Nobody with a soul and any understanding whatsoever denies the devastation that caustic drugs (EG: Meth, Krocodil) can cause. What should be vigorously debated is the actual effectiveness of making drugs illegal.
Hey, the point is to reduce deleterious use of drugs, not just to make them illegal, which doesn't necessarily solve the problem.
Sadly, the KDE experience had a SEVERE problem when they "upgraded" Kmail. The import was severely broken and for several days I was simply unable to get email at all until I have up on kmail (having used it since KDE 1.x days!) and switched to Thunderbird. It's not bad, but I sorely wish I could go back to Kmail on KDE 3.
Yes, I like now mostly like KDE4 and it's finally stabilized to something I don't mind much, but they've lost me for years when it comes to trusting my data.
You simply configure your DNS server properly, including setting the networks it's allowed to resolve for. A nameserver can be both authoritative for certain domains globally, and also be recursive for specific hosts.
Of course, there's also the problem of DNS amplification using source address spoofing by requesting authoritative DNS records, but simply doing the above greatly mitigates the effectiveness of the attack.
SQLite just called and wants you to take back your stale information back!
We sell a product using SQLite and have literally tens of thousands of installs with an error level low enough that our half dozen or so support staff keep up nicely. True, we use Post GRES on our central servers, but even there the admin requirements are quite reasonable...
Nokia is an interesting example. See, for the longest time, they had a competitive advantage over everybody else: they built the best feature phones. (A feature phone is a nice way to say dumb phone, a not-"smart" phone) Nokia had strong numbers: they had good phones that were reliable and had a good reputation. They were priced well. And while everybody else was spending all their cash on R&D for smart phones, Nokia laughed all the way to the bank producing the same old stuff better than everybody else and making insane profits.
That is, until nobody wanted the "chocolate bar" or "flip" phone anymore. Sometimes your greatest strength is also your worst weakness.
Google bought Motorola because of Patent trolling by Microsoft / Apple. They don't want Motorola to dominate the industry because it's more important for Google to have everybody using Android than Motorola grow. I get the feeling that the Nexus line being thrown to other companies was all about promoting trust despite owning one of the industry's big players, and it's worked.
Compare that to the industry's stance on the Microsoft Surface.... Dell/HP are pissed as hell. Dell is openly selling Android tablets side-by-side with their Windows tablets.
BTW: I have a Razr Maxx HD and I LOVE it. Nice bright screen, fast, great reception, great sound quality...
But there's nothing like waking up in the morning, realizing that you forgot to plug in the phone last night but it doesn't really matter because you still have more than 3/4 battery life left from the previous day. It's a much more liberating feeling than I would have expected. It doesn't let me down, even when I fly Coast-to-Coast red-eye watching movies the entire way at the end of a long work day.
So the Hollywood Elite can use their fame to push left leaning ideas and that's fine with you, but if someone famous tries to push conservative positions? Double standard much?
Not at all. If the Hollywood Elites say stuff that pisses off their fans, they lose popularity who then choose not to buy their stuff. I'm far less likely to go see anything with Tom Cruise in it since the whole creepy Scientology thing with his (ex)wife. He's free to say whatever he likes, and I'm free to like it or reject it.
Based on the fact that the primary (and really, ONLY) interface to Google glass is voice recognition, and given my experiences with voice recognition using the latest (or at lesast recent, Android 4.1) technology Google has for voice recognition, Google Glass is their Apple Newton.
The tech, it just ain't ready yet. I carefully enunciate: "Send Text to Kathy (pause) I think the problem is Becky, who wants to cancel Robert's plan"
A few beeps later...
"Sending text to Becky, The problem is Becky who wants to cancel Robert's plan".
Yeah, the example sorta sucks, but this pretty much happened to me when I decided to trust the text to speech for texting. It was almost a complete interpersonal disaster. It's good, but it's just not good enough. And given that text to speech has been "almost" good enough for at least 20 years, I'm not expecting it to improve any time soon until semantic understanding is part of the mix. (Watson: I'm looking at you....)
In response I like to send random sounding texts to family members like "Happy birth tazer ahh" just to see the response, to which I can reply: "Stupid voice to text, happy birthday Sarah!"..
the phone manufacturers are go so far for thin and light, they ignore forget about battery life and reception
Perhaps you should take a look at the Razr Maxx HD. It's thin, light, has fabulous reception, fabulous sound quality, and a battery life measured in days.
No, it doesn't have a keyboard, so I bought a folding bluetooth keyboard.
Now, when I need a keyboard, I have something that rivals a desktop, and when I want portability, I use Swype. And I'm honestly surprised at how well Swype actually does.
True, it would be smaller, and use less power. It would also require manually setting up stuff that's now set up via yum with a mature, stable distro (CentOS 6) that I'm extremely familiar with. I have no interest in spending a few days getting stuff to compile in order to save perhaps 15 watts of power.
Seeing your survey results doesn't surprise me. I bought the Droid Razr Maxx HD a month ago and I absolutely love this thing! It's amazing how much difference never having to worry about battery life is.
I mean literally never. With generous settings (Wifi left on, GPS off, 4G data on) I can go two full days without a recharge and still have about 10-20% battery at the end of day two. Getting through a single day has never been a problem.
Given that it's plenty fast (GTA III Vicy City plays well) big screen (a bit smaller than the GS3) that's bright, while still being a slim, svelte phone...
There's a time and place for everything. For most techie types, you can do fantastic amounts of real work with free hardware. I have a number of such embedded servers working for me, junkers from the back closet and past upgrades.
I still have a 500 Mhz Pentium III running 24x7 as a network monitor! 10 years of continuous, 24x7 service and it is still chugging along, currently running a 32 bit CentOS 6 distro. It burns less than 20 watts!
On the other hand, there's a time when money isn't much of an object. We have 4 32-core database servers with 128 GB of ECC RAM in each in our primary compute cluster. In absolute cost, they were not the slightest bit cheap despite being "white box" servers, but relative to the amount of work they perform, it was money very well spent.
When you have high processing loads, more powerful equipment allows you to do the same work with less administrative overhead since the number of units can be much smaller.
If you work at a financial institution and you have an undocumented process managing millions of dollars running on an unmaintained server, the problem extends much, much deeper than what to do with said undocumented, unmaintained server.
Quit, and find someplace that has some respect for its staff. The best you can accomplish in this environment is to stress yourself out beyond reason.
The years off the end of your life simply aren't worth it.
Stating the obvious in a sarcastic way while ignoring the truth: they were *paid in advance* to build out high speed data networks so that everyone would have access to truly broadband Internet and they have implemented only a small part of what was promised.
We have precious little to show for the generous application of public funds except for the raw number of square feet of the executives' gorgeous mansions.
When you run into this situation, the trick is to understand what the server actually does for end users and the answer is largely non-deterministic. So what you do is you write a network of cron jobs that take it "offline" for an hour a day, where that hour advances throughout the day.
After a week, increase the hour to 2 hours, and so on. If anybody is actually using said server, the complaints will shortly come out and you can then do a needs assessment.
When you get somewhere past 6/5 (6 hours per day, 5 days per week) you are pretty much ready to shut it down. And when you shut it down, keep it on hand "dark" for at least a year just in case.
Lastly, UPDATE YOUR FRIGGEN ADMIN LOGS because stuff like this is really a sign of gross incompetence at updating the logs.
I've been using Fedora for years. It is annoying to have to update every 18 months, especially when it causes severe breakage. (Kmail2 was an unmitigated disaster)
As one of those two KDE users, I can say that I have never, not even once, looked forward to a new release of KDE. I'm sorry, it's sad, and I acknowledge that fact.
The truth is that, while I've long loved KDE since 1.x became 2.x, the truth is that any advance in KDE has always come at the cost of severe breakage. I don't know why this is the case, it just is. Going from KDE 1.x to 2.x was horrible, and while all of 2.x was pretty good, going from 2.x to 3.x was so bad I still haven't recovered. I use Mozilla mail today because the transition from Kmail 2.x to 3.x actually ruined years of email history for me. I'm not nearly as angry as I should be, I guess.
The K developers have, in my opinion, have really dropped the ball on this one. And I say this as a fan of the general KDE environment, over 10+ years.
Except that email is commonly used for such. I have negotiated contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by email. (not yet multi-million, but well on my way, nonetheless)
While the US vs Microsoft doesn't show how regulation would cause a monopoly (we would need other examples for that), it does show that a monopoly that managed to dodge ten years of the government's best efforts to control it, still succumbed to the realities of the market and it's own instability.
So, you figure that it's all good pay a premium price for a monopoly's product for 10 friggen years because eventually market forces will weaken the monopoly?
It's ten years today, it might have been decades in the past... and you are OK with this market distortion because it's "short term" at only 10 years?!?!?
I, for one, don't want to wait that long to stop being screwed. Am I the only one?
Well, "the" is spelled "the" and not "hte" but I'll ignore that, except that by mentioning it, I haven't. Damn.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that there is no reason to assume that energy consumption should rise exponentially as our perceived standard of living rises. For example, California's energy usage per person has been flat since about 1970. Thanks to various regulatory initiatives, pricing incentives, and the like, California consumes less than half the amount of energy per person than Texas, while generating significantly more economic activity.
While there is some connection between energy consumption and economic growth, it's by no means a 1:1 relationship.
What makes no sense to me is why they'd use *Git* which is almost hostile towards the Windows platform, and not embrace Mercurial which has always been friendly to Windows users, offers capabilities similar to Git, and is designed more for ease of use and data integrity.
Git is all fine and well, but any VCS that includes both "history rebasing" and "garbage collection" as part of its commit history management, in my opinion, violates the very point of a VCS - to keep track of what was done by who, when. I'll pass, thanks, even if I do have a ton of respect for Linus.
And Cliff Young proved it long ago without resorting to random CAPITALIZATION that sounds like RANDOM SCREAMING to the inner voice that most of us USE when reading your blimey POST.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody with a soul and any understanding whatsoever denies the devastation that caustic drugs (EG: Meth, Krocodil) can cause. What should be vigorously debated is the actual effectiveness of making drugs illegal.
Hey, the point is to reduce deleterious use of drugs, not just to make them illegal, which doesn't necessarily solve the problem.
Portugal has given us an example that holds our current strategy out in sharp relief. The New York Times weighs in, as well as Forbes Magazine and Wikipedia
Do you care to show me the studies that show how criminalizing drugs consistently cause a reduction in abuse?
Sadly, the KDE experience had a SEVERE problem when they "upgraded" Kmail. The import was severely broken and for several days I was simply unable to get email at all until I have up on kmail (having used it since KDE 1.x days!) and switched to Thunderbird. It's not bad, but I sorely wish I could go back to Kmail on KDE 3.
Yes, I like now mostly like KDE4 and it's finally stabilized to something I don't mind much, but they've lost me for years when it comes to trusting my data.
You simply configure your DNS server properly, including setting the networks it's allowed to resolve for. A nameserver can be both authoritative for certain domains globally, and also be recursive for specific hosts.
Of course, there's also the problem of DNS amplification using source address spoofing by requesting authoritative DNS records, but simply doing the above greatly mitigates the effectiveness of the attack.
SQLite just called and wants you to take back your stale information back!
We sell a product using SQLite and have literally tens of thousands of installs with an error level low enough that our half dozen or so support staff keep up nicely. True, we use Post GRES on our central servers, but even there the admin requirements are quite reasonable...
Nokia is an interesting example. See, for the longest time, they had a competitive advantage over everybody else: they built the best feature phones. (A feature phone is a nice way to say dumb phone, a not-"smart" phone) Nokia had strong numbers: they had good phones that were reliable and had a good reputation. They were priced well. And while everybody else was spending all their cash on R&D for smart phones, Nokia laughed all the way to the bank producing the same old stuff better than everybody else and making insane profits.
That is, until nobody wanted the "chocolate bar" or "flip" phone anymore. Sometimes your greatest strength is also your worst weakness.
Google bought Motorola because of Patent trolling by Microsoft / Apple. They don't want Motorola to dominate the industry because it's more important for Google to have everybody using Android than Motorola grow. I get the feeling that the Nexus line being thrown to other companies was all about promoting trust despite owning one of the industry's big players, and it's worked.
Compare that to the industry's stance on the Microsoft Surface.... Dell/HP are pissed as hell. Dell is openly selling Android tablets side-by-side with their Windows tablets.
BTW: I have a Razr Maxx HD and I LOVE it. Nice bright screen, fast, great reception, great sound quality...
But there's nothing like waking up in the morning, realizing that you forgot to plug in the phone last night but it doesn't really matter because you still have more than 3/4 battery life left from the previous day. It's a much more liberating feeling than I would have expected. It doesn't let me down, even when I fly Coast-to-Coast red-eye watching movies the entire way at the end of a long work day.
Woah!
So the Hollywood Elite can use their fame to push left leaning ideas and that's fine with you, but if someone famous tries to push conservative positions? Double standard much?
Not at all. If the Hollywood Elites say stuff that pisses off their fans, they lose popularity who then choose not to buy their stuff. I'm far less likely to go see anything with Tom Cruise in it since the whole creepy Scientology thing with his (ex)wife. He's free to say whatever he likes, and I'm free to like it or reject it.
Based on the fact that the primary (and really, ONLY) interface to Google glass is voice recognition, and given my experiences with voice recognition using the latest (or at lesast recent, Android 4.1) technology Google has for voice recognition, Google Glass is their Apple Newton.
The tech, it just ain't ready yet. I carefully enunciate: "Send Text to Kathy (pause) I think the problem is Becky, who wants to cancel Robert's plan"
A few beeps later...
"Sending text to Becky, The problem is Becky who wants to cancel Robert's plan".
Yeah, the example sorta sucks, but this pretty much happened to me when I decided to trust the text to speech for texting. It was almost a complete interpersonal disaster. It's good, but it's just not good enough. And given that text to speech has been "almost" good enough for at least 20 years, I'm not expecting it to improve any time soon until semantic understanding is part of the mix. (Watson: I'm looking at you....)
In response I like to send random sounding texts to family members like "Happy birth tazer ahh" just to see the response, to which I can reply: "Stupid voice to text, happy birthday Sarah!"..
the phone manufacturers are go so far for thin and light, they ignore forget about battery life and reception
Perhaps you should take a look at the Razr Maxx HD. It's thin, light, has fabulous reception, fabulous sound quality, and a battery life measured in days.
No, it doesn't have a keyboard, so I
bought a folding bluetooth keyboard.
Now, when I need a keyboard, I have something that rivals a desktop, and when I want portability, I use Swype. And I'm honestly surprised at how well Swype actually does.
You're kidding, right?
True, it would be smaller, and use less power. It would also require manually setting up stuff that's now set up via yum with a mature, stable distro (CentOS 6) that I'm extremely familiar with. I have no interest in spending a few days getting stuff to compile in order to save perhaps 15 watts of power.
Just how much is YOUR time worth?
Simply put, I've purchased Android apps, and I don't want to lose those.
I have several Android devices all linked to the same google account. I'm able to access apps I've purchased interchangeably on all of them. I have
1) a Droid 2 Razr Maxx HD (that I LOVE),
2) a Samsung Stratosphere that I was happy to replace,
3) an Acer Iconia 7" tablet.
With the exception that the Stratosphere won't play the 3D games, I'm able to share my stuff between them.
Seeing your survey results doesn't surprise me. I bought the Droid Razr Maxx HD a month ago and I absolutely love this thing! It's amazing how much difference never having to worry about battery life is.
I mean literally never. With generous settings (Wifi left on, GPS off, 4G data on) I can go two full days without a recharge and still have about 10-20% battery at the end of day two. Getting through a single day has never been a problem.
Given that it's plenty fast (GTA III Vicy City plays well) big screen (a bit smaller than the GS3) that's bright, while still being a slim, svelte phone...
Yes!
There's a time and place for everything. For most techie types, you can do fantastic amounts of real work with free hardware. I have a number of such embedded servers working for me, junkers from the back closet and past upgrades.
I still have a 500 Mhz Pentium III running 24x7 as a network monitor! 10 years of continuous, 24x7 service and it is still chugging along, currently running a 32 bit CentOS 6 distro. It burns less than 20 watts!
On the other hand, there's a time when money isn't much of an object. We have 4 32-core database servers with 128 GB of ECC RAM in each in our primary compute cluster. In absolute cost, they were not the slightest bit cheap despite being "white box" servers, but relative to the amount of work they perform, it was money very well spent.
When you have high processing loads, more powerful equipment allows you to do the same work with less administrative overhead since the number of units can be much smaller.
If you work at a financial institution and you have an undocumented process managing millions of dollars running on an unmaintained server, the problem extends much, much deeper than what to do with said undocumented, unmaintained server.
Quit, and find someplace that has some respect for its staff. The best you can accomplish in this environment is to stress yourself out beyond reason.
The years off the end of your life simply aren't worth it.
Stating the obvious in a sarcastic way while ignoring the truth: they were *paid in advance* to build out high speed data networks so that everyone would have access to truly broadband Internet and they have implemented only a small part of what was promised.
We have precious little to show for the generous application of public funds except for the raw number of square feet of the executives' gorgeous mansions.
When you run into this situation, the trick is to understand what the server actually does for end users and the answer is largely non-deterministic. So what you do is you write a network of cron jobs that take it "offline" for an hour a day, where that hour advances throughout the day.
After a week, increase the hour to 2 hours, and so on. If anybody is actually using said server, the complaints will shortly come out and you can then do a needs assessment.
When you get somewhere past 6/5 (6 hours per day, 5 days per week) you are pretty much ready to shut it down. And when you shut it down, keep it on hand "dark" for at least a year just in case.
Lastly, UPDATE YOUR FRIGGEN ADMIN LOGS because stuff like this is really a sign of gross incompetence at updating the logs.
As somebody who works in the educational workspace providing information management services to schools, I would be fascinated in your take on the Learning Registry's potential for making low cost content available to teachers/students.
I've been using Fedora for years. It is annoying to have to update every 18 months, especially when it causes severe breakage. (Kmail2 was an unmitigated disaster)
Typically, though, updates cost me a morning.
As one of those two KDE users, I can say that I have never, not even once, looked forward to a new release of KDE. I'm sorry, it's sad, and I acknowledge that fact.
The truth is that, while I've long loved KDE since 1.x became 2.x, the truth is that any advance in KDE has always come at the cost of severe breakage. I don't know why this is the case, it just is. Going from KDE 1.x to 2.x was horrible, and while all of 2.x was pretty good, going from 2.x to 3.x was so bad I still haven't recovered. I use Mozilla mail today because the transition from Kmail 2.x to 3.x actually ruined years of email history for me. I'm not nearly as angry as I should be, I guess.
The K developers have, in my opinion, have really dropped the ball on this one. And I say this as a fan of the general KDE environment, over 10+ years.
There. I said it.
Except that email is commonly used for such. I have negotiated contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by email. (not yet multi-million, but well on my way, nonetheless)
While the US vs Microsoft doesn't show how regulation would cause a monopoly (we would need other examples for that), it does show that a monopoly that managed to dodge ten years of the government's best efforts to control it, still succumbed to the realities of the market and it's own instability.
So, you figure that it's all good pay a premium price for a monopoly's product for 10 friggen years because eventually market forces will weaken the monopoly?
It's ten years today, it might have been decades in the past... and you are OK with this market distortion because it's "short term" at only 10 years?!?!?
I, for one, don't want to wait that long to stop being screwed. Am I the only one?
It is harder to stick to the facts then to go all emo over speculation which sadly /. is becoming more and more.
Having hung around here for a *long* time, I can say that the signal/noise ratio isn't significantly worse now than it was 5 or 10 years ago.
Well, "the" is spelled "the" and not "hte" but I'll ignore that, except that by mentioning it, I haven't. Damn.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that there is no reason to assume that energy consumption should rise exponentially as our perceived standard of living rises. For example, California's energy usage per person has been flat since about 1970. Thanks to various regulatory initiatives, pricing incentives, and the like, California consumes less than half the amount of energy per person than Texas, while generating significantly more economic activity.
While there is some connection between energy consumption and economic growth, it's by no means a 1:1 relationship.
What makes no sense to me is why they'd use *Git* which is almost hostile towards the Windows platform, and not embrace Mercurial which has always been friendly to Windows users, offers capabilities similar to Git, and is designed more for ease of use and data integrity.
Git is all fine and well, but any VCS that includes both "history rebasing" and "garbage collection" as part of its commit history management, in my opinion, violates the very point of a VCS - to keep track of what was done by who, when. I'll pass, thanks, even if I do have a ton of respect for Linus.
So, Microsoft, why Git?
And Cliff Young proved it long ago without resorting to random CAPITALIZATION that sounds like RANDOM SCREAMING to the inner voice that most of us USE when reading your blimey POST.