No it's not, it could easily be structured more understandably.
But if that caused a severe performance penalty, that wouldn't be a step forward. The success metric was to get the product shipping fast so that it could be sold over the Christmas period, not to make something that would be wonderfully maintainable for all time.
But with people moving more into rual areas to retire, the bandwidth hasnt kept up with the usage, so now its down to voice only.
Sucks to be them if that matters to them. If they'd wanted good internet, they'd have not gone out in the boonies, but would have picked some nice small town that has just enough population to support good networking without the trouble of larger places. Instead, they trade that for lots more space; it's a valid option, even if not one that I'd ever pick.
In my personal experience, the older the legacy system, and the more embedded it is in your business... the harder it is to replace.
But if it's that old, it's probably also massively underdocumented (if at all) and so if something unexpected happens, your ass is still hanging out the window. Producing the documentation of what was actually done is at least as valuable a part of a replacement project as the change to the new system, as it should allow someone to start looking at which parts are required, which parts are emulating interfaces (from both sides, usually) that could be de-layered for improved performance and capabilities with no down-side, and which parts are just dumb holdovers from a few systems ago that nobody needs any more at all.
Just because something is painful doesn't mean you can get away without doing it.
By contrast Belgium's record of 18 months without a government as a result of PR should be a warning to us all.
Those who hope for a reduction of government meddling in their affairs will see it as a sign of true hope: the sky didn't fall in, despite the fact that the politicians couldn't agree on the most basic thing of all. Throwing them all out of office and only then starting work on the replacement would in fact be just fine...
In federal elections, state borders can be considered as districts causing the same kinds of distortions.
Maybe, but the effects are less severe because state lines are enormously more difficult to change for short-term political advantage. State-level gerrymandering requires sustained visible policies that affect migration and/or birth rates over decades.
It's the long-lived toxic nucleotides that are the real problem. Keeping something safe for 50 years isn't too hard (particularly if everything is vitrified and kept as small pellets so you can use passive cooling) but keeping it safe for 5000 years is a massive headache. So how should we deal with them? Bombard with more neutrons. Like that, they transmute into something hotter which will decay away much more rapidly.
Not if you have a short circuit. In that case the cable is gone.
What's the likelihood of that happening, versus the likelihood of something happening to an above-ground cable? Note that you should be thinking about putting the cable well down so that you're unlikely to hit it by accident, just like with water and sewage infrastructure (though even more like gas, if you're in an area with it piped in). Heat dissipation isn't a big deal with domestic supply; you use reasonably thick cabling and aren't really carrying that much current in the first place in normal service.
And, similarly, "chaotic" is not an explanation, either.
Would you accept "inherently impossible to predict any significant length of time ahead"? It's all very well to pick on the reason for the unpredictability (be it quantum uncertainty or extreme sensitivity to initial conditions because of non-linearity) but at a functional level, the outcome is similar: some stuff just can't be predicted in detail long term, and will continue to be like this whatever we do.
Google doesn't have a monopoly on search. Not even close. The only reason they get used is because they're the best. The second that they start sucking, people will leave in droves. It's pretty fucking far from tyranny when any user can go elsewhere. That's not a monopoly.
Google has a much higher share of search in the EU than in the US, so the EU is far more interested in keeping a close eye on what they're doing. That said, the story was about something that the EP is pushing for and they're not exactly the most influential set of people ever (they've got budgetary powers, the ability to vet the Commissioners, and the ability to revise proposed legislation). What's more, it would probably be possible to split the search side from the rest of Google enough to satisfy at least some of the EP without breaking up Google entirely. (Satisfying the whole EP? Might as well ask for something that satisfies the whole of Congress.)
Add to this that Munich airport is located far outside the city centre, which requires the traveller to take a one hour train ride from the airport to the main railway station.
Or you could spend at least 30 minutes sorting out a car hire and drive in through heavy traffic. Yeah!
Why not just tax petrol? Petrol burned is directly proportional to the amount of CO2 actually (not theoretically) emitted. This band system for efficiency is unnecessarily complicated.
Oh, they tax petrol a lot as well, but having an explicit connection to engine sizes makes it easier for the dumber members of society to figure out that smaller vehicles are better for their pocket.
Amazing how much the pro-gun lobby wants to waste on expensive crap like this, rather than simply allowing for effective laws.
That just means that you need to find an appropriate funding model. A yearly tax on every weapon owned by the citizenry could quite easily raise the monies required.
Though that the comparison is somewhat unfair to Republican politicians because it is their objective to reduce the concentration of wealth under their own control by shrinking government, regardless of the political persuasions of those who would benefit from that dispersal of wealth.
When push comes to shove, when it comes down to actual votes, do they really work to do such a reduction, or do they just claim to do that for the purposes of propaganda?
Where is this supermagical seawater-algae-avgas plant going to fit into the crowded spaces of an aircraft carrier anyway? Eating into the avgas tankage spaces might suffice but the US Navy really needs that volume filled with as much avgas as they can carry for an extended operational cycle. Carriers may be big but every cubic metre is already allocated to something, pretty much.
Strategically, it might make more sense to have these fuel production systems at the depots that the logistics ships/tankers come from, so that you're not critically dependent on having fuel supplies to them. Like that, an unfortunate catastrophe (whether natural, accidental or due to malicious intent) at a US naval base would be less likely to render large parts of the fleet impotent. The key is thinking in terms of ensuring that even if something really bad happens, the operational missions are not compromised more than necessary; planning for the worst, even if not hoping that it will come to pass.
The "Oh, you want to pay for that via a mechanism usable by mortals?" fee seems to the current favourite. There are a few companies that I simply will not trade with, ever, because of that sort of thing.
Apple customers are elitist that will go out of their way to use their fancy phones to do anything (ex: boarding passes).
Without denying that Apple customers are annoying elitists, being able to travel with just your phone (a device you're carrying anyway, and probably using shortly before the checkpoint too) doing everything that previously required paper is rather awesome. Or at least less grating than carrying a whole stack of printed things with you.
Two branches. The courts didn't have to uphold this ridiculous concept, but the executive branch also had the power to say "this isn't right" and refuse to prosecute.
But for all that, Congress is the legislative body, and has responsibility for defining the laws of the USA. That's its principal constitutional purpose. You can blame other parts of the federal government somewhat, but blaming Congress for bad laws is always precisely the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, I suspect any funds recovered via such penalties would fail to even begin to approach the total economic damage done to the community.
Ah, but in that case there would also be a strong case to be made for setting aside the contract (it having been obtained through fraudulent actions; an illegal "contract" is never a real contract) or at least the lock-in terms of it. You mustn't just penalize one half of the crooked agreement; you've got to deal with the other side if they were part of the conspiracy too. And no, the fact that a contract has been signed off by all the people who were authorized to do so at the time doesn't make it sacrosanct and beyond review, and it cannot do as that would provide a mechanism to allow fraud on a massive scale without any legal recourse, which would be exceptionally abhorrent to the public morals.
Hmm... In fact, "conspiracy" is a very suitable word to be considering here, given the reported statements, as it would allow some pretty extreme penalties to be levied against all concerned (e.g., a corporate conviction for conspiracy would be catastrophic for the company concerned, and would run the real risk of making them go bust. Like you ought to care.) In fact, check who the state DA has been taking payments from, just in case. It pays to be careful with this sort of thing...
I would emphasize that I definitely don't know the facts of the case or any of the individuals concerned. I'm merely commenting on how I would expect such things to be possible to go forward, treating the whole thing as hypothetical, given the (not necessarily unbiased) statement of the situation in the posts I'm replying to.
Desktops may. Laptops, not really. You run into problems with loss of battery life and gradually increasing general crankiness of the hardware. (The higher-powered a system is when first bought, the longer it lasts; low-ball it, and you're going to have to refresh sooner. And it's possible to replace some components in a desktop far more easily than in a laptop.)
Because if it is installed as/bin/sh (fairly common), it gets called in a great many places because of the OS APIs system() and popen(), which are both defined to use/bin/sh on Unix. Much of the reporting about it has been more than a little breathless, but that's journalists for you.
Not everything is vulnerable. CGI is not inherently vulnerable (it could use execve() directly) and the called code need not use bash ever. But it's still a serious problem as anything that explicitly requires bash is also definitely broken: we want it fixed ASAP. (A start would be to never process environment variables for function definitions during startup, especially when running as/bin/sh...)
That's prohibited for everyone. Airlines' experience, and that of their insurers, shows that it's just too much of a hazard. (Not that I mind; I think the smell of smoke is awful at the best of times.) Nicotine addict? Remember those patches on longhaul flights!
Outside of malicious HTTP headers landing in environment variable in CGI land, I'm hard pressed to think of another reasonable vector for this bug to be a problem...
To be fair, with a moderately competent CGI implementation, the subprocess will start just fine. The problem comes with whatever that subprocess calls, since environment variables are inherited by default. The deeper you go, the greater the likelihood that some programmer will have used system() or popen(), or even flat-out implemented the process as a shell script.
Now I'm building an app with Scala/Play framework and we don't have user sesssions or the web servers so scaling and server failures are not a problem.
If you don't have user state or session state, scaling is no problem. You just throw more hardware at it so you can have replicated servers with a simple load balancer in front. Job done.
It's scaling in the presence of (mutable) state that is hard. It's also what a lot of use cases need. Sometimes you even have to give up on scaling (boo!) in order to achieve other objectives, or think very hard to come up with an alternative approach such as spinning out processing to cloud-based slaves, which also doesn't truly scale, but can often go pretty large despite that (if you get the finances/business-model right).
Slashdot Mirror
No it's not, it could easily be structured more understandably.
But if that caused a severe performance penalty, that wouldn't be a step forward. The success metric was to get the product shipping fast so that it could be sold over the Christmas period, not to make something that would be wonderfully maintainable for all time.
But with people moving more into rual areas to retire, the bandwidth hasnt kept up with the usage, so now its down to voice only.
Sucks to be them if that matters to them. If they'd wanted good internet, they'd have not gone out in the boonies, but would have picked some nice small town that has just enough population to support good networking without the trouble of larger places. Instead, they trade that for lots more space; it's a valid option, even if not one that I'd ever pick.
In my personal experience, the older the legacy system, and the more embedded it is in your business ... the harder it is to replace.
But if it's that old, it's probably also massively underdocumented (if at all) and so if something unexpected happens, your ass is still hanging out the window. Producing the documentation of what was actually done is at least as valuable a part of a replacement project as the change to the new system, as it should allow someone to start looking at which parts are required, which parts are emulating interfaces (from both sides, usually) that could be de-layered for improved performance and capabilities with no down-side, and which parts are just dumb holdovers from a few systems ago that nobody needs any more at all.
Just because something is painful doesn't mean you can get away without doing it.
By contrast Belgium's record of 18 months without a government as a result of PR should be a warning to us all.
Those who hope for a reduction of government meddling in their affairs will see it as a sign of true hope: the sky didn't fall in, despite the fact that the politicians couldn't agree on the most basic thing of all. Throwing them all out of office and only then starting work on the replacement would in fact be just fine...
In federal elections, state borders can be considered as districts causing the same kinds of distortions.
Maybe, but the effects are less severe because state lines are enormously more difficult to change for short-term political advantage. State-level gerrymandering requires sustained visible policies that affect migration and/or birth rates over decades.
It's not too hard.
It's the long-lived toxic nucleotides that are the real problem. Keeping something safe for 50 years isn't too hard (particularly if everything is vitrified and kept as small pellets so you can use passive cooling) but keeping it safe for 5000 years is a massive headache. So how should we deal with them? Bombard with more neutrons. Like that, they transmute into something hotter which will decay away much more rapidly.
Not if you have a short circuit. In that case the cable is gone.
What's the likelihood of that happening, versus the likelihood of something happening to an above-ground cable? Note that you should be thinking about putting the cable well down so that you're unlikely to hit it by accident, just like with water and sewage infrastructure (though even more like gas, if you're in an area with it piped in). Heat dissipation isn't a big deal with domestic supply; you use reasonably thick cabling and aren't really carrying that much current in the first place in normal service.
And, similarly, "chaotic" is not an explanation, either.
Would you accept "inherently impossible to predict any significant length of time ahead"? It's all very well to pick on the reason for the unpredictability (be it quantum uncertainty or extreme sensitivity to initial conditions because of non-linearity) but at a functional level, the outcome is similar: some stuff just can't be predicted in detail long term, and will continue to be like this whatever we do.
Google doesn't have a monopoly on search. Not even close. The only reason they get used is because they're the best. The second that they start sucking, people will leave in droves. It's pretty fucking far from tyranny when any user can go elsewhere. That's not a monopoly.
Google has a much higher share of search in the EU than in the US, so the EU is far more interested in keeping a close eye on what they're doing. That said, the story was about something that the EP is pushing for and they're not exactly the most influential set of people ever (they've got budgetary powers, the ability to vet the Commissioners, and the ability to revise proposed legislation). What's more, it would probably be possible to split the search side from the rest of Google enough to satisfy at least some of the EP without breaking up Google entirely. (Satisfying the whole EP? Might as well ask for something that satisfies the whole of Congress.)
Add to this that Munich airport is located far outside the city centre, which requires the traveller to take a one hour train ride from the airport to the main railway station.
Or you could spend at least 30 minutes sorting out a car hire and drive in through heavy traffic. Yeah!
Why not just tax petrol? Petrol burned is directly proportional to the amount of CO2 actually (not theoretically) emitted. This band system for efficiency is unnecessarily complicated.
Oh, they tax petrol a lot as well, but having an explicit connection to engine sizes makes it easier for the dumber members of society to figure out that smaller vehicles are better for their pocket.
Amazing how much the pro-gun lobby wants to waste on expensive crap like this, rather than simply allowing for effective laws.
That just means that you need to find an appropriate funding model. A yearly tax on every weapon owned by the citizenry could quite easily raise the monies required.
Though that the comparison is somewhat unfair to Republican politicians because it is their objective to reduce the concentration of wealth under their own control by shrinking government, regardless of the political persuasions of those who would benefit from that dispersal of wealth.
When push comes to shove, when it comes down to actual votes, do they really work to do such a reduction, or do they just claim to do that for the purposes of propaganda?
Where is this supermagical seawater-algae-avgas plant going to fit into the crowded spaces of an aircraft carrier anyway? Eating into the avgas tankage spaces might suffice but the US Navy really needs that volume filled with as much avgas as they can carry for an extended operational cycle. Carriers may be big but every cubic metre is already allocated to something, pretty much.
Strategically, it might make more sense to have these fuel production systems at the depots that the logistics ships/tankers come from, so that you're not critically dependent on having fuel supplies to them. Like that, an unfortunate catastrophe (whether natural, accidental or due to malicious intent) at a US naval base would be less likely to render large parts of the fleet impotent. The key is thinking in terms of ensuring that even if something really bad happens, the operational missions are not compromised more than necessary; planning for the worst, even if not hoping that it will come to pass.
The "Oh, you want to pay for that via a mechanism usable by mortals?" fee seems to the current favourite. There are a few companies that I simply will not trade with, ever, because of that sort of thing.
Apple customers are elitist that will go out of their way to use their fancy phones to do anything (ex: boarding passes).
Without denying that Apple customers are annoying elitists, being able to travel with just your phone (a device you're carrying anyway, and probably using shortly before the checkpoint too) doing everything that previously required paper is rather awesome. Or at least less grating than carrying a whole stack of printed things with you.
Two branches. The courts didn't have to uphold this ridiculous concept, but the executive branch also had the power to say "this isn't right" and refuse to prosecute.
But for all that, Congress is the legislative body, and has responsibility for defining the laws of the USA. That's its principal constitutional purpose. You can blame other parts of the federal government somewhat, but blaming Congress for bad laws is always precisely the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, I suspect any funds recovered via such penalties would fail to even begin to approach the total economic damage done to the community.
Ah, but in that case there would also be a strong case to be made for setting aside the contract (it having been obtained through fraudulent actions; an illegal "contract" is never a real contract) or at least the lock-in terms of it. You mustn't just penalize one half of the crooked agreement; you've got to deal with the other side if they were part of the conspiracy too. And no, the fact that a contract has been signed off by all the people who were authorized to do so at the time doesn't make it sacrosanct and beyond review, and it cannot do as that would provide a mechanism to allow fraud on a massive scale without any legal recourse, which would be exceptionally abhorrent to the public morals.
Hmm... In fact, "conspiracy" is a very suitable word to be considering here, given the reported statements, as it would allow some pretty extreme penalties to be levied against all concerned (e.g., a corporate conviction for conspiracy would be catastrophic for the company concerned, and would run the real risk of making them go bust. Like you ought to care.) In fact, check who the state DA has been taking payments from, just in case. It pays to be careful with this sort of thing...
I would emphasize that I definitely don't know the facts of the case or any of the individuals concerned. I'm merely commenting on how I would expect such things to be possible to go forward, treating the whole thing as hypothetical, given the (not necessarily unbiased) statement of the situation in the posts I'm replying to.
desktops and laptops last more than 8 to 12 years
Desktops may. Laptops, not really. You run into problems with loss of battery life and gradually increasing general crankiness of the hardware. (The higher-powered a system is when first bought, the longer it lasts; low-ball it, and you're going to have to refresh sooner. And it's possible to replace some components in a desktop far more easily than in a laptop.)
Please note the article suggests a 3 year payback time on this, meaning a possibility of an extra $66k of savings for the medium duty kit.
A 3 year payback time is really quite good, in the region where garbage truck operators will do it without any additional incentives.
Why does bash have to worry about security?
Because if it is installed as /bin/sh (fairly common), it gets called in a great many places because of the OS APIs system() and popen(), which are both defined to use /bin/sh on Unix. Much of the reporting about it has been more than a little breathless, but that's journalists for you.
Not everything is vulnerable. CGI is not inherently vulnerable (it could use execve() directly) and the called code need not use bash ever. But it's still a serious problem as anything that explicitly requires bash is also definitely broken: we want it fixed ASAP. (A start would be to never process environment variables for function definitions during startup, especially when running as /bin/sh...)
light up a ciggy
That's prohibited for everyone. Airlines' experience, and that of their insurers, shows that it's just too much of a hazard. (Not that I mind; I think the smell of smoke is awful at the best of times.) Nicotine addict? Remember those patches on longhaul flights!
Outside of malicious HTTP headers landing in environment variable in CGI land, I'm hard pressed to think of another reasonable vector for this bug to be a problem...
To be fair, with a moderately competent CGI implementation, the subprocess will start just fine. The problem comes with whatever that subprocess calls, since environment variables are inherited by default. The deeper you go, the greater the likelihood that some programmer will have used system() or popen(), or even flat-out implemented the process as a shell script.
Now I'm building an app with Scala/Play framework and we don't have user sesssions or the web servers so scaling and server failures are not a problem.
If you don't have user state or session state, scaling is no problem. You just throw more hardware at it so you can have replicated servers with a simple load balancer in front. Job done.
It's scaling in the presence of (mutable) state that is hard. It's also what a lot of use cases need. Sometimes you even have to give up on scaling (boo!) in order to achieve other objectives, or think very hard to come up with an alternative approach such as spinning out processing to cloud-based slaves, which also doesn't truly scale, but can often go pretty large despite that (if you get the finances/business-model right).
Get the acid-free paper. Will last forever
Or until it gets wet.