Come now, you're interrupting the Two Minutes Hate.
The proper fix is probably just to reduce the ejection force somewhat, and the seats probably allow it, but from what I know of milspec equipment, the problem is likely that 27 tons of paperwork haven't been completed, so that's not an approved adjustment procedure yet.
When a car is tested for emissions, its drive wheels are usually placed on a treadmill. The other wheels are left on the ground standing still. Most cars today have wheel speed sensors for the stability control systems, so brakes can be applied to tires that lose traction. The algorithm to cheat is simple: If the drive wheels are turning at highway speeds, but the car clearly isn't moving at highway speeds, cut the power (and emissions) because the power isn't going anywhere useful.
We do have a choice. We can either trust others with our information, or we can live without the modern services they provide.
You can live without telephone or Internet service. You can live without credit. You can live without running water, electricity, cable TV, or any other privatized "public" utility. There's your alternative choice.
For most of the last century, America has been opposed to widespread government control. Out of a fear of "socialism", we campaign against raising the government-supplied standard of living. We say we don't want the government to take away our choice, without realizing that the only other option in the choice we have is to return to a standard of living set shortly after the Civil War.
We might not be in this mess now, and it might not be with these belligerents, but we would still be in much the same mess, as it dates back to the dawn of recorded history. Any "stability" is simply a nice political way of saying "we're resting between rounds".
The short version is that the nice relatively-fertile land we now call the "Middle East" was a convenient destination for refugees and conquerors from the kingdoms to the north, east, and west. As each group settled, they called the area their home, and ignored the claims of anyone who already happened to live there, who in turn were often exiled or subjugated.
Three thousand years later, the settlers are now distinct cultures, and their tales of settling and exile have turned into legends of a traditional homeland, often mixed with religious justification. As a result, any time an opportunity arises, a traditionalist can easily stir up support for reclaiming the land for his people. Other folks like to call his cause "extremist" to trivialize his intent, and we also like to point to an arbitrary moment in history when his group wasn't in control, downplaying his claim to the area. Do note that I'm not talking about any particular group or ethnicity... their histories are all pretty much the same.
The only time there hasn't been some kind of uprising is when there was a ruler oppressive enough to keep all such rebellions under control. That tactic really started in the area with the Assyrians, until they grew too complacent, and a rebellion erupted with foreign assistance. More recently, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein played the role for various areas, with similar ends.
There are only two ways that I see to have lasting peace in the area. One option is to nuke the entire area completely, with fallout, denying it to everyone. The tales of exiled peoples will get worse, but nobody will really want to go home for a few thousand decades. The more reasonable option is to keep working toward "political ends", supporting whatever group says they won't try to kill their neighbors. Perhaps in a few thousand more years, the distinct cultures will merge together enough that they no longer care about conquests predating the alphabet.
There's not much in the way of ballast in modern lighter-than-air craft. Aerostats control their altitude by adjusting their density. They control their density by inflating lift bags inside their outer shell. For weather-induced vertical movements, the craft doesn't need to do much of anything. It'll float or sink to its intended altitude naturally. As for the tether, it's plenty strong enough, and serves as an inertial mass to dampen the movement of the balloon.
Regarding air resistance, consider that the air at 10,000 feet is roughly one third as dense as at sea level. On the ground, aerostats are big unwieldy hulks. At their designed altitude, they can be maneuvered with relative ease.
In the meantime nobody's installing anything else if I get to hear about it.
Therein lies the problem.
If I'm picking a different product to install, it's because I've done my own research, and found that something else will make my system better, even if it's for silly reasons like "easier integration" or "doesn't require a call to a sales rep every time it breaks". Having an architect tell me I can't use it because something else has already been declared the standard just tells me that our architects are wasting our time and money.
I understand the benefits of standardizing, and of course the standard will be one option I consider. I'm just not going to let some other team, who's never seen my requirements, dictate the solutions I employ.
As proof by analogy, consider that I'm currently fighting my way through management trying to explain why a cloud-based monitoring solution is not going to work on systems that are designed to have no network connectivity.
At the altitudes where such balloons normally reside, the weather is pretty stable. With no pesky land features to complicate things, the weather is mostly just influenced by whatever's already happening upwind. As for the aerostats themselves, they are surprisingly maneuverable at their normal altitudes, usually having just a few horsepower of motors turning a few small propellers. With so little air resistance, the craft can avoid inclement weather easily.
Even if a lighter-than-air vehicle is caught in poor weather, the majority of the effects are mitigated. It's a balloon. It moves with the wind, doesn't make a good conductor, and is usually unmanned. Unlike an airplane, it's not trying to fight against the wind, so the forces on the structure are greatly reduced. In turbulence, the outer bag flexes and accommodates any stress. It might get a little shaky for the instruments, but not unreasonably so.
Source: I used to work with some folks that now design aerostats.
You're far enough into hyperbole territory that I'm not sure if you intend satire or not.
By rules, you mean laws? You think there's a problem with discovering lawbreakers?
Yes, some rules are explicitly laws. Others are only indirectly so, such as when the law gives decisionmaking authority to a security officer, and he decides to require a particular policy. I also never said I had a problem with it.
Groups "adversarial to the government and its security" prominently include military enemies and their agents, people out to destroy those the government protects.
Those are certainly prominent in the media, yes, but they're not the biggest threat, directly. It's rather unlikely that a military enemy will lay siege to the FBI to get confidential investigation notes. Security is far more likely to be breached by someone who just doesn't follow the rules, or, as I said before, is simply adversarial.
Some folks think that they're just so good at their job that the normal folks' rules don't really apply to them. Sure, they think can take home that classified document, because they're so dedicated that they're working overtime on it!
Some folks think that the rules are unimportant. Of course the log book should be filled out every time the door is opened, but they're in a hurry!
Some folks grow to hate their organization. Yesterday, they filed a questionable expense report. Today, they're beating a polygraph because they can. Tomorrow, they'll leak a secret to the public, just to see the uproar.
Well, yes. The government-security world works that way.
It's a matter of trust. The government will only trust you with its secrets if you play the game and follow the rules, including the silly ones that everybody knows are silly. The polygraph isn't really meant to magically find spies. It's meant to find the people who think they're above the rules or are adversarial to the government and its security.
If it actually catches any liars, that's a bonus, but it's not really the goal.
And how is that any worse than today, where any bank can change internal records unilaterally, and we rely on an infrequent audit to catch it?
That simple-majority rule is configurable, being just a convenient way to decide which competing blockchain to accept if it diverges for any reason. In this implementation, it's fairly straightforward to resolve, since we already have a centralized auditor: the US government (in various offices for various jurisdictions). If any participants' blocks cause the chain to diverge, both sides of the disparity get an audit.
This violates Bitcoin's rule against central authority, but we don't really care much, because our goals are different. With Bitcoin, the goal is to avoid government. With this blockchain transaction system, the goal is to avoid on a third party for routine operations. Transactions would be validated in blocks, and each bank would ideally unanimously verify each others' findings. The tedious third-party validation need only happen if banks disagree... and that would mean something failed in a big way, so it's probably a government matter.
Yet again, Bennett Haselton inspires us with a short-sighted solution, having never considered whether his system will actually work.
1. If a user recognizes a joke as a re-worded version of someone else's tweet, they can flag it as a "duplicate", with a link to the earlier tweet that they think is similar.
Right there in step 1 is the problem. By requiring a link to a sentence someone read months ago, the burden on the user is raised unacceptably. Users won't bother policing when it's difficult, unless the case is severe enough to stir up an outrage - which would already result in more damage than just flagging a user's tweets.
Of course, the potential for abuse is also high. Changing a single word can parody an original post, yet changing a different single word may not avoid plagiarizing. An automated algorithm won't likely be able to tell the difference, so it will fall to manual effort to identify which flagged duplicates are actually malicious. In context, even an identical phrase may be making a very different statement, so taking the tweet out of context for manual review makes false positives very likely.
Shakespeare plagiarized. Plato plagiarized. Tom Lehrer penned many verses praising plagiarism. The bottom line is that plagiarism goes hand-in-hand with creation, and it should always be evaluated only in the entire context of both works - the plagiarizing and the plagiarized. What is being said is often not what's being written.
So how is that different from when the init script goes and fubars itself, or shits all over a log and you can't fix it? Or what about the kernel itself? What if your CPU is really a small explosive device, planted to sabotage your mission-critical systems? I guess you should go fire everyone who ever puts anything into mission-critical systems, because they might fail sometime.
I am not suggesting that critical failure is acceptable, but I do argue that the expertise, testing, and trust of a new system should all scale proportionally to how critical that system is.
If you absolutely cannot have any failure, your critical systems should be running on a nice mature and well-understood flavor of an old Linux or Unix, stripped down to the bare minimum of utilities and subsystems. It should be attended by top-tier admins, with round-the-clock monitoring and redundancy, and every piece (hardware and software) should have been tested for years before deployment. You should probably also replace the manager who put your company in this single-point-of-failure position as well.
At the other extreme, if a system doesn't matter much, it can be staffed by entry-level admins who can barely spell "Unix", running on the newest and shiniest hardware, and those admins should have the freedom to experiment with settings and configurations until the whole thing catches fire. Then they can fix it and do it again. By the time that new technology is ready to go into production, the admins are now experienced enough to understand the machine they're responsible for, and they should know how to configure it to avoid those critical failures.
Ultimately, you are trusting your production system to work consistently within required parameters. That trust is gained by having reliable testing conducted by people who understand the system. You should be hiring people who can build that understanding, not just those who agree with your prejudices.
No. It gives you license to want to murder the previous sysadmin who didn't bother to learn the system he was using.
On the other hand, if it's only "poorly-configured" because it doesn't conform to your standards, but does fit the design Ubuntu intends, then you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Apparently systemd only consumes log messages by default. If you're looking for forensic analysis or troubleshooting, you can turn on forwarding to a normal syslog service like rsyslog or syslog-ng.
Long time Linux users who use Linux for critical systems...
Oh hey, that's me.
...repeatedly describe the problems they've encountered with certain pieces of software, such as systemd and GNOME 3.
Well, yeah. I'm a cranky old fart.
Instead of listening to these users and trying to understand their problems, you and your ilk deny that these serious problems exist...
Now wait just one Turing-completing minute there!
The problems aren't serious. They don't break my critical systems, because I'm not going to be deploying systemd into production until I've tested it thoroughly. My old init scripts will get a wrapper or a rewrite to fit the new OS as needed, but the software interface won't change very much at all. Now, if you want a serious problem, find a vulnerability in a basic system utility, like bash or OpenSSH. Those problems are already out in the wild, deployed to production systems. When a new one of those problems is found, there's a notable increase in the use of profanity around my desk.
A new startup system, or a new package format, or a new thing that does this thing different than how the old thing did that thing... none of those bother me. I'll wait, running my old-but-stable critical systems, until you short-tempered folks settle on exactly what you want to do. I'll then work around whatever issues remain, because that's my job. I'm a sysadmin.
What they WON'T have is targets that are camouflaged or hard to find (like real life) because that would require loitering and slow passes.
...or satellite surveillance, reconnaissance drones, or integrated targeting from ground troops, which the F-35 is built to work with, where the A-10 has to rely on the pilot's eyesight.
But it can't carry anywhere near the payload of the A10 (nor retain it's vaunted stealthiness if it carries external stores) to deal with target after target after target.
The Warthog has 11 hardpoints and a cannon with no stealth. The F-35 has 10 hardpoints and a cannon, with reduced (but still some) stealth.
There may a single gun-specific target that the F35 can cheerfully spatter with it's 4 seconds' worth of ammunition. The A10s 30+ seconds of ammunition will not be needed.
...and it may not be needed on a battlefield anymore, either.
...the A10, it was built to fly over (and survive) the most intensive Cold-War Soviet Armor Wave attacks. Iraqi ground fire proved this time and again that the A-10 was astonishingly rugged.
That's important if you're limited to flying low and slow. If you aren't in range of ground fire, you don't need to survive it.
they'll have a "strike" by some Red Force aggressors to "prove" the A-10 can't hold it's own in air-to-air (never mind that in actual deployment, they should be being covered by...F-35s)
Or the escort could just take care of the mission on its own, rather than needing twice the logistics and equipment to run the mission.
Maybe have FIVE A-10s simultaneously completing courses while 1 F-35 has to cover them all as well?
Sure, and we'll also include the cost of five times the maintenance, five times the crew, five times the supplies, and five times the pilots put in harm's way.
Tell you what: let the ARMY design the test. Then we'll see.
The Army won't be flying the plane. The Army won't care about the real logistics of executing the mission, and the Army won't be concerned with anything other than whether the bullets go where they point. That's great for making the grunts feel comfortable, but modern wars are fought with logistics.
some contrived anti-air defense that is somehow not good enough to defeat the F-35s rudimentary stealth but is good enough to be a credible thread to the A-10
Four Warthogs were shot down by SAMs during the first Gulf War. I'd like to think that the "rudimentary stealth" being developed today might perhaps be good enough to deal with technology from a quarter-century ago.
Per the article, it also doesn't "flat out work", either, being too slow and short-ranged to participate in forward missions. Sure, the grunts on the ground want the the A-10, because it's what they know and love. Whenever they see the A-10, it's doing its job. When it can't do the job, though, the grunts won't see it because they're too far out of range or in too urgent of a situation for the Warthog to help. Then, all the grunts know is that they didn't get help, and clearly it must be the brass's fault, because they're in charge. Now those commanders want different planes, but the grunts have still never directly seen the A-10 fail...
As other commenters have mentioned, it's not just that I get bored doing boring things. The oversimplification is that to me, every single task is some level of boring, all of the time, and that boredom is extremely uncomfortable. Having never experienced a normal brain, I can't tell whether the difference is in the perceived discomfort, or in the threshold of activity required to avoid it.
What normal humans don't actually do is rapid context-switching for our primary focus. We can actually multitask very well, as the brain is highly parallelized and many of the fundamental capabilities are available for several instances at once. What we usually can't do is to understand the result of that capability.
Consider, for instance, our ability to infer trajectories. We can watch a ball being thrown and predict where it will land with a very high degree of accuracy. However, trying to predict the paths of two projectiles becomes more difficult. The usual process is to consider each projectile in sequence, devoting one's full attention to it. That's a pretty straightforward example of how bad humans are at multitasking.
However, approaching the problem from a different perspective shows a very different insight. Rather than looking for the destination of several projectiles, ask only if any of several projectiles will hit a particular target. Then the visual and spacial processing parts of the brain can run free, only bringing a few candidates to conscious attention for more thorough analysis.
This functionality is what's observed in normal humans, in the "legitimate biological research" you refer to. However, the detail to note is that brains with ADD are different. The entire reason ADD is recognized is that some folks, myself included, responded differently, consistently, to experiments conducted between 1950 to 1990. There is a clear separate cohort of brains that are different in some way, and despite your ignorance, there has been a significant amount of research trying to figure out why they're different. So far, there have been a number of physiological differences found, with the most significant being the epinephrine/norepinephrine neurotransmitter balance. That's why low doses of stimulants can help ADD patients; the underperforming transmitters function at closer-to-normal levels. There have also been some MRI-detected differences in activity patterns, and pharmacological testing can often support a ADD diagnosis with strongly-correlated test results.
In short, my analogy is "biologically false" only under the assumption that all brains work identically. That assumption has been shows to itself be false.
The name is horrible. It's not that I lack the ability to pay attention, so much as I am required to pay attention to multiple things at once. To make an analogy to computers, my brain must run multithreaded. If I have to focus on a single task, a part of me is bored, and I can feel it. In a child, that frustration often leads to misbehavior, which is why the "bad parenting" myth persists.
It's worth noting that many medications function by shutting down that extra part, but often they don't relieve the discomfort. Sure, the ability to focus improves, but it doesn't make the subject any better.
I've taught myself to cope with the condition, usually entertaining myself with tactile puzzles or other fiddly bits while my more-conscious attention is watching the more important task. As I type this, for example, I have a triple-tap adapter nearby, that I periodically pick up and toss around while consciously thinking about my words. That's enough to satisfy the need to do something else. Similar techniques get me through the day at work, where I've been able to use the wide focus to me advantage, being able to troubleshoot several problems at once.
Slashdot Mirror
It's so hard that it's already done. As I understand, enabling full logging requires only a change to a single line in a configuration file.
Come now, you're interrupting the Two Minutes Hate.
The proper fix is probably just to reduce the ejection force somewhat, and the seats probably allow it, but from what I know of milspec equipment, the problem is likely that 27 tons of paperwork haven't been completed, so that's not an approved adjustment procedure yet.
When a car is tested for emissions, its drive wheels are usually placed on a treadmill. The other wheels are left on the ground standing still. Most cars today have wheel speed sensors for the stability control systems, so brakes can be applied to tires that lose traction. The algorithm to cheat is simple: If the drive wheels are turning at highway speeds, but the car clearly isn't moving at highway speeds, cut the power (and emissions) because the power isn't going anywhere useful.
We do have a choice. We can either trust others with our information, or we can live without the modern services they provide.
You can live without telephone or Internet service. You can live without credit. You can live without running water, electricity, cable TV, or any other privatized "public" utility. There's your alternative choice.
For most of the last century, America has been opposed to widespread government control. Out of a fear of "socialism", we campaign against raising the government-supplied standard of living. We say we don't want the government to take away our choice, without realizing that the only other option in the choice we have is to return to a standard of living set shortly after the Civil War.
We might not be in this mess now, and it might not be with these belligerents, but we would still be in much the same mess, as it dates back to the dawn of recorded history. Any "stability" is simply a nice political way of saying "we're resting between rounds".
The short version is that the nice relatively-fertile land we now call the "Middle East" was a convenient destination for refugees and conquerors from the kingdoms to the north, east, and west. As each group settled, they called the area their home, and ignored the claims of anyone who already happened to live there, who in turn were often exiled or subjugated.
Three thousand years later, the settlers are now distinct cultures, and their tales of settling and exile have turned into legends of a traditional homeland, often mixed with religious justification. As a result, any time an opportunity arises, a traditionalist can easily stir up support for reclaiming the land for his people. Other folks like to call his cause "extremist" to trivialize his intent, and we also like to point to an arbitrary moment in history when his group wasn't in control, downplaying his claim to the area. Do note that I'm not talking about any particular group or ethnicity... their histories are all pretty much the same.
The only time there hasn't been some kind of uprising is when there was a ruler oppressive enough to keep all such rebellions under control. That tactic really started in the area with the Assyrians, until they grew too complacent, and a rebellion erupted with foreign assistance. More recently, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein played the role for various areas, with similar ends.
There are only two ways that I see to have lasting peace in the area. One option is to nuke the entire area completely, with fallout, denying it to everyone. The tales of exiled peoples will get worse, but nobody will really want to go home for a few thousand decades. The more reasonable option is to keep working toward "political ends", supporting whatever group says they won't try to kill their neighbors. Perhaps in a few thousand more years, the distinct cultures will merge together enough that they no longer care about conquests predating the alphabet.
There's not much in the way of ballast in modern lighter-than-air craft. Aerostats control their altitude by adjusting their density. They control their density by inflating lift bags inside their outer shell. For weather-induced vertical movements, the craft doesn't need to do much of anything. It'll float or sink to its intended altitude naturally. As for the tether, it's plenty strong enough, and serves as an inertial mass to dampen the movement of the balloon.
Regarding air resistance, consider that the air at 10,000 feet is roughly one third as dense as at sea level. On the ground, aerostats are big unwieldy hulks. At their designed altitude, they can be maneuvered with relative ease.
In the meantime nobody's installing anything else if I get to hear about it.
Therein lies the problem.
If I'm picking a different product to install, it's because I've done my own research, and found that something else will make my system better, even if it's for silly reasons like "easier integration" or "doesn't require a call to a sales rep every time it breaks". Having an architect tell me I can't use it because something else has already been declared the standard just tells me that our architects are wasting our time and money.
I understand the benefits of standardizing, and of course the standard will be one option I consider. I'm just not going to let some other team, who's never seen my requirements, dictate the solutions I employ.
As proof by analogy, consider that I'm currently fighting my way through management trying to explain why a cloud-based monitoring solution is not going to work on systems that are designed to have no network connectivity.
At the altitudes where such balloons normally reside, the weather is pretty stable. With no pesky land features to complicate things, the weather is mostly just influenced by whatever's already happening upwind. As for the aerostats themselves, they are surprisingly maneuverable at their normal altitudes, usually having just a few horsepower of motors turning a few small propellers. With so little air resistance, the craft can avoid inclement weather easily.
Even if a lighter-than-air vehicle is caught in poor weather, the majority of the effects are mitigated. It's a balloon. It moves with the wind, doesn't make a good conductor, and is usually unmanned. Unlike an airplane, it's not trying to fight against the wind, so the forces on the structure are greatly reduced. In turbulence, the outer bag flexes and accommodates any stress. It might get a little shaky for the instruments, but not unreasonably so.
Source: I used to work with some folks that now design aerostats.
You're far enough into hyperbole territory that I'm not sure if you intend satire or not.
By rules, you mean laws? You think there's a problem with discovering lawbreakers?
Yes, some rules are explicitly laws. Others are only indirectly so, such as when the law gives decisionmaking authority to a security officer, and he decides to require a particular policy. I also never said I had a problem with it.
Groups "adversarial to the government and its security" prominently include military enemies and their agents, people out to destroy those the government protects.
Those are certainly prominent in the media, yes, but they're not the biggest threat, directly. It's rather unlikely that a military enemy will lay siege to the FBI to get confidential investigation notes. Security is far more likely to be breached by someone who just doesn't follow the rules, or, as I said before, is simply adversarial.
A true gentleman knows how to play the bagpipes, but doesn't.
A 3D printed drone that connects to the IoT and has iPhone connectivity with an app that hacks Tesla cars!
Well, yes. The government-security world works that way.
It's a matter of trust. The government will only trust you with its secrets if you play the game and follow the rules, including the silly ones that everybody knows are silly. The polygraph isn't really meant to magically find spies. It's meant to find the people who think they're above the rules or are adversarial to the government and its security.
If it actually catches any liars, that's a bonus, but it's not really the goal.
And how is that any worse than today, where any bank can change internal records unilaterally, and we rely on an infrequent audit to catch it?
That simple-majority rule is configurable, being just a convenient way to decide which competing blockchain to accept if it diverges for any reason. In this implementation, it's fairly straightforward to resolve, since we already have a centralized auditor: the US government (in various offices for various jurisdictions). If any participants' blocks cause the chain to diverge, both sides of the disparity get an audit.
This violates Bitcoin's rule against central authority, but we don't really care much, because our goals are different. With Bitcoin, the goal is to avoid government. With this blockchain transaction system, the goal is to avoid on a third party for routine operations. Transactions would be validated in blocks, and each bank would ideally unanimously verify each others' findings. The tedious third-party validation need only happen if banks disagree... and that would mean something failed in a big way, so it's probably a government matter.
Yet again, Bennett Haselton inspires us with a short-sighted solution, having never considered whether his system will actually work.
1. If a user recognizes a joke as a re-worded version of someone else's tweet, they can flag it as a "duplicate", with a link to the earlier tweet that they think is similar.
Right there in step 1 is the problem. By requiring a link to a sentence someone read months ago, the burden on the user is raised unacceptably. Users won't bother policing when it's difficult, unless the case is severe enough to stir up an outrage - which would already result in more damage than just flagging a user's tweets.
Of course, the potential for abuse is also high. Changing a single word can parody an original post, yet changing a different single word may not avoid plagiarizing. An automated algorithm won't likely be able to tell the difference, so it will fall to manual effort to identify which flagged duplicates are actually malicious. In context, even an identical phrase may be making a very different statement, so taking the tweet out of context for manual review makes false positives very likely.
Shakespeare plagiarized. Plato plagiarized. Tom Lehrer penned many verses praising plagiarism. The bottom line is that plagiarism goes hand-in-hand with creation, and it should always be evaluated only in the entire context of both works - the plagiarizing and the plagiarized. What is being said is often not what's being written.
Nope.
I installed the pro edition via the upgrade offer from Win7. I got the "Get Office" app preinstalled, and it periodically advertises Office 365.
So how is that different from when the init script goes and fubars itself, or shits all over a log and you can't fix it? Or what about the kernel itself? What if your CPU is really a small explosive device, planted to sabotage your mission-critical systems? I guess you should go fire everyone who ever puts anything into mission-critical systems, because they might fail sometime.
I am not suggesting that critical failure is acceptable, but I do argue that the expertise, testing, and trust of a new system should all scale proportionally to how critical that system is.
If you absolutely cannot have any failure, your critical systems should be running on a nice mature and well-understood flavor of an old Linux or Unix, stripped down to the bare minimum of utilities and subsystems. It should be attended by top-tier admins, with round-the-clock monitoring and redundancy, and every piece (hardware and software) should have been tested for years before deployment. You should probably also replace the manager who put your company in this single-point-of-failure position as well.
At the other extreme, if a system doesn't matter much, it can be staffed by entry-level admins who can barely spell "Unix", running on the newest and shiniest hardware, and those admins should have the freedom to experiment with settings and configurations until the whole thing catches fire. Then they can fix it and do it again. By the time that new technology is ready to go into production, the admins are now experienced enough to understand the machine they're responsible for, and they should know how to configure it to avoid those critical failures.
Ultimately, you are trusting your production system to work consistently within required parameters. That trust is gained by having reliable testing conducted by people who understand the system. You should be hiring people who can build that understanding, not just those who agree with your prejudices.
No. It gives you license to want to murder the previous sysadmin who didn't bother to learn the system he was using.
On the other hand, if it's only "poorly-configured" because it doesn't conform to your standards, but does fit the design Ubuntu intends, then you have nobody to blame but yourself.
I call FUD.
Apparently systemd only consumes log messages by default. If you're looking for forensic analysis or troubleshooting, you can turn on forwarding to a normal syslog service like rsyslog or syslog-ng.
Long time Linux users who use Linux for critical systems...
Oh hey, that's me.
...repeatedly describe the problems they've encountered with certain pieces of software, such as systemd and GNOME 3.
Well, yeah. I'm a cranky old fart.
Instead of listening to these users and trying to understand their problems, you and your ilk deny that these serious problems exist...
Now wait just one Turing-completing minute there!
The problems aren't serious. They don't break my critical systems, because I'm not going to be deploying systemd into production until I've tested it thoroughly. My old init scripts will get a wrapper or a rewrite to fit the new OS as needed, but the software interface won't change very much at all. Now, if you want a serious problem, find a vulnerability in a basic system utility, like bash or OpenSSH. Those problems are already out in the wild, deployed to production systems. When a new one of those problems is found, there's a notable increase in the use of profanity around my desk.
A new startup system, or a new package format, or a new thing that does this thing different than how the old thing did that thing... none of those bother me. I'll wait, running my old-but-stable critical systems, until you short-tempered folks settle on exactly what you want to do. I'll then work around whatever issues remain, because that's my job. I'm a sysadmin.
What they WON'T have is targets that are camouflaged or hard to find (like real life) because that would require loitering and slow passes.
...or satellite surveillance, reconnaissance drones, or integrated targeting from ground troops, which the F-35 is built to work with, where the A-10 has to rely on the pilot's eyesight.
But it can't carry anywhere near the payload of the A10 (nor retain it's vaunted stealthiness if it carries external stores) to deal with target after target after target.
The Warthog has 11 hardpoints and a cannon with no stealth. The F-35 has 10 hardpoints and a cannon, with reduced (but still some) stealth.
There may a single gun-specific target that the F35 can cheerfully spatter with it's 4 seconds' worth of ammunition. The A10s 30+ seconds of ammunition will not be needed.
...and it may not be needed on a battlefield anymore, either.
...the A10, it was built to fly over (and survive) the most intensive Cold-War Soviet Armor Wave attacks. Iraqi ground fire proved this time and again that the A-10 was astonishingly rugged.
That's important if you're limited to flying low and slow. If you aren't in range of ground fire, you don't need to survive it.
they'll have a "strike" by some Red Force aggressors to "prove" the A-10 can't hold it's own in air-to-air (never mind that in actual deployment, they should be being covered by...F-35s)
Or the escort could just take care of the mission on its own, rather than needing twice the logistics and equipment to run the mission.
Maybe have FIVE A-10s simultaneously completing courses while 1 F-35 has to cover them all as well?
Sure, and we'll also include the cost of five times the maintenance, five times the crew, five times the supplies, and five times the pilots put in harm's way.
Tell you what: let the ARMY design the test. Then we'll see.
The Army won't be flying the plane. The Army won't care about the real logistics of executing the mission, and the Army won't be concerned with anything other than whether the bullets go where they point. That's great for making the grunts feel comfortable, but modern wars are fought with logistics.
some contrived anti-air defense that is somehow not good enough to defeat the F-35s rudimentary stealth but is good enough to be a credible thread to the A-10
Four Warthogs were shot down by SAMs during the first Gulf War. I'd like to think that the "rudimentary stealth" being developed today might perhaps be good enough to deal with technology from a quarter-century ago.
(and doesn't accidentally kill them).
Of the very very few CAS friendly-fire incidents, the A-10 holds the high score.
Per the article, it also doesn't "flat out work", either, being too slow and short-ranged to participate in forward missions. Sure, the grunts on the ground want the the A-10, because it's what they know and love. Whenever they see the A-10, it's doing its job. When it can't do the job, though, the grunts won't see it because they're too far out of range or in too urgent of a situation for the Warthog to help. Then, all the grunts know is that they didn't get help, and clearly it must be the brass's fault, because they're in charge. Now those commanders want different planes, but the grunts have still never directly seen the A-10 fail...
As other commenters have mentioned, it's not just that I get bored doing boring things. The oversimplification is that to me, every single task is some level of boring, all of the time, and that boredom is extremely uncomfortable. Having never experienced a normal brain, I can't tell whether the difference is in the perceived discomfort, or in the threshold of activity required to avoid it.
What normal humans don't actually do is rapid context-switching for our primary focus. We can actually multitask very well, as the brain is highly parallelized and many of the fundamental capabilities are available for several instances at once. What we usually can't do is to understand the result of that capability.
Consider, for instance, our ability to infer trajectories. We can watch a ball being thrown and predict where it will land with a very high degree of accuracy. However, trying to predict the paths of two projectiles becomes more difficult. The usual process is to consider each projectile in sequence, devoting one's full attention to it. That's a pretty straightforward example of how bad humans are at multitasking.
However, approaching the problem from a different perspective shows a very different insight. Rather than looking for the destination of several projectiles, ask only if any of several projectiles will hit a particular target. Then the visual and spacial processing parts of the brain can run free, only bringing a few candidates to conscious attention for more thorough analysis.
This functionality is what's observed in normal humans, in the "legitimate biological research" you refer to. However, the detail to note is that brains with ADD are different. The entire reason ADD is recognized is that some folks, myself included, responded differently, consistently, to experiments conducted between 1950 to 1990. There is a clear separate cohort of brains that are different in some way, and despite your ignorance, there has been a significant amount of research trying to figure out why they're different. So far, there have been a number of physiological differences found, with the most significant being the epinephrine/norepinephrine neurotransmitter balance. That's why low doses of stimulants can help ADD patients; the underperforming transmitters function at closer-to-normal levels. There have also been some MRI-detected differences in activity patterns, and pharmacological testing can often support a ADD diagnosis with strongly-correlated test results.
In short, my analogy is "biologically false" only under the assumption that all brains work identically. That assumption has been shows to itself be false.
I have ADD, and I've had it for many years.
The name is horrible. It's not that I lack the ability to pay attention, so much as I am required to pay attention to multiple things at once. To make an analogy to computers, my brain must run multithreaded. If I have to focus on a single task, a part of me is bored, and I can feel it. In a child, that frustration often leads to misbehavior, which is why the "bad parenting" myth persists.
It's worth noting that many medications function by shutting down that extra part, but often they don't relieve the discomfort. Sure, the ability to focus improves, but it doesn't make the subject any better.
I've taught myself to cope with the condition, usually entertaining myself with tactile puzzles or other fiddly bits while my more-conscious attention is watching the more important task. As I type this, for example, I have a triple-tap adapter nearby, that I periodically pick up and toss around while consciously thinking about my words. That's enough to satisfy the need to do something else. Similar techniques get me through the day at work, where I've been able to use the wide focus to me advantage, being able to troubleshoot several problems at once.