A DC native, I fondly remember SASCO on King St. in old town Alexandria. Government surplus electronic stuff, s-100 cards, wonderful MIL-SPEC knobs, hardware and meters, any of which would have cost the gummint a fortune in taxpayer funds, bespoke many-pin connectors with huge cables, and tons of "God only knows what that was!" stuff. Wish it was still there; gone now for decades.
I browsed the surplus tables at a recent hamfest, but the junk is less interesting, more Chinese monoculture cheap shit, and acres and acres of grey hair and wrinkles: who will be running these in a decade?
That Tim Cook says he's not merging the two is only somewhat comforting (after his "why would anyone buy a PC?" line - perhaps he thinks the Mac is not a PC, but uhhh...)
I really, really, really dislike iOS, and hate most of the changes that have come over Mac OS since Snow Leopard, with the possible exception of tightened security (they haven't done a great job with this from an ease-of-use standpoint - it's kinda buggy).
It's like Apple is trying to turn Mac OS into iOS through the back door. #donotwant
"1. There is no reason to have anything r[u]nning as root"
Is that supposed to include the OS processes and services? 'cuz there's a ton of them on a server I work with.
I can see how I'd (begin to) secure anything I'd installed from running on root - and probably differently for each app/service. But what am I to do about the OS itself?
Or perhaps point 1 was stated with less precision than I'd imagine. (not being sarcastic - really wanna know).
Particularly with the FCC racing to lock down router firmware, the market needs a player who will do the minimum the law requires, but provide as much freedom to tinker as possible.
Noted on Twitter last night that many people have found inexpensive electronic clock kits, and are sending them to Irving High to help the teachers learn about what clocks are, that they're not terribly threatening, and to help their kids learn to build them.
That address is:
Irving High School
900 N O Connor Rd
Irving, TX 75061
The FCC is currently trying to end 3rd-party wifi router firmware (think Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc.), by requiring manufacturers to build devices that only accept firmware updates signed with the manufacturer's keys.
This means you'll only be able to install software the manufacturer has certified comes with their own bugs, embedded backdoors and security #fails, rather than be able to put something better on your hardware.
It also may mean that router manufacturers will be required to place NSA backdoors in the firmware and be unable to tell consumers about them due to National Security Letters.
The WSJ is right: We Need The Right To Repair Our Gadgets.
We're fortunate that our usual LCO is also a private pilot of many years experience - he's sensitized to planes in the nearby airspace, and exercises an abundance of caution.
His example has helped bring the other LCOs along quite a bit.
Our club routinely gets 5,000-15,000 foot waivers for medium-to-high-power launches, and it doesn't stop nimrods from flying over the launch area in general aviation aircraft.
Low-power sport rocketry (think the little Estes hobby-shop rockets) can hit the 2,000 foot level without too much sweat.
I'm tired of seeing available airspace disappear every time I turn around. The fields in which I launched as a kid are completely off-limits - noplace in the close-in metro DC area can you launch a model rocket legally.
"...the Government Accountability Office says the U.S. military is vastly overpaying for its satellite communications, to the tune of three sixteen-pound hammers."
Among our ~50,000 US/Can employees, the leading office location is "remote". More of our employees work remote than at our largest fixed point facility.
Not making a guess at this; it's lately been my job to research it.
My wife also works at a US enterprise, from home, all day, every day. She's a project manager working with teams worldwide. She has a VERY long work day, due to time zone math, but is very productive, and has flexibility through the day to tend to what needs doing.
I work from home a couple days a week to cut down on the commuting hours. I have better equipment in my home office than the company will buy for me. It's customized to my tastes. There's no goddamn white noise streaming out of speakers in the ceiling. I'm not shivering in the summer from the lousy hvac system. And if I can get into flow, I'm very productive indeed.
If kids are on school holiday on a day where there's no kid care, hard to stay in flow. If you think you're gonna work from home and keep young kids, just don't. These intents are not compatible.
I have an electric sit-stand that I cobbled together from a nice Ikea top and an old (hideous) electric sit-stand desk we found on Craigslist.
Standing gets old, sitting does too. Need to be able to move the top up and down to get the best of both worlds.
You'll really want a cable tray, and a couple long outlet bars for the back of it. You're screwed if you don't manage cables and provide power that floats up and down with you. Monitor arm helps, too - I like Ergotrons. I mount my KVM switch, my USB and Gigabit Ethernet hubs, my Thunderbolt dock sub-surface, so they're handy, but invisible, also float up and down with the desktop.
Check the min and max heights on your legs before you buy - wish my Craigslist model was just a teense taller, but it suffices.
There are nice motorized legs online for sale without desktops. My wife bought a set of these - they have memories for different height positions. She custom-stained a design into her own unfinished wood desktop before sealing it. Beautiful. She runs with a designed-for-desk treadmill she integrated into the whole affair.
Good chair for the sit times is a cherry on top. I have a used Aeron.
1. Spider Oak has built its business on zero-knowledge (Full Disc: not an employee or a fanboy, but a user. Like it, except for non-zero-knowledge on mobile/web)
2. There _is_ research going on about ways to compute on data without knowing the contents of the data. It's entirely likely that someone will solve search on zero-knowledge encrypted data, even though you and I don't yet know how it might work. (one way that comes to mind: zero-knowledge encrypt the query, then bounce the encrypted query against the encrypted ciphertext. This would probably suck 'cause it'd require ECB mode or something similar, and that's pretty weak, and such a technique would leak information like a sieve, but OTOH, not _impossible_ right out of the gate).
+1 for SpiderOak, but please know that their Android client is not Zero-Knowledge. It means that mobile use is...not quite as clean as one would like.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think you're right to be concerned about the rainforests due to what is already an increasing demand for palm oil.
However, I put the blame on business looking for monoculture farming, and a generally unsustainable US consumer culture. It's not a secret that Americans have stretched resources to and past the breaking point; that we have demanded everything be constantly available, and cheaper every year. It should be obvious to anyone with basic arithmetic skill that that cannot continue indefinitely.
I realize that regulation is now a dirty word, but that is, in fact what is needed. I realize that the international scope of the problem will make that difficult, but the scale of the problem, the size of the disaster looming ought to make it a priority.
I'm sure someone will weigh in, pointing out that shareholder value demands frosting in a can, at the expense of our global carbon sink. Please. Go ahead and make that point.
Commodore made the Colt (I think) PC (as in "IBM Compatible PC") during the same era as the Amiga 2000, so it's valid to question what's being talked about here, IMO.
Good point. Making the RPi talk RS232 to the ancient WattsUp took only a level shift and decidedly retro baud rate (the summary said "outdated"). (FYI, there's now a "net connected" WattsUp, but they want you to go through their proprietary portal: NFW! Hunk of junk!)
I probably should've mentioned that I initially used Google Analytics to build the graphs. It's really not designed for that.
The duct tape-like approach I took with hardware I had sitting around to bend it to my will (vs. buying something off the shelf - not to mention final fit and finish) make it feel like a hack to me.
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A DC native, I fondly remember SASCO on King St. in old town Alexandria. Government surplus electronic stuff, s-100 cards, wonderful MIL-SPEC knobs, hardware and meters, any of which would have cost the gummint a fortune in taxpayer funds, bespoke many-pin connectors with huge cables, and tons of "God only knows what that was!" stuff. Wish it was still there; gone now for decades.
I browsed the surplus tables at a recent hamfest, but the junk is less interesting, more Chinese monoculture cheap shit, and acres and acres of grey hair and wrinkles: who will be running these in a decade?
This is really the thing.
That Tim Cook says he's not merging the two is only somewhat comforting (after his "why would anyone buy a PC?" line - perhaps he thinks the Mac is not a PC, but uhhh...)
I really, really, really dislike iOS, and hate most of the changes that have come over Mac OS since Snow Leopard, with the possible exception of tightened security (they haven't done a great job with this from an ease-of-use standpoint - it's kinda buggy).
It's like Apple is trying to turn Mac OS into iOS through the back door. #donotwant
"1. There is no reason to have anything r[u]nning as root"
Is that supposed to include the OS processes and services? 'cuz there's a ton of them on a server I work with.
I can see how I'd (begin to) secure anything I'd installed from running on root - and probably differently for each app/service. But what am I to do about the OS itself?
Or perhaps point 1 was stated with less precision than I'd imagine. (not being sarcastic - really wanna know).
Thanks. Then my mind goes to: "so we know not a lot about PLA in the same scenario", except that it's generally well-regarded for safety.
Would seriously like to know whether they were using PLA or ABS filament for their "not as toxic" melted-plastic machine test.
I'm printing exclusively with PLA at home, but have no idea which they're talking about.
Of course, but for a manufacturer, this means "sign our updates and allow nothing else".
Particularly with the FCC racing to lock down router firmware, the market needs a player who will do the minimum the law requires, but provide as much freedom to tinker as possible.
This'll be exciting for someone.
Noted on Twitter last night that many people have found inexpensive electronic clock kits, and are sending them to Irving High to help the teachers learn about what clocks are, that they're not terribly threatening, and to help their kids learn to build them.
That address is:
Irving High School
900 N O Connor Rd
Irving, TX 75061
The FCC is currently trying to end 3rd-party wifi router firmware (think Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc.), by requiring manufacturers to build devices that only accept firmware updates signed with the manufacturer's keys.
This means you'll only be able to install software the manufacturer has certified comes with their own bugs, embedded backdoors and security #fails, rather than be able to put something better on your hardware.
It also may mean that router manufacturers will be required to place NSA backdoors in the firmware and be unable to tell consumers about them due to National Security Letters.
The WSJ is right: We Need The Right To Repair Our Gadgets.
We're fortunate that our usual LCO is also a private pilot of many years experience - he's sensitized to planes in the nearby airspace, and exercises an abundance of caution.
His example has helped bring the other LCOs along quite a bit.
Our club routinely gets 5,000-15,000 foot waivers for medium-to-high-power launches, and it doesn't stop nimrods from flying over the launch area in general aviation aircraft.
Low-power sport rocketry (think the little Estes hobby-shop rockets) can hit the 2,000 foot level without too much sweat.
I'm tired of seeing available airspace disappear every time I turn around. The fields in which I launched as a kid are completely off-limits - noplace in the close-in metro DC area can you launch a model rocket legally.
Paging Spiderman...
Interestingly, I had no use for NFC.
Until I got a set of bluetooth headphones last week that let me connect/disconnect by bumping them on the phone.
Do not want to live without it now.
Pound, Ounce...what's the diff? (Other than a factor of 16...)
"...the Government Accountability Office says the U.S. military is vastly overpaying for its satellite communications, to the tune of three sixteen-pound hammers."
I work for a leading enterprise in the US.
Among our ~50,000 US/Can employees, the leading office location is "remote". More of our employees work remote than at our largest fixed point facility.
Not making a guess at this; it's lately been my job to research it.
My wife also works at a US enterprise, from home, all day, every day. She's a project manager working with teams worldwide. She has a VERY long work day, due to time zone math, but is very productive, and has flexibility through the day to tend to what needs doing.
I work from home a couple days a week to cut down on the commuting hours. I have better equipment in my home office than the company will buy for me. It's customized to my tastes. There's no goddamn white noise streaming out of speakers in the ceiling. I'm not shivering in the summer from the lousy hvac system. And if I can get into flow, I'm very productive indeed.
If kids are on school holiday on a day where there's no kid care, hard to stay in flow. If you think you're gonna work from home and keep young kids, just don't. These intents are not compatible.
I have an electric sit-stand that I cobbled together from a nice Ikea top and an old (hideous) electric sit-stand desk we found on Craigslist.
Standing gets old, sitting does too. Need to be able to move the top up and down to get the best of both worlds.
You'll really want a cable tray, and a couple long outlet bars for the back of it. You're screwed if you don't manage cables and provide power that floats up and down with you. Monitor arm helps, too - I like Ergotrons. I mount my KVM switch, my USB and Gigabit Ethernet hubs, my Thunderbolt dock sub-surface, so they're handy, but invisible, also float up and down with the desktop.
Check the min and max heights on your legs before you buy - wish my Craigslist model was just a teense taller, but it suffices.
There are nice motorized legs online for sale without desktops. My wife bought a set of these - they have memories for different height positions. She custom-stained a design into her own unfinished wood desktop before sealing it. Beautiful. She runs with a designed-for-desk treadmill she integrated into the whole affair.
Good chair for the sit times is a cherry on top. I have a used Aeron.
It's QUADROTRITICALE!!!
Hmmm. Don't agree with this.
1. Spider Oak has built its business on zero-knowledge (Full Disc: not an employee or a fanboy, but a user. Like it, except for non-zero-knowledge on mobile/web)
2. There _is_ research going on about ways to compute on data without knowing the contents of the data. It's entirely likely that someone will solve search on zero-knowledge encrypted data, even though you and I don't yet know how it might work. (one way that comes to mind: zero-knowledge encrypt the query, then bounce the encrypted query against the encrypted ciphertext. This would probably suck 'cause it'd require ECB mode or something similar, and that's pretty weak, and such a technique would leak information like a sieve, but OTOH, not _impossible_ right out of the gate).
+1 for SpiderOak, but please know that their Android client is not Zero-Knowledge. It means that mobile use is...not quite as clean as one would like.
I think you're right to be concerned about the rainforests due to what is already an increasing demand for palm oil.
However, I put the blame on business looking for monoculture farming, and a generally unsustainable US consumer culture. It's not a secret that Americans have stretched resources to and past the breaking point; that we have demanded everything be constantly available, and cheaper every year. It should be obvious to anyone with basic arithmetic skill that that cannot continue indefinitely.
I realize that regulation is now a dirty word, but that is, in fact what is needed. I realize that the international scope of the problem will make that difficult, but the scale of the problem, the size of the disaster looming ought to make it a priority.
I'm sure someone will weigh in, pointing out that shareholder value demands frosting in a can, at the expense of our global carbon sink. Please. Go ahead and make that point.
Commodore made the Colt (I think) PC (as in "IBM Compatible PC") during the same era as the Amiga 2000, so it's valid to question what's being talked about here, IMO.
"You look like you're trying to drop a steamer! Would you like me to help?"
Good point. Making the RPi talk RS232 to the ancient WattsUp took only a level shift and decidedly retro baud rate (the summary said "outdated"). (FYI, there's now a "net connected" WattsUp, but they want you to go through their proprietary portal: NFW! Hunk of junk!)
I probably should've mentioned that I initially used Google Analytics to build the graphs. It's really not designed for that.
The duct tape-like approach I took with hardware I had sitting around to bend it to my will (vs. buying something off the shelf - not to mention final fit and finish) make it feel like a hack to me.
But OK, point made. I DQ myself.