Very few people actually know their version control software. Most people know the basic commands, and that's the case for pretty much all of them. Git is not much different in that regard.
And I suspect some don't understand version control at all. I've worked with the following (non-git) setup: One production branch, at any time one active development branch. When we merge to production, we branch off a new development branch. Could it get simpler? I don't see how. Yet people manage to start developing on the prod branch (that they have access to for hotfixes), fail to understand that bugfixes to prod must go into dev or be overwritten at the next merge, branch the dev branch instead of the prod branch, not to mention the guy blindly checking in his entire old local code over the current dev branch and it's all a brilliant example of Murphy's law. One guy mostly understands it but doesn't want to be the gatekeeper for everybody else. Though he gets to play fire fighter instead...
No, it's roughly the limit of 20/20 vision. I checked using the spreadsheet here and my 28" 3840x2160 screen that I sit 60 cm in away from is perfect for anyone with 20/18.5 vision or worse. However, that's only the lower limit for what is considered "normal" vision, not perfect visual acuity:
Healthy young observers have a binocular acuity superior to 20/20; the limit of acuity in the unaided human eye is around 20/10-20/8 (6/3-6/2.4), although 20/8.9 was the highest score recorded in a study of some US professional athletes.
I know that I at one point could make out most of the 20/16 line, not anymore though. Moving to 8K would double the pixel density so the same screen, same distance at 7680x4320 would be good up to 20/9.25 vision, covering 99.9% of the population in their prime. It is actually possible that this athlete could marginally detect a >8K monitor. So no, 8K makes sense if you want everyone to have a perfect picture.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data but that doesn't ring true to me based on those I know that have been in traffic accidents. Most of it is plain not paying attention or hitting some kind of blind spot where you thought it was clear. Even the ones where the environment played a role they misjudged that particular turn as icy and slippery, not that they were surprised by winter conditions. Or they made some bad assumptions about what people would do.
If you only count the "freak accidents" like tire blowouts or other mechanical failure, potholes, surprise oil spills, cargo falling off a truck, trees falling over the road and so on that go "above and beyond" ordinary driving and following the rules of the road I'd say those are a very, very small minority. Of course they've been in some accidents where they were faultless, but generally then the other person involved was at fault. Truly faultless accidents are rare.
You could make the exact same argument about the whole ADA, the truth is that it wouldn't happen by itself. I can't count the number of wheelchair users but I very rarely see one out and about shopping, strictly from a business point of view they're a <0.1% market that wouldn't even pay off the ramp. The only reason we give them special privilege in law is because they're not trying to be special snowflakes, they don't have a choice about being disabled. And beating shop owners over the head with the law has been the best way to get results.
I don't have any disabilities, but I do have a few food allergies. I can with certainty say I'd be pretty furious if I went to a restaurant and they said we serve a set menu, either you eat it or not but we don't care about your allergies and won't offer any alternatives. It's not as if I went to a sushi restaurant and they don't have steak. Sure some are just bitter but many simply don't want to be beggars, they feel they deserve and have the right to equal access and not be at the mercy of the owner's charity. Sometimes they just get a little carried away and try using the law where reality won't let it happen.
Facebook, et al. can only "put out" as much as you put in.
No, Facebook can only "put out" as much as everybody else puts in. For example my classmates from primary school are a tightly connected clique and since some of them have told Facebook they went to the same school, Facebook has correctly deduced that everybody in that clique probably went there too and is asking me to confirm it, but they basically know anyway. Another relative of mine did some genealogy thing and basically drew up the whole family tree for Facebook. Same with people tagging you in photos and checking you in and whatnot, even though you can hide it from your own timeline or even untag yourself Facebook knows that when a friend tagged you it was almost certainly correct. I doubt they really forget anything.
And most annoyingly, Facebook often knows when I send email because the one I send to has shared their address book/inbox with Facebook. There's no other way some of those "friend suggestions" could turn up on social media, so even when you try to keep a life separate from Facebook it's no good when the other end is being a tattle-tale. And I don't know if it's just my friends, but my impression is that you don't reach out and actually tell friends about the things that friends normally get told about. They post it to Facebook and expect people to have read it there, that's more or less the expected way to socialize. Not reading Facebook gets you the "Oh sorry, I didn't know you were stationed on a nuclear submarine under radio silence" looks.
Carpooling is a pain because you don't have the car with you during the day. If something unexpected happens and it isn't you driving that day, you are in trouble. With driverless cabs this problem disappears -- you will most likely have to accept a delay when you request an unscheduled cab and possibly a higher price, but you are not stuck.
You forgot the most annoying part about car pooling, you must be on schedule like a clockwork. At work I have to be there certain "core hours" of the day, while mornings and evenings I have a bit of flexibility as long as I get my total hours done. Can't find your keys in the morning? Need to leave an hour early? Work an hour late? Should have stopped to buy milk on the way home? Heck, even those who take the bus can mostly catch one leaving half an hour later. You get the door-to-door service, but it's the least flexible solution. If any of you are the least bit sloppy and unorganized, chances are big they'll either be annoyed with you or you'll be annoyed with them. It's not all of my friends I'd carpool with, to put it that way.
This is why it's important to have royalty-free codecs for the web that everyone is free to implement. (...) I just hope Opus audio and NetVC video become ubiquitous sooner rather than later.
At least for Opus it's probably already too late, in two-three years MP3 and AAC will be patent-free, the relevant dates seem to be respectively 16.04.2017 and 14.02.2018 so by the time Opus goes mainstream patents won't matter. That war was fought and lost sometime around Ogg Vorbis. Even if they are slightly inferior to Opus in compression they have almost universal hardware and software support and just giving them a little more bit rate negates the quality difference. A mainstream patent free video codec would be great to have though, but I'm not holding my breath. You need to get the industry support behind it and these days most cameras record in H.264, YouTube delivery is just one part of the puzzle.
I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that LibreOffice would cover all my needs at work, but in my experience the conversion to and from.doc files has always had glitches. So here's what I hope should happen:
1. Make LibreOffice the default 2. Make MS Office one of those applications you have to order with an associated license cost. 3. Go through Group Policy options and set defaults to OpenDocument format
So if you prefer/need MS Office, you can have it but by default it'll save in the office-wide format. If you really need some MS magic you can do a "Save as..." to get Microsoft's own format. Pretty sure it's not going to happen but...
Not to look a gift outbreak of common sense in the mouth, but how the fuck can GPS trackers be a form of search and seizure and civil forfeiture NOT be a form of search and seizure?
It's a form of seizure, but the supreme court hasn't found it an unreasonable one. And it's been used for a very long time. Basically, the issue was that without forfeiture they had a hard time catching the owners of smuggling ships. As long as you can't establish them as an accessory to the crime or you have jurisdiction problems, they can legally provide the supplies while the criminals operate on an asset-less basis. So the solution was to declare the assets - in this case the ship - used in illegal acts forfeit, making it a risk and a cost to be used in crime. This goes all the way back to the British.
I've been reading some of the court cases and it seems the minority has been trying really hard to find tortured ways of getting out of their own past precedents as the cases become more and more unreasonable but the majority falls down on "we've approved of civil forfeiture for 200 years, we can't overturn that now". They really, really, really don't like interpreting an old law in a new way. So without acts of Congress saying this is not okay, I don't think anything will change.
P.S. Civil asset forfeiture puts the US way ahead of the UK as fascist country in my opinion, I'm not really even sure if it should qualify as an "innocent until proven guilty" system anymore since you can be robbed blind and need to prove your innocence to the court. It stinks to high heaven.
He's still an employee during his notice period; treat him like one.
Or not, either way is fine. a) You're leaving for another company but during the notice period while it is our paycheck we expect you to be professional and loyal to your current employer. That means continuing to carry out your job duties to the best of your ability and help transition them to other employees. I'm sure they'll appreciate someone with working knowledge of the system guiding them. or b) I'm sure you know it's company policy to immediately terminate all access for leaving staff members, regardless of reason so don't take it personally. Think of it as two weeks paid vacation. Have you got everything in order? I can pretend I haven't seen this for another hour, but if you're ready I'll call the honor guard to escort you out. The check will be in the mail.
I mean you have to screw up pretty bad to make the last seem like a bad thing for an employee that's leaving voluntarily. You're getting two weeks pay for doing nothing. Pretty much the worst you can do is make them stay, but act like you don't trust them anymore.
And if they care a bit too much about their coworkers and start talking about transitioning, it should be pretty easy to to talk them out of it. Sure it'll be tough on the remaining staff, but it'll be like a "what if he was hit by a bus" exercise and we'll find out how much documentation and routines we're missing. They'll cope somehow and besides, it's company policy so I can't really make those kinds of exceptions.
You mean like browsers and Javascript? In that case 99% of the population has lost already. The pwn2own competition results are rather miserable. The part that/. probably doesn't want to hear is that the primary effect is centralization and gatekeepers.
Take Usenet for example, it got overrun by spammers and trolls because there was no real way to block them and the few moderated groups basically meant a few people were in control of the discussion. Instead we moved to forums, where you could use CAPTCHAs and various other tricks to block mass sign-ups, moderation, flagging of abusive users and so on. They're not perfect, but they work okay.
Why do so many people use Facebook instead of email? Same thing, much less SPAM. For the longest time, Linux users hailed the repository model over the Windows "download random exe from the Internet" model. Then Apple took it to the extreme with the "one store to rule them all" and suddenly it was a problem. Even on Android you have to pass by huge warning lights to enable third party repositories and Windows Phone has as far as I know joined Apple in the "one store" model.
My guess is that they'll push it to the cloud so all the application code runs on a server and they just need to lock down the browser, more per user&app sandboxes, more difficult time running unsigned software and more users with computers that need Apple's, Microsoft's or Google's sign-off to run an application. The average user simply doesn't understand the micromanagement involved, same way users won't use NoScript when browsing the web. They'll "outsource" it.
Trust me -- the small business bakery market will weed out those who want to miss great business opportunities and/or sales just because they don't want both figures on a cake wearing pants.
That depends on how much of peer pressure/boycott there is from your local church congregation and extended to their members to not shop at "gay friendly" stores and buy at stores that refuse gays service. From what I've understood the most successful such peer pressure in the US has been to make mainstream outlets "family friendly". Despite there obviously being a big market for adult material, they've managed to force adult stores out of malls, keep mainstream cinemas showing adult-only movies, video game stores from selling adult only-titles and so on simply by refusing to shop in any business that would touch it with a ten foot pole. You don't think the same can happen to a cake shop? I do.
The short story from any seasoned admin perspective: 'Whatever platform *I* know the tools for is better than the platform that I don't know the tools for'. This applies to all the parent posts. The Windows guy thinks Linux isn't enterprise ready because he doesn't know the tools. The Linux guy is shocked to hear this because Windows in his experience is a pain in the ass.
Of course leaving out the small detail that basically every managed Windows desktop uses AD and Windows admins either know it or they don't. If I search for tools to centralized manage Linux machines, I get dozens of alternatives in the top 50 hits. Like with everything else on Linux, there is no single standard.
Most large airliners today have some kind of in-flight cell phone/internet access. Apparently the flight recorder data is about 6 kbps, if you want to include the cockpit voice recorder you may double that. You'd immediately know when it goes dark and send out a search&rescue party, it can't get lost or destroyed in a crash, you would have data right away not days and weeks later and you could often deduce the problem long before you find the boxes.
which means we'd better stop dismissing lunar and asteroid mining and such as sci-fi dreams and start figuring out how to make them work
Well then start there, not build the Enterprise and say "When we're ready to build the warp drive..." because even Mars One got more realistic plans for travelling to Mars than anyone got for lunar/asteroid mining.
your workforce for the next step can have a place to stay in orbit rather than commuting to and from the surface all the time.
The effects of radiation and zero-g, not to mention humane working conditions means you'd want to rotate the crew a couple times a year. Nobody will live in space any more than they'd live on a nuclear submarine, unless it's another massively shielded artificial gravity sci-fi dream.
And ultimately it'll end up being recycled into raw materials or basic parts for something else once it's no longer needed
Nobody has such plans for the ISS, if you don't want to spend $3 billion/year to keep it in orbit all the plans I've heard for it is to deorbit it into the Pacific.
No, it's not going to be easy or simple. Colonizing North America wasn't easy or simple either, but we did it.
Who we? The 15th+ century colonists who managed to settle in a land already inhabited by Native Americans in the south to Inuits in the north? You're talking about living in an area where humans have lived since long before we had any kind of civilization or technology. It doesn't even remotely compare to the hostility of space.
Though I'll admit that attitude does seem kind of insane to the couch potatoes. Not really my problem though, my entire career my motto's been "They don't pay me to not get the job done." and the older I get the less reason I see to change it.
But on a wild bet I'd say it's not NASA paying you... if I'm an armchair naysayer, you're an armchair quarterback. And if you worked for Ford, we'd all be travelling around in flying cars by now.
Certain kinds of products are moving online. But I have a feeling the electronic retail stores are making their money on selling refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs and everything else too big to fit an ordinary parcel. A lot of other goods are selling on look and feel where people want to see the actual product in person, I got burned on this before Christmas when I bought something that... I mean all the specs and images were correct, but it was just underwhelming in reality. I certainly don't think they're worse off than specialty stores. The thing is, when people look at specialty stores what they often want is the selection, not necessarily the service. Online stores can often have an even wider selection and really there's no better service than getting what you want. I guess if you really want useful help but I suffer from a general distrust of clerks/salesmen, are they really helping me or their profit margin. Most of the time I'd rather trust my own judgement.
I've can't decide if you're a troll or just lack sane opinions, you seem to hate on most things except AMD for which you have a major boner. The average person doesn't use an encoder, ever. The only reason they care about decoding formats is because they download stuff off the Internet want their MKV to work on their gizmo, not just their computer. Both "DivX 3.11;-)" and MKV gained popularity that way.
Ordinary users upload videos to YouTube, but they don't have any say in what codec/settings/resolution/bitrate Google chooses to use. The people who edit video want it in their save/export dialog of whatever editing software they use, which Google can do fuck all about and those who transcode for "the scene" are 99% fine using a CLI. They just don't give a shit about legality so if WebM beat H.264 they'd use it and it'd be popular. Absolutely nobody cares about encoder GUIs.
[Patent FUD] encourages the use of older higher-bandwidth codecs which encourages provision of higher bandwidth internet connections.
Textbook broken window fallacy.
Isolated speaking, yes. However, you can consider it a cross-subsidy to enable other and presumably more worthy causes for high speed broadband than watching YouTube. Or you can assume that at some point we'll want higher bandwidth anyway for 4K TV so using a less efficient codec now means you're doing most of the roil-out for later when you'll use a more efficient codec. It's hardly unusual that creating less favorable conditions for some individuals may benefit the group as a whole or that different short-term incentives benefit the long term result.
Personally I consider broadband to be the electricity, telephone and running hot water of the 21st century, if you're not online you're more or less detached from contemporary society. Not that we all need to be on gigabit fiber, but dial-up just isn't cutting it anymore. Not like necessity of life because people lived without 100+ years ago and I guess in poorer parts of the world many do but it'd just not the way I'd like to live now.
If the US wants to go to Mars for more than a single short mission, it's going to need the ISS or a replacement. We'll need to be able to build ships in orbit so they aren't limited by the constraints of the first hundred or so miles of the trip (lifting the ship up from the surface to Earth orbit), that's the only way we'll be able to build them large enough for the crew, supplies and equipment needed for a mission of more than a week or two. And if we want this to be a sustained thing, sending more than a couple-three missions, we're going to need to be able to build ships without shipping the majority of their components up from surface.
And the ISS will help how, exactly? The entire ISS came from the Earth's surface. Unless you have a really fancy plan to do asteroid/lunar mining, that's where all future materials will ultimately come from too. The ISS is way, way down in Earth's gravity well so if you could do mining you wouldn't build it there anyway. We can assemble a ship in orbit with or without the ISS, nothing really gets easier. What we're building must have a crew module, so any astronauts working on assembly can just live there. Not that I really see the need, the assemblies could dock like spaceships do and just interlock with bolts.
Star Trek has ruined a generation's sanity when it comes to space stations. The only reason you'd want a space station is so you can have a ship come in for maintenance, repair, upgrades or refueling in orbit so they don't have to go down the gravity well. If all you're doing is sending ships out never to return, it's a total waste of time. Unless you get to the point where you have a shuttle taking things from Earth orbit and Mars orbit and returning for a refuel it doesn't make sense. And it probably doesn't make sense unless you can refuel in Mars orbit. Which means it's not happening in this century.
Space stations are not like gas stations where you just drop by as you pass one by. Unless you're planning to be in Earth orbit, entering Earth orbit to dock with the ISS and deorbiting to get to your destination costs a helluva lot of fuel. And that is the crux of the issue, it almost never makes sense to build a waypoint into your route as opposed to just going to whereever you were planning to go in the first place. If possible you might not even want to assemble in oribt, just launch multiple rockets on the same trajectory and have the bits assemble in zero g before firing off to their final destination.
What comes next? H.266? Is anyone working on it? Is it even possible?
Of course it is, the question is if anybody will care. We know there are many better image compression routines than JPEG like JPEG 2000, JPEG-XR and WebP, but it's "good enough" nobody cares and it is now absolutely guaranteed patent free. Same with PNG, there are arguably better compression algorithms but it works. Everywhere but the US the MP3 patent has expired and in 2017 the last patent will expire there too. In 2018 the MPEG2 patents including AAC end, which I think will make AAC the de facto codec for lossy audio.
Video is another ball of fur, there's Theora and VP8/9 and WebM but none have gained any real traction and from what I understand not even MPEG2 is patent free yet while H.264 is 10+ years from becoming patent free. In that kind of marketplace what's another patented codec? I assume the gains for each generation will be less though and with bandwidth and disc capacity increasing we might not care that much anyway. I know it's not the JPEGs slowing down my browsing experience...
I got modded down a few times here (unsurprisingly) when I mentioned who needs more than 1 TB besides some niche use. Everyone and their brother went on how creating a NAS from scratch and their database project at work was average Joe stuff and I didn't know what what I was talking about.
I think the Steam hardware survey is a pretty good indication, of the people on steam only 23.5% have >1TB disk space. And they're probably way above average as the average officer worker (no, not you with the MSDN collection and 14 VMs) sure doesn't use that much, nor the kind of people who could use a Chromebook. The "problem" for HDD manufacturers though is that they've killed any interest in anything but $/GB. The most typical big media people have is video and it's accessed linearly and for that hard drives work just fine. Everything else you can put on an SSD. So the incentive to invest is really, really low.
I guess same reason we should be seeing 128 gig ram machines but are not. Simply there is no market but it could easily be done today
Yes, I looked building an 8x8GB rig back in end of 2012 when the RAM market tanked but couldn't really find any reason to. In fact the 4x4GB RAM from 2011 is pretty much the only component I kept when I upgraded last year. By the way, for $2-3k you can now get an X99 mobo, Xeon E5-2603 and 8x16GB DDR4 Reg/ECC RAM but unless it's all about the RAM performance will be very anemic. But I haven't even found the incentive to bump it up to 32GB yet, which I could do any time. It doesn't exactly help that prices have more than doubled the last 2-3 years.
Well in this case I'd say there's Google and Wikipedia, use them. The source code is not the right place to teach someone about what CRC32 is or when, where or why you might want to use it. It's almost as bad as comments that try to teach you the programming language you're in. If you're implementing something that's not in an RFC or standard of some sort, I'd agree with you.
Or they could start making horribly bad decisions because they have no clue what to do when the computer glitches, like with Air France 447. I don't know the number of ways an airplane could break and probably neither does the pilots, they just drive the thing. I'm pretty sure the engineers at Airbus and Boeing can simulate a whole host of instruments failing or malfunctioning to add redundancy and determine which instruments are actually unreliable, probably far better than a pilot. If we increase engine power and our airspeed doesn't go up, are the engine control failing or the airspeed measurements? There's probably other instruments that can tell you the difference, but I wouldn't have much faith in the pilots figuring it out on the spot. Degraded autopilot mode might still be better than manual mode.
The whole point of the cabin lock-out is that a terrorist can't threaten/torture the code out of a crew member and gain access to the cockpit. All you need to do is add a second terrorist to press the other switch and they now got access to the cockpit. That would be silly.
The right solution is always having two persons in the cockpit. That way one would have to assault and incapacitate/kill the other which is a pretty big psychological barrier compared to turning a few knobs and waiting for impact. Anyone in mortal danger will also put up a good fight and hopefully alert other crew, who may then try to unlock the door and divide the attacker's attention. Or with luck maybe the attacked person can manage to hit the unlock switch.
It's not a perfect system but you should also realize the current crash was probably not the fastest way to crash the plane. There's almost certainly a "you're malfunctioning, give me manual control" override on the flight controls and after that a pilot could send the plane nose down in a spin which would make it almost impossible for any other crew to reach the cockpit within a matter of seconds, be almost impossible to recover from and with impact in less than a minute from flight altitude. The Germanwings pilot crashed it slow because he had all the time in the world as long as he kept the captain locked out.
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Very few people actually know their version control software. Most people know the basic commands, and that's the case for pretty much all of them. Git is not much different in that regard.
And I suspect some don't understand version control at all. I've worked with the following (non-git) setup:
One production branch, at any time one active development branch. When we merge to production, we branch off a new development branch. Could it get simpler? I don't see how. Yet people manage to start developing on the prod branch (that they have access to for hotfixes), fail to understand that bugfixes to prod must go into dev or be overwritten at the next merge, branch the dev branch instead of the prod branch, not to mention the guy blindly checking in his entire old local code over the current dev branch and it's all a brilliant example of Murphy's law. One guy mostly understands it but doesn't want to be the gatekeeper for everybody else. Though he gets to play fire fighter instead...
No, it's roughly the limit of 20/20 vision. I checked using the spreadsheet here and my 28" 3840x2160 screen that I sit 60 cm in away from is perfect for anyone with 20/18.5 vision or worse. However, that's only the lower limit for what is considered "normal" vision, not perfect visual acuity:
Healthy young observers have a binocular acuity superior to 20/20; the limit of acuity in the unaided human eye is around 20/10-20/8 (6/3-6/2.4), although 20/8.9 was the highest score recorded in a study of some US professional athletes.
I know that I at one point could make out most of the 20/16 line, not anymore though. Moving to 8K would double the pixel density so the same screen, same distance at 7680x4320 would be good up to 20/9.25 vision, covering 99.9% of the population in their prime. It is actually possible that this athlete could marginally detect a >8K monitor. So no, 8K makes sense if you want everyone to have a perfect picture.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data but that doesn't ring true to me based on those I know that have been in traffic accidents. Most of it is plain not paying attention or hitting some kind of blind spot where you thought it was clear. Even the ones where the environment played a role they misjudged that particular turn as icy and slippery, not that they were surprised by winter conditions. Or they made some bad assumptions about what people would do.
If you only count the "freak accidents" like tire blowouts or other mechanical failure, potholes, surprise oil spills, cargo falling off a truck, trees falling over the road and so on that go "above and beyond" ordinary driving and following the rules of the road I'd say those are a very, very small minority. Of course they've been in some accidents where they were faultless, but generally then the other person involved was at fault. Truly faultless accidents are rare.
You could make the exact same argument about the whole ADA, the truth is that it wouldn't happen by itself. I can't count the number of wheelchair users but I very rarely see one out and about shopping, strictly from a business point of view they're a <0.1% market that wouldn't even pay off the ramp. The only reason we give them special privilege in law is because they're not trying to be special snowflakes, they don't have a choice about being disabled. And beating shop owners over the head with the law has been the best way to get results.
I don't have any disabilities, but I do have a few food allergies. I can with certainty say I'd be pretty furious if I went to a restaurant and they said we serve a set menu, either you eat it or not but we don't care about your allergies and won't offer any alternatives. It's not as if I went to a sushi restaurant and they don't have steak. Sure some are just bitter but many simply don't want to be beggars, they feel they deserve and have the right to equal access and not be at the mercy of the owner's charity. Sometimes they just get a little carried away and try using the law where reality won't let it happen.
Facebook, et al. can only "put out" as much as you put in.
No, Facebook can only "put out" as much as everybody else puts in. For example my classmates from primary school are a tightly connected clique and since some of them have told Facebook they went to the same school, Facebook has correctly deduced that everybody in that clique probably went there too and is asking me to confirm it, but they basically know anyway. Another relative of mine did some genealogy thing and basically drew up the whole family tree for Facebook. Same with people tagging you in photos and checking you in and whatnot, even though you can hide it from your own timeline or even untag yourself Facebook knows that when a friend tagged you it was almost certainly correct. I doubt they really forget anything.
And most annoyingly, Facebook often knows when I send email because the one I send to has shared their address book/inbox with Facebook. There's no other way some of those "friend suggestions" could turn up on social media, so even when you try to keep a life separate from Facebook it's no good when the other end is being a tattle-tale. And I don't know if it's just my friends, but my impression is that you don't reach out and actually tell friends about the things that friends normally get told about. They post it to Facebook and expect people to have read it there, that's more or less the expected way to socialize. Not reading Facebook gets you the "Oh sorry, I didn't know you were stationed on a nuclear submarine under radio silence" looks.
Carpooling is a pain because you don't have the car with you during the day. If something unexpected happens and it isn't you driving that day, you are in trouble. With driverless cabs this problem disappears -- you will most likely have to accept a delay when you request an unscheduled cab and possibly a higher price, but you are not stuck.
You forgot the most annoying part about car pooling, you must be on schedule like a clockwork. At work I have to be there certain "core hours" of the day, while mornings and evenings I have a bit of flexibility as long as I get my total hours done. Can't find your keys in the morning? Need to leave an hour early? Work an hour late? Should have stopped to buy milk on the way home? Heck, even those who take the bus can mostly catch one leaving half an hour later. You get the door-to-door service, but it's the least flexible solution. If any of you are the least bit sloppy and unorganized, chances are big they'll either be annoyed with you or you'll be annoyed with them. It's not all of my friends I'd carpool with, to put it that way.
This is why it's important to have royalty-free codecs for the web that everyone is free to implement. (...) I just hope Opus audio and NetVC video become ubiquitous sooner rather than later.
At least for Opus it's probably already too late, in two-three years MP3 and AAC will be patent-free, the relevant dates seem to be respectively 16.04.2017 and 14.02.2018 so by the time Opus goes mainstream patents won't matter. That war was fought and lost sometime around Ogg Vorbis. Even if they are slightly inferior to Opus in compression they have almost universal hardware and software support and just giving them a little more bit rate negates the quality difference. A mainstream patent free video codec would be great to have though, but I'm not holding my breath. You need to get the industry support behind it and these days most cameras record in H.264, YouTube delivery is just one part of the puzzle.
I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that LibreOffice would cover all my needs at work, but in my experience the conversion to and from .doc files has always had glitches. So here's what I hope should happen:
1. Make LibreOffice the default
2. Make MS Office one of those applications you have to order with an associated license cost.
3. Go through Group Policy options and set defaults to OpenDocument format
So if you prefer/need MS Office, you can have it but by default it'll save in the office-wide format. If you really need some MS magic you can do a "Save as..." to get Microsoft's own format. Pretty sure it's not going to happen but...
Not to look a gift outbreak of common sense in the mouth, but how the fuck can GPS trackers be a form of search and seizure and civil forfeiture NOT be a form of search and seizure?
It's a form of seizure, but the supreme court hasn't found it an unreasonable one. And it's been used for a very long time. Basically, the issue was that without forfeiture they had a hard time catching the owners of smuggling ships. As long as you can't establish them as an accessory to the crime or you have jurisdiction problems, they can legally provide the supplies while the criminals operate on an asset-less basis. So the solution was to declare the assets - in this case the ship - used in illegal acts forfeit, making it a risk and a cost to be used in crime. This goes all the way back to the British.
I've been reading some of the court cases and it seems the minority has been trying really hard to find tortured ways of getting out of their own past precedents as the cases become more and more unreasonable but the majority falls down on "we've approved of civil forfeiture for 200 years, we can't overturn that now". They really, really, really don't like interpreting an old law in a new way. So without acts of Congress saying this is not okay, I don't think anything will change.
P.S. Civil asset forfeiture puts the US way ahead of the UK as fascist country in my opinion, I'm not really even sure if it should qualify as an "innocent until proven guilty" system anymore since you can be robbed blind and need to prove your innocence to the court. It stinks to high heaven.
He's still an employee during his notice period; treat him like one.
Or not, either way is fine.
a) You're leaving for another company but during the notice period while it is our paycheck we expect you to be professional and loyal to your current employer. That means continuing to carry out your job duties to the best of your ability and help transition them to other employees. I'm sure they'll appreciate someone with working knowledge of the system guiding them.
or
b) I'm sure you know it's company policy to immediately terminate all access for leaving staff members, regardless of reason so don't take it personally. Think of it as two weeks paid vacation. Have you got everything in order? I can pretend I haven't seen this for another hour, but if you're ready I'll call the honor guard to escort you out. The check will be in the mail.
I mean you have to screw up pretty bad to make the last seem like a bad thing for an employee that's leaving voluntarily. You're getting two weeks pay for doing nothing. Pretty much the worst you can do is make them stay, but act like you don't trust them anymore.
And if they care a bit too much about their coworkers and start talking about transitioning, it should be pretty easy to to talk them out of it. Sure it'll be tough on the remaining staff, but it'll be like a "what if he was hit by a bus" exercise and we'll find out how much documentation and routines we're missing. They'll cope somehow and besides, it's company policy so I can't really make those kinds of exceptions.
You mean like browsers and Javascript? In that case 99% of the population has lost already. The pwn2own competition results are rather miserable. The part that /. probably doesn't want to hear is that the primary effect is centralization and gatekeepers.
Take Usenet for example, it got overrun by spammers and trolls because there was no real way to block them and the few moderated groups basically meant a few people were in control of the discussion. Instead we moved to forums, where you could use CAPTCHAs and various other tricks to block mass sign-ups, moderation, flagging of abusive users and so on. They're not perfect, but they work okay.
Why do so many people use Facebook instead of email? Same thing, much less SPAM. For the longest time, Linux users hailed the repository model over the Windows "download random exe from the Internet" model. Then Apple took it to the extreme with the "one store to rule them all" and suddenly it was a problem. Even on Android you have to pass by huge warning lights to enable third party repositories and Windows Phone has as far as I know joined Apple in the "one store" model.
My guess is that they'll push it to the cloud so all the application code runs on a server and they just need to lock down the browser, more per user&app sandboxes, more difficult time running unsigned software and more users with computers that need Apple's, Microsoft's or Google's sign-off to run an application. The average user simply doesn't understand the micromanagement involved, same way users won't use NoScript when browsing the web. They'll "outsource" it.
Trust me -- the small business bakery market will weed out those who want to miss great business opportunities and/or sales just because they don't want both figures on a cake wearing pants.
That depends on how much of peer pressure/boycott there is from your local church congregation and extended to their members to not shop at "gay friendly" stores and buy at stores that refuse gays service. From what I've understood the most successful such peer pressure in the US has been to make mainstream outlets "family friendly". Despite there obviously being a big market for adult material, they've managed to force adult stores out of malls, keep mainstream cinemas showing adult-only movies, video game stores from selling adult only-titles and so on simply by refusing to shop in any business that would touch it with a ten foot pole. You don't think the same can happen to a cake shop? I do.
The short story from any seasoned admin perspective: 'Whatever platform *I* know the tools for is better than the platform that I don't know the tools for'. This applies to all the parent posts. The Windows guy thinks Linux isn't enterprise ready because he doesn't know the tools. The Linux guy is shocked to hear this because Windows in his experience is a pain in the ass.
Of course leaving out the small detail that basically every managed Windows desktop uses AD and Windows admins either know it or they don't. If I search for tools to centralized manage Linux machines, I get dozens of alternatives in the top 50 hits. Like with everything else on Linux, there is no single standard.
Most large airliners today have some kind of in-flight cell phone/internet access. Apparently the flight recorder data is about 6 kbps, if you want to include the cockpit voice recorder you may double that. You'd immediately know when it goes dark and send out a search&rescue party, it can't get lost or destroyed in a crash, you would have data right away not days and weeks later and you could often deduce the problem long before you find the boxes.
which means we'd better stop dismissing lunar and asteroid mining and such as sci-fi dreams and start figuring out how to make them work
Well then start there, not build the Enterprise and say "When we're ready to build the warp drive..." because even Mars One got more realistic plans for travelling to Mars than anyone got for lunar/asteroid mining.
your workforce for the next step can have a place to stay in orbit rather than commuting to and from the surface all the time.
The effects of radiation and zero-g, not to mention humane working conditions means you'd want to rotate the crew a couple times a year. Nobody will live in space any more than they'd live on a nuclear submarine, unless it's another massively shielded artificial gravity sci-fi dream.
And ultimately it'll end up being recycled into raw materials or basic parts for something else once it's no longer needed
Nobody has such plans for the ISS, if you don't want to spend $3 billion/year to keep it in orbit all the plans I've heard for it is to deorbit it into the Pacific.
No, it's not going to be easy or simple. Colonizing North America wasn't easy or simple either, but we did it.
Who we? The 15th+ century colonists who managed to settle in a land already inhabited by Native Americans in the south to Inuits in the north? You're talking about living in an area where humans have lived since long before we had any kind of civilization or technology. It doesn't even remotely compare to the hostility of space.
Though I'll admit that attitude does seem kind of insane to the couch potatoes. Not really my problem though, my entire career my motto's been "They don't pay me to not get the job done." and the older I get the less reason I see to change it.
But on a wild bet I'd say it's not NASA paying you... if I'm an armchair naysayer, you're an armchair quarterback. And if you worked for Ford, we'd all be travelling around in flying cars by now.
Certain kinds of products are moving online. But I have a feeling the electronic retail stores are making their money on selling refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs and everything else too big to fit an ordinary parcel. A lot of other goods are selling on look and feel where people want to see the actual product in person, I got burned on this before Christmas when I bought something that... I mean all the specs and images were correct, but it was just underwhelming in reality. I certainly don't think they're worse off than specialty stores. The thing is, when people look at specialty stores what they often want is the selection, not necessarily the service. Online stores can often have an even wider selection and really there's no better service than getting what you want. I guess if you really want useful help but I suffer from a general distrust of clerks/salesmen, are they really helping me or their profit margin. Most of the time I'd rather trust my own judgement.
I've can't decide if you're a troll or just lack sane opinions, you seem to hate on most things except AMD for which you have a major boner. The average person doesn't use an encoder, ever. The only reason they care about decoding formats is because they download stuff off the Internet want their MKV to work on their gizmo, not just their computer. Both "DivX 3.11 ;-)" and MKV gained popularity that way.
Ordinary users upload videos to YouTube, but they don't have any say in what codec/settings/resolution/bitrate Google chooses to use. The people who edit video want it in their save/export dialog of whatever editing software they use, which Google can do fuck all about and those who transcode for "the scene" are 99% fine using a CLI. They just don't give a shit about legality so if WebM beat H.264 they'd use it and it'd be popular. Absolutely nobody cares about encoder GUIs.
[Patent FUD] encourages the use of older higher-bandwidth codecs which encourages provision of higher bandwidth internet connections.
Textbook broken window fallacy.
Isolated speaking, yes. However, you can consider it a cross-subsidy to enable other and presumably more worthy causes for high speed broadband than watching YouTube. Or you can assume that at some point we'll want higher bandwidth anyway for 4K TV so using a less efficient codec now means you're doing most of the roil-out for later when you'll use a more efficient codec. It's hardly unusual that creating less favorable conditions for some individuals may benefit the group as a whole or that different short-term incentives benefit the long term result.
Personally I consider broadband to be the electricity, telephone and running hot water of the 21st century, if you're not online you're more or less detached from contemporary society. Not that we all need to be on gigabit fiber, but dial-up just isn't cutting it anymore. Not like necessity of life because people lived without 100+ years ago and I guess in poorer parts of the world many do but it'd just not the way I'd like to live now.
If the US wants to go to Mars for more than a single short mission, it's going to need the ISS or a replacement. We'll need to be able to build ships in orbit so they aren't limited by the constraints of the first hundred or so miles of the trip (lifting the ship up from the surface to Earth orbit), that's the only way we'll be able to build them large enough for the crew, supplies and equipment needed for a mission of more than a week or two. And if we want this to be a sustained thing, sending more than a couple-three missions, we're going to need to be able to build ships without shipping the majority of their components up from surface.
And the ISS will help how, exactly? The entire ISS came from the Earth's surface. Unless you have a really fancy plan to do asteroid/lunar mining, that's where all future materials will ultimately come from too. The ISS is way, way down in Earth's gravity well so if you could do mining you wouldn't build it there anyway. We can assemble a ship in orbit with or without the ISS, nothing really gets easier. What we're building must have a crew module, so any astronauts working on assembly can just live there. Not that I really see the need, the assemblies could dock like spaceships do and just interlock with bolts.
Star Trek has ruined a generation's sanity when it comes to space stations. The only reason you'd want a space station is so you can have a ship come in for maintenance, repair, upgrades or refueling in orbit so they don't have to go down the gravity well. If all you're doing is sending ships out never to return, it's a total waste of time. Unless you get to the point where you have a shuttle taking things from Earth orbit and Mars orbit and returning for a refuel it doesn't make sense. And it probably doesn't make sense unless you can refuel in Mars orbit. Which means it's not happening in this century.
Space stations are not like gas stations where you just drop by as you pass one by. Unless you're planning to be in Earth orbit, entering Earth orbit to dock with the ISS and deorbiting to get to your destination costs a helluva lot of fuel. And that is the crux of the issue, it almost never makes sense to build a waypoint into your route as opposed to just going to whereever you were planning to go in the first place. If possible you might not even want to assemble in oribt, just launch multiple rockets on the same trajectory and have the bits assemble in zero g before firing off to their final destination.
What comes next? H.266? Is anyone working on it? Is it even possible?
Of course it is, the question is if anybody will care. We know there are many better image compression routines than JPEG like JPEG 2000, JPEG-XR and WebP, but it's "good enough" nobody cares and it is now absolutely guaranteed patent free. Same with PNG, there are arguably better compression algorithms but it works. Everywhere but the US the MP3 patent has expired and in 2017 the last patent will expire there too. In 2018 the MPEG2 patents including AAC end, which I think will make AAC the de facto codec for lossy audio.
Video is another ball of fur, there's Theora and VP8/9 and WebM but none have gained any real traction and from what I understand not even MPEG2 is patent free yet while H.264 is 10+ years from becoming patent free. In that kind of marketplace what's another patented codec? I assume the gains for each generation will be less though and with bandwidth and disc capacity increasing we might not care that much anyway. I know it's not the JPEGs slowing down my browsing experience...
I got modded down a few times here (unsurprisingly) when I mentioned who needs more than 1 TB besides some niche use. Everyone and their brother went on how creating a NAS from scratch and their database project at work was average Joe stuff and I didn't know what what I was talking about.
I think the Steam hardware survey is a pretty good indication, of the people on steam only 23.5% have >1TB disk space. And they're probably way above average as the average officer worker (no, not you with the MSDN collection and 14 VMs) sure doesn't use that much, nor the kind of people who could use a Chromebook. The "problem" for HDD manufacturers though is that they've killed any interest in anything but $/GB. The most typical big media people have is video and it's accessed linearly and for that hard drives work just fine. Everything else you can put on an SSD. So the incentive to invest is really, really low.
I guess same reason we should be seeing 128 gig ram machines but are not. Simply there is no market but it could easily be done today
Yes, I looked building an 8x8GB rig back in end of 2012 when the RAM market tanked but couldn't really find any reason to. In fact the 4x4GB RAM from 2011 is pretty much the only component I kept when I upgraded last year. By the way, for $2-3k you can now get an X99 mobo, Xeon E5-2603 and 8x16GB DDR4 Reg/ECC RAM but unless it's all about the RAM performance will be very anemic. But I haven't even found the incentive to bump it up to 32GB yet, which I could do any time. It doesn't exactly help that prices have more than doubled the last 2-3 years.
Well in this case I'd say there's Google and Wikipedia, use them. The source code is not the right place to teach someone about what CRC32 is or when, where or why you might want to use it. It's almost as bad as comments that try to teach you the programming language you're in. If you're implementing something that's not in an RFC or standard of some sort, I'd agree with you.
Or they could start making horribly bad decisions because they have no clue what to do when the computer glitches, like with Air France 447. I don't know the number of ways an airplane could break and probably neither does the pilots, they just drive the thing. I'm pretty sure the engineers at Airbus and Boeing can simulate a whole host of instruments failing or malfunctioning to add redundancy and determine which instruments are actually unreliable, probably far better than a pilot. If we increase engine power and our airspeed doesn't go up, are the engine control failing or the airspeed measurements? There's probably other instruments that can tell you the difference, but I wouldn't have much faith in the pilots figuring it out on the spot. Degraded autopilot mode might still be better than manual mode.
The whole point of the cabin lock-out is that a terrorist can't threaten/torture the code out of a crew member and gain access to the cockpit. All you need to do is add a second terrorist to press the other switch and they now got access to the cockpit. That would be silly.
The right solution is always having two persons in the cockpit. That way one would have to assault and incapacitate/kill the other which is a pretty big psychological barrier compared to turning a few knobs and waiting for impact. Anyone in mortal danger will also put up a good fight and hopefully alert other crew, who may then try to unlock the door and divide the attacker's attention. Or with luck maybe the attacked person can manage to hit the unlock switch.
It's not a perfect system but you should also realize the current crash was probably not the fastest way to crash the plane. There's almost certainly a "you're malfunctioning, give me manual control" override on the flight controls and after that a pilot could send the plane nose down in a spin which would make it almost impossible for any other crew to reach the cockpit within a matter of seconds, be almost impossible to recover from and with impact in less than a minute from flight altitude. The Germanwings pilot crashed it slow because he had all the time in the world as long as he kept the captain locked out.
"This isn't right. You only paid $20 for this hammer? Bros, do you even bureaucrat? Here, lemme show you..."
Ah, but that's just the regular bureaucracy, you can add another order of magnitude if you want a military grade hammer.