Yes... the average child in 1st world countries can open a bank account. We trust them.
There is also Visa, Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, several local options, prepaid visa cards, etc... there is no shortage of options. If you only have cash, go to a local currency exchange and convert your cash to a prepaid bank card.
In Norway and Sweden, when using locally issued cards, there is no transaction fee. The smallest currency is a single Krone or Crown which is $0.12. The cheapest thing I know you can buy in either Sweden or Norway is a type of gum which costs 2.5NOK/SEK which is about $0.31. Even with a transaction fee, it would be covered. Besides, if they raised the price to 5NOK/SEK no one would notice the difference.
Outages happen, but typically not for long. Though with more electric cars burdening the grid, it could get worse. That said, there is always a diesel or gas car somewhere to be found. Those are generators by definition. Biltema, Kjell & Co and many other stores in Sweden sell cheap 12v to 220v converters. Even if power is down for a few hours which I've never heard of, it is generally possible to charge a phone. And the phone network will easily handle more than an hour of power loss. As such, there is always a way to pay in Scandinavia.
If people want to be anonymous about it, there are many many many different anonymous forms of payment as well.
Nope... in Norway at least, we can just go to a website and setup a bank account. You need a national ID number and you need the government two factor authentication to do so, but no interaction with the bank in person. In fact, we setup our kids when they were 8 and 10 years old and they didn't even need to be there. Now, for the rest of their lives, they can perform all banking transactions including taking loans for a house online.
Norway and Sweden have power grids which... well they don't really go down. Checking my power monitoring software at my house, I had one power outage 6 years ago and I remember we were warned about that because of grid upgrades. Additionally, I saw a mild brownout 10 years ago. The power grids in this part of the world pretty much just work. It's called being in a first world country.
All banking outages I'm aware of in Norway for the past 6 years (since I've been involved) have been due to negligence in failed changes during outage windows. It's been things like failed certificate renewals and such. This is very common.
The problem boils down to one simple thing. Banks tend to use more IT people and less IS people. As a result you get a whole lot more stupid people running systems.
Really? Over here in Norway, the machine would just go "beep beep beep" and then make you sign a receipt instead. I think I've actually done that for a 1500NOK dinner.
I can understand why you guys are struggling. But would it really be that big of a problem in Sweden? I always imagined Sweden, Norway and Denmark were pretty much the same when it comes to trusting that people are generally honest.
I don't think that's really a problem. How hard is it to use something like Paypal or the Swedish similar service.
In Norway, I gave a homeless person about $50 the other day hoping that she would go find someplace to take a shower and clean herself up a little. I paid it to her using a telephone payment system from the bank.
Of course, if that wouldn't have worked, I could go to any convenience store and buy a relatively anonymous prepaid credit card.
Now I have no idea what form of payments prostitutes here take, I would imagine they've sorted that out by now.
But to be honest... I have 500NOK in my wallet, it's been there over a year. I've traveled to 15+ countries this past year and other than in Qatar where I thought the money looked cool and took some out, I haven't used cash at all.
What's really amazing is that you can actually function pretty well without cash in America these days... at least it Seattle and Tampa. I was really shocked since the U.S. is basically a 2nd or 3rd world country (this is based on how the wealthy and middle class treat their poor)
Ok... I just read up on ANS. It was quite an enlightening read and it's humorous because I remember thinking of a similar pattern when working with arithmetic coding 10 years back.
Here's the thing. The simplicity of ANS is elegant in its nature.
It's also extremely obvious in hindsight, though I'll be absolutely shocked if anyone in the courtroom except for Duda will understand that.
I would however say that because ANS is effectively so amazingly simple in its nature, if Duda's argument is to keep Google from patenting their extensions as opposed to trying to file for a patent himself later, I believe it would be much easier to suggest that the base math as well as the extension are non patentable under the pretense that they are not as much algorithms as opposed to mathematical discoveries or formulas.
There are some catches to this.
The probability distribution S may justify the math as an algorithm rather than as a formula.
But I would say otherwise that no part of this compression should be able to be patented under the same grounds that a Taylor series couldn't be patented. And while I haven't become an expert on the math yet for ANS, it reminds me of a generalized infinite sum problem.
So... call me crazy, but I'd imagine that pretty much anyone with a masters degree in some form of math should be able to act as an expert witness to simply say that this is a discovery and not an invention and therefore is not patentable.
Well, to be accurate, it's subsystem. Win64, Win32, Win16, OS/2-16, POSIX, and Linux all run as subsystems on top of the Windows Kernel.
I was a bit tired when I wrote that and now that I'm reading it, I'm struggling to understand why I wrote it that way.
WSL is absolutely amazing in the sense that it's basically a clean-room "kinda user space" Linux Kernel. Microsoft, re-implemented the Linux Syscall interface (not that amazing, Sun, FreeBSD, etc... have all done this) and re-implemented components of devfs and procfs as well as lots of other stuff as well. It's a major undertaking since Linux is a bit of an ABI whore.
So, the weird thing is, it is kinda sorta a VM, more of a container with something more VM like than bare metal happening.
It actually is not another kernel as opposed to a subsystem which implements the entire ABI of a kernel. In fact, what's really funny is that it's not technically Linux, rather Ubuntu running on a full Linux kernel replacement.
Now, I'm really really glad you made me read further because the "VM" as I called it and the "not-bare metal" abstraction is the performance issue and it's known.
WSL is running on what's called Pico Processes is which another system for containerization which is yet another layer up. So, the definition of what bare metal is gets really confusing. Also the difference of what a virtual machine is get really blurry.
VMware in the earliest days (and even now for legacy support) runs a just-in-time compiler against guest operating systems to intercept hardware calls that need to be virtualized. Unlike more modern and refined hypervisors, it makes no real attempt at eliminating the need for this silliness. Instead, it's actually scanning loaded machine code for things like calls to INB/OUTB/INW/OUTW... etc... so that it can intercept them, set TRAPs (triggering NMI and/or debugs), inject calls to simulated functions, etc...
Then there's things like para-virtualization where you recompile the operating system kernel to explicitly make calls into the host OS and completely and totally remove any actual kernel from the kernel but instead do something more like user mode Linux. This requires the vendor of the "hypervisor" to change the kernel source of the guest or to supply the APIs needed by the guest. Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc... all support these APIs and they're even documented to varying levels. For example, the entire interface as needed by Hyper-V is part of the Linux kernel. Those same APIs are used by Windows and therefore could be used to paravirtualize much of Windows.
Then there's the in-between thing. See, a proper hypervisor as opposed to parahypervisor tends to perform resource allocation and provide a lot of bare metal resources to VMs. So Intel, AMD, NVidia, Cisco, and many others would have you believe that a VM in order to be a VM would require making use of hardware partitioning services.
This is simply not the case. That's legacy virtualization and is no longer needed for pretty much anything other than running non-paravirtualized operating systems.
Real "bare metal hypervisors" are ridiculously inefficient and risk massive security issues because there's no way to do things like have the host hypervisor enforce security. The latest hack on AMD's encrypted memory for VMs made me realize how insanely broken the entire hypervisor model is. In fact, pure hypervisors like VMware should never be allowed in a secure environment. Paravirtualization is the only possible way to start fixing VM security... and that will be a long road.
So... then we have Pico-processes which is a beautiful solution from Microsoft for providing a much much much better solution to the problem... at least when it comes to secure virtualization. Simply don't virtualize. Make a VM which isn't a VM.
Remember, a virtual machine doesn't in fact have to be a perfect replica of a physical machine. That's just VMware voodoo and witchcraft (and I pray they keep making that because I love VMware
Windows Defender is tuned for Windows kernel integration and performs well there. Although to be honest, recent builds of defender have been a hog as I'm assuming it's being a bit more aggressive at sandboxing for CPU prediction bugs.
That said, Windows defender doesn't seem to understand the WSL stuff at all, however it's using the entire system resources to real-time monitor disk reads and writes.
When running without Windows Defender real-time monitoring enabled, it seems to increase performance of the VM to near bare-metal speeds.
I paid $80 for season 1 and then paid for a subscription to see the other seasons but I couldnâ€(TM)t download them to watch offline. So I pirated the entire series and will cancel the subscription when Iâ€(TM)m done watching.
Thirteen 16 minute episodes (the average amount of new content per episode) for $20 is far too expensive. Especially for 200+ episodes. So, I figured $100 for 320 minutes of entertainment is more than fair. Especially for content that is 10 years old.
What can the EU or the US government possibly do to Google now?
Will they fine them?
How will they collect it?
Will they split them up?
How would they actually force that to happen?
Will they arrest the leadership?
How fast would Google bury the courts in so much paper and lawsuits that it would cost tax payers 10 times more money than the EU is asking just to process it?
Will they launch a political war on Google?
How exactly would the leadership of those countries stay in office if Google search results returned nothing but negative information about those leaders?
I get the feeling you don't realize just how big Google really is. Apple may be richer, but Google is way bigger than any company in the history of the world. They make IBM at their absolute largest look like a peanut shell next to an elephant.
What percentage of the entire world's infrastructure does Google currently own/run?
What would happen to the Internet if Google turned off their CDN and their sub-sea links?
These are just the little things.
If you break them up, how many of those smaller companies could earn enough money to be in business?
What would the impact of those lost services/products be?
Yeh... Size does matter. If Google pays the fines or complies with EU law, it will be purely to be nice.
I'm an American who immigrated to Norway. I came here, I took a local woman. I spread my seed and produced offspring and took some of the best jobs in engineering that Norway had to offer. I polluted the local culture with Americanisms. I've brought the word "Nifty" back to life on an almost national scale.
I am an immigrant and I'm not leaving!
One day though, I will become a Norwegian citizen (for tax purposes) and when that happens, I swear... I will vote for any politician that is in favor of a total ban on Eurovision Song Competition.
1) iOS used to be less buggy than Android. But to keep the market fair, Apple made iOS buggy enough to be Android now.
2) Neither iOS or Android has a solid app platform, they do however both have a massive number of apps. Some of them are even moderately decent. Of course if you have a T-Mobile Samsung you probably can't download the app or a software update because Play Store on that platform crashes after 10 taps or less.
3) Google still has impressively shitty music and movie stores outside of the US compared to Apple. Google seems to be hellbent on asking each publisher nicely for permission to sell their stuff. Apple on the other hand basically says "We're going to sell your shit and either you can help us set the price or we'll sell it for whatever we want and if you want your money, you'll ask us nicely for it".
4) When you say "Does that Android does" are you referring to the massive data collection? The tracking absolutely everything you do? The end to end absolute disrespect for any form of personal privacy? Thanks to desktop usage, Google already knows far too much about me. It's scary how frigging much Google knows about every move I make. Using an Android phone simply means that Google will now know every last thing about me... all the time... no matter when or where I'm doing it.
I believe strongly that current Google leadership is made up of generally good people with the right intentions. But what happens when the board ejects that leadership and elects someone who will shamelessly monetize off of data we let Google have in good faith?
No there are no rivals to the Google platform, but I would not be surprised if China were to make a legitimate attempt at one now.
Besides... it's not like they'll actually pay it... and if they do, they'll pay it over 50 years with a 0.1% interest rate.
Winning the money isn't the same as collecting it and I'm pretty sure it costs less than 2.8 billion euro to run the collectors around in circles for a few decades.
I was a developer at Opera. Until our company was mismanaged and driven into the ground by a profiteering board of directors hellbent on seeing ROI instead of long term growth through good products, we did make a better web browser than most. That wasn't EU but was Norway.
My drinking buddies worked for companies like Fast Search and Transfer which was consumed by Microsoft and ended up working on Bing... I know that's not really a better search engine... in fact it's horrible. I searched for "When is mother's day" on it using Cortana the other day and it returned nothing but incest porn links. So I'll assume it has a few bugs or that Bing is being use mostly by German politicians which is driving up ratings on certain web sites.
I heard of some operating system made by a Finnish guy... I can't remember his name or what the OS is called, but I'm sure someone around here may have heard of it.
Of course, there's also this Qt thing... made on the same floor of the same building as the Opera Web Browser. And the KDE thing which was made by a German guy who later worked at Qt. And oh... there's WebKit which was made by another German guy. And there's this thing called the World Wide Web made by Sir Timmy himself while working in Geneva.
There's also this chip thing called ARM which seems to be catching on. It's pretty much running the entire mobile and IOT world. And then there's Atmel who probably still sells more CPUs than the next 5 CPU producers combined.
Of course, for 10+ years the entire mobile phone market outside of the US was dominated by Nokia and Symbian... which to be fair was some of the worst software ever written, but it did have market dominance by a large scale.
Then there are things like major components you use. Like VideoLAN which is mostly french. There's GStreamer which is (or was) led by a Dutch guy.
There is plenty of stuff going on out here. I can write for a long time on the topic.
I am however against this lawsuit because I feel that it's nothing more than a fund raiser from the EU. In addition, they love to mention that Google lost the 2.3 billion euro. It says nothing about whether they've actually agreed to pay it or whether they decided it was cheaper to just waste more time in court. It's not like a credit reporting agency could really force them to pay. Could you imagine Dunn and Bradstreet lowering their rating over something like this?
Even if the EU fined Google 50 billion Euro, Google would just ignore it and move on. It's some piss-ant kid trying to build his resume by winning huge lawsuits against Google.
Let's be honest... even if Google did pay the 2.3 billion Euro... was that even a punishment to them? They can probably lose 5 billion every 10 years to the EU and it wouldn't make a difference to them. But also notice that no company... not Google, Apple or anyone else will ever pay a 2.3 billion euro fine and if they did, they'd pay it in pennies.
So the lawsuit is bullshit. They're doing it as a fund raiser. They're seeing how much money they can put in their coffers. Remember, if they win 2.3 billion Euro off of Google. So long as Google owes them that money, they can still spend it because they'll print the money (symbolically) and from a credit perspective justify it from the note.
First... $100k a year is wealthy? That's two people averaging $50k a year income. That's not wealthy. That's barely middle class (not middle income which is American for barely out of poverty).
Second... 14% of the people in America living in $100k+ a year household manage to make $100K+ a year without using the Internet? How the hell in 2018 can you earn $50K+ a year without using the Internet? I'm trying hard as hell to list careers that pay $50K+ a year and don't require Internet access. I suppose some of the union workers at UPS in the sorting facilities might get that much. Would a household with two people who work on a Tesla assembly line make that much?
Maybe this is counting a very large number of retired people who have investments that make $100K in returns a year.
I'm totally grasping at straws now. Who the hell can possibly be in that paygrade in 2018 without using the Internet? Is it possible it's a sales person who things that when he's watching porn on his telephone or tablet that it's not really Internet?
Please don't joke... I've actually been trying to buy a VAX this past month because I need something that runs DECTERM properly. The shipping on those things is a bit prohibitive though.
So... you're able to build a PC and install software on it and do all of that, but you can't remember how to swipe your finger to show hidden things?
I carry a PC which is 2lbs, has a respectable 8th Gen Core i7, a GTX 1060 and by the time it's a little old, I can get a new one and pass this one down to one of my kids.
When I get to work, I plug it into a 27" Wacom Cintiq, and external keyboard and mouse. When I'm on an airplane, I can play video games with an XBox One controller on a VR display.
As for temperature... not really a problem. It is never to hot to have on my lap.
As for swipes and stuff, I can detach the screen and use it as a 1lb tablet for reading and watching films or playing angry birds.
The big machines... they basically sit around running mining software to avoid letting them collect dust.
Let me recommend something useful. Get a laptop... something simple and good enough. Then get a passport. Then get a plane ticket. Travel and see the world.
If you think that a desktop is a replacement for a decent laptop, you probably are at risk of a vitamin D deficiency and should spend some time at a cafe in Madrid or maybe on the steps of a pyramid in south america.
And for some of us, typing class was a class which only girls were allowed to take in school because they were being prepared for their very exciting career as a secretary as someone forgot to call the school and say "Dude... this is the '90s, girls are legally allowed to think now"
You're asking whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that a single political party would have control over a specific issue.
Shouldn't you instead be asking whether there is a much deeper and more fundamental problem with the political system when it's possible for a single political party to make unilateral decisions on anything.
Newt Gingrich is possibly one of the greatest American patriots of all time. This is a man who loves America more than almost anyone else and he doesn't even need a reason to do so. He simply knows that since he was ejected from a vagina following a clearly misplaced penile ejaculation in such a manor as to place him on the American team, it is the best country in the world NO MATTER WHAT. And he loves the country and all it stands for so much that he campaigned for president while bragging that he spent his entire political career trying to completely undermine the American democracy by eliminating checks and balances. (For reference see transcripts of his performance in the republican primaries)
America is in a state today where the country came dangerously close to:
58% Republican in the house.. with 60%, they could force measures without allowing democrats to even voice their oppinions
A republican appointed majority in the judiciary branch (though supremes usually walk very close to center as it's too easy to block appointments)
55% Senate, 51% is enough to pass almost anything, but 60% would leave democrats entirely without a voice.
A republic president... though it was Trump and he's basically an independent who simply realized it was easier to force his way through the republican ranks than the democrats.
I don't really care whether the government is red or blue. I care that the government can be red or blue. America is failing miserably because the health and well being of the country has become a sport with two teams and players are picked like players for a football team.
American politics are based on power. If you're going to run for office, you need to do it as republican or democrat. This is why Bernie Sanders, a perpetual independent signed on with the democrats during the previous election. To run of office, you need the support and sponsorship of a party or you'll be unheard and not stand a chance. You have to join one of two teams and the only way you'll garner support from one team or another is if you join the team. Even Trump has to play by the republic rule book within certain limits.
The problem is, to get into office, you have to agree to kneel and deal as the power brokers say...which means voting with the party as opposed to with the best interests of people who voted for you. Or you have to establish yourself as a power broker yourself. Which means garnering support of the financial backers who will supply you power in office.
And the result is that the American system can no longer be "by the people" or "for the people". Instead is "by the parties" and "for the people controlling/funding the parties".
So... while you're claiming red or blue... you should consider finding some religion to have a deity to pray to for someone to weaken the red or blue power vacuums because both parties are run by people who think winning is about leaving at least half the American people completely and totally unrepresented.....
That said... Net Neutrality became an issue because America is too damn big geographically and has way too few people per square mile in most parts of the country outside of the urban centers. There are government sanctioned monopolies that are granted to individual companies such as Comcast. The same people who complain that the government should stay out of their homes are the same people who wouldn't have Internet access or possibly even running water if it weren't for the government intervening and supporting them. These people if they have anything that
Your state is a failure because it is either red or blue.
I am absolutely so glad I left America with no intention of ever going back. I now live in a country with so many political parties that none of them have the ability to do anything based on party lines. They actually have to sit, discuss and convince others that what they are doing is the right thing to do...not for the people or for the party or for the corporations... they have to convince each other that it's actually the right thing to do.
That said, just like in America, the politicians are uneducated frigging idiots that lack the knowledge to make decisions on what they're supposed to decide and they believe that the experts are the people who dress and speak like they do... which leaves them extremely poorly informed and therefore prone to believe the right thing to do is the idiotic thing.
For the most part though, they are relatively harmless because they can't sign any bills of any real importance into law because no one will ever agree on a large enough level to do so. As such, they have no power and cannot fuck things up too badly.
You on the other hand live in a blue state which means that at a state level, decisions are generally made by a club who all agree with each other because of the team they play on as opposed to on the issues themselves. The same would go for red states.
After all, why would you need to take the time to understand the issue and consider how it would affect the people when you can just vote on party lines and be frigging idiots. Heaven forbid the politicians took the time to understand what net neutrality actually means.
Here's one for you... make a simple case with simple drawings and gartner graphs to explain this :
Revoking net neutrality in the U.S. would make several American corporations stronger, but would make America as a whole weaker. It would hurt the schools, the military, the space program, the content producers, the politicians... it would actually hurt almost everyone except the few companies positioned to better exploit higher tariffs. And because non-US countries that all have net neutrality are not effected, it will give them an edge in every category upon which the U.S. claims to want dominance. Revoking net neutrality would basically place the U.S. on equal footing with Turkey.
I'm using the latest Surface Book with an i7, GTX 1060, 16GB, etc... I can highly recommend this machine as being well suited for performance and battery life. As a matter of fact, the battery life and performance often improves as Windows update brings in the BIOS/firmware updates as well.
I'm also considering one of these laptops for a hobby project. I do a lot of ARM development for Raspberry Pi. And I mean a lot. I had planned on building a 2000-3000 device cloud using Raspberry Pi clusters with a Cisco 3560 switch to tie them together in groups of 3-4 units. Yesterday, I managed to replace the Cisco switch with a Banana Pi router platform running fd.io, frr. That was a massive cost savings and it got me Cisco DMVPN support from the Banana Pi as well.
Another major change we made is to add another 20-50,000 Orange Pi Zeros to the cloud we're building. I suspect by the time we're done, I'll have a 500,000 device cloud. These will all be running on Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi and Orange Pi. Though at this quantity we may just work with the guys at Banana Pi to build what we want specifically.
So that said, it would be really nice to have a laptop which I can use to develop code on and test performance. Visual Studio Code and.NET Core work REALLY well on these laptops.
I have to agree with you though... every time I touch the long battery life laptops that sacrifice performance for battery life it's like being on an old Nokia telephone. Sure the battery last 4 days, but if you're surfing the web, you'll need that long to get the page to download because Nokia swore that unlike Windows Phone, they don't need a real processor, enough RAM or an MMU on the phone... oh... and I was one of the idiots writing the web browser for the Nokia phones. Every other one of our customers were like "We want to build the ultimate mobile experience. We'll give you the RAM you need and the performance you need to make the web work" and Nokia's like "If you use ARM and Symbian you don't need RAM or CPU performance because everyone in the whole world will make an entirely separate web page just for our phones".
So... when you perform the initial OS settings configuration, you choose what you want to sent to Microsoft. You can choose "Send nothing" or you can choose to give them enough information to allow Cortana to adapt to your behavior like Google does. Will Microsoft sell your data? I suppose there's a chance. I think it's far more likely that the revenue it would generate would be nothing in comparison to the issues it would stir up with their cloud business which is their real money maker these days.
Also, if you understand the concept of Microsoft Graph, you understand why the data is being send to the cloud. It actually makes perfect sense technically. The issue is that it's Microsoft getting the data. Linux will never have something as cool and useful as Graph because it would require collecting the data somewhere to make it work.
Windows 10 as a platform is actually very nice. I have to admit it's had some ups and downs, but overall it's still nowhere near as bad as MacOS with regards to usability. Also it has Linux built into it as a first class citizen. It's actually absolutely lovely. As soon as Microsoft sorts out compatibility between Linux and Windows graphics, it will be a thing of beauty. I'm hoping Microsoft cuts a deal with Ubuntu or someone else to run Windows on Linux as nicely as Linux runs on Windows.
If you're not a power user and have no need for wide-spread cloud integration of your stuff... that's fine. Do what you need to do. I see you use gmail, I might recommend Pine as a good alternative. There are some of us who use a computer for more than just surfing the web and watching Naruto.
Staff there reported symptoms including hearing loss, dizziness, fatigue, and cognitive issues
So lawyers, poli-sci grads, international studies grads :
- Are noticed to be misinterpreting everything they hear in a way that seems like they are suffering hearing loss
- Are dizzy after lunch and dinner... maybe having a little bit of trouble walking a straight line, can't touch their noses, etc...
- Appear to be lazy as shit and are hoping people will believe they have fatigue?
- Have cognitive issues... I mean beyond the aforementioned being a lawyer, poli-sci/international studies grad...
I seriously don't see how this isn't a bigger problem in all embassies around the world.
Is it possible this has always been the case but now, they're in a communist country and want to blame it on that?
I think it depends on the long term goal of what you're hoping to build.
I don't know RHEV but I am more than a little experienced with VMware. Sure, VMware can be setup pretty quickly. But VMware is a disaster after it's setup. You end up with bunches of VMs and bunches of LUNs and heaven forbid you use NSX or worse, Cisco ACI, you'll end up with a rats nest from hell. VMware, should never be used anywhere you need more than a few virtual machines.
See I guess the point is that if you're simply trying to build a system which facilitates 1990 style IT in a virtualized environment, VMware is ok. Probably the best tool for the job ever really. But this is 2018. We are supposed to be smarter than that.
I develop software for the enterprise and I've also taken over operations in our environment. They were wasting $1.6 million a year on VMware and servers. It was a nightmare.
I asked "Why are we spending all this money on 10Gb/s networking?", the answered "We need it for storage and for vMotion".
So I pointed out that the software itself would operate well on 10Mb/s networking, but that faster would decrease transaction latency as 10 times the line speed means 1/10th the time to transmit a single frame.
So I asked "My software works almost entirely using an in-RAM database. I don't read and write from disk except for cold storage. Why do you need that much performance for storage?". They attempted to make the case that it was required because they need to be able to migrate the virtual machines if needed across the hyper-converged storage.
I asked "Why would you migrate the VMs at all? They're designed to simply die and be replaced by newly spun up ones". And they explained that we can't depend on that.
I asked why they had 2 10Gb/s switches for each data center and two more in the middle. And I wanted to know why we were spending a lot of money on MPLS between two sites. And worse, if we lost a data center, would we be down to a single site/single point of failure. They explained that it was too expensive to add a third data center and that it wouldn't make sense and that the risk was acceptable as there was so much redundancy in each data center that if a catastrophe on that scale occurred, we had bigger problems.
So I talked to the CFO and asked him to give me a breakdown of what IT was costing us a year for the data center. I wanted the consultant and power costs as well. We were spending $3.0 million+
So, I started a grass roots project. Bought a 3D printer, 10 Cisco 8 port network switches, 40 Raspberry Pis and the additional accessories I would need. Then I built 10 "Pods" which is a switch and 4 Raspberry Pis. Then I setup Kubernetes and Couchbase and setup a CI/CD service. And then I simply deployed our applications (written in C#) and done. We use a distributed load balancer, but more for logging than anything else. We use IPv6 mobility and AnyCast for all our failover stuff.
We now have an IT cost for data center operations of about $25,000 a year. We have 10 sites for failover... what have a share-nothing database which can suffer MASSIVE outages and never miss a beat. We can scale to all our sites (1000+) if we want. And we can handle substantially more transactions a second than we ever could on VMware.
Oh and if any site goes down, we throw it in a box and put a new one there. It's not worth debugging.
Oh... the rest of our systems are pretty much SaaS these days. We did some research and realized that 95%+ of what we were running in our data centers was stuff that we needed just to keep the data center running. The remaining 5% of the system resources were used for communication, collaboration, accounting, identity and our internally developed applications. So we just stuck everything but our own stuff in the cloud.
When people go on about RHEV vs. VMware vs. Ubuntu, I can't help to think about a room full of men with hats discussing optimal horse breeding for pulling delivery carts while Henry Ford is building a factory to produce cars.
I'm going out on a limb here... from what you wrote, I'm not entirely sure whether you like and respect Bill or not and as such, I feel you should really take a good long breath and the take moment to share how you really feel about Bill with us.
Bill was no angel and I think that he has been pretty clear about that in the past.
Let's assume a few things.
1) He has the money now. He has a lot of it. He has massive gobs of money. So much he could fill a swimming pool with chocolate pudding just to swim in his favorite food and he would make the money back in less time than it would take to mix it... even if he was just collecting 0.5% interest.
2) He's grown up and seems to want to make a positive difference in the world
3) He couldn't really give the money back to the people he cheated to get there.
4) Most of the people he "cheated" did just fine anyway. Let's be honest, if you made a product that Microsoft would actively compete with or depended on, you probably the kind of person who wouldn't just sit in a corner and cry about how the big bad Bill took your ice cream. You'll get up and get more ice cream and keep this ice cream away from Bill.
So now, he's spending the vast majority of the money trying to leverage what he's learned in life to make world differences. He's a bit hit and miss on this, but he's making a greater difference in many places than most governments have.
One of the most important differences he's trying to make is to decrease world population through improvements in infant mortality. Around the world, he's hoping to keep families too busy changing diapers to fuck and make more. It works almost everywhere. This is why almost all first world countries have seen negative population growth and some second and third world countries (like the U.S.) are starting to see that too.
He's actively debunking stupid people. Like for example, the anti-vaxxers. They attack him all the time for trying to poison the world. Then he publicly says things like "I'm sorry, can you please go be stupid over there. I'm too busy saving childrens' lives to waste my time with you."
I don't think you have to love the guy and bow down and offer the inside of your right cheek to him. But consider that when someone is out there trying to make a positive difference, we can't forget what they have done in the past. We may not even be able to forgive it. But focus on the now and hope that a little less hate and a little more positive reinforcement will help that person do the right thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... the average child in 1st world countries can open a bank account. We trust them.
There is also Visa, Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, several local options, prepaid visa cards, etc... there is no shortage of options. If you only have cash, go to a local currency exchange and convert your cash to a prepaid bank card.
In Norway and Sweden, when using locally issued cards, there is no transaction fee. The smallest currency is a single Krone or Crown which is $0.12. The cheapest thing I know you can buy in either Sweden or Norway is a type of gum which costs 2.5NOK/SEK which is about $0.31. Even with a transaction fee, it would be covered. Besides, if they raised the price to 5NOK/SEK no one would notice the difference.
Outages happen, but typically not for long. Though with more electric cars burdening the grid, it could get worse. That said, there is always a diesel or gas car somewhere to be found. Those are generators by definition. Biltema, Kjell & Co and many other stores in Sweden sell cheap 12v to 220v converters. Even if power is down for a few hours which I've never heard of, it is generally possible to charge a phone. And the phone network will easily handle more than an hour of power loss. As such, there is always a way to pay in Scandinavia.
If people want to be anonymous about it, there are many many many different anonymous forms of payment as well.
Nope... in Norway at least, we can just go to a website and setup a bank account. You need a national ID number and you need the government two factor authentication to do so, but no interaction with the bank in person. In fact, we setup our kids when they were 8 and 10 years old and they didn't even need to be there. Now, for the rest of their lives, they can perform all banking transactions including taking loans for a house online.
Norway and Sweden have power grids which... well they don't really go down. Checking my power monitoring software at my house, I had one power outage 6 years ago and I remember we were warned about that because of grid upgrades. Additionally, I saw a mild brownout 10 years ago. The power grids in this part of the world pretty much just work. It's called being in a first world country.
All banking outages I'm aware of in Norway for the past 6 years (since I've been involved) have been due to negligence in failed changes during outage windows. It's been things like failed certificate renewals and such. This is very common.
The problem boils down to one simple thing. Banks tend to use more IT people and less IS people. As a result you get a whole lot more stupid people running systems.
Really? Over here in Norway, the machine would just go "beep beep beep" and then make you sign a receipt instead. I think I've actually done that for a 1500NOK dinner.
I can understand why you guys are struggling. But would it really be that big of a problem in Sweden? I always imagined Sweden, Norway and Denmark were pretty much the same when it comes to trusting that people are generally honest.
I don't think that's really a problem. How hard is it to use something like Paypal or the Swedish similar service.
In Norway, I gave a homeless person about $50 the other day hoping that she would go find someplace to take a shower and clean herself up a little. I paid it to her using a telephone payment system from the bank.
Of course, if that wouldn't have worked, I could go to any convenience store and buy a relatively anonymous prepaid credit card.
Now I have no idea what form of payments prostitutes here take, I would imagine they've sorted that out by now.
But to be honest... I have 500NOK in my wallet, it's been there over a year. I've traveled to 15+ countries this past year and other than in Qatar where I thought the money looked cool and took some out, I haven't used cash at all.
What's really amazing is that you can actually function pretty well without cash in America these days... at least it Seattle and Tampa. I was really shocked since the U.S. is basically a 2nd or 3rd world country (this is based on how the wealthy and middle class treat their poor)
What is a cheque?
Ok... I just read up on ANS. It was quite an enlightening read and it's humorous because I remember thinking of a similar pattern when working with arithmetic coding 10 years back.
Here's the thing. The simplicity of ANS is elegant in its nature.
It's also extremely obvious in hindsight, though I'll be absolutely shocked if anyone in the courtroom except for Duda will understand that.
I would however say that because ANS is effectively so amazingly simple in its nature, if Duda's argument is to keep Google from patenting their extensions as opposed to trying to file for a patent himself later, I believe it would be much easier to suggest that the base math as well as the extension are non patentable under the pretense that they are not as much algorithms as opposed to mathematical discoveries or formulas.
There are some catches to this.
The probability distribution S may justify the math as an algorithm rather than as a formula.
But I would say otherwise that no part of this compression should be able to be patented under the same grounds that a Taylor series couldn't be patented. And while I haven't become an expert on the math yet for ANS, it reminds me of a generalized infinite sum problem.
So... call me crazy, but I'd imagine that pretty much anyone with a masters degree in some form of math should be able to act as an expert witness to simply say that this is a discovery and not an invention and therefore is not patentable.
I like systemd :(
/etc is still there at all
Probably the only truly bad think left with Linux is that
Well, to be accurate, it's subsystem. Win64, Win32, Win16, OS/2-16, POSIX, and Linux all run as subsystems on top of the Windows Kernel.
I was a bit tired when I wrote that and now that I'm reading it, I'm struggling to understand why I wrote it that way.
WSL is absolutely amazing in the sense that it's basically a clean-room "kinda user space" Linux Kernel. Microsoft, re-implemented the Linux Syscall interface (not that amazing, Sun, FreeBSD, etc... have all done this) and re-implemented components of devfs and procfs as well as lots of other stuff as well. It's a major undertaking since Linux is a bit of an ABI whore.
So, the weird thing is, it is kinda sorta a VM, more of a container with something more VM like than bare metal happening.
It actually is not another kernel as opposed to a subsystem which implements the entire ABI of a kernel. In fact, what's really funny is that it's not technically Linux, rather Ubuntu running on a full Linux kernel replacement.
Now, I'm really really glad you made me read further because the "VM" as I called it and the "not-bare metal" abstraction is the performance issue and it's known.
WSL is running on what's called Pico Processes is which another system for containerization which is yet another layer up. So, the definition of what bare metal is gets really confusing. Also the difference of what a virtual machine is get really blurry.
VMware in the earliest days (and even now for legacy support) runs a just-in-time compiler against guest operating systems to intercept hardware calls that need to be virtualized. Unlike more modern and refined hypervisors, it makes no real attempt at eliminating the need for this silliness. Instead, it's actually scanning loaded machine code for things like calls to INB/OUTB/INW/OUTW... etc... so that it can intercept them, set TRAPs (triggering NMI and/or debugs), inject calls to simulated functions, etc...
Then there's things like para-virtualization where you recompile the operating system kernel to explicitly make calls into the host OS and completely and totally remove any actual kernel from the kernel but instead do something more like user mode Linux. This requires the vendor of the "hypervisor" to change the kernel source of the guest or to supply the APIs needed by the guest. Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc... all support these APIs and they're even documented to varying levels. For example, the entire interface as needed by Hyper-V is part of the Linux kernel. Those same APIs are used by Windows and therefore could be used to paravirtualize much of Windows.
Then there's the in-between thing. See, a proper hypervisor as opposed to parahypervisor tends to perform resource allocation and provide a lot of bare metal resources to VMs. So Intel, AMD, NVidia, Cisco, and many others would have you believe that a VM in order to be a VM would require making use of hardware partitioning services.
This is simply not the case. That's legacy virtualization and is no longer needed for pretty much anything other than running non-paravirtualized operating systems.
Real "bare metal hypervisors" are ridiculously inefficient and risk massive security issues because there's no way to do things like have the host hypervisor enforce security. The latest hack on AMD's encrypted memory for VMs made me realize how insanely broken the entire hypervisor model is. In fact, pure hypervisors like VMware should never be allowed in a secure environment. Paravirtualization is the only possible way to start fixing VM security... and that will be a long road.
So... then we have Pico-processes which is a beautiful solution from Microsoft for providing a much much much better solution to the problem... at least when it comes to secure virtualization. Simply don't virtualize. Make a VM which isn't a VM.
Remember, a virtual machine doesn't in fact have to be a perfect replica of a physical machine. That's just VMware voodoo and witchcraft (and I pray they keep making that because I love VMware
Windows Defender is tuned for Windows kernel integration and performs well there. Although to be honest, recent builds of defender have been a hog as I'm assuming it's being a bit more aggressive at sandboxing for CPU prediction bugs.
That said, Windows defender doesn't seem to understand the WSL stuff at all, however it's using the entire system resources to real-time monitor disk reads and writes.
When running without Windows Defender real-time monitoring enabled, it seems to increase performance of the VM to near bare-metal speeds.
I paid $80 for season 1 and then paid for a subscription to see the other seasons but I couldnâ€(TM)t download them to watch offline. So I pirated the entire series and will cancel the subscription when Iâ€(TM)m done watching.
Thirteen 16 minute episodes (the average amount of new content per episode) for $20 is far too expensive. Especially for 200+ episodes. So, I figured $100 for 320 minutes of entertainment is more than fair. Especially for content that is 10 years old.
Otherwise, I buy all my stuff.
Nonsense.
What can the EU or the US government possibly do to Google now?
Will they fine them?
How will they collect it?
Will they split them up?
How would they actually force that to happen?
Will they arrest the leadership?
How fast would Google bury the courts in so much paper and lawsuits that it would cost tax payers 10 times more money than the EU is asking just to process it?
Will they launch a political war on Google?
How exactly would the leadership of those countries stay in office if Google search results returned nothing but negative information about those leaders?
I get the feeling you don't realize just how big Google really is. Apple may be richer, but Google is way bigger than any company in the history of the world. They make IBM at their absolute largest look like a peanut shell next to an elephant.
What percentage of the entire world's infrastructure does Google currently own/run?
What would happen to the Internet if Google turned off their CDN and their sub-sea links?
These are just the little things.
If you break them up, how many of those smaller companies could earn enough money to be in business?
What would the impact of those lost services/products be?
Yeh... Size does matter. If Google pays the fines or complies with EU law, it will be purely to be nice.
I'm an American who immigrated to Norway. I came here, I took a local woman. I spread my seed and produced offspring and took some of the best jobs in engineering that Norway had to offer. I polluted the local culture with Americanisms. I've brought the word "Nifty" back to life on an almost national scale.
I am an immigrant and I'm not leaving!
One day though, I will become a Norwegian citizen (for tax purposes) and when that happens, I swear... I will vote for any politician that is in favor of a total ban on Eurovision Song Competition.
1) iOS used to be less buggy than Android. But to keep the market fair, Apple made iOS buggy enough to be Android now.
2) Neither iOS or Android has a solid app platform, they do however both have a massive number of apps. Some of them are even moderately decent. Of course if you have a T-Mobile Samsung you probably can't download the app or a software update because Play Store on that platform crashes after 10 taps or less.
3) Google still has impressively shitty music and movie stores outside of the US compared to Apple. Google seems to be hellbent on asking each publisher nicely for permission to sell their stuff. Apple on the other hand basically says "We're going to sell your shit and either you can help us set the price or we'll sell it for whatever we want and if you want your money, you'll ask us nicely for it".
4) When you say "Does that Android does" are you referring to the massive data collection? The tracking absolutely everything you do? The end to end absolute disrespect for any form of personal privacy? Thanks to desktop usage, Google already knows far too much about me. It's scary how frigging much Google knows about every move I make. Using an Android phone simply means that Google will now know every last thing about me... all the time... no matter when or where I'm doing it.
I believe strongly that current Google leadership is made up of generally good people with the right intentions. But what happens when the board ejects that leadership and elects someone who will shamelessly monetize off of data we let Google have in good faith?
No there are no rivals to the Google platform, but I would not be surprised if China were to make a legitimate attempt at one now.
Besides... it's not like they'll actually pay it... and if they do, they'll pay it over 50 years with a 0.1% interest rate.
Winning the money isn't the same as collecting it and I'm pretty sure it costs less than 2.8 billion euro to run the collectors around in circles for a few decades.
Let's try some stuff here.
I was a developer at Opera. Until our company was mismanaged and driven into the ground by a profiteering board of directors hellbent on seeing ROI instead of long term growth through good products, we did make a better web browser than most. That wasn't EU but was Norway.
My drinking buddies worked for companies like Fast Search and Transfer which was consumed by Microsoft and ended up working on Bing... I know that's not really a better search engine... in fact it's horrible. I searched for "When is mother's day" on it using Cortana the other day and it returned nothing but incest porn links. So I'll assume it has a few bugs or that Bing is being use mostly by German politicians which is driving up ratings on certain web sites.
I heard of some operating system made by a Finnish guy... I can't remember his name or what the OS is called, but I'm sure someone around here may have heard of it.
Of course, there's also this Qt thing... made on the same floor of the same building as the Opera Web Browser. And the KDE thing which was made by a German guy who later worked at Qt. And oh... there's WebKit which was made by another German guy. And there's this thing called the World Wide Web made by Sir Timmy himself while working in Geneva.
There's also this chip thing called ARM which seems to be catching on. It's pretty much running the entire mobile and IOT world. And then there's Atmel who probably still sells more CPUs than the next 5 CPU producers combined.
Of course, for 10+ years the entire mobile phone market outside of the US was dominated by Nokia and Symbian... which to be fair was some of the worst software ever written, but it did have market dominance by a large scale.
Then there are things like major components you use. Like VideoLAN which is mostly french. There's GStreamer which is (or was) led by a Dutch guy.
There is plenty of stuff going on out here. I can write for a long time on the topic.
I am however against this lawsuit because I feel that it's nothing more than a fund raiser from the EU. In addition, they love to mention that Google lost the 2.3 billion euro. It says nothing about whether they've actually agreed to pay it or whether they decided it was cheaper to just waste more time in court. It's not like a credit reporting agency could really force them to pay. Could you imagine Dunn and Bradstreet lowering their rating over something like this?
Even if the EU fined Google 50 billion Euro, Google would just ignore it and move on. It's some piss-ant kid trying to build his resume by winning huge lawsuits against Google.
Let's be honest... even if Google did pay the 2.3 billion Euro... was that even a punishment to them? They can probably lose 5 billion every 10 years to the EU and it wouldn't make a difference to them. But also notice that no company... not Google, Apple or anyone else will ever pay a 2.3 billion euro fine and if they did, they'd pay it in pennies.
So the lawsuit is bullshit. They're doing it as a fund raiser. They're seeing how much money they can put in their coffers. Remember, if they win 2.3 billion Euro off of Google. So long as Google owes them that money, they can still spend it because they'll print the money (symbolically) and from a credit perspective justify it from the note.
Thank you!!! I've been looking for this comment.
First... $100k a year is wealthy? That's two people averaging $50k a year income. That's not wealthy. That's barely middle class (not middle income which is American for barely out of poverty).
Second... 14% of the people in America living in $100k+ a year household manage to make $100K+ a year without using the Internet? How the hell in 2018 can you earn $50K+ a year without using the Internet? I'm trying hard as hell to list careers that pay $50K+ a year and don't require Internet access. I suppose some of the union workers at UPS in the sorting facilities might get that much. Would a household with two people who work on a Tesla assembly line make that much?
Maybe this is counting a very large number of retired people who have investments that make $100K in returns a year.
I'm totally grasping at straws now. Who the hell can possibly be in that paygrade in 2018 without using the Internet? Is it possible it's a sales person who things that when he's watching porn on his telephone or tablet that it's not really Internet?
Please don't joke... I've actually been trying to buy a VAX this past month because I need something that runs DECTERM properly. The shipping on those things is a bit prohibitive though.
So... you're able to build a PC and install software on it and do all of that, but you can't remember how to swipe your finger to show hidden things?
I carry a PC which is 2lbs, has a respectable 8th Gen Core i7, a GTX 1060 and by the time it's a little old, I can get a new one and pass this one down to one of my kids.
When I get to work, I plug it into a 27" Wacom Cintiq, and external keyboard and mouse. When I'm on an airplane, I can play video games with an XBox One controller on a VR display.
As for temperature... not really a problem. It is never to hot to have on my lap.
As for swipes and stuff, I can detach the screen and use it as a 1lb tablet for reading and watching films or playing angry birds.
The big machines... they basically sit around running mining software to avoid letting them collect dust.
Let me recommend something useful. Get a laptop... something simple and good enough. Then get a passport. Then get a plane ticket. Travel and see the world.
If you think that a desktop is a replacement for a decent laptop, you probably are at risk of a vitamin D deficiency and should spend some time at a cafe in Madrid or maybe on the steps of a pyramid in south america.
And for some of us, typing class was a class which only girls were allowed to take in school because they were being prepared for their very exciting career as a secretary as someone forgot to call the school and say "Dude... this is the '90s, girls are legally allowed to think now"
You're simply thinking too small
: .. with 60%, they could force measures without allowing democrats to even voice their oppinions
.which means voting with the party as opposed to with the best interests of people who voted for you. Or you have to establish yourself as a power broker yourself. Which means garnering support of the financial backers who will supply you power in office.
....
You're asking whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that a single political party would have control over a specific issue.
Shouldn't you instead be asking whether there is a much deeper and more fundamental problem with the political system when it's possible for a single political party to make unilateral decisions on anything.
Newt Gingrich is possibly one of the greatest American patriots of all time. This is a man who loves America more than almost anyone else and he doesn't even need a reason to do so. He simply knows that since he was ejected from a vagina following a clearly misplaced penile ejaculation in such a manor as to place him on the American team, it is the best country in the world NO MATTER WHAT. And he loves the country and all it stands for so much that he campaigned for president while bragging that he spent his entire political career trying to completely undermine the American democracy by eliminating checks and balances. (For reference see transcripts of his performance in the republican primaries)
America is in a state today where the country came dangerously close to
58% Republican in the house
A republican appointed majority in the judiciary branch (though supremes usually walk very close to center as it's too easy to block appointments)
55% Senate, 51% is enough to pass almost anything, but 60% would leave democrats entirely without a voice.
A republic president... though it was Trump and he's basically an independent who simply realized it was easier to force his way through the republican ranks than the democrats.
I don't really care whether the government is red or blue. I care that the government can be red or blue. America is failing miserably because the health and well being of the country has become a sport with two teams and players are picked like players for a football team.
American politics are based on power. If you're going to run for office, you need to do it as republican or democrat. This is why Bernie Sanders, a perpetual independent signed on with the democrats during the previous election. To run of office, you need the support and sponsorship of a party or you'll be unheard and not stand a chance. You have to join one of two teams and the only way you'll garner support from one team or another is if you join the team. Even Trump has to play by the republic rule book within certain limits.
The problem is, to get into office, you have to agree to kneel and deal as the power brokers say..
And the result is that the American system can no longer be "by the people" or "for the people". Instead is "by the parties" and "for the people controlling/funding the parties".
So... while you're claiming red or blue... you should consider finding some religion to have a deity to pray to for someone to weaken the red or blue power vacuums because both parties are run by people who think winning is about leaving at least half the American people completely and totally unrepresented.
That said... Net Neutrality became an issue because America is too damn big geographically and has way too few people per square mile in most parts of the country outside of the urban centers. There are government sanctioned monopolies that are granted to individual companies such as Comcast. The same people who complain that the government should stay out of their homes are the same people who wouldn't have Internet access or possibly even running water if it weren't for the government intervening and supporting them. These people if they have anything that
Your state is a failure because it is either red or blue.
I am absolutely so glad I left America with no intention of ever going back. I now live in a country with so many political parties that none of them have the ability to do anything based on party lines. They actually have to sit, discuss and convince others that what they are doing is the right thing to do...not for the people or for the party or for the corporations... they have to convince each other that it's actually the right thing to do.
That said, just like in America, the politicians are uneducated frigging idiots that lack the knowledge to make decisions on what they're supposed to decide and they believe that the experts are the people who dress and speak like they do... which leaves them extremely poorly informed and therefore prone to believe the right thing to do is the idiotic thing.
For the most part though, they are relatively harmless because they can't sign any bills of any real importance into law because no one will ever agree on a large enough level to do so. As such, they have no power and cannot fuck things up too badly.
You on the other hand live in a blue state which means that at a state level, decisions are generally made by a club who all agree with each other because of the team they play on as opposed to on the issues themselves. The same would go for red states.
After all, why would you need to take the time to understand the issue and consider how it would affect the people when you can just vote on party lines and be frigging idiots. Heaven forbid the politicians took the time to understand what net neutrality actually means.
Here's one for you... make a simple case with simple drawings and gartner graphs to explain this :
Revoking net neutrality in the U.S. would make several American corporations stronger, but would make America as a whole weaker. It would hurt the schools, the military, the space program, the content producers, the politicians... it would actually hurt almost everyone except the few companies positioned to better exploit higher tariffs. And because non-US countries that all have net neutrality are not effected, it will give them an edge in every category upon which the U.S. claims to want dominance. Revoking net neutrality would basically place the U.S. on equal footing with Turkey.
I'm using the latest Surface Book with an i7, GTX 1060, 16GB, etc... I can highly recommend this machine as being well suited for performance and battery life. As a matter of fact, the battery life and performance often improves as Windows update brings in the BIOS/firmware updates as well.
.NET Core work REALLY well on these laptops.
I'm also considering one of these laptops for a hobby project. I do a lot of ARM development for Raspberry Pi. And I mean a lot. I had planned on building a 2000-3000 device cloud using Raspberry Pi clusters with a Cisco 3560 switch to tie them together in groups of 3-4 units. Yesterday, I managed to replace the Cisco switch with a Banana Pi router platform running fd.io, frr. That was a massive cost savings and it got me Cisco DMVPN support from the Banana Pi as well.
Another major change we made is to add another 20-50,000 Orange Pi Zeros to the cloud we're building. I suspect by the time we're done, I'll have a 500,000 device cloud. These will all be running on Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi and Orange Pi. Though at this quantity we may just work with the guys at Banana Pi to build what we want specifically.
So that said, it would be really nice to have a laptop which I can use to develop code on and test performance. Visual Studio Code and
I have to agree with you though... every time I touch the long battery life laptops that sacrifice performance for battery life it's like being on an old Nokia telephone. Sure the battery last 4 days, but if you're surfing the web, you'll need that long to get the page to download because Nokia swore that unlike Windows Phone, they don't need a real processor, enough RAM or an MMU on the phone... oh... and I was one of the idiots writing the web browser for the Nokia phones. Every other one of our customers were like "We want to build the ultimate mobile experience. We'll give you the RAM you need and the performance you need to make the web work" and Nokia's like "If you use ARM and Symbian you don't need RAM or CPU performance because everyone in the whole world will make an entirely separate web page just for our phones".
So... when you perform the initial OS settings configuration, you choose what you want to sent to Microsoft. You can choose "Send nothing" or you can choose to give them enough information to allow Cortana to adapt to your behavior like Google does. Will Microsoft sell your data? I suppose there's a chance. I think it's far more likely that the revenue it would generate would be nothing in comparison to the issues it would stir up with their cloud business which is their real money maker these days.
Also, if you understand the concept of Microsoft Graph, you understand why the data is being send to the cloud. It actually makes perfect sense technically. The issue is that it's Microsoft getting the data. Linux will never have something as cool and useful as Graph because it would require collecting the data somewhere to make it work.
Windows 10 as a platform is actually very nice. I have to admit it's had some ups and downs, but overall it's still nowhere near as bad as MacOS with regards to usability. Also it has Linux built into it as a first class citizen. It's actually absolutely lovely. As soon as Microsoft sorts out compatibility between Linux and Windows graphics, it will be a thing of beauty. I'm hoping Microsoft cuts a deal with Ubuntu or someone else to run Windows on Linux as nicely as Linux runs on Windows.
If you're not a power user and have no need for wide-spread cloud integration of your stuff... that's fine. Do what you need to do. I see you use gmail, I might recommend Pine as a good alternative. There are some of us who use a computer for more than just surfing the web and watching Naruto.
Staff there reported symptoms including hearing loss, dizziness, fatigue, and cognitive issues
So lawyers, poli-sci grads, international studies grads :
- Are noticed to be misinterpreting everything they hear in a way that seems like they are suffering hearing loss
- Are dizzy after lunch and dinner... maybe having a little bit of trouble walking a straight line, can't touch their noses, etc...
- Appear to be lazy as shit and are hoping people will believe they have fatigue?
- Have cognitive issues... I mean beyond the aforementioned being a lawyer, poli-sci/international studies grad...
I seriously don't see how this isn't a bigger problem in all embassies around the world.
Is it possible this has always been the case but now, they're in a communist country and want to blame it on that?
I think it depends on the long term goal of what you're hoping to build.
I don't know RHEV but I am more than a little experienced with VMware. Sure, VMware can be setup pretty quickly. But VMware is a disaster after it's setup. You end up with bunches of VMs and bunches of LUNs and heaven forbid you use NSX or worse, Cisco ACI, you'll end up with a rats nest from hell. VMware, should never be used anywhere you need more than a few virtual machines.
See I guess the point is that if you're simply trying to build a system which facilitates 1990 style IT in a virtualized environment, VMware is ok. Probably the best tool for the job ever really. But this is 2018. We are supposed to be smarter than that.
I develop software for the enterprise and I've also taken over operations in our environment. They were wasting $1.6 million a year on VMware and servers. It was a nightmare.
I asked "Why are we spending all this money on 10Gb/s networking?", the answered "We need it for storage and for vMotion".
So I pointed out that the software itself would operate well on 10Mb/s networking, but that faster would decrease transaction latency as 10 times the line speed means 1/10th the time to transmit a single frame.
So I asked "My software works almost entirely using an in-RAM database. I don't read and write from disk except for cold storage. Why do you need that much performance for storage?". They attempted to make the case that it was required because they need to be able to migrate the virtual machines if needed across the hyper-converged storage.
I asked "Why would you migrate the VMs at all? They're designed to simply die and be replaced by newly spun up ones". And they explained that we can't depend on that.
I asked why they had 2 10Gb/s switches for each data center and two more in the middle. And I wanted to know why we were spending a lot of money on MPLS between two sites. And worse, if we lost a data center, would we be down to a single site/single point of failure. They explained that it was too expensive to add a third data center and that it wouldn't make sense and that the risk was acceptable as there was so much redundancy in each data center that if a catastrophe on that scale occurred, we had bigger problems.
So I talked to the CFO and asked him to give me a breakdown of what IT was costing us a year for the data center. I wanted the consultant and power costs as well. We were spending $3.0 million+
So, I started a grass roots project. Bought a 3D printer, 10 Cisco 8 port network switches, 40 Raspberry Pis and the additional accessories I would need. Then I built 10 "Pods" which is a switch and 4 Raspberry Pis. Then I setup Kubernetes and Couchbase and setup a CI/CD service. And then I simply deployed our applications (written in C#) and done. We use a distributed load balancer, but more for logging than anything else. We use IPv6 mobility and AnyCast for all our failover stuff.
We now have an IT cost for data center operations of about $25,000 a year. We have 10 sites for failover... what have a share-nothing database which can suffer MASSIVE outages and never miss a beat. We can scale to all our sites (1000+) if we want. And we can handle substantially more transactions a second than we ever could on VMware.
Oh and if any site goes down, we throw it in a box and put a new one there. It's not worth debugging.
Oh... the rest of our systems are pretty much SaaS these days. We did some research and realized that 95%+ of what we were running in our data centers was stuff that we needed just to keep the data center running. The remaining 5% of the system resources were used for communication, collaboration, accounting, identity and our internally developed applications. So we just stuck everything but our own stuff in the cloud.
When people go on about RHEV vs. VMware vs. Ubuntu, I can't help to think about a room full of men with hats discussing optimal horse breeding for pulling delivery carts while Henry Ford is building a factory to produce cars.
I'm going out on a limb here... from what you wrote, I'm not entirely sure whether you like and respect Bill or not and as such, I feel you should really take a good long breath and the take moment to share how you really feel about Bill with us.
Bill was no angel and I think that he has been pretty clear about that in the past.
Let's assume a few things.
1) He has the money now. He has a lot of it. He has massive gobs of money. So much he could fill a swimming pool with chocolate pudding just to swim in his favorite food and he would make the money back in less time than it would take to mix it... even if he was just collecting 0.5% interest.
2) He's grown up and seems to want to make a positive difference in the world
3) He couldn't really give the money back to the people he cheated to get there.
4) Most of the people he "cheated" did just fine anyway. Let's be honest, if you made a product that Microsoft would actively compete with or depended on, you probably the kind of person who wouldn't just sit in a corner and cry about how the big bad Bill took your ice cream. You'll get up and get more ice cream and keep this ice cream away from Bill.
So now, he's spending the vast majority of the money trying to leverage what he's learned in life to make world differences. He's a bit hit and miss on this, but he's making a greater difference in many places than most governments have.
One of the most important differences he's trying to make is to decrease world population through improvements in infant mortality. Around the world, he's hoping to keep families too busy changing diapers to fuck and make more. It works almost everywhere. This is why almost all first world countries have seen negative population growth and some second and third world countries (like the U.S.) are starting to see that too.
He's actively debunking stupid people. Like for example, the anti-vaxxers. They attack him all the time for trying to poison the world. Then he publicly says things like "I'm sorry, can you please go be stupid over there. I'm too busy saving childrens' lives to waste my time with you."
I don't think you have to love the guy and bow down and offer the inside of your right cheek to him. But consider that when someone is out there trying to make a positive difference, we can't forget what they have done in the past. We may not even be able to forgive it. But focus on the now and hope that a little less hate and a little more positive reinforcement will help that person do the right thing.