Our company fails the Joel test so badly, most strongly on the question 'Do you use the best tools money can buy?'

I've got the best laptop in the company, which is why I'm not allowed to complain (even though I do, see image), but some of my co-workers have dreadfully slow machines. I pity them so much, especially whenever I sit next to them to do some pair programming e.g.

That cpu goes up to 4Ghz, 1.8 is its base frequency (Which is pretty low on all mobile i7 cpus), I wouldn't complain about that one even though there are better cpus to be had. If i had to upgrade that machine i would go for 32GB ram first since thats more likely to be an issue for development.

You call that bad? That's an 8th Generation i7 with 16 Gigs of RAM, you don't get much better on a business class laptop.

Why the fuck are you complaining ?
That's the fastest thing you can get in a reasonably thin laptop
Of course your company isn't gonna buy you freaking gaming laptops

@ItsNotMyFault @ilPinguino @MagicSowap

Thanks for the realization that it may actually be not so bad for a business laptop. But I'm still gonna complain, simply because it's slow 😜

Bitch please, my company gave me a Lenovo X220 for 18months, that fucker could barely open notepad ++, and I was expected to run multiple virtual machines and do heavy excel processing on it... somehow.

Now, I’m on an 7th gen i7 and 32GB Ram, life is a breeze now, and your on a newer Machine than me and still complaining🤷‍♂️

Devs should have slow machines so that they are the first to suffer from their bloated programs.

@C0D4 Bitch Please, I used to code on an IBM Thinkpad with a Pentium III (Coppermine) and 128 MB RAM. Before that, I had a Pentium 1 with 16 Megs of RAM.

Makes you think twice whether you need that int instead of a byte - lots of patching once the program's data grew out of its intended borders.

But nowadays with several VMs, pentesting tools, large IDEs and lots of parallelized tasks running, I'm happy about every MB or MHZ or MBit/s I can get more.

@ilPinguino ooh how I miss the old P3’s. Memory management at its finest days 😉

How is this slow? It should Turbo up pretty nicely. Do you even have an SSD tho.. because I'm guessing the HDD is bottlenecking your CPU........ xD

@C0D4 Hmm... Is the performance improvement really worth learning assembly...

* borrows the one asm book in the school library that noone ever touched *

* finds bag of weed in book *

* not sure WHAT makes more dizzy though *

@ilPinguino I learnt with Turbo Pascal 3.0 at school. Issue was that I had an Atari ST while TP 3.0 was for DOS. Luckily, there was an x86 emulator for ST, and it had a Norton Index of 0.33.

This meant an original IBM XT was FUCKING THREE TIMES as fast as the system I had to work with.

@Fast-Nop You're older than me. My school had 486's - at a time where the industry had the last few series of P4, I had a P3 and the cops had P99s (Guess the country).

Oh... and most of the IT lessons I got were about Word or a touchtyping trainer... or writing macro virii for my teacher to discover. OTOH, the class had an average of straight 1.0 (Straight A's for those with inches and ounces), everyone was highly bored (no internet access, no games unless someone brought in a floppy)... and somehow, this class produced a few good pieces of malware (and more detention time per student than any other) and some respectable coders if I may say so.

And people wonder why I say I grew up in a 3rd world country in Central Europe. That was 2005 btw.

If used with a power saving or balanced battery profile you will not get a high boost. On maximum performance, however, it will go to its full 4GHz capability.

@irene nope. A little more to the west.

@irene Germany. Baden-Württemberg to be precise.
It was a private institution run by a charity which made things worse.

@irene Unless its Germany hahahaha (Ffs, biased opinion by a 'brave little Belgian')

@irene sudo MoveToTheWest -shengen agree -from X

@irene easier to buy you a pint :p

@irene yes. Judging by the state of the educational system, infrastructure, technical advancement and average competence, it is.
The government has no understanding of economy and still believes that a government run public transit system is superior to smaller, competing enterprises on a free market (and that's not even in the part that's been a socialist country until 89). The same could be said about the majority of the population.
I'll leave it at that. Just look at the level of technical education in the general population and you'll agree. Most people can't even operate a search engine - a skill I would consider equal to reading in the digital world.

@irene because that's socially acceptable? No, there's actually no reason at all... :p

@irene there's hope, we just gotta get rid of the old people running shit they don't understand, and possibly re-educate most of the population. There's been some steps to the right direction.

@irene LOL, nope! I mean, Romania is not slavic and what's happening here is kind of insane.

@irene isn't that cute?...

@irene statistically, my life progress bar is a little over 50% already. ^^

@irene your comment about Romania :)

@irene yeah I'll get a white beard, babble incoherent Chinese nonsense wisdom and beat up youngsters with pointer kung fu, that's my plan. 8-)

How is this slow? You don't have an ssd? If you managed to get that machine "slow" you are doing something wrong.

I work in a god damn Virtual environment and access it over the internet. It has 3 GB ram and 1 core!

Stop bitching about it.

@ilPinguino I graduated in Hamburg in 1996 and we had Pentium Processors. We used to play networked Doom 2 on those machines.

Please don't make it sound like Germany was still in the stone age.

I also studied IT science (Informatik) and the university was *very* well equipped with top notch Sun machines.

@Yamakuzure though Doom2 worked fine with a 486. It was Duke Nukem where I had to buy a Pentium board because a 486-DX4 wouldn't do. ;-)

@Fast-Nop so great Duke Nukem 3D was, so great was the disappointment about Duke Nukem Forever... 🤔

My company has a 3 on the Joel test.

At least it's getting better. When I started it was at 1

@Yamakuzure

First: You're comparing a university to a middle school.

Second: I just looked it up. In 1996, the Hamburgische Bürgerschaft had an average age of 51 years with(among others):

1 Software developer

9 Scientists (Also counting engineers)

14 Humanities majors (Not counting teachers, see below)

23 Teachers (Not counting University professors)

23 Economics clerks (Without degree)

7 Economics Majors (With degree).

My main points were

- Old farts (while the average age back then leaves something to be desired, it's about the same as the Bundestag (national parliament).

- People who don't give a fuck about education (Hamburg had 23 teachers)

- People who don't understand economics (7 Economics majors, 23 people FROM the economy).

I'd say Hamburg is the exception, not the rule - a de-facto meritocracy in this regard.

I know this post violates the No-Politics rule, but I consider it part of the discussion. Maybe we should leave it at that.

@ilPinguino germany is no third world country. Yes the education system is all over the place and the politics of it is shit. The schools are trying to get into propper programming more but its hard sometimes. It has improved grately in the last few years. When i was at school I couldn't choose computer science unless i picked maths as my major. Now schools offer computer science as a major subject.
As for universities:
3 rooms, one with windows, one debian and one apple plus another room for power supply for all the laptops.
For courses where you need lots of computing power they try to set up access to the necessary machines. It's not all shit.
Get down from your high horse.

@hasu It used to be shit. That's what it's about.

Things have improved. Logically, the "higher" educational facilities have more money, thus, better IT equipment.

We still have a government without Infosec 101 training - proven by a major security incident in 2015 (A member of the parliament opened an infected email attachment).

The educational system still fails to educate people, not only in computer sciences (albeit this could be fixed by people from companies who educate). It also fails to educate students about things any citizen should have:

- Basic understanding of legal matters (In school, I haven't had to pick up a law code ONCE).

- The more recent national history is only touched briefly (Cold War Era) as opposed to almost an entire YEAR of WW 2.

- Financial Education (this is actively lobbied against by banks and insurance corporations)

Besides, it's not a high horse, it's a motorbike. Easy mistake to make though.

@ilPinguino well ok, fair point.
Oh and you forgot to mention how they decided to have the gymnasiums make abitur in 12 years for no reason and are forbidding schools from offering ceetain topics as majors with the argument "students should go to different schools for different majors".
I've raged about the educational system so much in the past that I'm clinging on to hope about them at least moving forward in IT.... T_T

Lol about the motorbike.

@hasu Yeah... I forgot that. I have no personal experience (Middle School and Berufsausbildung, no university degree).

I considered volunteering in educating people on "digital self-defense", made a couple of calls and all.

The problem is that there seems to be a "gun control" mentality there: The knowledge about infosec / hacking is evil and the less people know about it, the better.

That may work for guns (theoretically, in the ivory tower and with some unicorn horn powder at least), but not for something that can be shared infinitely, researched easily and taught by millions of people, free of charge.

I mean, read the Wikipedia articles on SMTP, you know enough to send a phishing email.

@ilPinguino I happen to work with schools occasionally. Some of them are managing this better then others. We are basically a project, that allows students to come to us, check out what we do in research and we offer workshops to teach basics of coding. There are also some which include blocks about security. Even if it is just 1-2 h about passwords and facebook. ^^'

It's not ideal yet and the content of the workshops is not perfect but it's a step into the right direction. We also get in touch with teachers that way and can try to motivate them to push for more IT education. Doesn't always work, but it's something.

@hasu I think most teachers would love to see more IT education, but aren't qualified to do it themselves or are constrained by the rules way too much.

The other topics are probably similiar - plus, there's legal reasons. Teachers probably just can't go around handing out copies of Gerd Kommer's books (A good read about the financial sales business and the state of affairs in that matter, even if it's a bit cynical).

I get to speak to some people from different gov executive branches sometimes - they're more progressive the lower their ranks are. Young officers would love to learn more about the darknet and finally start doing something about child pornographers or arms dealers, but the brass often doesn't have the same agenda - applying good old police work to the darknet can and does work (undercover purchases did in Munich), but more cops need to be taught how.

But if they were, mass-surveillance would lose the last few pro-arguments it still has.

@ilPinguino In 1996 I graduaded from High School. (Abitur) University was later.

Dude I have yoga 920 with this same config. It's an Ultrabook, therefore a low low base clock cuz battery life!

Hook that thing to an egpu with 1060 or even 1070 Aorus box & it's a decent gaming machine. And 4k display. Developer + Gamer dream haha. 1080 in egpu would possibly be overkill for this processor though.

Still you my point is finally a performing Ultrabook that also lasts 5-6 hours under abuse and more with normal use.