So you should be on board with what Lets Encrypt is trying to do, which is removing the unnecessary garbage from the CAs for what is handled by a simple automated domain ownership check.
Lets Encrypt is probably a great option if you're trying to secure a general purpose Linux server somewhere. But if you're trying to secure something their scripts won't run on, then its a PITA that isn't really helping. Most of what we're complaining about is stuff their scripts won't run on.
What's even worse, is that many of these devices use HTTPS with an unverifiable certificate (either self-signed, missing an FQDN due to being local, etc). This is extremely annoying (and likely confusing to many) when trying to access such devices, to the point where they probably seem outright broken to an "average" user.
I wish one of these organizations would come up with some solution to that problem, which everyone can adopt.
For my own purposes, I set myself up an "internal CA" and loaded its certs on all my browsers/devices. However, that's extra atypical effort and my Android phone has a constant "Network may be monitored" warning banner as a side-effect of doing that.
Seriously, just get a cheap laser printer, throw it in a corner somewhere, and don't worry about it. They even make small cheap ones.
Ink jets dry out over time, and the ink costs more than the printer itself. Laser toner basically lasts forever, and can print far more pages. As a bonus, its easier to find laser printers with longer-lived interface protocols.
There's also the diversity of tech jobs, which all tend to look like "the same thing" to most lay people. Heck, just take every Slashdot headline that uses the phrase "IT Workers" as a blanket term for our entire industry and all its subsets.
I've often found it quite difficult to explain to the lay person that being a "programmer" is different from being "that creepy IT guy who fixes their random Windows problems".
Just make the damn thing as thick as the phone+case everyone carries now, but robust enough that the case isn't necessary. Then use the extra space for batteries (and not removing the headphone jack).
Seriously, the problem is that everyone tries so hard to make the phone look as "shiny" as possible on a store shelf, without giving a damn about what its *actually* like to the *actual* user a month later.
There is always "that guy" who needs to drive 300 miles in a day regularly. 305 miles is at least a five hour drive. Do you do that 20% of the time? If so, you need to find a new job because you are wasting your life away in a car.
And for some reason, "that guy" *always* shows up in comment threads on articles like this one. He also often needs the cargo capacity of a pickup truck, and sometimes is driving to some shack in the deep woods with no electricity. Oh, and also assumes his use case is typical, or at least a complete blocker to anyone adopting EVs.
Microsoft's dominance in the PC market was never really dislodged. Its also still quite a profitable business. Its just not something "cool" that people are talking about anymore.
What happened, was that new markets opened up where "Windows compatibility" was no longer relevant. As such, Apple and Google went in and took up the positions of "the Microsoft" and "the Apple" respectively. (with the only difference being that, this time, Apple grabbed just enough high-margin marketshare to get taken more seriously.)
And the server market? Microsoft never *really* dominated there. Linux just took over from the proprietary UNIXes of old.
In general, it seems like the only way to get a job without needing "10 years of experience in 50 different buzzwords" seems to be as a NCG.
Makes me wonder if there's a market of people who go back to school to "reset" their NCG status bit just so they can get a job in something other than "exactly what they were doing at their previous job."
Yeah, they seem to focus on software updates that make for good press releases, but don't give a damn at stuff that would only be noticed by everyday drivers.
There are bugs in the whole media player software stack that enrage me every time I drive the car. I don't even know whose ear to yell into about them anymore, because they simply don't care. (And if you mention on forums, you get drowed out by 50 pet feature requests to the point that actual bugs get lost in the noise).
Thankfully, these are really the only actual issues I have with the car. Everything else about it is wonderful, and its kinda hard to go back to an ICE car after driving one.
We keep hearing about this big bubble of women who went into computer science in the 80's, in far greater numbers than have been seen in recent years. This makes me wonder... where are these people? They'd all fall into the "older engineers" category now.
For some reason, these features (especially the FM part, but the others too) are common among shit-tier phones but quite uncommon among higher end models.
Its pretty clear from the abstract that they're *not* talking about Ctrl-Alt-Del as the sequence for resetting the computer. Rather, they're talking about Ctrl-Alt-Del as the non-app-trappable sequence for triggering certain behaviors in Windows NT (login prompt, etc.). In that context, a single button actually would have been fine.
Of course this is Slashdot, so everyone is ignoring that and just skipping to assuming it was the former:-)
It's the same way that insurance companies have got people thinking that insurance = health care. The so-called health care debate isn't about health care, it's about insurance and when people eventually realize that, if ever, we might manage to make some progress toward getting insurance companies out of the way of delivering health care.
And the way they've inserted themselves in the process is something that you never hear the talking heads, on *either* side, have any real discussion about. Its always about who is supposed to pay for this "insurance," not why its so critical to the billing/pricing structure that normal people simply cannot afford any healthcare without it.
Go to a cheap community college for the first two years while living at home. Then transfer to a four year college for the final two years and either work part time
I wonder how often this plan actually works in practice.
My own anecdotal experience with people who attempt this plan has been that they actually take 3+ years to muddle through the CC. Then, they still take another 4 years to finally finish the four year college that follows. So in practice, they don't really save that much and pay for the lost opportunity cost of starting their career younger.
I wouldn't be surprised if most people who are actually capable of doing the 2+2 plan are also capable of getting sufficient scholarships that they're better off just directly attending the four year school and finishing it early/on-time.
And most people who are unsympathetic towards this likely got their education at a time when it was actually possible to do so without crippling debt, then entered a job market that provided them with more opportunities.
Is there really no phone you can buy to avoid this?
Are your willing to have software developers/vendors laugh in your face when you actually want their software to run (or run without issues) on your phone? If the answer is yes, then I'm sure you can find options. If the answer is no, then you're SOL.
Unfortunately, so much we do on mobile these days is absolutely dependent on proprietary applications and protocols, which means that you can't really have a full experience without depending on those outside the F/OSS community.
And if it is that way, where does that leave all the major religions and their almost all male icons? Should women be almost all atheists if that idea was true.
On top of that, most major religions have historically been quite exclusionary towards the participation of women in their rituals and ceremonies.
Yet, somehow, once reforms let them in the door, the women actually seem to be more serious about participation than the men. Even if the foundations haven't changed. I still haven't figured this one out.
... STEM workers need to take personal responsibility to grow professionally instead of being forced to by a governing body.
And STEM fields are full of people who are only there because "its a good job," but who have no personal genuine love of the field. As such, they probably don't give two shits about it the moment they go home from work for the day. Fast forward a few years, change the tech at the office, and they're suddenly unemployable.
Of course I fear that there are enough of these people, that older workers who actually do have this genuine interest are lumped in with them... and punished as a result.
The author is confusing Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) with Full Self-Driving (FSD).
Every single person I talk to, who only casually observes Tesla-related news, assumes that EAP == FSD. Every friggin single one. Usually in knee-jerk comments, when I mention something about having to drive my car somewhere. (I have a Model S/w AP v1... Love it in stop-and-go highway traffic and long highway trips, but I'm quite well aware of its capabilities and limitations.)
And now, thanks to overreacting school rules, we can't pack them as lunch for our kids. The best and easiest option, taken off the table. Grr:-( I only hope that someday this nonsense will end, and efforts like this one will make it possible to stop having such rules.
It may be debatable as to whether you should be able to donate to your own charitable fund, but the whole concept of these funds actually makes sense. There is a version of these funds that's actually available to "normal" people without their own organizations. They're called "Donor Advised Funds." (If you ever see a clueless article about some fancy person giving money to the "Silicon Valley Community Fund," that is one of these such funds.)
These funds give you a way to separate the act of "getting the tax benefit of making a big donation" from the act of "actually making the donation to charities." They actually serve a useful purpose.
Let's say that you find yourself with a large lump of income (or appreciated securities, or anything else donate-able), and you want to get the tax benefit of donating a portion of it during a given year. However, you aren't yet ready to figure out how to divide it among every single charity you might want to contribute to. So you donate it to a DAF, and then later "direct" the funds at your leisure. (And while its in the DAF, it can get invested with the gains not being taxed.)
I don't have time or budget to deal with more than two paid streaming services. Billing, passwords, setting up and maintaining devices, etc is a real hassle.If it's not on either service, I am not going to watch it. Period.
This is made even more annoying by the very real possibility that every service will not necessarily be available on every device you actually want to watch content on. Sure, Netflix and Amazon Prime do a fairly decent job in this department, but they also have the experienced engineering resources to dedicate to the effort. There's really no guarantee that every other little two-bit studio-specific streaming service will do the same.
Let's take climate change for example. There is hard science that clearly shows the world is indeed warming and all the greenhouse gases have all shot up in the past two hundred years or so. That's not really debatable.
What is debatable is what precisely to do about it, if the cost of trying to fix it clearly outweighs not fixing it and how exactly we are going to fix it. Unfortunately it has become quite political.
I wish this were the debate. But instead, one side wants to do something while the other side wants to pretend the problem doesn't even exist in the first place.
When I was growing up, I think I was exposed mostly to whatever survived this era. The Apple IIe was commonplace, as were similar machines. However, the only place I ever saw a TRS-80 was as a bunch of disassembled components stashed in the corner of someone's office.
Actually, the original CNBC article is at fault here. It opens as stupid and sensational, without actually attempting to accurately describe the position until the 3rd frigging paragraph.
Slashdot Mirror
So you should be on board with what Lets Encrypt is trying to do, which is removing the unnecessary garbage from the CAs for what is handled by a simple automated domain ownership check.
Lets Encrypt is probably a great option if you're trying to secure a general purpose Linux server somewhere.
But if you're trying to secure something their scripts won't run on, then its a PITA that isn't really helping.
Most of what we're complaining about is stuff their scripts won't run on.
What's even worse, is that many of these devices use HTTPS with an unverifiable certificate (either self-signed, missing an FQDN due to being local, etc). This is extremely annoying (and likely confusing to many) when trying to access such devices, to the point where they probably seem outright broken to an "average" user.
I wish one of these organizations would come up with some solution to that problem, which everyone can adopt.
For my own purposes, I set myself up an "internal CA" and loaded its certs on all my browsers/devices. However, that's extra atypical effort and my Android phone has a constant "Network may be monitored" warning banner as a side-effect of doing that.
Seriously, just get a cheap laser printer, throw it in a corner somewhere, and don't worry about it. They even make small cheap ones.
Ink jets dry out over time, and the ink costs more than the printer itself.
Laser toner basically lasts forever, and can print far more pages. As a bonus, its easier to find laser printers with longer-lived interface protocols.
There's also the diversity of tech jobs, which all tend to look like "the same thing" to most lay people. Heck, just take every Slashdot headline that uses the phrase "IT Workers" as a blanket term for our entire industry and all its subsets.
I've often found it quite difficult to explain to the lay person that being a "programmer" is different from being "that creepy IT guy who fixes their random Windows problems".
Just make the damn thing as thick as the phone+case everyone carries now, but robust enough that the case isn't necessary. Then use the extra space for batteries (and not removing the headphone jack).
Seriously, the problem is that everyone tries so hard to make the phone look as "shiny" as possible on a store shelf, without giving a damn about what its *actually* like to the *actual* user a month later.
There is always "that guy" who needs to drive 300 miles in a day regularly. 305 miles is at least a five hour drive. Do you do that 20% of the time? If so, you need to find a new job because you are wasting your life away in a car.
And for some reason, "that guy" *always* shows up in comment threads on articles like this one. He also often needs the cargo capacity of a pickup truck, and sometimes is driving to some shack in the deep woods with no electricity. Oh, and also assumes his use case is typical, or at least a complete blocker to anyone adopting EVs.
Microsoft's dominance in the PC market was never really dislodged. Its also still quite a profitable business. Its just not something "cool" that people are talking about anymore.
What happened, was that new markets opened up where "Windows compatibility" was no longer relevant. As such, Apple and Google went in and took up the positions of "the Microsoft" and "the Apple" respectively. (with the only difference being that, this time, Apple grabbed just enough high-margin marketshare to get taken more seriously.)
And the server market? Microsoft never *really* dominated there. Linux just took over from the proprietary UNIXes of old.
In general, it seems like the only way to get a job without needing "10 years of experience in 50 different buzzwords" seems to be as a NCG.
Makes me wonder if there's a market of people who go back to school to "reset" their NCG status bit just so they can get a job in something other than "exactly what they were doing at their previous job."
Yeah, they seem to focus on software updates that make for good press releases, but don't give a damn at stuff that would only be noticed by everyday drivers.
There are bugs in the whole media player software stack that enrage me every time I drive the car. I don't even know whose ear to yell into about them anymore, because they simply don't care. (And if you mention on forums, you get drowed out by 50 pet feature requests to the point that actual bugs get lost in the noise).
Thankfully, these are really the only actual issues I have with the car. Everything else about it is wonderful, and its kinda hard to go back to an ICE car after driving one.
We keep hearing about this big bubble of women who went into computer science in the 80's, in far greater numbers than have been seen in recent years. This makes me wonder... where are these people? They'd all fall into the "older engineers" category now.
For some reason, these features (especially the FM part, but the others too) are common among shit-tier phones but quite uncommon among higher end models.
Its pretty clear from the abstract that they're *not* talking about Ctrl-Alt-Del as the sequence for resetting the computer. Rather, they're talking about Ctrl-Alt-Del as the non-app-trappable sequence for triggering certain behaviors in Windows NT (login prompt, etc.). In that context, a single button actually would have been fine.
Of course this is Slashdot, so everyone is ignoring that and just skipping to assuming it was the former :-)
It's the same way that insurance companies have got people thinking that insurance = health care. The so-called health care debate isn't about health care, it's about insurance and when people eventually realize that, if ever, we might manage to make some progress toward getting insurance companies out of the way of delivering health care.
And the way they've inserted themselves in the process is something that you never hear the talking heads, on *either* side, have any real discussion about. Its always about who is supposed to pay for this "insurance," not why its so critical to the billing/pricing structure that normal people simply cannot afford any healthcare without it.
Go to a cheap community college for the first two years while living at home. Then transfer to a four year college for the final two years and either work part time
I wonder how often this plan actually works in practice.
My own anecdotal experience with people who attempt this plan has been that they actually take 3+ years to muddle through the CC. Then, they still take another 4 years to finally finish the four year college that follows. So in practice, they don't really save that much and pay for the lost opportunity cost of starting their career younger.
I wouldn't be surprised if most people who are actually capable of doing the 2+2 plan are also capable of getting sufficient scholarships that they're better off just directly attending the four year school and finishing it early/on-time.
And most people who are unsympathetic towards this likely got their education at a time when it was actually possible to do so without crippling debt, then entered a job market that provided them with more opportunities.
Is there really no phone you can buy to avoid this?
Are your willing to have software developers/vendors laugh in your face when you actually want their software to run (or run without issues) on your phone? If the answer is yes, then I'm sure you can find options. If the answer is no, then you're SOL.
Unfortunately, so much we do on mobile these days is absolutely dependent on proprietary applications and protocols, which means that you can't really have a full experience without depending on those outside the F/OSS community.
And if it is that way, where does that leave all the major religions and their almost all male icons? Should women be almost all atheists if that idea was true.
On top of that, most major religions have historically been quite exclusionary towards the participation of women in their rituals and ceremonies.
Yet, somehow, once reforms let them in the door, the women actually seem to be more serious about participation than the men. Even if the foundations haven't changed. I still haven't figured this one out.
... STEM workers need to take personal responsibility to grow professionally instead of being forced to by a governing body.
And STEM fields are full of people who are only there because "its a good job," but who have no personal genuine love of the field. As such, they probably don't give two shits about it the moment they go home from work for the day. Fast forward a few years, change the tech at the office, and they're suddenly unemployable.
Of course I fear that there are enough of these people, that older workers who actually do have this genuine interest are lumped in with them... and punished as a result.
The author is confusing Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) with Full Self-Driving (FSD).
Every single person I talk to, who only casually observes Tesla-related news, assumes that EAP == FSD. Every friggin single one. Usually in knee-jerk comments, when I mention something about having to drive my car somewhere. (I have a Model S /w AP v1... Love it in stop-and-go highway traffic and long highway trips, but I'm quite well aware of its capabilities and limitations.)
And now, thanks to overreacting school rules, we can't pack them as lunch for our kids. The best and easiest option, taken off the table. Grr :-(
I only hope that someday this nonsense will end, and efforts like this one will make it possible to stop having such rules.
It may be debatable as to whether you should be able to donate to your own charitable fund, but the whole concept of these funds actually makes sense. There is a version of these funds that's actually available to "normal" people without their own organizations. They're called "Donor Advised Funds." (If you ever see a clueless article about some fancy person giving money to the "Silicon Valley Community Fund," that is one of these such funds.)
These funds give you a way to separate the act of "getting the tax benefit of making a big donation" from the act of "actually making the donation to charities." They actually serve a useful purpose.
Let's say that you find yourself with a large lump of income (or appreciated securities, or anything else donate-able), and you want to get the tax benefit of donating a portion of it during a given year. However, you aren't yet ready to figure out how to divide it among every single charity you might want to contribute to. So you donate it to a DAF, and then later "direct" the funds at your leisure. (And while its in the DAF, it can get invested with the gains not being taxed.)
I don't have time or budget to deal with more than two paid streaming services. Billing, passwords, setting up and maintaining devices, etc is a real hassle.If it's not on either service, I am not going to watch it. Period.
This is made even more annoying by the very real possibility that every service will not necessarily be available on every device you actually want to watch content on. Sure, Netflix and Amazon Prime do a fairly decent job in this department, but they also have the experienced engineering resources to dedicate to the effort. There's really no guarantee that every other little two-bit studio-specific streaming service will do the same.
Let's take climate change for example. There is hard science that clearly shows the world is indeed warming and all the greenhouse gases have all shot up in the past two hundred years or so. That's not really debatable.
What is debatable is what precisely to do about it, if the cost of trying to fix it clearly outweighs not fixing it and how exactly we are going to fix it. Unfortunately it has become quite political.
I wish this were the debate. But instead, one side wants to do something while the other side wants to pretend the problem doesn't even exist in the first place.
When I was growing up, I think I was exposed mostly to whatever survived this era. The Apple IIe was commonplace, as were similar machines. However, the only place I ever saw a TRS-80 was as a bunch of disassembled components stashed in the corner of someone's office.
Actually, the original CNBC article is at fault here. It opens as stupid and sensational, without actually attempting to accurately describe the position until the 3rd frigging paragraph.