@ThomasOwens Because then people who use mac might start using other products and learn mac isn't the only computer in existence. Also because indie software for mac is a rarity it seems. You can get every kind of drive scrubber and formatter for windows or *nix... Kind of surprised you can't just dd the thumb drive?

I still think that Google should release a Linux distribution, but include integrations to their services. I'd use it.

@ThomasOwens There are multiple distros like that; "cloud" based ones. ChromeOS was originally of this nature.

they call themselves "Cloud" OSs because they do everything with online web apps like google and use online servicers for file storage et al

@JimmyHoffa Not cloud based, though. Do you know how GNOME (and I think KDE, too) have mail clients and calendar clients and messenger clients and news clients?

Replace all of those clients with Google desktop clients.

That are designed to integrate with Google services - gmail, calendar, hangouts, news.

@ThomasOwens ...is that different from what I just said? Google "desktop clients" are just chrome extensions, no?

@JimmyHoffa Have the chrome extensions gotten better?

Can you effectively use Gmail offline now?

Or Calendar?

If so, I may need to take another look.

@ThomasOwens Have you seen any "google desktop client" that's not a chrome extension?

@JimmyHoffa When I last used the chrome extensions, they looked like shortcuts to the web apps. Not useful if I'm offline.

@ThomasOwens Ok, but what exactly are these "google desktop client" apps you're talking about if not the chrome extensions? I've never heard of any other apps from google unless you count the android native stuff

@JimmyHoffa Maybe it's just making those apps actually work offline.

@ThomasOwens oh you aren't referring to an actual application set you've seen/used?

@JimmyHoffa No. Something they would develop.

Gotcha. Yeah their extensions are considerably better these days. Should work offline, but go play with them and find out. Not like it's hard to get them all installed and running.

Instead of Thunderbird, you'd have some kind of email client. I don't care if it runs in Chrome or not, but it needs to work offline.

Drive, too. But I think there's an app for that for Linux now.

I'll have to check out the extensions and apps again.

Oh. They do have an offline Gmail. I don't see Calendar, though

Nope, found it. And it's offline enabled, too.

They have gotten better.

It actually looks like this is what I was looking for when I looked at Apps when they came out.

But they sucked back then.

Apps synchronize on login, yes? So if I go to my Windows side (once that's actually running - I need to call MS today and activate), or my Linux side, or my girlfriend's Mac, I'll be able to have all of my Chrome apps there. I should be able to mostly uninstall things from Linux.

how many roles can you apply to at one company before it gets weird?

GE

I would say 5 are in one division, but have different job descriptions, all of which I think are applicable

I dont want to come off as just trolling for interviews

but I do honestly think I could do all of them

Is there an HR contact email address?

nope - just their online application system

Oh. In that case, apply for all of them.

If there was an email address, you could apply for at least one, and then email HR or the recruiters and tell them what positions you're interested in and ask if you should apply to all of them or if they will match your resume across positions.

@Ampt whatever happened to rolling to a brand new project that's going to be all dev?

@JimmyHoffa account team fucked me over

@Ampt that sucks :/

@JimmyHoffa yeah yeah yeah, last thing I want right now is to hear about it

had to email the prospective project team and tell them I wouldn't be able to do it

yeah

they won't let me go without landing the perfect replacement

@GlenH7 which letter?

resignation?

@GlenH7 Oh, huh

yeah, I guess I should have

just felt like my obligation

since I was the one who initiated contact with him

either way, I'm actively looking for new jobs, so if anyone has anything, feel free to shoot it my way. Enderland already did that (thanks btw)

@JimmyHoffa yes. Yes I am.

@GlenH7 kind of, but the GF is open to moving someplace warm :)

Only thing I have would require you to move

Denver

oh really

well, no matter. only mods and room admins can see it

and you lot are cynical, but not evil.

@GlenH7 MOD A-.. sorry... old habits ;)

that's a neat trick, I'll hav eto remember that

hehe

The prospective project PM emailed me and he basically read me like a book.

He wants me to be on the project, and understands the implications of me not being able to roll off

so far no one knows that I'm actively looking for a new role.

nope :)

oh

I mean externally

they know I'm looking for a new role internally

but not that I'm now actively applying to other jobs outside the company

@GlenH7 you should damage your ear drums, maybe go shoot some guns and blow up something or take a nap on an old '82 20" Pioneer cabinet speaker playing Saving Private Ryan. I could listen to 8-bit mono and hardly tell the difference so there's nothing to lose in avoiding the expensive ultra master deluxe audiophile editions of music.

@GlenH7 Honestly, all the games they've been playing I wouldn't want to continue bothering if I were him.

This is my take on it - It's mostly the account team fucking me

everyone else wants to help

but doesn't have the time or effort to spend fixing this problem

plus there are very large people on the account who want me to stay

@GlenH7 wow, you're more evil than I; you sure about that comment you made earlier @Ampt about not being evil?

They are actively not renewing clearances if you don't currently need it, which is good for the company and the government, in the short and medium term and from a security perspective. That sucks on all kinds of levels for staffing future projects and employee mobility.

I don't think stupidity matters.. it's all about $$$$$$$

@GlenH7 Yeah, that's why it's not good in the long term.

but these are all good points

Unless they are monitoring future project projections and ensuring appropriate coverage for any future classified work.

But they could end up with new contracts and not enough people capable of working them.

@ThomasOwens depends on company goals. Lots of shops that do gov bidding just act like a revolving door; find people who already have the clearance when they win the bid or even sub out the work.

@GlenH7 My current manager is greedy, not dumb. I think that even the lightest hint that I would purposely work against him would be met very, very poorly

Cuts out a lot of cost, lowers the quality they provide and makes them somewhat less competitive on the bids, but the quality isn't particularly important if you're just relying on marketeering to win the contract.

@JimmyHoffa If that's the direction, that's not good. But contractors haven't tended to work out, unless they are bringing in unique knowledge that we don't have in hourse.

But our products tend to be long-lived. I wonder if technical management and security are getting into it.

@ThomasOwens if they were going that direction, they'd just pick them up when they win bids, put them on that one and only one project, and either let them go afterwards or keep them just on that project until they realize they're being screwed and leave

It may be hard to just pick them up. If you have an active clearance, you can go to Textron, BAE, Raytheon, Draper Labs, MITRE, Charles River Analytics, and a few smaller places. If you don't, you have limited mobility. So it depends on what the play of the employee is.

Oh. Lincoln Labs is a big employer here that has picked up a couple of people who left.

@MichaelT I never particularly noticed, that is good though. It's a great concept that is vastly underemphasized. People too often tend to think code can't be reasoned about and that's why you need static analysis and testing and all the extra stuff. Those tools are good too, but I'd rather work on reasonable code with no tools than unreasonable code with every tool.

Testing is more than just a "tool". It's a fundamental property of software that you can run it and see whether the result is as expected. It's never a proof, but sometimes I'm surprised by the simplest bugs in software that makes me ask "Did they even try to run this thing??"

I wish all software could actually be defined in terms of inputs and outputs so testing would be consistently straightforward

but those silly users keep demanding user interfaces for some reason

How are user interfaces not input and output?

in an abstract sense they are, but you can't just call displayUI(click, moveMouseRight, click) and check the return value or anything like that

the UI framework has to do some extra work to support useful UI testing (sadly none of the ones I work with do this)

The main reason we have things like View Models is to push as much functionality away from the UI surface as possible, so that it can be made unit-testable.

exactly

woot! I have IE8 standards mode.

Piss of quirks. You're a hooker and nobody cares.

@MichaelT awesome, I don't see how anyone could misinterpret that version of the post

Other than Visual Studio, is there any reason to use Windows as a programming environment? It seems Linux has the better programming environment in all respects. But I could be missing something.

my current libation, soon to celebrate the defeat of quirks mode.

More people have died while taking selfies than have been killed by sharks so far this year as they come up with more dangerous ways to impress friends online

@JimmyHoffa What sort of brandy do you recommend if a baking recipe calls for some?

@durron597 not a clue. This is only the second bottle of Brandy I've ever bought; quite like it though.

@MichaelT Online consensus seems to be E&J's

Is the one liquor I can think I've never really tried a great variety of because even the cheapest is bloody expensive

I splurged on this just because I was up on a long weekend

@MichaelT yeah, this is a batter recipe.

You don't want to put rotgut liquor into things even in batter

@GlenH7 Windows and Linux desktops.

If you're developing for windows, it's often easiest to develop on windows.

of course that's true of most OSes

cross compiling is often more work than it's worth

though having a non-Windows machine around just to make sure your code is portable helps; when I first tried porting something I was stunned at how much non-standard junk VS let me get away with

I develop on Linux and let the CI server build on the Windows node. And I realized my happiness increases when I don't have to interact with the Windows server personally. Just let it do it's thing...

I need to stand up a CI system here..

Anyone in here know Entity Framework?

if anyone's gonna know it, it would be @JimmyHoffa

If you're adding records to the many side of a one-to-many relationship between an entity and its related entities, will EF manage the primary/foreign key relationships automatically, or do you have to make all of those assignments yourself?

@RobertHarvey yes and no. You can do code-first or db-first, and in either case you can dictate or avoid dictating the foreign key information, it's just a matter of how the whole thing's configured. EF is persnickety as I saw the other week; frankly after spending a few days setting it up for production I decided given it's horrible support for upsert I'll just have to stick with classic ADO.NET for all updates... I'm using it for reads though and that's a perfectly good use

I don't know it super well but I went through a bit of trials with it just the other week getting it all setup and resetup...and resetup... I had done analysis on it in the past and liked the code-first and migrations it had, but while it creates some really nice clean structures, there were a couple scenarios where the naive structure wasn't ideal for me, so I took the structures it built, pulled them into a DB project and tuned them how I wanted from there

I can't encourage enough the visual studio database projects - those I've used consistently since '08 and they're fucking spectacular.

but that's just for managing databases and keeping them source controlled and manageable for updates just like the rest of your source

way better than the EF migrations

I'll have to check those out, thanks.

they have a new concept of a "data-tier" application, DAC - I can't speak to those one bit. The plain database project that's available right with visual studio (you have to install the SSDT - Sql Server Data Tools downloadable from MSDN to get it to build) is spectacular. the Data-tier thing sounds a bit meh; some idea of packaging code and database stuff together in a single package but I haven't touched them so I know zilch on those.

Hey @RobertHarvey What's the story with this post?

What about it? Old post, no flags, good views, apparently a good answer.

@RobertHarvey I noticed that you and Jeff Atwood deleted almost all of it's answers

Looks like there was a conversation going on between a couple users in the answer fields. Maybe it predates comments?

They all either repeated information already there, or didn't explain anything. They all had zero votes.

@RobertHarvey I did a SEDE query for questions with the most deleted answers that were not already protected and that one was #2 (This is #1) and I saw you had deleted almost all of them so I thought I'd ask. I guess not much to see there.

If you like that, you'll love this.

(see the comments below the answer)

@RobertHarvey haha

Needz moar picturez.

Also, best user name ever.

Isn't it.