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posted by janrinok on Sunday July 31 2016, @07:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the eating-your-own-dogfood dept.

Amid Dell's looming takeover of EMC, an edict has been issued insisting that Dell customers must only ever see Dell laptops during meetings and consulting engagements, EMC insiders have told The Register. Thus, any Macs in EMC staffers' hands will be confined to quarters.

After Dell and EMC combine, those office-bound Apple computers should be safe from company-wide rollouts of Dell Windows PCs. EMC has in the past revealed it has a bring-your-own-device policy that lets people use personal devices to access email, in-house messaging and private cloud storage.

At least EMC staff after being offered nice replacement kit, in the form of the gaming-bred XPS machines, that another insider told us have been promised to incoming Dell employees.


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  • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday July 31 2016, @04:24PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Sunday July 31 2016, @04:24PM (#382304)

    I concur; I really don't have any fire in me anymore for what OS to use. It has to work, and it has to work with various tools that A) help me do my job so that B) I can also use similar hardware for entertainment. I guess I am now agnostic towards operating systems. I believe there may be a superior OS out there, but I don't know what one it is...

    (That's not an invitation for a religious conversion! I use notepad in windows for my editor most of the time for anyone ready to hand out MAN guides printed on cheap paper... not vi or emacs or edlin or edit or gorilla.bas or google.docs or whatever is cool nowadays)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2016, @09:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2016, @09:58AM (#382557)

    I concur; I really don't have any fire in me anymore for what OS to use.

    Kind of interesting, isn't it? Someone can (should, or did) write a paper on the whole Linux Era. People's motivations to use it were as much countercultural (counter-corporate?) as anything. It would be an interesting read. Maybe it was largely fueled by baby boomer ex-protestors who were looking for one last big score before retirement.

    I sure enjoyed "sticking it to the man," spending endless hours getting early versions running and usable. I could then brag to people how I could print from Linux. I learned a lot, sure, but I think people's motivations were a little mixed during that time.

    Technology and iconoclasm!

    Now that the Linux Revolution has been co-opted by the big vendors, the sheen is gone a little bit. Microsoft is trying to capture some of that past glory with their new open source stuff, but as usual for them, they're too late to the game. The OSS industry is now a Nike commercial playing the Beatles' "Revolution."

    Now when I'm trying to get FreeBSD working on my various weird laptops, I heave a sigh and remember (not so fondly) the joys of looking for drivers, trying various compilation flags, and scouring messageboards and source codes for clues. Ugh! Who gives a shit anymore! Where's my idealism? What happened?

    • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:16PM

      by q.kontinuum (532) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:16PM (#383137) Journal

      I think it is information overflow. One thing I feel certain about is that I will never get bored as long as I have a working computer and e.g. a Linux. I could pick one driver and look into it, go from there, and learn, and not any time soon be really done with it: Learning the kernel interfaces, the interdependencies with other drivers, looking for ways to improve, ...

      But IT nowadays is a lot about jumping from one hype to another, learn new techniques, despair for finding 20 year old bugs being re-invented, curse about the lack of good documentation, and just when it gets halfway usable jump to the next hype. It's an overwhelming feeling of uselessness of all the acquired knowledge and lack of opportunity to learn anything properly. The old Unix concept of having small tools for small tasks and re-use the knowledge to tackle bigger tasks by combinations of the smaller tools is out of fashion. Instead everything is becoming more and more monolithic, is used like a fashion thing, and after discovering its as shitty as the last 8794367 hypes, it is dropped in favour of the next hype. Usually this happens just when the current hype grows our of the hype and actually starts to mature enough to be slightly useful.

      But even long standing projects like Linux seem to follow this path by adding new sub-sytems like systemd, requiring special tools to read log-files, special knowledge for each tool to know where to find the configuration, etc.

      The underlying system is still good, but where it once was possible with a minimalistic introduction to dig through the config files and bash scripts, now you'd have to download the source code of the kernel to understand systemd, or just happen to know by accident the right google key-words. This is in my case what kills the enthusiasm.

      --
      Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum