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Ask Slashdot: How Often Do You Update Your OS?
An anonymous reader writes: A couple friends of mine have been having a debate recently. One is constantly updating all of his operating systems (desktop, phone, and otherwise), often as soon as a new patch is available. He tries betas and nightlies. He has a different ROM on his phone every other week. The other friend is much more conservative with his updates. Once his systems are running smoothly, he wants to leave them alone for as long as possible. He'll do some serious security updates, but he's extremely wary of anything involving major UI changes or functionality differences. What's your preference? Are you constantly tweaking? Waiting for the early adopters to work out the kinks? How does your preference change between work machines and personal machines?
Let the suckers and adventurers be the beta testers.
Don't run the crap which is most likely to be causing you security problems in the first place -- I've never been impacted by a Flash zero day exploit because I don't run it.
Many years of being around computers has taught me that I have no intention of putting up with the drama of beta testing for companies who do a lousy job of QA.
I've seen WAY too many things which are broken on day 1, or even worse, which introduce new broken on day 1 that it takes some time to identify.
There isn't an OS vendor on the planet I'd accept a fresh release from and install on the first day.
If you do this stuff as a hobby, have fun with it. The rest of us don't have the time or the inclination to consider upgrading the OS to be a hobby.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
the Emacs vs VI war is over (Emacs won) ...
Yeah I'm thinking not. I've been a Unix sysadmin for over 15 years and I've never worked with a single person who uses Emacs.
Nothing to see here
Automotive control interfaces change all of the time.
Into about 1980 all American cars and trucks had, for many years, placed the headlights control on the dash at the left. Wiper blade control was usually on the lower left side of the dash near the knee bolster. They placed the turn signal on the left side of the column, placed the gearshift on the right side of the column, and placed the brights control on the floor, operated by the left foot. The radio was generally low on the right side. If a fancy car had an interior dome light with dimming capability it was usually placed on the left with the headlight control, and if there was cruise control, the function was integrated with the turn signal indicator stalk, with a slider on the side for set/coast and a button on the tip for on/off.
In the late seventies and eighties they started playing with multifunction stalks and all bets were off. Some cars integrated nearly every function into the stalk, and if the car had a floor shifter instead of a column shifter sometimes a second multifunction stalk was added to the right side. Floor controls were mostly eliminated and most low, hard to reach controls were relocated to stalks. Tilting telescoping steering columns added a third stalk on the lower-left of the column. When Mercedes Benz took over Chrysler they attempted to add a fourth stalk to the column, low on the right, for the cruise control. Steering wheels got controls on the front, then on the back. At one point early on there was a "rim blow" steering wheel where squeezing the wheel would activate the horn.
My point is that automotive controls are very much NOT standard. Even basic functions like gear selection could be pushbutton, could be a column stalk, could be a dash stalk, could be a floor stick, could be a dash-mounted knob, could be a center-console knob, and there are probably more variations yet. Drivers have to get used to each and every configuration.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What is the entire lab doing planning to run Win 10 Home? That's the only edition that forces mandatory updates. Pro lets you defer them; Enterprise lets you completely control the process
Say what? I work in a shop with extensive Solaris and Linux installation, and run several personal Linux boxes as well. They all have vi. None of them, as far as I know, and I checked several, have Emacs. This was not a conscious decision for any of them: it's just the way the hosts installed (although on my personal boxes, I would've installed vi had it not installed by itself). Who won the war?
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Version updates:
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Security and other interim updates: