It's not clear whether or not this is a troll but, being able to get a mortgage (and the interest rate of the mortgage) depends on your credit score. So, sure, once you have a mortgage, set a cron job to post "wasted" on your facebook account 3 times a day. Until then you have to do the bizarre credit dance and wonder if maybe one day the credit agency is going to datamine satellite imagery to see if you ever park within 10m of a pawn shop.
4. Encourage your employer to stop sales in the UK
I can't imagine anything more able to get the masses frothing at the mouth than learning that their government has effectively made Apple/Android devices illegal.
Possibly. Or management decided to ship it over the objections of all the technical people involved (both developers and QA). It's hard to say. But, I do 100% agree with your original post. If you develop on cutting edge hardware, you are highly likely to produce something that needs that cutting edge hardware. I even have experience doing this: Many moons ago I convinced my boss to get me a $50k Sun workstation to develop some visualization software. I worked at Sun so, internally, that wasn't a big deal but, the resulting software basically needed that $50k Sun workstation to run. It was a good lesson to learn.
These days I develop on whatever hardware happens to be sitting on my desk (or lap) and just send the job out to a bonkers powerful build server (or cluster) for compiling if that's a bottleneck in the development process.
At the very least, you'd think that *someone* within the company had a machine that represented minimum or recommended specs. And hopefully those people would test the game on those machines before they released it. You could even have an entire department devoted to doing this. You could call it something like "the quality assurance department".
Not only is it not going to take off, it's been in the process of not taking off for about 20 years. People have been plugging things like coffee pots into the internet since the 90s. I remember hearing Scott McNealy give a speech about how my refrigerator would soon be running Java and doing all sorts of things on the internet. In the 90s. It's not a new technological revolution, it's old technological ideas that are resurfacing because now that most people carry very powerful networked computers in their pockets, they think it would be great if everything had a networked computer in it. It won't. It will take what previously were decades reliable appliances, that could often be fixed by someone with a high school education, and turn them into more expensive, less reliable toys that the vendor plans to obsolete in 3 years.
Nuclear weapons have been used ONCE in the 70 years since their invention and have in recent decades been declining in number.
That's true. But, in another post in this thread, it was stated that we've had 7 nearly catastrophic incidents with nuclear weapons. It doesn't even matter how accurate that number is. The number is greater than 0 and probably greater than 7. For the sake of easy math, let's assume 7 is correct. So, in the 70 years since we've had nuclear weapons, on average, we have nearly destroyed civilization about once a decade due to human/computer/whatever error. I'm not a statistician but, those numbers don't strike me as particularly cheerful. Again... At this point, it only takes a single fuck up to destroy civilization.
Anecdotes like this practically answer the Fermi Paradox. We don't meet advanced civilizations because those civilizations destroy themselves fairly quickly. Once you have the technology to destroy your civilization, you only have to fuck up once to do it.
I understand this is a joke but, it's a surprisingly accurate one. As you lower the noise floor in the vehicle, it becomes increasingly difficult to make it tolerable in the cabin. You can take any car, pull out the interior, cover it in dynamat/dynapad type materials, put everything back in and you will nearly eliminate road noise. The problem is that you have then lowered the noise floor to such an extent that you can now hear a seatbelt gently tapping against the door. You can hear a crumb under your seat shifting as you accelerate. You can hear every single tiny noise that was previously masked by having a noise floor a few dB higher. Quiet cars are maddeningly difficult to make silent.
Reverse DNS is the big one but adding a real SSL certificate to the mail server lends credibility as well. It's definitely not trivial to setup a credible mail server these days but, it's certainly not an insurmountable task. I've run mine for about two years and, once I jumped through all the hoops to get it setup right, I've never had any issues with sending or receiving mail. The OP may want to look at some tools that will query the MX record and then test the mail server for various common pitfalls. This site has a number of useful tools for dealing with personal e-mail servers: http://mxtoolbox.com/
This is definitely the case. 20 years ago you would occasionally see people leave the industry to try to turn a hobby/passion into a business (starting a restaurant, etc.). Now you see people leaving the industry out of pure frustration. I don't blame them either. I've been writing software since I was a child and I imagine I'll be writing software for the rest of my life. I love writing software but loathe the modern software industry.
On the bright side, the toxicity of the modern software industry is probably a huge boon for the open source community. Contributing to open source projects while making an honest living outside the software industry is a very enjoyable lifestyle.
Actually, I think bad weather is one of the places where automated cars will make a very positive impact on safety. We already have a limited form of this technology with things like anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control, etc. If you've spent your entire life driving cars with these safety features, they probably feel normal to you. But, as the article suggests, once you come to rely on these features, you lose your ability to handle the vehicle safely in the absence of them. Have you ever pumped your brakes to prevent skidding? Do you know how to steer out of oversteer? Can your brain detect these conditions and react to them before you are in a dangerous situation? For most people, the answer is "probably not".
The reason why these will become wanted is the amount of traffic that will be able to be carried on the main roads will be orders of magnitude higher if all the cars are autonomous.
Sure, I understand the benefits and I actually think self-driving cars would be amazing for rural drivers once they get onto main roads. Driving 50 miles to town on empty country roads is fun the first few times but quickly becomes the most tedious part of rural living. Automating that would be fantastic. My biggest worry about self driving cars is that while they may handle 99.9% of all situations for 99.9% of people, they will never get to 100%. So, if you happen to be part of that 0.1%, you will be marginalized and penalized. The car will report to the dealership, insurance company, state, etc. that it is switched into manual driving mode several times a day and there will be financial consequences for that. Invalidated warranties, higher insurance, different registration standards, etc.
Meh, I'm old. I'll probably be dead before I have to yell, "Get onto my lawn!" at my self driving car.
I've always wondered how self driving cars would handle rural areas. In particular rural mountain areas with a foot of snow on the road. In a lot of rural areas there may be a distance of hundreds or thousands of meters between the GPS position of a house and the actual house. I can just envision walking a mile uphill in a foot snow while your car sits at the bottom of your driveway with a blinking, "NO ROAD" error. I just don't see how that problem can be overcome to the point where all vehicles could be 100% self driving without any possibility of direct steering/throttle input from the driver.
Sure, there is no one at the NSA who sits around all day and reads your e-mails and listens to your phone calls. I agree that's deluded thinking. But, what we've done is willingly created the infrastructure for mass surveillance on an unprecedented level. It's unnecessary to have someone reading your e-mails to determine if you are engaging in deviant behavior. It can be determined algorithmically just by collecting and analyzing *everyones* data. As the definition of "deviant behavior" shifts over time and as private industry starts getting more and more access to the mass surveillance infrastructure, the ramifications for society are pretty bleak.
Twenty years ago very few people had a cell phone and the world got along just fine. Now most people carry a device that knows your exact location, has a microphone, a camera and is largely not under your control. It's literally a spying device. Yes, it's a spying device that has useful applications for the user as well but, is it worth it to completely give up your privacy so you can play Fruit Ninja while you sit in a waiting room? This is the not the first story on this subject and it will not be the last. If the vast majority of the population is carrying a device that can easily and thoroughly be spied on, the government *will not stop* until it has access to that device whenever it "needs" it.
"Those who would give up privacy for mindless entertainment deserve neither" -- somenickname
I actually can't shop around. I live in a rural mountain area that had a nearby forest fire a few years ago and there is only one insurance company that will insure houses here. The homeowners insurance rates are so ludicrously high that the token percentage they drop it by bundling auto insurance means that no one could compete with the rate. Every year they raise the rates (20% increase this year) because, "Fuck you. You are legally obligated to pay us money so, pay us more".
And, to preemptively answer your question of, "Why not move?": Try selling a house where 30-50% of your mortgage payment goes to insurance. The dozens of For Sale signs around the neighborhood indicate that it may not be particularly easy.
What evidence is there for this statement? Insurance companies are not known for lowering rates. My rates continue to go up even as the value of my vehicles diminishes and I have 0 accidents, 0 claims and 0 tickets on my record.
Colorado should counter sue these states under the same Commerce Clause. As a state that takes in billions of dollars in tourism each year, having neighboring state police border camp and harass people driving on federally owned interstates is, in effect, the states regulating interstate commerce.
The thing that always baffles* me about these government agencies wanting to broaden their powers in the name of "terrorists" or "child porn" or whatever the current boogeyman is, is the fact that all of these groups are statistically insignificant. I would guess that you could round up every single child pornographer on the planet and you wouldn't even need a single United States maximum security prison to hold them. They are not a statistical threat to our country, our way of life or, really, our children. They are aberrations. Sure, on a small scale they can cause real and very unfortunate damage, but these are not people that are going to destroy our society. Their crimes are more offensive than that of, say, a car thief but, a car thieves crimes and a child pornographers crimes are about equally as likely to destabilize our society. I can't understand why we need to treat them any differently than a common criminal*.
* It doesn't actually baffle me and I do understand why we treat them differently than a common criminal: Because those in power want to retain that power and the best way to do that is to make sure the unwashed masses don't try to overthrow their masters. A scapegoat that convinces the unwashed masses to submit to ever increasing authoritarianism is the least violent way to enslave them.
Re:MATE is still far more advanced in usability
on
GNOME 3.14 Released
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· Score: 1
I actually use a very similar system of virtual desktops (though, only 3x3 and I map Ctrl-Alt + vi keybinds to navigate between them). XFCE has done a great job of handling this kind of setup for years. As you noted, once you have a static layout of virtual desktops your brain quickly builds up a mapping of the desktops and you intuitively know things like, "I'm looking at application X so that means application Y is to the right and up two screens". No Alt-Tabbing to try to find windows, no mousing over a window list, etc. You just know exactly where the thing you want is in relation to what you are currently looking at. I've actually converted a few people to this kind of setup once they've seen it in action.
Taking it a step further, you might find Qubes OS interesting (https://wiki.qubes-os.org/wiki). It still has some rough edges but, it's the next logical progression in a statically defined matrix of virtual desktops: You can make each virtual desktop actually represent a different virtual *machine*. It ends up being a really nice and secure workflow.
The Gentoo idea is interesting but, the LFS suggestion isn't really applicable. I've built and run LFS systems (even wrote my own package manager just for the amusement of it) and, though it's very fun and you learn a lot, "fun" and "learn a lot" is not something sysadmins look for in enterprise grade software. Really, this guy is indirectly asking, "What distros aren't using systemd?" Maybe he's used systemd and hates it or maybe he's just dreading the thought of it after reading so many negative comments about it.
Having used systemd, I'm very much opposed to the philosophy of it and pretty much indifferent to the use of it in practice. I don't even know which of my machines are running it because, for most people, it just stays out of the way.
I've got a 36U StarTech rack full of Supermicro chassis/motherboards and miscellaneous other things (Cisco switch, KVM, monitor, etc). The initial cost was pretty expensive but, the rack will last forever and the chassis will be useful until the SAS backplanes start to fail. In total the rack has around 100GB of RAM, 40TB of disk and around 30 cores of varying capability (everything from Intel Atom to Intel Xeon X56xx) and a lot of UPS (rack stays up for 1.5 hours without power). It's been up for a few years now and, though it's crazy stable, I do have some observations about a "home datacenter":
The rack sits in a 100sqft room on the main floor of my house and it presents some challenges: 1) A 100sqft room is likely to have a 15 amp breaker. The machines in my rack are all pretty power efficient (500W at idle) so, I'm not regularly bumping up against the 80% load of a 15 amp breaker but, it's something to consider. 2) Cooling. It can be a gigantic pain in the ass to keep the room at a sane temperature. In the summer, I have to open up the window and put a window fan in it. In Spring/Autumn, I generally monitor the drive temps and open/close windows as needed. In winter, I could open the server room door to heat the house except: 3) It's loud. Like, really loud. I've replaced all the power supplies in the big servers (which all have redundant power supplies) with super-duper-platinum-efficient power supplies and, it made it a huge difference but, it's still very, very loud. I bought a solid core door for the server room and put audiophile type sound absorbers in the room. It's still loud.
Apart from those 3 things, having a nearly-enterprise level rack in your home is doable. It's a lot of upfront money and work but, once it's all in place, it's pretty easy to maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there ANY government IT project that has been completed on time, under budget and exceeds specifications?
You are assuming that those things are desirable outcomes.
It's also the same ballpark figure that Oracle paid for Sun Microsystems. Pure insanity.
It's not clear whether or not this is a troll but, being able to get a mortgage (and the interest rate of the mortgage) depends on your credit score. So, sure, once you have a mortgage, set a cron job to post "wasted" on your facebook account 3 times a day. Until then you have to do the bizarre credit dance and wonder if maybe one day the credit agency is going to datamine satellite imagery to see if you ever park within 10m of a pawn shop.
4. Encourage your employer to stop sales in the UK
I can't imagine anything more able to get the masses frothing at the mouth than learning that their government has effectively made Apple/Android devices illegal.
Possibly. Or management decided to ship it over the objections of all the technical people involved (both developers and QA). It's hard to say. But, I do 100% agree with your original post. If you develop on cutting edge hardware, you are highly likely to produce something that needs that cutting edge hardware. I even have experience doing this: Many moons ago I convinced my boss to get me a $50k Sun workstation to develop some visualization software. I worked at Sun so, internally, that wasn't a big deal but, the resulting software basically needed that $50k Sun workstation to run. It was a good lesson to learn.
These days I develop on whatever hardware happens to be sitting on my desk (or lap) and just send the job out to a bonkers powerful build server (or cluster) for compiling if that's a bottleneck in the development process.
At the very least, you'd think that *someone* within the company had a machine that represented minimum or recommended specs. And hopefully those people would test the game on those machines before they released it. You could even have an entire department devoted to doing this. You could call it something like "the quality assurance department".
Not only is it not going to take off, it's been in the process of not taking off for about 20 years. People have been plugging things like coffee pots into the internet since the 90s. I remember hearing Scott McNealy give a speech about how my refrigerator would soon be running Java and doing all sorts of things on the internet. In the 90s. It's not a new technological revolution, it's old technological ideas that are resurfacing because now that most people carry very powerful networked computers in their pockets, they think it would be great if everything had a networked computer in it. It won't. It will take what previously were decades reliable appliances, that could often be fixed by someone with a high school education, and turn them into more expensive, less reliable toys that the vendor plans to obsolete in 3 years.
Nuclear weapons have been used ONCE in the 70 years since their invention and have in recent decades been declining in number.
That's true. But, in another post in this thread, it was stated that we've had 7 nearly catastrophic incidents with nuclear weapons. It doesn't even matter how accurate that number is. The number is greater than 0 and probably greater than 7. For the sake of easy math, let's assume 7 is correct. So, in the 70 years since we've had nuclear weapons, on average, we have nearly destroyed civilization about once a decade due to human/computer/whatever error. I'm not a statistician but, those numbers don't strike me as particularly cheerful. Again... At this point, it only takes a single fuck up to destroy civilization.
Anecdotes like this practically answer the Fermi Paradox. We don't meet advanced civilizations because those civilizations destroy themselves fairly quickly. Once you have the technology to destroy your civilization, you only have to fuck up once to do it.
I'm very surprised that the producers didn't consult experts with practical experience growing potatoes on Mars. Typical Hollywood bullshit.
I understand this is a joke but, it's a surprisingly accurate one. As you lower the noise floor in the vehicle, it becomes increasingly difficult to make it tolerable in the cabin. You can take any car, pull out the interior, cover it in dynamat/dynapad type materials, put everything back in and you will nearly eliminate road noise. The problem is that you have then lowered the noise floor to such an extent that you can now hear a seatbelt gently tapping against the door. You can hear a crumb under your seat shifting as you accelerate. You can hear every single tiny noise that was previously masked by having a noise floor a few dB higher. Quiet cars are maddeningly difficult to make silent.
Reverse DNS is the big one but adding a real SSL certificate to the mail server lends credibility as well. It's definitely not trivial to setup a credible mail server these days but, it's certainly not an insurmountable task. I've run mine for about two years and, once I jumped through all the hoops to get it setup right, I've never had any issues with sending or receiving mail. The OP may want to look at some tools that will query the MX record and then test the mail server for various common pitfalls. This site has a number of useful tools for dealing with personal e-mail servers: http://mxtoolbox.com/
This is definitely the case. 20 years ago you would occasionally see people leave the industry to try to turn a hobby/passion into a business (starting a restaurant, etc.). Now you see people leaving the industry out of pure frustration. I don't blame them either. I've been writing software since I was a child and I imagine I'll be writing software for the rest of my life. I love writing software but loathe the modern software industry.
On the bright side, the toxicity of the modern software industry is probably a huge boon for the open source community. Contributing to open source projects while making an honest living outside the software industry is a very enjoyable lifestyle.
Actually, I think bad weather is one of the places where automated cars will make a very positive impact on safety. We already have a limited form of this technology with things like anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control, etc. If you've spent your entire life driving cars with these safety features, they probably feel normal to you. But, as the article suggests, once you come to rely on these features, you lose your ability to handle the vehicle safely in the absence of them. Have you ever pumped your brakes to prevent skidding? Do you know how to steer out of oversteer? Can your brain detect these conditions and react to them before you are in a dangerous situation? For most people, the answer is "probably not".
The reason why these will become wanted is the amount of traffic that will be able to be carried on the main roads will be orders of magnitude higher if all the cars are autonomous.
Sure, I understand the benefits and I actually think self-driving cars would be amazing for rural drivers once they get onto main roads. Driving 50 miles to town on empty country roads is fun the first few times but quickly becomes the most tedious part of rural living. Automating that would be fantastic. My biggest worry about self driving cars is that while they may handle 99.9% of all situations for 99.9% of people, they will never get to 100%. So, if you happen to be part of that 0.1%, you will be marginalized and penalized. The car will report to the dealership, insurance company, state, etc. that it is switched into manual driving mode several times a day and there will be financial consequences for that. Invalidated warranties, higher insurance, different registration standards, etc.
Meh, I'm old. I'll probably be dead before I have to yell, "Get onto my lawn!" at my self driving car.
I've always wondered how self driving cars would handle rural areas. In particular rural mountain areas with a foot of snow on the road. In a lot of rural areas there may be a distance of hundreds or thousands of meters between the GPS position of a house and the actual house. I can just envision walking a mile uphill in a foot snow while your car sits at the bottom of your driveway with a blinking, "NO ROAD" error. I just don't see how that problem can be overcome to the point where all vehicles could be 100% self driving without any possibility of direct steering/throttle input from the driver.
Sure, there is no one at the NSA who sits around all day and reads your e-mails and listens to your phone calls. I agree that's deluded thinking. But, what we've done is willingly created the infrastructure for mass surveillance on an unprecedented level. It's unnecessary to have someone reading your e-mails to determine if you are engaging in deviant behavior. It can be determined algorithmically just by collecting and analyzing *everyones* data. As the definition of "deviant behavior" shifts over time and as private industry starts getting more and more access to the mass surveillance infrastructure, the ramifications for society are pretty bleak.
Twenty years ago very few people had a cell phone and the world got along just fine. Now most people carry a device that knows your exact location, has a microphone, a camera and is largely not under your control. It's literally a spying device. Yes, it's a spying device that has useful applications for the user as well but, is it worth it to completely give up your privacy so you can play Fruit Ninja while you sit in a waiting room? This is the not the first story on this subject and it will not be the last. If the vast majority of the population is carrying a device that can easily and thoroughly be spied on, the government *will not stop* until it has access to that device whenever it "needs" it.
"Those who would give up privacy for mindless entertainment deserve neither" -- somenickname
I actually can't shop around. I live in a rural mountain area that had a nearby forest fire a few years ago and there is only one insurance company that will insure houses here. The homeowners insurance rates are so ludicrously high that the token percentage they drop it by bundling auto insurance means that no one could compete with the rate. Every year they raise the rates (20% increase this year) because, "Fuck you. You are legally obligated to pay us money so, pay us more".
And, to preemptively answer your question of, "Why not move?": Try selling a house where 30-50% of your mortgage payment goes to insurance. The dozens of For Sale signs around the neighborhood indicate that it may not be particularly easy.
"but premiums will necessarily drop as well"
What evidence is there for this statement? Insurance companies are not known for lowering rates. My rates continue to go up even as the value of my vehicles diminishes and I have 0 accidents, 0 claims and 0 tickets on my record.
Colorado should counter sue these states under the same Commerce Clause. As a state that takes in billions of dollars in tourism each year, having neighboring state police border camp and harass people driving on federally owned interstates is, in effect, the states regulating interstate commerce.
The thing that always baffles* me about these government agencies wanting to broaden their powers in the name of "terrorists" or "child porn" or whatever the current boogeyman is, is the fact that all of these groups are statistically insignificant. I would guess that you could round up every single child pornographer on the planet and you wouldn't even need a single United States maximum security prison to hold them. They are not a statistical threat to our country, our way of life or, really, our children. They are aberrations. Sure, on a small scale they can cause real and very unfortunate damage, but these are not people that are going to destroy our society. Their crimes are more offensive than that of, say, a car thief but, a car thieves crimes and a child pornographers crimes are about equally as likely to destabilize our society. I can't understand why we need to treat them any differently than a common criminal*.
* It doesn't actually baffle me and I do understand why we treat them differently than a common criminal: Because those in power want to retain that power and the best way to do that is to make sure the unwashed masses don't try to overthrow their masters. A scapegoat that convinces the unwashed masses to submit to ever increasing authoritarianism is the least violent way to enslave them.
I actually use a very similar system of virtual desktops (though, only 3x3 and I map Ctrl-Alt + vi keybinds to navigate between them). XFCE has done a great job of handling this kind of setup for years. As you noted, once you have a static layout of virtual desktops your brain quickly builds up a mapping of the desktops and you intuitively know things like, "I'm looking at application X so that means application Y is to the right and up two screens". No Alt-Tabbing to try to find windows, no mousing over a window list, etc. You just know exactly where the thing you want is in relation to what you are currently looking at. I've actually converted a few people to this kind of setup once they've seen it in action.
Taking it a step further, you might find Qubes OS interesting (https://wiki.qubes-os.org/wiki). It still has some rough edges but, it's the next logical progression in a statically defined matrix of virtual desktops: You can make each virtual desktop actually represent a different virtual *machine*. It ends up being a really nice and secure workflow.
The Gentoo idea is interesting but, the LFS suggestion isn't really applicable. I've built and run LFS systems (even wrote my own package manager just for the amusement of it) and, though it's very fun and you learn a lot, "fun" and "learn a lot" is not something sysadmins look for in enterprise grade software. Really, this guy is indirectly asking, "What distros aren't using systemd?" Maybe he's used systemd and hates it or maybe he's just dreading the thought of it after reading so many negative comments about it.
Having used systemd, I'm very much opposed to the philosophy of it and pretty much indifferent to the use of it in practice. I don't even know which of my machines are running it because, for most people, it just stays out of the way.
I've got a 36U StarTech rack full of Supermicro chassis/motherboards and miscellaneous other things (Cisco switch, KVM, monitor, etc). The initial cost was pretty expensive but, the rack will last forever and the chassis will be useful until the SAS backplanes start to fail. In total the rack has around 100GB of RAM, 40TB of disk and around 30 cores of varying capability (everything from Intel Atom to Intel Xeon X56xx) and a lot of UPS (rack stays up for 1.5 hours without power). It's been up for a few years now and, though it's crazy stable, I do have some observations about a "home datacenter":
The rack sits in a 100sqft room on the main floor of my house and it presents some challenges: 1) A 100sqft room is likely to have a 15 amp breaker. The machines in my rack are all pretty power efficient (500W at idle) so, I'm not regularly bumping up against the 80% load of a 15 amp breaker but, it's something to consider. 2) Cooling. It can be a gigantic pain in the ass to keep the room at a sane temperature. In the summer, I have to open up the window and put a window fan in it. In Spring/Autumn, I generally monitor the drive temps and open/close windows as needed. In winter, I could open the server room door to heat the house except: 3) It's loud. Like, really loud. I've replaced all the power supplies in the big servers (which all have redundant power supplies) with super-duper-platinum-efficient power supplies and, it made it a huge difference but, it's still very, very loud. I bought a solid core door for the server room and put audiophile type sound absorbers in the room. It's still loud.
Apart from those 3 things, having a nearly-enterprise level rack in your home is doable. It's a lot of upfront money and work but, once it's all in place, it's pretty easy to maintain.