This isn't odd at all, and "temporary" is a relative term. I used to work for one of the largest US banks. I managed testing teams, and at one time had more than 30 contractors that made up bout 90% of my team. That was the way it worked there. At one point, there were contractors that had been there 5+ years, then the rules changed. You got 2 years, then you could come back after 6 months off. At least how it worked for me, I was in a testing organization and we worked on lots of different projects.
What you're describing there is the root of the laws against abusing TVC workers. Anyone in a job for 5+ years is, for all intents and purposes, FTE. I'd make the argument that 2 years is FTE. That you're willing to hold to the rules and dump them for 6 months until you can get another 2 years out of them only indicates how badly that particular company is violating the spirit of the law.
Well, let me clarify. The 5+ years is how it used to be, probably 10 years ago. Then it switched to 2 years (maybe 18 months). After that, you had to leave and could not come back, even as a contractor, for 6 months. There was never anything close to a guarantee that you would come back. Besides who could sit out 6 months? I can assure you that the bank i worked for took those laws VERY seriously.
When there were budget cuts, usually once or twice a year, contractors were the first to go.
And this occurrence is a red flag that you're incorrectly using TVCs. You hired them for a temporary job indicating said job was funded for a limited time. They should go when the work is completed. If you're using them as employees, that's the only way this happens.
Well, when there were budget cuts usually projects had to get cancelled/postponed. So it was all on the up-and-up. What was sad was that it became known and expected that there would be cuts every year. So smarter people (not me) learned to pad their staff a little in anticipation of the cuts.
Why on earth do you manage 30+ TVCs? Do you manage 30+ employees? If not, why not? TVCs are meant to fill temporary holes. It certainly sounds like your company (assuming you're only managing 30+ TVCs which I find likely) is dodging various labor laws and the costs and obligations associated with FTEs. Which merely implies that the laws and regulations aren't properly set up to promote employment.
This isn't odd at all, and "temporary" is a relative term. I used to work for one of the largest US banks. I managed testing teams, and at one time had more than 30 contractors that made up bout 90% of my team. That was the way it worked there. At one point, there were contractors that had been there 5+ years, then the rules changed. You got 2 years, then you could come back after 6 months off. At least how it worked for me, I was in a testing organization and we worked on lots of different projects. If a project came along and needed testing done, I had to be able to spin up a team of 5-10 people within a couple of weeks. Hiring contractors or using some of the big contracting houses (on/off/near shore) was what we did. When there were budget cuts, usually once or twice a year, contractors were the first to go. Although if they were with one of the contracting places, they usually just went to another project in the bank or sat on the bench until a new spot opened up. If you had someone you wanted to bring on full time, it was very hard to do because that is how their company kept their value at the bank.
It was a model that worked reasonably well, but was a lot of work to manage. I had a core team of employees and as long as there was funding available from the project, I could always spin up teams to do the work.
I had a 4 tb spinning drive fail, after only 2 years. It was 75% full. That is what is scary to me. The only narrative I came up with to explain it was that it was in my system, but powered on, 24x7. Now my backup drives are external and I power them on when I need them.
As drives get bigger, that is when I get nervous. I know, there's options to mitigate that, but I'm on a budget. I just migrated my OS to an SSD a couple of months ago, and still have spinning drives holding everything else.
This really is an amazing thing. And I mean that in the truest sense, not in an OMG-this-pumpkin-spice-frappachino-is-amazing kind of way. Sadly, I am guessing most people won't even read this story because it's not trash news.
I really liked this from the article: "Voyager 1 will not approach another star for nearly 40,000 years, even though it is moving at such great speed. "
This is true, but they can't, because Firefox elected instead to embrace the Chrome add-on model.
They had no choice. Go back and use a pre-change version of Firefox. The performance is terrible. It's single threaded, one thread dying takes down the whole browser, like it's the 1980s again. Can't even be properly sandboxed.
And the add-ons were a security nightmare. Bugs in the add-ons could be exploited by web sites to steal info from the browser or underlying OS.
The add-on API was holding the whole browser back. They could make necessary fixes because it would break add-ons. A clean start was the best of a bunch of bad options, and at least they selected an API that was familiar and allowed porting of many existing add-ons on day one.
Firefox is actually decent again now.
What add-ons are you missing, by the way? Maybe we can suggest some alternatives.
Firefox is making a comeback.... but it's yet to win me back. I moved to PaleMoon a couple years ago and love it. The time I use FF now is when I need to use the add-on Video Download Helper. If something ever goes horribly wrong with PaleMoon, I would likely go back to FF over Chromium. I just don't care for Chrom(e/ium). There are too many things about FF/Palemoon that I find very useful. For instance... for the MANY sites where I have accounts, I like to keep a password hint in the bookmark description. If I forget my password, just right-click on the bookmark, properties, and I see my hint. Years ago when I tried using Chromium for a while, I really missed that feature. I tried one of the encrypted password managers available, but after loading in all my passwords it barfed on something and lost them all. Simple and functional is good... FF got away from that, and Chrom(e/ium) is a bit too simple for me.
...especially when you're force to stuff them in a case that doubles the size.
Sorry, who is forcing you to do that? I have had the same phone for almost 3 years without a case and I have never broken it. It's nothing extravagant for sure - a BLU Life One X. Just be careful with your damn phone! I think having a case somehow makes people think their phone is protected so they can treat it like it's not an expensive electronic device. Cases are no guarantee of anything, my wife and daughter have both broken their phones in the last year, and both were in good cases.
I think you are right on price creep, and I refuse to pay it! People LOVE to complain about it, then they stand in line to get the next awesome phone. It's amazing to me how much time and money people are willing to spend on keeping up with the latest phone/status symbol. As long as they are willing to do it, manufacturers have no incentive to stop charging so much.
I have people I know who LIKE walking out of a restaurant and being asked to fill out a survey. They buy into the tracking / convenience BS. I don't understand it at all, it would drive me nuts. But honestly I don't see it very often at all. Here is my setup:
1. Home PC I run Linux (Devuan), and use PaleMoon. Yes, I use google as my search, but I am not logged into my google account on my PC. 2. Android phone, logged into my google account, and I get my gmail there. I only use that email for "official" type things. I check personal email accounts via my phone on occasion using k9mail. I use Dolphin for the browser. Other than whatsapp and texting, I don't do a whole lot on my phone. I use google maps mainly for traffic. My location is turned off unless I need to turn it on, then it goes right back off. I sync pictures and things via SyncMe to my home PC, I don't use google services. 3. I don't use facebook at all. I still have an instagram account, but deleted the app from my phone years ago (when the logo was still brown). I only check in on the few people I follow via my browser on my PC. 4. My personal email is at my own domain, where I can create throw-away email accounts if I need to. I pull all my emails to my local account using fetchmail. I don't get very much spam anymore at all. And I use alpine to read my email, so that helps to lower the risk of clickbait/phishing.
Am I still being tracked? You bet. But I refuse to voluntarily give up all of my information constantly, based on the principle of it and because there is no real benefit in doing so. It's all an invented, perceived convenience.
Silverlight. Company I work for has a platform that only runs in IE11 because a large portion of the UI was written in Silverlight. It's large and the platform is complex, and estimates were that it would take 1.5 years to rewrite it with current staff. So management decided to.... do nothing. We aren't exactly sure what will happen when Silverlight officially dies, it could very well be that nothing will change. If we have a bundled version of it, our application should still work. However, if IE11 stops supporting it, or if IE11 is no longer supported, then we will have a major crisis on our hands. Our platform is installed at client sites, but only supporting IE11 is a huge liability. It's also a great reminder about why being locked into proprietary technology is a baaaad idea.
Maybe these collaborative things work well for some people, but I can tell you that for software development - even Agile - the lure of tools like these are dangerous. Because faster isn't always better. You can't sacrifice sound engineering principles and system design for speed.
Full disclosure: I have been working on a project for a year now that has been going on for 2.5 years... that was supposed to release in 6 months originally. The original team that built it has been fired, and we are left holding the bag. They were all about fast fast fast. And they wrote a ton of code without thought to design or maintainability. They threw together "documentation" on collaboration tools. Their bug/story process statuses were new/open/closed. They copied/pasted code throughout the system because it was faster than building a common, reusable module. They didn't have testers, and development didn't write tests because NO TIME FOR THAT. We are on AWS and the code wasn't written to leverage elastic computing because even though that was promised, it would be faster to get it working and refactor it later. (hint: they never got it working, so we will have to eat that one and refactor it).
So this project has been a perfect example of how NOT to do a project, and fast collaboration was just one piece of the disaster. So I'll take the old-fashioned ways of building a sustainable project and documentation, thank you very much.
You have to remember, we are a big country. That definitely has an influence on things, our infrastructure is huge. I looked up some numbers, and in 2017 there were 78,774 branches of FDIC-insured commercial banks in the US. So it takes a while to implement technologies, and when things change fast, sometimes it's just easier to keep using things that work. Now if you are in a big city, you'll see more things like digital payment technology. But if something works fine, why change it?
Having said that, I personally rarely have cash on me. I carry a money clip with 2 credit cards, driver's license, and healthcare card. That's it. And I get by just fine. I have been to a few places that are "cash only", and I had to find an ATM. But I don't remember the last time I wrote a check.
I haven't been in a bank branch for several years. In fact, the bank I have used since the late 90s doesn't even have any branches in the state I now live in!
If you're old enough to remember how things were in the early 90s, you know that the cloud is really a marvelous thing. It's astounding how far we've come in the past 25 years. The real challenge with 'the cloud' is making sure to put the right things in it, and perhaps more importantly, not putting the wrong things in it.
I guess my objection isn't so much with the cloud per se, it's with the toll-collecting gatekeepers who keep growing fatter on the artificial scarcities they create. As for 'the wrong things', I feel that applications such as MS Office don't belong entirely in the cloud. Using the cloud as an extension of an office suite, for sharing among team members, for file backup, and for running applications when you don't have enough horsepower to do it locally - these things I have no problem with. Using the cloud in place of standalone programs that can easily be run locally with existing and readily available resources - that I DO have a problem with. And it's not just the rent-seeking aspect that I object to. Perhaps more importantly, I am against centralization of most things as a matter of principle, because excessive centralization leads to non-resilience and vulnerability.
Yes, and office suite is a very good example of how not to do it - with the caveat that if you are designed from the start to be that way, ala google docs. Not that I am a user of google docs per se, but my kids use them for school all the time, and it works quite well for that purpose. But I have definitely noticed that even cloud integration with MS Office has all sorts of downsides. Even recently, a colleague and I were trying to create a visio diagram of a database, sort of a poor man's ERD geared towards developers/testers. With our cloud version of Visio, they had stripped out the database templates. Luckily we were resourceful and got an old copy of Visio2013 that had what we needed built-in. Not only is the subscription model a PITA for regular people, it is really painful for corporations. We have MSDN licenses, but we would have had to get special permission and funding just to be able to get the capabilities with the new version of Visio that came included in older versions. THAT is where this cloud/subscription model is going to suck.
It's funny to me to see things moving to the cloud, because everything USED to be centralized, then we moved everything to a decentralized model. Now we are going back to that. Everything old is new again (albeit more advanced and powerful).
This is a bit of an over reaction I think. I mean - I agree with what you are saying, but "the cloud ate my homework" is going to happen. Like in this case, if you rely solely on MFA you lose all of those benefits when it goes down. That is just part of the game now. But the majority of the time, MFA via a cloud application works great. Much better than in the old days, and much easier to implement across a vast number of people. We just get so used to it working so well that when it does go down people freak out.
If you're old enough to remember how things were in the early 90s, you know that the cloud is really a marvelous thing. It's astounding how far we've come in the past 25 years. The real challenge with 'the cloud' is making sure to put the right things in it, and perhaps more importantly, not putting the wrong things in it.
When I read "Amazon is not too big to fail," I immediately thought that was simply a seed to plant in people's minds as they get bigger and bigger, to prevent the idea that Amazon is too big to fail and needs to be broken up or regulated.
They can't be too big to fail, Bezos himself said so!
I do agree that Amazon is the best at managing their customers, and as long as they continue to do that, it will be much harder for them to fail.
I haven't tried it yet, but my understanding is that it's relatively lightweight compared to running a VM, and it has direct access to your Windows filesystem. I used to use Cygwin to run a script to resize my photos, I could see this being used in a similar way.
I use Cygwin, but not on Windows 10 because I use WSL for that. Cygwin and WSL are very similar - the difference is the level they interface at. Cygwin is a translation layer between POSIX (or really SUS) APIs and the Win32 API. As far as Windows is concerned, every Cygwin application is just a console Win32 application.
WSL is lower level, and basically implements the Linux syscall interface on the Windows kernel. So applications talk to Linux based libraries which make system calls as Linux would expect, except they're being trapped by the Windows kernel and executed there. They are not technically Win32 applications and don't really have the interactions with Win32 that Cygwin applications would have. This would be the closest to "GNU/kWindows" you can get
Note that the Windows kernel is still enforcing security and other things, so WSL cannot be used to bypass permissions since the kernel is still involved with regular enforcements.
WSL is actually more like the BSD Linux personality - where the base kernel pretends to be Linux to run Linux binaries.
I find this interesting because I am an long-time linux user but work at a windows shop. When we needed to edit large (5MM row) csv files, people were trying to open them in Excel. I installed msys64 and using vi and other gnu tools sed/awk/cut/etc. I was able to quickly edit their files to do what they needed. Later on I wrote a shell script to take inputs and generate the csv files... and it was soooooo slow. It was faster to ssh to my home machine, run the script there, zip up the csvs, and send them back. It was on the order of 100x faster on Linux.
I have many opportunities to continue to leverage Linux now as we are creating new products using Linux servers in AWS. Now I am a go-to person since all of our developers are Windows developers. Worlds are colliding all over the place, but still need to keep a close eye on MS... trust has to be earned.
My approach to PCs has been this: 1. Wait. Don't buy the newest tech, it's just not worth it. 2. Figure out my budget 3. Look at benchmarks - by getting older tech they are well established. 4. Get the most #3 for #2
In the last year I bought 3 'new to me' systems, one for me and two for my kids. They are used Dell Inspiron 7010s, with 8GB RAM and i5-3570 processors. They were $100 each. I picked up Nvidia GTX cards (750/460/460ti) for cheap, ~ $25 each. All said I spent less than $400 on 3 computers.
A big bump in performance for them, they play games like TF2, Fortnite, etc. and a multitude of other less-intensive games like Terraria, Mark of the Ninja, etc. A big bump in performance for me, I run Linux and do various things like video converting, image editing, scripting, and a few games like Unreal Tournament and games from Humble Bundles.
Sure, I drooled over the new AMD offerings, but ultimately I don't need it and quite frankly can't justify the expense. This was the FIRST big-name PC I have ever owned for myself, I have always built my computers from scratch (with the exception of my first one, a 386DX-33 in 1991). But to build a new PC would take all-new EVERYTHING. (my old system was an Intel Q8400 that served me well for many years, and alas technology standards move on.) I did some video conversion timings on my old system and new, and I am seeing 6x performance increase. Could I get more out of a more expensive system? absolutely.. but it's not worth the money to me.
I guess my point is that I don't worry too much about the dizzying array of naming/numbering schemes because I know I will never ever have the fastest best system out there. Build or buy something that is good enough and carry on with your life.
This is the tip of the iceburg as more spaghetti code will be found. Tell me again why a startup manager also does DNS resolution?
I've been in software QA since '93 and a *nix user just as long... here's where there is real danger in systemd. Because the more complex, intertwined, and less elegant the codebase, the more likely fixing bugs will introduce or uncover more. People have always ignored this aspect of the *nix philosophy, or rather maybe just inherently understood it. I don't know how many times over the years I have seen a bugfix cause havoc in a monolithic spaghetti codebase. Then of course, you try to quickly fix those "new" bugs, which also causes issues you may or may not find immediately.
Phrases like "it's a one line code change" or "it should just flow right through" or "you don't need to test that, this fix won't affect it" always put me on alert.
I'm not saying the sky is falling for systemd. I'm just saying that there should be a fallback option to it, and there is not. Considering the staggering number of servers running Linux in the world, it's simply a risk that should be considered.
I just got done reading a great book Mistake Were Made (But Not By Me) . It's a very good read and quite insightful about how we justify our actions. It goes into how for the most part, people can't admit they made a mistake. In your example, Bill Clinton did not own up to his mistake. George W Bush maintained that there WERE WMDs in Iraq and we were completely justified in invading and occupying them. When faced with facts, people will double-down on their clearly incorrect statements. It talks about in our criminal justice system, which is rife with this cognitive discordance. It's quite fascinating. Remember the Central Park jogger case in the 80s? Police were able to coerce those kids to confessing to a crime they didn't commit by using interrogation tactics. Even though their confessions didn't line up, they had these guys, they were weak, and the police went in "like a pack of wolves".
Your idea that only weak people admit to mistakes is part of the problem. That isn't the case at all, it's actually quite the opposite. How can you trust ANYONE who refuses to admit fault - without justification, without conditions? It's the strong that can admit making mistakes, and the weak who cannot.
Cancer's what you die of if you don't die of anything else. Sure there are things that increase your chances of cancer (i.e. shit that kills you faster), but cancer rates increasing means nothing - it means you didn't die of all the other stuff, basically.
Obesity rates are to do an overabundance of food and a lack of self-control. Grown adults filling fridges full of crap. You want to find the cause of that, open your own fridge.
What microplastics would have to do with any of them, I wouldn't be able to fathom. But, hey, I just have a degree in maths and can read papers and statistics properly.
I'll keep it brief - both of these points are utter bullshit. Cancer rates increasing means nothing? They are a modern disease. As is obesity. There is not a scientist worth his microplastic-laden salt that would say obesity is because of an overabundance of food and self-control. There are ZERO scientific studies that support these knee-jerk 'theories'.
I switched from Kubuntu years ago to Xubuntu, then to Mint XFCE, and have generally been very happy with it. XFCE is just right. I set my system up to re-install instead of upgrade, which used to be the preferred method. Then they started supporting in-place upgrades, and they went well.
I am still on 18.3, and the current upgrade process seems to be getting more complicated. And since they adopted systemd as the init system, I have been facing some rather annoying issues.
I have looked into a LOT of distros... and I will move from Mint to Devuan (XFCE) soon. I think Mint has started to lose its way, at least for me.
I know there are 'clones' but I haven't found them to be very useful. I've tried nearly every player on Linux, and they are either wayyyy too simple or wayyyy to complicated. I don't need a music manager, everything I have is organized by file structure. I don't need a database. I don't need links to album art, or streaming sites, or scrotobobbler, or last.fm, or any of that. I need a decent music player for mp3s. A decent EQ would be nice, and maybe some visualizations if the mood strikes me. That's it.
I've just been using VLC for the past umpteen years, and it works just fine. An actual Winamp would be pretty cool though.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't odd at all, and "temporary" is a relative term. I used to work for one of the largest US banks. I managed testing teams, and at one time had more than 30 contractors that made up bout 90% of my team. That was the way it worked there. At one point, there were contractors that had been there 5+ years, then the rules changed. You got 2 years, then you could come back after 6 months off. At least how it worked for me, I was in a testing organization and we worked on lots of different projects.
What you're describing there is the root of the laws against abusing TVC workers. Anyone in a job for 5+ years is, for all intents and purposes, FTE. I'd make the argument that 2 years is FTE. That you're willing to hold to the rules and dump them for 6 months until you can get another 2 years out of them only indicates how badly that particular company is violating the spirit of the law.
Well, let me clarify. The 5+ years is how it used to be, probably 10 years ago. Then it switched to 2 years (maybe 18 months). After that, you had to leave and could not come back, even as a contractor, for 6 months. There was never anything close to a guarantee that you would come back. Besides who could sit out 6 months? I can assure you that the bank i worked for took those laws VERY seriously.
When there were budget cuts, usually once or twice a year, contractors were the first to go.
And this occurrence is a red flag that you're incorrectly using TVCs. You hired them for a temporary job indicating said job was funded for a limited time. They should go when the work is completed. If you're using them as employees, that's the only way this happens.
Well, when there were budget cuts usually projects had to get cancelled/postponed. So it was all on the up-and-up. What was sad was that it became known and expected that there would be cuts every year. So smarter people (not me) learned to pad their staff a little in anticipation of the cuts.
I manage 30+ of what the article calls "TVCs"
Why on earth do you manage 30+ TVCs? Do you manage 30+ employees? If not, why not? TVCs are meant to fill temporary holes. It certainly sounds like your company (assuming you're only managing 30+ TVCs which I find likely) is dodging various labor laws and the costs and obligations associated with FTEs. Which merely implies that the laws and regulations aren't properly set up to promote employment.
This isn't odd at all, and "temporary" is a relative term. I used to work for one of the largest US banks. I managed testing teams, and at one time had more than 30 contractors that made up bout 90% of my team. That was the way it worked there. At one point, there were contractors that had been there 5+ years, then the rules changed. You got 2 years, then you could come back after 6 months off. At least how it worked for me, I was in a testing organization and we worked on lots of different projects. If a project came along and needed testing done, I had to be able to spin up a team of 5-10 people within a couple of weeks. Hiring contractors or using some of the big contracting houses (on/off/near shore) was what we did. When there were budget cuts, usually once or twice a year, contractors were the first to go. Although if they were with one of the contracting places, they usually just went to another project in the bank or sat on the bench until a new spot opened up. If you had someone you wanted to bring on full time, it was very hard to do because that is how their company kept their value at the bank.
It was a model that worked reasonably well, but was a lot of work to manage. I had a core team of employees and as long as there was funding available from the project, I could always spin up teams to do the work.
I had a 4 tb spinning drive fail, after only 2 years. It was 75% full. That is what is scary to me. The only narrative I came up with to explain it was that it was in my system, but powered on, 24x7. Now my backup drives are external and I power them on when I need them.
As drives get bigger, that is when I get nervous. I know, there's options to mitigate that, but I'm on a budget. I just migrated my OS to an SSD a couple of months ago, and still have spinning drives holding everything else.
This really is an amazing thing. And I mean that in the truest sense, not in an OMG-this-pumpkin-spice-frappachino-is-amazing kind of way. Sadly, I am guessing most people won't even read this story because it's not trash news.
I really liked this from the article: "Voyager 1 will not approach another star for nearly 40,000 years, even though it is moving at such great speed. "
It's fascinating and hard to comprehend.
This is true, but they can't, because Firefox elected instead to embrace the Chrome add-on model.
They had no choice. Go back and use a pre-change version of Firefox. The performance is terrible. It's single threaded, one thread dying takes down the whole browser, like it's the 1980s again. Can't even be properly sandboxed.
And the add-ons were a security nightmare. Bugs in the add-ons could be exploited by web sites to steal info from the browser or underlying OS.
The add-on API was holding the whole browser back. They could make necessary fixes because it would break add-ons. A clean start was the best of a bunch of bad options, and at least they selected an API that was familiar and allowed porting of many existing add-ons on day one.
Firefox is actually decent again now.
What add-ons are you missing, by the way? Maybe we can suggest some alternatives.
Firefox is making a comeback.... but it's yet to win me back. I moved to PaleMoon a couple years ago and love it. The time I use FF now is when I need to use the add-on Video Download Helper. If something ever goes horribly wrong with PaleMoon, I would likely go back to FF over Chromium. I just don't care for Chrom(e/ium). There are too many things about FF/Palemoon that I find very useful. For instance... for the MANY sites where I have accounts, I like to keep a password hint in the bookmark description. If I forget my password, just right-click on the bookmark, properties, and I see my hint. Years ago when I tried using Chromium for a while, I really missed that feature. I tried one of the encrypted password managers available, but after loading in all my passwords it barfed on something and lost them all. Simple and functional is good... FF got away from that, and Chrom(e/ium) is a bit too simple for me.
...especially when you're force to stuff them in a case that doubles the size.
Sorry, who is forcing you to do that?
I have had the same phone for almost 3 years without a case and I have never broken it. It's nothing extravagant for sure - a BLU Life One X. Just be careful with your damn phone! I think having a case somehow makes people think their phone is protected so they can treat it like it's not an expensive electronic device. Cases are no guarantee of anything, my wife and daughter have both broken their phones in the last year, and both were in good cases.
I think you are right on price creep, and I refuse to pay it! People LOVE to complain about it, then they stand in line to get the next awesome phone. It's amazing to me how much time and money people are willing to spend on keeping up with the latest phone/status symbol. As long as they are willing to do it, manufacturers have no incentive to stop charging so much.
I have people I know who LIKE walking out of a restaurant and being asked to fill out a survey. They buy into the tracking / convenience BS. I don't understand it at all, it would drive me nuts. But honestly I don't see it very often at all. Here is my setup:
1. Home PC I run Linux (Devuan), and use PaleMoon. Yes, I use google as my search, but I am not logged into my google account on my PC.
2. Android phone, logged into my google account, and I get my gmail there. I only use that email for "official" type things. I check personal email accounts via my phone on occasion using k9mail. I use Dolphin for the browser. Other than whatsapp and texting, I don't do a whole lot on my phone. I use google maps mainly for traffic. My location is turned off unless I need to turn it on, then it goes right back off. I sync pictures and things via SyncMe to my home PC, I don't use google services.
3. I don't use facebook at all. I still have an instagram account, but deleted the app from my phone years ago (when the logo was still brown). I only check in on the few people I follow via my browser on my PC.
4. My personal email is at my own domain, where I can create throw-away email accounts if I need to. I pull all my emails to my local account using fetchmail. I don't get very much spam anymore at all. And I use alpine to read my email, so that helps to lower the risk of clickbait/phishing.
Am I still being tracked? You bet. But I refuse to voluntarily give up all of my information constantly, based on the principle of it and because there is no real benefit in doing so. It's all an invented, perceived convenience.
Silverlight. .... do nothing. We aren't exactly sure what will happen when Silverlight officially dies, it could very well be that nothing will change. If we have a bundled version of it, our application should still work. However, if IE11 stops supporting it, or if IE11 is no longer supported, then we will have a major crisis on our hands. Our platform is installed at client sites, but only supporting IE11 is a huge liability. It's also a great reminder about why being locked into proprietary technology is a baaaad idea.
Company I work for has a platform that only runs in IE11 because a large portion of the UI was written in Silverlight.
It's large and the platform is complex, and estimates were that it would take 1.5 years to rewrite it with current staff. So management decided to
Maybe these collaborative things work well for some people, but I can tell you that for software development - even Agile - the lure of tools like these are dangerous. Because faster isn't always better. You can't sacrifice sound engineering principles and system design for speed.
Full disclosure: I have been working on a project for a year now that has been going on for 2.5 years... that was supposed to release in 6 months originally. The original team that built it has been fired, and we are left holding the bag. They were all about fast fast fast. And they wrote a ton of code without thought to design or maintainability. They threw together "documentation" on collaboration tools. Their bug/story process statuses were new/open/closed. They copied/pasted code throughout the system because it was faster than building a common, reusable module. They didn't have testers, and development didn't write tests because NO TIME FOR THAT. We are on AWS and the code wasn't written to leverage elastic computing because even though that was promised, it would be faster to get it working and refactor it later. (hint: they never got it working, so we will have to eat that one and refactor it).
So this project has been a perfect example of how NOT to do a project, and fast collaboration was just one piece of the disaster. So I'll take the old-fashioned ways of building a sustainable project and documentation, thank you very much.
You have to remember, we are a big country. That definitely has an influence on things, our infrastructure is huge. I looked up some numbers, and in 2017 there were 78,774 branches of FDIC-insured commercial banks in the US. So it takes a while to implement technologies, and when things change fast, sometimes it's just easier to keep using things that work. Now if you are in a big city, you'll see more things like digital payment technology. But if something works fine, why change it?
Having said that, I personally rarely have cash on me. I carry a money clip with 2 credit cards, driver's license, and healthcare card. That's it. And I get by just fine. I have been to a few places that are "cash only", and I had to find an ATM. But I don't remember the last time I wrote a check.
I haven't been in a bank branch for several years. In fact, the bank I have used since the late 90s doesn't even have any branches in the state I now live in!
If you're old enough to remember how things were in the early 90s, you know that the cloud is really a marvelous thing. It's astounding how far we've come in the past 25 years. The real challenge with 'the cloud' is making sure to put the right things in it, and perhaps more importantly, not putting the wrong things in it.
I guess my objection isn't so much with the cloud per se, it's with the toll-collecting gatekeepers who keep growing fatter on the artificial scarcities they create. As for 'the wrong things', I feel that applications such as MS Office don't belong entirely in the cloud. Using the cloud as an extension of an office suite, for sharing among team members, for file backup, and for running applications when you don't have enough horsepower to do it locally - these things I have no problem with. Using the cloud in place of standalone programs that can easily be run locally with existing and readily available resources - that I DO have a problem with. And it's not just the rent-seeking aspect that I object to. Perhaps more importantly, I am against centralization of most things as a matter of principle, because excessive centralization leads to non-resilience and vulnerability.
Yes, and office suite is a very good example of how not to do it - with the caveat that if you are designed from the start to be that way, ala google docs. Not that I am a user of google docs per se, but my kids use them for school all the time, and it works quite well for that purpose. But I have definitely noticed that even cloud integration with MS Office has all sorts of downsides. Even recently, a colleague and I were trying to create a visio diagram of a database, sort of a poor man's ERD geared towards developers/testers. With our cloud version of Visio, they had stripped out the database templates. Luckily we were resourceful and got an old copy of Visio2013 that had what we needed built-in. Not only is the subscription model a PITA for regular people, it is really painful for corporations. We have MSDN licenses, but we would have had to get special permission and funding just to be able to get the capabilities with the new version of Visio that came included in older versions. THAT is where this cloud/subscription model is going to suck.
It's funny to me to see things moving to the cloud, because everything USED to be centralized, then we moved everything to a decentralized model. Now we are going back to that. Everything old is new again (albeit more advanced and powerful).
This is a bit of an over reaction I think.
I mean - I agree with what you are saying, but "the cloud ate my homework" is going to happen.
Like in this case, if you rely solely on MFA you lose all of those benefits when it goes down. That is just part of the game now. But the majority of the time, MFA via a cloud application works great. Much better than in the old days, and much easier to implement across a vast number of people. We just get so used to it working so well that when it does go down people freak out.
If you're old enough to remember how things were in the early 90s, you know that the cloud is really a marvelous thing. It's astounding how far we've come in the past 25 years. The real challenge with 'the cloud' is making sure to put the right things in it, and perhaps more importantly, not putting the wrong things in it.
When I read "Amazon is not too big to fail," I immediately thought that was simply a seed to plant in people's minds as they get bigger and bigger, to prevent the idea that Amazon is too big to fail and needs to be broken up or regulated.
They can't be too big to fail, Bezos himself said so!
I do agree that Amazon is the best at managing their customers, and as long as they continue to do that, it will be much harder for them to fail.
I use Cygwin, but not on Windows 10 because I use WSL for that. Cygwin and WSL are very similar - the difference is the level they interface at. Cygwin is a translation layer between POSIX (or really SUS) APIs and the Win32 API. As far as Windows is concerned, every Cygwin application is just a console Win32 application.
WSL is lower level, and basically implements the Linux syscall interface on the Windows kernel. So applications talk to Linux based libraries which make system calls as Linux would expect, except they're being trapped by the Windows kernel and executed there. They are not technically Win32 applications and don't really have the interactions with Win32 that Cygwin applications would have. This would be the closest to "GNU/kWindows" you can get
Note that the Windows kernel is still enforcing security and other things, so WSL cannot be used to bypass permissions since the kernel is still involved with regular enforcements.
WSL is actually more like the BSD Linux personality - where the base kernel pretends to be Linux to run Linux binaries.
I find this interesting because I am an long-time linux user but work at a windows shop. When we needed to edit large (5MM row) csv files, people were trying to open them in Excel. I installed msys64 and using vi and other gnu tools sed/awk/cut/etc. I was able to quickly edit their files to do what they needed. Later on I wrote a shell script to take inputs and generate the csv files... and it was soooooo slow. It was faster to ssh to my home machine, run the script there, zip up the csvs, and send them back. It was on the order of 100x faster on Linux.
I have many opportunities to continue to leverage Linux now as we are creating new products using Linux servers in AWS. Now I am a go-to person since all of our developers are Windows developers. Worlds are colliding all over the place, but still need to keep a close eye on MS... trust has to be earned.
It would be called SystemDE
Red Hat is pleased to announce its new desktop environment... systemd
My approach to PCs has been this:
1. Wait. Don't buy the newest tech, it's just not worth it.
2. Figure out my budget
3. Look at benchmarks - by getting older tech they are well established.
4. Get the most #3 for #2
In the last year I bought 3 'new to me' systems, one for me and two for my kids. They are used Dell Inspiron 7010s, with 8GB RAM and i5-3570 processors. They were $100 each. I picked up Nvidia GTX cards (750/460/460ti) for cheap, ~ $25 each. All said I spent less than $400 on 3 computers.
A big bump in performance for them, they play games like TF2, Fortnite, etc. and a multitude of other less-intensive games like Terraria, Mark of the Ninja, etc.
A big bump in performance for me, I run Linux and do various things like video converting, image editing, scripting, and a few games like Unreal Tournament and games from Humble Bundles.
Sure, I drooled over the new AMD offerings, but ultimately I don't need it and quite frankly can't justify the expense. This was the FIRST big-name PC I have ever owned for myself, I have always built my computers from scratch (with the exception of my first one, a 386DX-33 in 1991). But to build a new PC would take all-new EVERYTHING. (my old system was an Intel Q8400 that served me well for many years, and alas technology standards move on.) I did some video conversion timings on my old system and new, and I am seeing 6x performance increase. Could I get more out of a more expensive system? absolutely.. but it's not worth the money to me.
I guess my point is that I don't worry too much about the dizzying array of naming/numbering schemes because I know I will never ever have the fastest best system out there. Build or buy something that is good enough and carry on with your life.
This is the tip of the iceburg as more spaghetti code will be found. Tell me again why a startup manager also does DNS resolution?
I've been in software QA since '93 and a *nix user just as long... here's where there is real danger in systemd. Because the more complex, intertwined, and less elegant the codebase, the more likely fixing bugs will introduce or uncover more. People have always ignored this aspect of the *nix philosophy, or rather maybe just inherently understood it. I don't know how many times over the years I have seen a bugfix cause havoc in a monolithic spaghetti codebase. Then of course, you try to quickly fix those "new" bugs, which also causes issues you may or may not find immediately.
Phrases like "it's a one line code change" or "it should just flow right through" or "you don't need to test that, this fix won't affect it" always put me on alert.
I'm not saying the sky is falling for systemd. I'm just saying that there should be a fallback option to it, and there is not. Considering the staggering number of servers running Linux in the world, it's simply a risk that should be considered.
I just got done reading a great book Mistake Were Made (But Not By Me) . It's a very good read and quite insightful about how we justify our actions. It goes into how for the most part, people can't admit they made a mistake. In your example, Bill Clinton did not own up to his mistake. George W Bush maintained that there WERE WMDs in Iraq and we were completely justified in invading and occupying them. When faced with facts, people will double-down on their clearly incorrect statements. It talks about in our criminal justice system, which is rife with this cognitive discordance. It's quite fascinating. Remember the Central Park jogger case in the 80s? Police were able to coerce those kids to confessing to a crime they didn't commit by using interrogation tactics. Even though their confessions didn't line up, they had these guys, they were weak, and the police went in "like a pack of wolves".
Your idea that only weak people admit to mistakes is part of the problem. That isn't the case at all, it's actually quite the opposite. How can you trust ANYONE who refuses to admit fault - without justification, without conditions? It's the strong that can admit making mistakes, and the weak who cannot.
Sigh.
Cancer's what you die of if you don't die of anything else. Sure there are things that increase your chances of cancer (i.e. shit that kills you faster), but cancer rates increasing means nothing - it means you didn't die of all the other stuff, basically.
Obesity rates are to do an overabundance of food and a lack of self-control. Grown adults filling fridges full of crap. You want to find the cause of that, open your own fridge.
What microplastics would have to do with any of them, I wouldn't be able to fathom. But, hey, I just have a degree in maths and can read papers and statistics properly.
I'll keep it brief - both of these points are utter bullshit. Cancer rates increasing means nothing? They are a modern disease. As is obesity. There is not a scientist worth his microplastic-laden salt that would say obesity is because of an overabundance of food and self-control. There are ZERO scientific studies that support these knee-jerk 'theories'.
I switched from Kubuntu years ago to Xubuntu, then to Mint XFCE, and have generally been very happy with it. XFCE is just right.
I set my system up to re-install instead of upgrade, which used to be the preferred method. Then they started supporting in-place upgrades, and they went well.
I am still on 18.3, and the current upgrade process seems to be getting more complicated. And since they adopted systemd as the init system, I have been facing some rather annoying issues.
I have looked into a LOT of distros... and I will move from Mint to Devuan (XFCE) soon. I think Mint has started to lose its way, at least for me.
Wouldn't defamation of character be a better charge for this?
I've tried them all. If my memory serves, I think the issue with XMMS was that I couldn't resize it. It was very tiny on my screen.
I know there are 'clones' but I haven't found them to be very useful.
I've tried nearly every player on Linux, and they are either wayyyy too simple or wayyyy to complicated. I don't need a music manager, everything I have is organized by file structure. I don't need a database. I don't need links to album art, or streaming sites, or scrotobobbler, or last.fm, or any of that. I need a decent music player for mp3s. A decent EQ would be nice, and maybe some visualizations if the mood strikes me. That's it.
I've just been using VLC for the past umpteen years, and it works just fine. An actual Winamp would be pretty cool though.
I've tried plex and I just don't like it. I have been using serviio as my home media server for many years, and it works great.
I don't quite get SNAP.