I hope that the author was taking liberties with technical details to make it read like a detective story.
If that is how computer forensics really work, then the field is snake oil of the worst sort. I can understand how foolishness like the SCO and Oracle copy claims would arise from this sort of... I'm not even sure what to call it, it doesn't have the rigor of astrology.
> Programming is an information technology, and being a technology facilitates greater efficiency.
Which is not always a good thing. Sometimes the fact that a task is tedious or confusing should cause us to re-think the necessity of doing the task. Thanks to IT we can wind up doing something stupid really well, rather than realizing that maybe we shouldn't do it in the first place.
(I love programming, but I sometimes despair at how useless most of what I do really is)
I recently switched back to FF after a year or more using Chrome. I don't care all that much about performance, what drove me back to firefox was intolerable levels of ads.
I tried it several times, but IMO it is barely functional and ridiculous to configure. I know the developer does what they can, but Chrome seems to intentionally make it difficult for extensions to block ads.
> And it isn't hard to see the author's torment at being forced to do this to her father.
That guilt, torment, and second guessing of yourself is one of the terrible things that result when trying to take care of a mentally ill person. Unless you've actually been there, and been there, and been there, and been there again you can't understand how the experience wears you down.
I'm a empathetic and patient person, and I have had to make the same sorts of decisions the author describes. There are no good answers - only less terrible ones, and even those you are not sure of.
I'll admit I'm a bit biased. I have had a brief psychotic episode, committed against my will (based on the article its hard to commit people, but in my case, not being home at 11pm at night but walking in the street in a nearby town -- plus a yes from a person in my family to the police did it right away.) This in the US. So I've seen this from the other side. I felt my family were more concerned in maintaining the appearance they were doing the right thing and to prevent any further disruption than anything else. Nevermind if the patient loses the ability to think or develops side effects like tardive dyskinesia (where you can't control your tounge so it keeps sticking out of your face and drool -- which I experienced for a day, or uncontrollable eye tics), and weight gain which is very common. I was surprised that the psychiatrists don't spend much time with you, its a 10 minute conversation followed by a prescription for daily antipsychotics. Unfortunately, my parents trust in medicine and are very conservative and thorough, so they gave me more antipsychotic than I needed and talked me into taking it for months and getting prescription elsewhere even though the initial doctors were no longer involved. Your every behavior becomes second-guessed, if you become occasionally irritated like normal people, your family thinks you didn't take your medication or you might need help. In fact, at the end of the article, when the father said some loving things towards his son, I wondered to myself whether the father had said those things as part of the act to protect himself from treatment. Its what involuntary commitment does to you.
Btw, now there are antipsychotics that are injected once a month and release slowly.
> Oh, and she refuses to take her medication because she’s convinced that they will ruin her liver.
Until fairly recently doctors had no idea how to measure minimum effective doses of lithium, so many older people with bipolar disorder are suffering damage to their liver, kidneys, and thyroid. Mental health practitioners also used haldol and thorazine with a pretty loose hand - without worrying about side effects or toxicity.
So realize that she has a reason to believe that her meds are bad for her - because they are, they are just better for her than going un-medicated. Her doctor or social worker should probably be the one to explain to her the kind of testing and monitoring they do to make sure that they do as little damage as possible.
There was a short window about 10 years ago where OSX was the best unix workstation, no contest. But cygwin is really good these days, so good that the Apple premium cost and batshit insane vendor make it a non-starter.
Treat cygwin as just another unix variant and it will go pretty far. Windows native apps and virtualbox are guaranteed to cover any missed requirements.
I dislike advertising itself as much as the next engineer. I won't even attempt to defend that position with logic, it's a visceral preference.
But I especially wouldn't want to work for advertisers. It seems natural that such companies would be structured to have engineering work for sales and marketing, with management acting as a funnel rather than an umbrella.
No support. You NEED to be able to reach a human being to clear up problems with credit cards.
I used google wallet to pay for a google apps yearly account. I also used a different card to pay for a couple games from the android market.
I dutifully checked all the options to make sure that the card I used to pay for those games could never ever be used to pay the renewal fee on the the apps account. Then one day I found that the wrong card had been charged for the apps renewal. I couldn't get ahold of anyone at google. I couldn't find any help online. I couldn't even find a phone number to call.
So I removed the cards from my wallet account. Cancelled the wallet account, and snarl "no" anytime google tries to get a credit card from me.
> We need a structured approach to the serious acquisition of relevant skills, not tinkering
Because if anything is proven to get kids enthused about learning, it's a structured approach to learning serious skills. We can teach the kids CMMI, financial management, and marketing, so they can manage their outsourced programmers, or whatever it is we're all supposed to do.
If that is how computer forensics really work, then the field is snake oil of the worst sort. I can understand how foolishness like the SCO and Oracle copy claims would arise from this sort of... I'm not even sure what to call it, it doesn't have the rigor of astrology.