept in over time.

This might help:

So… this happened.

“Wi-Fi sex toy with built-in camera fails penetration test”

Ok,I guess I am not use[actually was unaware of it] to that lingo, behind the times or a different generation….Maybe ALL Three!

Sex toys sound more interesting! lol!

Sad to hear this news TK.

So now I see why you were SO into linux lol.

I guess this would be a reasonable place to ask this question though. What distro would you recommend going forward for a bunch of historically windows users?

For myself I am not that worried, I can make pretty much anything work and deal with issues as they arise. The problem is I will be converting everyone around me over to whatever distro I pick as well and they have only ever used windows up to now. So it needs to be “windows friendly”.

I have used Ubuntu a fair amount myself up to now and like it ok once you get used to it. I like that up to now it has been well maintained and good support.

Mint has also treated me pretty good but for some reason I just never used it as much, I think because I wanted a different experience then windows when I was using Linux lol.

So what would be your recommendations of distros going forward? For the most part normal internet surfing, email, general computing would be about it. Gaming and programs like Adobe will also be needed but I assume that they will need a separate machine or a virtual machine.

EDIT: Did some reading and I see it looks like just the desktop is dying, not Ubuntu itself. Which is good to hear. Although what are they meaning with this talk of cloud stuff? I am 100% completely and totally opposed to any form of “Cloud”. So if they will be moving to that, then count me out. This is why I am leaving windows and refuse to move past windows 7.

As you might tell, I am a bit out of the loop on all of this, by a few years lol.

Still, what distro would you recommend going forward?