This is one of the reasons I have been looking forward to AI driving. It forces us to have a real discussion about traffic laws that creates a motivation to fix lazy legislators leaving laws in place that people are forced to routinely break to make traffic work well. I'm tired of the speed limit being 10 MPH slower than the average speed of traffic, and I look forward to people finally standing up and demanding that speed limits be *higher* than the speed traffic naturally flows. Roads should have a recommended speed, that both AI and human drivers should aim for, and a legal limit that police can and should stop you if you exceed. We currently have de-facto versions of that with the recommended speed being the speed limit, and the legal limit being about 15 over, but in working that way, we're technically routinely breaking the law, and that's not how laws should work.
Android apps start fast and have a low memory footprint because they use shared memory to share code with the software that runs the phone. You can't do that unless the phone uses java for it's internal functionality, which Windows phones would not, so app's startup time and memory footprint would be much worse than on real Android.
Balmer understands markets, but he doesn't understand tech, or design. His reign at Microsoft showed a complete squandering of technical talent in a series of boondoggles that someone with better knowledge of the underlying technology would have foreseen, and this took Microsoft from a dominant position to near collapse. Satya Nadella has had little to praise or criticise, but so far I feel his steps have been more strategically sound. Balmer needs to remain silent, because all he's accomplishing now is removing all doubt.
Security is needed, but so is productivity. Neither is valuable without the other.
I worked for a company that got breached and had stuff stolen. Their security was overblown and cumbersome, and not layered properly. They tried to secure their entire network, instead of properly layering things, and thus a hack that should have been trivial was not. Had they properly layered their network so the general employee work could happen fluidly, and people could get their jobs done without giving away the keys to the kingdom they would have been much better off. After the breach came mandatory drive encryption (with no password) which brought their largely aging laptop population to its knees. So much wasted time and horrible frustration, all to implement basically worthless security policies.
Exactly this. I've seen so many companies waste time and money on ineffective overblown security measures that they should be spending actually getting the job done. Layer your security so that it stays out of the way as much as possible while still protecting what is actually important.
You say the goal is "to cut costs", but what costs?
If the cost-savings comes from undermining a union, they probably would have sued already, so I'm guessing it's not that.
This shouldn't be a tax dodge, because 1099s should end up paying roughly the same federal and state tax, so it must be a reduction in actual compensation. Assuming that's the case, those being harmed look to be the 1099 employees themselves. As such, it would seem like a class action suit would be the appropriate course of action. If the state itself isn't willing to abide by the rule, it shouldn't expect others to either. The state should either follow the rule or repeal it.
I used to load my machines up with RAM to speed them up. It's not useless, but it makes a tiny fraction of the difference an SSD makes. It simply isn't worth it. Window's caching is terrible, it tends to thrash your disks at inopportune times, and it's filesystems end up a slow tangled mess so quickly that without an SSD, it's just painful. Combine that with the high failure rate of spinning disks in a laptop, the extra-slow speed of laptop drives, and the reduced battery life from their high power usage and you'll be much happier with an SSD based laptop. When SSDs hit the $1/gig barrier it became time to start phasing spinning disks out of all but the lowest-performing laptops. Now that they're pushing down to about 1/3rd that, I'd avoid any laptop maker who doesn't, because they're not very good at what they do.
Windows machines in recent years have become extremely bottlenecked by drive performance, especially in the case of laptops which are so popular in companies. Laptop hard drives are slow, capable of only about 80 IOPS which is about the same speed they were 10 years ago, whereas mainstream SSDs by comparison, can typically deliver 80,000 IOPS. Since once you get Windows loaded up with all it's random messy software it's disk access ends up being tons of tiny reads, IOPS is a much more important number than transfer rate, and SSDs are literally 1000x faster. It can mean the difference between a 20 minute operation and one that takes a few seconds.
If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD. It's false efficiency, wasting very expensive time to save a relatively cheap expense. 256GB SSDs are under $100 and will handle most corporate work just fine. Up to 1TB, the expense is almost negligible and it will pay for itself almost immediately. Your IT department will be happier, your workers will be happier, your machines will be more secure because scanning them is a lot less intrusive and can happen more often. Your IT department should have a pile of SSDs ready to be deployed into any machine that needs to be re-imaged or where the user needs the speed. Not doing so is wasting money.
> I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates
No you didn't. You *thought* you installed all the updates because Windows lied to you and said you had. Windows Update has a horrible habit of checking to see what updates are available **for the state of your machine right now** and then telling you that it's done installing updates when those are installed, when in truth there are pending updates that required previous updates to be installed before they could subsequently be installed that Windows Update won't tell you about until you re-discover what updates are available. After an install, force re-scan after every reboot to see what new updates are now available and when you reboot and re-scan and it says you are done, you are actually done.
I feel like some wireless routers using openWRT might be useful here. Configure a few to nat the traffic from each port to a specific ip, then have that routed over the wireless. You could drop a wireless router in each island and update them all over wireless.
> Though NAT is included with almost all firewalls, it is not there to address security.
You missed my point. Firewalls are needed for security, and if you have a firewall, you can do NAT. Not needing NAT becomes a non-feature because it doesn't significantly impact complexity or cost.
There are definitely times when estimates are appropriate in programming, but the more unknowns there are inside a project, the more you need to nail those unknowns down before estimating is worthwhile. Sometimes, prototyping should be done without estimates.
Evacuated tubes have much better economic dynamics than sub-orbital flight. It's high-speed rail without air friction with potentially incredibly fast speeds. You could work in New York and have a lunch at midnight in Tokyo and be back to NY for dinner. It would be amazingly expensive to build, but it could be incredibly cheap to run.
Automation replaces work with rent. It's has a negative macroeconomic effect, amplified by the fact that work pays taxes, and rent doesn't. The solution seems obvious, reverse that dynamic. Make things that earn money for their owners pay taxes instead of workers.
Drive Writes Per Day is *the* important metric for judging the write load capabilities of a drive. 1 DWPD is perfectly adequate for consumer/desktop use and many fileserver applications but impractical for backing a database, where 5 DWPD is more appropriate. You pay about 50% more for a 5 DWPD drive than a consumer level one, but if it saves you from having to replace the drive 5 times, it's worth it.
Inaccuracies aside, this is an important property of SSD's to keep in mind when procuring them.
The summary refers to the time when neanderthals and modern humans intermixed, but can we really call what came before the mixing modern humans? It seems that something about the combination sparked huge evolutionary changes that allowed us to rather rapidly (evolutionarily speaking) develop modern society. As far as I'm concerned, the history of modern humans starts with the mixing.
> especially since they all say the exact opposite.
I always find it funny how conservative talk radio hosts seem to like pointing out how much more intelligent they and their listeners are than everyone else, almost as if they think that by saying it enough, it will make it true.
There's no monopoly on intelligence on either side of the isle, and regardless, a right and noble idea supported by stupid people is still right and noble. Arguing that an idea is stupid because it's supporters are stupid is invalid.
Immorality is much easier to excuse when you believe there is a divine order to things. When someone is poor, or suffering or has had a bad run of luck, belief in a divine plan makes it easy to see that as deserved, instead of unfortunate. When someone is rich, powerful and/or fortunate, you're more likely to see them as superior and deserving of their good fortune if you are religious.
Every time you hear someone thank god that for answering their prayers and blessing them with something, keep in mind that intrinsically behind that statement is the idea that god has made a judgement call and found them deserving of having their prayers answered. It's a round about way of saying "God chose this for me, because he thinks I deserve it." It always rubs me as subtly arrogant to imply that whatever good fortune you are enjoying isn't simply good fortune, but it's a reward you earned because god found you deserving of it, and thusly found everyone else who doesn't receive that same thing, undeserving.
I thought that evidence was pointing to us being the product of about 9.5 billion years of evolution. Given that we live on a 4.5 billion year old world, life would have had to survive some sort of space-gap before getting to earth.
If sentient life takes 9.5 billion years to evolve, and the universe is only 13.5 billion years old, life would have had to start evolving relatively fast for it to get this far. The earlier you go in the universe's history, the more rare planets become. Even more rare would be a planet orbiting a star hot enough to fuel life, but also in continuous operation for that long. If it really does take 9.5 billion years for life to reach this level of complexity, and in our case it survived the destruction of a planet to spread to a new one, then the Fermi paradox all-but disappears and likelihood that sentient life is currently extremely rare, or even unique to our planet increases dramatically.
Global warming was always a terrible name because the imagery was all wrong.
Global climate change is more accurate, but still nebulous.
Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening. I personally liked the name "Santa's revenge" from this winter's breakdown of the polar vortex. Melt the north pole, and you'll all get a taste of the cold!
The universe is 14 billion years old. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Extrapolation shows that life has likely been evolving for about 9 billion years. We also know that very shortly (in geologic terms) after water arrived on our planet, green slime started spreading. I thought the current dominant theory was that life's origins are extraterrestrial and that somehow it jumped from wherever it started through space to a newly formed earth. If life traveled here aboard the shattered remains of the planet it evolved on, this would seem to indicate that we are the descendants of an extremely unlikely chain of events, which might make us the only life to have survived this long.
We always get a false impression of the reliability and quality of old stuff, because the stuff that sucked and broke got thrown out years ago, and the only things that we still encounter are the ones that were well made. It's true with old houses, old cars, old furniture, pretty much everything. I'm sure there's a law for this phenomenon with some pompous dude's name on it but it's a well established and discussed phenomenon.
This is why the current generation of MLC SSD's is so disruptive. A single, cheap, consumer grade drive has IOPS and longevity that used to cost 100x as much. There are big changes coming in the storage industry.
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Driving correctly should not be illegal.
This is one of the reasons I have been looking forward to AI driving. It forces us to have a real discussion about traffic laws that creates a motivation to fix lazy legislators leaving laws in place that people are forced to routinely break to make traffic work well. I'm tired of the speed limit being 10 MPH slower than the average speed of traffic, and I look forward to people finally standing up and demanding that speed limits be *higher* than the speed traffic naturally flows. Roads should have a recommended speed, that both AI and human drivers should aim for, and a legal limit that police can and should stop you if you exceed. We currently have de-facto versions of that with the recommended speed being the speed limit, and the legal limit being about 15 over, but in working that way, we're technically routinely breaking the law, and that's not how laws should work.
Android apps start fast and have a low memory footprint because they use shared memory to share code with the software that runs the phone. You can't do that unless the phone uses java for it's internal functionality, which Windows phones would not, so app's startup time and memory footprint would be much worse than on real Android.
Balmer understands markets, but he doesn't understand tech, or design. His reign at Microsoft showed a complete squandering of technical talent in a series of boondoggles that someone with better knowledge of the underlying technology would have foreseen, and this took Microsoft from a dominant position to near collapse. Satya Nadella has had little to praise or criticise, but so far I feel his steps have been more strategically sound. Balmer needs to remain silent, because all he's accomplishing now is removing all doubt.
Security is needed, but so is productivity. Neither is valuable without the other.
I worked for a company that got breached and had stuff stolen. Their security was overblown and cumbersome, and not layered properly. They tried to secure their entire network, instead of properly layering things, and thus a hack that should have been trivial was not. Had they properly layered their network so the general employee work could happen fluidly, and people could get their jobs done without giving away the keys to the kingdom they would have been much better off. After the breach came mandatory drive encryption (with no password) which brought their largely aging laptop population to its knees. So much wasted time and horrible frustration, all to implement basically worthless security policies.
> security is a huge threat to productivity.
Exactly this. I've seen so many companies waste time and money on ineffective overblown security measures that they should be spending actually getting the job done. Layer your security so that it stays out of the way as much as possible while still protecting what is actually important.
You say the goal is "to cut costs", but what costs?
If the cost-savings comes from undermining a union, they probably would have sued already, so I'm guessing it's not that.
This shouldn't be a tax dodge, because 1099s should end up paying roughly the same federal and state tax, so it must be a reduction in actual compensation. Assuming that's the case, those being harmed look to be the 1099 employees themselves. As such, it would seem like a class action suit would be the appropriate course of action. If the state itself isn't willing to abide by the rule, it shouldn't expect others to either. The state should either follow the rule or repeal it.
I used to load my machines up with RAM to speed them up. It's not useless, but it makes a tiny fraction of the difference an SSD makes. It simply isn't worth it. Window's caching is terrible, it tends to thrash your disks at inopportune times, and it's filesystems end up a slow tangled mess so quickly that without an SSD, it's just painful. Combine that with the high failure rate of spinning disks in a laptop, the extra-slow speed of laptop drives, and the reduced battery life from their high power usage and you'll be much happier with an SSD based laptop. When SSDs hit the $1/gig barrier it became time to start phasing spinning disks out of all but the lowest-performing laptops. Now that they're pushing down to about 1/3rd that, I'd avoid any laptop maker who doesn't, because they're not very good at what they do.
Windows machines in recent years have become extremely bottlenecked by drive performance, especially in the case of laptops which are so popular in companies. Laptop hard drives are slow, capable of only about 80 IOPS which is about the same speed they were 10 years ago, whereas mainstream SSDs by comparison, can typically deliver 80,000 IOPS. Since once you get Windows loaded up with all it's random messy software it's disk access ends up being tons of tiny reads, IOPS is a much more important number than transfer rate, and SSDs are literally 1000x faster. It can mean the difference between a 20 minute operation and one that takes a few seconds.
If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD. It's false efficiency, wasting very expensive time to save a relatively cheap expense. 256GB SSDs are under $100 and will handle most corporate work just fine. Up to 1TB, the expense is almost negligible and it will pay for itself almost immediately. Your IT department will be happier, your workers will be happier, your machines will be more secure because scanning them is a lot less intrusive and can happen more often. Your IT department should have a pile of SSDs ready to be deployed into any machine that needs to be re-imaged or where the user needs the speed. Not doing so is wasting money.
> I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates
No you didn't. You *thought* you installed all the updates because Windows lied to you and said you had. Windows Update has a horrible habit of checking to see what updates are available **for the state of your machine right now** and then telling you that it's done installing updates when those are installed, when in truth there are pending updates that required previous updates to be installed before they could subsequently be installed that Windows Update won't tell you about until you re-discover what updates are available. After an install, force re-scan after every reboot to see what new updates are now available and when you reboot and re-scan and it says you are done, you are actually done.
I feel like some wireless routers using openWRT might be useful here. Configure a few to nat the traffic from each port to a specific ip, then have that routed over the wireless. You could drop a wireless router in each island and update them all over wireless.
> Though NAT is included with almost all firewalls, it is not there to address security.
You missed my point. Firewalls are needed for security, and if you have a firewall, you can do NAT. Not needing NAT becomes a non-feature because it doesn't significantly impact complexity or cost.
Automatic address assignment: Useless. DHCP is better.
No more NAT: Useless. NAT is part of firewalls which are still needed. It's easy, and incredibly flexible.
Better multicast routing: Useless. Multicast is dead, and will remain so.
Simplified routing: Useless. This has been implemented outside IP
QOS: Useless. The IPv6 implementation is wrong for how QOS is used now.
Larger Address Space: The only useful feature in IPv6, but it was done wrong, and should be abandoned.
We need IPv8 that does things right for the internet we have *today* not the internet we thought we'd need in 1998.
There are definitely times when estimates are appropriate in programming, but the more unknowns there are inside a project, the more you need to nail those unknowns down before estimating is worthwhile. Sometimes, prototyping should be done without estimates.
Evacuated tubes have much better economic dynamics than sub-orbital flight. It's high-speed rail without air friction with potentially incredibly fast speeds. You could work in New York and have a lunch at midnight in Tokyo and be back to NY for dinner. It would be amazingly expensive to build, but it could be incredibly cheap to run.
Automation replaces work with rent. It's has a negative macroeconomic effect, amplified by the fact that work pays taxes, and rent doesn't. The solution seems obvious, reverse that dynamic. Make things that earn money for their owners pay taxes instead of workers.
Drive Writes Per Day is *the* important metric for judging the write load capabilities of a drive. 1 DWPD is perfectly adequate for consumer/desktop use and many fileserver applications but impractical for backing a database, where 5 DWPD is more appropriate. You pay about 50% more for a 5 DWPD drive than a consumer level one, but if it saves you from having to replace the drive 5 times, it's worth it.
Inaccuracies aside, this is an important property of SSD's to keep in mind when procuring them.
The summary refers to the time when neanderthals and modern humans intermixed, but can we really call what came before the mixing modern humans? It seems that something about the combination sparked huge evolutionary changes that allowed us to rather rapidly (evolutionarily speaking) develop modern society. As far as I'm concerned, the history of modern humans starts with the mixing.
> especially since they all say the exact opposite.
I always find it funny how conservative talk radio hosts seem to like pointing out how much more intelligent they and their listeners are than everyone else, almost as if they think that by saying it enough, it will make it true.
There's no monopoly on intelligence on either side of the isle, and regardless, a right and noble idea supported by stupid people is still right and noble. Arguing that an idea is stupid because it's supporters are stupid is invalid.
Immorality is much easier to excuse when you believe there is a divine order to things. When someone is poor, or suffering or has had a bad run of luck, belief in a divine plan makes it easy to see that as deserved, instead of unfortunate. When someone is rich, powerful and/or fortunate, you're more likely to see them as superior and deserving of their good fortune if you are religious.
Every time you hear someone thank god that for answering their prayers and blessing them with something, keep in mind that intrinsically behind that statement is the idea that god has made a judgement call and found them deserving of having their prayers answered. It's a round about way of saying "God chose this for me, because he thinks I deserve it." It always rubs me as subtly arrogant to imply that whatever good fortune you are enjoying isn't simply good fortune, but it's a reward you earned because god found you deserving of it, and thusly found everyone else who doesn't receive that same thing, undeserving.
I thought that evidence was pointing to us being the product of about 9.5 billion years of evolution. Given that we live on a 4.5 billion year old world, life would have had to survive some sort of space-gap before getting to earth.
If sentient life takes 9.5 billion years to evolve, and the universe is only 13.5 billion years old, life would have had to start evolving relatively fast for it to get this far. The earlier you go in the universe's history, the more rare planets become. Even more rare would be a planet orbiting a star hot enough to fuel life, but also in continuous operation for that long. If it really does take 9.5 billion years for life to reach this level of complexity, and in our case it survived the destruction of a planet to spread to a new one, then the Fermi paradox all-but disappears and likelihood that sentient life is currently extremely rare, or even unique to our planet increases dramatically.
Global warming was always a terrible name because the imagery was all wrong.
Global climate change is more accurate, but still nebulous.
Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening. I personally liked the name "Santa's revenge" from this winter's breakdown of the polar vortex. Melt the north pole, and you'll all get a taste of the cold!
> I despair of ever managing to lay a good caulk bead.
It definitely looks like something any idiot can do, but I fail every time.
The universe is 14 billion years old. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Extrapolation shows that life has likely been evolving for about 9 billion years. We also know that very shortly (in geologic terms) after water arrived on our planet, green slime started spreading. I thought the current dominant theory was that life's origins are extraterrestrial and that somehow it jumped from wherever it started through space to a newly formed earth. If life traveled here aboard the shattered remains of the planet it evolved on, this would seem to indicate that we are the descendants of an extremely unlikely chain of events, which might make us the only life to have survived this long.
I think you're confused.
egarland's law states that only pompous windbags have their names associated with obvious phenomenon that everyone has always known.
We always get a false impression of the reliability and quality of old stuff, because the stuff that sucked and broke got thrown out years ago, and the only things that we still encounter are the ones that were well made. It's true with old houses, old cars, old furniture, pretty much everything. I'm sure there's a law for this phenomenon with some pompous dude's name on it but it's a well established and discussed phenomenon.
If you start with the assumption that you can't make secure software, then you shouldn't make any software at all.
This is why the current generation of MLC SSD's is so disruptive. A single, cheap, consumer grade drive has IOPS and longevity that used to cost 100x as much. There are big changes coming in the storage industry.