Not having a "real" platform, I used the web version of TaxACT. It was half the price of TaxCut to TurboTax. Being a web app, it was alright but the interface was buggy, and the questions were awfully worded.
I've been running Mint 115/16 for about 6 months, and other than tax filing it has been fantastic.
Reminder: before switching someone to Linux ask about how they do their taxes first.
Well before you brand me "denier" let me say I am very much pro-environment. I think we should have negligible impact on the biosphere because who knows how long we will need this one.
Now, there is no such thing as "climate science", but there is "climate" and "science" and even "science applied to climate" however none of these are climate science. We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas and warms faster than our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. And adding CO2 to that atmosphere will make it hotter. We've predicted that, and we can show in a lab experiment that is true. However that's where the science really ends. We have other ways that science is applied to climate, as in the study of ice cores and weather. But add these all up and you still can't call it "climate science" because we cannot (yet) account for everything going on. We cannot make a prediction and test it. First be have a sample set of one. It won't necessarily generalize. Second, the one we have is ours, and far too important to try any large scale experiment on. Third, its too big to try any sufficiently large experiment on.
So all we have is the ability to do is predict, wait, and measure. When we do that, we get wrong answers. Despite this "99% confidence" every single global warming alarmist has been wrong for the past 18 years. The increase between actual and prediction continues to grow. To me this is the single most important deciding factor. And I don't think it is to much to ask - that theory (models) match the actual. Over the last 17 years 8 months, not even the sign is the same. Actual is down a trivial amount (hundredths of a degree), but the models are saying 0.3 degree increase, with increased divergence expected. The fact that we can't predict a 20 year pause (even drop) is a big fucking deal. The humans have declared "the science settled" but despite that nature continues to do what it wants. So if you have all these "experts" saying "the science is settled" and nature is going the other way, who do you believe? Especially when they have these "99%" confidence intervals.
The truth of the matter is, only the science in the laboratory is settled. The science of what actually in the atmosphere is far from complete. I wouldn't be so "anti climate science" if these guys had a bit more modestly and a lot less hubris. But here's what they are doing. Their model predictions get more invalidated by the day, and how do they respond? "We have a 99% condience"... they double down on science that isn't working. They are in effect, becoming oracles or prophets of doom. A proper scientific response would be to retreat, revise the models until they have something that works, then apologize and start using the improved model. But that's not what these guys do. They spend way too much time making dire predictions (which don't validate) in the media.
I love science through and through, but I would be ashamed to call myself a climate scientist.
I was having this discussion about my boss's Chromebox. Which I was laughing at for being a thin client. "it'll revolutionize the world"" he said. "We've had citrix for years." I said. All this dies is give you a thin client where the server is any internet accessible site.
In order for the "tax" to be sustained, it had to 1) be a tax. Obama pledged no new taxes on the middle class. 2) is a tax on the "privilege" of "going without" health insurance. Now, we started this nation over a 3% tax on tea. Now we have a tax on "going without"? The Constitution died that day, because if they tax the absence of something, they can of course tax the presence of something. This rendering all the taxing provisions of the Constitution irrelevant.
1. A lot of late signups. - People waiting for the individual mandate being delayed. 2. Cancelled plans. Remember "if you like your plan, you can keep it" except you can't. All those people who lost their plan were insured are now uninsured and that greatly enlarged the number of people seeking. So you can't compare before and after numbers. 3. Some companies dropped plans entirely and let their employees get their own. My company was on the verge of doing that but elected not to at the last minute. 4. The combined numbers of 2 and 3 is estimated at 6 million. So backing that out, we only got aout 1 million more insured. Which is important, but not anything to brag about. 5. I'm not entirely convinced that the 7.1M number is actual people being insured. Maybe that many logins were created but a login is not insurance.
I run Mint at work and at home, and my retired neighbor runs it because of me.
However I continually run into limitations from it just not being windows. Unless all they do is web work, I foresee a need for them to run something micrrosoft.
Best to install SpiceWorks and see what you've got installed across your domain.
Many of the things I want to build with a 3D printer are not complicated but are outside the build envelope of the printers out there. Like my truck grill which is about 48" wide, 12" tall and 3" deep.
Why don't we have bigger print envelopes? This should just be a matter of more steps of the stepper motor.
Like some site that is (like "what that site is running?" (Apache, IIS etc)) where we can see who gets what fixed when. No point in changing my passwords on a still-affected site.
First. everyone who is pointing out your premature optimization is probably right. You can get a lot of scalability out of existing databases, particularly if you optimize your data schema with indexes. Even if you store all possible 9,999,999,999 phone numbers, the log base-2 of that is 34. So you'll need a b-tree 34 levels deep. That's big, real big, but b-trees are fast. Worst case you are reading 34 blocks from disk, which is ~16kB.
Next, don't choose databases by name. Choose them by their features because you use features, not names. That said, HBase is probably what you want. It's a blend of distributable hadoop and tables. You don't need atomicity (it doesn't sound like) which is one thing you give up when leaving SQL behind.
I was just explaining this to someone the other day that thought AWS was going to save them money. It's not cheaper than running your own shop. The only advantage I see is that you don't have to house/cool/maintain hardware. You can just move your application to higher capacity, faster servers. You get additional power and network reliability.
If your dev/test platform is already off-site and working, then what is the compelling reason to interrupt everything and do the move? Where I am working today, the tried to move from AWS to Google's cloud and had tons of issues of reliability. We're back on AWS. Our usage model though, lends itself to AWS. We sell "application instances" which are deployed for customers to AWS for its up-time reliability. All our development happens in-house though.
It's not a magic bullet. If you're looking to save money and your place already has a cooled closet and redundant network and power, then it offers no incentive for you to move.
I don't actually like to read my gmail. Its a horrid interface. No folders (no, I'm not going to search, TYVM) and the "folder" work around is a kludge doesn't cut it for me. Yahoo up until recently had the most powerful interface. But no SSL after login. Then they started limiting page sizes rather than continuous.
I'm thinking Horde Mail/GroupWare on a reliable cloud provider would be the way to go. But you can't leave google behind because of the drive, docs and all that stuff.
Your miles credit would be subject to bartering and fair market valuation provisions, if they can be considered property. However you might be able to argue that it's a negotiable instrument and has no fair market value. This would then require you to haggle ("sure, I'll take you 8 miles for 15 miles of credit" as enforcing it at 1:1 would support the idea of it being property. This means now, you have to auction the miles, this complicating the whole process, making it more unattractive.
Thanks for the clarification. But this just reinforces me point. We are choosing fragmentation. You can sign any binary, executable or DLL, C++/CLI or C#. MS is forcing people to develop a C# code base to lock them in. Again, further fragmenting the market.
Oh, I'm all for getting the job done. That's why I want consolidation. Since you run a consulting firm, how much of your code is actually customer specific? Like I said, schemas and logic changes, but I bet if you look across your customers, you'll find about 20% of your function is duplicated between unrelated projects. You don't care because its billable hours. Maybe you copy and paste? I don't meant hat in a bad way. But when you stop looking at billable hours, and focus just on getting the job done, I don't want to duplicate other people's work.
Let me give you an example from this very weekend. I needed to get the distance between two GPS coordinates. Googling for it I found javascript code that I then copied and converted to C/C++. In an ideal world, I'd just get the library and be done. But there are different implementations. There's Haversine, and 2 other ways to calculate the distance, each with nuances of implementation. Now, in my ideal world, I wouldn't matter what language it was done in (this was.Net's promise) Instead me and everyone else does the same conversion from the JS to our language. You as a consultant should love the idea that the body of programmed knowledge is available to your developers regardless of choice of language.
I want to make it clear that I am not arguing that we should only have C++. I was arguing that everything we've come up with since C++ (Java and.NET) have only served to fragment and divide. Now we have 3 major ecosystems all being maintained separately. Who wants to maintain 3 code bases that do the same thing? Billions of dollars poured into the maintenance of these toolkits a year. Hibernate and NHibernate. Dozens of SQL drivers on dozens of systems. The work expands exponentially. All to do the same thing. To keep their ecosystems on par with each other. Imagine if we just poured the same into one project, how much more we could accomplish. I don't suggest C++, though it has a fantastic track record. Managed memory systems are all the rage. I've done Java, Python and C#. I don't want to pick one. I but I want all of them to use the same platform. I'm hinting that C++ is it, because Java has JNI,.Net has the C++/CLI and Python has C/C++ wrappers. Imagine if we promoted the common stuff to a common universally maintained C++ package.
I also think we need side projects to experiment. NodeJS is very cool. And we need to explore our itches. But by t he time we start to develop these things into ecosystems, we should focus on consolidation so that everyone can benefit. Yes, it'll be an effort, but less effort than continually maintaining separate code bases.
Anyone who tells you that is lying. C++ even works on Windows Phone. You can't really ban a language that compiles to CPU opcodes. Furthermore, do you think that every title that is released on PS4 and 360 is completely re-coded into.Net for the 360? No. It's the same as what people do for the phones. Common C++ code, wrapped in platform specifics.
What would Qt add to Arduino? Maybe signals slots, but it's too limited. Now Qt runs nicely on a RasberryPi or BeagleBone. So for a few dollars more you get a GUI...
C++ doesn't manage memory. Your or your toolkit are responsible for deleteing instances. Qt makes this easy for QObjects because it accepts a parent, and all children are deleted when the parent is deleted. The rest of the classes, generally, are implicitly shared. But if you use new on an unparented object, then you must delete it.
If you're only using the stack, then this is also taken care of for you.
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Not having a "real" platform, I used the web version of TaxACT. It was half the price of TaxCut to TurboTax. Being a web app, it was alright but the interface was buggy, and the questions were awfully worded.
I've been running Mint 115/16 for about 6 months, and other than tax filing it has been fantastic.
Reminder: before switching someone to Linux ask about how they do their taxes first.
Well before you brand me "denier" let me say I am very much pro-environment. I think we should have negligible impact on the biosphere because who knows how long we will need this one.
Now, there is no such thing as "climate science", but there is "climate" and "science" and even "science applied to climate" however none of these are climate science. We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas and warms faster than our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. And adding CO2 to that atmosphere will make it hotter. We've predicted that, and we can show in a lab experiment that is true. However that's where the science really ends. We have other ways that science is applied to climate, as in the study of ice cores and weather. But add these all up and you still can't call it "climate science" because we cannot (yet) account for everything going on. We cannot make a prediction and test it. First be have a sample set of one. It won't necessarily generalize. Second, the one we have is ours, and far too important to try any large scale experiment on. Third, its too big to try any sufficiently large experiment on.
So all we have is the ability to do is predict, wait, and measure. When we do that, we get wrong answers. Despite this "99% confidence" every single global warming alarmist has been wrong for the past 18 years. The increase between actual and prediction continues to grow. To me this is the single most important deciding factor. And I don't think it is to much to ask - that theory (models) match the actual. Over the last 17 years 8 months, not even the sign is the same. Actual is down a trivial amount (hundredths of a degree), but the models are saying 0.3 degree increase, with increased divergence expected. The fact that we can't predict a 20 year pause (even drop) is a big fucking deal. The humans have declared "the science settled" but despite that nature continues to do what it wants. So if you have all these "experts" saying "the science is settled" and nature is going the other way, who do you believe? Especially when they have these "99%" confidence intervals.
The truth of the matter is, only the science in the laboratory is settled. The science of what actually in the atmosphere is far from complete. I wouldn't be so "anti climate science" if these guys had a bit more modestly and a lot less hubris. But here's what they are doing. Their model predictions get more invalidated by the day, and how do they respond? "We have a 99% condience"... they double down on science that isn't working. They are in effect, becoming oracles or prophets of doom. A proper scientific response would be to retreat, revise the models until they have something that works, then apologize and start using the improved model. But that's not what these guys do. They spend way too much time making dire predictions (which don't validate) in the media.
I love science through and through, but I would be ashamed to call myself a climate scientist.
I was having this discussion about my boss's Chromebox. Which I was laughing at for being a thin client. "it'll revolutionize the world"" he said. "We've had citrix for years." I said. All this dies is give you a thin client where the server is any internet accessible site.
Any why not everyone just get a Occulus, a webcam and superimpose the 3D model on the webcam image being fed into the occulus?
I'm very interested in this problem. Why does it matter?
Movies special effects have been projecting images onto mist for at least 2 decades now.
“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”
They patented an incubator or heat lamp?
In order for the "tax" to be sustained, it had to
1) be a tax. Obama pledged no new taxes on the middle class.
2) is a tax on the "privilege" of "going without" health insurance. Now, we started this nation over a 3% tax on tea. Now we have a tax on "going without"? The Constitution died that day, because if they tax the absence of something, they can of course tax the presence of something. This rendering all the taxing provisions of the Constitution irrelevant.
1. A lot of late signups. - People waiting for the individual mandate being delayed.
2. Cancelled plans. Remember "if you like your plan, you can keep it" except you can't. All those people who lost their plan were insured are now uninsured and that greatly enlarged the number of people seeking. So you can't compare before and after numbers.
3. Some companies dropped plans entirely and let their employees get their own. My company was on the verge of doing that but elected not to at the last minute.
4. The combined numbers of 2 and 3 is estimated at 6 million. So backing that out, we only got aout 1 million more insured. Which is important, but not anything to brag about.
5. I'm not entirely convinced that the 7.1M number is actual people being insured. Maybe that many logins were created but a login is not insurance.
I run Mint at work and at home, and my retired neighbor runs it because of me.
However I continually run into limitations from it just not being windows. Unless all they do is web work, I foresee a need for them to run something micrrosoft.
Best to install SpiceWorks and see what you've got installed across your domain.
Many of the things I want to build with a 3D printer are not complicated but are outside the build envelope of the printers out there. Like my truck grill which is about 48" wide, 12" tall and 3" deep.
Why don't we have bigger print envelopes? This should just be a matter of more steps of the stepper motor.
Like some site that is (like "what that site is running?" (Apache, IIS etc)) where we can see who gets what fixed when. No point in changing my passwords on a still-affected site.
First. everyone who is pointing out your premature optimization is probably right. You can get a lot of scalability out of existing databases, particularly if you optimize your data schema with indexes. Even if you store all possible 9,999,999,999 phone numbers, the log base-2 of that is 34. So you'll need a b-tree 34 levels deep. That's big, real big, but b-trees are fast. Worst case you are reading 34 blocks from disk, which is ~16kB.
Next, don't choose databases by name. Choose them by their features because you use features, not names. That said, HBase is probably what you want. It's a blend of distributable hadoop and tables. You don't need atomicity (it doesn't sound like) which is one thing you give up when leaving SQL behind.
I was just explaining this to someone the other day that thought AWS was going to save them money. It's not cheaper than running your own shop. The only advantage I see is that you don't have to house/cool/maintain hardware. You can just move your application to higher capacity, faster servers. You get additional power and network reliability.
If your dev/test platform is already off-site and working, then what is the compelling reason to interrupt everything and do the move? Where I am working today, the tried to move from AWS to Google's cloud and had tons of issues of reliability. We're back on AWS. Our usage model though, lends itself to AWS. We sell "application instances" which are deployed for customers to AWS for its up-time reliability. All our development happens in-house though.
It's not a magic bullet. If you're looking to save money and your place already has a cooled closet and redundant network and power, then it offers no incentive for you to move.
Good to know. Now I just need to find a way because my state makes it illegal for labs to sell directly to consumers.
With the shuttering of 23andme.com, forced by the FDA, we no longer have the ability to have our genes sequenced on our own prerogative.
Thanks federal government.
Yes. If I use IMAP, then why use gmail at all?
I don't actually like to read my gmail. Its a horrid interface. No folders (no, I'm not going to search, TYVM) and the "folder" work around is a kludge doesn't cut it for me. Yahoo up until recently had the most powerful interface. But no SSL after login. Then they started limiting page sizes rather than continuous.
I'm thinking Horde Mail/GroupWare on a reliable cloud provider would be the way to go. But you can't leave google behind because of the drive, docs and all that stuff.
You can't experiment on kids like that. They are too resilient and you won't get good data. It's not soud. Use midgets instead, ginger midgets.
Your miles credit would be subject to bartering and fair market valuation provisions, if they can be considered property.
However you might be able to argue that it's a negotiable instrument and has no fair market value. This would then require you to haggle ("sure, I'll take you 8 miles for 15 miles of credit" as enforcing it at 1:1 would support the idea of it being property. This means now, you have to auction the miles, this complicating the whole process, making it more unattractive.
Thanks for the clarification. But this just reinforces me point. We are choosing fragmentation. You can sign any binary, executable or DLL, C++/CLI or C#. MS is forcing people to develop a C# code base to lock them in. Again, further fragmenting the market.
Oh, I'm all for getting the job done. That's why I want consolidation. Since you run a consulting firm, how much of your code is actually customer specific? Like I said, schemas and logic changes, but I bet if you look across your customers, you'll find about 20% of your function is duplicated between unrelated projects. You don't care because its billable hours. Maybe you copy and paste? I don't meant hat in a bad way. But when you stop looking at billable hours, and focus just on getting the job done, I don't want to duplicate other people's work.
Let me give you an example from this very weekend. I needed to get the distance between two GPS coordinates. Googling for it I found javascript code that I then copied and converted to C/C++. In an ideal world, I'd just get the library and be done. But there are different implementations. There's Haversine, and 2 other ways to calculate the distance, each with nuances of implementation. Now, in my ideal world, I wouldn't matter what language it was done in (this was .Net's promise) Instead me and everyone else does the same conversion from the JS to our language. You as a consultant should love the idea that the body of programmed knowledge is available to your developers regardless of choice of language.
I want to make it clear that I am not arguing that we should only have C++. I was arguing that everything we've come up with since C++ (Java and .NET) have only served to fragment and divide. Now we have 3 major ecosystems all being maintained separately. Who wants to maintain 3 code bases that do the same thing? Billions of dollars poured into the maintenance of these toolkits a year. Hibernate and NHibernate. Dozens of SQL drivers on dozens of systems. The work expands exponentially. All to do the same thing. To keep their ecosystems on par with each other. Imagine if we just poured the same into one project, how much more we could accomplish. I don't suggest C++, though it has a fantastic track record. Managed memory systems are all the rage. I've done Java, Python and C#. I don't want to pick one. I but I want all of them to use the same platform. I'm hinting that C++ is it, because Java has JNI, .Net has the C++/CLI and Python has C/C++ wrappers. Imagine if we promoted the common stuff to a common universally maintained C++ package.
I also think we need side projects to experiment. NodeJS is very cool. And we need to explore our itches. But by t he time we start to develop these things into ecosystems, we should focus on consolidation so that everyone can benefit. Yes, it'll be an effort, but less effort than continually maintaining separate code bases.
Anyone who tells you that is lying. .Net for the 360? No. It's the same as what people do for the phones. Common C++ code, wrapped in platform specifics.
C++ even works on Windows Phone. You can't really ban a language that compiles to CPU opcodes. Furthermore, do you think that every title that is released on PS4 and 360 is completely re-coded into
What would Qt add to Arduino? Maybe signals slots, but it's too limited. Now Qt runs nicely on a RasberryPi or BeagleBone. So for a few dollars more you get a GUI...
C++ doesn't manage memory. Your or your toolkit are responsible for deleteing instances. Qt makes this easy for QObjects because it accepts a parent, and all children are deleted when the parent is deleted. The rest of the classes, generally, are implicitly shared. But if you use new on an unparented object, then you must delete it.
If you're only using the stack, then this is also taken care of for you.